Unspeakable Read online

  Holly climbed to her feet. She was trembling and gulping for air. "Please-the boy. His name's Daniel. I don't even know if he's still breathing. His mother's in the kitchen Mary. She's in a real bad way, too."

  "Hey, hey, steady," said Mickey, putting his arm around her. His black raincoat was glittering with rain.

  "All his bones are broken," said Holly. "Oh God. He's such a sweet little boy. He never did anything to anybody."

  "I told you!"raged Elliot Joseph."Iexplainedit to you! He had that devil in him! He had that devil in him and I had to beat it out of him!"

  "Will you kindly shut the fuck up?" snapped Mickey. Then he looked down at Daniel and asked the paramedic, "How is he? Is he still alive?"

  "Hanging on by his fingernails. God knows how."

  "Please," said Holly. "He's been through so much."

  "We're doing what we can, ma'am. What's his pulse rate?"

  "I saved him from the devil and you made him deaf, you deaf bitch!"

  Mickey shot Elliot a quick look. Two of the officers had him in the doorway, holding his arms, while a third was handcuffing him. "Did he hurt you?" Mickey asked Holly intently.

  "Just a-slap on the face. A knock on the head. Nothing serious." But the vision in her left eye was blurred and she was trembling like a startled pony.

  "Okay," said Mickey, taking hold of her hand and giving it a squeeze. "I won't be a moment."

  "It's all right. I'm not going anywhere until I know that Daniel's okay."

  Mickey went across to Elliot Joseph. He kept his back turned to her, so Holly couldn't see what he was saying, but he nodded his head from time to time as if he were talking to Elliot Joseph quite calmly. Only the complicated jumble of anxiety on Elliot Joseph's face gave Holly any idea that Mickey might be threatening him.

  Elliot suddenly threw himself wildly from side to side. "You can't touch me! You can't touch me and you fucking know it! You touch me-you lay one single finger on me, go on!"

  Nod, nod, nod,from Mickey.

  "I got rights. I got fucking human rights and tribal rights and you touch me, you just fucking touch me once, and you're finished. You and that deaf bitch who made my boy deaf. I'll get the both of you, I swear it."

  Nod?

  "You're out of your mind. That's my boy over there, and if I beat that devil out of him, you ought to be giving me a fuckingaward."

  Nod, nod, nod?

  "Well, she's my wife and she tried to stop me beating him and that was not in the boy's best interest, was it? If your boy had that devil in him, what wouldyoudo? Nothing, I'll bet, you faggot."

  Nod.

  "She had it coming. She dropped the fucking supper and she had it coming. A woman drops your fucking supper, what are you supposed to do? Say, like, 'Thank you very much, no problem, I'll just eat it off the rug'?"

  Mickey turned to one of the officers. The officer's face was round and bland like a self-confident cheese, no eyebrows and tiny, colorless eyes. He unholstered his baton and handed it over. Mickey smacked the baton in the palm of his hand,smack, smack, smack,although Holly couldn't hear it.

  "So what are you going to do?" Elliot Joseph demanded, defiantly lifting his chin. "Hit me? You better just try, you faggot. I got human rights and I got Wallowa rights."

  Mickey gave no perceptible nod this time, but he must have said something because the cheese-faced officer suddenly reached up and seized Elliot Joseph's bandanna, wrenching his head back. Then he clamped his other hand around Elliot Joseph's throat.

  "Wob you doib, mab, I carn breeb!"

  Mickey took a step to the right. Elliot Joseph tried to purse his lips but he was gasping for breath and so he couldn't. Mickey tilted the baton way back over his shoulder, paused, and then cracked him straight in the mouth. Blood flew up against the door, and the cheese-faced officer flinched as his cheek was sprayed with scarlet squiggles.

  One of the paramedics looked up from the floor. She glanced toward the doorway but didn't make any comment about what she saw there. "The kid's stable," she told Holly. "We should be able to move him now. Do you want to come along?"

  Hard Words at theDoernbecher

  It was well past five o'clock before Dr. Sokol came along the corridor to tell Holly that Daniel was going to survive.

  She had been sitting for three and a half hours in the visitors' lounge at the Doernbecher Children's Hospital. She had started to type out her reports on her laptop, but her head was throbbing and she couldn't focus without squinting, so she closed it up. She knew that she should have gone home, but she couldn't-not if Daniel was going to die-and so she stood by the window while the rain gradually trickled down in front of her face, and lightning flickered in the distance.

  Every time the lounge door swung open she looked up with a nervous jump. She knew that it couldn't be Elliot Joseph, but she couldn't stop herself. She had been jostled and punched plenty of times before, but Elliot had done more serious damage than a few bruises. He had made her question her competence. If she weren't deaf, maybe she would have heard him muttering threats behind her back. Maybe she would have picked up some subtle intonation in Mary's voice, some plea for help that she simply hadn't been able to detect by lipreading.

  The lounge door opened and Dr. Sokol appeared. He wasn't much older than Holly and had a blue-shaven head and rimless glasses. He was still wearing his green theater robes and he looked exhausted.

  "Well, it was touch and go a couple of times, but the kid's going to live."

  "How bad is it?"

  Dr. Sokol wiped his neck with a towel. "About as bad as you can get. Let me tell you, I've had to deal with kids who were hit by semis, and eventheyweren't as badly traumatized as Daniel. He has a skull fracture, a broken collarbone, seven broken ribs, a broken pelvis, a fractured ankle, a ruptured spleen, and a damaged liver. That's not including all of his lacerations and contusions."

  "You say he's going to live ."

  "It's too early to say if he's going to make a comprehensive recovery. We had to relieve some pressure on the brain tissues as soon as they brought him in, and in the long term I'm worried about his mobility. His father must have used him as a trampoline."

  "Jesus," said Holly.

  Dr. Sokol lifted his finger and thumb, pinched only a half-inch apart. "He wasthisclose to the cemetery, believe me."

  Holly didn't know what to say. Dr. Sokol sat down, breathing with the deep steadiness of a man who was doing his best to keep his self-control. Then he said, "I thought Children's Welfare were supposed to keep an eye on situations like this make sure that things like this didn't happen."

  Holly sat next to him. "We try to do our best, Doctor. But we have very limited resources and very restricted rights. The law is overwhelmingly in favor of children being taken care of by their natural parents, and it isn't at all easy to define where careless parenting ends and calculated cruelty begins."

  "Careless parenting? Elliot Joseph has a long-term history of alcoholic psychosis. He seriously believed the kid was possessed by a devil. Judging by Daniel's general condition, he must have been whipped and beaten several times before, over several months at least. What clearer definition of constructive cruelty do you need than that?"

  "He was beaten before?"

  "Pretty consistently, I'd say."

  "I never saw any bruises and his mother never said anything."

  "I thought you people were trained to see the signs."

  "I never saw any bruises, ever! My God! Don't you think I would have done something about it if I had?"

  Dr. Sokol looked at her for a long time. He didn't say anything, but she could guess what he was thinking. She could also tell that she had shouted too loudly. When she shouted too loudly, her voice became even more distorted than usual. Her speech therapist had told her, and so had Daisy: "When you're upset, Mommy, you sound like you're drowning."

  Mount Hood

  The rain trailed away to the east, and the city sparkled in milky sunshine.

 
Holly stood by the window in the waiting room, watchingMount Hood reappear from the clouds.

  Mount Hood was fifty-six miles away to the southeast, the tallest peak inOregon , at 11,235 feet. Sometimes it looked to Holly like a mountain from a Japanese painting, snow-covered and spiritual, a place where the gods assembled. At other times it appeared more sinister, like a pyramid-shaped spaceship fromStargate.

  But she felt its presence every day; she felt its overwhelming gravity; and sometimes, when she and Daisy were out cycling throughForest Park , she would stop, and shade her eyes, and stare at it, as if it were somehow the answer to what had happened to her, and where her destiny lay.

  She would look at Daisy afterward and feel that extraordinary sensation of being a mother, of having created a daughter to go out into the world and do things that she would never do. Most of all-most precious of all-was that Daisy couldhear, and when she saw Daisy clapping or dancing or listening to music, Holly was almost compensated for the total silence which always surrounded her.

  Every day, winter and summer. Silence.

  George GreyeyesDrinks Cappuccino

  She was packing away her laptop and her report papers when George Greyeyes appeared in the waiting-room doorway.

  "Holly? Hey, I've just been over at the Vets' Hospital: Doug told me I'd find you here." He came up to her and gave her a hug. He was six feet four inches tall and always made her wish she were wearing six-inch heels.

  "I was just leaving, as a matter of fact."

  "Are youokay?Doug told me that Elliot Joseph attacked you."

  "A couple of bruises, that's all." She tried to smile but she was a little too close to crying, and all she could manage was a grimace.

  "The nurse told me about Daniel," said George. He always spoke very slowly, so she found it easy to read his lips. "I suppose we can thank our lucky stars that bastard didn't quite manage to kill him."

  "Not much to be thankful for, is it?"

  George checked his weighty stainless-steel watch. "Listen, how about you give me a ride back downtown and I buy you a coffee? I think we need to talk about this."

  They left the Doernbecher Children's Hospital and Holly drove them into the city center. More rain was drifting in, and it speckled the windshield. George Greyeyes touched her arm to attract her attention. "Knowing you, I expect you think this is entirely your fault."

  She glanced at him. "Who else can I blame? I've had my suspicions for over six months that Elliot Joseph was beating up on Daniel's mother."

  "Did you ever ask her direct?"

  "Oh, for sure. She denied it-shealwaysdenied it. But whenever I made a visit, there was always anatmosphere,you know, especially when Elliot was prowling around. That thing with women when they fiddle with their jewelry and they won't look you in the eye and they keep repeating over and over that everything's just fine. My God, I've been doing this long enough. I should have trusted my intuition."

  The rain suddenly started to grow heavier, and people on the sidewalks scurried for cover. They stopped at a red traffic signal and George touched her arm again. "There's nothing like hindsight, Holly, especially in the child welfare business."

  "But it honestly never occurred to me that he was hurting Daniel too. Daniel always seemed so well, he wasn't particularlyhappy-that was obvious-but he wasn't distressed."

  "Detached, more like. Children have this way of accepting things, even abuse. After all, they don't have much of a choice, do they?"

  "I never saw any marks on him. Never."

  "Well, Elliot must have been clever at hiding it, like most abusers are. Punch them in the stomach, twist their ears, whip them on the buttocks with a wire coat hanger."

  "But I didn't think the situation through, did I? I didn't ask myselfwhyElliot might have been hitting Mary. It didn't occur to me that she was trying to keep him away from Daniel."

  "No reason why you should," said George. "If anybody's to blame, it's me."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I knew that Elliot was hearing voices and experiencing psychotic episodes about demonic possession. I've come across it quite a few times before in Native American alcoholics. They get their tribal mythology all mixed up with theirdelirium tremens."

  George Greyeyes was forty-one years old, with high cheekbones and the classic Roman nose of the Nimipu, which was what the Nez Percé Indians called themselves. His shiny black hair was brushed straight back to his collar, and he always wore three-piece suits and two-tone shirts and black shoes as shiny as his hair. Instead of a necktie, however, he wore a silver necklace with a turquoise thunderbird on it.

  He was a senior case worker for NICW, the National Indian Child Welfare Association, which was based inPortland -the only association in the country that dealt specifically with abused Indian children. He and Holly had known each other for more than eleven years. In fact, it was George Greyeyes who had persuaded her that she ought to look for a job in child welfare, and over the years they had worked together on dozens of cases, particularly Native American children with one or both parents in prison.

  Holly and George had developed an unusual rapport, a calm and natural closeness in which conversation was rarely necessary. This was partly because of the mundane brutalities they encountered, day after day: daughters raped by their fathers, babies burned by their mothers' cigarettes, two-year-old toddlers starved and locked in cupboards for weeks on end. Most of the time, words weren't enough.

  Holly parked opposite Peet's Coffee & Tea on Southwest Broadway. She and George dodged across the street under her red-and-white golf umbrella. Inside the coffeehouse it was warm and busy and smelled of freshly grinding arabica. Holly saw several people she knew from theJusticeCenter and gave them a wave. Then she and George took a table in the corner by the window. Holly ordered a skinny almond-flavored latte and George ordered a cappuccino with extra sprinkles. On the windowsill beside them stood a vase of yellow roses.

  Holly pushed her hand into her hair. "God this is the first time in thirteen months I could really use a cigarette."

  "This wasn't all your fault, Holly, take it from me."

  "No Michael Sokol was right: I should have read the signs. I always suspected that Elliot might be violent. But, for crying out loud, I havedozensof cases where husbands are violent-even in the most respectable families-yet, they never touch their kids. A mother finally told me last Friday that her husband had been punishing her for years-like, ritual punishments for little things that she'd forgotten to do: put a fresh roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, maybe, or press the shirt that he wanted to wear. Two or three times a week he locked her in the bedroom, stripped her naked, and beat her with a cane while she had to beg his forgiveness for being such a bad wife . And that was in Northwest, in the smartest six-bedroom house you've ever seen, with two Mercedes in the garage, and they had twin seven-year-old girls that the husbanddotedon."

  George had hands as big as tractor seats, and he made a mess of tearing open a packet of brown sugar. "Sometimes you can't read the signs because you don't know what the signs mean. That's why I'm telling you thatI'mto blame too. I went to interview the Joseph family only seven weeks ago, and I could see then that Elliot was severely delusional, and getting worse."

  "I saw your report. That's another reason why I feel so guilty."

  "Uh-huh. Don't be. You couldn't see what he was delusionalabout. Like I say, many Native American alcoholics have nightmares based on ancient Indian beliefs. Yourwhitealcoholic, okay, he hears voices and he sees bugs climbing up the walls-frightening enough, I'll grant you. But your Native American alcoholic sees reallyprimalterrors: monsters and devils that are deeply ingrained in his tribal psyche. I had one guy who insisted he was being followed by the Eye Killers, who can stop your heart just by staring at you; and another guy who was thought that Bear Maiden was hiding under his bed. Bear Maiden is supposed to be covered all over in black hair, and she can break your neck with one bite.

  "It seems more than likely
to me that Elliot Joseph believed Daniel was possessed by a Native American devil. I don't know which one."

  Holly said, "He kept saying it was black, like a shadow."

  "Could have been Raven. Raven is usually a bird, but he can take on any shape he feels like. Traditionally he's very cunning and dangerous, a scavenger. But whatever devil it was, it obviously scared Elliot so much that he felt he had no other choice except to exorcize it. That was a danger I should have anticipated and warned you about."

  He took his spoon and scooped the froth off the top of his cappuccino. "I just want to say this, Holly: You and I, we were partly responsible for what happened here, I'll admit it, but it was a very unusual incident, very difficult to predict, and we went through all the correct procedural steps. I don't think that we should fall over ourselves to acceptallthe blame."