“Maple Valley’s this way,” she said, not turning, “and we can talk to the police there, and a doctor.”
“No,” I said.
She looked at me. “You’re in no state to make rational decisions,” she said.
I closed my hand around her wrist and squeezed. She cried out. She let go of the steering wheel and tried to shake off my grip. I stared at her and held on, remembering my grand-mère’s tales of the strength of the dead.
“Stop,” I said. I felt strange, totally strange, ordering a woman around the way a pimp would. I knew I was hurting her, too. I knew I could squeeze harder, break the bones in her arm, and I was ready to, but she pulled the car over to the shoulder and stamped on the brake.
“I got to go to Sea-Tac,” I said. I released her arm and climbed out of the car. “Thanks for ride. You want the jacket back?” I fingered the denim.
“My Lord,” she said, “you keep it, child.” She was rubbing her hand over the wrist I had gripped. She heaved a huge sigh. “Get in. I’ll take you where you want to go. I can’t just leave you here.”
“Your daughter’s show?” I said.
“I’ll phone. We’re going someplace with phones, aren’t we?”
I wasn’t sure exactly where we would end up. I would know when we arrived…. I remembered the inside of Richie’s apartment. But that was later. First he had pulled up next to where I was standing by the highway, rolled down the passenger window of his big gold four-door Buick, said he’d like to party and that he knew a good place. Standard lines, except I usually told johns the place, down one of the side streets and in the driveway behind an abandoned house. I had asked him how high he was willing to go. My pimp had been offering me coke off and on but I’d managed not to get hooked, so I was still a little picky about who I went with; but Richie looked clean-cut and just plain clean, and his car was a couple years old but expensive; I thought he might have money.
“I want it all,” Richie had said. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”
I climbed into his car.
He took me down off the ridge where the Sea-Tac Strip is to a place like the one where I usually took my tricks, behind one of the abandoned houses near the airport that are due to be razed someday. There’s two or three neighborhoods of them handy. I asked him for money and he handed me a hundred, so I got in back with him, but then things went seriously wrong. That was the first time I saw and felt his rope, the first time I heard his voice cursing me, the first time I tasted one of his sweaty socks, not the worst thing I’d ever tasted, but close.
When he had me gagged and tied up and shoved down on the back seat floor, he drove somewhere else. I couldn’t tell how long the drive was; it felt like two hours but was probably only fifteen or twenty minutes. I could tell when the car drove into a parking garage because the sounds changed. He put a shopping bag over my head and carried me into an elevator, again something I could tell by feel, and then along a hall to his apartment. That was where I learned more about him than I had ever wanted to know about anybody.
I didn’t know his apartment’s address, but I knew where Richie was. If he was at the apartment, I would direct Marti there even without a map. The fire inside me reached for Richie like a magnet lusting for a hammer.
Shaping words carefully, I told Marti, “Going to the Strip. Plenty of phones.”
“Right,” she said.
“On the other road.” I pointed behind us.
She sighed. “Get in.”
I climbed into the car, and she waited for an RV to pass, then pulled out and turned around.
As soon as we were heading the way I wanted to go, the fire inside me cooled a little. I sat back and relaxed.
“Why are we going to the—to the Strip?” she asked. “What are you going to do when we get there?”
“Don’t know,” I said. We were driving toward the sun, which was going down. Glare had bothered me before my death, but now it was like dirt in my eyes, a minor annoyance. I blinked and considered this, then shrugged it off.
“Can’t you even tell me your boyfriend’s name?” she asked.
“Richie.”
“Richie what?”
“Don’t know.”
“Are you going back to him?”
Fire rose in my throat like vomit. I felt like I could breathe it out and it would feel good. It felt good inside my belly already. I was drunk with it. “Oh, yes,” I said.
“How can you?” she cried. She shook her head. “I can’t take you back to someone who hurt you so much.” But she didn’t stop driving.
“I have to go back,” I said.
“You don’t. You can choose something else. There are shelters for battered women. The government should offer you some protection. The police….”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“I do,” she said. Her voice got quieter. “I know what it’s like to live with someone who doesn’t respect you. I know how hard it is to get away. But you are away, Sheila. You can start over.”
“No,” I said, “I can’t.”
“You can. I’ll help you. You can live in Kanaskat with me and he’ll never find you. Or if you just want a bus ticket someplace—back home, wherever that is—I can do that for you, too.”
“You don’t understand,” I said.
She was quiet for a long stretch of road. Then she said, “Help me understand.”
I shook my braids back and opened the collar of the jacket, pulled down the lapels to bare my neck. I stared at her until she looked back.
She screamed and drove across the center lane. Fortunately there was no other traffic. Still screaming, she fought with the steering wheel until she straightened out the car. Then she pulled over to the shoulder and jumped out of the car and ran away.
I shut off the car’s engine, then climbed out. “Marti,” I yelled. “Okay, I’m walking away now. The car’s all yours. I’m leaving. It’s safe. Thanks for the jacket. Bye.” I buttoned up the jacket, put the collar up, buried my hands in the pockets, and started walking along the road toward Richie.
I had gone about a quarter mile when she caught up with me again. The sun had set and twilight was deepening into night. Six cars had passed going my way, but I didn’t hold out my thumb, and though some kid had yelled out a window at me, and somebody else had honked and swerved, nobody stopped.
It had been so easy to hitch before I met Richie. Somehow now I just couldn’t do it.
I heard the Rabbit’s sputter behind me and kept walking, not turning to look at her. But she slowed and kept pace with me. “Sheila?” she said in a hoarse voice. “Sheila?”
I stopped and looked toward her. I knew she was scared of me. I felt strong and strange, hearing her call me by a name I had given myself, as if I might once have had a chance to make up who I was instead of being shaped by what had happened to me. I couldn’t see it being possible now, though, when I was only alive to do what the fire in me wanted.
Marti blinked, turned away, then turned back. “Get in,” she said.
“You don’t have to take me,” I said. “I’ll get there sooner or later. Doesn’t matter when.”
“Get in.”
I got back into her car.
For half an hour we drove in silence. She crossed Interstate 5, paused when we hit 99, the Strip. “Which way?”
I pointed right. The fire was so hot in me now I felt like my fingertips might start smoking any second.
She turned the car and we cruised north toward the Sea-Tac Airport, my old stomping grounds. We passed expensive hotels and cheap motels, convenience stores and fancy restaurants. Lighted buildings alternated with dark gaps. The roar of planes taking off and landing, lights rising and descending in the sky ahead of us, turned rapidly into background. We drove past the Goldilocks Motel, where Blake and I had a room we rented by the week, and I didn’t feel anything. But as we passed the intersection where the Red Lion sprawls on the corner of 188th Street and the Pacific Highway, fire fla
red under my skin. “Slowly,” I said to Marti. She stared at me and slowed the car. A mile further, past the airport, one of the little roads led down off the ridge to the left. I pointed.
Marti got in the left-turn lane and made the turn, then pulled into a gas station on the corner and parked by the rest rooms. “Now wait,” she said. “What are we doing, here?”
“Richie,” I whispered. I could feel his presence in the near distance; all my wounds were resonating with his nearness now, all the places he had pressed himself into me with his rope and his cigarette and his sock and his flaked stone knife and his penis, imprinting me as his possession. Surely as a knife slicing into a tree’s bark, he had branded me with his heart.
“Yes,” said Marti. “Richie. You have any plans for what you’re going to do once you find him?”
I held my hands out, open, palms up. The heat was so strong I felt like anything I touched would burst into flame.
“What are you going to do, strangle him? Have you got something to do it with?” She sounded sarcastic.
I was having a hard time listening to her. All my attention was focused down the road. I knew Richie’s car was there, and Richie in it. It was the place he had taken me to tie me up. He might be driving this way any second, and I didn’t want to wait any longer for our reunion, though I knew there was no place he could hide where I couldn’t find him. My love for him was what animated me now.
“Strangle,” I said, and shook my head. I climbed out of the car.
“Sheila!” said Marti.
I let the sound of my self-given name fill me with what power it could, and stood still for a moment, fighting the fire inside. Then I walked into the street, stood in the center so a car coming up out of the dark would have to stop. I strode down into darkness, away from the lights and noise of the Strip. My feet felt like match-heads, as if a scrape could strike fire from them.
Presently the asphalt gave way to potholes and gravel; I could tell by the sound of pebbles sliding under my feet. I walked past the first three dark houses to the right and left, looming shapes in a darkness pierced by the flight lights of airplanes, but without stars. I turned left at the fourth house, dark like the others, but with a glow behind it I couldn’t see with my eyes but could feel in my bones. Heat pulsed and danced inside me.
I pushed past an overgrown lilac bush at the side of the house and stepped into the broad drive in back. The car was there, as I had known it would be. Dark and quiet. Its doors were closed.
I heard a brief cry, and then the dome light went on in the car. Richie was sitting up in back, facing away from me.
Richie.
I walked across the crunching gravel, looking at his dark head. He wore a white shirt. He was staring down, focused, his arms moving. As I neared the car, I could see he was sitting on a woman. She still had her clothes on. (Richie hadn’t taken my clothes off until he got me in his apartment.) Tape was across her mouth, and her head thrashed from side to side, her upper arms jerking as Richie bound his thin nylon rope around her wrists, her legs kicking. I stood a moment looking in the window. She saw me and her eyes widened. She made a gurgling swallowed sound behind the sock, the tape.
I thought: he doesn’t need her. He has me.
I remembered the way my mind had struggled while my body struggled, screaming silently: no, oh no, Blake, where are you? No one will help me, the way no one has ever helped me, and I can’t help myself. That hurts, that hurts. Maybe he’ll play with me and let me go if I’m very, very good. Oh, God! What do you want? Just tell me, I can do it. You don’t have to hurt me! Okay, rip me off, it’s not like you’re the first, but you don’t have to hurt me.
Hurt me.
I love you. I love you so much.
I stared at him through the glass. The woman beneath him had stilled, and she was staring at me. Richie finally noticed, and whirled.
For a moment we stared at each other. Then I smiled, showing him the stumps of my teeth, and his blue eyes widened.
I reached for the door handle, opened it before he could lock it.
“Richie,” I said.
“Don’t!” he said. He shook his head, hard, as though he were a dog with wet fur. Slowly, he lifted one hand and rubbed his eye. He had a big bread knife in the other hand, had used it to cut the rope, then flicked it across the woman’s cheek, leaving a streak of darkness. He looked at me again. His jaw worked.
“Richie.”
“Don’t! Don’t… interrupt.”
I held out my arms, my fingertips scorched black as if dyed or tattooed, made special, the wrists dark beyond the ends of my sleeves. “Richie,” I said tenderly, the fire in me rising up like a firework, a burst of stars. “I’m yours.”
“No,” he said.
“You made me yours.” I looked at him. He had made Tawanda his, and then he had erased her. He had made Mary his, and then erased her. Even though he had erased Tawanda and Mary, these feelings inside me were Tawanda’s: whoever hurts me controls me; and Mary’s: I spoke up once and I got a curse on me I can’t get rid of. If I’m quiet maybe I’ll be okay.
But Sheila? Richie hadn’t erased Sheila; he had never even met her.
It was Tawanda who was talking. “You killed me and you made me yours,” she said. My fingers went to the jacket, unbuttoned it, dropped it behind me. “What I am I owe to you.”
“I—” he said, and coughed. “No,” he said.
I heard the purr of car engines in the near distance, not the constant traffic of the Strip, but something closer.
I reached into the car and gripped Richie’s arm. I pulled him out, even though he grabbed at the door handle with his free hand. I could feel the bone in his upper arm as my fingers pressed his muscles. “Richie,” I whispered, and put my arms around him and laid my head on his shoulder.
For a while he was stiff, tense in my embrace. Then a shudder went through him and he loosened up. His arms came around me. “You’re mine?” he said.
“Yours,” said Tawanda.
“Does that mean you’ll do what I say?” His voice sounded like a little boy’s.
“Whatever you say,” she said.
“Put your arms down,” he said.
I lowered my arms.
“Stand real still.” He backed away from me, then stood and studied me. He walked around, looking at me from all sides. “Wait a sec, I gotta get my flashlight.” He went around to the trunk and opened it, pulled out a flashlight as long as his forearm, turned it on. He trained the beam on my breasts, my neck. “I did you,” he said, nodding. “I did you. You were good. Almost as good as the first one. Show me your hands again.”
I held them out and he stared at my blackened fingers. Slowly he smiled, then looked up and met my eyes.
“I was going to visit you,” he said. “When I finished with this one. I was coming back to see you.
“I couldn’t wait,” said Tawanda.
“Don’t talk,” Richie said gently.
Don’t talk! Tawanda and Mary accepted that without a problem, but I, Sheila, was tired of people telling me not to talk. What did I have to lose?
On the other hand, what did I have to say? I didn’t even know what I wanted. Tawanda’s love for Richie was hard to fight. It was the burning inside me, the sizzling under my skin, all I had left of life.
“Will you scream if I say so?” said Richie in his little boy’s voice.
“Yes,” said Tawanda; but suddenly lights went on around us, and bullhorn voices came out of the dark.
“Hold it right there, buddy! Put your hands up!”
Blinking in the sudden flood of light, Richie slowly lifted his hand, the knife glinting in the left one, the flashlight in the other.
“Step away from him, miss,” said someone else. I looked around too, not blinking; glare didn’t bother me. I couldn’t see through it, though. I didn’t know who was talking. “Miss, move away from him,” said another voice from outside the light.
“Come here,” Richie
whispered, and I went to him. Releasing the flashlight, he dropped his arms around me, held the knife to my neck, and yelled, “Stay back!”
“Sheila!” It was Marti’s voice this time, not amplified.
I looked toward her.
“Sheila, get away from him!” Marti yelled. “Do you want him to escape?”
Tawanda did. Mary did. They, after all, had found the place where they belonged. In the circle of his arms, my body glowed, the fire banked but burning steady.
He put the blade closer to my twisted throat. I could almost feel it. I laid my head back on his shoulder, looking at his profile out of the corner of my eye. The light glare brought out the blue in his eye. His mouth was slightly open, the inside of his lower lip glistening. He turned to look down into my face, and a slight smile curved the corner of his mouth. “Okay,” he whispered, “we’re going to get into the car now.” He raised his voice. “Do what I say and don’t struggle.” Keeping me between him and the lights, he kicked the back door closed and edged us around the car to the driver’s side. Moving in tandem, with his arm still around my neck, we slid in behind the wheel, me going first. “Keep close,” he said to me. “Slide down a little so I can use my arm to shift with, but keep close.”
“Sheila!” screamed Marti. The driver’s side window was open.
Richie started the car.
“Sheila! There’s a live woman in the back of that car!”
Tawanda didn’t care, and Mary didn’t care, and I wasn’t even sure I cared. Richie shifted from park into drive and eased his foot off the brake and onto the gas pedal; I could feel his legs moving against my left shoulder. From the back seat I heard a muffled groan. I looked up at Richie’s face. He was smiling.
Just as he gunned the engine, I reached up and grappled the steering-wheel-mounted gear shift into park. Then I broke the shift handle off.
“You said you’d obey me,” he said, staring down into my face. He looked betrayed, his eyes wide, his brow furrowed, his mouth soft. The car’s engine continued to snarl without effect.
The Living Dead Page 10