by John Irving
"We have a big family," Raspberry Rath said. "There's a lot of us brothers. We don't know from one day to the next who's riding around in what truck."
"There's another truck?" Bensenhaver asked the deputy. "You didn't tell me there was another truck."
"Yeah, it's black. I forgot," the deputy said. "They have a black one, too." The Raths nodded.
"Where is it?" Bensenhaver asked. He was contained but tense.
The brothers looked at each other. Weldon said, "I haven't seen it in a while."
"Might be that Oren has it," said Raspberry.
"Might be our father who's got it," Weldon said.
"We don't have time for this shit," Bensenhaver told the deputy, sharply. "We'll find out what they weigh--then see if the pilot can carry them." The deputy, thought Bensenhaver, is almost as much of a moron as the brothers. "Go on!" Bensenhaver said to the deputy. Then, with impatience, he turned to Weldon Rath. "Name?" he asked.
"Weldon," Weldon said.
"Weight?" Bensenhaver asked.
"Weight?" said Weldon.
"What do you weigh?" Bensenhaver asked him. "If we're going to lug you off in the copter, we got to know what you weigh."
"One-eighty-something," Weldon said.
"You?" Bensenhaver asked the younger one.
"One-ninety-something," he said. "My name's Raspberry." Bensenhaver shut his eyes.
"That's three-seventy-something," Bensenhaver told the deputy. "Go ask the pilot if we can carry that."
"You're not taking us anywhere, now, are you?" Weldon asked.
"We'll just take you to the National Guard hospital," Bensenhaver said. "Then if we find the woman, and she's all right, we'll take you home."
"But if she ain't all right, we get a lawyer, right?" Raspberry asked Bensenhaver. "One of those people in the courts, right?"
"If who ain't all right?" Bensenhaver asked him.
"Well, this woman you're looking for," Raspberry said.
"Well, if she's not all right," Bensenhaver said, "then we already got you in the hospital and we can castrate you and send you back home the same day. You boys know more about what's involved than I do," he admitted. "I've never seen it done, but it doesn't take long, does it? And it doesn't bleed much, does it?"
"But there's courts, and a lawyer!" Raspberry said.
"Of course there is," Weldon said. "Shut up."
"No, no more courts for this kind of thing--not with the new law," Bensenhaver said. "Sex crimes are special, and with the new machines, it's just so easy to castrate someone that it makes the most sense."
"Yeah!" the deputy hollered from the helicopter. "The weight's okay. We can take them."
"Shit!" Raspberry said.
"Shut up," said Weldon.
"They're not cutting my balls off!" Raspberry yelled at him. "I didn't even get to have her!" Weldon hit Raspberry so hard in the stomach that the younger man pitched over sideways and landed on the prostrate pig. It squealed, its short legs spasmed, it evacuated suddenly, and horribly, but otherwise it didn't move. Raspberry lay gasping beside the sow's stenchful waste, and Arden Bensenhaver tried to knee Weldon Rath in the balls. Weldon was too quick, though; he caught Bensenhaver's leg at the knee and tossed the old man over backwards, over Raspberry and the poor pig.
"Goddamnit," Bensenhaver said.
The deputy drew his gun and fired one shot in the air. Weldon dropped to his knees, holding his ears. "You all right, Inspector?" the deputy asked.
"Yes, of course I am," Bensenhaver said. He sat beside the pig and Raspberry. He realized, without the smallest touch of shame, that he felt toward them more or less equally. "Raspberry," he said (the name itself made Bensenhaver close his eyes), "if you want to keep your balls on, you tell us where the woman is." The man's birthmark flashed at Bensenhaver like a neon sign.
"You keep still, Raspberry," Weldon said.
And Bensenhaver told the deputy, "If he opens his mouth again, shoot his balls off, right here. Save us the trip." Then he hoped to God that the deputy was not so stupid that he would actually do it.
"Oren's got her," Raspberry told Bensenhaver. "He took the black truck."
"Where'd he take her?" Bensenhaver asked.
"Don't know," Raspberry said. "He took her for a ride."
"Was she all right when she left here?" Bensenhaver asked.
"Well, she was all right, I guess," Raspberry said. "I mean, I don't think Oren had hurt her yet. I don't think he'd even had her yet."
"Why not?" Bensenhaver asked.
"Well, if he'd already had her," Raspberry said, "why would he want to keep her?" Bensenhaver again shut his eyes. He got to his feet.
"Find out how long ago," he told the deputy. "Then fuck up that turquoise truck so they can't drive it. Then get your ass back to the copter."
"And leave them here?" the deputy asked.
"Sure," Bensenhaver said. "There'll be plenty of time to cut their balls off, later."
Arden Bensenhaver had the pilot send a message that the abductor's name was Oren Rath, and that he was driving a black, not a turquoise, pickup. This message meshed interestingly with another one: a state trooper had received a report that a man all alone in a black pickup had been driving dangerously, wandering in and out of his rightful driving lane, "looking like he was drunk, or stoned, or something else." The trooper had not followed this up because, at the time, he'd thought he was supposed to be more concerned about a turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver, of course, couldn't know that the man in the black pickup hadn't really been alone--that, in fact, Hope Standish had been lying with her head in his lap. The news simply gave Bensenhaver another of his chills: if Rath was alone, he had already done something to the woman. Bensenhaver yelled to the deputy to hurry over to the copter--that they were looking for a black pickup that had last been seen on the bypass that intersects the system of county roads near the town called Sweet Wells.
"Know it?" Bensenhaver asked.
"Oh, yeah," the deputy said.
They were in the air again, below them the pigs once more in a panic. The poor, medicated pig that had been fallen on was lying as still as when they'd come. But the Rath brothers were fighting--it appeared, quite savagely--and the higher and farther from them that the helicopter moved, the more the world returned to a level of sanity of which Arden Bensenhaver approved. Until the tiny fighting figures, below and to the east, were no more than miniatures to him, and he was so far from their blood and fear that when the deputy said he thought that Raspberry could whip Weldon, if Raspberry just didn't allow himself to get scared, Bensenhaver laughed his Toledo deadpan laugh.
"They're animals," he said to the deputy, who, despite whatever young man's cruelty and cynicism were in him, seemed a little shocked. "If they both killed each other," Bensenhaver said, "think of the food they would have eaten in their lifetimes that other human beings could now eat." The deputy realized that Bensenhaver's lie about the new law--about the instant castration for sexual crimes--was more than a farfetched story: for Bensenhaver, although he knew it was clearly not the law, it was what he thought the law should be. It was one of Arden Bensenhaver's Toledo methods.
"That poor woman," Bensenhaver said; he wrung the pieces of her bra in his thick-veined hands. "How old is this Oren?" he asked the deputy.
"Sixteen, maybe seventeen," the deputy said. "Just a kid." The deputy was at least twenty-four himself.
"If he's old enough to get a hard-on," Arden Bensenhaver said, "he's old enough to have it cut off."
* * *
--
But what should I cut? Oh, where can I cut him? wondered Hope--the long, thin fisherman's knife now snug in her hand. Her pulse thrummed in her palm, but to Hope it felt as if the knife had a heartbeat of its own. She brought her hand very slowly up to her hip, up over the edge of the thrashed seat to where she could glimpse the blade. Should I use the saw-toothed edge or the one that looks so sharp? she thought. How do you kill a man with one of these? Alongside the sweating, swive
ling ass of Oren Rath that knife in her hand was a cool and distant miracle. Do I slash him or stick him? She wished she knew. Both his hot hands were under her buttocks, lifting her, jerking up. His chin dug into the hollow near her collarbone like a heavy stone. Then she felt him slip one of his hands out from under her, and his fingers, reaching for the floor, grazed her hand that held the knife.
"Move!" he grunted. "Now move." She tried to arch her back but couldn't; she tried to twist her hips, but she couldn't. She felt him groping for his own peculiar rhythm, trying to find the last pace that would make him come. His hand--under her now--spread over the small of her back; his other hand clawed the floor.
Then she knew: he was looking for the knife. And when his fingers found the empty sheath, she would be in trouble.
"Aaahhh!" he cried.
Quick! she thought. Between the ribs? Into his side--and slide the knife up--or straight down as hard as she could between the shoulder blades, reaching all the way through his back to a lung, until she felt the point of the thing poking her own crushed breast? She waved her arm in the air above his hunching back. She saw the oily blade glint--and his hand, suddenly rising, flung his empty pants back toward the steering wheel.
He was trying to push himself up off her, but his lower half was locked into his long-sought rhythm; his hips shuddered in little spasms he couldn't seem to control, while his chest rose up, off her chest, and his hands shoved hard against her shoulders. His thumbs crawled toward her throat. "My knife?" he asked. His head whipped back and forth; he looked behind him, he looked above him. His thumbs pried her chin up; she was trying to hide her Adam's apple.
Then she scissored his pale ass. He could not stop pumping down there, though his brain must have known there was suddenly another priority. "My knife?" he said. And she reached over his shoulder and (faster than she herself could see it happen) she slid the slim-edged side of the blade across his throat. For a second, she saw no wound. She only knew that he was choking her. Then one of his hands left her throat and went to find his own. He hid from her the gash she'd expected to see. But at last she saw the dark blood springing between his tight fingers. He brought his hand away--he was searching for her hand, the one that held the knife--and from his slashed throat a great bubble burst over her. She heard a sound like someone sucking the bottom of a drink with a clogged straw. She could breathe again. Where were his hands? she wondered. They seemed, at once, to loll beside her on the seat and to be darting like panicked birds behind his back.
She stabbed the long blade into him, just above his waist, thinking that perhaps a kidney was there, because the blade went in so easily, and out again. Oren Rath laid his cheek against her cheek like a child. He'd have screamed then, of course, but her first slash had cut cleanly through his windpipe and his vocal cords.
Hope now tried the knife higher up, but encountered a rib, or something difficult; she had to probe and, unsatisfied, withdrew the knife after only a few inches. He was flopping on her now, as if he wanted to get off her. His body was sending distress signals to itself, but the signals were not getting all the way through. He heaved himself against the back of the seat, but his head wouldn't stay up and his penis, still moving, attached him still to Hope. She took advantage of this opportunity to insert the knife again. It slipped into his belly at the side and moved straightaway to within an inch of his navel before engaging some major obstruction there--and his body slumped back on top of her, trapping her wrist. But this was easy; she twisted her hand and the slippery knife came free. Something to do with his bowels relaxed. Hope was overwhelmed with his wetness and with his smell. She let the knife drop to the floor.
Oren Rath was emptying, by quartfuls--by gallons. He felt actually lighter on top of her. Their bodies were so slick that she slipped out from under him easily. She shoved him over on his back and crouched beside him on the truck's puddled floor. Hope's hair was gravid with blood--his throat had fountained over her. When she blinked, her eyelashes stuck to her cheeks. One of his hands twitched and she slapped it. "Stop," she said. His knee rose, then flopped down. "Stop it, stop now," Hope said. She meant his heart, his life.
She would not look at his face. Against the dark slime coating his body, the white, translucent condom hugged his shrunken cock like a congealed fluid quite foreign to the human matter of blood and bowel. Hope recalled a zoo, and a gob of camel spit upon her crimson sweater.
His balls contracted. That made her angry. "Stop," she hissed. The balls were small and rounded and tight; then they fell slack. "Please stop," she whispered. "Please die." There was a tiny sigh, as if someone had let out a breath too small to bother taking back. But Hope squatted for some time beside him, feeling her heart pound and confusing her pulse with his own. He had died fairly quickly, she realized later.
Out the open door of the pickup, Oren Rath's clean white feet, his drained toes, pointed upward in the sunlight. Inside the sun-baked cab, the blood was coagulating. Everything clotted. Hope Standish felt the tiny hairs on her arms stiffen and tug her skin as her skin dried. Everything that was slick was turning sticky.
I should get dressed, Hope thought. But something seemed wrong with the weather.
Out the truck windows Hope saw the sunlight flicker, like a lamp whose light is shone through the blades of a fast fan. And the gravel at the roadside was lifted up in little swirls, and dry shards and stubble from last year's corn were whisked along the flat, bare ground as if a great wind was blowing--but not from the usual directions: this wind appeared to be blowing straight down. And the noise! It was like being in the afterblow of a speeding truck, but there was still no traffic on the road.
It's a tornado! Hope thought. She hated the Midwest with its strange weather; she was an Easterner who could understand a hurricane. But tornadoes! She'd never seen one, but the weather forecasts were always full of "tornado watches." What does one watch for? she'd always wondered. For this, she guessed--this whirling din all around her. These clods of earth flying. The sun turned brown.
She was so angry, she struck the cool, viscid thigh of Oren Rath. After she had lived through this, now there was a fucking tornado, too! The noise resembled a train passing over the pelted truck. Hope imagined the funnel descending, other trucks and cars already caught up in it. Somehow, she could hear, their engines were still running. Sand flew in the open door, stuck to her glazed body; she groped for her dress--discovered the empty armholes where the sleeves had been; it would have to do.
But she would have to step outside the truck to put it on. There was no room to maneuver beside Rath and his gore, now dappled with roadside sand. And out there, she had no doubt, her dress would be torn from her hands and she would be sucked up naked into the sky. "I am not sorry," she whispered. "I am not sorry!" she screamed, and again she struck at the body of Rath.
Then a voice, a terrible voice--loud as the loudest loudspeaker--shook her in the cab. "IF YOU'RE IN THERE, COME OUT! PUT YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD. COME OUT. CLIMB INTO THE BACK OF THE PICKUP AND LIE THE FUCK DOWN!"
I am actually dead, thought Hope. I'm already in the sky and it's the voice of God. She was not religious and it seemed fitting, to Hope: if there were a God, God would have a bullying, loudspeaker voice.
"COME OUT NOW," God said. "DO IT NOW."
Oh, why not? she thought. You big fucker. What can you do to me next? Rape was an outrage even God couldn't understand.
* * *
--
In the helicopter, shuddering above the black truck, Arden Bensenhaver barked into the megaphone. He was sure that Mrs. Standish was dead. He could not tell the sex of the feet he saw protruding from the open door of the cab, but the feet hadn't moved during the helicopter's descent, and they seemed so naked and drained of any color in the sunlight that Bensenhaver was sure that they were dead feet. That Oren Rath could be the one who was dead had not crossed the deputy's or Bensenhaver's mind.
But they couldn't understand why Rath would have abandoned the truck, aft
er performing his foul acts, and so Bensenhaver had told the pilot to hold the helicopter just above the pickup. "If he's still in there with her," Bensenhaver told the deputy, "maybe we can scare the bastard to death."
When Hope Standish brushed between those stiff feet and huddled alongside the cab, trying to shield her eyes from the flying sand, Arden Bensenhaver felt his finger go limp against the trigger of the megaphone. Hope tried to wrap her face in her flapping dress but it snapped around her like a torn sail; she felt her way along the truck toward the tailgate, cringing against the stinging gravel that clung to the places on her body where the blood hadn't quite dried.
"It's the woman," the deputy said.
"Back off!" Bensenhaver told the pilot.
"Jesus, what happened to her?" the deputy asked, frightened. Bensenhaver roughly handed him the megaphone.
"Move away," he said to the pilot. "Set this thing down across the road."
Hope felt the wind shift, and the clamor in the tornado's funnel seemed to pass over her. She kneeled at the side of the road. Her wild dress quieted in her hands. She held it to her mouth because the dust was choking her.
A car came along, but Hope was unaware of it. The driver passed in the proper lane--the black pickup off the road to his right, the helicopter settling down off the road to his left. The bloody, praying woman, naked and caked with grit, took no notice of him driving past her. The driver had a vision of an angel on a trip back from hell. The driver's reaction was so delayed that he was a hundred yards beyond everything he'd seen before he surprisingly attempted a U-turn in the road. Without slowing down. His front wheels caught the soft shoulder and slithered him across the road ditch and into the soft spring earth of a plowed bean field, where his car sank up to his bumpers and he could not open his door. He rolled down his window and peered across the mire to the road--like a man who'd been sitting peacefully on a dock when the dock broke free from the shore, and he was drifting out to sea.
"Help!" he cried. The vision of the woman had so terrified him that he feared there might be more like her around, or that whoever had made her look that way might be in search of another victim.
"Jesus Christ," said Arden Bensenhaver to the pilot, "you'll have to go see if that fool is all right. Why do they let everyone drive a car?" Bensenhaver and the deputy dropped out of the helicopter and into the same lush muck that had trapped the driver. "Goddamnit," Bensenhaver said.