Free Hell by Robert Olen Butler Page A

is perfectly clear. I am not an abuser. With Pat it wasn’t about being tough, it was about touching. When I hit her, it was about touching, and it was about touching whenever I sought out the backseat of White House limo SS100X, my favorite, the one I always insisted on. I was the President. It was the restored midnight-blue Lincoln Continental where Kennedy was shot. I would ride around right in that same backseat. The very spot. They touched him there. And they could touch me if they wanted to. I wasn’t going to run away.
    And up ahead, among the denizens in the crowd only a few moments away from suffering the blunt trauma of Dick Nixon, is Patricia Dankowski, once known professionally as Trixie Smith, a Chicago prostitute from Avondale, reared only a few blocks from Saint Hyacinth’s Basilica in a brick semidetached where she was touched for a few years by her father—he’s now, unbeknownst to her, in the basement of a brick semidetached in a very rough neighborhood of Hell where the rapists perpetually rape each other—and she is oblivious to the indiscriminate touching all around of the jostling throng of denizens. She squeezes an arm out of the press of bodies and runs a hand through her over-bleached hair, great clumps of it tearing loose in her fingers, but she does not notice, as she is thinking of the night of September 26, 1960, when she was touched for a brief time by the future President of the United States: Call me Jack, he says, and he smiles a lot of teeth at me and he’s a good looking man, even better looking than his photos, and we’re at the Ambassador East, which isn’t a first for me, though it’s not a place I’ve been in lately since they’ve come to know me by sight and I advise against it for any clients, so as to avoid a scene. Not that I’ve ever been in the Presidential Suite, where they’ve put him, and he’s got Peggy Lee playing on a phonograph when I come in, though he switches it off as soon as he motions to the bedroom door, which is too bad because I’d like to hear her go on singing “I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good” while I’m working Jack Kennedy, and he asks me “Do you have a TV, Trixie” and I say “Yes, I do, Jack” and he says “I’m going to debate that fellow Dick Nixon on TV in about an hour and a half” and I say “I didn’t just fall off the hay wagon, Jack” and he laughs and he says “Well then, what do you think I should do about Quemoy and Matsu” and I say “Nuke ‘em, Jack” and he laughs again and he’s naked real quick and so am I and I’d just as soon take a little bit longer because when John Fitzgerald Kennedy is inside me I get it in my head that I’m somebody after all but I’m only somebody for what’s got to be less than sixty seconds and then I’m nobody again, just like my old man always said afterwards, but when I’m dressed and passing through the sitting room I get up the nerve to ask Jack to play my favorite song and he waves off all his men already coming in from the other bedroom and he smiles and he goes to the phonograph and he puts the needle on the vinyl and he and I stand there together and Peggy sings to me about how a man is always going to end up making you sing the blues in the night . And now there is, very nearby, a roaring engine and then a wild flinging of bodies and Patricia Dankowski is hit and shattered by Satan’s chauffeur. She tumbles over the right front fender and along the side of the car, and for a very brief moment, as she hurtles past, she and Hatcher look each other in the eyes.

    Having seen the eyes of this woman flying past, Hatcher turns his face from the street. Hoover is moaning—not yet reconstituted from his eyeplucking—and so Hatcher closes his own eyes and waits, and waits. Eventually, the sucking and tucking and zipping sounds of a reconstitution begin and Hoover falls silent. Outside, the roar of body-thumps eventually ceases and there is only the sound of the engine