—Movie Star Confidential, December 1962
It was pavement. Shitty pavement, but still asphalt. A single lane. One minute they were in the reserve, and the next they weren’t. They were on a real road for the first time in days. Occasionally, they would continue to spot a few wild animals, largely impalas and gazelles, but most of the creatures they saw now, other than birds, were the great herds of Maasai cattle and goats. The shepherds usually were boys, but not always: he saw a couple of old men holding their long crooks sideways against the back of their necks. He saw women carrying water and children carrying water, sometimes using petrol cans and one little girl using a pair of metal buckets so rusty they looked like terra-cotta pots with handles. And all of them were walking in sun that cooked you, whether you were out in the open in the grass or inside the kiln of a Land Rover. If he survived this, he thought to himself, never again would he take tap water for granted. Never.
Both the driver and his partner in the back spoke English, but the one in the back seemed more fluent. Still, Billy knew that he shouldn’t assume anything: though the driver’s accent was Russian or Ukrainian or whatever, it was certainly possible he understood any and every word that they said. Earlier, Katie had been whispering something to David, but he hadn’t heard what and the fellow had ordered them all to quiet down. He decided enough time had passed that he would venture a question. He leaned forward and directed what he hoped sounded like a polite but confident inquiry at the driver.
“Can you tell us where we’re going?” he asked.
Margie nudged him. She was worried he was only going to get them into more trouble. But he was scared for her; he was scared for the baby inside her. The kid. He was worried about the gash across her stomach and the smaller lacerations she had from the broken glass. He had vowed as soon as his first wife was pregnant with their first child to always ask himself, what would my mother or father do in this situation? And then, more times than not, do the opposite.
When the driver ignored him, he went on, “Excuse me. My wife is pregnant and one of her cuts is still—”
With the back of his left hand, without taking his eyes off the road, the driver smacked him so hard in the nose that Billy fell back against the seat and felt whirling pinwheels of pain and saw white lights behind his eyes. He’d heard the bone against bone over the growl of the Land Rover’s engine, and then he heard Margie shriek once and felt the Land Rover speeding up. The guard in the back was laughing. He opened his eyes because his nose was running and there was something wet on his lips, and he understood it was blood.
* * *
.?.?.
It was like the time （the one time） that Roman Stepanov had belted him. Usually the corporal punishment was meted out by his mother, and usually it was far more creative than mere spanking or brute violence. There was the front closet that, for reasons he couldn’t quite parse, scared the shit out of him when he had to be inside it alone. It was big and had a light, but the switch was outside the door and Mother always shoved him in there in the dark. And then locked the door. He’d sit on the floor, his knees at his chest and his arms hugging his shins, and be eye level with the bottoms of furs and dusters and wool coats. When he grew tired, because invariably Glenda would box him in there for hours, he’d curl up on the floor next to the galoshes with the tin buckles he hated, his mother’s leather boots that smelled of the street, and umbrellas musty from their work in the rain.
And then there were the nights when she would use her husband’s old neckties to bind his ankles to the chair in the dining room until he had cleaned his dinner plate. When one of the Irish girls was sticking around to clean up after dinner—to this day, Billy didn’t know why some nights his mother had them stay and some nights she didn’t—they knew to look away. They were better cooks than Glenda, but largely because Glenda was a terrible cook. In Billy’s memory, he was more likely to eat what they prepared than what his mother concocted, but he was unsure whether it was because he wanted to be polite or because their brisket was better than his mother’s mussels and clams.
There was no “worst” punishment, but among the stories he thought about most in the small hours of the night now that he was a grown-up was the underwear. Katie was just starting to walk, he believed, and so he supposed he was six. But memories, he knew, were fuzzy, frangible things. Perhaps his sister was only six months old. Perhaps she was as old as two. Which meant he could have been five and he could have been seven. His misbehavior had occurred when they had gone to the doctor. Just a checkup. But, apparently, he hadn’t wanted to strip down to his underpants. Eventually he had, but whatever the reason, first he’d made a stink. And so, when they got home, she made him take off all of his clothes but his underpants and spend the rest of the day in them. And only them. She wouldn’t allow him to retreat to his bedroom, even when she had a friend over for tea.