But you knew. You didn’t know what, but you knew something. Right there on the coffee table. He said it was booby-trapped and that rusty nails would blow out your eyes and leave scars on your face so ugly no boy would ever be able to look at you without throwing up. You tried poking the box with a broomstick. You threw a shoe at it from across the room. You even encouraged your baby brother to go over and rattle it. A part of you thought: he might blow up. Another thought: small price to pay.

But you still didn’t know. Like you didn’t know—every time he slapped you—whether he was going to slap you again. Or if it was a warning. The fun little sprinkle before the monsoon.

“You think I don’t know what kind of girl you are?”

Even his voice sounded rancid. Like gone-bad bacon grease. Mommy kept a can under the sink. Maybe he dabbed his lips. “Think I can’t sniff out sin? Think I can’t snuffle out defilement? Behold the foulness of virgins!” He always said the same thing. Always went biblical. Every time.

Tonk liked to run his hands through your hair—you wore it short, in little curls. Sometimes he’d tickle you. And sometimes, when he started in on the crank, he’d press his thumb stump right on your underpants. (Your underpants were five different sizes, all in the same pattern: tiny pink flowers and bumblebees. Your mother said she got them at a yard sale but you knew she boosted them from Gimbels, because she gave them to you out of her “shopping coat” which had a special “party pocket” in back that she wore even in summer when it was too hot for long pants, let alone a knee-length car-coat that would have been too big for Kaye Newman, the fat TV lady with the armor-plated bun who hosted movies on Afternoon Matinee. Maybe Kaye dipped her fingers in baggies full of white stuff her live-in super-spy boyfriend made, then turned the baggies inside out and licked them when there wasn’t any more of it, then soaked the licked-clean baggie in a glass of water and swirled it around and drank it. Kaye Newman probably didn’t do those things, but your mother did. Your mother lived on popsicles and butter. Sometimes butter popsicles. She said everything else curdled her milk.)

Tonk was missing his left thumb. He said it happened when an Albino chieftain, in far-off Albinia, tried to make him tell where the president lived. Tonk wouldn’t talk. Not even when they buzz-sawed his thumb. Nothing could make him spill. He was a patriot. You wanted to say, “The White House? Isn’t that where the President lived?” But you didn’t want to be righter than Tonk was.

Tonk said he could prove he was an international spy: he had international knick-knacks. From Africa. From Iraq. From the Koreas. From what he used to call “the world’s hot spots.” He’d hold up what looked like a wooden divot and say, “I got this ashtray in Afghanistan,” pronouncing it Afcandystan. “Little blind girls carve them in kiddie prison, where they nail their toes to floor. See how lucky you have it? I have seen things government agents had to train me how to forget. If I even accidentally told you they could take you away. Don’t even think about asking. Do you want me to tell you?”