Hungry for the World by Kim Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

in that house, below us in the downstairs bedroom. He was the son of my dead step-grandfather, and I called him Uncle, but I hardly knew him. Whenever he emerged, beetle-browed and growly, my brother and I gave him wide berth. Only when he left on some mysterious errand did I venture down into his corner room with its walls of painted concrete and its single, high window opened to air the musty smell.
    Often it was my girl cousin Les, a year my junior, who accompanied me, who didn’t need to be dared. Meeting her for the first time may be my oldest memory: my uncle, her new stepfather, carrying in his arms a little girl of two, white-blond hair and green eyes. My being a year older than she was gave me the only advantage I would ever have over Les.She ran faster, hit harder, bit deeper than any other child I knew. She won basketball free-throw contests when girls were not supposed to compete, set records in the one-hundred-yard dash, alternately pampered and beat her huge stallion, Smokey, and broke the hearts of any number of boys whose affections she relentlessly trashed.
    While my grandmother took her afternoon nap, we would sneak to the basement and begin our sleuthing, uncovering clues as to the life of our fearsome relative. What we found was a wooden wardrobe, several shirts pressed into neatness by Nan, a pair of black wingtips. In the bureau drawer was a pocket watch, matchbooks advertising various bars, important-looking papers, several handkerchiefs, shoestrings, bottle openers, military insignia, and a fistful of foreign coins. Next to the metal bedstead, in the magazine rack made of black iron, we discovered something far removed from the airbrushed portraits of teen idols hanging on the walls in the room above our heads: copies of
True Detective
and
True Crime
, on their covers the colored illustrations of women clad in slips and garters, hands to their mouths to stifle the scream, their eyes wide and focused on the dark male figure in the doorway.
    There were other magazines, too, but instead of drawings, they had black-and-white photographs. In my mind’s eye, I can no longer see the nude bodies or the settings or anything else that appeared in the smudgy pages—nothing except the black bars of ink covering the eyes, which I understood were meant to shield the men and women from shame, the shame I myself felt as Les and I lay on our uncle’s high-sprung bed, reading in the basement’s cool light, our skin tingling, our hearts racing with fear that we’d be caught.
    It was there, in the room shut off from the drowsy heat of a summer afternoon, that Les and I found the book. On its cover was a woman, sitting on a chair, bound and gagged. Behind her, the men were dark and menacing silhouettes, shades of gray, sharp blue lines, black eyes and mouths. Les and I took turns reading the details aloud, how the rich, spoiled virgin had been kidnapped and held for ransom, how her captors raped her repeatedly and in all ways, how she had hated it at first, then how she came to want it more than anything. How foolish and childish she had been! Now she knew some part of herself she had never known before. She understood her truest nature.
    And it must be true because I was dizzy with the buzz in my ears, the ache between my legs, and I knew it was sin and that sin came from what we should not know and feel.
    Les and I read until we had memorized the most graphic pages, and then we foraged again and found another such book—the supposed diary of a Hong Kong madam. Whereas the first paperback taught us of a woman’s desperate need to be dominated, the second taught us how a woman might please a man: with her knowledge of sexual secrets, her store of coveted tricks.
    I had no context for the emotions and physical yearnings the books incited, no one to ask or tell, no one who would not be horrified, who would not punish. I could never bear the shame of confession, nor could I deny that dark part of me that wanted, more