Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
“What about you, Trey? You signed up yet?” Billie called after him.
“Flat feet,” Hank butted in loudly. “They wouldn’t take him,” he said, but then he shot us a not-really wink-wink and used his finger to make little circles by his temple.
This is the part I don’t remember well.
I woke up lying on the saggy brown couch. The makeout couple gone. No music, no laughing or chattering from the kitchen. Aching neck. Blurred vision. Trey Morgan looming over me, shaking my shoulder, saying something echoey and far away like wake up kid, party’s over, time to go. He pulled me upright by my shirt.
Where’s Billie, I said. She left. Why? What happened? You had too much to drink, kid. Go home and sleep it off. I couldn’t get my legs under me. Trey held me up and walked me to the front door, already open to the night, pushed me out onto the stoop and closed the door behind me.
Somehow I staggered down the dark driveway to the main loop of the park and then around to the parking lot by the cafe. Sonny the cook was there, leaning on the old Fairlane, smoking a cigarette, talking to someone. Alice. Where’s Billie she said, and I said I don’t know. Sonny’s face through curling smoke, are you okay, no I gotta go home.
Wait, Alice said, but I didn’t.
The cafe was closed, the street empty, half a moon above. I started to cross the lawns of Library Park, tripped on my own feet by the swing-set. On my knees in the sandy dirt, an insistent whooshing in my ears. Something is wrong, I thought. I passed out and Billie just left me there? Where was everyone else? Why was Trey in such a fucking hurry to get me out the door? A stubborn fog muffled my thoughts, like when they gave me the gas at the dentist’s office. No. Like that time I took one of my mother’s pills.
Something is wrong.
I rose to my feet, turned and lurched off in the other direction. If I took the back way to Space 19, no one would see. Out of the park, up First Street, I took the rear entrance to the school grounds. Running across the blacktop, falling again, skinned knees and hands. Cutting through the baseball field. My stomach rolled. I stuck a finger down my throat until I wretched and threw up on the pitcher’s mound. Then down into the slash of Bottlerock Creek, the water low and the banks overgrown with thorny brush.
Rounding another bend in the creek bed, a square of light above the bank. I scrambled up and found myself behind Trey Morgan’s trailer, shimmering under the moon. Wet feet in muddy sneakers, bloody stinging hands, heart pounding, breath on fire.
The light came from a back bedroom window, filtered yellow through an old ratty curtain that hung slightly cockeyed. A thin pie-wedge was left uncovered in one corner of the window. I needed a boost and found a stray cinderblock that had settled into the dirt over the winters and was secured by weeds and time. I lifted it free and winced at the sound of the grass tearing loose and the suck of earth, suddenly aware of transgression and risk—trespass on my part, the threat of exposure. I placed the cinderblock on its side, an eight-inch boost. I stepped up and maneuvered my eyes to the gap where the curtain didn’t cover the window.
This is the part I can’t unsee.
Billie lay sprawled out on an unmade twin bed, her body limp. Her beautiful muslin dress unbuttoned and laid open to the waist, breasts exposed, the hem bunched up at her hips. Hank standing at the foot of the bed, blue jeans and jockey shorts around his ankles. White t-shirt, pinkwhite bottom, hips slamming against her. Billie’s body rocked with the impact, and for a blink of time I thought she was willing but then I saw her face. Mouth slack, eyelids fluttering half open.
“Heeeyyy,” she said, one long slurred syllable.
Hank said, “Shit! She’s waking up, you assholes gonna help or what?” And two other figures entered my view from the other side of the room. Trey and Timmy. “Get her arms,” Hank said. Trey looped around behind him and pinned Billie’s right arm to the bed. Timmy hurried to the other side and pinned her left arm down, his eyes trained on Hank.
“You’re on deck, Bilderback!” Hank shouted, even as he kept ramming into her.
Timmy yelled, “Hell yeah!” His eyes wild, his face beading sweat. His mouth twisted into a snarl and he mashed at one of Billie’s breasts with one hand.
All the muscles under Hank’s white t-shirt tightened, and he let go a long ugly grunt. “That’s how it’s done, kiddies! That’s how it’s done.”
“Hey, no,” she said. “Please. Wait.” Some timid dawn in her blurry voice, her head rolling side to side, eyes swimming the room, mouth opening without words.
“She’s gonna scream,” said Timmy.
“Joey, cover her mouth,” Hank said. I couldn’t see Joey but there was a beat of silence, then Hank said, “Joey, cover her goddamn mouth.”
“No. I won’t,” said Joey’s voice, and I saw his back go out the bedroom door.
Hank hollered. “You leave, I’ll kill you. Trey, go after him, don’t let that little fucker leave.”
All at once the scene fractured into chaos. A pounding rumbled the air like a car wreck. Knuckles and metal. A rain of glass. A male voice shouted, “Open the door. Open the fucking door!” Trey left the room, Timmy couldn’t control both of Billie’s arms. She scratched his face with her free hand, drove Hank backwards with a kick to the chest. Billie bared her teeth and growled like a cornered animal, launched herself off the bed and staggered out of the room in a screaming, half-naked blur.
Hank stood at the door of the bedroom with an ear cocked toward the racket, not brave enough to go and investigate. Timmy drunk, confused and bereft, still grasping for arms that were no longer there.
I jumped down from the cinderblock and skirted around to a front corner of the trailer, staying hidden. Sonny the cook, on the stoop by the front door with his finger in Trey’s face. “I’d go back inside if I were you. This won’t end well.” And Trey stepped backward through the doorway, disappeared into the trailer.
In the moonlight a hulking shape hurried away on the dirt drive, shadowy at first, then separating into two figures.
One was Alice Terwilliger, the other was Billie Armstrong, shaking and mumbling, covering her nakedness with an American flag wrapped like a blanket around her shoulders.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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