Bogs wasn’t there that day, but Henry Backus, who had been washroom
foreman down there since 1922, told me that four of his friends were. Andy held them
at bay for a while with a scoop of Hexlite, threatening to throw it in their eyes if they came any closer, but he tripped trying to back around one of the big Washex four-pockets. That was all it took.
They were on him.
I guess the phrase gang-rape is one that doesn’t change much from one
generation to the next. That’s what they did to him, those four sisters. They bent him over a gearbox and one of them held a Phillips screwdriver to his temple while they
gave him the business. It rips you up some, but not bad–am I speaking from personal
experience, you ask?–I only wish I weren’t. You bleed for a while. If you don’t want
some clown asking you if you just started your period, you wad up a bunch of toilet
paper and keep it down the back of your underwear until it stops. The bleeding really
is like a menstrual flow; it keeps up for two, maybe three days, a slow trickle. Then it stops. No harm done, unless they’ve done something even more unnatural to you. No
physical harm done–but rape is rape, and eventually you have to look at your face in
the mirror again and decide what to make of yourself.
Andy went through that alone, the way he went through everything alone in
those days.
He must have come to the conclusion that others before him had come to,
namely, that there are only two ways to deal with the sisters: fight them and get taken, or just get taken.
He decided to fight. When Bogs and two of his buddies came after him a week
or so after the laundry incident (‘I heard ya got broke in,’ Bogs said, according to
Ernie, who was around at the time), Andy slugged it out with them. He broke the nose
of a fellow named Rooster MacBride, a heavy-gutted farmer who was in for beating
his step-daughter to death. Rooster died in here, I’m happy to add.
They took him, all three of them. When it was done, Rooster and the other
egg–it might have been Pete Verness, but I’m not completely sure–forced Andy down
to his knees.
Bogs Diamond stepped in front of him. He had a pearl-handled razor in those
days with the words Diamond Pearl engraved on both sides of the grip. He opened it
and said, I’m gonna open my fly now, mister man, and you’re going to swallow what I
give you to swallow. And when you done swallowed mine, you’re gonna swallow
Rooster’s. I guess you done broke his nose and I think he ought to have something to
pay for it’
Andy said, ‘Anything of yours that you stick in my mouth, you’re going to lose it.’
Bogs looked at Andy like he was crazy, Ernie said.
‘No,’ he told Andy, talking to him slowly, like Andy was a stupid kid. ‘You
didn’t understand what I said. You do anything like that and I’ll put all eight inches of this steel into your ear. Get it?’
‘I understand what you said. I don’t think you understand me. I’m going to bite
whatever you stick into my mouth. You can put that razor in my brain, I guess, but
you should know that a sudden serious brain injury causes the victim to
simultaneously urinate, defecate… and bite down.’
He looked up at Bogs, smiling that little smile of his, old Ernie said, as if the
three of them had been discussing stocks and bonds with him instead of throwing it to
him just as hard as they could. Just as if he was wearing one of his three-piece
bankers’ suits instead of kneeling on a dirty broom-closet floor with his pants around his ankles and blood trickling down the insides of his thighs.
‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I understand that the bite-reflex is sometimes so strong
that the victim’s jaws have to be pried open with a crowbar or a jackhandle.’
Bogs didn’t put anything in Andy’s mouth that night in late February of 1948,