Richard Deming

A Soda for Susan

Though she was nearly fifteen, the girl was so small and thin-boned, she looked no more than twelve. The man was somewhere in his mid-forties.

There was something furtive about the man which made him oddly repellent in spite of his neat appearance. His thin, too-white hand gripped the girl’s with a possessiveness which didn’t seem quite normal.

The girl’s face was set in placid lines as she trudged along by his side eating the candy bar he had given her. Looking up into the man’s face, she noted the strange urgency in it, but it didn’t seem either to puzzle or disturb her.

St. Louis’ Forest Park is dotted with refreshment stands but the girl had paid no attention to the several they had passed up to that moment. Now, as they started to pass the last stand before the entrance to the bridle path toward which they were headed, she suddenly hung back against the man’s grip. Obviously the enticements of the stand motivated her, however, and not reluctance to go on with the man.

He attempted to drag her past, but stopped abruptly and forced a thin smile when the child spoke in a piping voice which clearly carried to every customer at the stand.

“I’m thirsty, mister,” she said. “Can I have a soda, please?”

More than twenty customers clustered about the refreshment stand, a mixture of couples of all ages, young girls in giggling groups, groups of young men who speculatively eyed the gigglers, plus a few people who seemed to be alone. A number turned to glance at the man and girl when the girl spoke.

One was a powerfully-built sailor in his late teens, a clean-looking youngster with his cap jauntily riding the back of his crew-cut head. He looked from the small girl to the man with a frown.

His face frozen into its smile, the man said in a voice so low it was audible only to the girl, “Later. After a while I’ll buy you all the soda you want. Come on now.”

“But I’m thirsty, mister,” the girl piped.

Several people were now frowning at the man, and dead silence fell over the group about the stand. The sailor’s expression became an undecided scowl.

The man avoided looking at anyone but the girl. “Wait here,” he said in an unnerved voice, released her hand and walked over to the counter.

“Bottle of soda,” he said, laying down a dime.

The attendant had been too busy serving customers to notice either the man and child or the sudden unnatural silence of his patrons. In a harried voice he asked, “What kind?”

“Any kind,” the man said.

Shrugging, the counterman uncapped a bottle of orange, set it down and picked up the dime. The man quickly carried the bottle to the girl.

“Come on now,” he said, starting once again to move toward the entrance to the bridle path.

“You didn’t get me a straw,” the child said loudly.

The man stared at her as though he would enjoy boxing her ears, but he forced another thin smile. His gaze avoiding the numerous eyes now studying him with indecisive hostility, he returned to the counter, plucked a straw from a glass container and carried it to the girl.

“Thanks, mister,” she said in a clear voice, sticking the straw in the bottle and trustingly holding her free hand out to him again.

The man grasped it convulsively and moved off toward the bridle path at such a rapid pace, the girl’s thin legs almost had to run to keep up. Every eye at the refreshment stand stared after them.

The teen-age sailor’s indecisive scowl suddenly became an expression of determination. Straightening away from the counter, he announced generally, “That kid doesn’t know that guy from a hole in the wall. You people can stand here and think about it all day, if you want, but I’m going to check up on this.”

He strode off after the man and child. Almost instantly a group of three young men followed, then another lone man, and then the entire group was trailing after the sailor.

Casting a worried look back over his shoulder, the man saw the crowd of more than twenty people streaming toward him, and halted in a sudden terror. He attempted to jerk his hand from the girl’s, but the move surprised her into tightening her grip, so that he couldn’t run without dragging her along with him. Frenziedly he slapped at her wrist, belatedly causing her to turn loose, but by then the sailor was upon them.

The man hacked to a tree, both hands raised defensively and his face forming what he meant to be a placating smile. It came out as a grimace of fear.

Now that he had his quarry cornered, the sailor wasn’t sure how to proceed. Stopping directly in front of the cringing man, he clenched his fists but said nothing. Both were still standing in silence, the man attempting an appeasing smile and the sailor glaring at him, when the rest of the crowd arrived and formed a semicircle about them.

A middle-aged woman with a lantern jaw, trailed by a meek-looking man her own age, took the initiative from the sailor.

In a demanding voice she asked the girl, “Do you know this man, dear?”

The child had been staring around interestedly at the crowd so suddenly formed about her and her companion. She didn’t seem in the least disturbed by the phenomenon. At the question she focused her attention on the lantern-jawed woman.

“No, ma’am,” she said politely. “He’s just a nice man who bought me candy.”

The woman’s nostrils flared as she looked at the man. Then her attention returned to the girl and she summoned a smile designed to get the child’s confidence.

“You just met this man today, honey?”

“Yes, ma’am. Just outside the rest room over at the pavilion.”

The woman turned to the man, her expression approaching ferocity. “You were hanging around the woman’s rest room, were you? Waiting for some innocent child too young to know she shouldn’t talk to strangers? Where were you taking her? Off in the bushes?”

“Listen,” the man said feebly. “I ain’t done nothing. What’s eating all you people?”

“Where were you taking her?” the woman repeated in a voice of doom. “There’s nothing up this bridle path but a lot of deserted spots.”

“We was just taking a walk,” the man said in a semi-whine. “There’s no law against giving kids candy. I just like kids.”

“That I believe,” the woman spat at him.

The man’s eyes darted around the circle of hostile faces without much hope. He gulped twice before he could manage words that bordered on hysteria, “You people got no right to question me. I ain’t done nothing.”

His tone, his expression and his whole manner were so obviously guilty that his mild opposition only further incensed the crowd. It was enough to finally trigger the rage of the young sailor, who all this time had been standing before the man and had never unclenched his fists.

“You damned kid raper!” he said, and smashed the man back against the tree with an uppercut.

The man made a feeble effort to defend himself, but he didn’t have a chance against the powerful youngster. Deliberately, with almost emotionless calculation, the sailor beat him until his face was a bloody pulp and his body a quivering mass of bruises. When the man tried to end the one-sided fight by huddling on the ground with his arms protectively around his head, the sailor jerked him to his feet, held him erect against the tree with one hand and smashed blow after blow into his face and body.

The crowd watched silently with a mass look of grim approval, not a semblance of horror on any face.

The girl watched too, her placid expression evaporating with the first blow and a peculiar intentness replacing it. As the sailor warmed to his task, her expression became more and more excited until her eyes seemed to glow feverishly.

When the sailor finally began to tire, the girl’s excitement simultaneously began to fade. Unobtrusively she backed through the crowd, which was too intent on the beating to notice her, and drifted away toward the refreshment stand. By the time the sailor let his unconscious victim slump to the ground, the girl was well beyond the stand and had quickened her pace to a near trot.

An hour later, when she entered her house, she found her father asleep on the front-room sofa and her mother reading the Sunday society column.

As the girl came in the front door, her mother looked up casually and said, “Back already, Susan? Have a nice time at the park?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Susan said politely.

“What do you find to do there?” her mother asked. “I should think that after a few Sundays you’d exhaust the facilities. You haven’t missed a Sunday this summer, have you?”

But the question was only an idle attempt to show parental interest, and she didn’t expect an answer. She had returned to her paper before her daughter could even reply.

The following Sunday Susan arrived at the pavilion promptly at two P.M. as usual. Seating herself on a bench against the wall just outside the men’s rest room, she waited quietly.

Though she was an intelligent girl and unusually well read for her age, it was knowledge born of experience rather than from books that made her pick this particular spot. Any text on abnormal psychology could have told her that public rest rooms are a favorite hunting ground for sexual deviates. She hadn’t any books on abnormal psychology or sexual deviates, but she did know that if she sat on this particular bench long enough, the type of person necessary to her Sunday-afternoon game would inevitably appear.

She had developed an instinct for spotting the type, and she dismissed most of the men who passed in and out of the door with a glance. Once she smiled tentatively at a nervous-looking man in his sixties, but he only gave her a pleased smile in return, said, “Hi there, young lady,” and walked on.

It was nearly three-thirty before she found the man she wanted. He was a slovenly-dressed, red-faced man of about fifty-five, with little red-rimmed eyes which constantly shifted from side to side. He glanced at her as he started to pass on his way to the rest room, then stopped abruptly when she gave him a radiant smile.

He smiled back, not in the way most adults smile at children, but in an appraising manner, running his eyes slowly over her thin form. “Waiting for your daddy, honey?” he asked hopefully.

“No,” she said. “Just resting. I’m not with anybody.”

The red-faced man looked gratified. He glanced around in a vaguely furtive manner. “Like to go over to the zoo and look at the bears?”

“I saw them,” she said. “I’d rather have a bar of candy.”

The man took another cautious look around, seemed satisfied that no one was paying any attention to them, and asked, “Now why should I buy a little girl candy? What would that get me?”

“Whatever you want,” she said placidly, looking straight at him.

The man looked surprised. He examined the girl again and a faintly glazed expression appeared in his eyes.

“How do you mean, whatever I want?”

“Well, you know. Buy me some candy and we’ll play whatever game you want. I’ll go look at the bears with you, or take a walk somewhere, or whatever you want.”

He licked his lips. “Take a walk with me where?”

“Anywhere. I know a bridle path where nobody ever goes, hardly.”

The man’s expression became a mixture of hope and amazement. “You know pretty much for such a young one, don’t you? How old are you?”

“Twelve,” she lied.

He ran his eyes over her thin body again. “You been to this bridle path with men before?”

“Sure,” she said. “When they buy me candy.”

Again the man glanced all around, an increasing furtiveness in his manner.

“They sell candy right there,” Susan said, pointing to the refreshment stand in the center of the pavilion. “I want a chocolate bar with nuts.”

“All right,” he said. “You wait here.”

Hurrying over to the stand, he returned with a candy bar and gave it to her. She said, “Thank you,” in a polite tone and rose from the bench. Familiarly she slipped her hand into his.

“This bridle path is pretty far,” she said. “Halfway across the park. I’ll show you where.”

Bridle paths snaked over a good portion of Forest Park, and the girl led her companion in a direction exactly opposite to the one she had taken with her companion of the previous Sunday. They walked nearly a half mile, passing two refreshment stands enroute, before they came in sight of then-destination.

Here, as in the location she had chosen the previous Sunday, a refreshment stand was situated only a short distance from the place the bridle path came out on the road. The usual mixed crowd ringed the stand, men and women of all ages, plus a few children. As she and the man neared it, she scanned the faces of the customers, her attention settling on a young soldier in uniform whose wide shoulders strained the material of his suntan shirt.

Directly alongside the soldier Susan suddenly hung back from her companion’s grip.

“I’m thirsty, mister,” she said in a clear voice. “Can I have a soda, please?”

Dropping Susan’s hand, the red-faced man selfconsciously began to fumble in his pocket for a coin. Susan’s face was placid as she looked up at him, but its placidity concealed growing excitement at what she knew would shortly begin to happen. Excitement mixed with the hate she felt for all men who bought little girls candy.

Content

Richard Deming
A Soda for Susan