by Ron Rash
“What is it,” she asked.
“For pain.”
“How do I know that?”
“Look and you’ll see who made it,” the man said, showing her the drug name on the bottle. “That certainly should assure you it’s safe.”
Jennifer placed the tablets in her mouth and swallowed them. The man stepped back and leaned against the wall, nodded for her to sit at the table.
“How do you know so much about my family and me?”
He smiled.
“We have the Internet down here too. A few of us even know how to use it.”
Jennifer felt her face redden.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You better eat that food while it’s warm.”
Jennifer took a bite. How many hours had passed since lunch? She ate the first hamburger, then, after a few moments of hesitation, decided to eat the second. The food nestled in her stomach, and Jennifer was overcome with a drowsy satiety rarely felt since tenth grade. She’d drunk all of the water, so he went upstairs and got another bottle. He twisted off the cap and placed it on the table.
“Thank you,” she said, lifting it with her left hand as he went to stand by the door.
He had taken off the coat. His white shirt, though wrinkled, was clean, the shoes worn but polished. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, but he didn’t have the musty odor of the homeless. His voice was calm, sane. Build a bond. Build a bond.
“You know my name, but what is yours?”
“Jim will do.”
“Jim?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a family, Jim?”
“A son who lives out of state.”
“And a wife?” Jennifer asked, nodding at the gold band on his hand.
“She died a while back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“In a lot of ways it was a relief for her,” Jim said. “We had a daughter, but she died too.”
It was a connection, but Jennifer wasn’t sure how to manage it.
“Was she about my age?”
“A few years older.”
“That must have been hard.”
“No need to talk about it,” Jim said. “It’s done.”
“I understand,” Jennifer said carefully, “but you can understand how my parents are feeling right now.”
“Yes, I believe I can.”
He came to the table and took the wrappers and bag but left the bottled water.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” he said. “Those magazines and books, they might help you pass the time.”
After he left, Jennifer removed the baking tray covering the metal bucket. It wasn’t easy or comfortable but she managed to empty her bladder, place the tray back over the bucket. She didn’t feel as humiliated as she thought she would. It was even a bit funny. Jennifer felt calmer as she lay down on the mattress. She’d be rescued soon, she really would. Jennifer gingerly moved her shoulder and found the pain had dimmed. Her jeggings and tunic reeked of grime and car exhaust, so she changed into the sweat clothes. Jennifer closed her eyes and slept.
* * *
—
There was no clock, but three meals meant a day had passed. He brought her food and, with each meal, more tablets for the pain. On the third day he let her take a shower. While the water ran, Jennifer searched but could find no weapon, not even a rusty razor blade. To break the mirror and wield a glass shard wouldn’t work. Woozy from the drug and left-handed, what chance would she have? She did think of something else though.
“If I give you my username and password, could you at least send my parents an email to show I’m safe?”
“Do you really think I’d fall for that?” he asked.
“No,” Jennifer answered softly. “But I’ve got to try, don’t I? If your daughter were in my place, you’d want her to try, wouldn’t you?”
“I think she did try,” he answered.
Hours later, when Jim returned with the food and tablets, Jennifer told him the shoulder hurt less and she didn’t need the pills.
“You have to take them,” he told her. “I can force you to, but I hope it won’t come to that.”
She took them. He made her open her mouth and lift her tongue to be certain.
* * *
—
When counting meals became too tedious to keep up with, two showers meant a week had passed. Jennifer realized, with a sense of relief, that time didn’t matter. Food and water were provided before they were missed, as were the clean sweatshirt and sweatpants, undergarments, sanitary napkins. The pills helped, and she did not resist them, even took more when offered. When Jennifer looked in the bathroom mirror, she saw prominent cheekbones, a tautness to her upper neck and chin. She slid a hand over her tightening abdomen. Jennifer thought of the Pilates class that had caused her to be alone the evening of her abduction. A seven p.m. weekend session for, as the flyer said, those with weight-management issues. The svelte, spandex-encased instructor always seemed either amused or irritated as she barked instructions. The studio was an octagon walled with mirrors. One of the most overweight girls called it the corral.
Now, as she stared into the cabin’s bathroom mirror, Jennifer thought how much easier things would have been if her father had brought home product samples. No exercise regimens, no points calculated, no stepping on scales to watch the red line shiver, then pronounce its judgment. The results might have even inspired a new ad campaign: Be pain-free and lose weight at the same time.
Jim knocked on the door, asked if Jennifer was all right.
“Just admiring myself,” she answered.
As he followed her downstairs, Jennifer asked why the ransom hadn’t been paid yet.
“Things like this take time,” he answered.
A thought came as she settled on the mattress.
“If it isn’t paid, will I die, Jim?”
“We all die,” he answered.
“I mean die here.”
“You don’t need to be worrying about that,” he said, then nodded at the magazines. “You want me to get you some new ones?”
“No,” Jennifer answered. “They’d be as boring as these are.”
Jim brought her a radio, a device as antiquated to her as a sextant. It picked up news stations, but soon Jennifer left the dial on the easy-listening channel. It was better than an iPod—no downloading the songs she liked or songs people expected her to like. This music was easy, soft and soothing and always there, requiring nothing, not even being listened to.
One day Jennifer faked taking the tablets, slid them into a pocket. But a while later after Jim left, she began to feel anxious so swallowed them. She lay on the mattress, mostly easing in and out of sleep. One of her professors had ranted about the tyranny of technology and Jennifer realized he was right. The nag of her cell phone, every call, email, text, no matter how trivial, demanded a response. Nags and gnats. The same thing, she thought, remembering the grainy clouds that drove her inside at her family’s summer house. An unceasing swirl of demands, hadn’t that been her whole life?
She and Jim didn’t talk much, but she found out a few things about him. He’d owned a small business but lost it in the recession. His wife had been an office manager at the county extension office. One day Jennifer asked how his daughter had died, but Jim didn’t answer except to say that his son had the sense to leave this place at eighteen, or he’d likely be dead too. Jennifer asked if Jim had any hobbies. He knitted his brow and seemed to give the question a good deal of thought.
“No,” he finally answered. “I guess I’m past that sort of thing.”
When Jennifer asked about the ransom, Jim told her that negotiations were moving along. Soon, he promised. She occasionally thought of escape, but what was the point if it would soon be over? Jim hadn’t hurt her,
never threatened to. She wasn’t afraid of him, not really. If the negotiations took so long, she suspected her parents were to blame.
Except for her freedom and a cell phone, he gave her what she requested: candy, soft drinks, more pills more often. She tired of reading and asked for a television. Though it picked up only three channels, that was enough. Jennifer liked game shows, especially when contestants dressed in silly costumes, hoping to win a dishwasher or an oriental rug. At first, she enjoyed hearing the cheery voices, but then she tired of them, choosing the radio’s soothing music instead. Silenced, the tiny people inside the glass seemed like fish in an aquarium.
* * *
—
Then a morning came when, as Jim took her upstairs for a shower, he told her she’d been in the cellar for thirty days. Jennifer couldn’t tell if it seemed longer or shorter than that. After toweling off, she studied her face and shoulders, raised her arms and examined them too. Her face could never be beautiful—forehead a bit too broad, eyes set a bit too close—but otherwise she resembled the slim women, breathing mannequins as she’d thought of them, who filled the glossy pages of high-fashion magazines her mother read.
Jennifer widened her mouth to see her teeth. Her parents and dentist acted like one day without flossing would cause her teeth to spill out like a snapped strand of beads. Watching herself in the mirror, Jennifer raised a finger, tapped the nail against her front teeth. They were all still there, if a bit gray.
She’d dressed and they’d gone back down the stairs. Jim told her that very soon they would trade places and Jennifer would be the one free. I’m sorry you had to be involved, he said, but it was the only way. He took out his billfold and showed her a black-and-white photograph of his daughter.
When she awoke the next morning, the door was open. Beside the bed were the jeggings and tunic, her cell phone and Kavu bag. On the table were an orange-tinted prescription bottle and a neatly printed note—RANSOM PAID. Jennifer placed the bottle and phone in the Kavu bag and made her way up the steps to the main floor. The front room was unchanged. Nothing on the counters, chairs pressed close to the dining table, trash cans empty. Jennifer looked out the front window. No vehicle, just a dirt drive that led up a hill into the woods. The front door was unlocked. She took a glass from the cupboard and went to the faucet. She drank, then leaned and splashed water on her face, trying to emerge from the dreamy state she’d been in for, how long had it been? Jim had told her yesterday but the number escaped her.
Some muted but insistent inner alarm told her to flee now, that Jim might change his mind and return, so Jennifer went down the steps and into the yard. Despite the trees the sunlight was harsh, so much so that Jennifer stepped back onto the porch. She took out the prescription bottle and went back inside for more water. After a few minutes she came out again, slowly walked up the drive and soon came to a dirt road. The cell phone had been charged and she had a signal. Thirty minutes later a silver North Carolina Highway Patrol car appeared.
After the arrest and a week of cameras and microphones; after a trial that brought more cameras and microphones, along with questions of individual guilt and corporate culpability; after James Dillard received a verdict of guilty and a sentence of twenty years in prison; after Jennifer’s second involuntary stay at a drug-treatment clinic, Jennifer’s parents accepted that she’d have to be the one to alter her life. They threatened to take her credit cards away until she mentioned that a solicitation arrest would bring yet another round of cameras and microphones, and more uncomfortable questions about James Dillard and the source of his daughter’s addiction.
The credit cards were returned and Jennifer found an apartment in a neighborhood gentrified enough to support a dealer who made home deliveries. Once a month, Jennifer took the bus to the prison. She and Jim sat across from each other, Plexiglas between them. It would be for only a few minutes and wasn’t so different than when they had been in North Carolina except, sometimes, they spoke about his daughter.
The Belt
The rain announced itself timidly, a few soft taps on the tin roof. Soon the rain fell steadily. Since it was July, Jubal waited for rumbles of thunder, the dark sky darkening more as lightning stabbed the ridges. Then rain would gallop down, pounding the tin before the sun herded the storm into Tennessee. But this was more like November rain, the kind that lingered days. Night came and the rain continued. As Jubal settled into the shuck mattress to sleep, it hit the roof not like hooves but a drummer boy’s quickstep. When he awoke the next morning, the sound overhead was the same martial cadence, so he was not surprised that he’d dreamed again of the war, of the moments after his horse buckled and he’d been thrown. As Jubal rose from the bed, the aches of eight decades awakened too. His bones always hurt more in wet weather so before dressing he rubbed liniment on his back and shoulders. He looked out the window at the rain, the rivulets coursing down the ridge. As he pressed the brass buckle into the belt holes, he felt the familiar indention the minié ball had made.
Jubal went into the kitchen and unhinged the range’s iron door, struck a match to the wood and newspaper he’d tindered the night before. He set the coffeepot on the iron eye. The house was chilly, so for the first time in two months he made a hearth fire, stood in front of it hands out until the coffeepot heated. He filled his cup and stepped onto the front porch and stared across the pasture at the French Broad. Water usually clear enough to see the river’s bottom was now brown as his coffee. The sandbars had disappeared, but the big boulder midstream broke the onrushing water like a ship’s hull. No flood had ever submerged this rock.
When Jubal saw the buggy coming up the muddy lane, he remembered it was Saturday. Rob, his grandson, was bringing the boy to stay with him while Rob and his wife, Lizzie, went to Marshall. Rob pulled up beside the porch and Lizzie and the child got out, Lizzie holding an umbrella over their heads as they came up the steps. Rob pulled the brake and brought the canvas tote sack onto the porch.
“Clear most all week and now it comes a-pouring,” Lizzie said, shaking her head.
“It’s surely over the banks down in the bottomland,” Rob said, as the three of them stared at the river. “They’s likely crops being washed away.”
“You sure you ought to go?” Jubal asked.
“I checked and the bridge is fine,” Rob said.
“For now,” Jubal cautioned, “but if it don’t clear by afternoon it may not be.”
“The eggs and butter won’t keep till next market day,” Lizzie said, “and you know we got need of cash money.”
“I know that,” Jubal said. “I just want you all to be careful.”
“If that bridge looks chancy on the way back,” Rob said, “we’ll stay with Lizzie’s folks.”
“If it comes to that, would you mind keeping the boy till morning?” Lizzie asked.
“Of course not,” Jubal said, taking the child into his arms and nuzzling him with his beard. “Me and him will be fine, won’t we, partner?”
The child giggled and clung tighter around Jubal’s neck.
“We best get on,” Lizzie said, bussing the boy on the cheek. “You be sweet and maybe we’ll bring you back a play-pretty.”
“Rub that lucky buckle of yours,” Rob said as he released the brake. “Maybe it’ll settle this weather down.”
Rob jerked the reins and the wagon went down the pike toward the bridge. Jubal shifted the child to one arm.
“Let’s get you out of this nasty weather,” he said, giving a last look at the river. The boulder was still visible, but less of it showed.
Once inside, Jubal set the boy and the sack on the davenport. He went to the back porch and brought the box filled with the whirligigs and animals he’d carved for the child. He set the toys between the davenport and the hearth.
“There you are, Jubal,” he told his namesake, and seated the boy on the floor. He poured himself a
nother cup of coffee and watched the child play. A lucky man, he’d often said of himself, and worn the source of that luck every day since the afternoon it saved his life. He had never meant it as a provocation, but in the first years after the war the buckle’s etched eagle, wings and talons extended, had caused hard stares, at times words, and once a fistfight.
Now only a handful of veterans remained. There was another war, bigger than any before, and despite what President Wilson said the country was edging into it. Jubal feared that Rob, his only grandson, might be called up. He almost expected it. Lucky as Jubal had been, little good fortune had found its way to those around him. Pure luck, his comrades called it as they’d marveled at the buckle and its indention. After Chickamauga, some touched the buckle before battle, but it seemed the luck was indeed pure, unable to be diluted and spread to others, then or afterward. Jubal’s wife and son and daughter were all shadowed by stones now. Rob, his only grandchild, had found little luck in his life. He’d married well, but he and Lizzie had encountered a passel of troubles. Their barn had burned three Octobers ago, a year’s worth of curing tobacco lost, but before that two miscarriages had sent Lizzie into a dark place.
But luck had come with this child playing before him. Despite his being born a month too soon and puny, the boy not only survived but quickly grew hale and hearty. Jubal had never asked, but he’d always wondered if Rob and Lizzie thought naming the child after him would help the boy survive. The Franklin clock chimed, another hour passing with no sign of the rain easing. He went to the window, but the glass was too streaked to see much. The child got up, gained his balance, toddled over to Jubal, and raised his arms to be lifted.
“Getting hungry, are you?” Jubal said, picking up the boy.
He felt the hippin. It was dry so he set the child down and opened the sack. He got the nursing bottle, put on his coat and hat, and went out the back door to the springhouse. By the time he got back, the hat and coat were soaked. The child suckled the rubber tip until nothing was left, then put his head on Jubal’s chest and closed his eyes. Jubal walked to the back room and laid the boy on the bed. He poured another cup of coffee and went onto the front porch. The boulder was only a foot or so above the water. The pike and the lower pasture had vanished except for the barbed-wire fence. He thought of Rob and Lizzie and hoped they had the good sense to stay in Marshall. Even if the bridge held, the pike could be washed out.