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“We don’t want you to play out there anyway,” said Brenda.
So Butcher and I kept watching soap operas and Brenda, Arnold, and Laura went out to the yard. I wasn’t worried because I could keep an eye on them through the back window.
Butcher, I started to realize, was a very strange little boy. He almost never smiled, and when he knew people were watching him, his face was contorted into a sort of squinty frown.
“Butcher, is something bothering you?” I asked, when The Secret Storm was over.
“No.”
?
??You seem unhappy.”
“Do you want to come look at my room?” he asked in a solemn voice.
“Sure.” I checked outside, and the kids were doing fine. Butcher led me up two flights of stairs, his black sneakers leaving diamond imprints on the carpeted steps. On the third floor, the ceiling was low and slanted.
“Here,” he said, opening a door with “Butcher” stenciled on it. I paused in the doorway to look. Inside, the room was filled with cowboys. There were cowboys on the wallpaper, cowboys on the rug. A giant horsehead was sewn into the bedspread, and ten gallon hats decorated the curtains. There was a lamp made out of a cowboy boot and a carving of a horse rearing up. A bowl shaped like a rolled-up lariat was plopped in the middle of the bureau, and an animal skin was tacked up above Butcher’s bed.
“That’s a gazelle skin,” Butcher said. “My father got it during the war. It sweats in hot weather.”
I climbed onto the bed to get a better look. Sure enough, drops of liquid were zigzagging down the wall under the skin. “Weird,” I said.
“I don’t let anyone come in here,” he said. “Not even my mother. I clean the room and make the bed myself.”
“Why?”
“I like to be alone.”
“But don’t you have friends?”
“I like to be alone.”
I turned around and sat on the bed. Butcher had taken some wrinkled pieces of drawing paper out of a drawer and was clutching them in his hand. He stared at me for a moment and then came and sat beside me, thrusting the papers into my lap.
“What’s this?” I asked. The papers were covered with crude, childish drawings of people strangely entangled. It took me a few seconds to realize that the people were naked, embracing. Balloons floated out of their mouths, circling words like “Oh, Oh,” and “Mmmm.”
“Butcher, these are ridiculous,” I said.
“I drew them myself.” He slipped off the bed and stood a few feet away, watching me leaf through his artwork. He was very intense, and I sensed his dark little eyes moving back and forth across my face.
“People don’t even look like this.” I pulled out a drawing of a woman whose breasts were entirely covered by her nipples.
“Oh yeah?” said Butcher. He was stuck in a kind of pose, one leg in front of the other, hands in pockets. Still, those eyes covered me. I felt uncomfortable and slid down the bed a few inches, but his eyes followed.
“Here, put these away,” I said, handing him the drawings. “You should throw them out.” I was hoping to break the spell, but he kept staring as he stepped forward to take the drawings from my hand. He slipped them back in the drawer and then stepped over beside me. He was standing too close, almost touching my leg, but he was acting so oddly that I didn’t think to move away. Outside, the voices of the other children drifted up. Butcher’s room was incredibly hot. The windows were all closed. I felt a little dizzy. It was almost like another world in that room.
“I like you,” Butcher said.
I fought to restrain a high-pitched laugh. Here was this grumpy little boy, trying to act like a man. He was so wound up he was tight, a dark little ball of muscle, a fist.
“Let me take off your shirt,” he said.
I should have said no, but instead I said, “Why?” I can’t explain it. Everything was silly, and it just seemed to happen. I don’t think I even thought about it. He reached out with one dark little hand and fumbled with the top button on my blouse. I put my hand up to protest, but then dropped it. He needed two hands to undo the button. Then, using two hands, he undid the next, and the next, and the next. His eyes were drawn down and I was watching his face. I wish I could explain it, but I can’t. I’ve worried about it so much since. It was a kind of madness in me, really. I was hypnotized—not by him, but by his fascination with me.
My blouse fell open, and he stepped back to examine what he’d done. He was absolutely motionless. For a few seconds, I was actually enjoying it—feeling the way a snake-charmer feels, probably, exercising a power that he can’t really understand. Then I looked beyond Butcher across the room. His bureau had a mirror on it. I saw myself reflected back in the glass, framed by the cowboy-boot lamp and the wooden bucking bronco. I was trying to understand what I was seeing when Mrs. Benedict walked into the room.
TWO
