43

After the two silent men helped Rufus to the toilet, where they let him sit long enough to take care of business, they led him to the chair and tied him up again.

He wasn’t sure where Savanna was, but he feared she might be out there trying to mess with Earl. He could only hope Earl would see through her, that he would recognize her as a predator, but he had no faith in that. Savanna was nothing short of brilliant when it came to weaponizing sex. Aim for a man’s weak spots and dissect him piece by fucking piece.

Rufus wanted to scream, but he didn’t. He didn’t even move. He was tired. Tired in his bones. His lungs even felt tired as he breathed. But he wouldn’t sleep. He couldn’t allow himself to sleep. There was something waiting for him in sleep he simply wasn’t strong enough to deal with.

He heard the two men shuffling around in the other room. They never spoke unless it was to answer a question from Savanna, and then they used only monosyllables, saying no more than was necessary. Despite how he should feel about the two men, Rufus found himself developing a kind of begrudging respect for them. They seemed more like objects than subjects, unable to do anything but react to the world they had been placed in, automatons who’d been cursed with a free will they did not know how to access.

They brought him food periodically, usually fast food. Burger King, he thought, which was telling, because the only Burger King in Coulee County was near Brethren, so he was assuming the house was in the mountains not too far from there.

It began to storm. Thunder rumbled dimly at first but soon grew stronger, rocking the cabin with devastating booms that might as well have been dynamite exploding in the front yard. The rain came next, pouring as if from a tipped bucket onto the tin roof. Rufus felt some on his face as it slipped through a leak in the roof.

Another drop hit his eye and he felt his lid flutter. He saw something, a bare bookshelf, nearly covered in a net of spiderwebs. His other eye opened as well and the bookshelf came into focus. A single spider skittered along its web, moving up to the top shelf and disappearing into a crack in the wood.

Rufus tried to blink again, tried to will himself back to the comfort of blindness, but he was incapable of doing so. Somehow, he could see again. Somehow, he was able to perceive the world as it was, not as it pretended to be.

He rolled his eyes, rotating them first to the right and then up to the left and back again. It was dark, but that didn’t matter. He could still see the boxes pushed against the wall, stacked haphazardly like steps leading up to the watermarked ceiling. He traced the dark water stain to its source and rolled his eye up just in time to see another drop of rainwater falling. It landed in his open eye, and when it did, his peripheral vision grew. He saw everything then, a stone fireplace, cold and silent; a panorama of junk and cobwebs and bare hardwood floors littered with dust bunnies that appeared to be somehow alive and inanimate at once.

But it was the door that drew him. To the left of the bookshelf, slightly ajar, but not enough to see on the other side of it, was a brown, wooden door. A red ribbon was tied to the doorknob, and it fluttered in the breeze that came through the slight opening.

The rain had stopped. There was just that breeze from outside the cabin. He waited, riveted, unable to look away, as the door began to open wider and stronger winds rushed in from the wild places in the mountains. The red ribbon slipped free from the door knob and blew across the room, landing on Rufus’s face, tickling his nose and cheek. He tried to reach for it, to pull it away, to scratch the itch, but he couldn’t.

Your hands are tied, dumbass. But that wasn’t it. Not quite. He couldn’t even strain against the ropes. He was paralyzed. That was when he understood.

She was back.

A shadow covered the door. It was a narrow shadow and not a narrow shadow, because there were a dozen or more iterations of the shadow that shuttered off from the original, like flashes from a strobe light, except there was no light. Which was impossible. You couldn’t see without light. Hell, he was blind, but he could still see, so nothing made sense in this world he’d slipped into.

The shadow girl stepped forward and all her iterations came together, closing rank until they snapped into a single image that squeezed through the doorway awkwardly. She was just the shape of a body, head, torso, and limbs, all featureless and dark, and she moved with a stuttering gait more like a wind-up toy than a person.

He couldn’t look away as she stepped over, chopping her steps unnaturally. She made it close enough for him to touch her if he’d been able to move his hands to do so. Her body bent unnaturally until her face was a mere inch from his. Her face was a void, a horrifying nothing; looking into it felt like being more than blind; it felt like being dead and more than dead too. Looking into her face was like looking into something worse than death. It was looking into a life lived wrong.

Rufus tried without success to speak, to banish the shadow girl. He wanted to tell her she was dead and it was okay to be dead, that it was better than being alive, and if he could make this feeling go away by dying, he’d do it in a heartbeat. But he feared that wouldn’t work, that this shadow girl lived in a place that would allow her to follow him anywhere.

So he did what he always did and wished he could go back and make a different choice.

That didn’t work either. He was forced to stare into the void, the abyss, and like some famous philosopher had said, the abyss was staring right back at him.

*   *   *

The moment had come when he’d least expected it. The third thing that marked his life. The two weeks after the incident with the boys and Harriet passed in a muddy slog. Rain and more rain, falling from nearly sunless skies, accompanied his already dark mood. There had been a change in the students, too. Ever since the day he’d tried to help Harriet, the boys had treated him with subtle indifference. There wasn’t outright defiance. No, it was more sinister, and somehow worse. They often smiled at each other knowingly when he was around. Sometimes one of them would pretend not to hear him when he gave instructions. He’d repeat himself, his voice louder, and only at that point would the boy feign ignorance and say with a half smile that he hadn’t heard Rufus.

The weather grew darker as October turned to November. Rufus felt a shift in his relationship with Harden and Deloach. They seemed constantly disappointed in him. Much like the boys, neither man actually said anything directly, but it was what they didn’t say that Rufus noticed. Gone were the pats on the back, the words of encouragement, the talk of him one day taking over for Old Man Irwin. Instead, both men barely acknowledged his presence.

At least until it happened.

It was something he had hardly even dared dream about. Sure, he found Savanna attractive. No, that wasn’t exactly right. He found her more than attractive. She was intoxicating. Being around her was like being drunk. Sometimes he found himself forgetting all of his problems, all of his doubts, and just soaking her up. The smell of her, the way she seemed to appear more vivid than nearly anything else. It was as if the rest of the world were in black and white and she was in Technicolor.

The night had been rainy again. Lightning flashed outside and Rufus smelled wood smoke. Probably a tree struck somewhere. A shadow crossed the yard. He assumed it was Mrs. Duncan, bringing him leftovers. Except it was raining pretty hard, and she didn’t always get out if the weather wasn’t nice. She’d apologize the next day, and he’d tell her there was no need because he was a grown man and should be able to handle his own supper. But the truth was, he did sort of depend on her. He was usually exhausted by the time he returned to the barn, and she was a hell of a cook. Her leftovers were better than just about anything he’d ever eaten.

He sat up, unsure what to do because he was already in bed, wearing nothing but a pair of briefs, still wet from the long, soggy walk home in the rain.

He’d just have her put it on the table by the door, and then when she shut the door, he’d get up and retrieve it.

The knock came, a series of light raps.

“Come on in,” he said. “Get out of the rain.”

When the door swung open, Rufus did a double take. It wasn’t Mrs. Duncan but her daughter Savanna. She held a covered dish, her hands and arms shiny with rain, her white blouse soaked so thoroughly it lay flat and translucent against her skin.

Rufus looked away, finding the barn rafters, the dark hollows where he sometimes heard something scurrying late at night, causing him to close his eyes and sink a little deeper under the covers. He felt like doing the same thing now.

Her breasts were plainly visible beneath the white blouse. Surely she knew this. Didn’t she?

“I brought your supper, Rufus,” she said.

“You can put it on the table there. I’m sorry you had to come out in the rain.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I like the rain. It feels good to get wet sometimes.”

He wasn’t ready for this. He let her last comment sort of hang but quickly realized that wasn’t what he wanted to do. He tried to think of something to say, something that would smooth things over, make it all less awkward. “What’s for dinner?” That was all he could come up with. Jesus, he was an idiot.

“Well, if you’d look, you would see it’s your favorite. I asked Mama to cook it for you special.”

He kept his eyes on the rafters. Maybe the rat would show itself. Maybe it would come scurrying out and end this moment of impossibility, break his trance, make the world go back to itself, because … because …

“Rufus?”

“What?”

“Look at me.”

With a nearly agonizing slowness, he moved his eyes along the center rafter, toward the front of the barn. When he saw the front side of the barn, he turned his chin down, and his gaze followed, easing toward the door frame and where she stood, her blonde hair wet and frizzy around her plump face.

“Rufus,” she said, stepping forward.

“What?” His eyes were on her face, nothing else.

“Look at me.”

And he did. He took her all in, his eyes only lingering on her breasts for a second before he pulled back his gaze and framed her like a flower in a field, blooming despite the hard rain. She was soaked, but the rain couldn’t keep her from being what she was, which was an undeniably sexual creature. Her back arched and his eyes were drawn to her breasts again, her wet flesh, the dark of her navel beneath the blouse, which stretched and pressed itself into her like a second layer of skin.

“I know you like me,” she said.

“How …?”

She held a finger to her lips and shushed him. “I never like talking to boys too much. Some of my friends, they go on and on about how their boyfriends won’t talk to them, how they only want to …” She smiled slyly, nodding at him, as if encouraging him to finish her sentence.

“Only want to what?” he said, his throat dry, his voice hoarse and small.

“Only want to, you know.” She stepped a little closer.

“I’m not dressed,” he said.

“Oh, okay. Does it make you nervous I’m so close?”

“A little bit.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“What?”

“Being nervous.”

He must have given her an odd look when she said this. He couldn’t remember his exact reaction, but her words had stuck with him for many years. He’d often wonder if that should have been his first clue. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized he’d been too far gone to recognize clues. There are times in life when you are oblivious to everything except that one person or thing in your field of vision. That person you can’t erase from your memory no matter how hard you try. That person whose hold over you is purely physical, purely experiential, but so intoxicating that quitting them is worse than quitting smoking or drinking or even breathing.

“Well, I understand it,” he said. “I feel it now.”

“I can relax you,” she said.

“How will you do that?”

“First, you got to look at me.”

He looked at her again. Her hands were at her waist. She clutched the bottom of her blouse and tugged it upward, pulling it over her head.

“Keep looking,” she said with a grin, “or you might hurt my feelings.”

“I wouldn’t want to do that,” he said.

“No, course not.” Her hands went to the front of her blue jeans, and she ripped all the buttons on the fly open in one swift moment. The next part wasn’t so easy. She wore her blue jeans tight, and they were wet, so shrugging them off was like shedding a particularly tight skin.

When they were finally on the floor next to her blouse, she was standing right beside Rufus’s bed.

“You ain’t never done nothing like this, have you?”

“No.”

That made her smile, and he remembered thinking how he’d assumed when girls found out he wasn’t experienced, they would be put off. But not Savanna. He seemed incapable of displeasing her.

She reached for his hand and placed it against her belly. “Touch me wherever you want.”

He started tentatively, but she began to grow impatient with him. “That’s not the spot,” she said. “Down there.”

He moved his hand down and found her center. Her body reacted immediately, and the way she shook and moved in time with his hand was the most wonderful thing Rufus had ever experienced.

The rest of it happened as in a dream. She climbed onto him, and there was a kind of vicious bucking, her body riding his so fast and hard he almost stopped her because he wanted to slow down to feel her against him, to soak it all up, but it seemed she had other ideas.

She always had other ideas, he realized later.