A white-hot rage settled over him. Without any idea what he planned to do once he was inside, he flung himself at the back door and swung it open. Empty cartons and packages of paper towels and toilet paper lined the walls of the back hallway. He blinked his eyes, adjusting them to the dim light. The storage room was on his left, the door partly ajar, and he could hear Billy T's voice. “You're so pretty, Holly Grace. Yes... Oh, yes...”
Dallie's hands curled into fists at his sides. He walked toward the doorway and looked inside. He felt sick.
Holly Grace was sprawled on an old ripped couch, her white Woolworth's tights down around her ankles, one of Billy T's hands pushed up under her skirt. Billy T knelt by the couch, huffing and puffing like a steam engine while he tried to pull her tights the rest of the way off and feel her up at the same time. His back was to the doorway so he couldn't see Dallie watching them. Holly Grace lay with her head turned toward the door, eyes squeezed shut, just like she didn't want to lose a minute of what old Billy T was doing to her.
Dallie couldn't make himself look away and as he watched, the last of any romantic notions he might have had about her died away. Billy T got her tights off and started fumbling with the buttons on her blouse. He finally jerked it open and pushed up her bra. Dallie saw the flash of one of Holly Grace's breasts. The shape was distorted from the pressure of the bra band, but he could still see that it was round and full, just like he'd imagined, with a dusky nipple all puckered tight.
“Oh, Holly Grace,” Billy T moaned, still kneeling on the floor in front of her. He pushed her skirt up to her waist and fumbled with the front of his trousers. “Tell me how much you want it. Tell me how good Ï am.”
Dallie thought he was going to be sick, but he couldn't move. He couldn't turn away from the sight of those long graceful legs sprawled so awkwardly on the couch. “Tell me,” Billy T was saying. “Tell me how much you need it, honey bun.”
Holly Grace didn't open her eyes, didn't say a word. She just turned her face into the old plaid pillow on the couch. Dallie felt a prickle travel along his spine, a creeping of gooseflesh, as if somebody had just walked over his grave.
“Tell me!” Billy T said, louder this time. And then, abruptly, he drew back his fist and hit her in the stomach.
She gave a strangled, horrible cry and her body convulsed. Dallie felt as if Jaycee's fist had just landed in his own stomach, and a bomb went off in his head. He sprang forward, every nerve in his body ready to explode. Billy T heard a sound and turned, but before he could move, Dallie had shoved him to the concrete floor. Billy T looked up at him, his fat face puckered with disbelief like some comic book villain. Dallie drew back his foot and kicked him hard in the stomach.
“You p-punk,” Billy T gasped, clutching his stomach and trying to get out the words at the same time. “Sh-shit-eating punk—”
“No!” Holly Grace screamed, as Dallie started after him again. She jumped up from the couch and raced to Dallie, grabbing his arm as he stood there. “No, don't do this!” Her face contorted with fear as she tried to pull him toward the door. “You don't understand,” she cried. “You're only making it worse!”
Dallie spoke to her real quietly. “You pick up your clothes and go on out into the hall now, Holly Grace. Me and Billy T are going to have ourselves a little talk.”
“No... please—”
“Go on, now.”
She didn't move. Even though Dallie couldn't think of anything he wanted to do more than gaze at her beautiful, stricken face, he made himself look at Billy T instead. Although Billy T outweighed him by a hundred pounds, the pharmacist was all fat and Dallie didn't think he would have much trouble beating him into a bloody pulp.
Billy T seemed to know it, too, because his little pig eyes were distorted with fear as he fumbled with the zipper on his pants and tried to struggle to his feet. “You get him out of here, Holly Grace,” he panted. “Get him out of here, or I'll make you pay for this.”
Holly Grace gripped Dallie's arm, pulling so hard toward the door that he had trouble keeping his balance. “Go away, Dallie,” she pleaded, her voice coming out in frightened gasps. “Please... please go away....”
She was barefoot, her blouse unbuttoned. As he extricated himself from her grasp, he saw a yellow bruise on the inner curve of her breast, and his mouth went dry with the old fear of childhood. He reached out and pushed the blouse away from her breast, breathing a soft curse as he saw the network of bruises that marred her skin, some of them old and faded, others fresh. Her eyes were wide and tortured, begging him not to say anything. But as he gazed into them, the supplication disappeared and was replaced by defiance. She yanked the front of her dress closed and glared at him as if he'd just peeked into her diary.
Dallie's voice wasn't more than a whisper. “Did he do that to you?”
Her nostrils flared. “I fell.” She licked her lips and some of her defiance faded as her eyes nervously darted toward her uncle. “It's—it's all right, Dallie. Me and Billy T... It—it's all right.”
Suddenly her face seemed to crumple and he could feel the weight of her misery as if it were his own. He took a step away from her toward Billy T, who had risen to his feet, although he was still bent slightly forward, holding his pig stomach. “What did you say you'd do to her if she told?” Dallie asked. “How'd you threaten her?”
“None of your goddamn business,” Billy T sneered, trying to edge sideways to the door.
Dallie blocked the path. “What'd he say he'd do to you, Holly Grace?”
“Nothing.” Her voice sounded dead and flat. “He didn't say anything.”
“You whisper one word about this and I'll call the sheriff on you,” Billy T screeched at Dallie. “I'll say you broke into my store. Everybody in this town knows you're a punk, and it'll be your word against mine.”
“Is that so?” Without warning, Dallie picked up a carton marked FRAGILE and threw it with all his strength against the wall behind Billy T's head. The sound of breaking glass reverberated in the storeroom. Holly Grace sucked in her breath and Billy T began to curse.
“What did he say he'd do to you, Holly Grace?” Dallie asked again.
“I—I don't know. Nothing.”
He slammed another carton into the wall. Billy T let out a scream of fury, but he was too cowardly to take on Dallie's young strength. “You stop that!” he shrieked. “You stop that right now!” Sweat had broken out all over his face, and his voice had grown high-pitched with impotent rage. “Stop that, you hear me!”
Dallie wanted to sink his fists into that soft fat, to punch Billy T until there was nothing left, but something inside him held back. Something inside him knew that the best way to help Holly Grace was to break the conspiracy of silence Billy T used to hold her prisoner.
He picked up another carton and balanced it lightly in his hands. “I've got the rest of the night, Billy T, and you've got a whole store out there for me to wreck.” He threw the carton against the wall. It split open and a dozen bottles shattered, filling the air with the pungent smell of rubbing alcohol.
Holly Grace had been strung tight for too long, and she broke first. “Stop, Dallie! No more! I'll tell you, but then you've got to promise to go away. Promise me!”
“I promise,” he lied.
“It's—it's my mama.” The expression on her face begged him for understanding. “He's going to send my mama away if I say anything! He'll do it, too. You don't know him.”
Dallie had seen Winona Cohagan in town a few times, and she had reminded him of Blanche DuBois, a character in one of the plays Miss Chandler had given him to read over the summer. Vague and pretty in a faded way, Winona fluttered when she talked, dropped packages, forgot people's names, and in general acted like an incompetent fool. He knew she was the sister of Billy T's invalid wife, and he had heard she took care of Mrs. Denton while Billy T was working.
Holly Grace went on, letting loose a flood of words. Like water from a dam that had finally broken, she could no longer hold back
. “Billy T says Mama's not right in the head, but that's a lie. She's just a little flighty. But he says if I don't do what he wants, he'll send her away, put her in a state mental hospital. Once people get in those places, they don't ever leave. Don't you see? I can't let him do that to my mama. She needs me.”
Dallie hated seeing that helpless look in her eyes, and he slammed another carton into the wall because he was only seventeen himself and he wasn't exactly sure how to make that look go away. But he found that the destruction didn't help, so he yelled at her. “Don't you ever be such a fool again, you hear me, Holly Grace? He's not going to send your mama away. He's not going to do a goddamn thing, because if he does, I'm going to kill him with my bare hands.”
She stopped looking so much like a whipped puppy, but he could see that Billy T had bullied her for too long and that she still didn't believe him. He made his way through the rubble and grabbed the shoulders of Billy T's white pharmacist's jacket. Billy T whimpered and threw up his hands to protect his head. Dallie shook him. “You aren't ever going to touch her again, are you, Billy T?”
“No!” he blubbered. “No, I won't touch her! Let me go. Make him let me go, Holly Grace!”
“You know if you ever touch her again, I'll come and get you, don't you?”
“Yes... I—”
“You know I'll kill you if you ever touch her again.”
“I know! Please—”
Dallie did what he'd been wanting to do since he'd first looked into the storage room. He drew back his fist and slammed it into Billy T's fat pig face. Then he hit him half a dozen more times until he saw enough blood to make himself feel better. He stopped before Billy T passed out, and got real close to his face. “You go ahead and call the police on me, Billy T. You go ahead and have me arrested, because while I'm sitting in that jail cell over at the sheriffs office, I'm going to be telling everybody I know about the dirty little games you've been playing in here. I'm going to tell every cop I see, every do-good lawyer. I'm going to tell the people who sweep out my cell and the juvenile officer who investigates my case. It won't take long for the word to spread. People'll pretend not to believe it, but they'll be thinking about it every time they look at you and wondering if it's true.”
Billy T didn't say anything. He just lay there whimpering and trying to hold his bleeding face together in the palms of his pudgy hands.
“Come on, Holly Grace. You and me have somebody we got to talk to.” Dallie scooped up her shoes and her tights and, taking her gently by the arm, led her from the storage room.
If he had expected gratitude from her, she quickly let him know exactly how wrong he was. When she heard what he intended to do, she started to yell at him. “You promised, you liar! You promised you wouldn't tell anybody!”
He didn't say anything, didn't try to explain, because he could see the fear in her eyes and he figured if he were in her place, he'd be scared, too.
Winona Cohagan. twisted her hands in the ruffle of her frilly pink apron as she sat in the living room of Billy T's house listening to Dallie talk. Holly Grace stood by the stairs, her mouth white and pinched as if she wanted to die of shame. For the first time Dallie realized that she hadn't cried once. From the moment he had burst into the storage room, she had remained dry-eyed and stricken.
Winona didn't spend any time cross-examining either of them, so Dallie got the idea that someplace deep in her heart she might have suspected Billy T was a pervert. But the quiet misery in her eyes told him that she had no idea her daughter had been his victim. He also saw right away that Winona lòved Holly Grace and that she wasn't going to let anyone hurt her daughter, no matter what it might cost her. When he finally walked toward the front door to leave the house, he figured Winona, for all her flightiness, would do what was right.
Holly Grace didn't look at him as he left, and she didn't say thank you.
For the next few days she was absent from school. He, Skeet, and Miss Sybil paid an after-hours visit to Purity Drugs. They let Miss Sybil do most of the talking, and by the time she was done, Billy T had gotten the idea that he couldn't stay in Wynette any longer.
When Holly Grace finally came back to school, she stared right through Dallie as if he didn't exist. He didn't want her to know how much he was hurt by her stuck-up attitude, so he flirted with her best friend and made sure there were good-looking girls around him whenever he thought he might run into her. It didn't work as well as he'd hoped, because every time he ran into her, she had a rich college-prep boy at her side. Still, sometimes he thought he caught a flicker of something sad and old in her eyes, so he finally swallowed his pride and went up to her and asked her if she wanted to go to the homecoming dance with him. He asked her like he didn't much care whether she went with him or not, like he was doing her a big fat favor by even thinking about taking her. He wanted to make sure that when she turned him down, she would understand he didn't really give a damn and that he'd only asked her because he didn't have anything better to do.
She said she'd go.
Chapter
18
Holly Grace looked up at the anniversary clock on the mantel and swore under her breath. Dallie was late as usual. He knew she was leaving for New York City in two days and that they wouldn't see each other for a while. Couldn't he be on time just once? She wondered if he had set out after that British girl. It would be just like him to go off without saying a word.
She had dressed for the evening in a silky peach-colored turtleneck, which she'd tucked into a pair of brand-new stretch jeans. The jeans had tight cigarette legs whose length she had accented with a pair of three-inch heels. She never wore jewelry because putting earrings and necklaces near her great mane of blond hair was, she felt, a clear case of gilding the lily.
“Holly Grace, honey,” Winona remarked from her armchair on the other side of the living room. “Have you seen my crossword puzzle book? I had it right here, and now I can't seem to find it.”
Holly Grace retrieved the book from beneath the evening newspaper and sat down on the arm of her mother's chair to offer her advice on twenty-three across. Not that her mother needed advice, any more than she had really lost her crossword puzzle book, but Holly Grace didn't begrudge her the attention she wanted. As they worked on the puzzle together, she put hef arm around Winona's shoulders and leaned down to rest her cheek on top of her mother's faded blond curls, taking in the faint scent of Breck shampoo and Aqua Net hair spray. In the kitchen, Ed Graylock, Winona's husband of three years, was puttering with a broken toaster and singing “You Are So Beautiful” along with the radio. His voice kept fading out on the high notes, but he came on strong as soon as Joe Cocker slid back into his range. Holly Grace felt her heart swell with love for these two—big Ed Graylock, who had finally given Winona the happiness she deserved, and her pretty, flighty mother.
The anniversary clock chimed seven. Giving in to the vague nostalgia that had been plaguing her all day, Holly Grace stood up and gave Winona's cheek a peck. “If Dallie ever gets here, tell him I'll be at the high school. And don't wait up for me; I'll probably be late.” She grabbed her purse and headed for the front door, calling out to Ed that she would invite Dallie for breakfast in the morning.
The high school was locked up for the night, but she banged on the door by the metal shop until the custodian let her in. Her heels clicked on the concrete ramp that led into the back hallway, and as the old smells assaulted her, her footsteps seemed to be tapping out the rhythm of “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” with the Queen of Soul wailing right in her ear. She started to hum the song softly under her breath, but before she knew it she was humming “Walk Away Renée” instead and she'd rounded the corner to the gym, and then the Young Rascals were singing “Good Lovin'” and it was homecoming 1966 all over again....
Holly Grace had barely said more than three words to Dallie Beaudine since he'd picked her up for the football game in a burgundy 1964 Cadillac El Dorado that she knew for certain didn't belong to him. It had deep velou
r seats, automatic windows and an AM/FM stereo radio blaring out, “Good love....” She wanted to ask him where he got the car, but she refused to be the one to talk first.
Leaning back into the velour seat, she crossed her legs and tried to look like she rode in El Dorados all the time, like maybe the El Dorado had been invented just for her to ride in. But it was hard to pretend something like that when she was so nerveus and when her stomach was growling because all she'd had to eat for dinner was half a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup. Not that she minded. Winona couldn't really cook anything more complicated on the illegal hot plate they kept in the small back room they'd rented from Agnes Clayton the day they'd left Billy T's house.
On the horizon in front of them, the night sky glowed with a patch of light. Wynette was proud of being the only high school in the county with a lighted stadium. Everybody from the surrounding towns drove over to see Wynette play on Friday nights after their own high school game had ended. Since tonight was homecoming and the Wynette Broncos were playing last year's regional champions, the crowd was even bigger than normal. Dallie parked the El Dorado on the street several blocks away from the stadium.
He didn't say anything as they walked along the sidewalk, but when they reached the high school, he slipped his hand into the pocket of a navy blazer that looked brand new and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “Want a cigarette?”
“I don't smoke.” Her voice came out tight with disapproval, like Miss Chandler's when she talked about double negatives. She wished she could speak the words all over again, say something like, “Sure, Dallie, I'd love a smoke. Why don't you light one up for me?”
Holly Grace spotted some of her friends as they headed into the parking lot and nodded at one of the boys she'd turned down for a date that evening. She noticed that the other girls wore new wool skirts or A-line dresses bought just for the occasion, along with low square-heeled pumps that had wide grosgrain bows stretched across the toes. Holly Grace had on the black corduroy skirt that she'd worn to school once a week since her junior year and a plaid cotton blouse. She also noticed that all the other boys held hands with their dates, but Dallie had shoved his hands in the pockets of his slacks. Not for long, she thought bitterly. Before the evening was through, those hands would be all over her.