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he tripped trying to back around one of the big Washex four-pockets. That was ail 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.