Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  Kaylyn gathered her eyebrows in delight. She put her lips next to her ear. “Don’t worry, honey, I got it on tape. I’ll make sure your initiation stays in the right hands.” She winked and walked away.

  A week after the incident, 56 drove her out to a secluded spot of woods off Stillwater Road. As he eased closer to her and his breath covered her neck and face, she began to cry. He pulled back and asked her what was wrong, not concerned so much as annoyed.

  “I just don’t want to black out like that again. And not remember what happened. I didn’t want my first time to be like that.”

  She was about to tell him what Kaylyn had said to her when it got scary. Whereas he’d seemed embarrassed the morning after Ostrowski’s, a fury descended over him now, so quickly that she didn’t have time to so much as stutter an objection. “You wanted it,” he hissed, then began snatching her clothes off. His hands were enormous construction cranes picking apart her outfit. She made the most half-hearted effort to slow him down, but he took her wrists aside with one crushing vise of a hand and pushed her face against the window until she stopped fighting him. Years later, after she’d been with a few other men, she’d understand how truly large 56 was. So soon after the previous weekend—and her first time conscious—it felt like she was being split in half. Each time she cried out, it seemed to spur more vicious actions from him, and when she flailed an arm behind her and tried to tell him to stop, he grabbed a fistful of her hair and smacked her face into the door. The rest of it passed with her drifting into a dream, one that felt more real than what was actually happening.

  When he was done, he slumped back to the driver’s side and pointed to himself, thick, pink, and uncircumcised. This was the first time she’d ever seen a man in this frankly sexual way. He was covered in her blood.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, trying to wipe it off with the rim of his underwear.

  She needed to throw up, and it took everything in her to swallow the urge.

  As he finished buckling he glanced at her, and now he looked as sick as she felt. “I’m sorry.” His voice retreated, and he had to look away. “I’m just crazy about you.” He started the truck. “It’ll get easier.”

  She wanted to be furious at him—or at least she considered that as a reaction. Yet he rubbed the back of her neck on the way back to town. One hand on the steering wheel, the other massaged her shoulder, tickled the down at the nape, and climbed to scratch at her scalp. The clouds had a wonderful blue glow in the early evening sky. The way the sun colored their borders. This wasn’t a cruelty in him, she decided. He was just hotheaded, full of power and desire. He didn’t understand how harsh he could be. She just had to make him understand he had to be more gentle.

  Even if he was the love of her life, this incident terrified her. She never wanted to feel that kind of helplessness again. He was perfectly reasonable, she learned, if she just went to Ostrowski’s and went along with everything. He liked watching his friends with her, and her compliance with the team made him gentler, tamed him. Mostly they were like any high school couple: they parked at the Brew or out in the woods off Stillwater or waited for his mom to be out of the house. But once or twice a month, they’d go to Ostrowski’s, that dim basement, and he and his friends would take turns with her. She forgot about Kaylyn’s taunt, bordering on a veiled threat—she did what she did because that’s what he wanted. They told her what to do, and she did it. They had her do things she never would have imagined herself capable of. They put on movies and re-created the scenes with her. They moved her around like a doll. She didn’t pretend to understand how he could like watching her this way. Moretti’s rat face perched over her, his hand pinching her breast. Ostrowski’s fat heaving against her. Levy biting his lip in a snarl. Matt Moore pulling her hair like he hadn’t known her since she was six when they played the Bible character game in Youth Group. How could 56 like this? Then they’d whisper gross, cruel things to her at school. Moretti showed her a banana from his lunch, and with Hailey less than five feet away: “Think I could get this all the way in you?”

  The one time she managed the courage to tell 56 she didn’t want to do this anymore, didn’t want to be a toy for the team, he got frighteningly angry with her—what she’d seen that time in his truck. “You think that’s about them? Don’t be a fucking retard, Tina. That’s for me. You think when I get to the NFL there ain’t gonna be fifty fucking girls hotter than you lined up to do whatever turns me on? I want that girl to be you but don’t think that it’s gotta be.” These words were barked with such fury, she’d have agreed to anything to calm him. “Those guys are like my brothers,” he went on. “We share everything.” But this refrain wasn’t quite true. A few times other guys from the team came over, and 56 instructed her to suck them off. A freshman named Chase Gobbert had been invited because he’d once recovered a key fumble. She heard Ostrowski say as much to him (“We got a reward for you, rookie”). Gobbert had grabbed her head in such a way that she’d gagged. When she caught her breath they were all laughing, and she’d laughed along. She’d learned to construct all this as normality. Years would pass before she understood it was not. She was in love. And love made you do things you’d never expect, things so far beyond yourself or who you thought you were that you don’t even recognize the person who does them. Love was what God gave you to make you both unbearably strong and intolerably weak. Love was the ghost of yourself, a mirror image you saw in a crowd—different life, different ideals, different map of the world—but somehow still you.

  * * *

  She opened the trunk. In the bag was a roll of duct tape. She went around the side of the car, listening to the crickets, and opened the passenger door. Fifty-six sat with his head slumped forward, chin resting on his chest. Carefully, she took his body in her hands and eased him forward until his forehead rested on the dash. A bit of crystal drool escaped his lips and oozed to the floor. She had to work quickly. She’d given him a much lower dose than Cole because she wanted him to come to. She slipped the Buckeyes hat off and dropped it to the center console. Taking his right wrist, she wound the tape around twice, then passed it along his gut and wound it around his other wrist. Then around his back. The tape screeched horribly each time she played out more of it. Fifty-six made a soft sound in the back of his throat, and her heart beat faster. If he woke up now—the tape just looked so flimsy, so ineffectual compared to his size. She wound it around his torso and chest again and again, climbing up his arms until she’d taped all the way to his shoulders.

  He stirred and the duct tape crinkled. She tore off the tape, rolled out more, and began winding it around his ankles. She coated his boots with it and then coiled it around his shins all the way to his knees. Satisfied, she stepped back. He looked like a gray mummy.

  With 56 secured to the point of immobility, she tore free a strip the length of a pencil, tilted his head back and placed it gently across his lips. She patted it firmly into place.

  * * *

  Roughly a year before this night, Cole had taken her out to one of the access roads near the cornfields where the first wave of wind turbines had gone up. This was when they still seemed positively alien, swooshing in the dark, those distant lights at the towers’ tops blinking simultaneously. They’d sat on the hood of his car and watched them wink.

  “These things are crazy. Just really nuts,” she’d said. She could tell he was nervous, trying to cut through his own anxiety and instead sitting without saying anything.

  Maybe she knew what he was about to do. She couldn’t remember except that eventually she’d asked, “What’s on your mind?”

  He launched into it then. A speech he must have rehearsed for weeks, maybe months. “I know you can do better than me probably, Tina. I know you got guys coming at you from all sides, but sometimes I think you let them use you. You know, take what they want from you and don’t really respect you or nothing.”

  “Maybe that’s my choice,” she snapped. More harshly than she’d i
ntended. You could recognize something was true, see it in a man like Travis of the electronics department, and still do nothing about it.

  “No, I know. Alls I’m saying is that I’m not that guy. I’ll never be the most impressive guy you could be with. I got a job I’m really good at, though, and I think you’re amazing. It’s not just that I want to take care of you, but—I don’t know—I think you can take care of me too. Sometimes I’m just like—it’s a feeling like it’s the last day of school before Christmas but you gotta get done with a math test first. That feeling. Like you’re going to burst and you can’t believe you have to sit there and do it. Only it’s like that all the time with me. The only time it’s not is when I’m with you.”

  Then he was holding a ring in front of her. It was thin with a small diamond at the top. “This was my mom’s before she died.” He didn’t look at her but instead considered the ring pinched between his fingers. The turbines caught the cool wind and the blades whipped on, backlit by the stars.

  He sat watching her.

  Before she discovered she’d say yes, she first thought of 56, and a plan—a daydream, really—that had grown to occupy so many of her idle moments. She thought of what she’d have to do if she ever wanted to close that chapter of her life, which would forever threaten everything Cole promised, which kept her sad and hurt and fearful, which kept her going back to the Travises, which kept her perpetually haunted by a life she never got to have and that, the deepest part of her knew, was nothing more than a drowning fantasy in the first place.

  * * *

  Fifty-six moaned sleepily and his eyes fluttered. He had to breathe through his nose and the change led him to stir. Now came the hard part. From the trunk she retrieved the Terrain Deer Drag Sled ($39.97 at Walmart) and placed it on the ground by the door. She lifted his legs out of the car, which were heavy enough. She had to throw her whole back into grabbing his torso, and even then he felt impossibly dense. A hunk of granite she was trying to heave bodily. Straining, she managed to more or less topple him out of the car and onto the sled. His shoulder landed first, but his head thumped against the plastic and this briefly roused him. His eyes fluttered open and she heard the sticky crinkle of the tape as he explored its confinement. Facing away, she wrapped both arms around his legs, used her hip as added leverage, and heaved the rest of him onto the sled. She took the rope around her chest and began dragging him across the field. Once she’d pulled him away from the car, she had to stop and rest. She looked around. Other than the crickets, the meadow was empty. She went back to the trunk, grabbed a plastic Walmart bag and another item: ammonia inhalants.

  She’d found out about them when she googled smelling salts on her parents’ computer. They were for “arousing consciousness.”

  She tucked the bag into the back pocket of her jeans and walked back to 56. He lay on the sled, struggling against the tape and the G, his eyes twitching. She stripped one of the salts from the package, knelt down, and held it to his nose. He muttered his head away but didn’t come to.

  It took her three more salts before his nostrils flared, and he was able to overcome the drug. His head whipped back, his eyes popped open, and he surged against his bonds.

  “Shhh,” she said, putting a hand on his face. She caressed the stubble on his cheek. “Hold on, babe. Hold on.”

  He shouted into the tape, muffled barks at her, and she remembered the power of his voice when he called for a last-second shift in the defense. “Just hold on a minute, babe. I just need to . . . I just need to talk to you for a second.”

  He kept screaming through his gag, eyebrows writhing in fury. He bucked against the tape. She shushed him again and stroked his chest.

  “Just listen for a second.” Finally, he ceased, but he kept his head off the ground, glaring at her. Breath pulsed furiously from his nostrils. “Just listen.”

  She kept stroking his chest and the gut he’d grown since high school.

  “I want you to know . . .” She stopped and thought about how to restart. All that time in the car. All that planning and she still had no idea how to describe what she felt. “This was the only way to see you. To get you to listen to me. I knew if I just called you or showed up at your door, you’d think I was insane and still in love with you and . . . Okay, I mean I am still in love with you. You know? But I knew I’d never get you to listen unless I did something drastic, okay? Don’t be scared.” Her fingers crept under the rim of his jeans where she hadn’t constricted him with the tape. She felt the patch of his pubic hair. Felt him stir. The fury in his face twitched in the oddest way. This wasn’t at all what she’d thought she’d say. Even after all this time, all the perspective she thought she’d gained, a ghost remained inside of her. “It was just you never let me talk to you after you ended it. You never really explained, and I never believed your reason. But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I want you to know . . .” She undid his belt buckle, undid the button on his jeans, unzipped the fly. “I loved you, Todd. I loved you so, so much.” Despite his situation, he helped her lower his pants by tilting his hips off the ground. His eyes went from pure fury to that pure longing. She’d seen it so many times before. In the cab of his truck. In Ostrowski’s basement while his best friends had her two at a time. He was hard instantly. With experience in the years since high school, she knew how enormous, how aberrant he was. She spit into her hand and began working it. The way he’d taught her. “If you had just explained to me what happened, maybe I could have done something to fix it. And then maybe everything would have been different, you know? Maybe you would’ve had me to care about you, so you wouldn’t have gotten into all that stuff you did at OSU and Mount Union. You would’ve stayed away from drinking and the pills and whatever else. You would’ve played like you should have played and you would’ve gotten drafted.” Tears came to her eyes, but she’d expected that. “And we could have had everything. Our kids would’ve grown up without worrying about anything. I could have had kids in the first place. You know I can’t? I can’t get pregnant anymore. My uterus is damaged. But I don’t think it would’ve been, you know? If you’d just stayed with me. Everything would’ve worked out differently.” His eyes closed and his head tilted back on the ground. He heaved breaths through his nose. She worked her hand up and down faster. She lowered her face and met him with her mouth for a moment or two, just to keep it wet. “I’m getting married now, though. His name is Cole.”

  Fifty-six did not appear to hear this. She put him back in her mouth, savored him. A moment later, he came, an impossible amount of that salty male fluid erupting over her tongue and spilling onto her hand, arching into the air as she pulled her head away. His spine curved toward the stars, and he made a pleasured sound beneath the tape. That sensation of trying to gulp, choke, and spit all at once reminded her of her first time doing this while the others looked on, hip-hop pulsing in the background. Slowly 56 came to rest on the sled. She wiped her hand on his jeans, crawled on top of him so that she straddled him. His chest was so broad her knees barely touched the ground on either side. She peeled the tape back from his mouth.

  “You,” he said, breathing heavily. “You are the craziest fucking bitch I’ve ever met in my life.” He rolled his eyes. “Christ . . .”

  She stared at him, tears beginning to cloud her eyes. Twelve years waiting for this moment. “You shouldn’t have done that to me. You shouldn’t have left me like that.”

  She slapped the tape back on his mouth and pulled the Walmart bag from her back pocket. She slipped it over his head just as his eyes went wide. She wrapped the bag tight around his face, knotting a ball of plastic at the base of his chin to cut off any air. She grabbed his nose with the other hand and pinched.

  He thrashed, and all his strength, all his power, was immediate and visceral beneath her. He bucked and twisted, screamed into the tape, the sound baking in his throat. His head whipped back and forth and she lost her grip on his nose, tried to recapture it, but he fought her hand
, ducking and dodging his head. She pulled the bag down harder and could see the place where his nostrils sucked the plastic against those two small dark holes then released it. Sucked it back, released it. He heaved, and she almost fell off. He tried to scissor his arms and legs while the tape screeched and cracked. She grabbed his head with both hands to try to keep the bag in place, and just when she thought he would give up, he jerked his entire body to the left and sent her sprawling into the grass. The bag opened around his neck, and he could get air again. His breath heaving. She’d banged her left wrist against the ground when she fell off him and could feel the sprain creep up into her arm and fingers. She couldn’t believe it: He had managed to work a good deal of the tape up his arms. He’d stretched it away from his body, so his forearms now had room to work, the duct tape having rolled into sticky threads. Even more unbelievably, he’d managed to get a foot out of his boot, and now the foot was caught in the bottom of his jeans but close to being free. Because his jeans and underwear were down around his thighs, he didn’t have far to go before he’d be able to pull it out and stand. All that strength and something else—some kind of fury deep inside him, a fury he’d used to knock that Marysville quarterback’s brain against the inside of his skull, a fury he’d used to pin her face to the window of his truck only a few miles from here—made her understand how quickly he could get free.

  With his grunts and the squeak of protesting tape behind her, she sprinted to the car. In the trunk, she slapped aside blue plastic bags, scrambling, but there was nothing useful. Her panic surged when she heard his voice behind her.

  “Help! Hellllllp!”

  He had managed to work the tape off with his tongue. She thought of the shovel in the woods but it was so far, and she’d have to leave him alone for so long.

  Then she remembered the tire iron.

  She pulled it from the compartment beneath the floor of the trunk. A perfect cross of sturdy metal. She jogged back to 56, who’d rolled onto his back and nearly had his right leg free. He bucked and thrashed his legs to pull it from the last stretch of pant leg.