Here’s for Your Trouble
For Ace
His father finds Jem’s success at soccer ironic. Whenever the boy’s legs scissor, Art pictures the scar between them, plum and serrated. Once he sneaks into a pot-filled hotel ballroom and watches Jem come in second at a slam poetry contest, cap cocked and body lithe. They feed him Jose Cuervo. His piece, “Never Use the Same Word Twice—NEVER!” alludes darkly to the rape. There’s a little dance in his step when he mentions Brittney, the love of his life, and the only girl who knew, Art suspects. The other kids appear to treat Jem like a fellow human, but for a long time he sits alone on a sofa, sometimes worrying his hat brim.
His mother considers it critical that they call it a rape. The police prefer the term “assault.” The “perp” is named Sam Baker. A private eye finds him in a little apartment built on the garage loft attached to his parents’ house. He suffocated them with chlorine gas, and never set foot in their part of the house. They had banished him to the loft because they couldn’t stand the smell of formaldehyde.
Sam worked as the school custodian. He could have drugged the boys, but chose instead to punch them in the nose. He discovered Jem at a school play, in which he portrayed an otter with a lisp. Art and Diane waited 20 minutes before searching backstage. They divorced. Jem’s teacher, the director, poured Drano down her throat.
Sam operated on a card table under ultraviolet lamplight. He photographed everything. He had no medical training, just an old hardcover of Grey’s Anatomy, heavily notated, that his mother had bought him at a yard sale when he was young. A cinch, the doctors said, with some reverence. First he hacked through the perineum with his mother’s grapefruit knife, then with a finger in the anus, shoved out the prostate gland, severing the nerves and connective tissue. He sewed the boys up with his mother’s thread, but didn’t know how to stanch the internal bleeding. One boy died that way, but the other three lived. When they woke, he gave them each a toy. He gave Jem a plastic horse with a knight in saddle. He said, “Here’s for your trouble.” He carried the kid down the stairs in the night, leaving him under a ratty blanket in a shopping cart at the Piggly Wiggly.
They found Sam hosting an intimate candlelight tea with his “kids.” He had made their bodies from melted candle wax. He made the heads from the pinkish-grey prostates, shellacked with clear nail polish, and painted with hair and happy faces.
In prison, they took him apart.
The police returned the evidence to Jem: knight and horse.
Art works two jobs to afford the green Mustang for Jem’s 16th birthday. At midnight, he watches him in the driveway with Brittney, and finally one night, sees him turn his hat around and lean back slowly as she disappears below the dash.