Billy Summers

She starts to slide. He gets the shirt off just in time to catch her and keep her from falling onto the floor. Her plain white cotton bra is askew, one breast covered and one out because the strap that’s supposed to go over her left shoulder is broken. He shoves the bra down, turns it around, and manages to get it unhooked.

Once her top half is undressed, he’s able to lie her back down. He pulls off her soaked denim skirt and throws it on the floor with the rest of her clothes. Now she’s naked except for one earring, the other gone God knows where. She’s all over gooseflesh, still shivering. It’s because she’s cold, but it’s also shock. He saw shivering like that in Fallujah, and saw it turn into convulsions. Of course she hasn’t suffered multiple bullet wounds in the legs like poor old Johnny Capps, but there is blood on her, and now he sees three bruises on one of the girl’s small breasts as well. Narrow bruises. Somebody grabbed her there and squeezed. Really hard. There are two more finger-shaped bruises on the left side of her neck and Billy thinks of her saying No, don’t choke.

Mindful that she may not be done vomiting, Billy turns her on her side and then pushes her front-first to the back of the couch so she hopefully won’t fall off. She’s snoring again, the sound harsh but regular. And her teeth are chattering. She’s one fucked-up American.

He hurries into the bathroom and gets one of his two bath towels. He kneels in front of the couch and rubs her back, her butt, her thighs and calves. He does it briskly, relieved to see a little faint color rise into her pallid skin. He takes one of her shoulders (another bruise there, but smaller), rolls her onto her back, and begins again: feet, legs, stomach, breasts, chest, shoulders. When he does her face she raises her hands in a weak warding-off gesture, then drops them as if it’s too much work, just too much. He makes an effort to dry her hair but he’s not going to get far with that because there’s a lot of it, and the rainwater from the gutter soaked it to the scalp.

Billy thinks, I’m fucked. No matter how this goes, I’m fucked. He drops the towel and reaches for her, planning to roll her back onto her side so that she won’t choke if she throws up again, then re-thinks. He takes her right leg and lowers it so her heel is on the floor and her vagina is revealed. The labia are enflamed bright red and split in several places, one of the splits still beading up fresh blood. The flesh between her vagina and her rectum – he knows the word for that part but can’t think of it in this stressed-out moment – is torn worse than her labia, and God knows what damage there might be inside. He can see several dried splats of semen as well, most of it on her lower stomach and in her pubic hair.

The guy pulled out, Billy thinks, then remembers that there were three shapes in the van, and judging from the sound of their laughter, all male. One of them did, anyway.

This thought makes him aware of his own situation. Considering what has happened to the girl on his couch, it’s not without irony: she’s out cold with her legs open and both of them as naked as the day they were born. What would his Evergreen Street neighbors think if they could see this tableau? Not even Corrie Ackerman, kind heart that she is, would continue to defend him. He can see the headline in the Red Bluff News: COURTHOUSE ASSASSIN ALSO RAPED TEENAGER!

Fucked, he thinks. Fucked to the sky and back down to the ground.

Billy wants to get her into bed, but he has something else to attend to first. Now that things have settled down, he realizes his feet hurt like blue fuck. There’s a lot of stuff he didn’t buy when he stocked this place, and that includes tweezers, but there are Band-Aids and some leftover hydrogen peroxide in the bathroom from the last tenant. The disinfectant is probably long past the sell-by date, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Walking on the sides of his feet as best he can, Billy gets a paring knife from the kitchen, then the bathroom stuff. The Band-Aids are decorated with Toy Story characters. He sits on the floor beside the snoring, shivering girl and uses the knife to lift the splinters enough so he can pull them out. There are five in all, including two big boys. He douses the bleeding wounds with peroxide. The sting makes him think the stuff may actually do some good. He covers the two biggest wounds with Band-Aids that probably won’t stick very long. He guesses they’re pretty old, maybe from two or even three tenants back.