Chapter Twenty-Four

Clint stayed with Renee in Rainbow. He approved of her new décor and appeared genuinely touched by her preparations for the babies. He didn’t press her to go to Texas and face the stone cold blue stare of Gunter Beck, though she often thought she’d like to have Lena around, especially when the babies began kicking in earnest. How her mother-in-law would have loved that. Clint did. His hands seemed to be always on her belly. His love-making became tender and gentle and so very careful that at times she wished they were back in The Tin Can tearing up the sheets.

Most important of all when Uncle Dewey’s trial date was set and the prosecutors wanted to depose her in detail, Clint went along and held her hand. Her courage transferred Dewey’s daughter who stiffened her fragile spine and agreed to testify, too. Lest the occasion of their molestation be too far in the past, two young Hispanic women not yet out of their teens came forward to tell their tales. After being kicked out by his wife, Dewey moved into an apartment in their complex and courted their mother in order to get to her girls, aged ten and twelve. He earned their trust, offered to stay with the children when the mother worked nights to make sure none of the teenaged boys hanging around got in their pants, he said.

For all his current scraggly looks, Renee knew Dewey possessed ways of making an immature girl feel pretty, desirable, ready for sex. He’d see them through this rite of passage and make sure they knew all they needed to know about men, he promised them. That line worked well on an insecure tomboy once upon a time, and he still used it, evidently. By the time girls reached the age of eighteen, he generally lost interest and let his victims go, though he’d tried to get at Renee during holidays long after she started college. “You were always my favorite,” he’d whisper while carols played obscenely loud in the Niles home, her mother drank herself into a stupor with well-spiked eggnog, and her dad spent the evening at a gentlemen’s club in Lafayette. She’d push him away.

She told all when called to the stand: the trips to France, the things he’d made her do and threatened to tell her father. Her agitation caused the babies to kick furiously in her belly as if punching her from the inside out of anger. She looked to Clint in the seats beyond the lawyers for reassurance and found a face made unrecognizable with hatred, his blue eyes lasering fury directed at the back of Dewey’s head which should have exploded under that gaze. Her problems had done this to the kindest man she’d ever known. Again, she feared she only brought trouble and chaos into the world, not love. Her knees wobbled as she made her way back to his side and grasped his hand like a lifeline rescuing her from dark seas of her past.

Her cousin Chelsea gave similar testimony, only having no Clint in her life or layers of tough hide built up over the years, broke down and cried on the verge of hysteria. If possible, her story was worse. At home and handy, the blonde woman who so resembled her mother got no trips abroad, only promises that Dewey would tell Anna what Chelsea begged him to do to her. If that failed and his daughter seemed to waver toward confession, he hinted that her mother might have a fatal accident so the two of them could be alone together forever. She had no idea he’d move on as she matured.

Against the advice of his attorney, Dewey wanted to tell his side. His perversion went so deep, he perceived his actions as normal and easily explained. Mounting to the witness box, he swore to tell the truth—as he saw it. The lawyer made sure his client appeared well-dressed, nicely groomed, and completely sober, a tidy disguise for a scrawny and disgusting middle-aged man, a retro-vision of the man Dewey had once been before paying life’s tolls for heavy drinking and his secret debauchery of girls.

“See here,” Dewey began. “I want to set the record straight. I never molested any child. These here girls all bled before I touched them. That’s nature’s sign they are women and not children anymore, the getting of their period. In a lot of cultures, they’d be ready for marriage. All I did was train them for that. Their husbands should thank me one day.”

Clint surged to his feet. In the row behind him, Bodey Landrum set hands on his shoulders to push him down again, but Clint shook him off as easily as a bull did even such a skilled rider. He took a few steps before a huge bailiff got in his way, and he lowered his head as if he’d butt the man in the gut to get at Dewey. Calmly, the officer of the court asked him to return to his seat. That didn’t really change his mind about vaulting the barrier between him and Dewey and beating this terrible man to a pulp again, but Renee’s hand on his arm and a soft request to stay by her side did. Clint settled against her, hip to hip with the babies in her belly kicking against his side, but she felt his pulse racing beneath her fingertips.

Her uncle pointed a finger in their direction. “See there now, that’s the guy who beat me up. Broke two of my teeth.” Dewey showed the unrepaired damage of his ragged dentition to the jury. The female members turned their heads away. “Stove in some ribs, too. He’s the one should be on trial.”

Ex-Aunt Anna stood with a fist raised in the air as if to make herself appear taller and more noticeable. “Liar! I kicked your ribs in Dewey, and you know it. Give me credit for something.”

“I was married to that woman. She got a mean temper. You see why I turned to my daughter for comfort, don’t you?” Dewey turned to the jury for sympathy. Even the men looked in another direction. His attorney buried his face in his nicely manicured hands.

Not a stupid person considering what he’d gotten away with for years, Dewey noted their reaction and changed his tact. “See, I got a condition. It’s called hebephilia. Now ain’t that a mouthful? It means I have a yen for girls who just became women, you know, around eleven. That’s what the shrinks tell me. I’m pretty much done with the gals around sixteen when it becomes ephebophilia, except for the redhead over there. She kept coming back for more Dewey years past that age. Really, I only need court-ordered therapy, not a jail sentence.”

He kept an eye on Clint who stirred in his seat, but gave the jury an ingratiating broken-toothed grin that failed to charm, so he returned to his first weird defense. “Like I was saying, I trained those girls good. Always used a condom till I got them on the pill and never gave a one of them any diseases. I kept away the boys who might have knocked them up. Like my niece, Renee. Her feller put her in a family way long before they got hitched. Thought I taught her how to avoid that, but she turned into a real slut, not like my other pretty girls who still remember Dewey’s lessons.”

A woman seated near Anna with the other two witnesses, her dark-eyed, wounded daughters, began cursing in Spanish and spit on the courtroom floor. Clint bolted to his feet again. This time Bodey locked his arms around his friend, not to save Dewey but to protect the bullfighter from arrest.

Chelsea began to scream, “Yes, I remember your lessons—so well sex repels me. I’ll never have a normal life, never!”

The gavel pounded. “Clear the spectators, bailiff. Whatever anyone thinks of the accused, I will not have pandemonium in my courtroom.” Despite her words, the judge, a woman, looked at the victims with compassion on her face. “The law will deal with him.”

It did. The verdict came in guilty, very guilty, after only a half hour of deliberation. The judge assigned the maximum sentence on their recommendation, adding years for each of the four known victims. If Dewey ever got parole, he’d be a doddering old man wearing diapers by the time he got out.

“I’m glad this is over,” Renee said as they walked from the courthouse. The November air cooled her skin, and she hoped Clint’s temper. “I despise what he did to me, but I hate what he did to you in there, Clint. You would have killed him if he’d gotten off.”

“I can’t deny it.”

“If I turned you into a murderer, I couldn’t live with myself anymore.”

“It would have been Dewey who did that, not you, Renee. Never blame yourself again for any of this.”

“Hell, I’d have helped you hide the body,” Bodey said. Having no wish to expose Eve to this lurid trial, he’d left his own pregnant wife at home. “Let’s vamoose and tell the ladies waiting at home the good news that Dewey won’t be around anymore.”

“As long as he’s locked up, I’ll get over it like the bulls that lose all their fury once the rodeo is done. But, that pervert does deserve to die,” Clint said, meaning every word.

****

Others agreed. Uncle Dewey didn’t thrive in the penal system. Nor did he serve out his sentence. An inmate shived him the shower in the most trite of prison deaths. The warden personally called Chelsea to express his regrets about not being able to protect her father and to ask what she wanted done with his body.

She gave a short answer. “Cremate it. I’ll come to get the ashes.”

Chelsea asked Renee to ride along the day she received the cremains of her father stashed in a plain cardboard box. Clint spoke out against it, but Renee insisted on honoring the request. Just the two of them would go together and see Dewey to his end.

“She’s not strong like me. She doesn’t have a person like you in her life. I can do this for her, help her gain all that closure my therapist always talks about. For me, the circle is almost completed. Let me see it through to the end,” she argued.

He let his wife go with reluctance. She held Chelsea’s hand as the warden presented the box and again expressed his condolences.

“I don’t need kind words. Just tell me exactly how he died,” Chelsea insisted.

The head of the prison, an older man, had the demeanor of a kindly grandfather despite his high-ranking position in the prison system. Known for being compassionate, he never let a prisoner walk that last mile alone. “You really don’t want to know that, Miss. Better you remember your father as he was.”

“I want to hear every detail.” Eyes hard as blue pebbles reinforced her words.

“Okay, then. Cons don’t take to child molesters. They raped him with a broomstick before stabbing him in the gut and trying to saw off his genitals with a piece of sharpened plastic. He didn’t die right away, lived long enough to know he’d been mutilated. Lots of internal damage carried him off in a few hours. We did do our best to save him and find the culprits. No one talked.”

“I appreciate your telling me, Warden,” Chelsea replied with a soft voice and perfect good manners. She stood, shook his hand, and exited with the small brown box tucked in her capacious handbag.

Back in the car, she turned to Renee. “Maybe now I can sleep at night knowing he’ll never creep into my bedroom again. I’m glad he suffered.”

Renee couldn’t say she grieved for Uncle Dewey, but the manner of his death shook her a little. Loving Clint Beck made his wild red rose grow back with fewer thorns. “Chelsea, call if you want to talk. Only I can totally understand. What will you do with the ashes?”

“Pull over at the next gas station.”

“We don’t need to fill up yet.”

“I’ll only be a minute.”

Presuming a rest stop, Renee steered into the first station off the interstate. Well, these days she could always use a bathroom. A six months, the babies enjoyed bouncing on her bladder. Chelsea got out lugging her heavy purse, but didn’t veer toward the restrooms. She made her way to a dumpster with Renee following, raised the lid, and chucked the brown box full of ashes into the bin among the used menstrual pads from the ladies room, half-eaten sausage sandwiches, and a multitude of flies. The heavy lid clanged down like iron being forged into a chain link.

“Garbage,” her cousin said. “Just garbage, and this is where he belongs.”

Renee didn’t disagree, though she would have used the word, “Closure.”