Chapter 15
Right after they drove through Orley Sipe asked Tiffany about her shoulder. Orley, at 40 mph, all ten seconds of it, consisted primarily of a combination café and gift shop, the latter closed, no longer run day-to-day due to Hope’s folks dispute over the true origin of those Beepers. Sipe imagined Beepers leaping on the car as it sliced through Orley, refugees escaping a dying kingdom.
“It’s fine,” said Tiffany. “Don’t worry. You didn’t hurt me.”
Sipe nodded.
“I’m a baby. You could’ve pinched my arm and I would’ve made just as much noise. I’m sorry I’m such a baby.”
She looked at her phone. A few minutes later she told him the street address in Pendleton for Timbers Athletic. It closed at 7. Plenty of time to get there. And Henry was off looking for Hope. Gwen had caught Henry, and bothered him about the car, but he’d told her it was an emergency. If Tiffany was with Sipe, then nothing was probably going to happen to Lori’s car, now was it?
The highway started to curve more and rise as trees thickened and moved nearer roadside.
“This is really pretty, isn’t it?” said Tiffany. “At least where there are lots of trees. Usually I have to drive. Uncle Norm makes me drive a lot of the time when we go over the hill. I can’t really look so much. See the sights. I think that’s what I’d like to do most of all. Just drive. Go on a road trip all alone, check things out. Do you like to drive?”
“Sometimes.”
“’Sometimes’. Huh.” She didn’t say anything else for a few minutes. She looked at Sipe. Maybe just gauging the bruise. Still. It started to get uncomfortable.
Finally she spoke. Asked Sipe, “Is this guy we’re going to see, your friend, is he a nice guy?”
“He’s my boss’ son.”
“Oh. Right. Is he nice?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know if someone is nice?”
“It doesn’t come up.”
“He can’t be that nice, I mean, if he hit you.”
“No.”
“Wait. That’s right. Who hit you? It was her, right? People magazine lady?”
“People magazine lady.”
“Do you normally read People magazine?”
“No. When I got Connie, the other day, we were putting his bags in the car, and it was just this thing in his apartment. He told me to hold onto it. First he said pitch it, then he said hold onto it. So I just folded it, put it in my jacket.”
“But you didn’t look at it?”
“It’s not mine. It’s Connie’s.”
“So you don’t know her? Millicent?”
“No.”
“Did she have a reason to hit you? You weren’t trying to break her arm, were you?” After a second she said, “I’m kidding. I know you weren’t going to break my arm.” She touched her shoulder. Extended it like a bird warming up a wing.
“I was looking at her car engine. They told me she was having car trouble.”
“Huh.”
“So I looked. She Tasered me. Stun gunned me. Then she hit me. Kicked me.”
“Are you going to hurt them? I mean, it could happen. She might try to do that to you again. She’s kind of big, isn’t she? She looks big. I looked it up on my phone. They’ve got footage from the fight she got into. The fight with the Russian lady. The one that got her kicked off the Olympic team. You want to see it?”
“Driving.”
“I know. I meant later. It’s all surveillance camera type footage. It looks like a bear and a dog going at it. You look at it and you’re all ‘that’s one brave dog’. I bet Pluto would be like that if a bear came after me or came after Uncle Norm. Pluto doesn’t do much, he doesn’t look like much, but dogs are like that. Loyal. He’d totally get killed, but…”
The road coiled out of the dark, the tunnel of tall pine trees fell away, and ahead the asphalt sliced along a hillside. The road through Snoqualmie Pass, bridging the eastern and western halves of Washington was steep, but the difference was the wideness of the roads, multiple lanes, the shoulders, the safety in having an abundance of time to correct an error. This was a two-lane road. You sneezed, your tire strayed onto the pencil-width worth of shoulder, you were locked into turning into meat inside a blackened metal coffin. The steep hillside looked like something the movies would use, the bad guys’ car rolling down it towards a fiery end.
“This is the part Norm hates,” said Tiffany. “Hates it. He’s like Pluto when Pluto sees a cat. Puuuuure chicken. I swear. He’s such a weenie sometimes. Both of them are.”
An oncoming car swished past them, a flash of metal and glass. Tiffany thought the other driver might’ve been going 80. The driver had one hand on the wheel, their head angled towards the passenger seat, something, a phone, a distraction in their right hand.
At one point, negotiating the steep hillside, Sipe caught sight of storm catchers on the hillside above them. Aged wood thrusting up like bones halfway ejected out the earth, indiscriminately interrupting tumbleweeds tumble. He could almost picture a colossus, once long ago striding the earth, a hide composed from tumbleweed, but some sort of extinction event occurred, maybe hastened by the wind turbines, some war between wood and steel, and only here and there you could still catch sight of fragments, bones, bits of tumblemeat rotted, clinging to the bone. It wasn’t a thousand feet down to the bottom of the hillside on his left. It just looked it. He imagined storm catchers erected on the hillside down there, catching all the unfortunate travelers, the current day meat and metal tumbleweeds, plummeting from the highway for one reason or another.
One last curve and the road was back to negotiating the rolling humps of dust-colored plain, the steep drop left behind.
Tiffany yawned.
“I usually tell Norm, ‘you can open your eyes now, Little Normie’. He hates that.”
He waited for her to say you can open your eyes now, Little Sipey, but she didn’t.
Tiffany fell asleep in the car. She’d said something about getting up earlier than usual. Planning to run, first day of her new regimen, but instead Henry and her had found Sipe. Then everything that had happened after that, up to and including him nearly popping her arm out of the socket, leaving her susceptible to the warmth of the sun, and the car moving, she was lulled asleep.
The Old Man’s crew peppered with nappers. Trick being having someone with you to wake you up, or having an alarm on you, a phone. Sipe could follow directions, someone just showed him how to set up an alarm on his phone, but Sipe didn’t trust technology quite that much. On a job, you didn’t nap. That was the only way to be sure. Things happened when you napped, when you ought to be paying attention. You think two guys in a car couldn’t both fall asleep?
Tiffany’s sleep a quiet sleep. No snoring. No talking. No indication that dreams included a replay of Sipe grabbing her, hurting her. She faced him. Left cheek pressed into seatback. He kept glancing at her. He told himself to stop looking, but by then it’d ignited inside his head. Paige asleep, and Bryce coming on into the room. Of course stepdad had beer breath. Bryce told him it was a drunk’s crime. It wasn’t him, it was the him he became. The admission coming when Sipe had Bryce out in the woods, lashed to a tree. Before then, walking him at gunpoint from the car parked on the forest road into the trees, Bryce had been innocent of it all. It was those two women, Sipe’s sister Greta and the girl, they had it in for him, they had a little on Bryce and they’d turned it into a lot. Once he was bound to the tree, sitting on the forest floor, Bryce’s story altered. Confession clearly the only way out. Bryce hadn’t planned it. Greta out of town, Bryce bored with the marriage, with work, with life in general, the Mariners gone tits up yet again, he was soaked to the gills, just wanted to go see the girl, drink in what a pretty girl she was, and things got a little out of hand. The girl didn’t look like Greta. Paige
was beautiful. A girl transforming into this goddess and her upper body sticking out above the sheets all clumped up at her waist. Bunched up. Enough light coming in from the hallway and it was on display. Inhale and exhale. Look at ‘em, rise and fall and rise and fall, perfect handfuls, straining against some thin tank top. Asleep but she had ‘em on display.
Bryce had worked for the parks department. A supervisor. His dad a businessman, a city councilman. When the allegations arose, both Bennetts talked willingly, insisting that Greta was barely held together with spit and Scotch tape, a wounded woman with a wounded beautiful daughter. It was a conspiracy. Bryce the real victim here. He wasn’t perfect, he’d fooled around a little (no surprise when you looked at Greta), and she’d convinced Paige to parrot this story about rape. Revenge on Bryce for being a less than perfect husband.
Greta in glasses, this dopey Prince Valiant haircut post-wedding, all elbows and knees, a feminist maybe going lesbo, all-around about as fuckable as some lady freshly airlifted from a concentration camp. Birdwoman incapable of attracting some man to fuck her, to even the marital score with Bryce, so instead she decided to fuck him, humiliate him, tarnish his dear old dad, too, publically. Anyone that’d listen, and a lot of people listened to the Bennetts, Bryce would forcefully state the real victim here was Paige, being used by her mother.
Sipe didn’t know what had happened until late, after Greta and Paige had moved out of the town. Forced out, more or less. Not surprising, if your father-in-law was a prominent businessman/councilman with friends in high places. Sipe called his mother once a year. Sometimes twice. The older mother got the less close to the vest she held cards. She’d figured out people weren’t quite so worth protecting.
When his mother told him the stepdad had done things to Paige, sex things, all he could see was that 4 year old covered in frosting, getting frosting on her uncle’s face. Even though the 4 year-old was 10 years a ghost that’s who’d suffered, that’s who’d cried and struggled and had something torn out of her.
Sipe cashed in on his seniority. Just telling the Old Man he had a family thing to go deal with was enough. Sipe bought a camera, a professional deal, drove to Longview, checked in to a motel and let them know he was an amateur photographer looking to up his game. He did reconnaissance, figured out the best spot to take Bryce, and then sweated out exactly how to get him out there.
There was little to sweat. Bryce would eat his lunch in his city rig, smoke a cigarette, and then take a nap in his city rig. No dummy, he had a couple prime, out of the way spots to stretch that hour out to an hour and a half.
Two days in a row he did it. The third day Sipe knocked on the sleeping man’s window and smiled at Bryce. Coming to Bryce as a stranger. A mustached and half-bearded stranger with a map in hand. A camera around his neck. Sipe knew Greta had at most one picture of her baby brother as an adult, and in that one, Sipe’s face was messed with frosting.
Bryce didn’t know who Sipe was other than a man interrupting naptime then a man producing a gun and walking him from the city truck and forcing him into a car trunk.
Not until Sipe had him out in the woods, deep off the regular track, the drivable arteries thinning and turning ever less navigable, the only regularly created sound in the world tree tilt, the only sign of civilization jet contrail dissipating in a pale blue sky did the gunman say,
“I’m Paige’s uncle.”
“Who?”
You had to give him a moment to catch up. Bryce woken from a nap, shoved in a trunk, facing a loaded gun. It was a lot to take in. To process. Forgetting Paige not all that surprising. It was about Bryce all the time anyways. All about his dick plowing some prime vagina before anyone else on the planet ever could.
Anyone else in the Old Man’s employ might’ve ended it right there, incapable of keeping down the rage surge. Sipe made a plan, he stuck to it.
Bryce stripped, hands bound, tied to the tree, gagged, Sipe produced the knife, sliced Bryce’s biceps and his hairline. Surface deep. Waited until Bryce stopped freaking out, and waggled the bloodied knife. Set it down a good foot distant of Bryce’s socked feet.
“You didn’t give Paige a choice. See, I’m giving you an option. You figure some way to wiggle on out from them ropes, enough I mean, you can get the knife, drag it with your toes, and cut yourself free. Get out of here before something smells that blood, comes looking for the source.”
The third day Sipe arrived and thought his once upon a time brother-in-law might be sleeping. The second day, Bryce had been pale. That third day he was gray. No pulse or so weak a pulse Sipe couldn’t feel it.
Each day Sipe had cut him someplace new, let some blood out, thinking the smell might attract something in the woods. Bear. Cougar. Wolf. Higher elevation, no clouds at night, it got cold. Colder than Sipe had predicted. Maybe he’d cut something vital, something that had bled a little more vigorously than he’d planned.
Bryce’s predicament hadn’t hit the papers, but two days in, eating in a Longview restaurant, Sipe had overheard diners talking about it. They didn’t know Bryce, didn’t even know his name, just knew Councilman/Businessman Bennett’s son was missing. Not too upsetting. The conversationalist still found a way to dig into their dessert. Sipe took that as a warning shot. Pretty soon the search would expands outside the more civilized parts of the county.
The last trip out to check on Bryce, Sipe had worn his third pair of shoes. Slightly different sizes, forensics might think there were multiple kidnappers. He sliced the ropes on the side of the tree opposite Bryce, gathered them, tucked them in a bag with Bryce’s shed clothes and the bloodied knife – the potential getaway knife, and buried the bag in a hole dug in a random spot at a lower elevation in the forest. For good measure, the collapsible shovel went in the hole on top of the bag, and Sipe kicked and pushed and threw the soil back in on top of the cored spot. Then the pants and boots clad in soil went into a plastic grocery store bag dropped off in a rest stop garbage can the day Sipe drove back to Seattle.
Last Sipe saw of Bryce, the dead or dying man’s weight left him draped and leaning against the base of the tree. In a few more days his skin color would be inseparable from the tree bark, but the way he tilted, he might more likely be slumped across the forest floor.
Back in Seattle, Sipe checked newspapers, not on-line, but the physical papers. Home, almost a week went by before he saw a story about a missing Longview man.
Bryce Bennett’s body recovered. Cops looking into possible homicide. Following all available evidence.
Just to confuse things for the law, the second day, Sipe had hammered a Polaroid picture into the tree above Bryce. This picture Zeke had forced on him at some point and that Sipe hadn’t chucked. Zeke agog that the picture was left in a library book of all things. Some kid might find that for God’s sake. Sipe couldn’t remember the book Zeke had found the picture in, but the guys had gotten some gas out of making fun of Zeke, riffing on his worry, an old man checking out kids books and all.
A poorly lit picture, head to waist, this lady laying on her back, wearing glasses, more or less dressed, but the low cut top is pulled down far enough both her breasts are exposed, nipples hardened, her hands cupping, showing off the goods. Zeke called it a Mona Lisa face. Some people would say the lady was smiling. Some people would say she looked indifferent. The cops would copy the picture, cover up the breasts, waggle it in faces and ask if anyone ever remembered seeing Bryce Bennett with some lady of what appeared to be Asian ancestry.
Out of it, not yet cut anew on his second day out in the woods, Bryce had slit his eyes, tipped his head towards Sipe and looked at the Polaroid. Sipe having trouble with the Velcro pouch on his belt, trying to dig out a nail.
“Who’s that?” asked Bryce.
“I don’t know.”
“She looks fat. That your girlfriend? You fuck ‘em fat?”
&
nbsp; Sipe hadn’t fed Bryce. Removed the gag to give him some water. Enough to make him piss himself, put that odor in the air. Once the gag was back in place, the Polaroid nailed to the tree, Sipe had cut him again. The strokes a little deeper than intended, not that Sipe needed to defend the honor of women of a certain weight class, it was just the look on Bryce’s face, blood dried on his forehead and around the orbits of the right eye, the fruits of the initial scalp slice, and still he’d dredged up a sneer, a look of unquestionable ownership Sipe could imagine Paige had witnessed close-up, the 4 year-olds feared monster from under the bed now sharing the bed.
Pendleton was only 15 miles from Pilot Rock. Once he’d driven out of the small town, a metropolis compared to Little Creek and Orley, Sipe woke Tiffany, first trying to do it just with the sound of his voice, and then giving up, reaching out and so soft he had to keep doing it, shaking her, but not having to touch the shoulder he’d earlier threatened with permanent injury.
She yawned. She looked around. Told him, “You let me fall asleep.”
Sipe nodded.
“I can’t wait until I’m an old woman and I can nap everyday. No one will care. Do you nap?”
“I’m not an old woman.”
She didn’t laugh. He thought the line had dropped with a thud. He looked. She grinned. When she smiled like this a little gumline showed. Her hair was in her eyes. Sipe thought it looked like some shot from a montage, the credits for some TV show. Next a quick cut to her holding up her phone in Henry’s kitchen, crying, followed by her driving Norm’s truck off the asphalt and onto the weed filled, railcar populated field.
Phone in hand, she told him they’d be at Timbers Athletic in like ten minutes.
The Lipless Gods Page 16