It was at this point that Billy Ray Cobb caught up with her. A vexed little frown, pouty-sagging lips, his heavy-lidded eyes veined with red as, panting just slightly, he closed his fingers around "Starr Bright's" wrist. He said two things to her but afterward she would not be able to recall which he said first. One was "Wondered where you were, baby!" and the other was "Looks like the fun's already started, eh?"
Not in her scratched oxblood-leather Gucci overnight case but in her midnight-blue sequined purse with wallet, makeup supplies, designer condoms, and amphetamine and Valium tablets did "Starr Bright" carry her protection. A pearl-handled German-made stainless steel knife with a slender five-inch blade. Kept wrapped in tissue at the bottom of the purse, its razor-sharp blade untested. The knife was protection, not a weapon. Still less a concealed weapon. So far as she knew, the knife was not illegal in any of the several states in which "Starr Bright" had been a resident since acquiring it several years before. Protection after she'd been falsely arrested in a cocktail lounge of a Hyatt Regency Hotel in Houston, Texas, by two plainclothes vice-squad detectives who'd detained her for five hours during which time they'd forced her to commit upon their persons sex acts of a particularly repulsive nature. Never again will "Starr Bright" be humiliated, never again made to service pigs on any terms but my own.
That night, "Starr Bright" dreamt so strangely!-obsessively, with much anguish, of the air-mattress in the motel pool.
She had scarcely seen it, had virtually no impression of it except it was made of plastic, stripes the colors of the American flag red white and blue, about five feet long perhaps, not a child's but a grown-up's float, an object of salvation if one were in water over one's head, in danger of drowning. "Starr Bright" was not a capable swimmer, water frightened her, the eerie buoyancy that cannot be depended upon, the disequilibrium, loss of control. In her dreams she was naked in the water, she was clutching at the air-mattress gasping for breath, her heart pounding as someone, a man, faceless, heavy bodied, tried to pull her from it and into the water to drown. Sometimes the man was Billy Ray Cobb, sometimes he was a stranger-or were there two men, or more?-laughing at her terror, which was a female's ridiculous, contemptible terror, their fingers hard and pitiless as steel yanking at her ankles, her bare legs, arms, gripping the nape of her neck. "Starr Bright" was naked and defenseless in the water, which was a dark choppy water and not the synthetic bright turquoise of the motel pool. If only she could grab hold of the air-mattress and pull herself up onto it she could save herself-but her arm- and shoulder-muscles were weak, flaccid, her feeble strength was rapidly fading, her mouth filled with poisonous water it would be death to swallow. And the jeering laughing, and the hard, hurting male fingers.
Help me! Please help me! Oh, God!
"Starr Bright" thrashed about wildly, flailing her arms, kicking, fighting for her life… and woke suddenly to find herself in a strange bed, a damp rumpled bed in a room that hummed loudly with air-conditioning that yet did not dispel the odor of whiskey and cigarette smoke and human sweat and the underlying stench of insecticide. She was not alone but beside a stranger, naked, a fattish man who lay sprawled on his back in the center of the bed, head flung back and mouth ajar, wetly snoring.
Mr. Cobb it was. Who'd been unexpectedly rough, impatient with her. Reddish-veined pig's eyes contracting and his vision going inward oh! oh! uhl as he'd grunted grinding himself stubbornly and then desperately into her. Twenty-two solid minutes she'd clocked it as the night before she'd clocked their earlier episodes eight minutes, twelve minutes, sixteen, a part of "Starr Blight's" brain detached and even clinical despite the generous lines of coke she'd snorted with her froggy-eyed friend whose first name, or names, momentarily eluded her. They'd checked into the Paradise Motel in the early evening and had sexual intercourse then gone out again hurriedly not taking time even to shower and cleanse themselves as "Starr Bright" so badly wanted, yes and to shampoo her sticky hair as well, scrub thoroughly between her chafed legs and run the shower as hot as she could bear it but Mr. Cobb had insisted upon going out at once to purchase a bottle of Jack Daniel's whiskey and several grams of cocaine innocently white and powdery-granular as confectioner's sugar and so the night had shut about her like walls pushing inward, threatening suffocation. C'mon, baby! Loosen up, baby! Though Mr. Cobb was in fact a stranger to her yet "Starr Bright" seemed to know how necessary it might be to anesthetize herself, she'd only pretended to inhale a line of coke held on a shaky spoon-mirror to her nostrils, in fact in the secrecy of the ill-smelling bathroom she'd hurriedly swallowed not one, nor even two, but three tablets of Valium, the most she allowed herself in even emergency situations, or when alcohol, too, was involved. So she'd been amiably dulled against Mr. Cobb's grinding, grunting, panting, and his hard grasping hands, his red-rimmed frog's eyes, his escalating demands. How many minutes, how many hours, where exactly they were, and why she, "Starr Bright," a top "exotic dancer" admired by the other girls for her Ice Princess glamor and her obvious intelligence, was here she did not know, could not comprehend. And sinking to sleep again, drenched with sweat, shivering, trying to keep as far away as possible from the snoring man in the center of the bed, "Starr Bright" found herself this time in a swimming pool in a distant city, she was eight or nine years old and she'd been brought to Atwater Park by an older girl cousin who lived in the city, little Shirley Lott from Shaheen visiting for the day, shy and excited as always when visiting Yewville which seemed to her a large city, fraught with mystery and adventure. But something had gone wrong, her cousin was not watching her as her mother had requested, but drawn off with her own friends and out of earshot and so Shirley, in her pink-puckered swimsuit and her white rubber bathing cap with the strap that buckled a little too tightly beneath her chin, found herself surrounded in the pool by children she didn't know. Several older, bigger boys stared at her, skinny strangers with hair wetly rat-slick, eyes alert asking who she was, where was she from? and Shirley told them and they smiled at her as if they liked her and invited her to come for a ride in their inner-tube across the pool. Shirley was wary at first trying to see where her cousin Tildy had gone, but she couldn't see Tildy, the boys seemed so friendly, grinning at her so she trusted them, yes she was flattered too. Shirley Lott was a pretty little girl much prettier than her younger sister Gwendolyn and her daddy loved her best, she could see it in his eyes he loved her best, and she had boy cousins her age and older, all of them members of the First Methodist Church in Shaheen where Ephraim Lott was the minister and so Shirley trusted these Yewville boys though they were strangers to her and she'd been warned by her mother not to take up with children she didn't know unless Tildy knew them, many times she'd been warned but in the excitement of the Atwater pool she forgot. Come with us! Don't be afraid! the boys said, and there was Shirley allowing herself to be pushed through the opening of the boys' inner-tube that was so slippery and bouncy in the water, she'd squealed with childish excitement paddling and kicking as immediately the boys tugged her toward the farther end of the pool where the water was six feet deep and Shirley began to be frightened but the boys swimming beside her said it was okay, she was okay, nothing would happen to her, she was safe inside the inner-tube. But the bolder boys were ducking beneath her and tugging at her feet, pinching her thighs, poking their fingers between her legs as she thrashed helplessly, panicked, sobbing, No! No! Let me go! swallowing water, choking. But the boys wouldn't let their little-girl victim go, they'd captured her in the inner-tube and were tugging her in noisy triumph across the pool into the deep water where only older children and teenagers were allowed to swim, and at last someone intervened, an older girl who knew the boys and shouted at them to leave Shirley alone, what the hell did they think they were doing?-as the boys shoved Shirley out of the inner-tube and into the water and she began to sink and would have drowned had not the girl caught her, and hauled her out of the pool and onto the puddled concrete where she lay sobbing and coughing up water, stricken as a wounded animal. The boys had fled from the pool shrieking with laughter, carrying their inner-tube with them, and Shirley's cousin Tildy at last took notice of her, the circle of onlookers gathered around her, and came running to her, and the nightmare was ended. Except the nightmares of childhood never end but continue forever beneath the surface of memory so long as memory endures.