“Then he did it on another occasion but not on accident?” she said.
“The next week I stayed over at his house. I woke up in the middle of the night on the couch. He was doing something.”
“You don’t have to say any more, Jimmy.”
“I have to, Miz Broussard. He was rubbing my leg. He said I had a charley horse and was yelling in my sleep.”
“It’s all right, Jimmy. Where’s that ice water, Aaron?”
I didn’t want to go into the living room. I didn’t want to bring Jimmy more shame and embarrassment. In those days we didn’t have adequate ways of reporting sexual abuse or pedophilia. The victim was usually blamed or accused of lying; the issue would be buried, and anyone who raised it again was excoriated.
I put two glasses of ice water on a tray and set it down in the living room, then sat on the brick steps in the porte cochere with Bugs and Snuggs and Skippy and Major. The windows were open, and I could still hear my mother talking with Jimmy.
“You’re not fixing to call him up, are you?” he said.
“I’m so angry I can’t rightly say.”
“He’s not going to do it anymore. He’s done with me because of that woman.”
“Which woman?”
“Miss Cisco. She’s got a Rocket Eighty-eight and comes from Las Vegas or somewhere. Mr. Krauser said he’d be spending most of his time with her and I shouldn’t be hanging out at his place. Then she flushed him. I’m glad.”
“She broke up with him?”
“I was there when she did it. I went over there to get my bicycle after he said he was going to fix it and then stuck it in the garage on a nail. She said he’d broke his word to somebody about sending boys to a camp, and he was on Clint Harrelson’s S-list.”
“His what?”
“It’s a bad word.”
“I think I can survive it.”
“She said Mr. Krauser was on Clint Harrelson’s shit list.”
“I don’t care about any of that. I care about you, Jimmy, and what’s been done to you. We’re going to have a talk with Mr. Krauser.”
My mother’s manic personality had just shifted into overdrive. I knew nothing good would come of it. I got up from the steps and went through the side screen into the living room. “Mother, I think we should take Jimmy home and forget this.”
“We will not. Drive us to Mr. Krauser’s house, Aaron.”
“Bad idea, Mother. Mr. Krauser isn’t going to change his stripes because people take him to task.”
“There is only one way you treat white trash,” she replied. “As white trash. This man is not only white trash, he’s a deviant. Now drive us there, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The events that would follow remain among the most embarrassing and tragic in my life. Even today I have a hard time writing about them.
I DROVE THE THREE of us to Krauser’s machine-gun bunker of a house, my mother in the passenger seat, Jimmy McDougal in back. With his high forehead and wispy blond hair and milk-white skin and lack of definable eyebrows, he looked like a space alien that had been trapped and stuck in a cage. My mother was holding her riding quirt in her lap.
“You’re not going to use that, are you?” I said.
“That’s up to him,” she replied.
I pulled to the curb in front of Krauser’s house.
“No, in the driveway,” she said. “So he doesn’t try to escape in his car.”