Born to Run

by John M. Green

  She decided not to call room service, not yet; she and Mitch didn’t need interruptions or witnesses and, having turned up the radio in the room to muffle the noise for when the shower finished, she drew her one-piece suit’s front zipper down from her collar to her crotch as she walked across to the bathroom. She smiled and paused when she caught herself in the mirror, and spread open her top to expose her breasts. She licked her thumbs and forefingers and tweaked and rubbed her dark brown nipples stimulating them into short thick shafts almost as hard as the shiny metal cylinder she’d slid over one of her teeth.

  She didn’t really need to be aroused ahead of what she was about to do but persuaded herself not to waste the opportunity. She flicked her red hair forward and curled her lips into her fail-safe fuck-me pout and stood for a moment, her hands on her hips, taking in the sight. Maybe she should get out a camera for a quick self-portrait? Niki worked as hard at her body as her moves. She was as taut and springy as a silk strap uplifting a porn star’s bra, though with her mounds Niki never wore one, squeezing by with nipple-tight shirts and Ts.

  She twisted round to see… yes, the flush had come to her cheeks and, yes, as always it made her tattoo down there glow. It was a red and blue rose, her smooth cream skin providing the necessary white. Frederico in Milan was truly an artist, she decided. He’d given her the tattoo years before she’d even heard of Isabel Rosa Diaz, but Niki tingled with a frisson of delight every time she spied one of the election posters or bumper stickers. Niki prized her body. She exercised daily, twice if she could. For her there was nothing better than working out on a simple bar, or sometimes two at a time.

  Moments later, naked and very ready, she slid into the shower stall with Taylor and, before he could fake a protest or even turn his phony gape of shock into a hesitant grin, she dropped to her knees, her hands lightly stroking the insides of his thighs while her tongue flicked the water off the tip of his fast-rousing penis.

  She knew what he was thinking: this was too good to be true… what if it were a set-up and someone came in… ummm… terrific… what if it wasn’t a set-up but someone came in anyway… like room service… there could be a scandal… thnyumm… wonderful… This was the part, when he was pressing his shoulders back against the tiles and thrusting his hips forward, where she knew it’d be: if only my Julia would do it like this… my god… ohmygod… oh, jeez-us.

  She’d soaped up her palms. This was the moment, she could feel it, and without missing a stroke, her mouth and one hand switched positions so Taylor wouldn’t notice, not for a few seconds, anyway. At first she nipped him lightly, in play—she didn’t want to hurt him. He moaned. And while one hand kept pumping faster and faster, she nipped hard and quick, his whole body convulsed with intense pleasure and he squealed. While still pumping him with one hand, the fingers of her other started caressing and massaging, delicately, the spot on his sac where she’d bitten into him. Finally, she wrapped her lips round him for his final spasm. She locked on to him, tight, and, at the perfect moment…

  No, Julia never did that, did she?

  Niki would have smiled… if she’d been able to.

  “ONE thing I don’t get, Niki,” said Mitch Taylor, who was licking the twin peaks of whipped cream and wild berries that Niki had dolloped over herself in ways too daring and exotic even for the award-winning chefs in room service. “Here I am a Democrat, and you, not just a Republican but a raging hawk, and we’re… you know… doing…”

  Already slanted back on her elbows, Niki let her head dangle into the pillow elongating her neck into a silky arc that ached to be stroked, and she gurgled, “Mitch, sweetie… Fucking you Democrats… it’s my life’s work.”

  19

  ISABEL WAS NO fool. She couldn’t suppress her past forever; she knew that. How could she ask the people to elect her president if, whenever a glass smashed she’d risk losing it? It was time to confront it. For years, she’d been able to wave off probing journalists with “It’s a migraine” or, if they pressed or it was someone close to her, a rehearsed and till now respected “Please, some things should stay private.” But she knew that if she didn’t tackle this herself, it wouldn’t be long before someone’s insistence would push her over, as Davey had almost managed the other morning.

  “Ed,” she said after the boy had gone off to play catch with George, “You’ve never pressed me, but the rape…”

  “Don’t need to know,” he cut her off, but the furrow between his eyebrows told her differently this time.

  “Maybe not,” she said, taking a breath, “but I need to tell you…”

  SHE is fifteen. It’s a last, fading June light. Biting her lip with anticipation, Isabel is hunched over the kitchen table in their grimy trailer, scratching at her homework under a single globe, anxious for her mother to wake.

  Her English term paper (a ten-page essay prophetically entitled, “If I were President…”) is placed neatly at the corner of the table, the large handwritten red “A+” screaming to be complimented.

  Maria Rosa’s head is lolling on the arm of the sofa and a towel covers over the grey cottony tufts coiling out of the rips. The TV is on but the sound is down, and a half-bottle of cheap pink wine dangles from her fingertips, swaying precariously near the open bottle of gaudy red nail lacquer on the floor.

  “Just brilliant.” Her teacher actually said those words in front of the entire class. “Isabel, what you’ve written is beautiful. I would be proud if you became my president one day.” Despite what happens that evening, Isabel will not forget those words.

  Isabel’s pride is aching to be shared. Repeatedly it drags her mind away from her homework and darts her eyes over to the couch. Unable to exercise restraint any longer, she slides noisily off the hard wooden bench and stands over her mother, breathing expectantly, making a couple of loud rasps. On the second, Maria Rosa stirs and absently grumbles a few low bars of Bésame Mucho. Isabel is pent up like a jack-in-a-box as she contemplates her mother’s reaction: if the booze has worn off, she will be thrilled; if not… but Isabel doesn’t want to think about that.

  Outside, the steel mesh step creaks and Isabel’s pride congeals into foreboding. The door swings open and Maria Rosa’s latest boyfriend trips on the torn curl of carpet and lurches inside. The five bottles of beer he’s hugging to his chest almost spring free but he manages to grip them even as he stumbles and swears—he never wastes good beer. Maria Rosa’s eyelids attempt a flutter, like a flagging butterfly. A slit opens but reveals only the whites. A string of drool threads out the corner of her mouth and down her chin.

  His presence compresses Isabel into a tight cold sweat. Her eyes focus on a cockroach, and she hunches her body into itself as if she too had wings. He says nothing to her, as if she’s not there—which is how they’d both like it—and he sets his precious bottles on the table, directly on top of her essay. It is insensitive, ignorant, as if her sheets were merely drink coasters in a bar, but she knows he does it to make a point: she isn’t wanted here. She bites her lip as the five circles of moisture spread themselves over the top page, and she pulls her eyes to the floor, unable to watch the evidence of her triumph dissolving into hollow pink blotted Olympic rings, blurry symbols of her former glory.

  He snatches at Maria Rosa’s bottle and in doing so knocks over her nail lacquer so it oozes like red mercury, poisoning the floorboards. “Drink without me, will you? Bolivian bitch!” The bottle flies out of his hand and smashes against the wall. The yellowing wallpaper soaks up just enough of the violent splash of pink liquor that it looks even more like someone had pissed on it than before.

  Maria Rosa, startled, grabs her slippers and runs outside—she has good reason to fear this one.

  Isabel cowers at the table, her eyes continuing to avoid his as if praying he’d go away. Now, it has the opposite effect, and he picks up the jagged green neck of the broken bottle, brandishing it at the girl as he approaches. “I’m not good enough for your fuckin’ ma? That what you think?”r />
  Still looking down, she shakes her head, but it is too robust to be convincing.

  “Fuckin’ liar!” He thumps at the table with the glass, and Isabel recoils fearing a shard will snap off and fly at her. It doesn’t, and he stares at her as if undecided about what to do next.

  She bites into her knuckle and looks at him. She has witnessed this one with her mother—the trailer is pitifully small. Already nursing a dismal black eye herself, she knows what he is capable of, and flinches from his gaze down to her books, and for a second, to her ruined class paper.

  “Look at me when I’m talking’,” he yells and swipes at the books, but misses. On the upswing, the edge of the glass slices across her neck, terminating just below her ear. Beads of blood form along the slash, then the red spills down her neck like a stage curtain.

  But this is not the finale.

  “Look at me!” His yellowing teeth push his lips back like a snarling dog’s. “I’ll show you how good I am.” He slaps her face with his free hand, slamming her head back into the wall behind her.

  Isabel is dazed and woozy. He must be swearing, she thinks, but isn’t sure. ¿Dónde está mi mami? Where’s my…? Isabel tries to scream her mother’s name but no sound can escape the gurgling of the thick liquid mounting in her throat. Straining, she holds it back.

  He shifts his precious bottles to the floor, almost delicately, but this time successfully flicks off her books with a rough sweep of his arm. He yanks her up onto the table and the back of her head smashes down onto her school paper. Her blood is soaking into it and finally obliterates what the five wet stains hadn’t. The “A” is gone; no longer will she ever be able to boast of it. The “+” is still there, encircled by blood, like a shield against evil but it wards off nothing as she woozes in and out of reality.

  He tears at the waist of her jeans and pulls them down to reveal her white panties. He rips them down.

  The pain searing her neck and under her head blocks Isabel from fully grasping his intentions, at least until his filthy thumbnails are digging into the insides of her knees and he is forcing her legs open. She gasps with the shock as much as the rasping pain of his hard plunge into her. His forearms bulge with the power of desire and are pinning down her shoulders. His breath stinks of beer and tobacco and ham—honey-baked, she thinks, as though it might be important—and as she squirms, his spit slobbers into her eye. She can’t wipe it, she can’t do anything to help herself, and both terror and rage clash inside her.

  Her vomit sprays over his neck and denim shirtfront. If only she’d had better aim… The rest oozes down the sides of her sad face, and the bilious chunks splatter and plop into the blood that has soaked and matted her once black hair.

  ¿Dónde está mi mami? She tries to wriggle free and vainly twists her head searching. The startling pain again flares across her neck. His white-knuckled fist, an inch from her eyes, intimidates her even more than the macabre contortion of his scowl and the belligerent purple veins pulsing on his arm that make his wolf tattoo snarl. She can’t think of… down there, but instinct, maybe disgust, sinks her teeth into his arm, just below his fucking wolf tattoo, and she clamps her eyes and her mouth till her tongue recoils from the repulsive taste of blood. His blood. She hopes it is his.

  It is his turn to scream.

  Good.

  His spare hand grabs again for the broken bottle, “I’ll fix you,” he shrieks in her ear.

  Bad.

  She dares to open her eyes as he pulls himself out of her. He is towering over her, bristling, his penis still partially erect and flailing from side to side and his arm is soaring, brandishing the bottle neck, like a ghoul with a burning torch in a horror movie. His eyes are ablaze and his howl shrieks like a zombie’s. One hand pushes her legs apart and his other arm winds back and round in an underarm so swift and sure that she faints in shock before he hits his target, a small mercy, so she never hears him yell, “You’ll never forget your first fuck now.”

  He holds his penis fondly in his hand, the blood streaming from his wrist mingling with hers. He starts stroking. When he is finished and zipped up, he walks toward the door. “Tell your fuckin’ whore mother,” he spits out the corner of his mouth, “she’ll have to get her booze from some other stupid cunt from now on.”

  A frayed grey bath towel is limp over the arm of the sofa where Maria Rosa’s head had been resting just minutes earlier. He snatches it up and presses down on the blood on his arm. “Fuck you,” he scowls at her and swipes the rag across his face and his shirt, but it just smears her blood and chuck into a fetid brown sludge. He tears the stinking shirt off and heaves it at Isabel. “Clean yourself up,” he orders her, “You disgust me.”

  His foot has almost kicked the door open when he remembers his beers. He swivels back to the gory butcher’s block and leans down to get them careful to avoid any of the red drips. Isabel’s eyes stutter open and, almost instinctively, she pries the bloody shard out of her body, unleashing a venom that impels her to slam it down onto his bare shoulder, just above the wolf tattoo. But the arcing glass discharges a green glimmer of light that alerts the beast and he snatches her wrist just as it goes limp. Consciousness escapes her.

  After the swearing and smashing is long stopped—Isabel has no idea how long—her mother steals back inside to discover her daughter almost catatonic, shivering and heaving without sound on the floor. A blood-drenched cushion is gripped between her legs and her once-white shirt is soaking red from the gash across her neck. Screwed up pages of sopping school paper are strewn all around her on the floor, the writing illegible.

  ED shouldered the burden of Isabel’s story under a canopy of heavy silence. Like many, he’d heard the words “fifteen” and “assault” and “scar” before, a combination whose hideousness was tempered by its vagueness and so able to be touched on, though in hushed tones, in polite company and prime-time documentaries. He was one of the very few who’d also heard the word “rape” too, but apart from the original hospital and George’s late wife, Annette, Isabel had never till now divulged to anyone how degenerate and degrading it had been.

  In the deafening quiet, Ed stared at the wall opposite them, at the oil painting of golden haystacks, an original whose fanatical and intense swirls were now almost jumping at him. He touched his ear. How had she dealt with this… this horror? At fifteen, no less?

  He pondered his own experiences; he’d averted his eyes from other fifteen-year-olds… some even younger… a lifetime of combat had taught him that nothing was unthinkable. He too had suppressed horrors and this was hardly the moment for them to arise again. Unlike Isabel’s, his were in times of war. Raw as it still was, his first wife’s adulterous and fatal car smash didn’t remotely qualify, though the ache was with him daily. He tried to keep his own nightmarish images at bay, for a moment even closing his eyes as if to shut them out, Isabel probably thinking it was her story alone he was stressing over.

  His arm hooked protectively around his wife. The two sat on the sofa and Ed glanced sideways to see Isabel staring blankly though the French doors, out to the patio where George and Ed’s little boy were playing catch.

  GREGORY was calling from campaign headquarters. “Close-up say they’ve got some new angle on your past,” he told Isabel, the inflexion in his voice not able to hide his concern. “They’re running it whether we cooperate or not.” As Isabel gripped the handset, Gregory didn’t even remotely understand her anxiety, but her tight mouth revealed to Ed that whatever Gregory was saying, it was not good.

  She attempted to compose herself. Twisting back around to Ed, she said, “Close-up’s got something.” Her voice, already weakened, broke as she said it. “Gregory says it’s about my past. Ed, they want me there, in the studio, but they won’t say what it is.”

  “It’s an ambush, that’s what.”

  “God, if they found the rapist! Ed, I’ve only just told you. I couldn’t face…”

  Ed grabbed for the phone to speak to Gregory b
ut pressed hands-free. “Samson,” he said, “Isabel’s in Detroit tomorrow with a zillion…”

  “They know that,” answered Gregory, “though they don’t know about the debate preparation, which is secret… not listed on the published press calendar. The prep’s only part way through when Close-up goes to air. The itinerary shows her with a night off, flying out to Des Moines, to be fresh for the next morning.”

  Gregory had a full production crew already at work dressing up an old church fellowship hall out in Detroit’s suburbs to duplicate the actual set for the first presidential TV debate. Isabel’s secret debate dress rehearsal was scheduled to be held there tomorrow night.

  Ed wasn’t in the mood for Gregory’s blabbering. He stood, “Tell those fucks she’ll do their show… from Detroit.”

  A surge of alarm shot up Isabel’s spine, but Ed continued, his head nodding “it’s okay” to her and his hand patting the air in calm. “Samson, but it’s on one condition: they tell us what this thing is… Right now. Not later today. Not tomorrow. In the next five minutes, or no dice.” He terminated the call before Isabel could intervene.

  “It’s not what you think,” he reassured Isabel, praying he was right.

  “But what then?”

  Ed didn’t answer her.

  A contorted image suddenly loomed up in Isabel’s imagination: she was seated on the studio set and from behind the curtains a muffled voice started humming Bésame Mucho.

  “My mother?” Her heart hammered. “I won’t see that… woman,” she whispered. “Ever.”

  “You’re as good as president. What’s it matter?”

  “How could you agree to me appearing without asking me?”

  “Know your enemy,” he said, only part-quoting the ancient Chinese warrior philosopher, Sun Tzu. He didn’t think she needed to know the whole quote: “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.”