“This is neato!” I said to Mr. Harvey. He could have been the hunchback of Notre Dame, whom we had read about in French class. I didn’t care. I completely reverted. I was my brother Buckley on our day-trip to the Museum of Natural History in New York, where he’d fallen in love with the huge skeletons on display. I hadn’t used the word neato in public since elementary school.
“Like taking candy from a baby,” Franny said.
I can still see the hole like it was yesterday, and it was. Life is a perpetual yesterday for us. It was the size of a small room, the mud room in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other. I could almost stand up in it, but Mr. Harvey had to stoop. He’d created a bench along the sides of it by the way he’d dug it out. He immediately sat down.
“Look around,” he said.
I stared at it in amazement, the dug-out shelf above him where he had placed matches, a row of batteries, and a battery-powered fluorescent lamp that cast the only light in the room – an eerie light that would make his features hard to see when he was on top of me.
There was a mirror on the shelf, and a razor and shaving cream. I thought that was odd. Wouldn’t he do that at home? But I guess I figured that a man who had a perfectly good split-level and then built an underground room only half a mile away had to be kind of loo-loo. My father had a nice way of describing people like him: “The man’s a character, that’s all.”
So I guess I was thinking that Mr. Harvey was a character, and I liked the room, and it was warm, and I wanted to know how he had built it, what the mechanics of the thing were and where he’d learned to do something like that.
But by the time the Gilberts’ dog found my elbow three days later and brought it home with a telling corn husk attached to it, Mr. Harvey had closed it up. I was in transit during this. I didn’t get to see him sweat it out, remove the wood reinforcement, bag any evidence along with my body parts, except that elbow. By the time I popped up with enough wherewithal to look down at the goings-on on Earth, I was more concerned with my family than anything else.
My mother sat on a hard chair by the front door with her mouth open. Her pale face paler than I had ever seen it. Her blue eyes staring. My father was driven into motion. He wanted to know details and to comb the cornfield along with the cops. I still thank God for a small detective named Len Fenerman. He assigned two uniforms to take my dad into town and have him point out all the places I’d hung out with my friends. The uniforms kept my dad busy in one mall for the whole first day. No one had told Lindsey, who was thirteen and would have been old enough, or Buckley, who was four and would, to be honest, never fully understand.
Mr. Harvey asked me if I would like a refreshment. That was how he put it. I said I had to go home.
“Be polite and have a Coke,” he said. “I’m sure the other kids would.”
“What other kids?”
“I built this for the kids in the neighborhood. I thought it could be some sort of clubhouse.”
I don’t think I believed this even then. I thought he was lying, but I thought it was a pitiful lie. I imagined he was lonely. We had read about men like him in health class. Men who never married and ate frozen meals every night and were so afraid of rejection that they didn’t even own pets. I felt sorry for him.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll have a Coke.”
In a little while he said, “Aren’t you warm, Susie? Why don’t you take off your parka.”
I did.
After this he said, “You’re very pretty, Susie.”
“Thanks,” I said, even though he gave me what my friend Clarissa and I had dubbed the skeevies.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No, Mr. Harvey,” I said. I swallowed the rest of my Coke, which was a lot, and said, “I got to go, Mr. Harvey. This is a cool place, but I have to go.”
He stood up and did his hunchback number by the six dug-in steps that led to the world. “I don’t know why you think you’re leaving.”
I talked so that I would not have to take in this knowledge: Mr. Harvey was no character. He made me feel skeevy and icky now that he was blocking the door.
“Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home.”
“Take off your clothes.”
“What?”
“Take your clothes off,” Mr. Harvey said. “I want to check that you’re still a virgin.”
“I am, Mr. Harvey,” I said.
“I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me.”
“My parents?”
“They only want good girls,” he said.
“Mr. Harvey,” I said, “please let me leave.”
“You aren’t leaving, Susie. You’re mine now.”
Fitness was not a big thing back then; aerobics was barely a word. Girls were supposed to be soft, and only the girls we suspected were butch could climb the ropes at school.
I fought hard. I fought as hard as I could not to let Mr. Harvey hurt me, but my hard-as-I-could was not hard enough, not even close, and I was soon lying down on the ground, in the ground, with him on top of me panting and sweating, having lost his glasses in the struggle.
I was so alive then. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to be lying flat on my back with a sweating man on top of me. To be trapped inside the earth and have no one know where I was.
I thought of my mother.
My mother would be checking the dial of the clock on her oven. It was a new oven and she loved that it had a clock on it. “I can time things to the minute,” she told her own mother, a mother who couldn’t care less about ovens.
She would be worried, but more angry than worried, at my lateness. As my father pulled into the garage, she would rush about, fixing him a cocktail, a dry sherry, and put on an exasperated face: “You know junior high,” she would say. “Maybe it’s Spring Fling.” “Abigail,” my father would say, “how can it be Spring Fling when it’s snowing?” Having failed with this, my mother might rush Buckley into the room and say, “Play with your father,” while she ducked into the kitchen and took a nip of sherry for herself.
Mr. Harvey started to press his lips against mine. They were blubbery and wet and I wanted to scream but I was too afraid and too exhausted from the fight. I had been kissed once by someone I liked. His name was Ray and he was Indian. He had an accent and was dark. I wasn’t supposed to like him. Clarissa called his large eyes, with their half-dosed lids, “freak-a-delic,” but he was nice and smart and helped me cheat on my algebra exam while pretending he hadn’t. He kissed me by my locker the day before we turned in our photos for the yearbook. When the yearbook came out at the end of the summer, I saw that under his picture he had answered the standard “My heart belongs to” with “Susie Salmon.” I guess he had had plans. I remember that his lips were chapped.
“Don’t, Mr. Harvey,” I managed, and I kept saying that one word a lot. Don’t. And I said please a lot too. Franny told me that almost everyone begged “please” before dying.
“I want you, Susie,” he said.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t,” I said. Sometimes I combined them. “Please don’t” or “Don’t please.” It was like insisting that a key works when it doesn’t or yelling “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it” as a softball goes sailing over you into the stands.