My Life as a Rat Page 3

  Ignoring me, usually. Of course, why’d my brothers take note of me?

  They were not so polite to Mom, sometimes. Mouthy, she’d call them. But in our father’s presence, they were watchful, wary. They behaved.

  If Daddy became annoyed with one of them he had ways of disciplining: sometimes a sharp, level look; sometimes an uplifted hand, the flat of the hand, a fist.

  Flick of Devil-Daddy tongue which the boys could not miss. Hot red, sharp-pointed tongue like a blade slicing their hearts. But in the next instant, gone.

  Even so, outside the house the older Kerrigan boys sometimes got into trouble.

  Almost there was a hushed reverent air to the phrase—into trouble.

  The first time I was too young to know what had happened. Nor did Katie know. And if Miriam knew, she wouldn’t tell us.

  On the phone with relatives our mother spoke derisively: “It’s nothing. It’s a stupid rumor. Those liars.”

  Though sometimes her voice quavered: “It’s her word against theirs! That’s what everybody says, and that’s a legal fact.”

  Near-inaudibly Mom would speak into the phone, in the kitchen. Seated, hunched over, pressing the avocado-plastic receiver against her ear as if trying to keep the words inside from spilling out.

  If Katie asked what was going on Mom said, scolding: “Never mind! It’s no business of you girls.”

  You girls. Often we’d hear from Mom’s mouth.

  Her gaze avoiding us, skittering away across the linoleum floor.

  We were mystified but we knew better than to persist in questions. We knew better than to ask our brothers who were the ones in trouble. (And if we asked Rick he’d shrug us off—Don’t ask me, ask them.) No possibility of asking our father who was the custodian of all secrets and didn’t take kindly to being questioned about anything. And eventually we learned what had happened, or some version of what had happened, as we learned most things not meant for us to know, piecing together fragments of stories as our mother sometimes, with a curious sort of self-punishing patience, fitted together broken crockery to mend with glue.

  The girl whose word was against theirs was a fourteen-year-old special-needs student at the middle school where Lionel was in ninth grade. Jerr was sixteen, a junior at the high school.

  Liza Deaver was the name. Liza Lizard she was called for her face was splotched like a turtle’s shell.

  At fourteen she had the body of a mature woman, fattish, slow-moving, with thick plastic-rimmed glasses and lenses that magnified her eyes. She wore slacks with elastic waistbands and plaid shirts that billowed loose over her big soft breasts and belly. We’d overheard our brothers imitating her speech which was slow and stammering and whining like the speech of a young child.

  Liza’s mental age was said to be nine or ten. And it would remain that age through her life.

  Liza was physically clumsy, poorly coordinated, and often made her way swaying and lurching with one eye shut, as if seeing with both eyes confused her. Oddly, unpredictably, Liza sometimes burst out in anger and tears and had to be sent home from school by the special-needs teacher.

  We’d heard that, in the special-needs classroom at the school, Liza had some talent for drawing. Except her drawings were of people with large round balloon-faces on small stick legs—just faces, legs.

  Retards, they were called. Special-needs was the adult term, retards what others kids called them.

  Liza Lizard was a cruel name. Yet sometimes it seemed, if boys called this name after her, Liza misheard it, and thought it might be something else, and turned to them with a peculiar squinting smile, a childish sort of hope.

  I did not—ever—utter aloud the name Liza Lizard. But like other girls I may have sniggered when I heard it.

  It is shameful now to recall—Liza Lizard. You did not—ever—want the attention of the crude coarse cruel boys to turn upon you and so possibly, yes—you did snigger when you heard it.

  No news item about the incident in Patriot Park would appear in the South Niagara Union Journal. Only minors were involved, and the (alleged) victim so unreliable.

  Sometimes in Liza Deaver’s confused telling there were just five or six boys involved. Sometimes, many more—ten, twelve.

  Sometimes Liza Deaver remembered a few names. Sometimes, just one or two.

  What would come to be generally known was that a loose group of boys between the approximate ages of fourteen and seventeen, not a gang, not even friends had cajoled Liza into coming with them to Patriot Park after school. One of the older boys, not a Kerrigan, had been friendly with Liza, or rather had pretended to be friendly with Liza, so Liza would boast that he was my boyfriend.

  The Kerrigan brothers Jerome Jr. and Lionel were not the ringleaders in the assault—if there was an “assault.” This was much-reiterated by my brothers. All they’d done (they would claim) was follow other boys tramping through muddy playing fields and past skeletal trellises in the municipal rose garden to the swimming pool, to the weatherworn stucco building where refreshments were sold in summer and where there were foul-smelling restrooms and changing rooms. In the off-season the building was deserted, dead leaves blew about the cement walk. But the restrooms were kept unlocked through the year.

  The boy who was Liza Deaver’s “boyfriend” led Liza into the men’s room saying they had “nice surprises” for her.

  It was so, Liza Deaver liked “surprises.” Usually candy bars, snacks in cellophane wrappers from a corner store, cans of sugary soda pop. Sometimes these were given to her by kindly persons who knew her and her family and sometimes by others who were not so kindly.

  Questioned afterward by parents, school authorities, Family Court officers the boys would claim that Liza had “wanted” to come with them. Going to the park had been “her idea.” Into the men’s restroom, her idea. She’d told them that she had done such things with her brothers and other boys and sometimes they gave her “surprises,” and sometimes they didn’t.

  Liza Deaver denied this. Liza’s parents denied it, adamantly.

  Liza Deaver had not been injured enough to require hospitalization but she’d been examined in an emergency room and treated for cuts, bruises, bloodied nose and teeth, “chafings” in the vaginal and anal areas. Clumps of hair had been pulled from her head and (it was whispered) the boys had “grabbed and pulled out” pubic hairs of which (it was whispered) Liza had many.

  Still the boys insisted that it had been Liza’s idea. They’d been “nice” to her, they said. These gifts they’d given her: a Mars bar with just a small bite missing, a plastic bead necklace found in the trash, a small stuffed puppy with button eyes, a perfumy deodorant. (Liza Deaver was notorious for her strong, horsey odor.) It was not clear how long Liza remained in the restroom with the boys for Liza lacked a firm grasp of the passage of time but the boys insisted that it had been for “only a few minutes”—“definitely no more than a half hour.” It was 5:40 P.M. by the time Liza limped home, a distance of about a mile; it was estimated that the boys had led Liza away from school at 3:30 P.M., though accounts differed about who exactly had been with Liza from the first, and who had joined later. The fact that Liza had brought home with her the “gifts” the boys had given her seemed to suggest that she’d been happy to receive them, for otherwise—wouldn’t she have thrown them away, in disgust?

  If she’d been victimized by the boys, and not a willing companion, wouldn’t she have called for help as soon as they’d released her, and she was able to run out into the street?

  (Though it wasn’t clear that the boys had kept Liza in the restroom against her will. She hadn’t been a captive, they said; she’d wanted to stay, and only left because it was suppertime, and she suddenly remembered that her parents would be angry with her if she was late.)

  Eventually, it was established that there were at least seven boys involved in the incident. These included Jerome Kerrigan Jr. and his brother Lionel but not (it seemed) Les. (Certainly not Rick.) No doubt there were
more boys but the seven who were named refused to provide the names of other boys—they were not rats.

  Poor Liza! Questioning left her confused about the boys’ names but she could (more or less) identify them by other means, descriptive means and by studying pictures.

  Yes she’d gone into the park and into the restroom with them willingly but when she’d wanted to leave they had not let her leave. Yes she’d been held captive by them, in the restroom. No she had not wanted to do the “nasty” things they did to her.

  Yes she had told them she wanted to go home. Yes she had started to cry but they just laughed at her. No no no she had not told them that her brothers had done these nasty things to her, and other boys and men beside. She had not.

  It was not clear if Liza had intended to tell her parents that “something bad” had happened to her. After they’d released her she’d slipped into her house by a rear door and was discovered by her mother in a flushed and disheveled state, clothes soiled and torn and misbuttoned, and her face smeared with blood. At once, confronted by her frightened mother, Liza burst into tears and began stammering and sobbing.

  It was the “worst day” of their lives, Mrs. Deaver said. They would “never, not ever” recover from what had been done to their daughter whose fault was she was “too friendly” to people who were not her friends.

  The Deavers lived in a ramshackle house on Carvendale Road, at the edge of the school district. On one side of the road was the township of South Niagara, on the other side an unincorporated region of scrubby farmland, overgrown pastures and derelict dwellings.

  The Deavers were a large family but not as the Kerrigans were a large family. For the Deavers were a welfare family whose father could not provide for his wife and many children—nine? Ten? And of these, what a pity, what a shame, unless it was a crime, as people said, several were not right in the head—what the kids called retards.

  Mr. Deaver, when he was employed, worked at the railroad yard. Mrs. Deaver worked part-time at a local mall. Several of their children were out of school and only intermittently employed and the youngest had not yet begun school.

  At Family Court, Liza initially sat mute and frightened as others spoke on her behalf. Her deep-shadowed eyes were swimmingly magnified behind the thick lenses of her glasses. After a while she began to answer questions in a hushed, hoarse voice. Eventually she began to speak louder. And then she began to cry, to sob, to stammer, to stutter and to choke. Her splotched-turtle face was flushed and puffy, saliva glistened at her lips. Family Court officials who tried to make transcripts of her not-very-coherent and contradictory accounts would insist afterward that they felt sorry for the “poor, mentally disabled girl”—and for the Deavers, who accompanied Liza and never let her out of their sight—(Mrs. Deaver went with Liza several times to the restroom during the course of the session)—were nonetheless unconvinced that Liza was telling the truth or even that with her impaired cognition she had a clear conception what truth might be.

  It was generally conceded—Boys will be boys. And—These boys’ lives might be ruined . . . How much worse the situation might have turned out for the boys, if the girl had been seriously hurt!

  There were extensive interviews with the accused boys by Family Court officers, with the boys’ fathers and their attorney present. (The fathers of the accused boys hired a single lawyer to represent their sons, a local lawyer with connections to the Kerrigan family.) In this way a public hearing in juvenile court was avoided. There were no arrests. No formal charges were made against the boys who were suspended from school for one week.

  Liza Deaver was placed on suspension for the remainder of the school year for it was believed that her presence would be “distracting” and “hazardous,” in the words of the school principal; Liza herself was known to have a raging temper, and to strike out furiously, in frustration, at younger and smaller children when she believed they didn’t respect her. (Liza was usually intimidated by individuals older than herself.) As it happened Liza Deaver never returned to school but was allowed to drop out for “medical reasons.”

  All this my sister Katie and I would learn, much later. At the time, we knew little.

  No one in the family talked about Liza Deaver, so far as we knew.

  No one talked about the trouble. For weeks Jerr and Lionel were subdued around our mother and wary of our father, like kicked dogs. But cunning kicked dogs. They had 9:00 P.M. curfews. Jerr wasn’t allowed to drive for six weeks. Both boys had extra chores around the house. On the phone my mother said, incensed, “It was all that girl’s fault! She did it deliberately! Those Deavers better get her fixed! Before it’s too late.”

  When my mother hung up I asked what “fixed” meant. I wondered if whatever the boys had done to her, Liza might need fixing like a broken clock.

  Disdainfully my mother said, “Like a cat, spayed. So it can’t have kittens people have to drown.”

  To Die For

  GROWING UP, WE KERRIGAN KIDS KNEW THAT OUR DADDY would die for us. No one had to tell us, we knew. Of course, the concept “to die for” was not in our vocabularies. Still, we knew.

  In our father’s big Irish Catholic family in Niagara Falls he’d been raised with the conviction that families stuck together. Irish immigrants had had a hell of a hard time coming to America, hadn’t even been considered “white” in some quarters, like Italians, Greeks, and Jews, until even the 1950s. And so, the Irish stuck together, in theory at least.

  Not in theory, but in reality, and crucially, a family had to protect its own. You might quarrel with relatives, a brother or a sister, you might quarrel with your parents but essentially you stuck together, you never deserted or betrayed one another. You never went outside the family—that was unforgivable.

  Inside the family you never lied when it really mattered, and you never cheated.

  Siding with your brother against your cousin, but with brother and cousin against the stranger.

  You would die for your family and you would (maybe) die for your (close) friends the way soldiers would die for their (close) buddies.

  Something like this, Jerome Kerrigan had truly seemed to feel for his immediate family, if not all of the Kerrigans. And for the guys in his platoon in Vietnam, he dared not recall without his eyes welling with tears and his mouth working to keep still.

  If Daddy was suspicious of strangers he was almost naively trusting of relatives and friends. Often he did household repairs for no payment, wouldn’t hear of being paid except in drinks, hospitality, reciprocal favors. That was friendship—loyalty, paying back what you owed. Being generous.

  He lent money to people who, he had reason to know, probably wouldn’t be able to repay him; he lent money without interest, knowing that this was a disadvantage, for those to whom he’d lent money would repay the lenders who’d demanded interest, and not him. Yet, Daddy could not bring himself to lend money with interest—that was not how he saw himself.

  And so, Daddy lent money to his heavy-drinking brothers. He provided bail bond for Kerrigans who found themselves on the wrong side of the law—business fraud, bad checks, failure to pay alimony, embezzlement. He did favors for guys in the plumbers’ union, for guys he’d gone to school with who’d had bad luck. He respected bad luck—it could happen to anyone.

  The more kids you have, the more possibilities for bad luck. That was a grim fact.

  The most extravagant thing Daddy did, that I remember from my childhood, was helping one of his younger sisters buy a house in Buffalo, so that she and her husband could live near her husband’s family, who would help her nurse her husband afflicted with some terrible wasting disease like multiple sclerosis. Our mother had not liked this arrangement, she’d sighed and fretted and all but wept over the phone, for a large amount of money was involved, but in Daddy’s presence she did not dare complain for, as Daddy would’ve pointed out to her, he was the one with a salary.

  At the same time, you did not wish to cross Jerome Kerrigan.

/>   You did not wish to find yourself on his shit list. For there were many on this list who were, in Daddy’s eyes, fucked.

  Forgiving was rare. Forgetting, rarer.

  And the closest you were to Daddy, the harder for Daddy to forgive.

  He liked to quote an Italian adage—Revenge is a dish best served cold.

  Another remark he favored from the boxing world was What goes around comes around. Which was more hopeful for it seemed to mean not just bad but good, too. The good you do will be returned to you. Eventually.

  “Accident”

  IN NOVEMBER 1991 WHEN HADRIAN JOHNSON WAS BEATEN UNCONSCIOUS and left to die on the shoulder of Delahunt Road, and the lawyer who’d defended Jerome Jr. and Lionel Kerrigan at the time of Liza Deaver pleaded their case to prosecutors, the defense of boys will be boys didn’t work so well for them, or for my cousin Walt Lemire and a neighborhood friend named Don Brinkhaus who was also involved in the beating.

  At this time Jerome Jr. was nineteen and no longer living at home. He’d managed to graduate from South Niagara High with a vocational arts major and, through Daddy’s intervention, was an apprentice plumber with the contractor for whom Daddy also worked, the largest and best-known plumbing contractor in the city; he had not yet been accepted into the plumbers’ union but there was no doubt that he would be as soon as he completed his probationary period. (No African Americans belonged to the local plumbers’ union. This would be emphasized, unfairly some thought, in the media coverage of the case; unfairly because there were no African Americans in the local police officers’ union, the firefighters’ union, the electricians’ and the carpenters’ unions, among others. The only local union in which black men were welcomed was the sanitation workers’ union which was predominantly black and Latino.) Lionel was sixteen, a sophomore at the high school, big for his age, coarse-skinned, easily bored. Even in vocational arts Lionel’s grades were poor, he cut classes often, our mother didn’t dare report him to our father for fear of a terrible scene. But Lionel was in awe of his independent older brother who lived by himself now in a place near the railroad yard and owned a car, Daddy’s old 1984 Chevrolet he’d passed on to Jerr since it was all but worthless as a trade-in. Weekends the two hung out together drinking beer with Jerr’s friends, cruising in Jerr’s car. Jerr had hated school but now he was hating full-time employment even more, being overseen, assessed and judged. Worse, he hated being a plumber’s assistant, actually having to clear toilets of shit, every kind of crap, came close to puking every time he went out.