The Woman

by Jack Ketchum

  “Says the man with nine fingers,” she says.

  Cleek can’t help it, he bursts into laughter. The damn thing still throbs like a sonovabitch and he’s been popping half-Vicodins like they’re antacids all day but Belle has actually made a joke and it’s actually funny! The tension in the room bursts and drains away like all that dirty water on the floor. Belle smiles too. A real one this time.

  He reaches into the back of his belt and pulls out the .45 and puts it to the woman’s head.

  “The doctor is in,” he says.

  ~ * ~

  “Dry as a bone, now. We don’t want her coming down with something,” Chris says.

  The woman’s shivering and Belle can hear those nasty teeth chattering but less so as she goes about her business, starting with her hair which is still matted, which will take a lot more washing and a hell of a stiff brush before it will be anywhere near decent but she‘s struck that it‘s such thick, healthy hair and wonders how that can be given the life she’s led. Or that Belle supposes she’s led.

  She moves down to her face and neck, drying these quickly because gun or no gun and even with the towel between them she doesn’t like the proximity to that goddamn mouth of hers. She dries each arm and as she does realizes that her husband’s done his job quite well, if brutally. She’s pretty clean. Not much grime coming off on the towel at all. But then comes the hard part.

  Her torso. Her breasts and belly. Her privates.

  She doesn’t want to touch these. But Chris is expecting her to so she does and as she does, as she runs the towel over her breasts, a curious thing happens. There’s a tingling where there shouldn’t be. That’s not possible, she thinks. That’s ridiculous. So she runs the towel roughly over her belly and even more roughly over her ass and the fur between her legs — she thinks of it as fur, not pubic hair. But there it is again. That tingling.

  She denies the feeling. She curses the feeling and curses this woman who by all rights shouldn’t even be here, who should be out digging up roots and berries or lord knows what and truth be told, curses her husband too. She sweeps the towel down over both legs as quickly as possible.

  “There,” she says.

  And stands away.

  ~ * ~

  The female touching her reminds her of Second Stolen touching her. The wish to touch and yet not to touch, both at the same time, which she has read quite clearly. The Woman taught Second Stolen not to wish to touch her the hard way. With a thick branch of birch which she whipped across the girl’s thighs until she lay huddled whimpering on the floor of the cave.

  Second Stolen is gone now. They’re all gone.

  The Woman is alone with prey and monsters.

  ~ * ~

  Cleek has applied Bacitracin and clean dressings to both the wounds at her side, which are healing remarkably well, and her left ankle. Now he moves to her right ankle and slips the cuff up slightly so that he can get at the swollen red chafing there and swabs the antiseptic over it and wraps it tight.

  He stands and sees that she’s holding her hands out to him, palms up, so that he can get at her wrists. Almost a gesture of supplication he thinks. And perhaps it is. Her wrists are much worse. Particularly the right one — the one she worked free. The one she tried to throttle him with. It’s not only bleeding, it’s leaking thin yellow pus.

  He attends to the left one first. Cleans away the blood, swabs it, bandages it. Then he turns to Belle.

  “Honey? Throw some alcohol onto one of those sterile pads, would you?”

  The woman’s had no problem with any of this so far. If anything she’s seemed grateful. But that could be pure exhaustion. She’s clearly exhausted. This next bit could go down a little bit harder. He should probably warn her. He takes the pad from Belle and holds it up for the woman to see.

  “This is gonna hurt,” he says and makes a face, pulls his lips back, a grimace of pain.

  She looks at him questioningly. She doesn’t get it.

  “Owwwww!” he says and hisses and makes that face again.

  She nods.

  He applies the pad to the worst of the damage. Her fingers stiffen but she holds the wrist steady and doesn’t make a sound. Good girl, he thinks.

  “Soak me another, hon,” he says. “Make that two.”

  When he’s finished the room smells of alcohol. He lights a smoke and stands back to admire his work. Looks good — clean and fresh and good.

  “Let’s see that dress.”

  Belle holds up her project.

  “It buttons up along the sides,” she says. “So you don’t have to untie her or anything.”

  “That’s good. Try her on.”

  Belle’s hesitant as ever around the woman but she walks over and lifts the dress. The woman shifts to one side as though trying to escape it. Like it’s some living thing. Belle flinches.

  “Go on. She’s not going to do anything. All this is new to her, that’s all.”

  He’s not sure Belle believes him but she lifts the dress and pulls it down over the woman’s head and drapes it across her body. He can see her hands are shaking as she fumbles with the buttons along one side and then the other. The woman’s calm though. Just watching her.

  “There,” she says and steps away.

  It’s a very conservative baby blue dress, very Old World he thinks. Very rigid cuts. It looks incongruous as hell on her and that makes him smile.

  “She looks like one of those polygamist-types, doesn’t she?”

  “Mennonite. The polygamists are Mormons.”

  “Right.”

  “You wanted it sturdy. That was the point.”

  “You did good, Belle. Very nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  He notices a funny thing. The woman was fine with being stark naked. Didn’t seem to think a single thing about it. Now she looks sort of…well, he guesses the word is shamefaced. As though this little bit of domestication has left her absolutely humiliated. Again he has to smile.

  “She cleans up pretty nice, doesn’t she?”

  “Should we feed her?”

  “Yeah. We probably should. What’ve we got in the way of leftovers?”

  “Stew. There’s leftover stew.”

  “Fine.”

  When Belle’s gone to heat the stew he goes to the sink and fills an old tin cup with water. The water’s rusty but that’s what you get down here. Better than nothing. He brings it over.

  The woman looks down into the cup and immediately her mouth starts moving. She’s thirsty as hell. He puts it to her lips and she sucks it down.

  “You want more?”

  This much she seems to understand. She nods vigorously.

  He fills the cup again and she drinks. On an impulse he lifts his other hand into her long hair and is surprised as hell when she actually leans into it. Like she’s savoring the contact.

  Damn! This woman keeps surprising him.

  ~ * ~

  Belle watches her husband feed the woman with the soup spoon. She’s obviously starving, swallowing the stew without chewing, spilling some of it down over her chin. Her husband scoops it off her and feeds it back to her. Like she’s a baby.

  Belle has never had this kind of treatment from Christopher Cleek. Not even when she was running a temperature of one hundred four degrees down with the flu last spring. It rankles.

  It rankles even more when he reaches up to stroke her hair.

  She finishes the bowl. He wipes her chin with a sterile pad.

  She’s hiccupping.

  No, wait. She’s crying.

  The bitch is actually crying. Tears rolling down her cheeks.

  “Go raibh maith agat,” she says.

  “Thank you,” Chris prompts her.

  She doesn’t understand. Belle thinks the whole thing’s ridiculous. First dressing her up. Now trying to teach her to speak. Trying to teach her anything.

  The woman’s nothing but a savage.

  “Thank you,” he prompts again.


  She still doesn’t understand. Correction. An ignorant savage.

  “Thaaank you,” Chris drawls. “Thaaaank you.”

  ”T-aank ooo,” she says. As if to belie me.

  It doesn’t mean anything. A parrot could do as much. A mynah bird. She remembers seeing one on The Tonight Show who could imitate a duck or a monkey or even a cat.

  Chris turns to her and smiles.

  “See? She’s learning,” he says.

  So is Belle. Learning more about her husband every minute of every day.

  She’s had time now to go into his study and have a look at his books. The picture isn’t good. They owe money on nearly everything. The second mortgage, the Escalade, the office. The interest on their credit cards is ridiculous. And now he’s buying the Bluejacket properties. With what? Peg will be going off to college soon. Then Brian. They’ll both want cars. He brings in good money from his practice and his investments are paying out good dividends but she wonders how he intends to juggle all this.

  How he sleeps nights as well as he does.

  And she wonders about this obsession of his.

  This thing. This woman.

  TWENTY

  Genevieve sat at the end of Vance & Eddie’s bar farthest from the door nursing her second Dewars rocks of the evening and listening to Jerry Lee Lewis croon I ONLY WANT A BUDDY NOT A SWEETHEART and rattle that ol’ piana against a Dixieland band while the on the TV Giada De Laurentiis constructed some sort of pasta dish with a cream of sweet potato sauce and broiled shrimp. Which looked quite tasty.

  The bar was pretty dead tonight. A handful of local businessmen up front and only she and Ginger among the regulars. She didn’t really get along with Ginger — a stringy ash blonde whose sole passions seemed to be clothes-and-shoe-shopping and local businessmen — the second of which passions she was indulging at the moment. Andrew, the bartender, she did get along with and glad of the company when he walked over.

  “Care for something to soak that up, Genevieve? Mussels are fine tonight.”

  “I’ll just take some fries and mayo, thanks.”

  “One trip to Europe and you’re eatin’ like a frog?”

  “Ribbet.”

  He called in the order.

  “Your little charges giving you heartaches again? You’re frowning, my dear. Bad form in a bar.”

  She hadn’t been aware of it.

  “They’re not so bad.”

  “Boys still checking out that cute butt of yours?”

  “I took a shot at dressing more or less like a nun. But nothing seems to work.”

  “You should be glad it doesn’t. Keeps them interested.”

  “Right. But interested in what?”

  “They have my complete and utter sympathy. I guarantee I wouldn’t be able to tell a triangle from a square if I was a kid and you were bending over your daily lesson plan.”

  “Sweet, Andrew. You think if I told them which way I swing it would dampen things down a bit?”

  “Honey, that’d only make it worse. What’s with the paper?”

  She hadn’t been aware of fingering the note in front of her either.

  “A phone number. Parents of one of my students. I’m pretty positive this girl is pregnant.”

  “Ouch. So you’re telling the parents?”

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “That’s a toughy, Genevieve. Could make things worse for her.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’d say that nine times out of ten if they don’t know already and some outsider does know she’s gonna have hell to pay at the family hearth and home.”

  “But it’s going to be very obvious very soon.”

  He shrugged. “Hey, it’s your call. My dad always told me not to try and change a woman’s mind once she’s set on something. Think I’ll heed the old man on this one.”

  Down the bar Ginger held up her empty wineglass and he moved away.

  She sipped her scotch and considered.

  She’d left her cell phone in her desk at school again. Maybe that was a sign.

  And maybe not.

  Andrew was right, she knew, to think this might be a mistake. It amounted to interfering. But she wished back then and still did that somebody had interfered with Dorothy, a gifted pianist and her first lover — their brief high school affair an experiment for both of them. Dorothy had gone off to college with a double major in music and psychology only to get herself pregnant by her music teacher, who then got scared of fucking a student and dumped her.

  Dorothy was just then showing according to what she heard, when they found her naked, face-up on the floor of her dormitory bathroom.

  Her wrists slashed the right way.

  She heard the ding of the call bell behind her and knew that would be her french fries but by then she was already on the move toward the pay phone by the rest rooms in back, paper in hand.

  ~ * ~

  “Ah, hell,” her father said. “Never fails at dinnertime. Peg, you want to go see who that is?”

  She got up from her chair and walked down the hall to the phone and waited for the answering machine to kick in.

  Hello, was what she heard. This is Genevieve Raton and this message is for Mr. or Mrs. Cleek. Peggy is a student in my geometry cl…

  She cut off the message. Deleted it. Erased the number from caller ID.

  Good god.

  She walked back to the kitchen and sat down in front of her salad.

  “Wrong number,” she said.

  ~ * ~

  Genevieve hung up the phone and wondered if she should try again. She’d heard the message on the machine — it was the father’s voice. Somebody had heard hers too. Somebody had hung up on her.

  She was still wondering when she returned to the bar and her french fries.

  Andrew set a fresh Dewars rocks in front of her.

  “You’re up to your buy-back,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  He leaned toward her and cocked his head.

  “Well?”

  “No answer.”

  He just looked at her for a moment, expressionless.

  “I should let it lay, right?”

  He shrugged.

  “I should.”

  Below the phone number was the Cleek address, written in her neat loopy script. No, she thought. Not a good idea.

  She crumpled up the scrap of paper in her fist. Andrew smiled. She pushed it away toward him across the bar.

  Then she thought about Dorothy again. And something told her she should close no doors on this. Not yet.

  So that when his back was turned to her she retrieved the ball of paper and slipped it into her purse.

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-ONE

  Cleek could not have said later what got him out of bed that night and saw him padding down the stairs in his boxers and t-shirt and slippers. It could have been any number of things which woke him. A dog barking. A tree branch scraping the window in a gust of summer breeze. It could have been anything that kept him awake. Concern that she’d escaped somehow or hurt herself trying. The urge to see her once again in that Mennonite dress. To touch her wooly hair. Anything.

  ~ * ~

  Belle knew what woke her. Cleek did. A creak on the stairs and an empty space beside her on the bed. She listened. Heard the front door open and close again. Felt her eyes pool with angry tears. The silence of the house deafening until filled with her own wracking sobs against the feather pillow.

  ~ * ~

  Brian had never slept at all. So that when he heard his father’s footsteps in the hall and then on the stairs and heard the sounds of his mother’s muffled crying it took no leap of logic to determine that his father had not gone downstairs for a drink of water or a late-night snack but for other reasons entirely and when he heard him open and close the door his intuitions were confirmed. Lighter on his feet than his father — and quieter — he followed.

  ~ * ~

  The two girls slept. Peg’s sleep mercif
ully dreamless at the moment though that would change by morning as now it always did. Darlin’s sleep filled with children. Children who liked her. Children who wanted to be kissed.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Now that he’s here he knows exactly why he’s here. It’s no mystery to him at all and shouldn’t have been from the start. He flips on the light and sees that she’s wide awake and staring at him in that watchful cautious way of hers. He sees her in that dress. He loves that dress. Belle did a fine job there. Damn fine job. Mennonite, Mormon — what’s the difference? They’re all good to their menfolk right?

  Respectful.

  Not like some.

  Some women, all they think about is fi-nances. Don’t know the bold strokes. Worry that financial stuff like a dog worries a bone. Can’t see the forest for the trees. Don’t know the wheel from the deal.

  He doesn’t remember doing it — he’s been stuck in his own mind here for a second or two he guesses — but he’s practically on top of her now. Close enough to reach out and touch. She doesn’t look all too worried about that. Could be she’d like to be touched. Seemed to like it this afternoon. That pat on the head.

  But he’s thinking that maybe it’s not his hand she wants this time.

  He’s thinking it’s cock. Cock-co-cock-co-cock-co-cock. Cockadoodledoo. Anycock’lldo.

  Slut, he thinks.

  You bit my fucking finger off.

  ~ * ~

  Brian sees it all through his peephole. His father, the lawyer, upstanding citizen, Christopher fucking Cleek, PTA, Rotary and Kiwanis, with his hand on the woman’s collarbone, stroking her collarbone and then moving down to her breasts, the woman and his father standing eye to eye — though while her eyes are on his face his father is looking elsewhere, over toward the wall. Weird. It strikes him that his father’s chickenshit. That he can’t look her in the eyes. He hadn’t expected that.

  Then he’s unbuttoning the side of her dress.

  He’s aware that his mouth has gone dry and is hanging open — he’s mouth-breathing again, which he hasn’t done since the second grade — and that he’s clutching the wad of dirty gum so hard it’s gone soft again.

  His father pulls the dress up and drapes it over the woman’s shoulder.