They hadn’t hit Evvie, or him, or even the water surrounding them. They’re shootin’ God, he thinks. The canoe slides over beside them; he could reach out and touch it. “Go on and swim to the bank. And do what we said. And do it without complaints,” says the Wolf.
Under the moon, they stand freezing on the riverbank and count to fifty. The men in the canoe are a few yards away, with guns pointed. “Dance!” one of them says. “This is the senior prom and they’re playin’ your song! ‘You Belong to Me’!”
The other man—the Wolf, it sounds like—howls with laughter.
A naked, trembling Evvie is in his arms, and they’re dancing, and she starts to cry.
“No. You can’t do this,” he tells her, furious. “Stop your sobbing or we’ll fucking die.”
“I–I–”
“Stop!”
She gulps down air. She stiffens. They dance like robots until they’re told they can stop and swim back to the other side.
The deep pleasure of returning to their clothes, to the embracing warmth of the dark car, to the motion of the road, to the trembling of his own body, is enough to make him weep, silently, and for the first time he thinks of Lauren, and Ramona, and wonders if they’ll all ever sit at the table again together. But he can’t remember their faces. Where their faces might be is a dull sound, a small orange light flashing like a siren. He grabs Evvie’s hand and squeezes. She pulls herself together. She’s stopped crying and is now sitting beside him with her eyes closed and her teeth chattering and her face lifted up to the ceiling of the car, as if she’s praying.
The car pulls up to an ATM machine on the edge of some small town where houses dot the hillside. “Now we get out and you two empty your accounts.”
“Gladly,” Ben says.
The night is silent except for small-town oblivion roiling in the hills like dark laughter. The guns pointed while first he, then Evvie, empty their accounts to a grand total of $780.
“I have some in the savings account that I’ll get you as soon as the bank opens. I have over ten thousand dollars, and it all belongs to you. I want you to have it. And I won’t say a word about any of this. And then I can ask a lot of other people for money. I know some really rich people.”
Dracula and the Wolf do a little dance to these words, then throw their heads back and laugh. Were they celebrating how rich they’d be or simply mocking him?
“Maybe we’ll be back in the morning. If you’re well-behaved children we might even take you out for ice cream,” says the raspy Dracula voice. “Give me my headache pills,” he orders the Wolf, and swallows them down without water, whatever they are.
The car pulls down a dirt road that cuts through some kind of dead harvest. Maybe it’s wheat. It lies down in the moonlight, half frozen, like long bones. It occurs to Ben that this might be the last landscape of his life. He withdraws his affection from what he sees now. He looks at it and tries to see it as ordinary.
But nothing is ordinary. Not the moon, black sky, trees, road, hand he’s holding—he’s grabbed Evvie’s again—and breath he takes. Not any breath. All of it extraordinary, now and forever shall be. He will never be bored again. He will go home and start all over. He will love his life, every spoon and doorway every face every window every breath, as never before.
Lauren. He lets his thoughts be subsumed by the name, lets the name repeat itself in his mind, Lauren, Lauren, Lauren, but still cannot clearly remember her face. He sees a pair of sandals she’d worn when it was warm. Red sandals that left stripes on her feet. She’d painted her toenails red to match. It had taken her hours to do so, she was so meticulous.
He focuses on those small feet, then lets his eyes, like two desperate hands, travel up her body, but finds Evvie’s body, and Evvie’s face, the face he knows best, shining in his mind the way it used to, when he was away without her, missing her with every cell in his body. His jaw is trembling and he can’t make it stop.
The car slows down to twenty miles an hour or less. On the dead ground Ben sees abandoned tires and a cracked full-length mirror that holds the black sky, and farther back, on a knoll, what appears to be a pair of shoes. You usually only see one shoe, but Ben sees a pair, he’s sure of it, and they’re so unlikely—white patent-leather men’s loafers, such as an old man in Florida might wear—that he feels chills shoot through his body. They had murdered the old man because they felt like it, because they could, because they were bored, maybe just to see him die, like in the Johnny Cash song. As he catches sight of two warehouses—large sheds, really—waiting for them in the middle of this godforsaken field, his eyes fill with tears. The sheds look alive, hungry even, like they’ve been patiently waiting here for a long, long time. They seem to be proud of themselves, proud of taking part in the historical reality of evil, and Ben understands that, up until now, evil had been such an abstraction to him that he’d sometimes argued that it didn’t exist; it wasn’t a force—it was just people gone wrong. Looking at the sheds, he understands such a position can be held only by those who’ve never confronted it.
“Warehouse X needs a paint job,” sings the Wolf. The car bounces over rough terrain, then slows down to a stop.
He holds back tears of pity that he and Evvie have together come to this, tears that he might never get to say good-bye to Lauren, that she would think he’d disappeared on her. He sees her making calls in her kitchen, her profile now coming into view. Lauren. She would try to contact his parents, and they’d know nothing. She would try, then, to contact Evvie, and she’d be missing too, and Lauren would assume they’d run off together. It would make sense to her—another abandonment. He couldn’t bear that thought.
“Do we get to make any calls before—” He stops himself.
“Before?” says the Wolf.
“Before shut the fuck up?” sings Dracula.
Apparently they settled on WAREHOUSE WHY. Those words are spray-painted on the door, which is heavy and metal and padlocked. The headlights shine upon it now. Chipped green paint makes a circle on the door, decorated with painted red dots, someone’s idea of a wreath. Very clever, Ben wants to say. Fucking clever maniacs! The edge of his fear is barely controlled rage, so much so that he gets close to making a dive for one of them. He’s a killer too right now, he just doesn’t have the gun. His eyes slide over to check on Evvie, but she seems to have evacuated her body. Her face is white marble. Her eyes are at half mast. His heart cries out her name, and then, strangely, both of their names together reverberate inside of him, Ben and Evvie. Ben and Evvie.
The men both get out of the car and Dracula opens Evvie’s door. “Both of you exit out this way.”
With guns they point them toward the door. The Wolf opens the padlock and steps inside. “It’s nice enough,” he says.
“Where’s the music?” says Dracula.
“I can go get the boom box myself,” the Wolf offers.
“Is that what you call a good idea? Are you stupid enough to forget the operation policy of sticking together?”
Dracula says they all have to stick together, and they march single file into Warehouse X. The dank air smells heavily of some kind of wretched chemical. They stand with Dracula in the doorway, the two of them side by side, in front of him, while the Wolf disappears into the pitch-black, whistling. Ben wants to ask what the smell is but controls himself. As long as they don’t have to breathe it for long, he doesn’t need to know.
The Wolf emerges from
the black with a boom box. Again Ben feels hope sear through his body. A simple smile explodes on his face. He has the urge to thank the Wolf man profusely. He wants to break down weeping and explain how much they both love music and how he would do anything in the world to go on living in this world, where it was possible to hear music, that they were both good people who would be glad to be of service of any kind and find as much money as they needed, as long as they would eventually be released to life.
“Please,” he finally says, childlike. “Please don’t kill us.” And then, a lie that comes out of nowhere. “My wife is three months pregnant. Don’t kill the baby.” For a moment this seems true. “It’s our first child. Please don’t kill us.”
Evvie
She’d been trying to pray, bargaining with God, God full of spikes, God with his dark laughter, God who had made her this freak, this loose-cannon desperate wretch of a person who had thought a little kidnapping might be good. God the Divine Madman who had given her too long a leash.
And who was she? Had that person she’d become always been there, waiting to take over? Or had some spirit entered her, something she couldn’t have controlled? Was a body just a receptacle for various selves who would never stop coming, never leave her alone? No wonder she saw her desperate prayers like shreds of wet paper hanging from a skeleton’s bones, and God with his dark laughter, God with his arrows aimed at the head, oh but God, oh but if you let Ben live, I will die a million times over, reincarnate me as a tortured animal, I will come back willingly to live in hell if you just let Ben live and let them do, let them do whatever they want with me.
She is almost happy when they tape her mouth shut and tie her arms behind her back. Several times she’d been on the verge of grabbing Rocky, of pleading with him, Rocky who’d seemed so—what had he seemed like then? A million years ago when they’d first sat in the car that day across from PPG and she’d been someone else. He’d seemed humane, in his crazy way, humane with imagination and something warm coming from him and she had liked his eyes! Windows to the soul! They’d been spinning in her mind like pinwheels at a fair she’d gone to when she was small. He’d made her weak in the knees that day downtown—the way he looked at her. She’d never understood that expression, “weak in the knees,” until then. Had she been falling in love with him? She’d dressed up for him that day. Had she been drugged? Under a spell? He’d lulled her, because she’d wanted lulling. And thank you, God, for how he is taping my mouth shut so tightly and thank you, Mr. Rocky. Mr. Dracula. She looks up at the mask. She had never loved Dracula. But she reconsiders. Now she thinks she will love Dracula and live with him here forever until she starves, if he just lets Ben go.
She sits cross-legged beside Ben in the dark. Her arms ache, wrenched back behind her. They’ve taped and tied Ben too. Terror is giving rise, in strange, watery moments, to a great fatigue that is almost a death wish, then suddenly blasted away by a longing so great she thinks it will break her into pieces.
The Wolf turns up the boom box. The Bee Gees? The Bee Gees? If she hadn’t been taped she’d say it out loud. She would scream it. Next he’d flick a switch and the lights would come on.
But it stays pitch-dark. Much darker than the night. And the darkness is supremely alive, vibrating, as if a murder of crows is circling in the air before their eyes, flapping their wings.
“We’re going to have some fun now.” Dracula’s cool hand reaches for the back of her neck. She whimpers.
“I’m not sure what game to play,” says Dracula, in the whining voice of a spoiled child. It’s true that he is quite the actor.
“We could play American Idol Meets Survivor. Or we could play Tell Me a Story, Asshole. Or we could get started with something much more fun.”
“Any ideas?” he calls over to the Wolf. “Any preferences?”
The Wolf just howls into the dark.
“Who wants to sing a song? A song so good, so pitch-perfect true, it could cause a man like me to throw their gun out the window. A song to change the world is what I’m searching for. A song that could make me break down and cry!”
Ben makes a noise behind his taped mouth. Then another, louder noise.
“Are you sitting there telling me you don’t have stage fright?” Dracula asks. “Wolfman Jack, this man wants to sing us a saving song of succulence. Turn off the Bee Gee brothers.”
Dracula comes over and bends down between Evvie and Ben. He has a hand on each of them, and presses down. Rips the tape off Ben’s mouth. “You’re a brave man. You must know, my friend, that if you get the song wrong, it’s all over. Those are the rules that inspire greatness. Get it right the first time. Perfect pitch. And choose the song carefully. You have one minute. Imagine that. And if you fail, imagine that I’m a man who can send your wife special delivery into the arms of her maker. You’re in the hands of a special delivery man.” He stands up straight and fires a shot at the ceiling.
“Singer, rise!”
Ben stands up.
“What will you sing?”
“Any requests?” Ben manages. This strikes Dracula’s funny bone for a moment. He bends in half. Then shoots back up. “Something great. Something you can sing as if your life and hers depend upon it.”
Evvie thinks she can feel a silent wind encircle them. What song? What song could he possibly sing?
He begins. His voice is hoarse: “What’s Goin’ On,” a choice that somehow seems inevitable.
He makes it to the word “Brother,” and then Dracula begs him to stop. “Please, don’t do that!”
Ben stops.
“If Marvin Gaye weren’t dead, he’d kill himself. Don’t you know another song?”
“I know a lot.”
“I bet you know a lot. I bet you even know an old-fashioned song from time gone by.”
“I do.”
“And you better sing it now,” Dracula says.
Ben begins without hesitation.
“The water is wide and I can’t cross over
And neither have I wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two”
Evvie had taught him this one. Her grandmother had sung it to her in earliest childhood.
“And the boat can row my love and I
Love is gentle, love is kind”
“Not hitting the mark, my friend. Not hitting it.”
Ben sang louder.
“The sweetest flower when first it blooms
But love grows old and waxes cold”
“Enough of that!”
Silence.
Dracula doesn’t deliver Evvie into the arms of her maker; he’s not keeping his word.
“Maybe I’d rather hear you tell a story,” Dracula says. “A story about your wife! This woman with stars in her eyes! Maybe one where Starshine was a kid. And she fucked up royally! Something amusing! We heard a story last month about a kid who fucked up royally. And it was a good story, with a monster in it. Tell us a story along those lines. So once upon a time, your wife here was an innocent child.”
He’d said chi-old.
“And this chi-old did such and such stupid shit, or maybe ran into the arms of the wrong person. A chi-old meets a monster and—”
Ben stands there.
“Begin. We’re just getting to know you here is all. Save yourself, partner.”
After a long silence, Ben begins. “She rode this red bike,” he says.
“Who?” Dracula says.
“Evvie. My wife. When she was a kid.”
He is not a natural storyteller. You had to fish things out of him; otherwise he’d turn a story into haiku. How was he going to pull this off? Evvie already knows what story he’s trying to tell. Her heart slams up against her chest. It was his favorite story, one she’d told him when they were first together, in a bar near his mother’s llama farm. She’d told him the story and he’d listened, then said, OK, marry me.
“She thought if she rode the bike fast enough she’d start flying, like Pegasus. The bike was her horse. She would ride the bike five blocks to visit a goat. A city goat who looked neglected. She took the goat presents. Then an old man came and yelled at her to get off the property, so she got back on the red bike and rode home. The bike had a name but I forget it right now. It’ll come to me.”
Ben’s voice was steady and utterly clear.
“An old man with a shotgun?”
Ben pauses. “Sure.”
“Go on.”
“Some kids need to visit goats,” Ben says, an odd scolding tone having seeped into his voice.
“I beggeth your pardon?” says Dracula.
“This is how God must have felt when creating the world,” says Ben, his voice strangely calm. “You say words in this pitch-black darkness and it’s like everything comes to life. Like the goat and Evvie on her bike are right here in front of my eyes.”
“Do you want to die, or tell us an amusing story without a goat in it?”
Ben’s voice is getting stronger. “The goat is dead. She loved riding on roads where the trees lined up and seemed to be cheering her on. She felt that trees were cheering her on. I think she still feels that. And maybe they are. Maybe the whole world is cheering us on.”
First You Try Everything Page 22