THUGLIT Issue Seventeen

by Steve Bailey

  The Mercedes slows down, performs a jerky lane change, brakes and pulls off to the shoulder. This is it, this is it, this is it…

  She has to wait a long time for anything to happen. She listens very closely for footsteps, speaking, anything. She imagines a tough and barrel-chested highway trooper walking slowly up to the driver's side window of her car, gun drawn, eyes narrowed in tension and anticipation. Wait a minute, why am I waiting? She starts kicking and shouting again. She can hear the metal of the trunk booming and sounding as she fires away, totally content to ruin and bash her feet. Doesn't matter.

  The engine turns off. Total silence.

  "Hey! I'm in here! Help!" She screams and kicks.

  Without any warning, the trunk gently pops open. The cold clean air of the natural world outside heaps in on her. She looks up at the daylight—so vividly blue and shiny it blinds her. She sneezes and her vision begins to return, and with it a sound, a vehicular squeal followed by three loud pops like a car backfiring and the Mercedes is struck—unmistakably by another car, and all she can see is the glaring blue sky swinging. She feels like a baby in a carriage that has come loose from a parent's grip at the top of a very tall and quaking hill.

  In turn, the Mercedes strikes something else and swings to a sudden stop. Only silence hums now. A low and resonant pain fills her body. She has no idea what just happened.

  She coughs and looks at the sky. "Hey!" she screams. "I'm in here! I'm in the trunk! Don't shoot!" A new, strange trepidation has thinned her voice. Cautiously, she lifts her head to observe the world.

  It is still a beautiful day. Her Mercedes is off to the side of the road. The red Jeep sits square in the road, straddling both lanes of the highway. There seems to be no one around.

  She tries to untangle herself from her anguished position, but can't do so without her arms. She can't move. She wants to cry in frustration. She rolls onto her chest and tries to pull her wrists apart. Her shoulders and forearms fill with acid and she groans with the effort until, startlingly, the duct tape breaks and her arms come free.

  She pushes herself from the trunk.

  She tries to stand on her feet, but her legs are useless and she collapses on the grass. Birds are chirping. The asphalt is burning to the touch, smells hot. She crawls forward, dragging her body toward the police car in the road. The officer—not a man as she's envisioned, but a woman, young and very pretty—lies on her back in the road. She looks at Abby with her enormous eyes. Her mouth opens and closes mutely. She's hurt, shot—though Abby can't tell where or how badly. The young officer's expression is hopelessly blank.

  Abby gets to her knees and moves toward the officer, but a male voice behind her screams, "Stop! Don't go by her!"

  She turns and sees the black kid holding himself up on the door of Abby's own smashed up Mercedes.

  He looks like he's about to collapse. He's having difficulty breathing, a little blood splotches his Charlotte Hornets t-shirt. Abby struggles to put together the scene that just happened.

  "Are you shot?" she asks him. Why the fuck am I talking to him?

  The punk ignores the question and shouts at the red Jeep, "Will! Will! Talk to me, man!"

  She looks back at the cop.

  "Don't go to her!" he shrieks and something breaks in his voice and he doubles over, coughing, hacking, spitting.

  Abby gets to her feet and moves to the cop. "Are you okay?" Abby asks her. She's clearly not.

  "I'm serious!" the punk screams. "Don't touch her!"

  Fuck him, Abby thinks. She looks at him, "This is over, you idiot! You're caught." The radio. Cops have radios. Abby searches her body for a radio but doesn't see one. Her car, she needs to get to the cop's car.

  "You have to come with us," he shouts.

  "Fuck you," she says.

  "We have your daughter, lady." Then he collapses, coughing. "We have her and you gotta come with us."

  Abby looks at him. "What?"

  "Your daughter," he says. "We've got her. If you don't come with us, they'll kill her."

  The kidnapper behind the wheel of the red Jeep is so obviously dead that Abby doesn't even bother to check closely for breath or a pulse. The driver's head hangs to the side of his broken neck. His dead eyes look at nothing; his plastic sunglasses are folded and placed neatly on the passenger seat next to him. "Fuck," the black kid says, looking at this. He hangs on Abby's shoulder, clutching his shattered hip. He looks up and down the road. "We have to get out of here. Move him. Move his body."

  "What?"

  "Dump his body and get in the driver's seat. We have to go right now, lady."

  Her mind is moving very slowly. She can't quite put together the sequence of events that have placed her here, standing on an empty stretch of hot road somewhere, propping up her assailant, looking at a dead body, and obeying the verbal commands of the panicked man beside her. She doesn't even realize she is obeying until after she has obeyed. She opens the driver's door and pulls out the heavy body of Will. She drops it on the road and looks at the punk who's still breathing.

  "Get in," he says.

  "What?"

  "Get in the driver's seat. You have to drive us."

  "Drive us where?"

  "To your daughter. I have to bring you there. Get the fuck in."

  In a complete daze, she gets in the driver's seat and watches as he hobbles around the front of the car and seats himself beside Abby. He winces with every motion. Maybe his pelvis is broken. Serve him right, Abby thinks.

  "Now drive, lady." There's liquid in his voice.

  She shifts the car into gear and applies pressure to the gas pedal, effectively kidnapping herself.

  Margaret was born on the hottest day of 1950. Abby was so regretful that she had been born, because she had married the wrong man and then recommitted to the mistake by having a child with him.

  Now, forty years later, she finds herself gripping the steering wheel of a criminal's car, driving one of her bleeding assailants toward a promise, a rumor, a fume of her daughter. She has no reason to believe that Margaret has actually been kidnapped. She also knows she has no reason not to believe it either. The choice is clear, stark and cruel.

  Believe and risk your life.

  Disbelieve and risk your daughter's life.

  The punk sucks his teeth in pain, pressing the flat of his hand against the corner of his hip, dark blood welling between the Vs of his splayed fingers. "What happened to you?" she asks him. "Were you shot?"

  "I was hit by the fucking car."

  "Which car?"

  "This one," he says. "Will drove into the cop, hit me and your Mercedes."

  "The cop shot your friend, right?"

  "He's not my friend. Just drive."

  "Where am I going?"

  "Just keep driving, I'll tell you. Stop talking."

  "How do I know you have my daughter? Why do you have my daughter!"

  "I don't know, lady. Stop talking."

  "Fuck that." She balls her right fist and brings it down like a stone onto his broken hip.

  He howls in pain—screams so loud—right at the windshield and shoves her shoulder hard. The steering wheel cranks in her hands and the car performs a violent squiggle on the road. She stares right at him. "You motherfucker," she says. "Why are you doing this to us?"

  "I don't know, lady," he says. "It's got nothing to do with me. I was paid. Your daughter's a lawyer, right? Fuckin' figure it out, it's about that."

  She thinks for a moment, then says, "I'm not doing this. I'm driving you straight to the police."

  "Fucking do that, lady, and they'll kill her."

  She imagines Margaret tied to a chair—movie-style—a bandana in her mouth, rope twisted around her wrists, eyes dinner-plate round in fear, and Abby suppresses the thought. It was only last night Abby was drinking wine by herself, alone in her house, and now this. "Please," she says. "Please take us where we need to go."

  "We? Fuck you." Calming himself, he inhales steady, measu
red breaths, looks levelly at her and says in a slow, reasonable voice, "I don't want anyone to die. I don't want her to die. I don't want to die. I just want to get where we're supposed to go."

  "Where are we going?"

  He looks at the road. Abby has the gas pedal pretty hard underfoot. "Slow down," he says. "You gotta get us off the highway. We can pick it up again in another hundred miles. The directions are in my pocket. You gotta get 'em."

  "What?"

  "My left pocket. You gotta get 'em."

  She inhales, holds it and lets it out in a minor pah. She takes her right hand from the steering wheel and reaches into his tight and bloodied jeans pocket. She fishes out a folded sheet of paper and hands it to him. The kid unfolds it and reads the handwriting.

  "For fuck's sake," she sighs.

  Within twenty minutes, the kidnapper has fallen asleep. She listens closely to his breathing.

  Margaret. What do you want me to do? But she firmly knows what she's going to do. She knows she has to take this hoodlum she would have never otherwise believed at his word and drive him to this dark, unknowable destination where Margaret, death, both or nothing awaits. Abby passes a string of semi-trucks struggling up the grade. Where is she? "Where are we?" She asks loud enough to wake the punk.

  "What?"

  "Where are we?"

  "Georgia."

  Georgia. She checks the directions again. There aren't many other cars on the road, she watches the faces of everyone she sees and imagines trying to steal their attention somehow. She wonders what that would look like, a woman of her age mouthing HELP at another driver, gesturing in a fury to the slumped-over guy in the basketball t-shirt next to her. She never signals anyone.

  Slowly, the sky begins to darken.

  Hours later, the directions have taken them to the edge of Davey State Park. She begins to wonder if the kid beside her is even alive anymore. She doesn't hear much from him. She looks at him and the blood that has stanched the graphics on his basketball t-shirt. The Charlotte Hornets, a new-ish expansion team. She doesn't really follow the NBA, at least not like she used to. For a long time, a quarter of her life, sports meant something to her. More than something.

  The directions take her off the main road. A left turn at something called Small River Drive.

  Basketball was—and this has never embarrassed her, she has never questioned it—the purest expression of herself. After college, she missed it terribly. When life, bad jobs, bad friends, the drinking, debt and the mistakes took full hold, that's when she found herself cringing in pain, in longing, flipping through her photo albums and studying the old pictures of herself in her royal blue Volunteers uniform. That Abby wore muscle like a coat of armor. She was wide-set and upright like a predator. That Abby was as close as she had ever come to perfect. It was, unquestionably, her peak. And she wasn't even a very good ball player. She was always good enough, got time on the court, but she wasn't a star and she never had a real chance of being one.

  Small River Drive is a long, muddy, stony trail through tightening woods. She feels less like she is driving somewhere and more like she is being squeezed into something. The completely unconscious body beside her rocks with the motion of the car.

  The climax of her athletic life was an unthinkably miraculous six-game streak of come-from-behind victories for which she herself was singularly responsible. She could never explain it. That particular February she was on fire, but only for a while, and always with only a handful of minutes left on the clock. Six games saw Abby—the hard-partying, irresponsible, wild woman of the team—lead berserker rallies late in the game to bring her Vols over the edge by as few as three points.

  In not a few of those games, she had even been close to fouling out, or had already committed a few striking errors that had contributed to their point deficit. It was almost automatic: the score, the clock, the failure-fatigue and frustration, all slid into her in a certain way, unlocked her like a key. She swung her body, jumped in overly-committed leaps for rebounds, annihilated herself for the ball, and it worked.

  One local sports columnist wrote that Abby Klutter was known for falling on opponents suddenly, late in the game, like a "big hard squall." That eye-rolling phrase wound up earning her a nickname she wielded for a few years. Squall. She liked it. She certainly liked it better than the nickname she had privately, and permanently, given herself at the age of nineteen when she once drunkenly whispered to her own bloodied reflection, "I am the Mad Heart of Fucking Up."

  And then, as mysteriously as her streak arrived, it left. Her basketball career ended quietly. She graduated two years late. And that was that.

  After forty minutes, she knows that her kidnapper has bled to death. She knows because he hasn't moved, he isn't breathing, and an erection is lifting his blood-stained jeans. The woods finally open a bit and her headlights fall on a darkened, disheveled cabin sitting in tall, black grass. No lights in the cabin. No cars in the stony lot out front. It seems very clear that no one is here. She looks to the wrinkled directions in her hand to confirm that there is nothing more written. This is where she was to be taken.

  She leaves the car running and steps out into the cold world. Water hangs in the air. Storm coming. She looks in the windows, knocks on the door, screams, "Hello!" No response at all. The front door is locked. She breaks the glass with her elbow, lets herself in and finds a completely empty cabin. No one lives here. No one is here now. It slowly occurs to her that this is perfect. This is her window of escape and opportunity. All she has to do is drive herself and her dead captor out of the woods, straight to a police station, and let the professional search for Margaret begin. She gets back in the car with the dead body and performs a tight three-point turn while his blood sloshes around the floor of the car. She begins the drive back through the long, narrow road.

  Where are you, Margaret? Do they really have you?

  Abby has little visibility at night. The rain begins to splatter down on the Jeep's windshield. She's never driven a Jeep before, she doesn't know how to activate the wipers. She works one of the dials on a lever, and when she returns her vision to the road, she sees the single set of white headlights approaching from ahead.

  Automatically, unthinkingly, she stomps on the brake. Her car slides in the mud then stops. She looks at the dead punk. She can feel her own pulse in her throat and head. Blood thuds in her ears. The headlights approach; soon her car will be within their wash, she will become perfectly visible.

  There is nowhere for her to go.

  She can reverse, but then what? The headlights roll forward, onto the hood of the Jeep, then onto her. She ducks low, clumsily, knocking into the body that lazily falls atop her, heavy and dull. It hurts. She gasps in pain and tries to wriggle the thing off her.

  The other car stops, the yellow, dusty headlights fill the cabin of her Jeep. Her own breathing is so heavy, so jagged. What the fuck am I going to do? The other car rumbles, engine on, but parked. The stiffening body atop her is cumbersome, heavy, smelly, bloody. She wants to throw it off her, she wants to scream at it.

  A narrow shadow enters the light. She stops her breathing. In a moment, she will be revealed, and then what? A chain from around the corpse's neck comes loose from his shirt and jingles in her ear, rubs against her face. She pushes the body off of her and sits up into the glare. She holds a hand forward, sees nothing but the burn of the lights and the shadow of the man in the prism of headlights. He's a young man in a jean jacket and a wrinkled fishing hat. He looks very confused, standing between Abby's Jeep and his own car, a low, dirty sedan with a North Carolina license plate. She can't tell if he can see her or not. She believes they are holding eye contact, but she cannot know what he sees exactly. They are only seven or eight feet apart. Something engages in the man's head, in his eyes.

  He makes a hard move forward and she stamps on the gas pedal, throwing the weight of her Jeep forward, pinning the man between the two cars. He flails, tries to twist. She reverses and the
man falls down, disappears from view. She drives forward, until his body is underneath the Jeep. She inhales. She doesn't know how long she's been holding her breath.

  Panting with adrenaline, she leaves the Jeep and runs over to his car, opens the driver's door, searches for the trunk latch and pops it. She inhales deeply, and walks around to the back of the car. Margaret, looking peaceful, asleep, is curled in the trunk.

  "Thank you, God," she whispers.

  Abby places her hands on her daughter's shoulders, Margaret's auburn hair spills over her hands. Rain begins to dot on Margaret's face and clothes. "Margaret, Margaret…" she whispers, then shouts, "Margaret!"

  Margaret stirs, flutters, lifts her wide, fearful eyes onto her mother's face. She inhales sharply and blinks. "Mom?"

  "Can you get up? Can you stand?" Abby asks as she pulls her daughter from the trunk.

  Her daughter's body feels heavy and surprisingly muscular as she lifts it. Margaret struggles to get her feet underneath her. Abby walks her in the mud, around to the front of the car, says, "Here, get in this, I'll drive us."

  Something ferociously hot tears through Abby's body at the hips. A sound like a whip crack slices through the air. Though she doesn't feel it, she is aware that she's been shot even before she sees the man clawing through the mud beneath the Jeep and into the collision of headlights. One hand full of mud, the other holding a smoking pistol. The man's face is muddy, his eyes incensed. "Get in," she says, hurrying her daughter into the car. "Quickly."

  Margaret, in her disorientation, begins screaming.

  "No, no," Abby says, whispering soothingly, ignoring the gunman scrabbling in the mud not a dozen feet away. "Just get in the car."