Body Language

Body Language

James Hall

For Evelyn,maker of vivid memories

O! It comes over my memory as doth the raven over the infected house, boding to all…

SHAKESPEARE, Othello

To look back is to relax one’s vigil.

– BETTE DAVIS, The Lonely Life

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Her memory of that day never lost clarity. Eighteen years later, it was still there, every odor, every word and image, the exact heft of the pistol, each decibel of the explosion detonating again and again in the soft tissues of memory.

The loop of tape replayed unexpectedly, while she was driving the car, drifting off to sleep, in the middle of conversation: seeing again the boy sprawled on his bedroom floor, his face blown away, hearing the deafening echo.

Like transparencies overlaid, that time and this one continually mingled. The terrified girl she’d been and the resolute woman she had become, inhabiting, forever, the same body.

Alexandra Collins aimed the .38 Smith & Wesson revolver at the rear window of her parents’ bedroom. Eleven years old, a tall, thin child with straight black hair and bangs that brushed her eyebrows. The revolver belonged to her father. It had a four-inch barrel and was too heavy for her to hold in a shooting position for very long. After only a few seconds, her arm began to droop. Not long enough to take careful aim.

The fifth of September. Her father was mowing grass down by the canal where their small wooden fishing boat was moored against the seawall. As she lowered the pistol and held it loosely at her side, Alex watched her father work in the Miami sun, shirtless and sweating heavily. He was an inch over six feet tall, with muscular shoulders and a tight waist. His hair was black and wavy and he wore it longer than most men. When he grew out his mustache, people said he looked like Clark Gable. Alexandra could tell that other women found him attractive from the way they smiled with their eyes and followed his movements even when Alexandra’s mother was watching.

At that moment, her mother, Grace Collins, was at the grocery store and wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. Alexandra was alone in the house. She could hear a drone that sounded like a bumblebee trapped in a glass bottle. It was louder than the lawn mower.

Turning from the rear window, she lifted the pistol again and this time aimed across her father’s bureau out the side window of her parents’ bedroom. The gauzy curtains were open a few inches and she could see the side of the Flints’ house and, off in the far corner of their yard, a plywood playhouse painted white with red trim. It had a single window and a flower box with some plastic roses poking out. Mr Flint had built the house and positioned it beneath a jacaranda tree. It was the neighborhood hang-out, where the Flint girls, Molly and Millie, and their kid brother, J.D., and Alexandra played with Barbies until last week, when Alexandra decided she was too old for dolls. That was right after Darnel Flint raped her.

On television she’d seen men holding pistols with both hands. She tried to remember how it was done. She found a comfortable grip on the .38, then tried to locate the best place for her left hand. After some experimenting, she discovered that by cradling her right wrist, she could hold the pistol steady for maybe half a minute. Long enough to scare him.

The buzzing sound was changing, growing more impatient. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere deep inside her flesh.

Through her parents’ window she watched the Flints’ station wagon back out their driveway, the kids and parents going off to do their weekly grocery shopping. Only Darnel allowed to stay home.

Darnel Flint was seventeen, a senior in high school. He had long fingers and broken nails and he lisped certain words. He didn’t play sports and he didn’t have a car or a part-time job, and his clothes were always wrinkled. His skin was pale and his mustache was so blond, it was nearly invisible. Darnel’s father was a burly, flat-faced man who drove a Coca-Cola truck for a living. He was extremely religious and he filled his house with wood plaques and metalwork and mirrors with Old Testament quotations that he had hand-painted on them. While he was at work, Mrs Flint drank whiskey from iced-tea glasses and sat in her Florida room in her pink housecoat, talking on the telephone.

The month before the rape had been the happiest time in Alexandra’s life. She and her parents had vacationed in North Florida at a beachfront village named Seagrove, where there were dunes and sea oats and miles of white sand. For the whole month of August, her father rented a wood house with a tin roof and a wraparound porch just across from the beach. The house was painted pale yellow and had white trim. The days were long and hot and she and her dad spent several hours each day building a sand castle beside the still waters of the Gulf.

While her mother looked on, the two of them constructed it on a part of the beach where hardly anyone walked, far enough from the gentle slap of the surf so that her father claimed the castle would survive at least a thousand years. They worked on it all month – minarets and moats and towers, and a complex system of escape tunnels beneath the castle walls. She collected twisted pieces of driftwood to use as barricades and placed them strategically just beyond the moats. Her father christened Alexandra ‘Princess of the Sugary Sands’ and declared the sand castle her official palace.

In the cool of the late afternoons, her parents took long walks down the beach, holding hands, leaving her to add new features to the sand castle. The morning they were to depart Seagrove, her father assured her that her creation would always be there, forever in the same place, exactly as they’d left it. And someday they would return and resume their building project.

Then just a week ago, on the first Saturday after the start of the new school year, Darnel came into the playhouse holding a bowl of ice cream and he told his sisters and kid brother to scram. J.D., a cute kid of five with dark hair, demanded to stay, but Darnel punched him in the chest and he ran off, wailing. As Molly and Millie marched away, they gave Alexandra superior smiles, as if they both knew exactly what was in store for her and didn’t much care.

‘The dog goes, too,’ Darnel said as he dumped Pugsy, Alexandra’s boxer, outside the door.

While Pugsy scratched at the plywood door, Darnel held out the dish of Neapolitan ice cream to Alexandra. The dish was green. Reluctantly, she took it and ate a few bites; then Darnel unzipped himself.

‘This is for you. I’ve been saving it.’

Alexandra stared at his erect penis, then dropped the dish and sprang for the door, but Darnel was quick and got a hand over her mouth. While he clamped her mouth shut with one hand, he dragged down the elastic band of her white shorts and shoved his rough hand between her legs.

As he wedged himself inside her, Alexandra opened her mouth against Darnel’s hand and bit deep into one of his fingers, wrenching her head to the side, trying to strip flesh from the bone. She tasted the tang of his blood, and Darnel cried out, but he did not stop.

The rest of it was fast and clumsy and it hurt at first; then she was numb. The ice cream dish was broken on the plywood floor and a puddle of ice cream melted next to her head the whole time. As Darnel rose up on straightened arms and began to groan, she turned her head to the side and her gaze fell on the playhouse mirror, where she and the Flint sisters had made their first experiments with makeup. Mr Flint had inscribed a passage from the Twenty-third Psalm across the top of the mirror. With her eyes blurred. Alexandra stared at the mirror, and for a second she thought she saw the outline of someone’s face. But when she blinked her eyes, the apparition had vanished.

As Darnel worked to his climax, she turned her head away and let the Scripture run through her mind, a quieting refrain. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’

Finally, Darnel rolled away and lay panting for several moments. Then he told her that from this moment onward he and Alexandra were engaged, which meant he had the right to kill her if she violated their sacred oath of silence.

She said nothing to her parents. Her father was a police officer and she was afraid he would explode and kill someone. Her mother taught high school and had a very stern manner. Several times, she had told Alexandra that girls who misbehaved with boys had only themselves to blame. Girls were in charge. They simply had to be strong and prudent and exercise good judgment about what gestures of affection they gave to their male friends. Flirting could lead to trouble, she said. Be vigilant.

For the next few nights after the rape, Darnel tapped on her bedroom window and stood with a bowl of ice cream in his hand. Ashamed she’d provoked him to such an emotional pitch, Alexandra trembled and fought back tears. She peeked around the edge of the curtains but wouldn’t show herself.

Even after he gave up and stalked away, she couldn’t sleep. Each time her eyes began to drift closed, she felt again Darnel Flint’s suffocating weight against her chest, and she jerked awake.

Then last night, Darnel Flint had been at the window again and his hair was slicked back and he wore a new shirt and was holding a rose. Through the glass she told him to leave her alone. She never wanted to see him again. He was disgusting and mean and he had hurt her.

‘I love you and you love me. This is the way love works.’

‘I don’t love you. I hate you.’

‘Be careful what you say,’ he hissed at her. ‘If you reject me, I might go crazy and kill your entire family.’

She shut her curtains against him.

The next morning when her father went out for the paper, he found Pugsy lying on the sidewalk. His neck was broken and his hips were crushed as if he’d been run over by a car and had dragged himself into their yard to die. Alexandra sobbed but was too frightened to tell her parents what she suspected.

After they buried the dog down by the canal, Alexandra lay all morning in her room and thought of the summer on the beach, trying to revive the feelings she’d had just a few weeks earlier. How every morning she woke to the pleasant mumble of the surf, then right after breakfast ran across the empty roadway to check her sand castle. Dolphins rolled past in groups of three and four; the Gulf changed colors all day, from blue to emerald green, and then to silvery red. Each night, the sunsets turned the sky into immense paintings that the three of them would try to interpret. At lunch, they had lemonade and sandwiches on the screened porch with the radio playing country music, the paddle fans circling. Lazy lizards climbed the screens, puffing out the orange disks at their throats. The air was rich with honeysuckle and coconut suntan oil. Her mother and father were quietly in love. Alexandra was tanned and healthy, Princess of the Sugary Sands.

But recalling it didn’t help. She was no longer that girl. Last week, after Darnel raped her, Alexandra had risen out of her body, and now she hovered above herself like a shadowy haze. She looked down at the little girl with the pistol that was too heavy. Floating near the ceiling, she watched the girl open the cylinder of the .38 and look at the bullets, spin the cylinder as she’d seen her father do, then click it closed.

Alexandra wasn’t afraid of guns. She’d been around them since she was little. Her father had shown her how to clean them, how to put the safety on and take it off. He had pistols and rifles and shotguns around the house and he said it was important that she knew how to handle them responsibly.

Alexandra listened to her father pushing the lawn mower through the brittle September weeds. She felt dizzy and far away. She had been forced out of her body by Darnel Flint and she doubted she would ever be able to return. She would have to live in exile for the rest of her days, forever homesick, forever banished from her own flesh.

The Flints’ front door was unlocked, as it always was. When Alexandra pushed it open and stepped into the house, she heard one of Darnel’s heavy-metal albums playing from his bedroom stereo.

She shut the front door and stepped into the Flints’ living room. Mr Flint’s Old Testament verses crowded the walls and shelves and mantel. Women’s magazines littered the floor; ashtrays overflowed. There was the smell of stale cigarettes tinged with Mr Flint’s English Leather cologne.

She walked down the hallway to Darnel’s room and pushed open the door.

He was propped against his pillows, still in his pajamas. J.D.’s twin bed was neatly made beside his. It took Darnel a few seconds to look up from his Penthouse magazine. When he saw her, he grinned. His cheeks were puffy and white, and as always they seemed to be printed with circles of rouge.

‘Well, well, well, look who came for a visit. My little fiancée. Couldn’t stay away, could you?’

He set the magazine aside and started to get up. Then he saw the pistol and his grin crumpled.

‘You killed Pugsy,’ she said.

She watched herself from above, a girl in pink shorts and a yellow top, white Keds, holding a .38 Smith & Wesson down by her side. She felt giddy and breathless from being so far outside her body.

‘Jesus Christ! What do you think you’re doing with that gun?’

He was kneeling in the center of the unmade bed.

‘You killed my dog, Darnel. Admit what you did.’ She lifted the gun a few inches but didn’t point it at him.

‘Okay, okay, I killed the damn dog. He was getting old anyway. He was a pest.’

She took a deep breath and blew it out.

‘You shoot me, they’ll send you to the electric chair. You’ll get fried.’

‘You’re going to stop bothering me, Darnel.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Sure. Whatever you say.’

‘You’re going to stop coming to my window and you aren’t ever going to touch me again, either.’

‘All right, all right,’ he said, staring at the gun. ‘I won’t ever bother you again. Okay? Now get out of here.’

‘You’ve got to swear on a Bible.’

She kept the pistol at her side.

He looked wildly around the room.

‘This will do.’ He leaned over to his bedside table and picked up one of his schoolbooks – twelfth-grade civics.

‘And swear you’ll never tell anyone what you did to me, either.’

‘Okay, yeah. I swear. I swear. All of it. Every single word you just said.’ He pressed the civics text against his heart.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Goddamn it, I swore, didn’t I? You and me, it’s finished. I got another girlfriend anyway. I’m not interested in you anymore, you little shrimp.’

‘You’ll never stand outside my window again. Say it.’

‘Okay, okay, never in a million years will I stand outside your window.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now when your parents get home, you’re going to tell them what you did to Pugsy.’

‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that. My dad’ll kill me.’

She raised the pistol, supported it with her left hand, cocked the hammer with her thumb, and aimed at the wall a couple of feet beside him.

She heard her father’s lawn mower sputter and die out. She heard him trying to start it. Pulling the cord, pulling it again.

She was very calm, floating high, watching herself, that little girl.

‘All right, all right, goddamn it.’ He put his hands up beside his shoulders. ‘I’ll tell my dad about your stupid dog. Okay? Now get the hell out of my room.’

Alexandra took a deep breath and let it go. She was lowering the pistol when behind her she heard the surge and flutter of water – a toilet flushing.

She swung around and peered down the hall toward the Flints’ single bathroom. As she waited for the bathroom door to open, she heard Darnel fling his civics book aside, then heard the screech of the bedsprings.

She spun back and glimpsed his snarling face, his hands clawing the air as he leapt at her. Jerking away, she slammed against the door, stumbled, and fell to the floor. On her way down, the pistol fired.

Darnel was flung backward against the edge of the bed. After hanging there a moment, he spilled to the floor and came to rest in a sitting position, his legs stretched across the rattan rug, his back propped against the side of the mattress. He was motionless except for his right arm, which twitched.

The bullet had struck him in the jaw and had torn away his right cheek. His bedspread was covered with blood and the spatter of his skull. She watched Darnel’s arm quiver for a few moments. It was as if he was trying to shake loose something stuck to his fingers. Gradually, the arm went dead. And at the same time, the buzzing beneath her skin eased.

She got back on her feet. She felt nauseated and empty and even farther away from her body than she’d been before – up above the ceiling, beyond the roof, way up in the air and the high, streaming clouds. But she couldn’t stop staring at Darnel, at the open place where his jaw had been. In her hand, the pistol hung heavy, tilting her sideways. She saw the blood running down his hairless chest, the angle of his neck as it hung to the side. Her eyes burned from staring, but she could not pull away.

Then she was crying, dragging in gulps of air between sobs, but at the same time she floated high up in the air like a peaceful mist, looking down at the girl who sobbed and was frozen in place, a gun in her hand.

In the Flints’ hallway, there were heavy steps. She stopped crying, but Alexandra didn’t move, didn’t turn from the faceless thing before her. Her eyes ached, but she continued to stare at the dead boy.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’ Her father, Lawton, was behind her, breathing hard. He smelled of cut grass and sweat. ‘Christ Almighty.’

He stood unmoving for a few moments; then his hands were gentle but commanding as he drew Alexandra into the hallway and pried the pistol from her hand and ordered her to stay put, not to move. He sprinted down the hallway and out the back door of the Flints’ house.

Alexandra wiped her nose and stared at a rectangle of copper that sat on the hallway bookshelf. Etched into it was a quote from Ecclesiastes: ‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.’

She looked at the words from the Bible, read them over and over to herself for whatever comfort they might provide, but she had no idea what they meant. She was cold and vacant and the buzzing had completely ceased.

When her father returned, he was carrying a plastic sandwich bag filled with white powder. He held it inside a blue bandanna.

‘You stay here,’ he said.

He went into Darnel’s room, and Alexandra moved to the doorway to see.

She watched him step around the widening circle of blood and stoop over Darnel and dump the powdery dust across his shirt. He stood up and dropped the empty bag near his lifeless hand.

‘What’s that?’

‘A drug,’ he said. ‘An illegal substance.’

‘Why do you have it?’

‘For emergencies,’ he said, ‘occasions like this.’

He stared down at the body, the sweat sheening his face.

‘Daddy,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

‘I don’t need to hear it, sweetheart. I can see.’

‘I just wanted to scare him. That’s all.’

‘I know, I know. It’s all right. We’ll fix this. We will.’

‘He killed Pugsy, Dad. He murdered the dog.’

Her father stepped over to Darnel’s dresser and, using the blue bandanna, opened each of the drawers and dumped them onto the floor.

‘But it wasn’t just about Pugsy,’ she said. ‘It was about me.’

Her father drew a long breath and stared at the dead boy.

‘Did he touch you, Alexandra?’ he asked quietly, his eyes hidden from her. ‘Did he hurt you?’

‘Yes.’

Her father tried to say something, but the words failed in his throat and he swallowed hard.

‘Am I going to the electric chair?’

He shook his head and stepped over to her and squatted down to look squarely into her eyes.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not if I have anything to say about it.’

She hugged him and he patted her back as she wept. Finally, he rose and took her by the arm, then drew her away and guided her out of the room, down the hallway and toward the back door.

At the door, she halted.

‘There’s somebody else in the house.’

Her father turned and knelt down to peer into her eyes. His eyes were bruised and misty. She had never seen him look so naked before.

‘I heard a toilet flush,’ she said. ‘There’s someone else here.’

Her father gazed past her, down the hallway, and swallowed hard. Then he rose, walked down the hallway, opened the bathroom door, and went inside. He came back out a few moments later. Next, he went into the Flints’ bedroom, then the girls’ room. When he came back down the hall, he was shaking his head.

‘There’s no one here.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Alexandra, listen to me. Nothing happened here. It’s all going to go away and we’ll forget it and things will be the way they were before. I promise you that. Exactly the way they were. This didn’t happen, Alex. This simply didn’t occur.’

They walked back to their yard and Alexandra sat in the shade of a mango tree, and through the blur of her tears she watched her father finish mowing the grass. Her body felt heavy and old, as if the part of her that had been floating above had stolen all the buoyancy from her flesh.

She watched him, shirtless in the sun, a scattering of gray hairs showing among the dense forest on his chest. He pushed the mower through the tall grass by the canal. And she thought about men, how they could do such terrible things, then go right back to eating ice cream, mowing the grass. She watched her father and tried to picture herself as a grown woman married to a man like him, someone strong and sheltering.

The flesh of her face felt heavy. She couldn’t imagine laughing again, or even smiling. It was the first time in her life she had noticed the dreadful pull of gravity.

A half hour later when the Flints returned home, the twins ran over to Alexandra and began to chatter while they ate their raspberry Popsicles. Alex tried to act natural, listening and nodding. Molly asked her about her reddened eyes, and Alexandra said her allergies were acting up. A few minutes later, Mrs Flint screamed and screamed again, and the girls went flying into their house.