The Black Stiletto Read Online Free PDF Page A

especially after he’d slap her. Once this happened while all three of us kids were present. We were shocked, and John stood up to the creep.
    “Don’t you hit my mom!” he threatened with as much menace as an eighteen year old could muster. John would have been a formidable opponent, but my stepfather was a big man. He probably had a lot more experience in serious fighting than John did.
    Douglas just told him to shut up and then he left the house. My mom started crying and we tried to comfort her.
    “You should leave him,” I suggested.
    She looked at me like I was mad. “How dare you!” she said. “How could I possibly do that? How would we live? Where would the money come from? We just got married. I can’t go leaving a man I just married!”
    I shrugged in response and glanced at my brothers. The looks we exchanged indicated they agreed with me. But they weren’t about to come between my mom and our stepfather.
    John was lucky. As soon as he graduated from high school, heleft. He joined the military like my dad, only he enlisted in the army instead of the navy. Better to enlist than be drafted, he said. The Korean War was on and he actually wanted to go over there and serve. Mom didn’t want him to go—none of us did, except for Douglas. The bastard was glad to get rid of the oldest kid. One less obstacle in the way of what he wanted— me . John went away to boot camp and, sure enough, was sent overseas to Korea. As I write this, I don’t know what happened to him, whether or not he survived, or what. I was already gone by then.
    If Douglas wasn’t working in the oil fields or beating up Mom, he was out in a nearby vacant lot shooting one of his many firearms. He owned several guns—pistols and rifles—and he went out to target practice every few days. Sometimes he’d walk around the house with a handgun and pretend he was a cowboy gunslinger, doing quick draws from an old holster he had. He idolized John Wayne and other cowboys in the movies and thought of himself as an outlaw or something. Made me sick.
    As time went on, Douglas made life hell for me and Frank. If my mom wasn’t the object of Douglas’s aggression, then it was Frank. My stepfather treated Frank like dirt. So, naturally, Frank stayed away from the house as much as possible. He was busy in high school, he had his friends, and he had a part-time job at a drugstore. So we hardly ever saw Frank.
    Neither of my brothers was there to help me when I needed them.
    It finally happened on Halloween night, 1951. I was in eighth grade at Odessa Junior High School. My birthday was the next week and I had dressed up as a witch to go to a costume party that some kids were throwing. There was a carnival and all, and that was the thing to do. I didn’t really want to go, but I didn’t care to stay at home either. Frank was out with his friends, so no one was at home except Mom and Douglas when I came in just after midnight.
    Mom was asleep in their bedroom. In a drunken stupor, most likely. I noticed the nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the kitchen counter. Douglas was in the living room armchair doing nothing. We didn’t have a television. No one we knew had a TV then. Douglas was drunk, too, but lucid enough to give me a lecherous grin when I walked in the door.
    “Well, looky here,” he said. “It’s the Wicked Witch of the West.”
    I didn’t answer him. I just wanted to go to my room, take off the stupid costume, and go to bed. I was tired and not in a very good mood.
    “Got any candy for me, sweetheart?” he asked.
    I shook my head and went to the refrigerator to see if there was anything to drink besides water. As I was looking, I sensed him standing behind me.
    “Didn’t you go trick or treatin’?”
    “No,” I answered, my back still to him. “I just went to a party. I’m too old to trick or treat.”
    “Oh, I don’t think so. You’re just the right age. In fact, your birthday is next week, ain’t it?”
    I