The Rapist (4 page)

“Yeah. Old Fuckface. That’s what Beth at Joe’s calls you. Christ, most everybody I know calls you that. You’re a joke, bud. Don’t talk to me about breeding and crap like that. I’m just as good as you are. Better. Least my old man wasn’t a drunk, and he for sure didn’t beat my mom up all the time.” She laughed, a horrible sound, like a rabbit caught by a barn owl.

“You alla time pretend to be some kinda big shot what thinks he’s smart. I got an uncle who’s a Certified Public Accountant, and he can talk rings around you.” She hooted again, giving the mice heart attacks for miles around. Her mouth chomped open again. “I saw you last night.”

This was unexpected. I should have ordered the slattern away at this point.

“You were standing behind that big ol’ tree. You was watchin’ me and the guys party, and you was whackin’ yer petey.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. And when she said “petey”, wouldn’t you know it? It got bigger.

“What kind of trollop uses language like that?” I asked, my voice trembling. “I couldn’t help noticing you and the hoodlums you were with, for your information. I happened to be innocently on my way home and you were right in my way.”

The horrid tramp laughed. Laughed! “On your way home! We were fifty yards from the path. The same path you always ride your bike on like I’ve seen you do ten thousand million times! Who you kiddin’?”

“Get away,” I said.

It was then she stood up and did an astounding thing. She lifted the tank-top up and over her head, exposing her breasts. She stood before me like that for a moment and then said in a haughty voice, “Well, Old Fuckface, that’s it. I was gonna let you kiss ’em and maybe give you a roll in the hay, but not now, buster. I thought maybe you wasn’t as creepy as everybody makes out, but you’re worse than what anyone says. You’re a jack-off and a creep besides. You blew it. You can eat your heart out, bud.”

My brain exploded with a white heat. I remember only snatches of what happened next. Tiles in a mosaic rather than a complete picture.

How it happened I don’t know. She was rising to her feet and then she wasn’t. She was pinned beneath my weight. I drifted somewhere above the both of us, floating, detached. I’m two people. One mind, split. One above and emotionless, the other feeling her body beneath me, her open palms bludgeoning my ears until I want to scream, but it’s she who screams.

She scratches, deep furrows in my face. One ear feels nearly severed.

Bastard, bastard, bastard!
she screams, over and over. Something unintelligible, guttural.

I work between her knees, forcing them apart. I catch her wrists, stop her blows. I feel myself gaining control. She weakens. Screams again, her loudest scream. It penetrates my brain, gives me new strength. I smile, and she sees my smile, and I see the surrender in her eyes. She continues to fight, but we both know who will win.

Holding her wrist still, I slam her with an elbow. She’s stunned. I let go of her wrists, and her arms fall to the ground. She looks at me, but there’s no recognition in her eyes. She might have been looking at a movie that she wasn’t interested in.

I reach down, hook my fingers in her shorts, begin to pull them down, and then they rip and there’s no underwear; she’s nude save for her tank-top which is even easier to tear off. I throw it aside and it falls in a small, pink heap.

I have the strength of ten lions, and I am so hard. Harder than last night even. I try to enter her and at first I can’t. She moans but her heart isn’t in it. I push again and I’m in. I feel the skin on my penis tear, and she moans louder, and I grow even harder. It’s not possible to be this hard. I thrust, hard, and I’m in all the way, and she feels like sandpaper, and I know we are both bleeding, but nothing will stop me now.

I bring her up to me, feel her breasts on my chest, and I hear her moaning again… but, no! It isn’t her moaning. It’s me. I can feel her breathing though. It starts and stops and every few seconds she has a sharp intake of air.

It’s my first time, and I understand now what the poets speak of. I know now the poets don’t have the words. Pretenders, all.

Her eyes roll back in her head, and her mouth lolls open, and I kiss her but she doesn’t kiss back. I don’t know if she’s conscious or not, but it doesn’t matter to my pleasure. I find I don’t like kissing at all.

No matter.

And then it begins to build. It builds to where I’m in danger of passing out. The pressure mounts in my groin and in my brain, and I know I’m thrusting like a madman, but it feels as if I’m barely moving. She’s panting in time with my thrusts, and at first I think it’s from her own pleasure, but I see that it’s not. Each time I slam into her she pants as the air is forced out of her. She’s panting just to get air back into her lungs to stay alive, and it’s an involuntary action—I see she’s passed out.

That excites me even more. I’m a blur, slamming my body into hers, over and over, and every nerve ending in my body has become my penis, and way down deep inside I begin a sound I’ve never made before. It’s like water sluicing down a deep river, into a dam, and each wave beats against the concrete of the dam, and I see a crack in the structure and that excites me more, and I slam harder and harder, and then it breaks and the water pours through, slabs of concrete thrown aside from the force as if they were made of Styrofoam, and I’m through and it’s… ohohohohohohohohohohoooooooooooo… one long groaning, moaning, straining sound coming from a part of me that’s never been reached.

And I’m done. Like that. I feel nothing now and if I felt something before it’s vanished.

I’m back in my body. My faculties—as they say—are intact.

And that was how I raped her. I don’t deny it, never have. But, I didn’t kill her. She killed herself. It was an accident, pure and simple. After I withdrew from her putrid body—it was all I could do to force myself to even touch her if the truth be known once I orgasmed—she leaped up, cursing and yelling, and ran down the path, screaming she was going to get her boyfriend to come thrash me and castrate me. That was when she slipped and struck her head on the rock and fell into the water and drowned.

How can that be construed as murder? For that matter, how can what I did be called rape, under the circumstances? Would you not have done the same under those circumstances? The woman was a common whore and not capable of being raped. I was within my rights as anyone with a modicum of sense could see.

Look here—there I was, minding my own business, quietly fishing, and this whore of Babylon comes along and pushes me into a situation that was her own doing, wholly.

I’m an honorable man—I think when they came to my house to question me they thought I’d lie or at least make it difficult for them, but I had nothing to hide. I had committed no crime. If the world had been a just place, they would have buried her with a big red A sewn on her burial shroud.

You think me bitter, perhaps. Nothing could be more distant from the truth.

I have given much thought to this concept society defines as rape and have found it wanting. In no other species on earth does such a concept occur, in either your world or mine. You have seen the birds of the air suspended high above the ground engaged in sexual combat, and it seems clear that the female many times has not been a willing participant. Is the male bird murdered or even censured by his fellow avians? Not at all. It is a normal part of their existence. I have heard from reliable sources of horses cruelly nipping and biting mares to force them to their pleasure and have yet to hear of a stallion punished for this activity. Most times, according to my sources, the mare is forced into the situation and held firmly in position by her owner while the stallion has his way with her.

There is still another way to think of this.

If I, or you for that matter, were to go up to a female in a crowded bus station and rub your elbow up against her elbow, would you be tossed into prison? If you grasped one of the opposite sex’s hand and violently shook it, would you be condemned to die? If you were to lean down and pat a small girl’s head, would you stand trial as a charged felon? You see then, my point.

What is sexual intercourse but the rubbing together of different parts of the body? We attach so much mystery to something that has no mystery, once seen in the light of reason. What makes fucking different from pinching someone’s ear? Oh, says one way in the back, afraid to show his face, it is different because it involves
these,
and he points to his puny member and shriveled testicles. Well, think beyond what your mother has told you and what has been told in kind to millions of simpletons who question nothing and therefore discover no truth, and tell me—for I am simple too, in another, purer way—who decided sexual organs were different and why, from say, your left index finger? The iconoclast says further, seeing his argument weaken, but they are the instruments for procreation and therefore sacred, meant to be used only under holy sanction, which customarily means in wedlock, and that is why taking your pleasure is unlawful and a crime against society. Whoosh! That is a laughable and pitiable argument indeed. Who decrees that the penis, which shoots out semen to fertilize the woman’s womb and therefore prolong and propagate the species (which is the only reason for such sanctions), is holier than the fist, which destroys the predator and therefore accomplishes the same objective? Or the fingers that plant the wheat that sustains us? They each serve to protect and prolong the species. For that matter, rape itself is instrumental in propagating the species in that many of these so-called perverse acts result in pregnancy. The rapist should be applauded, not reviled. And there is this: to buy the idea of holy wedlock being the only legal basis for intercourse is to buy the idea of a holy God in the first place and the cornerstone for the whole argument… and where does that leave the atheist or, for that matter, the agnostic? If the act occurred among a society (and there are several) that requires the gift of sex from both genders upon request, is it any less a crime? Or is it a crime at all? It would seem to depend upon the society and its own provincial ideas and therefore not a crime against society as some would have us believe but a crime against a particular group or tribe. In some societies it is considered a crime not to provide sex when demanded. If the concept of rape is a crime before God, does that mean that God will punish those societies that don’t hold it as such? It seems to me that there is no such crime as rape except as it exists as an invention of archaic societies.

Try this one. In certain North American Indian tribes, it was at one time, before the English “civilized” them, the custom that if an enemy approached their hiding place and silence was crucial to survival for the mothers to put their infant boys’ penises into their mouths and suck on them to keep their babes quiet. Such a logical response to danger would doubtless be dealt with harshly by the keepers of the present society, an insane reaction to an ingenuous and logical act of intelligent survival.

The decision has been made to dispose of me, and I have no interest in vainly contesting their verdict.

I didn’t start out to rape her. It doesn’t really matter what my intentions were, at least not to the men and women who put me in here; their hearts are stone and not capable of recognizing truth in any guise, but I should like someone to know the truth, even if it is only you. You, at least, by the reading of this text, have shown some faint interest in my case, more so than the idiots who sat on my jury; what was on their minds was rushing home as soon as possible to paint a picture of the “madman” they had sentenced to death to their friends and neighbors, their only opportunity in life of achieving any importance. Reflecting from my own notoriety, I am afraid I disappointed them, never once drooling, nor rolling my eyes, nor crying out for mercy, nor “confessing” to anything so venal, nor, in short, acting out any of the roles they had assigned for me in their shallow minds. There was one instance of flatulence, which I shall describe later, but you shall see my behavior to be circumspect and justified in this instance. If they described anything but a dignified, utterly composed gentleman sitting calmly in the docket, they have lied, as I am certain they did. I proved to be poor copy for their sensationalist minds as I sat with honor and decorum whilst all about me lawyers, reporters, judges, jury, spectators and Philistines babbled like baboons on a banana boat. There! You see that? And she said I wasn’t a poet! I will show you even more evidence of my talents.

I started to say that my original intent was not rape. When she jumped up and exposed her breasts and spoke to me in that vile manner, I sprang up behind her as she turned and did the low thing; I slapped her across the face. That is my crime. For a brief moment, I forgot my breeding and sank to her level. For that, I should have been punished, and that is for what I accept my punishment now, not for the insensate charge of rape. I acted not the gentleman, and that is what I am above all else. Of all societies’ flawed concepts, the one that remains logical is the one of gentility and the only one I can subscribe to as a thinking man. The concept of character is a dialectical one, of great value if ever there is to be a viable society, and I was, for an instant, guilty to the marrow of not being such a person. On that basis I accept death as a just penalty but not for the other. Not for rape. And not, most assuredly, for murder.

She screamed when I smote her, and I lost control. I detest, no, abhor with a white-hot abhorrence, loud noises of all kinds, especially a woman’s scream, and I confess at this point to taking leave of my senses. Once, when I was seven, a neighbor child burst with a horrid bang a balloon just inches from my face. My mother had to forcibly restrain me from pummeling the little baggage, and that insensitive parent even had the temerity to apologize to the brat’s mother for
my
behavior.

I struck her again. I must have hit her several times although I do not remember the exact number—my only thought was to still her shrieking horrible voice. I realized after a time that she was quiet and ceased striking her. She looked much less churlish in repose, even somewhat soft and feminine, and this aroused me as it would any man. As she was asleep and couldn’t possibly be harmed by my action, I decided to take my pleasure of her. Just as I finished, she had the bad grace to awaken and jumped up, shoving me aside with such violence that my shirt became torn, whereupon she began screeching out the insults and threats I have heretofore mentioned.