He looked at her face. The ends of her mouth quivered upward, as if she were hoping he would find her amusing. Again, he thought of Sandra.
“Yeah, right,” he laughed, realizing that it was just her lame version of a joke. “See ya.”
He hurried outside to the Ford. When he unlocked the door he looked back toward the store. The girl’s blank stare had returned to the TV screen, her frosty blue concoction once again plugged into her mouth. No interest in what he was doing at all.
“Lucky for you, fat girl,” Mitch mumbled as he turned the key in the ignition. “Being brain-dead just saved your pathetic little life.”
FOURTEEN
By the time the morning fog lifted, Henry Brank had put several miles between himself and the ghost of Simpson’s Bald. He’d awakened before dawn with his heart like a feather, and now he strode along in the bright sunshine with his vitamin-filled sack swaying behind him, singing in anticipation of the day to come.
“Sluts and tramps, chicks and dykes.” He made up the words as he walked along. “In the woods they’re all alike.”
He wondered, as he moved through the trees, what sort of women you would find way up here. College girls camping with their sorority sisters? Or harder, jackbooted women who wore leather and enjoyed fucking their own kind? He’d found both sorts before. Coeds usually flirted with him at first, hoping that would change their fate. The dykes started out swinging, brash as young men, but their best punches consisted mostly of poorly aimed kicks at his groin. Had their little karate instructors not warned them about how easy it was to catch an upturned ankle and twist it into agony? He chuckled as a blue-tailed skink slithered like liquid sapphire off the top of a warm rock. It made no difference to him what kind of women they were. All made good sport for a while, but they all wound up the same.
The thought of them, though, made him move faster through the forest. His breath began to come hard as he traversed the spine of the mountain range he’d climbed just two days before. The trail twisted around boulders that seemed to thrust up from the bowels of the mountains themselves. Though hiking this fast through the warm, thick air strained his back and bad leg, he kept pushing onward, like a shark drawn to the scent of blood.
He stopped only when he reached the ancient black gum tree that marked the trail to the Big Fodderstack fissure. Dropping his sack, he flattened himself against the brown scaly bark, breathing deeply and listening. No voices floated down from the little cave; no pans clattered in preparation of a midday meal. He nodded. He’d pegged it right: the women had broken camp and gone on to wherever they were headed. Probably he could strut up there brash as John Wayne. Nonetheless, he slid his knife from his boot as he eased out from behind the tree. Better to be careful around women.
He crept up the trail silently, his ears keen for any sound another person might make. Although the rocky footpath revealed few clues, he found one fresh track left in a patch of mud. He measured the depth with his finger and smiled. Some not-very-heavy person had recently walked up here in a pair of brand-new boots.
The breeze carried no particular smell of close humanity, so he crawled up to a huckleberry bush that grew where the trail widened into the ledge. He crouched behind its leaves, listening. Nothing. Cautiously he stood and crept onto the ledge itself. It was as he’d expected— an empty granite shelf sticking out from a vacant cave like a pouty lower lip. The only clue that the area had recently been a camp was the small dark circle of a neatly constructed fire. He squatted down and touched it with his palm. The dirt still felt warm.
He sheathed his knife and flopped down inside the cave, rubbing his cheek hard against a crack along one wall that smelled of cigarettes and perfume. Here their odors hung in the air. Deodorant, toothpaste, brandy, coffee. It was even better than he had hoped: in all that reeking bouquet of smells nothing bore the slightest scent of a man. He closed his eyes and imagined the women still here, underneath him, wrapping their legs around him while he thrust himself inside them. How good that would feel. Hot and soft as bread fresh from the oven.
He returned to his pack and fished out a Moon Pie, stuffing it in his mouth while he scanned the woods for their trail. He found it easily. Like most hikers, they had made no attempt to cover their tracks, and their trail of matted-down grass stretched out before him as plainly as if it had been lined off by the highway department. Brank chuckled as he licked the chocolate crumbs from his fingers. There would not be much sport to this, but there would be an awful lot of fun.
“I’ll have them in an hour,” he predicted to no one in particular as he reshouldered his sack and set off down the matted grass trail.
The women, though, had not taken some Audubon Society bird stroll. They’d gone up one side of a mountain so steep he thought his lungs would burst before he reached the top. Halfway up, with his shirt wet and clinging to his skin, he sat on a shady log and paused to rest. They’re going somewhere special, he decided. Nobody would hike up this high just to watch the leaves change. On a whim he untied his sack and dug out his vitamins. He opened the jar and shook out half a dozen. “I might need some extra C,” he muttered, remembering one of Fate’s old caveats about protecting himself against disease. “You never know what sort of germs you might run into.”
He dropped the vitamins back in his sack and saw Buster, coiled tightly against the remaining Moon Pies. With one hand he unbuttoned his shirt as he lifted the snake from the sack with the other.
“How’re you doing, old Buddy?” He looked into the snake’s beady black eyes.
The snake darted his tongue toward him. It didn’t appear hungry or in pain. Brank cuddled it under his chin.
“We’re gonna have some fun here in a little while,” he promised as the creature slithered around his arm, seeking warmth. “You help me out, I’ll give you something real good to eat.”
The snake coiled tighter in response.
“Atta boy.” Brank unwrapped the reptile and tucked it inside his shirt. “Just sit still for a little while longer.”
The snake felt cool against his damp belly. He retied his sack and climbed on.
When he finally crested the mountain he stopped in a shoulder-high thicket of red elderberries. He settled himself to listen and looked out at the hundred lesser mountains that rolled away from him. At first the breeze brought nothing but the echo of a flicker drilling a tree. Then, all at once, on a puff of wind from the west, he heard the same voices he’d heard the night before.
They floated up so clearly you could almost hear what they were saying. Words, then laughter, then something that sounded like someone singing. Suddenly he knew exactly where they were—Slickrock Springs, a hidden-away place the Indians considered holy. An easy walk from here. He grinned as he pushed out from between the dense branches. Slickrock Springs meant bad medicine for a white man, but today the Great Spirit would just have to make an exception.
Brank waded into a tangle of wild fox grapes, zigzagging silently through the thick foliage. In twenty minutes he’d reached the edge of the spring. Out of breath, he looked up.
Slickrock had always reminded him of a small volcano—a broad mound of giant sandstone boulders rising fifty feet to cradle the hot spring that gurgled in the center of them. He could still hear the women’s voices, fainter though, as if they hovered on the air above his head. An outcropping of rock jutted forth a third of the way from the top. If he could climb up there, he could see what awaited him without being detected.
He hid his sack and rifle under a hawthorne bush, then began to climb. By wedging his toes and fingers into the cracks between the boulders he could pull himself up like a lizard scaling a wall. But the sandstone offered little purchase; once, his foot slipped out of a crack, banging him noisily against the rocks. Panicked, he pressed himself against the boulder, praying the women hadn’t heard. He held his breath through a long bubble of silence, then their conversation resumed. With sweat now streaming from his forehead, he climbed on. Just below the outcr
opping he balanced on his toes, stretching full length and reaching up until his fingers curled around the edge of the ledge. Then he hoisted himself up. Every muscle in his back and shoulders screamed, but with one final effort he thrust with his feet and managed to fling himself belly-down on the ledge, gasping, sweat stinging his eyes.
When his heart had slowed to a gallop, he turned around and straightened up. If he stretched as tall as he could, he would be able to peer over the rocks and see what was going on. Higher and higher he rose, until finally everything came into view.
“Sweet fucking shit,” he whispered, as the world suddenly turned gold around him. “It’s Trudy. And one of her sidekicks.”
Two women lay on the boulders beside the pool. One had dark hair and wore a sweatshirt and underpants. Trudy, however—the one that took his breath away—lay naked. She had a mane of blonde hair that looked like a puddle of sunlight. Her arms cradled her head and lifted her breasts towards him. The rosy points of her nipples rose to the mountain air. Her belly was flat and ended in the small mound of her crotch, the inner workings of which were hidden by a thatch of darker blonde hair. She had the longest legs he’d ever seen. She was eating a candy bar while her friend smoked a cigarette. One would laugh, and the other would join in. The sound jingled on the air like a wind chime. He watched them until he could stand it no longer. With his penis stiff as steel he crouched down on the ledge and relieved himself in three quick strokes. A tornado ripped through him as he splattered against the rocks.
“Ahhhh, Gott,” he groaned, his heart rattling inside his chest.
He crouched, trembling, on the ledge until the fire inside him cooled to an ember. He needed to find out for certain if they were alone. Carefully, he stretched up again. The women lay there happy, content. No guns or fishing tackle had been left beside them by boyfriends who might have gone off to explore. Except for a pile of cast-off clothes and two bright backpacks under a tree, his sister and her little pal could have been dropped down from heaven purely for his own enjoyment. He watched as she rearranged herself on the boulder, then he squatted back down on the ledge.
He looked up into the sky. A wide V of Canada geese flapped southward across a field of blue while the sun fell like warm honey on his forehead. A crazed, delirious hum spun in his brain as he began unlacing his boots.
“At last,” he whispered, offering his thanks to whatever gods had delivered unto him that day his rightful and most long-awaited prey. “Trudy, old girl, in a few minutes you’re finally gonna belong to me.”
FIFTEEN
Joan felt the shadow first. A small interstice of darkness fell across the bright sunlight that bathed her face. A cloud, she thought. But the chill did not move. Reluctantly she opened her eyes to see what was obstructing the light that had just a moment ago warmed her so deliciously. A colossus stood above her. Its face blocked the sun, and she could see nothing but a black shape haloed with a corona of blinding light.
“Mary?” she asked tentatively, an instant before she looked down and saw that the figure stood barefooted. Dark hair covered the tops of the feet; the nails were thick as claws. A snippet of bright green grass clung to one dirty toe. Joan opened her mouth to speak, but the foot moved. Fast, as if stomping a cockroach, it slammed down on her throat, crushing her vocal cords. When she next opened her mouth it was only to suck in air, to hang on to the slender thread that tethered her to this life.
“You make one sound and I’ll sic my little friend on you.” A man’s coarse whisper rasped flat on the air. He held up a long, twisting snake. Joan stared at it, unable to take her eyes off its darting, flicking tongue.
“Did you say something?” Alex’s voice rose in a question, somewhere to her right.
Joan struggled beneath the foot to reply, to warn Alex, but faster than any thug she’d ever seen on the subway the man knelt and pressed the edge of a hunting knife flat against her throat. The blade felt like ice beneath her jaw and her pulse throbbed hot against it.
“One word and this rock’ll look like a hog-killing.”
“What?” Joan heard the surprise in Alex’s voice. She squirmed to see her raising up on one elbow; then Alex, too, registered what was happening. “What the fuck . . .” she began.
The man turned suddenly and dangled the snake over Alex. Her blue eyes grew huge and wide and she began to gulp air as if she’d just come up from the bottom of the spring.
He sheathed his knife and arranged the snake in a heavy coil on Joan’s chest. The creature rose up like a cobra, its eyes glittering like shiny black seeds. Panic surged inside her. “Don’t you move, now,” the man said. “I’d hate for you to get bit.”
The man pulled some thin rope and a red bandana from inside his shirt and forced the bandana between Alex’s jaws. He knotted it at the back of her head, then rolled her, unresisting, on her side, pulling her arms and legs tight behind her and binding them with the rope.
“Be still!” the man ordered as Alex stared speechless and terrified, her back arching like an inverted hobby-horse.
He tied her arms and legs, then patted her hip as if he’d just won a contest in a rodeo. Licking the tip of one index finger, he reached for Alex’s nipple.
“No!” Joan screamed before she realized what she’d done. The man jumped and turned back to her. His eyes blazed and she saw the index finger that had been bound for Alex’s breast stop and curl into a fist. It rose, then roared down out of the sky like lightning and collided with the bridge of her nose. Bones snapped as her face melted in a furnace of pain.
“You don’t tell me no,” the man said. “You may be Trudy’s partner, but don’t you ever tell me no.”
The man looked down at her. His face darkened with a deeper rage, then he smiled slightly, as if some good idea had just occurred to him. He forced Joan’s mouth open. His hands smelled like rotten meat and the cloth he stretched between her jaws tasted like kerosene. He pulled her head forward by her hair and tied the cloth tight against the base of her skull. Her tongue seemed to double, to triple in size. There was not enough room for it and the rag in her mouth. She tried to suck in more air, but she couldn’t. This is how you will die, she realized. You will not be stabbed.You will not be bitten by the snake.You will die simply trying to breathe in air.
The man put the snake around his neck and raised Joan’s arms high above her head. He pulled up her sweatshirt. The air felt cold on her bare breasts, the sandstone boulder rough against her back. She saw nothing beyond the black underside of her sweatshirt. She tried to keep breathing as she felt hands jerking her underpants down the length of her legs.
Hail, Mary, full of grace, she began to repeat inside her head, picturing the pretty pink rosary beads that she’d left, where, in her jewelry box? In the bathroom drawer with her birth control pills? She couldn’t miss taking any of her pills; she had a date with Hugh Chandler in just a few days.
The hands pried her legs apart, then squeezed her sex as someone might coax juice from an orange. It burned from the outrage while her legs jerked as if she’d just grabbed an electrical wire.
Blessed art thou among women . . .
The hands traveled up her belly to her breasts, pinching her nipples with sharp fingernails. She gasped with pain, but then the fingernails disappeared, replaced by a hot wet mouth that sucked her right breast until it went numb. She squirmed to get away, to fold herself into the rock, but the hands grabbed her hips and jerked her forward. They grabbed her thighs and pushed her legs so wide apart she feared they would snap off like twigs. I am not wet, she thought, this will not work, and she tried to twist back into the woods or the rocks or even into the dark green depths of Atagahi itself. But she could not move. A weight pinned her legs flat as something began to batter an entrance to her vagina.
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. He rammed into her harder; she couldn’t remember any more of the rosary she’d known since she was four. She thought of Times Square and the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue a
nd her Aunt Carla the ex-Rockette. Her legs would not break off like this. Aunt Carla could put on her tap shoes and turn this man’s balls to hamburger and the smile would never leave her face. Un vero angelo, her mother laughs when she talks about Aunt Carla. Joan thought of her mother and her mother’s kitchen, where the sun slants across the red linoleum floor and the walls are redolent of garlic and lemons and the yeasty smell of dough rising. Renata Tebaldi, her mother’s favorite soprano, sings from the stereo. Giovanna, her mother calls her by her Italian name. She wished with all her soul that she were back in that bright, warm, infinitely safe kitchen. If she could ever get back there she would never leave again.
He pummeled into her until finally, like a poorly stitched seam, her tissue tore and gave way. The stranger was within.
Time stopped then. Joan felt the beginning of each stroke, its path and its thumping end. She endured each without thought as to when this might cease, knowing only that when the choking in her head met the fire that was ripping up through her vagina, she would die. Surely God would grant her that mercy. Finally, just as she decided to quit breathing, she felt something spew up into her, and it was over. He quivered inside her for an instant, then shrank away. The hands left her hips; a coolness enveloped her.
Then she left, as fully as he did. She flew to a faraway place where her grandmother squabbled with Mrs. Cannanero about the best place to buy tomatoes, where nuns smelling of lavender repeated their prayers like pigeons cooing, and where, on an afternoon just like this one, you could get a hot dog and an egg cream and feel like the world belonged to you.
SIXTEEN
Mitch Whitman sighed at the aging Dodge pickup trundling ahead of him. Though its right taillight had blinked for the past twenty minutes, the truck had ignored an obvious turn and chugged on into the mountains ahead of him, one worn back tire wobbling.
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