My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ did not—ever—utter aloud the name Liza Lizard. But like other girls I may have sniggered when I heard it.

      It is shameful now to recall—Liza Lizard. You did not—ever—want the attention of the crude coarse cruel boys to turn upon you and so possibly, yes—you did snigger when you heard it.

      No news item about the incident in Patriot Park would appear in the South Niagara Union Journal. Only minors were involved, and the (alleged) victim so unreliable.

      Sometimes in Liza Deaver’s confused telling there were just five or six boys involved. Sometimes, many more—ten, twelve.

      Sometimes Liza Deaver remembered a few names. Sometimes, just one or two.

      What would come to be generally known was that a loose group of boys between the approximate ages of fourteen and seventeen, not a gang, not even friends had cajoled Liza into coming with them to Patriot Park after school. One of the older boys, not a Kerrigan, had been friendly with Liza, or rather had pretended to be friendly with Liza, so Liza would boast that he was my boyfriend.

      The Kerrigan brothers Jerome Jr. and Lionel were not the ringleaders in the assault—if there was an “assault.” This was much-reiterated by my brothers. All they’d done (they would claim) was follow other boys tramping through muddy playing fields and past skeletal trellises in the municipal rose garden to the swimming pool, to the weatherworn stucco building where refreshments were sold in summer and where there were foul-smelling restrooms and changing rooms. In the off-season the building was deserted, dead leaves blew about the cement walk. But the restrooms were kept unlocked through the year.

      The boy who was Liza Deaver’s “boyfriend” led Liza into the men’s room saying they had “nice surprises” for her.

      It was so, Liza Deaver liked “surprises.” Usually candy bars, snacks in cellophane wrappers from a corner store, cans of sugary soda pop. Sometimes these were given to her by kindly persons who knew her and her family and sometimes by others who were not so kindly.

      Questioned afterward by parents, school authorities, Family Court officers the boys would claim that Liza had “wanted” to come with them. Going to the park had been “her idea.” Into the men’s restroom, her idea. She’d told them that she had done such things with her brothers and other boys and sometimes they gave her “surprises,” and sometimes they didn’t.

      Liza Deaver denied this. Liza’s parents denied it, adamantly.

      Liza Deaver had not been injured enough to require hospitalization but she’d been examined in an emergency room and treated for cuts, bruises, bloodied nose and teeth, “chafings” in the vaginal and anal areas. Clumps of hair had been pulled from her head and (it was whispered) the boys had “grabbed and pulled out” pubic hairs of which (it was whispered) Liza had many.

      Still the boys insisted that it had been Liza’s idea. They’d been “nice” to her, they said. These gifts they’d given her: a Mars bar with just a small bite missing, a plastic bead necklace found in the trash, a small stuffed puppy with button eyes, a perfumy deodorant. (Liza Deaver was notorious for her strong, horsey odor.) It was not clear how long Liza remained in the restroom with the boys for Liza lacked a firm grasp of the passage of time but the boys insisted that it had been for “only a few minutes”—“definitely no more than a half hour.” It was 5:40 P.M. by the time Liza limped home, a distance of about a mile; it was estimated that the boys had led Liza away from school at 3:30 P.M., though accounts differed about who exactly had been with Liza from the first, and who had joined later. The fact that Liza had brought home with her the “gifts” the boys had given her seemed to suggest that she’d been happy to receive them, for otherwise—wouldn’t she have thrown them away, in disgust?

      If she’d been victimized by the boys, and not a willing companion, wouldn’t she have called for help as soon as they’d released her, and she was able to run out into the street?

      (Though it wasn’t clear that the boys had kept Liza in the restroom against her will. She hadn’t been a captive, they said; she’d wanted to stay, and only left because it was suppertime, and she suddenly remembered that her parents would be angry with her if she was late.)

      Eventually, it was established that there were at least seven boys involved in the incident. These included Jerome Kerrigan Jr. and his brother Lionel but not (it seemed) Les. (Certainly not Rick.) No doubt there were more boys but the seven who were named refused to provide the names of other boys—they were not rats.

      Poor Liza! Questioning left her confused about the boys’ names but she could (more or less) identify them by other means, descriptive means and by studying pictures.

      Yes she’d gone into the park and into the restroom with them willingly but when she’d wanted to leave they had not let her leave. Yes she’d been held captive by them, in the restroom. No she had not wanted to do the “nasty” things they did to her.

      Yes she had told them she wanted to go home. Yes she had started to cry but they just laughed at her. No no no she had not told them that her brothers had done these nasty things to her, and other boys and men beside. She had not.

      It was not clear if Liza had intended to tell her parents that “something bad” had happened to her. After they’d released her she’d slipped into her house by a rear door and was discovered by her mother in a flushed and disheveled state, clothes soiled and torn and misbuttoned, and her face smeared with blood. At once, confronted by her frightened mother, Liza burst into tears and began stammering and sobbing.

      It was the “worst day” of their lives, Mrs. Deaver said. They would “never, not ever” recover from what had been done to their daughter whose fault was she was “too friendly” to people who were not her friends.

      The Deavers lived in a ramshackle house on Carvendale Road, at the edge of the school district. On one side of the road was the township of South Niagara, on the other side an unincorporated region of scrubby farmland, overgrown pastures and derelict dwellings.

      The Deavers were a large family but not as the Kerrigans were a large family. For the Deavers were a welfare family whose father could not provide for his wife and many children—nine? Ten? And of these, what a pity, what a shame, unless it was a crime, as people said, several were not right in the head—what the kids called retards.

      Mr. Deaver, when he was employed, worked at the railroad yard. Mrs. Deaver worked part-time at a local mall. Several of their children were out of school and only intermittently employed and the youngest had not yet begun school.

      At Family Court, Liza initially sat mute and frightened as others spoke on her behalf. Her deep-shadowed eyes were swimmingly magnified behind the thick lenses of her glasses. After a while she began to answer questions in a hushed, hoarse voice. Eventually she began to speak louder. And then she began to cry, to sob, to stammer, to stutter and to choke. Her splotched-turtle face was flushed and puffy, saliva glistened at her lips. Family Court officials who tried to make transcripts of her not-very-coherent and contradictory accounts would insist afterward that they felt sorry for the “poor, mentally disabled girl”—and for the Deavers, who accompanied Liza and never let her out of their sight—(Mrs. Deaver went with Liza several times to the restroom during the course of the session)—were nonetheless unconvinced that Liza was telling the truth or even that with her impaired cognition she had a clear conception what truth might be.

      It was generally conceded—Boys will be boys. And—These boys’ lives might be ruined … How much worse the situation СКАЧАТЬ