The Hollow Man

EYES

At this same moment, more than a thousand miles to the east, the thirteen-year-old blind, deaf, retarded boy named Robby Bustamante is being beaten by an “uncle” who has lived with his mother for the last four months. The “uncle” sleeps with his mother and provides her crack and heroin for various services rendered.

Robby’s crime is that he is still not toilet trained at age thirteen and has soiled his pants at a time when “Uncle” is home alone with the boy. Uncle, coming down from some bad Colombian, flies into a rage at the sight and smell of Robby, jerks him up from the pillowed corner of the small room where the boy has been rocking with his teddy bear and nodding silently to himself in the night, and begins striking him in the face with a fist that Robby cannot see coming.

Robby begins crooning a weird falsetto cry and throws palsied hands to his face to ward off the invisible blows.

This enrages Uncle further and the big man begins pounding Robby in earnest, slapping away the ineffectual, splayed-wrist hands, and punching the boy in the mouth, pulverizing the blubbery lips, smashing in the carious front teeth, breaking the boy’s broad nose, smashing cheekbones and closing eyes.

Robby goes down with a spray of blood on mildewed wallpaper, but continues the falsetto crooning and begins slapping the torn linoleum with his palms. Uncle does not know it, but the child is trying to find his teddy bear.

The nonhuman noises push Uncle the last millimeter across the killing line and he begins kicking the boy with his steel-capped Redwing boots, first in the ribs, then the neck, and then, when Robby is huddled in the corner, no longer crooning, in the face.

Uncle comes out of the red place he has gone and looks down at the blind and deaf boy, still huddled in the corner but at impossible angles now—wrists and knees splayed the wrong directions, one finger rising vertically backward, the bruised and mottled neck twisted wrong on the fat pulpy body in its urine-soaked Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas—and Uncle pauses. He has killed men before.

Uncle grabs Robby by his tuft of coarse black hair and drags him across the linoleum, down the hall, and through the small living room where MTV still blares from the black thirty-two-inch television.

There is no falsetto crooning now. Robby’s pulped lips leave a trail of saliva and blood on the tile. One of his blind eyes is wide open, the other swollen shut under his scarred brow. His loose fingers flop across the floor moldings at the doorways and make pale lines in the red smears his face leaves.

Uncle opens the back door, steps out, glances around, steps back in, and uses his foot to shove Robby down the porch steps. It is like listening to a gunnysack filled with two hundred pounds of Jell-O and loose rocks fold itself down the six wooden steps.

Uncle grabs Robby by the front of his too-small pajamas and drags him across the moist grass of the yard. Buttons pop and flannel tears, Uncle curses, gets a grip on Robby’s uncut hair, and commences dragging him again.

Behind the rotting garage, beyond the fallen-down fence and the abandoned lot behind it, back under the rain-dripping elms in the dark, out beyond the edge of light where a shack once had sat in the high grass not far from the river, leans the outhouse. No one uses it. A faded sheet of cardboard nailed on the door reads: KE P O T. A length of rotting rope has been tied around the door handles to keep kids out.

Uncle tears off the rope, steps into the foul-smelling darkness, rips the boards off the one-hole seat, drags Robby in, levers the boy’s body into a sitting position, and then grunts and heaves to tilt the seemingly boneless mass up and over the sill where the seat had been. Robby’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-patterned pajama top tears off on a nail and remains behind as his body slides into the dark pit. His bare feet seem to wave as they disappear into the hole. The noise from ten feet below is liquid and yielding.

Uncle steps out into the darkness, obviously relieved to be breathing fresh air, looks around, sees nothing, hears only a distant dog barking, finds a large rock underfoot, and then steps back into the outhouse to wipe his hands and shirt with the pajama top. Finished, he drops the rag into the reeking, rectangular hole and uses the rock to bang the seat boards back into place as best he can in the darkness.

There is no sound from the outhouse for the hour Uncle waits in the house until Robby’s mother returns with the car.

Robby, of course, does not hear the voices raised in shouts, nor the brief bout of weeping, nor the quick sounds of packing and car doors banging.

He does not see the house and porch lights being switched off.

He does not hear the roar of the car’s engine or the sound of tires crunching over the gravel of the drive as his mother leaves him for the last time.

Robby cannot hear the barking of the neighbor dog finally die down, like a scratched record finally being shut off, or sense the descent of silence in the neighborhood as the rains come softly, pattering on the leaves and dripping down from tears in the corrugated roof of the outhouse under the trees.

All these things I have told you are true. All the things I have yet to tell you are true.