Springfield, Virginia April 1962

It was 8 p.m. and I lay on my bed, curled up into as small a ball as I could possibly get. My history book lay open on my desk. I had tried to read the day’s assignment but although I read it once, twice, three times I couldn’t understand it.

I kept feeling over and over the feeling I had felt that afternoon: No one is going to help me and he is going to kill me.

That afternoon Jerry and his friend Robbie — the only friend I think he ever had — had sat out on the lawn and shot BBs through my window screen while loudly laughing. I had crawled under my desk into the corner of my room. I listened as the gun went off and the BBs tore small holes in the screen.

I didn’t cry. But a feeling began to wash over me. It was broad daylight, about 4:30 on a late April afternoon. Did anyone notice these 13-year-old boys shooting their rifles at the house? If they saw them, they did nothing. But, it seemed, no one ever saw Jerry do anything. Except for me. He made sure I saw everything.

I was down in the rec room watching TV after dinner when Jerry strolled in. “C’mon here,” he had said and I went with him into his room. “I’ve got something I want to show you.” He motioned for me to sit on the foot of his bed. He went to his closet, pulled back the folding doors and from a shelf took down a stack of magazines, maybe 6 or 7. He sat next to me and took one off the top. On the cover it said “True Crime” and he flipped it open to two pages of photos. The paper was cheap newsprint and the photos were in grainy black and white. There in the middle of the page was a body or rather a body with no arms or legs only a woman’s head. The mouth on the face was drawn up into a grimace. “See?” Jerry said, “he cut off her arms and legs. Do you think it hurts? To have your arms and legs cut off?”

I was mute and just stared at the picture. The torso seemed to be lying on sand or the bare ground of a vacant lot. Did it hurt? I wondered, trying to answer his question. To feel the first slice of the sharp blade into your soft flesh? Yes, I thought it would hurt. Then the

continuing pressure, the pain...

“I bet it hurts a lot”, he said.”It would take a long time to cut through the bones with just a switchblade.” He closed the magazine and picked up another. “Here’s what Jack the Ripper did.” I’d never heard of Jack the Ripper. Jerry opened the magazine to another grainy black and white photo of a woman lying in a brass bed with a headboard and footboard. Her head was thrown back with almost the identical grimace as the armless and legless woman had had.

Her torso was cut vertically from neck to groin and coming out of her gut appeared to be a rope of some sort. “Those are her intestines. See how he strung them over the footboard? Kinda like on a Christmas tree!” And Jerry laughed a breathy little “Ha!”

My ears began to burn. Jerry leaned into my face, his eyes bright and he smiled his mischievous dimpled smile. I pulled back from him. “That’s what I’m going to do to you one day when we grow up. And I’ll do it real slow. It will be real real painful. You’ll probably want to scream but I will have stuffed a dirty rag in your mouth. And I’ll tie your arms by the wrists to the headboard and your legs by the ankles to the footboard and you can buck and squirm but I’ll do my work real real slow.”

I stood up abruptly and walked out, as he laughed. I felt nothing but the burning in my ears, a tightness in my temples, a headache beginning that would be painful beyond anything I’d ever known.

Heading up the stairs to the living room where Mom and Dad were engaged in drunken verbal battle — very civil though, each sitting in their matching wingbacks, sipping bourbon from their highballs and smoking, the air a thick haze — I forgot with each step what had just happened. I was 10 years old and it wouldn’t be until 1984 after I was jumped by four teen-age boys in broad daylight as I walked to the T in a dangerous section of Boston and dragged down an alley where I was kicked and beaten that I would recall to mind that Spring evening in my brother’s bedroom on a quiet street in a small suburb outside of Washington, D.C.

Barbara Dickenson

9 April 2018

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