It’s true that Amy hasn’t always made her own decisions, she hasn’t always been in control of the situations she’s found herself in, but, if she could help it, she would never let a man treat her like she’s a victim again.
Because it’s just sitting there unattended, Amy digs in Aaron’s bag and carries it to the edge of the railcar. Inside she finds his wallet and some other personal junk that isn’t interesting, but her fingers jump when she sees his digital camera in the front pocket, wrapped in a small cotton sack. She wants to see who else Aaron has taken pictures of, remembering the way he’d approached her that morning, his obvious ploy to get her in bed.
The first few photos in its history are of Amy herself, a close-up of her face, then one of her leaving the café. She feels something roil in her stomach, before she even realizes what it means, as she finds images of herself walking into the café, and even before then, when she first entered town, long-range shots of her bending over to tie her shoes. It’s as if Aaron had anticipated her coming, standing at his motel window with this camera at first light, waiting for a woman to wander into his frame. Amy thought his line was pitiful but she was wrong. These pictures of her coming into town, nearly a dozen of them, showed that he’d planned for her arrival. He’d been waiting to tell her she’s pretty.
Amy looks over her shoulder at Aaron, still sleeping, this skinny dweeb who somehow convinced her to go along with him. She wants to hit him, to kick his face in while he sleeps, but she merely closes her eyes, shakes her head in disgust, then turns back to his camera.
There are a few more shots of Valentine and other towns, stone-built town halls and decommissioned tanks in municipal parks, then images of a woman lying naked in bed, covering her face in embarrassment, followed by a few of this same woman standing outside a coffee shop; then a different woman tied-up, her breasts squeezed purple in the cinch of a nylon rope, what happened after Aaron snapped her photo outside a shopping mall; others of a woman blindfolded, her ankles and wrists hogtied, her parts exposed; another of Aaron wielding a knife, biting a woman’s nipple as he slices across her belly.
There’s a video Amy plays. A big woman lounges in a dark room, the curtains drawn. Her bottom-heavy breasts rest on her stomach as she lies in bed, drinking from a beer can. Her hair is done up in what looks like an old-fashioned style, even though she can’t be much older than thirty.
The camera’s small speakers distort from the loud music that plays in the room, an undulation of hoary blues music, the big woman singing in chorus between slugs of beer, spread out naked on the bed, her flesh sinking into itself.
Amy turns again to look at Aaron, to see if the video woke him. He’s slumped in the corner, arms folded over his chest, sleeping.
His voice is under the music in the video. “The Kellogg Rooming House. June 15, 2010.”
The image shakes, as if the camera had been set on a table, although the woman is still the only one on the screen. She’s humming to herself, twisting her legs as she lies there, her long brown body full across the bedsheet. There’s a pop. The sound feeds back in short crackles. Then two more. The woman in the video drops her beer to the floor. Three small holes appear on her body, two in her stomach and one in her breast. The woman cries, it sounds likes drunk wailing, like she’s merely confused and lonely. The video plays for a long time after she’s shot, the loud music over her moans as the bedsheet blots red. Long after she stops making noise, stops moving, the video freezes on the image of the woman in her bed, the holes in her stomach and breast.
Amy holds the camera for what seems like a short time. The image of the woman dims and then fades to black. Amy still doesn’t jump; even the thought of it has left her. Her head buzzing. Her vision fuzzy outside the borders of the camera viewfinder. She can’t control it: Amy thinks of simple Chadron, her husband back in Aurora, drinking a morning beer at the kitchen table.
Sitting at the edge of the railcar with the camera in her hands, Amy doesn’t think that Aaron is awake while she watches the video. She’s wrong about that.
The train is going over a bridge. Amy sees this above her through a dizzying matte of tree branches. She’s landed at the foot of the pylons that support the bridge. There are whole minutes of blackness and white noise, the sound of train rumble vibrating through bridge feet. Amy feels behind herself. Her fingers bump the blood-sticky hilt of the knife in her back.
She felt the burning of it before she heard Aaron grunt, the knife needling into the softness of her lower back. It was the crescendo of pain rising in her torso that caused Amy to arch away from him, her body going stiff, legs straightening in shock, the fire of the knife at her kidneys. The camera was in her hands, his bag nestled between her legs at the edge of the railcar. It was only by chance that when Amy rolled away the train was going over a bridge that spanned a wide coulee, and that as she fell the thirty feet through snapping tree branches, clutching to his bag, she curled into herself and landed in the spongy gut of a stream bottom.
It’s when she bumps against the knife that Amy understands she’s still in danger, that the images on Aaron’s camera come back to her, and that she’s still holding the camera, she still has his bag—and he will come looking for them.
Amy is unable to stand when she first tries. The pain in her back saps the strength from her legs, the muscles battered, but she manages to gain her knees on the second try, and then her left foot as she leans against a tree. She can crutch herself along, grasping from one sapling to another, his bag slung over her shoulder, moving from the spot, down the coulee to where there’s light. It’s a narrow snatch of forest she’s in, a few acres hugging tight to where the railway bridge spans the gully. It gives her enough of a head start on Aaron, though.
He will make sure she’s dead, Amy knows this. That’s why she drives herself on, advancing quicker as her legs stretch out underneath, the pain in her muscles abating as she moves them. There’s still the blooming shock of the knife in her back, where the blade keeps her wound more or less closed, but Amy can’t worry about that. She doesn’t want to end up like those other women in the camera.
It’s when Aaron’s bag slips from her shoulder and dumps its contents to the ground that Amy finds his pistol. The bag tilts upside down as it drops, his wallet and notebook fall out, then the gun on top of them. The glint of its plating flashes a ray of light. Amy checks the pistol and sees it’s loaded. She secures the safety and stuffs it into her beltline. She unfolds his wallet, removes his driver’s license and sees that his name really is Aaron Kleinhardt, just as he told her. If he planned on killing her all along then it couldn’t matter if she knew his name.
At the edge of the woods Amy spies the open country of a farm, long furrows of soil ground in by tractor tires during harvest. The trees edge into a straight line where the field begins, along the right-of-way, so she can see a long distance in front of her. Aaron can see too if he’s looking. There’s an irrigation shed or something like it, a wooden structure in the clearing, about fifty yards away. Amy can just make out its flat roof, its wood shingles worn the same color as the soil. It’s getting cold again. As she hobbles across the frozen clods of dirt she can feel the wind blow through her.
She crouches inside the shed once she reaches it. There isn’t much to the structure, one main line that humps in and out of a concrete box dug into the ground, a few pipes that sprout near the door with gauges at their ends, the dripping odor of moss. But there’s space enough to settle against the wall planks and wait to see if Aaron will find her. She feels behind herself again, touches the sticky hilt of the knife. There isn’t much blood. Even with her fall, the blade’s channel hasn’t widened.
Amy isn’t sure what she’ll do when he discovers her. She girds herself, holding the pistol between her hands, and whispers that she can do this, she’s shot before. And it’s true, she’s shot a pistol many times. She knows how to prepare the gun, how to stare down the back of it while loading the chamber and how to flip th
e safety so that it’s ready to fire.
It isn’t long before Aaron finds her, a few minutes, as if he was poised at the other end of the clearing, watching as she entered the irrigation shed before circling in.
She hesitates, despite herself, when he opens the door, shocked somehow to see him standing there looking pathetic.
“I’m unarmed,” he says, holding his hands up by his face, his fingers outstretched. “Please don’t shoot.”
Amy slides across the concrete floor as far away from him as she can get before jarring the knife against the back wall. She doesn’t shoot. She holds the pistol out, both hands squeezed around the gun so that it looks tiny wrapped under her fingers, its barrel emerging darkly from her hands.
“I don’t want to kill you,” she says.
“Give me the gun, please. You don’t know what you saw. There’s a good explanation.”
Aaron inches closer as he talks, kind of leaning, his feet sliding to catch up. His body becomes bigger in the doorway once he clears it, the flimsy door quivering in the wind behind him, his hands still held out in front.
“Give me the gun and we’ll wait for the next train to come.”
“Stop moving.”
“We both made mistakes today. I’m willing to walk away. Just give me the bag.”
Amy feels like closing her eyes, to just black out everything and squeeze until this man is gone. But she holds Aaron in the doorway with her gaze, her jaw stern, eyes flashing a glint of blue above the pistol clutched in her fingers. She sizes him up, determines where she should shoot to wound him, where she can aim to kill. She looks him in the eyes again. It’s difficult to look Aaron in the eyes and not falter for an instant, to stifle a flutter of sympathy, because of the way he holds himself. His skinny limbs and bad posture, those ill-fitting clothes made for a younger man. And that half-smile, still he’s smirking, like he can’t believe that it’s come to this. All the while he inches closer.
Amy feels how those other women must have underestimated him, because of the way he looks and acts, like he couldn’t possibly get the better of her. But she can see it in his eyes too—in a too-late way like the others—how all this is thrilling him. She knows what’s going to happen.
He’s started to say something when Amy shoots. She squeezes the pistol until it pops, and then again, hitting him twice in the chest. He still talks, even as he tries to pool blood in his fingers. Invoking the train, trying to sell her. The words end as a sort of gulping. He staggers out of the shed and falls into the dirt.
It’s ten minutes or more before Amy is certain he’s dead. The gasps of his body twitter out into nothing. Slowly she works to her feet, the burn pulsing from the knife in her back, and then she escapes the shed, the pistol poised in front of her, just in case. She has to step over him, to look down at his pale face still smirking, one eye open and one closed. Amy doesn’t falter when she sees his chest bloat. She knows he’s dead. It’s just the mechanics of his lungs working.
She doesn’t cry yet because there’s the knife in her back, her clothes wet with blood, and she’s walking toward what looks like a farmhouse on the horizon.
Amy fires three shots in the air before she collapses, too weak to continue, using the last of the bullets to attract the attention of the farmer and her husband in the house that’s less than a mile away. They’re the ones who find her.
Acknowledgements
My sincerest thanks those who made this book possible.
Foremost, to Nicole, for acting in ardent good faith to ensure that there’s room for writing and literature in this life we’ve built together; to my daughters, for putting up with a pensive father with aplomb; to my mom for passing on a love for books and never talking me out of fixations; to Karen, for making sure I had time to write most every day, even when there was a baby in the house; and to my family and friends for their support.
I’m grateful for my crew of mentors, advocates, and compatriots: Bill Sedlak, Amber Mulholland, Drew Justice, Ryan Borchers, Stephanie Delman, Jonis Agee, Susan Aizenberg, Bob Churchill, Cleo Croson, Natalie Danford, Nabina Das, Miles Frieden, Amina Gautier, Anne Greene, Jordan Hartt, Arlo Haskell, Nicola Mason, Kassandra Montag, Dave Mullins, Emily Nemens, Amy O’Reilly, Jessica Rogen, Lucas Schwaller, Sam Slaughter, Brent Spencer, Mary Helen Stefaniak, Travis Thieszen, Felicity White, and Mark Wisniewski. A special thanks to Richard Burgin.
Thanks to Queen’s Ferry Press, Bradley Cole, Brian Mihok, and Kelsey Hall, for helping get this book to press, and to Erin McKnight for her tireless enthusiasm and guidance.
Finally, this book couldn’t have been written without the support of the following organizations: Akademie Schloss Solitude, Key West Literary Seminar, Port Townsend Writers Conference, Wesleyan Writers Conference, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Creighton University, Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska, 1877 Society and Omaha Public Library.
Theodore Wheeleris a reporter who covers civil law and politics in Omaha, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has been widely featured in national anthologies and magazines, includingBest New American Voices,New Stories from the Midwest,The Southern Review,The Kenyon Review,Boulevard, andFive Chapters. He’s been a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, a resident of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and has won the Marianne Russo Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. He is also the author of a fiction chapbook andKings of Broken Things, a novel that’s forthcoming in the spring of 2017.
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