The Compass (Catch and Hold)

1. October 1989You can call me Haze.”

OCTOBER 1989

"YOU CAN CALL ME HAZE.”

W illiam ripped his headphones off when an outside sound penetrated the seal around his ears. The hairs on his body bristled instinctively, even before his brain interpreted the sound.

A woman was screaming. Not outside – downstairs.

Aftershock . That was the next thought his brain seized upon.

The last time a woman screamed like this in his house was exactly one week ago. In fact, it had been three women – his grandmother, mother, and sister – all screaming their heads off in the living room, where they watched the World Series. For a split second, he had been so pissed, assuming he missed a huge play – and there he was with his head stuck in the fridge, fishing around for another Coke.

But then the cabinet doors burst open and the dishes flew out, smashing into shards inches from his feet. The cereal boxes leaped from the top of the fridge and ricocheted off his head. Only when the shaking knocked him flat on his ass did his brain catch up to what was happening. It all transpired within milliseconds .

But now – today – there was no shaking, and Nonna had already taken Kelly to soccer practice. His parents were still at the processing plant, and Mike was at Uncle Bill’s auto body shop.

That's when William heard the familiar raspy bark – the grating sound of Jimmy’s voice when he was tweaking. And then he heard it again – a female voice, screaming.

Unmistakable peril.

His journal tumbled to the floor as he sprang out of bed. Meddle still spun on his turntable, but adrenaline propelled him downstairs.

He had no plan.

The screaming came from the in-law unit. He twisted the doorknob – Jimmy had forgotten to lock it. Which meant that Jimmy was going to be in bad shape.

William pushed the door open. The all-too-familiar acrid-sweet smell assailed his nostrils. Clearly Jimmy had been at it for a few days. Pipes, needles, cigarette butts, liquor bottles, vinegar, foil, spoons–

A teenage girl on the couch.

Her tank top was torn, her bra wrenched up, her blue-streaked hair matted with blood from a gash on her left temple. She looked only a few years older than William. She was giving Jimmy the fight of her life, but after all, Jimmy was six-foot-two of solid muscle, and she – well, she wasn't.

Jimmy wasn't making much sense; he never did when he got to this point. His speech had devolved into a chain of profanities strung together without other parts of speech to give them meaning. He enunciated poorly, except when he landed on the words that his unhinged mind thought were most venomous.

William had the presence of mind, finally, to realize he needed a weapon. He ran out to the patio and retrieved a baseball bat, then sprinted back to the in-law unit, where Jimmy had wrenched up the girl’s skirt.

He was screaming at her to give it to him, and something about a cavity search. Some bunch of nonsense about shoving something up her cunt, or something being shoved up there .

William wouldn’t kill him. He’d just knock him out of commission, just long enough for the girl to escape.

He sneaked up behind Jimmy and swung the baseball bat across his back. It landed with a feeble thud, but Jimmy flinched back just enough for the girl to punch his Adam’s apple and get out from underneath him.

Wearing only one shoe and holding the shreds of her tank top together, she fled the in-law unit and burst out the front door, into the street.

That’s when William knew, from the look on Jimmy’s face, that he was going to die.

He dropped the baseball bat – later, he’d wonder why; maybe to run faster – and fled the same direction as the girl. Unfortunately, his legs were only half as long as Jimmy’s, and he hadn’t enjoyed the same head-start as the girl. On the sidewalk, Jimmy’s arms banded around his torso.

William screamed for help. He saw the girl then; she had made it all the way to the stop sign at Taraval. At his plea, she turned to watch in horror as Jimmy dragged him back to the house.

William had a moment of detachment, just long enough to lock eyes with her. He had never seen her before, and for all he knew, she was just some random girl Jimmy had abducted off the street. But he realized, as if by Morse code signal to some receiver lodged in his brain – she would go get Mike. He was just five blocks down Taraval.

“Get inside, faggot!” Jimmy’s spittle sprayed William’s cheek. William screamed and flailed, but of course he stood no chance against his meth-addled older brother. Jimmy dragged him back inside, up the stairs, into William’s bedroom.

He flung William to the floor and kicked-slammed the door behind them. William scuttled backwards into the corner like a crab.

Jimmy just stood there a minute, his chest heaving, his snarl framing his mottled teeth. His rage imparting a garish hue to the weeping sores on his sallow face.

Then he spied William’s journal on the floor. It had fallen open to a page right in the middle .

“Ho-ly crap,” Jimmy said ominously. “Is that really what I think it is?”

Panicked, William crawled toward it, but flinched back when Jimmy’s arm swooped to snatch it from the floor. William watched with growing dread as his brother flipped through the pages.

“I thought I told you never to let me catch you doing this fairy-ass shit again,” he said in a low tone, shaking the journal at William so he could hear its pages rattling.

Jimmy flipped through some more pages, sniggering at each one. Finally, in a mocking high-pitched voice, he began to read aloud William’s poems. When he was done with each page, he ripped it from the notebook, sneering as he tore it to shreds.

William felt his intestines, his very soul, being gouged out with a spoon, but he dared not twitch a muscle. Jimmy had done it before, two years earlier – laid waste to all the poems and songs William had composed since he was eight years old. This time, the entire process took less than fifteen minutes.

When the entire past two years of William’s life lay in a snowy heap in front of him, Jimmy lingered a moment longer, still sneering. William felt a strange sense of calm then – of acceptance. This was it. Even if his body survived the day intact, he was still dead.

Jimmy swooped again and snatched William by the hair. But that small patch of hair came right out of William’s scalp, so Jimmy gripped another, larger chunk and used it to hurl William onto the bed. In one swift movement, Jimmy pinned William to the mattress with a knee to the chest.

“I bet you’d love to suck a real man’s cock, wouldn’t you?” Jimmy rasped out. William watched in horror as Jimmy notched the tab of his zipper down, one tooth at a time. “Not one of those pencil dicks you’re used to sucking off in the school bathroom. Something long, thick, and hard to choke on. You’d love that, wouldn’t you, faggot?”

Fully unzipped now, Jimmy’s fly tumbled open, and he reached into his boxers.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” screamed William .

With that, a switch flipped, and Jimmy woke from his fever dream. For a moment, he blinked down at William, as if confused.

And then he was furious again, re-zipping his pants with a vengeance. “I’m gonna curb-stomp your fairy ass.”

He again seized William by the hair and used it to haul him from the bedroom to the living room.

Where they met Mike.

“Jimmy,” said Mike, with forced calmness. “What are you doing?”

“I’m curb-stomping this little faggot! It’s about time one of us did it.”

Jimmy knocked Mike aside and dragged William down the stairs, out the front door, to the sidewalk.

Where they met the girl Jimmy tried to rape.

“Jimmy,” she pleaded. She had zipped Mike’s jacket over her torn tank top, and some man – maybe Uncle Bill – had lent her one of his ill-fitting shoes.

It was as if she were invisible now. As if Jimmy couldn’t even hear her. He flung William to the ground, by the curb.

“Jimmy!” she shrieked as Jimmy positioned William’s head against the curb. William fought back with everything he had, but he was a Lilliputian battling a Titan. The girl launched herself onto Jimmy’s back, the ill-fitting shoe tumbling from her foot.

“Stop it!” she screamed.

“Back off, Jimmy.”

William didn’t recognize the stern voice. Neither did Jimmy, and it stopped him in his tracks. Still holding William’s head against the curb, Jimmy turned his head to look, giving William a clear view of Mike. With a gun.

Jimmy actually laughed at him. “What are you gonna do with that thing?”

Mike aimed the gun squarely at Jimmy’s head. “Well, I’m certainly not going to let you kill our brother.”

He was so calm, and deadly serious. Almost formal. William had never once seen him like that. Maybe that’s why it silenced Jimmy for a moment – just long enough for a wary look to appear in Jimmy’s eyes.

“Stop playing,” he scoffed. “You don’t even know how to use that thing.”

“I do. As you know all too well.”

William had no idea what Mike was talking about, but Jimmy looked like he did. Then another sneer crept over his face, and with a final, spiteful shove that did no real damage, he released William’s head.

Slowly, Jimmy clambered to his feet. Mike kept the gun pointed at him, and Jimmy, not daring to say anything more to Mike or William, turned instead to the girl.

“I wouldn’t take anything from your skanky-ass dyke-hole even if your dad paid me to.”

“When my dad is done with you, you’ll wish Mike had shot you,” she spat back.

And that was the first time Jimmy looked truly worried. Mike said, “Get your shit, Jimmy.”

“Yes. Get your shit, Jimmy,” she echoed derisively.

She stood ramrod straight the whole time they waited outside. But after Jimmy gathered his wallet and his paraphernalia and peeled away in his beat-up ‘68 Camaro, her knees began to wobble. Mike set the gun down and caught her around the elbows.

“Shit,” he said, gesturing to the blood in her hair and the gash on her forehead. Too shell-shocked to stand, William didn’t even try to – he remained seated on the curb.

The girl shrugged off Mike’s assistance and held her hand out to William. “Let’s take care of you.”

“What?”

She gestured, and only then did he feel it – the enormous abrasion on the left side of his face, where it had scraped along the curb. The stinging roared to life with a vengeance as the adrenaline simultaneously wore off.

William accepted the hand she offered, and they returned inside. While Mike scrambled to put the in-law unit in order, she tried to restore order to William’s face in the bathroom upstairs. He sat on the toilet lid as she dabbed his wounds with a washcloth and soap.

He watched her face while she worked. “Is your dad going to do something to him?”

She laughed a bit. “No, but Jimmy thinks he is. And that’s all that matters. Trust me, Jimmy will not come back here, ever again.”

Only then did William detect the foreign inflection in her voice. It reminded him of the Russians in the Richmond District. While she continued to doctor his wounds, he said, “Why didn’t you just call the cops?”

She soaked a cotton ball in hydrogen peroxide and dabbed his skinned cheek. He winced, but swallowed the hiss of pain. “You know your parents could get in a lot of trouble if the cops thought they were tolerating a meth den in their house,” she replied. Pausing a moment, she lifted her eyes to his. “You don’t believe me, that Jimmy won’t bother you again.”

William shook his head to clear it. “It’s not just that. He tried to rape you, and…” He couldn’t tell her what he thought Jimmy was about to do to him, in the bedroom. So he just said, “I’m afraid he’s going to hurt someone else.”

Her dark, heavy brows came together. She found a clean towel and blotted his wounds. Finally, she said simply, “Jimmy is not going to hurt anyone else.”

“How do you know?” he demanded.

“Because he’ll go to prison first.”

It seemed like a feeble argument, but she looked weary, so he decided to drop the subject for now. She put a few dots of antibacterial ointment on some gauze. It finally occurred to him to ask, “What’s your name?”

She taped the gauze over the skinned area on his cheek. “Serafima.”

He rolled the name over and over in his mind. Serafima . “That’s a cool name. ”

“Thanks.” She brought the first aid supplies to the vanity and began doctoring her own wounds. “But you can call me Haze. That’s what my friends call me.”