The Whore's Child

man like Bill, and to know he could get away with it and there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do. I hadn’t felt such self-loathing in months, since I’d sat alone in the boys’ room at school after eating all those mustard packets.
    It was a slow song that the band was playing, and on the dance floor Bill kept pulling my mother toward him as she kept pushing him away. I couldn’t watch. I knew it was my job to march out onto the dance floor and rescue her, but I also knew that I was only a boy. Worse, I had a terrible feeling that it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d been ten years older. I was a coward at twelve, and a coward I would always be. My throat constricted with the knowledge of who I was and what.
    â€œLet’s
go,
” my mother prodded me in the side, the dance suddenly, finally, over, her voice containing an even greater urgency than that first morning of our journey— now so impossibly long ago—when I sat sleepily on the edge of my bed. “Move.”
    Outside in the parking lot, I pulled away from her and darted between a car and a pickup truck, where in the dark I fell to my knees and let my dinner rise. I don’t know how long it took to bring everything up from inside me, to put it out there on the ground where I knelt like a sick dog, stunned and weak. I don’t know how many times my mother whispered, “Hurry, John! You have to hurry!” It was only after she stopped that I realized we were no longer alone in the parking lot, that Bill had come up behind her and was blocking the patch between the parked vehicles. When I finally got to my feet, the rancid taste of the vomit still on my tongue, he said, “Stay right where you are, sweetie, while I have a word with your mother.”
    He had her up against the car now with his back to the restaurant, so he never saw Clarence strolling amiably across the lot toward us, looking like a man who had it in mind to help someone change a flat tire. But I saw him.
Hurry, Clarence,
I pleaded silently.
Hurry!
    â€œSo, here we are, Little Miss Cock Teaser,” Bill was saying to my mother.
    â€œI’m going to scream,” she warned him, but the fear in her voice was terrible.
    â€œNah, don’t do that,” Bill said. “Just tell sweetie here what kind of woman you are. Just so he knows.”
    Hurry, Clarence!
    He turned to me then. “You know what a pussy is, sweetie?” he said, then reached up under my mother’s skirt and grabbed her between the legs. She went up on her tiptoes and her mouth opened like she was going to scream, but there was no sound. She was looking past him, off into the dark desert beyond the parking lot, as if at some betrayal she could not name, whose existence she had not suspected.
    â€œThis here in my hand is pussy. Course you’ll probably grow up liking the other, like your fat friend.”
    Bill didn’t know Clarence was close enough to hear this but must’ve sensed something, because he turned just as Clarence arrived.
    â€œYou stay the fuck out of this, Clarence,” Bill said, but he let go of my mother and she slumped back against the car, sliding right down to the ground, clutching herself, whimpering, her knees together, her ankles splayed out on the pavement, her skirt up around her waist.
    â€œCome on out here where I can get my hands on you, Bill,” Clarence said flatly. He was far too big to fit between the two vehicles.
    To this day I have no idea why, but Bill did what he was told, stepping forward sullenly, like a kid, to receive his punishment. Clarence grabbed him by the throat, banged the back of his skull against the cab of the pickup, then lifted him by the seat of his trousers and tossed him into the bed of the truck, where he landed like a sack of potatoes and lay still.
    â€œThere,” Clarence said, brushing off his hands the way he’d done when he’d finished his steak and pushed his plate away.
    The next day, as we sped across the desert into Arizona, we surrendered a lot of pretense, my mother and I. So far we’d been taking turns buoying up each other’s flagging spirits, but it was suddenly as if we were sharing the same pool of emotions and the water in that pool had gone cold. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her that wasn’t accusatory, and I had the distinct impression she was somehow disappointed in me. When the silence became