The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  “Don’t move,” she says, “or you’ll injure yourself.”

  “What?” I croak.

  Or you’ll injure yourself. I don’t remember being hurt, only being tied to a chair, stabbed with a needle. An agitated fear is setting my teeth to chattering. In spite of her warning, I bend my left leg, but I feel nothing wrong. Only in the right leg. The leg that is beginning to throb more urgently.

  “Are you in pain?” she asks. “We can give you something for that.”

  Her facial expression is carefully neutral, but there’s a nervous quality about her watchfulness, and I have to close my eyes for a moment, willing myself to breathe through the feeling of being slowly suffocated.

  “What have you done?” I demand.

  The nurse walks back into the room carrying a glass of water with a bent straw. She hands it to Evangeline, who holds the straw to my pinched lips. I jerk my head away but keep my eyes focused, like a laser guidance system, on the fat nurse.

  “I want you to listen carefully to me,” Evangeline says. “You were chosen by us for a very special purpose. You don’t yet know just how important you are, Elizabeth. You’re not aware of the truth of things. You’re not right-thinking—”

  “You’re fucking crazy,” I mutter to her, but my eyes are still on the nurse. The woman’s uneasy—whatever she’s done to me, she’s unsure about it, and scared. “Help me,” I say to her. “Help me, please.”

  “Give her something for the pain,” Evangeline tells her, standing up.

  The nurse pulls a syringe out of her pocket and moves closer to the bed.

  “Stop,” I order, and she freezes.

  “I’m a police officer,” I tell her. “If you help me, I’ll make sure that nothing happens to you.”

  “Brenda,” Evangeline barks. “Give her the shot.”

  “No, no,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

  Evangeline gazes at me through half-closed eyes, the green paint on the walls making her look like a perching lizard.

  “All right,” I say. “I’ll be cooperative, I swear, just don’t drug me again.”

  Evangeline nods and the nurse puts the syringe back in her pocket.

  “Go get Tommy,” she tells the woman, and the nurse leaves the room.

  “Your comfort level will be determined by the degree to which you yield to the truth,” she tells me. “And, Elizabeth, I’ll know if you’re trying to con me or trick me.”

  Brenda walks back into the room, Tommy following, holding the cattle prod.

  “Untie her,” Evangeline tells the nurse, and Brenda unbuckles the wrist restraints.

  I bring my arms to my chest, rubbing circulation into them.

  “Help her sit up,” Evangeline tells Brenda.

  Brenda looks at her, startled, but positions her hands behind my shoulders, pushes me into a sitting position. My vision first darkens and then clears with a zigzag of crazily shifting, pinpoint lights.

  Around the lower part of my right leg, I see a large, bulky bandage with a length of narrow chain emerging from under it and falling off the side of the mattress. Two red blooms, like small poppies, stain both sides of the white gauze. My foot emerges from the bandage, naked and whole.

  Tommy moves nearer to the bed, bringing the prod closer to my body.

  Evangeline has moved to the foot of the bed and stands with her hands demurely clasped at her waist. “Submission, Elizabeth. Submission is the key to salvation.”

  She tells Brenda to unwrap the bandage, and I circle both hands tightly at my knee as the binding pressure is released, trying to dull the escalating throbbing sensation at the bottom of the gastrocnemius muscle. I want to tell her to stop, want to turn my head and look away, but instead, I watch more of the length of chain being revealed as the bandage is removed. The last link is attached to a circlet of thin, plastic-coated steel, like a flexible bike cable, which disappears into my flesh behind the outer anklebone, passes through my leg under the Achilles tendon, and emerges on the other side.

  I stare at the circle of cable, my mind like a flock of birds smashing into the path of a jetliner, unable in that moment to grasp the idea that it has been threaded through my flesh. But the plastic coating is brown with dried blood, my dried blood, and the reddened, inflamed skin at the straining cuts glistens with some kind of strong-smelling gel.

  The far end of the chain is draped off the side of the mattress, and I follow the course of the links gingerly with both hands, careful not to pull on the two incisions in my ankle. I lean dizzily over the edge of the bed, my stomach pushing bile into the back of my throat, and see that the far end of the chain is looped through a hole bored into a large, flat stone. Painted on its surface, in bright yellow letters, is SUBMIT, E 5:21.

  “Ephesians,” Evangeline says, her voice dimmed through the building roar in my head. “‘Submit yourselves one to another in the fear of God.’”

  The chain is long, but not as long as I am tall.

  “You will be able to move, but only in a limited capacity,” she says, and I look up at her, my throat churning to swallow back the acid burning on my tongue. “And only by carrying the stone. In this way will your waywardness be proven unto you.”

  She smiles at me.

  I turn my head slowly to Brenda, who’s still holding the bandages in her hands. My thoughts fragment, the broken birds are sucked into an engine of rage and fear, and I begin to retch, both hands covering my mouth. Brenda leans over me, one hand on my shoulder, an absurd yet instinctive response.

  “Did you do this to me?” I ask her, whispering muffled through my fingers.

  She looks at me in timorous, cow-eyed worry, taken in by my woozy, gentle tone.

  I reach out both shaking hands toward her and, before she can react, grab two fistfuls of her hair and bring the bridge of her nose like a missile onto my forehead. A flattening of cartilage, a scream, and I fling her away, onto the floor. I stagger up, lunge for Evangeline standing at the foot of the bed, and my fingers close around her throat, squeezing, but also throttling desperately, trying to separate the cervical vertebrae, to pinch off the nerves to stop any movement, any breath, any more ravings from her, and I know that Tommy Roy is behind me and will jab me with the cattle prod, sending electricity through me and into his mother’s carcass as well.

  Evangeline’s eyes are bulging, and she claws at my hands—she’s been caught completely off guard, and that knowledge strengthens me beyond the drug tremors. Her wig begins to slide, exposing a stubbled, pale scalp, and my mouth opens to scream, to bellow, but a pain like a shark’s bite breaks my grip, compelling me backward onto the bed. Tommy is holding on to the chain connected to my leg, and he jerks it again, pulling the incisions open further, straining the Achilles tendon at the delicate attachment to the heel, and sending fresh blood streaming over my leg and over the bed.

  I rear up again, go at him, the pain a river of fire, and he extends the cattle prod and presses the metal prongs into my stomach, sending me thrashing, helpless, against the mattress.

  When the spasms abate, I bare my teeth at him like a rabid badger and say, panting, “I guess in your world…this means we’re going steady now.”

  He makes a feint like he’s going to jab me again, but I jeer at him with harsh, derisive laughter.

  “Come on,” I taunt, kneeling on the bed, the chain rattling around me like wind chimes underwater. “Come see what it’s like being kissed by a Polish dyke kobieta, you flaccid-dicked motherfucker.”

  Brenda has pulled herself upright off the floor and is cupping both hands under her bleeding nose, looking wild-eyed and angered. But she backs quickly away from me. The pattern on her nurse’s tunic, I now see, is palm trees and dancing monkeys.

  Not my circus, not my monkeys, I hear Benny say loud and clear in the throbbing electric mass behind my eyes.

  I snarl at her like a dog. “You ready to be kissed by me again, tubby?”

  Her brows come down. She’s looking at a lu
natic.

  The door is slammed open, and Curtis Roy walks in, his police uniform without a crease, his pistol pointed at my head. It breaks the surge of adrenaline, and, like a marionette whose strings have been cut, my body goes slack against the wall behind the bed.

  “That’s just perfect,” I say, breathing hard. “The two Roy boys. A redneck double date.”

  Evangeline has righted her wig. She tugs hard at her sweater, smoothing away all signs of struggle. Her hands shake uncontrollably with fear and a towering rage. The meth scars on her face show behind the troweled-on makeup, like careless heat bubbling up through pancake batter.

  “You must be so proud,” I croak. I want to keep taunting her, but I have no more breath to speak.

  “Tie her up,” Evangeline directs, her voice regaining a cold composure.

  I’m yanked roughly onto the bed by the Roy brothers, my wrists once more secured to the ropes that are tied to the ringbolts in the walls.

  Evangeline tells Brenda to give me the shot of tranquilizer, but before the drug does its work, both Uncle Benny and I tell the red witch, “Pierdol sie.” Go fuck yourself.

  33

  It seems as though the woman has been talking forever, reading Bible verses, droning on and on about submission.

  “Corinthians, chapter eleven, verse three: ‘But I would have you know, that the head of the woman is the man,’” Evangeline says, with a dramatic pause before the next reference. “Corinthians, chapter fourteen, verse thirty-four: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak.’…Genesis, chapter three, verse sixteen: ‘Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’”

  In trying to block out Evangeline’s harping, I remember the gun-toting crazy man in the building on Norman Avenue in Brooklyn. The place where my first partner had been shot and where I had used the urgent rivalry between the Mets and the Yankees to make a dent in the shooter’s psyche.

  Somehow, I don’t think Evangeline Roy is a baseball fan. And I doubt if she’s ever been to Brooklyn. Her reference to being uplifted has got to be a coincidence. To think otherwise unrolls a connected universe of crazies that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around. And yet, I wonder—my mind struggling after the scattered details of that day—was the Mets guy’s hair sprouting from under his ball cap a light auburn color?

  Evangeline’s voice is a toxic spill of threatening invective and supernatural punishments.

  “How about this,” I yell from my bed, unable to bear any more Bronze Age wisdom. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  My hands are tied, but my mouth is free, and Evangeline springs from her chair like an agitated spaniel, walks to the bed, and stuffs a piece of gauze into my mouth.

  As soon as she is seated, I manage to push the gauze out with my tongue and I hoarsely sing at the top of my lungs, “‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead, which ol’ witch, the wicked witch…’”

  She loudly reads, “Timothy, chapter two, verse eleven: ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.’”

  But I’m la-la-la-ing too loudly for her to hear herself think, and so she finally stands and stomps out of the room. She does not slam the door, but I hear her on the other side trying to control her desire to shoot me and have done with it.

  I yank futilely at the ropes attached to the wrist cuffs, as I’ve done a hundred times before, hoping that the screws in the ringbolts will tear out, but there is no give. Lying still and concentrating, I try to count up hours or days since I’ve been taken. But I have no idea how many of those hours have been spent unconscious; I could have been tied up and on my back for a week. My Eve Clock, the internal clock my mother said all women have, is near to useless next to all the drugs pumped into my system. If I had to guess, I would say that it’s been several days since I was taken to the Roy house.

  The house is mostly silent. A few creaks of floorboards when someone walks softly down the hall. The quiet closing of a door, the muffled, distant sound of a car driving up and cutting its engine close to my room. I’ve heard no planes or helicopters. No sounds of any animals or birds. No search dogs.

  I hear little conversation, as though everyone outside my room speaks in whispers. No sounds of normal life or life’s pursuits.

  Meals are brought in, mostly sandwiches, soup, and water, prepared foods that don’t require much cooking. I eat only enough to stay alive, but as Evangeline does not now test the food prior to my consumption, I don’t know if it’s drugged. By the way I have to fight constant drowsiness, though, I suspect that the egg salad swimming in Miracle Whip is loaded with enough tranq to stun an elephant.

  I have a new nurse, Connie. Brenda has fled for the hills. Connie is younger, fit, and, judging from her glassy-eyed lack of empathy over my condition as well as her alacrity at doing Evangeline’s bidding, she’s swallowed the Corinthians Kool-Aid. She changes my bandages and cleans the incisions without answering any of my questions, taunts, or threats. The only reaction I get from her is when I describe in detail the intimate day-to-day love life of the female inmates in Gatesville prison, where she may end up when the Feds bust down the doors to rescue me.

  “That’s disgusting,” she tells me, her mouth twisted in revulsion as she gathers up her empty gauze wrappers and ointments.

  “You better acquire a taste for it, Nurse Connie, if you’re going to survive doing hard time.”

  She calls in Tommy to release the restraints. It’s been explained to me by Evangeline that daily I’ll get three “free” periods to move around the room. Once I’ve shown “adequate cooperation,” I’ll be given more privileges, allowed to forgo the restraints altogether.

  I watch Connie watching the elder Roy brother as he takes command of the close quarters of the room, undoing the wrist cuffs. It’s evident that Nurse Connie has a biblical-size crush on Tommy Boy, something that I might be able to use at some point, as either a deflection or a prod. Maybe I’ll tell her exactly how our Tommy likes to play with knives around attractive young women.

  When I’m released, they both leave and I know I have only a short while to do what I need to do before the door is opened and I’m restrained again.

  Careful not to become tangled in or pull on the leg chain, I slowly move to the far side of the bed and sit at the mattress edge, letting the pounding dizziness in my head subside. There’s still a thin wrap of gauze, closed with surgical tape, around the ankle, which shows seepage from the incisions, and I gently rub at the tender area around the wounds. The pain is now only moderate when I’m not moving—a deep, dull ache that feels as though the marrow is slowly draining from the bone—but any movement of the leg, specifically a contraction of the calf muscle, sends electric shocks along the nerves from the Achilles tendon to the bottom of my heel. The entire ankle is swollen and warm to the touch, and I’m worried that an infection may be festering.

  I take a deep breath and stand up. The leg begins to cramp immediately and I brace myself against the wall, biting down on my lip, trying to control the agonized pumping of my ribs. I relax the calf by lifting the heel off the floor, toe pointing downward, and the painful pressure is relieved. The only way I’m going to be able to walk is by hopping along alternately on my right toes. If I’m unable to stretch the calf muscle, it will very quickly shorten and atrophy. I don’t let myself think about the permanent damage that may already have been done to the tendon itself or to the heel attachment that, once torn away, might never fuse perfectly back to the bone.

  I’ve been told by my new nurse that I’ll need to start walking so that I don’t lose large-muscle strength. But even though I told her to kiss my perfect Yankee ass, I know that I need to build up my strength to make any escape possible.

  I bend down carefully and try to pick up the stone. Immediately, I right myself again, my face pressed hard against the wall,
rubber-lipped, a black hole threatening to engulf my entire head. When my vision clears, I end up easing myself onto the floor and, by pulling the stone after me, crawl a few feet to the near corner of the room.

  The carpet is old and thin, almost curling away from the walls, with cheap quarter-round molding that’s chipped and bowed in many sections. The room is dark, even with the light on, and any disturbance of the molding will, hopefully, be hard to spot. I hook my fingers into a space and gently pull. There is a cracking noise and I freeze, but I hear nothing outside the door. I dig in deeper with my nails, and a section of the molding separates and pulls easily from the wall. I set it aside and tug up the corner of the rug and the underpad, exposing the anchoring tack strips. I’m looking for anything, a paper clip, a long nail, anything sharp, but I see nothing other than the carpet tacks. I tug at the tack strip, but it’s glued to the floor. I tamp down the padding and the carpet, replace the strip of molding. It gaps noticeably from the wall, so I pull one of the adhesive strips from my gauze bandage, make a loop, sticky-side out, and use it to close the gap. The adhesive may not hold long, but it’s the best I can do.

  I crawl along the wall to the next corner, passing the floor heating vent. The vent grating is large and old, the metal rusted, but when I tug at it, it doesn’t budge. The two screws are not tightly fitted, but I can’t unscrew them with just my fingers. So I move on.

  The next corner also yields nothing, only the hard kernels of mouse droppings below the carpet and some dust balls. Fortunately, the molding fits tightly back onto the wall.

  By my reckoning, fifteen minutes has passed, and I need to work faster if I’m going to examine every corner of the room. I begin to crawl rapidly, only to be pulled up short when the embedded hobble is yanked by the unyielding stone behind me. I’d forgotten to pull the chain along with me. I mouth a silent scream and wait for the pain in my leg to subside.

  Stupid, stupid bitch, I think, grinding my teeth in frustration. The drugs are making my mind slow and unclear, but until I find a way to sever the chain, I have to think of the stone as another appendage.