Rape by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

addressing Nate like Nate was the Jew judge Schpiro, “She said she’d suck us off for ten bucks each. If there was ten of us, we’d get a discount: nine bucks each. She did! You can laugh but she did! She’s ahooker junkie. Anybody in the neighborhood will tell you. Some people, they came to Father Muldoon to tell him what they knew about Teena Maguire, if it was needed to be known for our sake. Our attorney Mr. Kirkpatrick he’s gonna get witnesses from like her high school, guys who knew her way back, establish a pattern of ‘promiscuous and reckless sexual behavior’ to present to the jury. He’s already got witnesses testifying she was falling-down drunk and high on coke before we ever saw her. Before she ever got to the fucking park. And the daughter, see it was some kind of mother-daughter deal. Like, two-for-one. The little cunt was half price.”
    Lloyd said, squirming with sudden excitement, “That girl! She saw my face, I guess. Must’ve picked out my picture. And in the damn lineup she collared me. And there’s bloodstains, and other stuff. Wish to hell I’d known what was coming, this girl, this kid, putting the finger on me.” He shook his head, mute in anguish.
    Nate crowed, “See? You assholes? What I told you, I’d of been there, you needed to finish the job and dump ’em both. Tied down with rocks. Save your old man having to sell his boat.”
    Marv Pick, Lloyd Pick. Marv had a dagger/flaming heart tattoo on his left forearm, Lloyd had a greasy black coiled cobra on his. When they’d wrestled as kids, thumping and thudding on the floor of their room or downstairs in the living room, Irma screamed at them the entire house wasshaking. Of course Marv, always heavier than Lloyd by ten–fifteen pounds, and meaner, always won.
    The night before the brothers vanished, leaving Marv’s 1989 bronze Taurus in a parking lot at Fort Niagara State Park, they were observed driving in this vehicle slow along Baltic Avenue. Slow to the corner of Baltic and Chautauqua. Slow past the Kevecki house at 2861 Baltic. They were drinking beer. Hell, they’d put away most of a case of Coors, fast. They were excited but also aggrieved. They were in a brooding mood but also edgy. They were not exactly sorry for what they’d done because they could not clearly recall any single moment in which they had made a conscious decision to “do” anything to anyone whether sexual, violent, rough-play, or whatever, and so they did not consider themselves responsible, somehow. Their dad was the one taking this hardest. He was sure looking sorry. Their mom was an excitable loyal mom who refused to believe any of this could be serious, that felony crap the prosecutors were threatening. Her word against theirs their mom said. And that woman a drunk and a whore . Their mom wasn’t wanting to think about how much this was costing. Maybe couldn’t face thinking about it like: What if they lost their house? Where’d they live? That cocksucker Nate was right: their dad’s boat. Christ, Marv and Lloyd loved that boat, too! It was fucking boring out there on fucking Lake Ontario where it was always windy and clouding up to rain fishing with the old man but made you sick at heart to think Condor II was gone, you would not ever go fishing with Dad again. Not ever.
    Kirkpatrick who was their legal counsel had instructedthem: no talking about the case, and no approaching the Maguire woman and her daughter.
    How many times they’d been told, the gang of them: stay away from Baltic Avenue.
    No cruising west of the park to intimidate the Maguires or any other witnesses who’d seen them in the park that night. (There were a lot of these witnesses. Fucking cops had really tossed out a net.) No trying to contact the Maguires. Not Martine, not the daughter, and not the grandmother. Or any other relative. The judge had okayed something called an