Bumpity-bumpity-bump.
There goes the train, over the hill.
Bumpity-bumpity-bump.
Here comes the car, out of the drive.
Sleeping in cars, that was the best. When she was little, dozing in the backseat at night, wrapped in her blanket, Maggie next to her, the wheels on the road, the hum and rumble of the engine. Sometimes she wanted to stay there forever, in the dark, always moving. She wished they’d never get home.
The blanket. She’d gotten tangled up in it somehow; it was in her mouth; she couldn’t move. I have to move, I have to get up, she thought. We’re almost there.
Bumpity-bumpity-bump.
Smell of raw gas. Of exhaust. Warm metal. Pressed into her cheek. Dark, all dark. A bump, a jolt. Her skull slammed against the metal. Pain echoed through her head like a struck drum, and there was something in her mouth – a washcloth, maybe. She couldn’t spit it out, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She tried to move, to sit up, to do something. Her hands – her hands were behind her back, tied there, she could feel the rough twine rubbing her wrists raw, and she thrashed around, struggling to draw in a breath, her chest aching from the strain, until finally she lay still.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
A car trunk. She was in a car trunk.
What had happened?
She’d come out of Charlie’s place, and something … some-one … Her head hurt. Someone had hit her.
Hit her and tied her up and locked her in the trunk of a car.
She screamed, once, twice, but with the cloth in her mouth it hardly made a sound. She kicked out with her feet, striking metal with her bare toes, and the pain from that was enough to make her stop. Think.
Did she want whoever was driving to hear her?
He was going to kill her.
She was sobbing now, and she told herself, I have to stop. I won’t be able to breathe.
But he was going to kill her. How could there be any doubt? The way he’d hit her … He’d hit her with something. A blow like that, that could have killed her, and he didn’t care.
Where was he taking her?
The car bounced and swerved, moving slowly. There was something else: a smell. What was it? She’d smelled it before.
Think. Think.
Her wrists were tied, but her feet weren’t. She could run if she got the chance.
The car stopped. She lay there in the trunk, waiting. Lie still, she told herself. Don’t move.
Spoiled babyfood. That was what it smelled like.
He was opening the trunk – she knew that from the click and creak of metal – and a little light came on inside the trunk. Don’t look, she told herself. The man leaned in and scooped her up, grunting, like he was lifting a heavy sack of flour. She let herself go limp in his arms. Corpse Pose. Don’t resist the pull of the earth.
He walked a few paces. Who was he? The policeman? Dark as it was, with her head purposefully lolling, eyes halfclosed, she couldn’t really tell.
Abruptly, he released her, letting her roll off his arms. She cried out a little; she couldn’t help it, the cry muffled by the cloth in her mouth. But the landing wasn’t what she expected: The ground yielded.
Plastic bags. She’d landed on plastic bags. Fast-food wrappers and Styrofoam. Soiled napkins, plastic forks. Banana peels and melon rinds. Animal parts. A flapping of birds.
The dump. They were at the dump.
She lay there and didn’t move.
The man walked away. She heard his footsteps, making soft hissing noises from the exhalation of air trapped in layer upon layer of plastic bags.
Was he leaving? Maybe he thought she was already dead, or dying.
She lifted up her head. She could see him lean over the open trunk of the car, pull something out, and in the light from the trunk she could see what it was. A baseball bat.
Now – move now. She rolled up to a sitting position, got to her knees, managed to stand, took a few staggering steps. He caught up to her easily. Her arm took the first blow, right above the elbow. She stayed on her feet, stumbled forward, and he swung again, and this time the bat smashed against her hip. She fell, landing on her side, but her legs kept moving, scrabbling through the plastic bags and garbage, her chin scraping on a dented can, and the bat struck again, hitting her shoulder, and she rolled onto her back, and she could see him standing over her, resting the bat on his shoulder.
She rolled over again, onto her side, then onto her stomach, too slowly, and the bat slammed against her ribs, and she rolled once more, and suddenly she was falling, falling into space, into nothing again.
There was a rush of birds crying out, beating their wings, feathers and claws brushing against her as she landed. She lay there, stunned. Took in what she lay on: stuffed garbage bags and cracked tires. From above she heard a bird scream, the man give a surprised shout, and then a chorus of barking dogs. She struggled to sit up, crawled on her knees, then half fell off the pile she’d landed on and crawled behind it. Crouched down. Could he see her? The dogs kept barking. A couple men, shouting at them. Then, finally, a car engine starting and the car driving away.
She stayed where she was. She thought she might pass out. It was so hard to breathe, and everything … everything hurt. Her head …
Just lie down. Just for a few minutes.
Then she heard the car engine and saw the headlights coming around the hill.
She burrowed into the garbage, curled herself into a ball. The car moved slowly down the road. She couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything except the black garbage bags around her, but she could hear its low idle, the crunch of tires on dirt and gravel.
Had it stopped?
No. The car kept moving, slowly, until finally she couldn’t hear it anymore.
She stood up, dizzy and shaking.
There was some light here, from a few utility lamps strung here and there on skinny poles, and ambient light from town, too. Not enough to see much about where she was, but enough to look up and have some idea how far she’d fallen. A story’s worth, at least. Maybe two. The way she’d landed, on decades of garbage bags and tires, it was like one of those stuntpeople falling into an air mattress. If she hadn’t been at a dump, she really would have been hurt.
That thought made her laugh.
Don’t laugh, she told herself. You’ll choke.
She had to get rid of the gag somehow.
She tried lying down again, thinking maybe she could bring her arms from behind her back under her legs, get them in front of her. She’d seen that done on TV, hadn’t she?
The pain in her arm and shoulder sent a wave of white across her eyes, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was. No use. The way her hands were tied, rope looped multiple times around her wrists and forearms, she couldn’t do it.
She stood up again. It was harder this time.
In the dim, gray light, she made out a rectangular shape, large, tilted at an angle, about her height, just a few yards away. What was it?
A refrigerator. She moved toward it.
The doors had been removed. Where the bottom of the freezer door would have been attached, there was still a metal hinge, a blunted projection with a ragged hole where the bolt had once been.
Could that work?
She knelt down so the hinge was roughly even with her mouth. Came at it from the side, opened her mouth as wide as she could, pushed against the hinge, trying to catch it in the folds of the cloth, but it slid off. She tried again. Same result. And again.
She cried out in frustration but could barely make a sound. I just want to sleep, she thought. Curl up right here.
No, she told herself. No. You could die if you do that. Suffocate. Try again. One more time. Just try.
The hole in the hinge, she thought. It had sharp edges on it from where they’d pried out the bolt.
She tried to slide the hinge underneath the cloth. On the first attempt, she shoved the cloth in even farther. Gagged on it. Tried again. It moved but caught on her teeth. Again. This time she could feel the cloth catch, just a little. She opened her mouth so wide that her jaw hurt. A little more. Just a little more. The cloth moved, inch by inch.
And then it was out.
She fell back, gasping. The air was so sweet. Even the dump smells were beautiful.
She let herself lie there for a minute. Just to rest.
But I can’t stay here, she thought vaguely. The man had left, but would he come back? Could he be looking for her now? Driving on the road that circled the dump? She hadn’t thought of that.
A fresh rush of adrenaline got her to her feet.
Her feet. She’d lost her flip-flops at some point. It wasn’t too bad at first – no cans or glass, that stuff had already been sorted and gleaned. But still she stepped on things, things that hurt, and she couldn’t stop to look and see what they were. Animal bones, maybe. Shards of hard plastic.
She picked her way through the bags and tires, trying to find some kind of path. Her hip was stiffening up; every step on that side sent bolts of pain shooting down her leg, and she hadn’t gone very far before she lost her balance and fell. She didn’t know if she could stand up again, with her hip like that, without her arms to aid her, with no firm surface.
Use your core! Use your core! She’d had a trainer once who said that nearly every set, regardless of the exercise, and Michelle heard her voice now.
She’d never liked that trainer.
Somehow she stood.
The third time she fell, she thought, That’s it. I can’t do it. Maybe she could lie there for a while. Maybe in the morning someone would find her. Someone who could help.
She thought about that some more. Remembered the first time she’d come here, the buzzard sitting on the cow head, picking at the hide and the scraps of flesh the butchers had left. That’s what the man had wanted for her. He’d wanted to beat her to death and throw her body over the side, into the garbage, for the birds to eat.
Well, fuck that.
Use your core!
She stood.
She just had to get to the road. It wasn’t too far. She risked running into the man in the car, she knew that, but it had been a while now, and he hadn’t come back, and she knew she could not continue much longer through this landscape of garbage bags and abandoned couches.
She could see the road, just over a ridge of trash.
Only a few more steps. Past the crumpled baby carriage. Around the torn mattress, bleeding springs and stuffing.
Here was the road. She stepped onto it, feeling like she was climbing off a rocking boat onto solid land. Beautiful road, she thought.
She hesitated for a moment, swaying. Up or down?
How had the man gotten into the dump? It couldn’t be open now, could it? Were there gates at the bottom? She couldn’t remember. There was a guard shack, she remembered that. What had he done, bribed the guards?
The man had gone down, hadn’t he? Could he be waiting for her there?
She wasn’t sure she could even make it that far.
Up. What choice did she have?
Was there anyone up on top who could help her? Anyone at all?
I’ll get to lie down, she told herself. There were shacks up there, she remembered those. A table, with umbrellas. Maybe someone had some water. People lived up there, didn’t they?
Up and up and up.
Her feet hurt. She’d cut them, she thought, but she wasn’t sure. Stepping wrong, the pain in her hip made her cry out. A lot of things hurt, actually. It hurt when she breathed. Her arm, too, every time it moved. Her head.
Count to ten, she told herself. Take ten steps. One step at a time. Okay. Now ten more.
Ten more steps. She could do that.
She could see the top of the dump now, stretching out ahead of her, a vast plateau ringed and dotted by mounds of garbage that in the near dark took on the contours of hills and shrubbery, the resting birds moving now and again like ripples on a wave.
Over there were some shacks, she thought – rectangular, hard angles against all the softer curves. There were little lights on in some of them, and she thought she even heard music.
She stumbled toward the lights.
‘Hello?’ she called out. Tried to anyway. Her voice cracked and broke. ‘Hello,’ she said again. It came out a whisper.
She kept walking. Were there people there, sitting at a table? Drinking beers, playing cards? Waiting for sleep, and then for the next day to begin? There would be work for them in the morning, wouldn’t there? Garbage to sort. Cans and plastic bottles. Copper wire from junked appliances. Maybe a T-shirt to wear.
She thought she saw someone at a table stand up, someone else pull him down. Were they ignoring her? How could that be? She had her hands tied behind her back, for fuck’s sake.
They probably hadn’t seen what the man had done to her. Or maybe they’d seen it and were afraid. Well, no one wants trouble, right? She could understand that.
‘Can someone help me anyway?’ she whispered. Or thought.
When she fell this time, she didn’t get up again. That’s okay, she told herself. It’s warm enough out here. I can just rest awhile.