by Isla Morley
* * *
Eudora’s country roads, gravelly and rutted, are chancy at night. A car found this out the hard way. We heard the crash, and we followed Daddy out to see, even though we’d been told to stay put. And there was the Oldsmobile: high-centered, back wheels spinning, turn signal flashing as though it intended to wind up in Lester Pickett’s cornfield. Daddy helped the driver from his car and ushered him up to our front porch, where I could see it was Mr. Dobbs Hordin from the school library. Apart from a tiny spot of blood on his forehead, he seemed fine. Mama served him a glass of warm sugar water, while Daddy went back to the car to wait for Sheriff Rumboldt.
“You have a wife we can call, Mr. Hordin?”
He sipped his water, clutching the quilt around his neck. “Please don’t go to any trouble, ma’am. I’m mighty sorry for the inconvenience to you and your family.”
“Some relative, perhaps?” Creasing Mama’s brow was the same little frown she got when she read a recipe and came to an ingredient that seemed out of place. Dobbs Hordin wouldn’t have known, as we kids did, how you could measure the length of Mama’s frown and determine the amount of trouble you were in. “There must surely be someone I can call.”
“You know my children?” she asked after learning he worked at the high school.
“There are three hundred and some youngsters at Eudora High, Mrs. Hallowell.”
It wasn’t exactly a denial, but it was an omission, and Mama says omissions qualify as lies. Dobbs Hordin had, in fact, recommended two books to me the previous week. He’d been especially nice about it, too. Asked my name, asked what it was about nineteenth-century poetry that caught my fancy so. And there he was in our living room, telling Mama in so many words he’d never seen the likes of me.
Later, when the car had been towed away and Sheriff Rumboldt had given Mr. Hordin a ride back home, I could hear Mama and Daddy talking in their bedroom.
“He wouldn’t let me call anyone. Can you imagine that?”
“Shock can do funny things to a man.”
“Seemed awful calm to me. There’s something about that man that doesn’t set right. Why would he be driving down our way when he lives clear across town, especially at this time of night?”
* * *
Mama, you’re going to have to look especially close at this note if you want to know who’s got me. Before signing my name to the note, I give him a hard look. “We were nice to you. We helped you.”
He’s got that same calm expression, just as he had when Mama quizzed him. Dobbs folds up my letter and tucks it in an envelope. When he licks it, his tongue is basting with spit, like his appetite’s been whetted. “Now, let me show you around.”
What he calls the kitchen is not much more than the table I hid beneath, three chairs, several metal bookshelves loaded with canned goods, and a counter with a gas stove and a kettle. There is a stand and a washbasin and a storage space with cubbies. Each plastic tub in it is clearly labeled: TUPPERWARE, FIRST AID, LAUNDRY SUPPLIES. Where are the windows is what I’d like to know. There must be one in the restroom.
“I need to use the facility,” I announce, to see if I’m right.
He leads me around the partitions to a narrow door that opens to a stall the size of the broom closet. “Powder room,” he announces.
There’s a drum with a toilet lid on it. Next to it is a stack of boxes labeled WARNING: CHEMICALS, along with a mound of toilet paper rolls and written instructions taped to the wall about how to separate the toilet bowl from the waste reservoir beneath it, when to add disinfectant, and how to use something called an accordion valve to flush water from the top tank into the bowl. He taps the sheet. “A chem-john’s a little different from what you’re used to, so be sure to follow all the steps, please.”
He closes the door. No window, only walls made from the kind of pressed board with holes in it. I can hear him shuffling about on the other side. Can he see me in here?
Mama! Help me. What do I do now?
How do I get up those stairs and back on the other side of that door? When he brought me here it was still light outside. We drove up to what looked like a concrete outhouse, except it was an entrance of some sort: a door, two narrow concrete walls on either side of it, and a little overhang, and that was all. You see a door like that, with nothing behind it but a big open field, and you think it’s a joke. He says it leads to the safest place in the world, and because you’ve already had the bejesus scared out of you being told your brother’s been in a car crash, you want to be somewhere safe. You step through it. You go down concrete steps so steep and so narrow that you have to hold on to the wall. Through more doors and into a circular room that looks like a giant drum. That’s all it takes to be completely cut off from Eudora, Kansas, population 2,200, on the town’s biggest night of the year. I’d still be at the Horse Thieves Picnic if I hadn’t got fed up waiting for Arlo, if I hadn’t decided to walk home without telling anyone. If I hadn’t climbed into Dobbs Hordin’s ugly car.
“You done in there?” he asks through the holes in the wall.
I step out. “I want to go home. Right now.”
He scratches his head. “I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”
It’s eerie, the silence down here. No cicadas screeching from the elm trees; no kettle on the boil. No lawnmowers; no tractor churning up a nearby field in the last light. If we were aboveground, I might be able to hear the distant strains of music at the carnival, or at least the faint roar of freeway traffic on K-10, maybe a crop duster headed for a barn. But underground, there is nothing but the sinusy breath of Dobbs Hordin and those briny eyes thinking of a way to explain something that makes no sense.
“Maybe if I show you. Come with me.” He offers me his hand.
I shove mine under my armpits.
He makes a sweeping gesture as though by some miracle this is not the room in which I have just spent the last couple of hours but some new place that wants discovering. “I call this the Ark.”
We move to the section that is meant to look like a living room. Between two brown recliners is a bronze floor lamp with a yellowed shade. On top of a rickety chest of drawers is an artificial potted plant. It is exotic-looking, leaves shaped like tongues. The shag carpet in mustard and orange colors matches the curtains, which don’t frame a window but hang around a paint-by-numbers picture—a boy reclining next to a creek, his straw hat pulled over his eyes, a fishing pole at his side.
“My mother took up painting when my brother died. She said that’s how she pictured my little brother, Elby, in heaven.”
It’s hideous, I want to shout.
On the other side of the Peg-Board partition is a supply closet and what he calls “sleeping quarters.” The cot has a folded quilt at one end, a pillow at the other, and smack-dab in the middle a white teddy bear with a big red bow—something you might win at a stall on the midway. Hanging from the ceiling is a plastic curtain that Dobbs pulls till it makes a cubicle, like the one they have you change in at Dr. Hubacher’s office. “For privacy,” Dobbs says, as though that explains everything.
He points to the clothes rack. “These should all fit.”
The dresses are from another era, with pleated sleeves, modest necklines, fitted bodices, and long A-line skirts. Beneath their hems is a tub marked INTIMATES. Next to it are two pairs of ballerina flats—one black, the other tan—and a pair of house slippers. “Blue—your favorite color, right?”
I stare at him. He looks so pleased with himself.
I start to shake. I tell myself this is not the time to be weak. This is the time to be strong. To fight him. “You tricked me.” My voice quavers. I try again, loudly this time. “You lied!”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
Could it really have been little more than two hours ago when Dobbs had leaned out of his car window, stopping beside me on the street? I had my face set to smile even though the evening, having started with such promise, had been such a letdown, and even
though I had the long walk home ahead of me. The poem I’d written on the bleachers was crumpled in my hand, the misery of waiting for and then giving up on Arlo too clichéd for iambic pentameter. “There’s been an accident,” Dobbs had said. “Your brother.” That was all it took for me to leap into the passenger seat. He had to reach across me to close the door, had to belt me in. I had forgotten simple tasks. And then he was driving down Winchester Road, and I couldn’t imagine why he was still going the speed limit. When he turned left on the county road instead of heading for Lawrence, I asked, “Aren’t we going to the hospital?” “I’m sorry it has to happen this way,” had been Dobbs’s reply. I thought he meant my brother, twisted and bloodied, fighting for his twenty-year-old life, and my having to carry such a load at the age of sixteen. It hadn’t made sense. Not so much the words as the tone of his voice—flat. The way he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror—flat, too. There was a bumpy dirt road and a gate and a sign: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. Dobbs had gotten out of the car. He’d unlatched the gate and pushed it into a thick patch of foxglove.
That’s where everything might as well stop. Right there, with me sitting patient as you like, hands folded tightly in my lap, watching Dobbs wedge the gate in the weeds. Before the word if had a chance to cross my mind.
Now, it is fully formed.
If I had slipped into the driver’s seat. If I had backed out of the driveway. If I hadn’t sat there, so quietly, with all the alarm bells ringing in my head.
Whatever this is, I fear it is worse, much worse, than trickery or lying. “Take me home! I want to go home!”
“Like I said, you’ve got nothing to fear—”
“Don’t come any closer!”
He holds up his hands. “I need you to be calm, that’s all.”
I glare at him.
“Stay calm and everything is going to be fine.”
And that’s when I open my mouth and scream.
I know what this is. This is what they warn every teenage girl about.
I keep yelling.
Dobbs doesn’t move.
My scream ricochets off the concrete walls and swirls around us like a dust devil.
When I’ve run out of breath, he says calmly, “Getting all het up won’t help.”
I scream again. This time, the effort rips out half my throat. Something tears; Lord help me if it’s my resistance.
“Nobody can hear you,” he says in the next lull.
What is this place? I run to the door. I yank on the handle, screaming where the crack ought to be. I slam my fists against the door. “Help me! Somebody! Help!”
Behind me, Dobbs might as well be chiseled from marble.
“Let me out of here! I want to go home!”
He grabs my wrists, but I wrest them easily from his grip. He should be stronger. It is sickening just how weak he is. And then I realize he isn’t weak at all; he’s purposefully trying to keep from hurting me.
“This isn’t like you, Blythe.”
I deliver a kick that catches more air than shin. Don’t fight like a girl, I think.
I roar at him, and he suffers rather than counters each blow. His hair bounces out of its neat side parting and falls over his eyes. I swing my hand and it catches him in his face. I feel his skin roll under my nails like the pale dough Mama uses for biscuits. Apart from red welts on his cheek, there is no response, no about-face.
It’s clear now what his intentions are.
I don’t want him to soil me without first leaving a bruise. I want his spoils damaged.
A thick vein sticks up out of his sinewy neck, and his eyes flicker like strobe lights. With my hands bound in his grip, I buck and kick.
He says, “I don’t want to hurt you, Blythe.”
“You are hurting me!”
And he just keeps saying those same stupid, useless words while I fight him, a not-quite-full bag of flour.
“I DON’T WANT you to struggle now because that will only make things worse. Think of something nice.”
I look around. My head feels like it’s about to split open. I try to protest, but my lips won’t work. My tongue’s swelled up. Last thing I remember, my arm was twisted behind my back. We were in the kitchen. A rag.
“You’ve only been out twelve minutes. I used just a drop.”
Why is he wearing a plastic jumpsuit? I ask him for a glass of water.
“No, not now.”
I lift my hand to insist, but it won’t cooperate. I look down. Both my arms are tied to the chair. On the table in front of me is a pair of scissors. I start shaking worse as soon as he picks it up.
“Be still now.”
I swing my head to see where he’s going with them. From behind me, he tells me to settle down. I shake and buck and bounce the chair about.
“You want to get an ear snipped off or not?”
“No, please. What are you going to do? Please don’t! I haven’t done anything to you!”
Mama, why haven’t you come? Daddy!
I hear the sharp blades slide open. He leans close to me. I feel his hot breath on my neck. He pushes my head forward.
“Mama!”
“Hush, now.”
A warm spread happens between my legs.
He smells it, too. “That’s okay; accidents happen. We’ll get you cleaned up after I finish. Now, hold still.”
I can’t stop crying, but I keep my head very still as soon as those blades come toward it.
“Think of something nice, like I said.”
Snip. I feel the weight give way. One auburn braid lands in my wet lap.
Think of something nice. Think of something nice.
Daddy hollering up the stairs this afternoon. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. Don’t make us all late for the picnic, you hear?” Suzie has long overshot her allotted ten minutes in the bathroom. Gerhard is pacing out his frustration in front of the door. And there I am, the youngest girl, with Theo giddyapping on my back, using my braids as reins. What will Theo use now?
Snip! There goes my other braid.
Think of something nice! Me trying to look nice for Arlo, winding my hair around a hot roller when Suzie barges into Mama’s room. “What’s this? Remedial hairdressing?” Suzie calls my hair a national embarrassment. She says braids are childish. “Are you wearing Mama’s perfume?” Suzie sniffing my neck, declaring, “Blythe’s got a boyfriend! Blythe’s got a boyfriend!” Making wet kissing noises, knowing full well I’d never been kissed.
Snip.
I wanted to look like a grown-up, not a freckled, pudgy sixteen-year-old. Mama likes to say round cheeks are an indication of good health and that Gene Tierney had an overbite, too, and that didn’t stop her from being considered one of the most beautiful movie stars back in her day. According to Mama, if I’d just show my green eyes instead of letting my bangs hang in them and if I’d accentuate what she insists are Grandma’s bow lips, I’d be more grateful for what God gave me.
Dobbs is hacking at my bangs. The scissors are going to gouge my eyes out. I squeeze them shut.
My sister, watching me weave my hair quickly back into braids: “Who is he? The retard?” She means Arlo, who’d inexplicably changed from the friend I had known since first grade, the one with whom I used to play down by the creek on Sundays only after the others had left, to someone whose attention the girls in my class compete for. Suzie refuses to notice that Arlo has shed his baby fat, his bowl haircut and fidgety mannerisms, probably because he’s never taken much notice of her, and these days, even less so. But she’s right: Arlo is the one who I am fixing to meet at the Horse Thieves Picnic. Suzie pulls a face at me and mouths the word freak.
Snip, snip, snip.
Worse than freak now.
He starts cutting more quickly. Bits of hair fly about.
I can’t think of something nice. Mama’s face is all, but she’d be crying, seeing this.
It goes on for ages and when I think there can’t surely be anything left to cut, he th
rows a thick wet towel over my head.
I struggle for breath. He’s going to smother me. I wrestle and kick and the chair tips all the way backward and I land upside down. My skirt is up around my waist. The smell of my urine is shameful.
He rights the chair, then smooths my skirt back over my knees. “I do not want to give you chloroform again. Please, sit still now. This is the tricky part.”
I try to be still, but I’m shaking too hard. He lathers my head with something that smells like tar. The package on the table reads, VAN’S CARBOLIC HOUSEHOLD SOAP.
“Please, no,” I beg when he picks up the plastic razor.
It scrapes my scalp. The blade is too dull. It nicks and cuts. He daubs where blood runs down my temple. My head is stinging all over, but the sound is just as terrible. The sound of scraping; the sound of skin crawling; the sound of the razor tapping against the bowl.
I can’t think of anything except the word freak.
* * *
When he’s done shaving me, he comes back with a nail trimmer. I dig my fingers into my palms, but he pries each one loose and clips my nails down to the quick. He sweeps up my hair from the floor and the table, bags my nail trimmings, and stuffs it all in a tin can.
He undoes the straps. “Easy now.”
I run my hand over my head. It’s bristly in places, slick in others. I can’t imagine how hideous I must look. I burst into tears.
He lets me have a drink. This time I really do need to use the facility.
There are locks on all the other doors in this place, some with the kind that uses buttons and some that need keys, but this toilet door barely latches. I pull down my wet underwear. I squat over the commode. What’s to become of me? I can’t bear to go with him being able to hear me.
When I leave the stall, he hands me a rag, an ugly polyester nightgown, and big white granny briefs. I go back into the toilet. I put on the underwear. I decide I will just sit here forever, or until someone comes, but he raps on the door, and I have to get up.