Buried Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

girl, some Norwegian girl, stringy blond hair and a slack expression on her face: a neighbor’s mildly retarded daughter. She took his pants down and played with him there in the prairie grass, and when he told Ma, there was some commotion in the house, Ma and the Old Man yelling and angry about something.
    1949. John, a neighbor boy, and the boy’s little sister, all of them naked, John and the boy “messing” with the little girl. When the Old Man found out, he took the razor strop off its nail.
    “I’ll teach you . . .”
    And the same year, a contractor friend of the Old Man was always taking John, the little builder, for rides in his truck. Real friendly, always “horsing around,” tickling him, “wrestling” with the seven-year-old boy, whose head always seemed to end up between the man’s legs, pressed hard to the crotch of his rough work pants. John, aware even then that the contractor was “messing” with him, just the way he himself had “messed” with the neighbor girl. He never told the Old Man about these rides, and he was never punished for what the contractor had done to him. John remembered that he dreaded the man, his truck, the little drives. He hated being messed with.
    Strange, then, that he should have become a contractor. What could Rogers make out of that one?
    Then, in the sex history, there was the panty thing that Dr. Helen Morrison thought was important. A nice lady with a good mind: John found her attractive and sympathetic. Some of the victims were found with what appeared to be their own underwear—queeny silk stuff that women wear—lodged deeply in their throats. So maybe the panty thing was important.
    The first time it surfaced, John was six, maybe seven: call it 1949, the year too many people were getting messed over. Ma and the Old Man were getting dressed on their way somewhere, and Ma couldn’t find any underwear in her drawer. Every piece missing. They found it, all of it, in a brown paper bag, under the front porch, in the sandbox Dad built where John played.
    John never knew why he took his mother’s underwear—it couldn’t be a sex thing at that age—but he told his parentsthat he liked the feel of it. The Old Man took down the razor strop and taught him what he would like and what he wouldn’t like. And the strop wasn’t enough for John Stanley Gacy: for the rest of John’s life—and maybe it started right there—he felt that the Old Man never “accepted” him.
    The next time the panty thing surfaced, John was twelve or thirteen. It was almost as if he wanted to block it out of his mind, the underwear thing, because he couldn’t recall if it was then or later (the next time he was fifteen and Karen found panties while making his bed) that Ma told him she’d make him wear the underwear he seemed to like so much. For punishment. Maybe she did make him wear it, once. It was all hazy in there, and he couldn’t clearly recall exactly what had happened.
    Ma didn’t tell the Old Man, though. There came a time when Ma just stopped talking about her only son’s problems. The Old Man picked on the boy, swung on him for nothing, hollered at him because he wasn’t perfect. Ma kept John’s transgressions to herself, punished him herself, and then—whatever John had done—it was over and no one had to talk about it again.
    But the Old Man wasn’t dumb. Maybe he never got any further than the eighth grade, but he read a lot, and there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do with tools. A jack-of-all-trades, very intelligent. The night of the second panty thing, John was up in his room, sitting out Ma’s punishment, dreading the moment when the Old Man, finally home from work, stepped in the door. Because he would know. John lay on his back in his bed. Over in one corner were the bookcases he had made out of orange crates and painted so they looked like fine furniture. The bed was made, his clothes were all folded in drawers or neatly hung. John’s bedroom: the