Read Red Mist for Free Online Page B

can bring out what’s already there, encourage it, shape it. But I can’t transform the dog into something
     it wasn’t born to be.”
    She finishes telling me that she and Jack were two peas in the same pod and she did to him exactly what was done to her, and
     she didn’t recognize it at the time, couldn’t possibly have the insight, even though she was a social worker, a therapist. She was molested by the local Methodist minister when she was ten, she claims.
    “He took me out for ice cream, but that’s not what I ended up licking,” she puts it crudely. “I was crazy in love. He made
     me feel so excited and special, except in retrospect I don’t think
special
is what I really was feeling.” She goes into graphic detail about her erotic relationship with him. “Shame, fear. I went
     into hiding. I can see that now. I didn’t associate with other kids my age, spent huge amounts of time by myself.”
    Her unrestrained hands are tense in her lap, only her ankles shackled, and the chains clink and scrape against concrete whenever
     she restlessly shifts her feet.
    “Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say,” she continues, “and what was really going on was I couldn’t tell anyone the truth
     about my life, about the lying, the sneaking around to motels and pay phones and all sorts of things a little girl shouldn’t
     know about. I stopped being a little girl. He took that from me. It went on until I was twelve and he got a job with a big
     church in Arkansas. I didn’t realize when I got involved with Jack, I basically did the same thing to him because I was encouraged
     and shaped in a certain way to do it, and he was encouraged and shaped in a certain way to accept it, to want it, and oh,
     yes, he sure did. But I see it now. What they call insight. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure out we don’t go to hell, we build it on a foundation already laid for us. We build
     hell like a shopping mall.”
    So far she has avoided telling me the minister’s name. All she’s said is he was married with seven children, and he had to
     have his God-given needs met and considered Kathleen his spiritual daughter, his handmaiden, his soul mate. It was right and
     good that they were joined in a sacred bond, and he would have married her and been open about his devotion but divorce was
     a sin, Kathleen explains to me in a flat, dead voice. He couldn’t abandon his children. That was against God’s teachings.
    “Fucking bullshit,” she says hatefully.
    Her tiger-eyed stare is unwavering, her once lovely face peanut-shaped and haggard now, with a spiderweb of fine lines around
     a mouth that once was pouty and voluptuous. She is missing several teeth.
    “Of course, it was unadulterated bullshit, and he probably moved on to some other little girl after I started shaving my parts
     and hiding from him when it was my period. Being beautiful and talented and smart didn’t land me anywhere good, that’s for
     damn sure,” she emphasizes, as if it is imperative I understand that the ruin sitting across from me isn’t who she is, much
     less who she was.
    I am supposed to imagine Kathleen Lawler as young and beautiful, wise and free, and well intentioned when she began her sexual
     relationship with twelve-year-old Jack Fielding at a ranch for troubled youths. But what I see before me is the wreckage caused
     by one violation that caused another and another, and if her story is true about the minister, then he damaged her the same
     way she damaged Jack, and the destruction still hasn’t ended and probably never will. It is the way all things begin and continue. One act,
     one deception. A chronic lie that escalates to critical mass, and lives are disabled, disfigured, and defiled, and hell is
     built, lights on and welcoming and like that motel Kathleen described in the poem she sent.
    “I’ve always wondered if my life would have turned out different if certain other things hadn’t happened,” she ponders