“‘Dun-phy.’ Your father is done for.”
Their laughter was idiot laughter like pebbles shaken inside a metal container. There was not even cruelty in it, rather a vacuousness, an emptiness, repulsive to her, loathsome. Without looking back at her tormentors she began to run as they cupped their hands to their mouths calling after her—“Dun-phy! Ug-ly! Where’re y’going, cunt!”
She emerged from the underpass, panting. Desperate to escape the jeering boys she ascended crude stone steps into a vacant lot strewn with the rubble of a ruined building, cut through the lot and into a no-man’s-land of scrub trees that opened out into a muddy field, and ran blindly through the field—she thought that they would probably not follow her for it would mean running in mud, and mud sucking at their shoes as it was sucking at her sneakers, and splattering up onto her trousers.
Their cries behind her faded. She made her way to the dead end of Fort Street where she scraped some of the mud off her shoes against a curb. Her heartbeat was subsiding, the danger was past. Still she felt debased, shamed. They had dared to mock Luther Dunphy!
She felt a thrill of murderous rage. A double-barreled shotgun in her hands, she would blast them with buckshot.
At the Fort Street bridge over the Mad River she waited until traffic passed. A thunderous tractor-trailer passed with Illinois license plates. High in the cab the driver cocked his head to observe her on the pedestrian walkway, staring and dismissing in virtually the same instant the lone female figure in shapeless clothing. In that instant she felt a thrill of relief—No one will see me! I am safe.
Making a decision then to take the shorter way home to Depot Street, and not the longer, on public streets.
She crossed the bridge ducking her head against the wind. Below was the narrow turbulent river that so fascinated her, in the March thaw a confusion of boulder-sized ice chunks amid dark rushing water. The sound of the river was cascading sound, a waterfall of sound, as of numerous voices murmuring together nearly out of earshot.
Safe. If invisible to the enemy, safe.
On the other side of the river she ascended a hill of tangled trees and underbrush, emerging at the far end of the Baltimore & Ohio railroad yard where freight cars and other railroad equipment no longer in use were kept; the property was posted against trespassing but no one would see her, for no one ever seemed to be around this part of the yard. Dawn was within a quarter mile of Depot Street when she heard an excited mutter of voices somewhere close by; still, she was slow to realize They are in front of me now. They have crossed in front of me. Then ahead to her horror she saw several of the boys who’d chased her out of the underpass now approaching her through the railroad yard with broad sniggering smiles—Dun-phy! Hiya!—and when she turned she saw the others behind her, quickly approaching and calling Dun-phy! Hey!