Mammoth

by Douglas Perry

  On cue, a tear fell out of her eye and bounced down her face. She let it roll all the way to her jaw. No use crying over spilt milk, her father used to say to her, but Winnie didn’t agree. Spilt milk, a bad grade, a lost love, a missed opportunity—the only things worth crying over were the things you couldn’t change.

  She’d almost gone all the way with a boy long before she met Johnny. Dear me! Why was she thinking of that now? Gus Mannarino. The beginning of her sophomore year. He had used his finger on her until she’d screamed out involuntarily, screamed in ecstasy and fear and shame. Winnie stopped in her tracks, the night air hanging heavy on her. She squeezed her fists into her eyes. He was the RA in the dorm next to hers. A tall, skinny kid with a cloud of bouncy black curls. She and Danielle met him in the shared laundry room. He brought a six-pack to their room later, and the three of them had cracked open the suds and talked about their classes and Creedence Clearwater Revival. When Dannie left for choral practice, it was just the two of them, smiling at each other from opposite ends of her bed. The next day she had no idea how things had gotten so hot and heavy, but she remembered vividly the effort it took to ask him to stop. It took everything she had. He had stopped at once, smiling at her the whole time as he put his shoes on. When he closed the door behind him, Winnie sat there alone, physically drained, feeling herself leaking onto her bedspread, wondering where her underwear had gone. She expected him to call her for a date in a day or two, or to stop by again with more beer, but he never did. In the months that followed she saw him every once in a while, walking into or out of his building. One time, she spotted him with a girl, a short, stocky, black-haired girl with a bowl haircut. If he noticed Winnie watching them, he didn’t give any indication.

  She trudged on, cresting the top of the incline and falling gawkily into the descent. The houses here were all two stories, clapboard, with winking eaves and gaudy wraparound porches that chased the sunlight through the day. She and Johnny rented one of the smaller houses in the neighborhood. It was poorly constructed, put together seemingly without the aid of architectural plans. At the top of the stairs to the second floor, Johnny had to duck or he’d hit his head on the ceiling. Half the time he still forgot. Catching sight of the house, Winnie reached under her shirt and cupped her belly. They would have to move, of course. Those stairs were too steep, too dangerous, for a toddler.

  Winnie rubbed her stomach some more, tried to gauge if it was rounder—bigger—than normal. She didn’t think so. It had always pooched out a bit, a soft and smooth mound. If she’d had her heart set on being a Playboy centerfold she would have had to do something about that, work with a medicine ball or whatever, but Johnny seemed to like her just as she was. She tried to picture herself with a huge, pregnant belly. The roll and bounce of it, her breasts swollen and her face flushed. The thought of it made her smile.

  She was still pure, she thought. There was still only Johnny, her first time being on their wedding night as God intended, on that hard, narrow hotel bed overlooking the Columbia River Gorge. Today had been close with that man—Gordon. Gordon Johnson. But not as close as with Gus Mannarino, and she’d never counted that, either. Close only counted in horseshoes, she thought. Her father said that one, too; he said it all the time. He was full of stupid sayings.

  She hopped up the step to the front door, walked in, and locked the door behind her, the first time she’d locked it in weeks. She checked every room, every closet and window. She looked behind the shower curtain in the bathroom and left the curtain pulled back, the tub exposed. She noted that from the hallway she could see the empty tub in the bathroom mirror. She sat in the living room, looked out on the dark, empty street, and breathed. The phone lay on the table next to her, within easy reach. The front window was cracked open, allowing the night air to infuse the room, to insinuate itself along her bare arms and ankles.

  The baby inside of her was so quiet and still that Winnie strained to believe it was really in there. She slipped her hands under the shirt again, felt the warmth coming off her flesh. Her belly was rounder, she decided. The baby was in there, all right, sleeping safely—while its father was miles away, deep in the forest, unreachable.

  Who would she call if the Johnsons came banging through the door? Winnie stewed on that for a minute. She didn’t want to have to call anybody. She should be able to look after herself, to protect her child on her own. Johnny kept a gun in his bedside table, under his men’s magazines. Winnie went into the bedroom, kneeled down, and pulled open the drawer. She hefted the revolver in her right hand and managed to heave open the chamber. Empty. She looked around; there were no bullets in the drawer. Where would he keep the ammunition? She peered at the closed closet door where his extra uniforms hung but decided not to open it. She placed the gun back where she found it, put the latest magazine on top. The girl on the cover leered lasciviously, daring Winnie to admire her cleavage. She ignored the girl, closed the drawer.

  Back in the front room, she stared out the window. Maybe she should learn karate, she thought. She felt herself nodding. Yes, there had to be classes she could take in Bakersfield. She imagined herself flying through the air like Bruce Lee. If he could do it, so could she. She leaned back and kicked out with her right foot. The movement felt good. She was still limber; she could get her leg shoulder-high without any effort at all. She’d go to the library in the morning, ask for the Bakersfield phone book. The thought of doing it, of making a call to a dojo and signing up for a class, sent a satisfying jolt through her. She loved Johnny, but she wanted to take care of herself.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The car door swung open and creaked on its hinges. Tori hid behind her hair.

  “Come on, now, hon. Come out of there.”

  Tori closed her eyes and pretended not to hear. She had pretended for the whole five hours she’d been in the car, except for when she needed to pee or was hungry.

  The woman sighed. “You’re acting like a little baby. You’re not a baby. You’re seven years old.”

  “I’m not seven,” Tori said.

  The woman waited, and Tori waited.

  “You’re going to like it better if you get out on your own,” the woman said.

  They went through this same routine when they stopped for lunch, and the woman was right. Tori pushed herself off the seat and stepped down from the car. The air in Phoenix was cool and heavy. She didn’t like what she saw. The world looked like it had been erased, leaving only the dull shadow of what should be there. Her feet wobbled on the gravel that filled the driveway. The front yard was barren, a moonscape except for a green-brown stump here and there, a stone pathway cutting through it. The adobe house was short and bent, a house for the old lady in the shoe.

  “This is grandma’s house?” Tori asked.

  “Yes, it is,” the woman said.

  “Where’s my grandma?”

  “I’m your grandmother,” the woman said, indignant. “I told you that.”

  Tori stared at a window along the side of the house; it was the only window with any light coming from it. She turned and looked up at the woman. “Yeah, but you’re not my grandmother. My grandmother lives on Bear Road.”

  “That’s your other grandmother, dear. That’s your daddy’s mother. I’m your mother’s mother.”

  “My mother’s dead,” Tori said.

  The woman kneeled and took Tori’s shoulders in her hands. “I know that, dear. It’s very sad.”

  “So you can’t be my grandmother.”

  The woman stood up and snatched Tori’s hand. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

  Inside was where they kept all the color in Phoenix. Red walls gave over to blue walls and then yellow walls. Green curtains hung in the living room. The room where they put her suitcase also had green curtains, along with a tightly made single bed, a small desk, a drawing board and a set of shelves. Tori started to cry. She blinked to make them di
sappear, but that only forced them down her face.

  “Oh, dear,” the woman said. She moved around Tori, into the room, and grabbed a picture frame from the desk. Tori saw the picture before the woman pressed it to her hip. Her mother. That isn’t why I’m crying, she wanted to say. She saw pictures of her dead mother every day.

  “This is a nice room, don’t you think?” the woman said.

  “Yes.”

  “All right then. I’m glad we can agree on something.” The suitcase was on the bed, and the woman unzipped it and began to search the front pocket.

  “When’s my dad coming?”

  The woman glanced over her shoulder to offer a disapproving look before returning to what she was doing. “Your father,” she said, “isn’t welcome here.”

  Standing in the doorway, Tori watched the woman rifle through her clothes, and in her mind she watched her father looking through the house for her, calling out her name. She squeezed her hands into fists. More than anything she wanted to run, and so she did. She bolted from the room, tore down the hallway, yanked open the front door. She’d so surprised the woman that as she ran past the room’s window, out in the street, Tori saw that she was still in there, looking around the door toward the hallway. Was the woman calling her name? Tori didn’t hear anything. She raced to the corner, turned, and kept going.

  She could do that same thing right now, she thought. Just take off running. The men would be so shocked that they wouldn’t do anything. They’d know right away they couldn’t catch her, that no one could catch her. She looked over her shoulder. Gordon was still clutching the gun in his hand. He spun it on his finger like a Wild West gunfighter. She looked over the other shoulder: The meaner one, Melvin, plodded on, mumbling to himself, his shirt still balled up in his hand and pressed against his head. The shirt was soaked in blood. Tori had a headache that she attributed to the crash, but at least she wasn’t bleeding. She watched Melvin’s belly shake and bounce with every step. She studied the intricate weaving of hair that flowed around his navel and swept upward to overwhelm his chest. Her father had hair along the stomach and chest, but Melvin’s was another four or five levels of magnitude. Tori wondered if that meant the man’s family had evolved less from the apes, that he had more physical strength and less intelligence. Melvin adjusted the shirt and muttered something.

  The woman did catch up to her, of course. Tori remembered it with the pure clarity of a nightmare. The woman pulled the car alongside her about three blocks from the house, rolled down the passenger-side window, and ordered her to get in. Tori kept walking, her head down. Tears started to fall from her eyes in skittering dribbles, and she swiped at her nose with a forearm.

  “Do you want to be in big trouble, young lady?” the woman barked.

  Who was she talking to? Tori wondered. She marched on. Her breathing had begun to sputter. She coughed on the snot rolling down her throat, stumbled over her own feet as she tried to squeeze off the tears with some mighty blinking.

  The car sped ahead of her, pulled to the curb, and the woman got out. The woman grabbed her by the arm and pulled. Tori let herself go slack, and she fell, swinging on the woman’s arm like Tarzan in the jungle. Her heels scraped the asphalt, and the woman grunted in surprise and effort. The woman stabilized herself, took hold of Tori under both arms, and dragged her. Tori offered no resistance and said nothing. She gazed up at the blue, cloudless sky. A pick-up truck jangled toward them and slowed, the driver giving them a good long look. The woman shifted, humped Tori’s weight to her right arm, and waved at the pick-up with the other one. The truck accelerated, made a lazy right turn at the end of the block.

  Back at the house, Tori sat at a small table in the kitchen nook, unspeaking, for hours. The woman didn’t give her a glass of milk or graham crackers or anything. An old man walked through a couple of times. He didn’t say anything to her. The third time he came through he put a Scrabble board on the table. He didn’t ask her if she wanted to play. He turned and left the room. She dropped her head back, closed her eyes, and began to count. She counted and counted until she lost track. She was thinking about starting over when she heard a thump on the door. She opened her eyes and saw that it was dark outside. A few minutes later, Billy stepped into the kitchen and smiled at Tori.

  “Hey, kid,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “You want to go home?”

  Tori started to cry. “Yes.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  Tori put her hands to her eyes and pushed to hold off more tears. The pain as she pressed her fingers against her eyeballs felt strangely satisfying. She glanced over her shoulder again at Gordon. He was walking with his head down, trying to ignore the other one’s cursing, probably because he knew it was directed at him. The other one, Melvin, had turned around in his seat to tell Gordon to trust him, and that was why he had lost control of the car. The vehicle had barely missed ramming a tree, glanced it instead, and ended up on the shoulder of the road, turned all the way around and with two wheels off the ground. Gordon somehow hadn’t been injured at all and pulled Tori out through the window. Melvin managed to get the front door open and stepped free of the wreck. He had banged against something when the Eldorado swung around. Blood oozed down the side of his head, dripped off the back of his ear.

  The three of them had shuffled down an incline, pushed into the woods and started walking, even though they could barely see more than a few feet in front of them. Melvin had been through all of this more than once over the past hour. He made Tori stay a couple of steps ahead of them so they could keep an eye on her in the moonlight as the two men bickered over the car crash.

  It was a warm evening but shivers raced through Tori’s body, making it difficult to breathe. She understood what was happening. Fear was making her system shut down. She knew what these two men were going to do to her. They were going to beat her and rape her, and probably leave her in the woods to die. The thought of it made her retch and she bent forward. Her legs felt like logs, and she feared they were going to stop working altogether and she’d fall over. She pictured the men kicking her in the stomach and the head, yelling at her to get up. She straightened herself, sensing that they had also stopped and were watching her carefully. She thought again about making a break for it, but she wasn’t sure she was capable. And she wasn’t sure it would matter. Gordon held the pistol in his right hand; he continued to twirl it on his index finger, three revolutions forward and then three back. Tori was staring at it out of the corner of her eye when it whipped up and exploded. Stunned, Tori threw herself at the ground. She landed on her stomach and knees, and the pain of the landing made her jerk into a fetal position.

  “Yes, sir! I got it!” Gordon yelled. “You see that thing spin? It was just like that dog!” He cackled, high and loud.

  “Goddamn it, Gordon, what’s the matter with you?” Melvin was brandishing the sopping shirt at his brother like a lightning bolt.

  Gordon turned toward his brother, confused and defensive. “I’m just trying to have some fun. Everything’s so serious.”

  Melvin threw his shirt at him in strangled fury. It fluttered in the air and fell well short of its intended target. “We crashed the car—which was your goddamn fault—and we’re on the run from the law. So, yeah, I don’t want to hear any knock-knock jokes right now.”

  Gordon bit down on his left hand, pouting.

  “You, Missy,” Melvin snapped. “Go pick that thing up.”

  Tori did a double take. “Me? Pick what up?”

  “The possum. The possum.”

  Tori followed Melvin’s pointing finger and spotted a dead animal smashed against a tree. It looked like a huge rat. She looked away, and the movement made her dizzy. “I can’t.”

  “Oh, yes, you can.”

  “What do you want me to do with it?” she finally said.

  Melvin sighed in irritation.
“Pick. It. Up.”

  Gordon raised the gun. “Go on, pick it up. Missy.”

  Tori stepped over to the opossum and kneeled down. The animal had been hit above its back legs, paralyzing it, but it was still alive, curled in on itself. Its black eyes jumped helplessly. Smoke from the wound, or mist from the night, hovered around its head. Tori’s heart clanged in her chest, her hands shook. She just wanted to be a normal girl, she thought. She wanted to have a normal father. And a boyfriend and a proper first kiss. She started to reach out for the animal, but an invisible barrier—her revulsion—stopped her. She lost her balance, screeched in panic, and fell backward, wrenching her spine. Shoving off with her feet, she violently pushed herself away from the opossum as if it were attacking her.

  “Goddamn it,” Melvin said. He marched over to the animal, noted that it was still breathing, and stepped down on its neck. He picked it up by the tail and held it in front of Tori’s face. “This is dinner, Missy, and now you ain’t getting any of it.”

  That was fine by her. Tori got to her feet, looked at Melvin and the opossum, and then at Gordon and the gun. There had to be a way to make this all go away, she thought. She shut her eyes and started counting.

  “Go on, get moving,” Melvin said, and gave her a push with an open palm.

  They walked for another forty minutes until they came upon a fallen tree, and Melvin decided they’d found the right place to settle for the night. He tossed the animal corpse on the ground and indicated that Tori should sit on the tree trunk. Tori sat as commanded and hugged herself, squeezing her knees together so hard she felt it in her throat. Melvin sat down next to her.