The Binding

by E. Z. Rinsky

  The yard is still empty.

  “Hurry,” she says. “They’re at their meal.”

  I limp over to one of the two officers. High stakes practice.

  His eyes go wide as he sees me approach, clad in mask.

  “Father,” he gasps. “Please.”

  I ignore him. Unfold the ice bag to reveal the two pink fingers. It’s only been about fifteen minutes since I severed them—they still look pretty vital. If they’ve withered too much, I suspect they won’t work. But surely Sophnot had to leave himself some margin of error.

  Oliver opened the collar with the neck facing me. Which means his right pinky goes in the hole to the left of the center.

  But which is which?

  Fuck.

  One looks slightly crooked. Which was his right hand. Right?

  I take the two pinkies between my index and thumbs and gently insert them on either side of the guard’s collar. It springs open easily and the collar drops at my feet.

  He gasps, big disbelieving breaths. The relief that rushes over his face is profound as he lets the weighted ball roll off his lap.

  I can hear the faint hiss of breath through Mindy’s nostrils. I spring open her collar and she pitches forward onto her knees.

  “Ohhh,” she cries, drawing in deep gulps of air. “Ohhh.”

  Courtney’s eyes regard my masked face with something between confusion and fear. Thinks I’m Oliver Vicks unlocking them.

  “Should just be a day or two,” I say, displaying the severed pinkies. “Make a simple swap and collect our check, right? Easy peasy.”

  I stick the fingers into his collar. It springs open harmlessly. The relief on my friend’s features makes me forget my stinging thigh for a moment. He rubs his hands over his neck and throat, like to confirm they’re still there.

  He looks at the severed fingers I’m holding, tries to ask something, but lets it go.

  I let Mindy and Courtney collect themselves while I unlock the second officer.

  Becky is gazing at all of us, as if she still doesn’t quite believe what’s happening.

  Courtney crawls over to Mindy and puts his arm over her shaking shoulders.

  I limp over to them. “Hey,” I say through the hole in the mask, “we have to leave right now.” I point across the yard. A few inmates are milling around outside the cafeteria. I lift the robe to show them my gash. “They’ll be back any minute. And I don’t think I can pass as Oliver for long.”

  Courtney stands up and helps Mindy to her feet. Her face is badly sunburned, and there’s a deep red stripe around her neck.

  “Water,” she says.

  “Just hang on a little longer,” I say. “Come on. Act like you’re my prisoners.”

  I leave the two officers groaning on the ground. Guide Courtney, Mindy and Becky down the stairs on the edge of the wooden platform. We’re a pathetic procession. Mindy is so weak she can hardly walk, Becky is still in a daze, and I’m limping badly. All three of them are barefoot.

  “Hurry,” I whisper.

  Within ten minutes they’ll turn the floodlights back on, and this place will be packed.

  We make it to the gate in the chain link fence without being spotted.

  “Parking lot,” I say. “Hopefully they left the keys in our Hummer like last time.”

  We follow the dirt path that winds around the admin building toward the parking lot. There are lights on at the front entrance, and at least a few officers there on duty, missing out on the meal. We pass the row of Dumpsters, and spot the Hummer pretty quickly; not many visitors at this hour.

  Courtney helps Mindy and Becky into the backseat.

  I crawl into the driver’s seat and am relieved to see the keys in the ignition. Courtney climbs in and closes the passenger door.

  “Can you drive?” he asks. “Aren’t you woozy?”

  I pull the wax mask down over my face.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Mindy coughs in the backseat.

  I turn the car on, take a deep breath, and pull out of the parking lot, following the path toward the front gate.

  “Nobody talk,” I say, as I roll up at the inside of the closed gate. An officer strides over from the tollbooth, deeply confused by this development. I roll down the window, and when he sees my hood and mask, his face freezes.

  “Father,” he wheezes, and looks away, as he’s terrified of even looking directly into my masked face.

  The other officers on the scene approach us, to see what’s going on.

  “Get back!” bellows a voice I recognize. Sergeant Don pushes his way past the other officers, storms over to the car and pushes the stunned officer aside. But when he sees the mask his own wrinkled features contort into something between fear and disbelief.

  “Father,” he says, and hangs his head in deference, puts his hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry. We’ll open the gate. We just weren’t expecting you. I thought there would be another . . .” Slowly he looks back up and removes his hand, as he realizes who else is in the car with me. He still doesn’t look at me, but his dark eyebrows arch in confusion as his gaze shifts from Courtney, to Becky, to Mindy. “Father,” he says slowly. “These were meant to be sacrifices. I don’t understand.”

  I take a deep breath, ignore the pulsing pain in my leg, and stick my hooded head halfway out the window.

  “Don, my son,” I growl, as low as I can manage. “I always planned to put you on the twenty-third floor. But if you keep me waiting one second longer, you’ll be sacrificed along with these sinners.”

  My heart stops as Sergeant Don’s face runs a gamut of emotions.

  “Of course.” He smiles and turns. “Open!” he yells.

  The first and second security gates spread apart. We’re ten meters from freedom.

  “Good Sabbath,” I say.

  “Good Sabbath, Father,” Don answers.

  I let my foot fall onto the gas and burn metal through those two gates. Don’t exhale until we’re half a mile from the prison. I pull over to the shoulder, rip off the mask and throw it out the window. I’m hyperventilating.

  “Oh god. Oh god,” I cry.

  “Change with me,” Courtney says. “I’ll drive. You’re losing a lot of blood.”

  I open the driver’s seat and tumble to the pavement. Courtney’s pale face appears over me, a full, poorly shaved moon.

  “Come on,” he says, helping me up. I put my hand around his shoulders as he guides me to the passenger side door. He sniffs.

  “Why do you smell like cooking oil?” he says.

  “I was just in hell,” I say, collapsing into the passenger seat. “You’ll be surprised to know, hell looks a lot like a family restaurant.”

  I close my eyes as Courtney starts to drive. Mindy makes a horrible sound behind me.

  “We’re going straight to get you water,” Courtney says, and his voice sounds far away. “And I can get you hooked up to an IV.”

  If Mindy responds, I don’t catch it. My head is swimming.

  I roll down the window and dry wind from the open window blasts my cheeks. The dark hills in the distance rise and fall like the earth beneath them is breathing. I hear a high voice, whether it’s coming from Becky in the backseat, or the wind in my ears I can’t tell.

  “My father, my king.”

  I open my eyes and am looking at something I don’t quite understand. Swirls of white and brown. For a few seconds I think I’m staring at some kind of amazing coffee cake. And then as my vision focuses I realize it’s a water-stained ceiling. I turn my head to the left and suddenly everything hurts: jaws, neck, ribs, back, thigh. Feels like I got hit by a truck last night.

  Courtney is sleeping in a bed beside me, snoring gently. Light streams in at the edges of the heavy curtains.

  “Hey,” I say, my voice hoarse. “Hey!”

  Courtney sighs and rolls over. Blinks at me.

  “Morning,” he says. “How’s your thigh?”

  With great effort, I turn my gaz
e down to my lower body. I’m wearing a pair of bright white underwear that I don’t recognize. My right thigh is swathed in a heavy bandage. I reach down, touch the cut and recoil.

  “Hurts,” I say.

  “Yeah. It’s pretty deep. But I cleaned it out really well last night. It’s probably gonna hurt to put weight on it for at least two weeks.”

  “Where are we?” I say. “I don’t remember coming here.”

  “Some motel on the way back to Denver,” he says.

  “Why didn’t we go to the hospital?”

  “They would have asked a lot of questions,” he says. “And we don’t know what the fallout of this is going to be. Besides, they couldn’t have done more than I did, short of give you a blood transfusion. But you didn’t need that. Mindy is next door on an IV. You can buy the fluid over the counter, you know.”

  “Becky?” My voice sounds weird in my ears.

  “I left her in bed,” Courtney says. “But this morning we’ll either need to get her to a clinic, or find her some heroin.”

  I grimace. There aren’t many worse things to watch than someone withdrawing from heroin.

  I try to sit up in bed, and Courtney throws off his covers and rushes over to me. He’s wearing a fresh white undershirt, straight out of the package.

  “Whoa, whoa,” he says. “Just rest today. You probably shouldn’t walk.”

  I settle back into the lumpy mattress.

  “Did you walk into a Walgreens last night wearing a sackcloth?” I ask.

  “Walmart Supercenter,” he says. “And you’d be surprised how well the cashier took it.”

  “Can you get me some coffee? And something to eat?”

  He yawns and stretches to the ceiling, pulling his T-shirt up to display his convex midriff.

  “Okay. I’ll check on the girls and be back with coffee in a sec.”

  He pulls on a new pair of jeans, and sneakers and leaves me alone in the room. I inspect my torso. There’s a nasty bruise that extends from my right hip all the way up my side. I poke it and groan in agony.

  I rub my eyes and think about what happened last night. The face in the pool, the stairs, the diner . . .

  Shooting him five times, point blank, and missing.

  I wonder if Courtney tried calling the authorities last night, telling them about what’s going on in SCF, maybe omitting some of the wilder details. Doubt anyone’s going to believe that an inmate has been running that place for over a decade.

  Still not sure I can believe it.

  Courtney returns, way too quickly to have gone across the street.

  “Where’s my coffee?” I ask.

  The door slams shut. It’s not Courtney, it’s Mindy. She looks awful. Face raw and peeling from the sunburn. I see the dried blood on her wrist from where she must have pulled out her IV herself.

  “Mindy?” I try to sit up and regret it. “What are you doing. You should rest.”

  She ignores me, just starts tearing apart the room like a maniac. Flings the dresser drawers open, storms into the bathroom, then back out, and stares at me.

  “Where are they?” she asks, voice so hoarse she sounds like the voice-changer Oliver used on the phone.

  “Whoa, whoa. Sit down,” I say, nodding to Courtney’s bed. “You probably shouldn’t be walking around. Courtney’s bringing us some stuff from across the street.”

  She drops to her knees and gropes under Courtney’s bed. I hear her grunt, and she pulls out the silk bag containing the books, and stands up. When she snatches the keys to the Hummer off the nightstand I grab her wrist.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I ask.

  “Let go of me,” she rasps.

  “Give me the bag. I can’t let you—”

  With her other hand she picks up the bedside lamp, and brings the heavy base down on my left shoulder. I hear an awful crack, and I go light-headed for a second.

  “Jesus!” I scream. My entire arm goes numb and I lose my grip on her. She drops the lamp and heads for the door. I try to roll out of bed, and the movement on my shoulder takes my breath away. It’s broken.

  “Mindy!” I yell. “Don’t be stupid! You think we can’t find you?”

  She rushes out, slamming the door shut behind her.

  Epilogue

  “You sure you don’t want to call first?” Courtney asks, pulling our latest rental car into a metered parking place across from the boarding school.

  “I want to surprise her,” I say. I check my fresh shave in the rearview mirror. Rub a comb through my hair for the fiftieth time this morning. Rub some lint off of my shoulder sling.

  “You look great,” Courtney says. “Don’t be nervous.”

  I step out of the car into the brisk air.

  “I look like a public service announcement for unsafe working conditions,” I say, gesturing with my free hand to my cast, and the cut over my right eye which, seven weeks later, still hasn’t healed thanks to a secondary infection.

  He locks the car and pulls his new flannel shirt tighter over his skeletal frame. We got enough cash from pawning Sampson’s shit to justify a shopping trip at REI.

  “What’s the plan?” he asks.

  “If anybody asks, we’ll say we were invited to give a guest lecture on making the wrong life decisions.”

  We cross the street and walk straight into campus. Don’t even have to hop a fence.

  It’s no Saddleback Correctional Facility.

  Yet, I’m at least as nervous as if we were breaking back into the prison. Haven’t seen Sadie face-to-face for five years, and since then we’ve probably only had three phone conversations that lasted longer than fifteen minutes.

  Just chill. You’re her dad. She loves you.

  I think about the first ten years of her life, the two of us in that slummy apartment on the Lower East Side, me dropping her off at elementary school every morning then scrounging for freelance PI work. Can’t believe that ended up being the golden age.

  Courtney and I walk shoulder to shoulder across an immaculately groomed lawn, me trying to fight my limp, Court anxiously scanning his surroundings like this pristine campus is a war zone. We get a few looks from the uniformed kids rushing between classes, but nobody stops us.

  It’s eleven thirty, so we find a picnic table with a view of the cafeteria and wait for lunch.

  “Beautiful facility,” Courtney says, surveying the colonial red brick buildings, carefully trimmed hedges, expansive green lawns.

  “Nice to know my money was footing the landscaping bill,” I sigh. “Thanks for coming here with me.”

  “Well, you couldn’t really drive across the country wearing that.” He motions to my sling. “And it’s not as if I had a lot of other pressing opportunities.”

  He taps his fingertips against the wooden tabletop and tries to smile. He’s tried to hide it, stay upbeat, but he’s nowhere close to forgetting about Mindy.

  I pull the comb back out of my sling and brush the hair out of my eyes.

  “You’re fine,” he reassures me.

  At noon there’s a campus-wide bell, and students pour from the buildings, laugh and shriek their way toward the cafeteria.

  Courtney removes a pair of binoculars from his acrylic bag. I rip them away from him before he can use them.

  “Are you nuts?” I say. “Are you trying to get on the sex offender registry?”

  I look from face to face, a little part of me scared I won’t even recognize her. They’re all wearing the same navy blue, and from thirty feet away I’m not even sure about some of their genders.

  But when I spot her, there’s no doubt in my mind. I feel like I’m having the air squeezed out of me.

  “That’s her,” I say, mostly to myself, and leap from the bench, bound across the lawn to her, ignoring the pain in my thigh. I push through the pubescent swamp, eyes focused only on the prize.

  “Sadie!” I say. “Hey!”

  I catch up to her right outside the cafeteria. She’s with four fr
iends, two girls and two guys. For a moment I can’t talk, just gawk at her stupidly. When I left her she was a wide-eyed kid. Now she’s halfway toward womanhood. She’s only a head shorter than me, and she holds herself with a sort of confidence she definitely didn’t learn from me. Her hair is darker than I remember, and short. A little curly. Her brown eyes though are exactly the same.

  “Sadie,” I say. “Hey. It’s me.”

  Her friends look between me and her with confusion. She’s quiet for a second, then—in that voice I know so well from her answering machine—“What happened?” she says, looking at my cast and the wound over my eye.

  “Got into a little tussle,” I grin. “But you should see the other guy. Did you get my messages?”

  She nods quickly.

  “Wait here, I’ll be right back okay?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Sure.”

  I stand outside the cafeteria while laughing kids swarm past me, a few minutes pass, and then they’re all swallowed by the dining hall. I wait outside, in the suddenly silent courtyard. Courtney is sitting at the same bench, observing. I give him a thumbs-up, as I anxiously shift my weight from foot to foot.

  My heart leaps as I see someone leaving the cafeteria, and then drops when I see it’s not Sadie, it’s one of the boys she was with.

  “Hi,” he says, approaching me, clearly a little nervous. “Um, sorry, Sadie said she can’t talk now.”

  I swallow.

  “Should I come back later? After classes?”

  “Um . . .” He clasps his hands behind his back. “No, I don’t think so. Maybe just call her later or something.”

  I’m a little dizzy. I stare at him levelly.

  “What did she say exactly, champ?”

  “She . . .” He hesitates. “She said to tell you not to come visit her here. That’s all.”

  I feel my face tightening. I force myself to nod.

  “Are you her boyfriend?” I ask.

  He shrugs.

  “Yeah. Guess so.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Russell.”