by John Irving
"Much more," she said in his ear, which smelled like dust. She had to wet her fingers to wet herself. God, I'll never get him inside me, she thought, but when she found him with her hand, she knew that the rubber was the lubricated kind.
"Oh," he said. He lay still on top of her; he seemed surprised by where she'd put him, as if he didn't really know what was where. "Oh," he repeated.
Oh, what now? Hope wondered. She held her breath. A car, a flash of red, whined past their open door--the horn blast and some muffled, derisive hoots fading away from them. Of course, she thought: we look like two farmers fucking off the side of the road; it's probably done all the time. No one will stop, she thought, unless it's the police. She imagined a bread-faced trooper appearing over Rath's lurching shoulder, writing out a ticket. "Not on the road, buddy," he'd be saying. And when she screamed at him, "Rape! He's raping me," the trooper would wink at Oren Rath.
The bewildered Rath seemed to be feeling rather cautiously for something inside her. If he's just come, Hope thought, how much time do I have before he comes again? But he seemed more like a goat than a human to her, and the babylike gurgle in his throat, hot against her ear, seemed close to the last sound she imagined she'd hear.
She looked at everything she could see. The keys dangling from the ignition were too far to reach; and what could she do with a set of keys? Her back hurt and she pushed her hand against the dashboard to try to shift his weight on her; this excited him and made him grunt against her. "Don't move," he said; she tried to do what he said. "Oh," he said, approvingly. "That's real good. I'll kill you quick. You won't even know it. You just do like that, and I'll kill you good."
Her hand grazed a metal button, smooth and round; her fingers touched it and she did not even have to turn her face away from him and look at it to know what it was. It opened the glove compartment and she pushed it. The spring-release door was a sudden weight in her hand. She said a long and loud "Aaahhh!" to conceal the sound of the things in the glove compartment that rattled around. Her hand touched cloth, her fingers felt grit. There was a spool of wire, something sharp, but too small--things like screws and nails, a bolt, perhaps a hinge to something else. There was nothing she could use. Reaching around in there was hurting her arm; she let her hand trail to the floor of the cab. When another truck passed them--catcalls and bloops from the air horn, and no sign of even slowing down for a better look--she started to cry.
"I got to kill you," Rath moaned.
"Have you done this before?" she asked him.
"Sure," he said, and he thrust into her--stupidly, as if his brute lunges could impress her.
"And did you kill them, too?" Hope asked. Her hand, aimless now, toyed with something--some material--on the floor of the cab.
"They were animals," Rath admitted. "But I had to kill them, too." Hope sickened, her fingers clutched the thing on the floor--an old jacket or something.
"Pigs?" she asked him.
"Pigs!" he cried. "Shit, nobody fucks pigs," he told her. Hope thought that probably somebody did. "They was sheep," Rath said. "And one calf." But this was hopeless, she knew. She felt him shrinking inside her; she was distracting him. She choked a sob that felt like it would split her head if it ever escaped her.
"Please try to be kind to me," Hope said.
"Don't talk any," he said. "Move like you did."
She moved, but apparently not the right way. "No!" he shouted. His fingers dug into her spine. She tried moving another way. "Yup," he said. He moved, now, determined and purposeful--mechanical and dumb.
Oh, God, Hope thought. Oh, Nicky. And Dorsey. Then she felt what she held in her hand: his pants. And her fingers, suddenly as wise as a Braille reader's, located the zipper and moved on; her fingers passed over the change in the pocket, they slipped around the wide belt.
"Yup, yup, yup," said Oren Rath.
Sheep, Hope thought to herself; and one calf. "Oh, please concentrate!" she cried aloud to herself.
"Don't talk!" said Oren Rath.
But now her hand held it: the long, hard, leather sheath. That is the little hook, her fingers told her, and that is the little metal clasp. And that--oh, yes!--is the head of the thing, the bony handle of the fisherman's knife he had used to cut her son.
* * *
--
Nicky's cut was not serious. In fact, everyone was trying to figure out how he got it. Nicky was not talking yet. He enjoyed looking in the mirror at the thin, half-moon slit that was already closed.
"Must have been something very sharp," the doctor told the police. Margot, the neighbor, had thought she'd better call a doctor, too; she'd found blood on the child's bib. The police had found more blood in the bedroom; a single drop on the cream-white bedspread. They were puzzled about it; there was no other sign of violence, and Margot had seen Mrs. Standish leave. She had looked all right. The blood was from Hope's split lip--from the time Oren Rath had butted her--but there was no way any of them could know that. Margot thought there might have been sex, but she wasn't suggesting it. Dorsey Standish was too shocked to think. The police did not think there had been time for sex. The doctor knew no blow had been connected with Nicky's cut--probably not even a fall. "A razor?" he suggested. "Or a very sharp knife."
The police inspector, a solidly round and florid man, a year away from his retirement, found the cut phone cord in the bedroom. "A knife," he said. "A sharp knife with some weight to it." His name was Arden Bensenhaver, and he had once been a police superintendent in Toledo, but his methods had been judged as unorthodox.
He pointed at Nicky's cheek. "It's a flick wound," he said. He demonstrated the proper wrist action. "But you don't see many flick knives around here," Bensenhaver told them. "It's a flick-type of wound, but it's probably some kind of hunting or fishing knife."
Margot had described Oren Rath as a farm kid in a farm truck, except that the truck's color revealed the unnatural influence of the town and the university upon the farmers: turquoise. Dorsey Standish did not even associate this with the turquoise truck he had seen, or the woman in the cab whom he'd thought had resembled Hope. He still didn't understand anything.
"Did they leave a note?" he asked. Arden Bensenhaver stared at him. The doctor looked down at the floor. "You know, about a ransom?" Standish said. He was a literal man struggling for a literal hold. Someone, he thought, had said "kidnap"; wasn't there ransom in the case of kidnap?
"There's no note, Mr. Standish," Bensenhaver told him. "It doesn't look like that kind of thing."
"They were in the bedroom when I found Nicky outside the door," Margot said. "But she was all right when she left, Dorsey. I saw her."
They hadn't told Standish about Hope's panties, discarded on the bedroom floor; they'd been unable to find the matching bra. Margot had told Arden Bensenhaver that Mrs. Standish was a woman who usually wore a bra. She had left barefoot; they knew that, too. And Margot had recognized Dorsey's shirt on the farm kid. She'd got only a partial reading of the license plate; it was an in-state, commercial plate, and the first two numbers placed it within the county, but she hadn't gotten them all. The rear plate had been spattered with mud, the front plate was missing.
"We'll find them," Arden Bensenhaver said. "There's not much in the way of turquoise trucks around here. The county sheriff's boys will probably know it."
"Nicky, what happened?" Dorsey Standish asked the boy. He sat him on his lap. "What happened to Mommy?" The child pointed out the window. "So he was going to rape her?" Dorsey Standish asked them all.
Margot said, "Dorsey, let's wait until we know."
"Wait?" Standish said.
"You got to excuse me asking you," said Arden Bensenhaver, "but your wife wasn't seeing anybody, was she? You know."
Standish was mute at the question, but it seemed as if he were importantly considering it. "No, she wasn't," Margot told Bensenhaver. "Absolutely not."
"I got to ask Mr. Standish," Bensenhaver said.
"God," Margot said.
> "No, I don't think she was," Standish told the inspector.
"Of course she wasn't, Dorsey," Margot said. "Let's go take Nicky for a walk," she said to him. She was a busy, businesslike woman whom Hope liked very much. She was in and out of the house five times a day; she was always in the process of finishing something. Twice a year she had her phone disconnected, and connected again; it was like trying to stop smoking is for some people. Margot had children of her own but they were older--they were in school all day--and she often watched Nicky so that Hope could do something by herself. Dorsey Standish took Margot for granted; although he knew she was a kind and generous person, those were not qualities that especially arrested his attention. Margot, he realized now, wasn't especially attractive, either. She was not sexually attractive, he thought, and a bitter feeling rose up in Standish: he thought that no one would ever try to rape Margot--whereas Hope was a beautiful woman, anyone could see. Anyone would want her.
Dorsey Standish was all wrong about that; he didn't know the first thing about rape--that the victim hardly ever matters. At one time or another, people have tried to force sex on almost anyone imaginable. Very small children, very old people, even dead people; also animals.
Inspector Arden Bensenhaver, who knew a good deal about rape, announced that he had to get on with his job.
* * *
--
Bensenhaver felt better with lots of open space around him. His first employment had been the nighttime beat in a squad car, cruising old Route 2 between Sandusky and Toledo. In the summers it was a road speckled with beer joints and little homemade signs promising BOWLING! POOL! SMOKED FISH! and LIVE BAIT! And Arden Bensenhaver would drive slowly over Sandusky Bay and along Lake Erie to Toledo, waiting for the drunken carfuls of teen-agers and fishermen to play chicken with him on that unlit, two-lane road. Later, when he was the police superintendent of Toledo, Bensenhaver would be driven, in the daytime, over that harmless stretch of road. The bait shops and beer palaces and fast-food services looked so exposed in the daylight. It was like watching a once-feared bully strip down for a fight; you saw the thick neck, the dense chest, the wrist-less arms--and then, when the last shirt was off, you saw the sad, helpless paunch.
Arden Bensenhaver hated the night. Bensenhaver's big plea with the city government of Toledo had been for better lighting on Saturday nights. Toledo was a workingman's city, and Bensenhaver believed that if the city could afford to light itself, brightly, on Saturday night, half the gashings and maimings--the general bodily abusings--would stop. But Toledo had thought the idea was dim. Toledo was as unimpressed with Arden Bensenhaver's ideas as it was questioning of his methods.
Now Bensenhaver relaxed in all this open country. He had a perspective on the dangerous world that he always wanted to have: he was circling the flat, open land in a helicopter--above it all, the detached overseer observing his contained, well-lit kingdom. The county deputy said to him, "There's only one truck around here that's turquoise. It's those damn Raths."
"Raths?" Bensenhaver asked.
"There's a whole family of them," the deputy said. "I hate going out there."
"Why?" Bensenhaver asked; below him, he watched the shadow of the helicopter cross a creek, cross a road, move alongside a field of corn and a field of soybeans.
"They're all weird," the deputy said. Bensenhaver looked at him--a young man, puffy-faced and small-eyed, but pleasant; his long hair hung in a hunk under his tight hat, almost touching his shoulders. Bensenhaver thought of all the football players who wore their hair spilling out under their helmets. They could braid it, some of them, he thought. Now even lawmen looked like this. He was glad he was retiring soon; he couldn't understand why so many people wanted to look the way they did.
"'Weird'?" said Bensenhaver. Their language was all the same, too, he thought. They used just four or five words for almost everything.
"Well, I got a complaint about the younger one just last week," the deputy said. Bensenhaver noted this casual use of "I"--as in "I got a complaint"--when in fact Bensenhaver knew that the sheriff, or his office, would have received the complaint, and that the sheriff probably thought it was simple enough to send this young deputy out on it. But why did they give me such a young one for this? Bensenhaver wondered.
"The youngest brother's name is Oren," the deputy said. "They all have weird names, too."
"What was the complaint?" Bensenhaver asked; his eyes followed a long dirt driveway to what appeared to be a random dropping of barns and outbuildings, one of which he knew was the main farmhouse, where the people lived. But Arden Bensenhaver couldn't tell which one that might be. To him, all the buildings looked vaguely unfit for animals.
"Well," the deputy said, "this kid Oren was screwing around with someone's dog."
"'Screwing around'?" Bensenhaver asked patiently. That could mean anything, he thought.
"Well," the deputy said, "the people whose dog it was thought that Oren was trying to fuck it."
"Was he?" Bensenhaver asked.
"Probably," the deputy said, "but I couldn't tell anything. When I got there, Oren wasn't around--and the dog looked all right. I mean, how could I tell if the dog had been fucked?"
"Should've asked it!" said the copter pilot--a kid, Bensenhaver realized, even younger than the deputy. Even the deputy looked at him with contempt.
"One of these half-wits the National Guard gives us," the deputy whispered to Bensenhaver, but Bensenhaver had spotted the turquoise truck. It was parked out in the open, alongside a low shed. No attempt had been made to conceal it.
In a long pen a tide of pigs surged this way and that, driven crazy by the hovering helicopter. Two lean men in overalls squatted over a pig that lay sprawled at the foot of a ramp to a barn. They looked up at the helicopter, shielding their faces from the stinging dirt.
"Not so close. Put it down over on the lawn," Bensenhaver told the pilot. "You're scaring the animals."
"I don't see Oren, or the old man," the deputy said. "There's more of them than those two."
"You ask those two where Oren is," Bensenhaver said. "I want to look at that truck."
The men obviously knew the deputy; they hardly watched him approach. But they watched Bensenhaver, in his dull dun-colored suit and tie, crossing the barnyard toward the turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver didn't look at them, but he could see them just the same. They are morons, he thought. Bensenhaver had seen all kinds of bad men in Toledo--vicious men, unjustifiably angry men, dangerous men, cowardly and ballsy thieves, men who murdered for money, and men who murdered for sex. But Bensenhaver had not seen quite such benign corruption as he thought he saw on the faces of Weldon and Raspberry Rath. It gave him a chill. He thought he'd better find Mrs. Standish, quickly.
He didn't know what he was looking for when he opened the door of the turquoise pickup, but Arden Bensenhaver knew how to look for unknowns. He saw it immediately--it was easy: the slashed bra, a piece of it still tied to the hinge of the glove-compartment door; the other two pieces were on the floor. There was no blood; the bra was a soft, natural beige; very classy, Arden Bensenhaver thought. He had no style himself, but he'd seen dead people of all kinds, and he could recognize something of a person's style in the clothes. He put the pieces of the silky bra into one hand; then he put both hands into the floppy, stretched pockets of his suit jacket and started across the yard toward the deputy, who was talking to the Rath brothers.
"They haven't seen the kid all day," the deputy told Bensenhaver. "They say Oren sometimes stays away overnight."
"Ask them who's the last one who drove that truck," Bensenhaver said to the deputy; he wouldn't look at the Raths; he treated them as if they couldn't possibly understand him, directly.
"I already asked them that," the deputy said. "They say they don't remember."
"Ask them when's the last time a pretty young woman rode in that truck," Bensenhaver said, but the deputy didn't have time; Weldon Rath laughed. Bensenhaver felt grateful that the one wi
th the blotch on his face, like a wine spill, had kept quiet.
"Shit," Weldon said. "There's no 'pretty young woman' around here, no pretty young woman ever sat her ass in that truck."
"Tell him," said Bensenhaver to the deputy, "that he is a liar."
"You're a liar, Weldon," the deputy said.
Raspberry Rath said to the deputy, "Shit, who is he, coming in here, telling us what to do?"
Arden Bensenhaver took the three pieces of the bra from his pocket. He looked at the sow lying beside the men; she had one frightened eye, which appeared to be looking at all of them at once, and it was hard to tell where her other eye was looking.
"Is that a boy pig or a girl pig?" asked Bensenhaver.
The Raths laughed. "Anyone can see it's a sow," Raspberry said.
"Do you ever cut the balls off the boy pigs?" Bensenhaver asked. "Do you do that yourselves or do you have others do it for you?"
"We castrate them ourselves," said Weldon. He looked a little like a boar himself, with wild tufts of hair sprouting upward, out of his ears. "We know all about castrating. There's nothing to it."
"Well," said Bensenhaver, holding up the bra for them and the deputy to see. "Well, that's exactly what the new law provides for--in the case of these sexual crimes." Neither the deputy nor the Raths spoke. "Any sexual crime," Bensenhaver said, "is now punishable by castration. If you fuck anybody you shouldn't," said Bensenhaver, "or if you assist in the act of getting a person fucked--by not helping us to stop it--then we can castrate you."
Weldon Rath looked at his brother, Raspberry, who looked a little puzzled. But Weldon leered at Bensenhaver and said, "You do it yourselves or do you have others do it for you?" He nudged his brother. Raspberry tried to grin, pulling his birthmark askew.
But Bensenhaver was deadpan, turning the bra over and over in his hands. "Of course we don't do it," he said. "There's all new equipment for it now. The National Guard does it. That's why we got the National Guard helicopter. We just fly you right out to the National Guard hospital and fly you right back home again. There's nothing to it," he said. "As you know."