SUMMER 1977
The room seemed to expand and contract, maybe due to the day’s heat or the relative coolness of the evening. Like a body breathing, Martha thought. The light and absence of light made rooms within the room. At times the others disappeared within those shadowy folds, only to reemerge hours later in a new window of light.
She was terrified of Tanner but unsure whether her fear was of him or the things he said, his voice like the answer to the question at the center of her body. Whenever she imagined grabbing Izzy and running from the room, Tanner spoke again, and Martha realized they needed to stay.
Misty was right. Martha could exist in two places at the same time. Here in this stifling room, and in the space that opened when Izzy saw the new sun. Watching Izzy staggering, arms raised toward her vision, Martha felt Misty in that opening, waiting on the other side.
“Someone’s coming.”
Danny stood in the doorway, looking down the path in the last of the sunset, the fading orange outside world. Tanner joined him, the two men shoulder to shoulder.
Izzy watched, sitting with her back against the far wall. Two figures approached on the path. From their size and the heavy swagger of their walk she could tell they were men. As they got closer she saw that they were about her age, college boys, maybe, handsome in a soap-commercial way. A little scuffed now from the walk, their faces streaked with dirt and sweat, their hair matted from the heat. Both were humped with large backpacks like turtle shells. One wore an Oklahoma State T-shirt, the other a grimy white tank top.
Tank Top smiled at Danny and Tanner, raising his hand in a weary greeting. His arms and chest were sunburned lobster red. Izzy hadn’t considered that others might arrive at the room. It felt like an intrusion. Anyone else entering might pierce the skin of what was happening, popping it like a bubble.
“So this is the place,” Tank Top called out. “We heard there was something new on the trail.”
Oklahoma State shrugged off his backpack. Tank Top guzzled from a canteen. Tanner and Danny stayed in the doorway. The woman in the corner lifted her camera but Ernst told her to put it away. She ignored him. Film began to whir.
“Holy shit,” Tank Top said, seeing Tanner up close for the first time. Then: “Sorry, man. You must get that a lot, right?” He stepped toward the door, still smiling.
“You have to go around,” Tanner said. “Or back the way you came.”
“What? Why?”
“This place isn’t open to you.”
“What are you talking about?” Tank Top looked into the room. “What’s going on in there?”
“You heard him.” Danny’s voice was hard with threat. “Go around or turn around.”
Oklahoma State unzipped his backpack and reached in. Danny said, “Stop,” and he stopped, one hand deep in the bag.
Tank Top was still looking into the room: at the woman filming, then Ernst, then Martha and Izzy sitting against the wall.
“Are you okay in there?”
He was speaking to Izzy. She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to tear at his big idiot face, his accusing eyes.
He stepped forward and Danny shoved him back. Tank Top stumbled and fell on his backside in the dirt. Oklahoma State pulled a pocketknife from his backpack, holding it out awkwardly. Danny grabbed his wrist, twisted, clubbed him in the side of the head with a grapefruit-size fist. Oklahoma State let out a groan and fell. Danny moved toward Tank Top, who scrambled in the dirt. Get away from me get the fuck away from me. Danny kicked his chest and back, his head. Oklahoma State rolled on the ground, ears between his elbows, moaning.
“Stop,” Ernst said. “Make him stop.”
Tanner turned to face the room.
Izzy felt overrun with rage. She wanted to be out there with Danny, kicking, driving the men away.
“Do you want him to stop?” Tanner asked her.
Izzy shook her head.
“Not until they’re gone,” she said.
“We’re leaving,” Ernst said.
“Please keep your voice—”
“We’re not staying here. This is crazy.”
Ernst grabbed his girlfriend’s rucksack, shoving her gear inside. She pulled it back, holding the bag and her camera to her chest. A small box of film fell to the floor.
“You want to stay?” he asked, incredulous. “They just beat the shit out of a guy.”
“It got out of hand,” she said. “They were protecting—”
“What are they protecting?” Ernst turned to Izzy, his face wrenched with fear and disgust. “This has gone way too far.”
The two college boys were gone. Tank Top had finally got to his feet and dragged Oklahoma State up and they ran back the way they came. An awkward, embarrassing flight. Izzy hated them but she also knew that feeling, trying to run from shame. They would run forever. She imagined them still running years from now in the scorched landscape the new sun would leave behind. Like figures from a parable, a pair of bad examples.
Danny stalked the outside perimeter, kicking at the low mounds of dirt, slowly defusing, as if he wouldn’t come back inside until all his anger was spent.
Martha sat beside Izzy. When the boys first ran off she said, maybe to herself, Why did I think that? Izzy asked her what she was thinking, and Martha said, That I wished Danny had killed them. Her voice was pained and thin.
“Just a little while longer,” the girlfriend said.
“No.” Ernst grabbed the bag from her again, then the camera, then one of the last plastic jugs from beside the bench.
“We’re taking some water,” he said to Tanner, who watched from the doorway.
“Take it all,” Tanner said.
Izzy wanted to call out, joining in. Yes, take it all. We don’t need it anymore.
“Let’s go,” Ernst said.
His girlfriend looked around the room, unable to decide what to do. Izzy wanted to spit in her face. Those two never should have been inside in the first place. Impurities. Doubters. They kept the sun from moving through.
“Go!” Izzy shouted. Beside her, Martha’s body shuddered from the violence of the sound.
The woman followed Ernst to the door. Tanner stepped aside to let them pass. Ernst looked at him and shook his head.
“You’re all fucking crazy,” he said.
Tanner smiled, boyishly pleased, like he had just won a game.
Through the openings in the walls, Izzy saw Danny passing back and forth in the gray twilight, still stalking the edge of the path. Martha said, “I’m thinking it again.” It sounded like she was going to cry. “Please don’t hurt them,” she said, her voice too small for Danny to hear. They were just words to counteract the words in her head. Izzy understood. She took Martha’s hand. Ernst and his girlfriend started off down the path.
Martha knew now that she had made a mistake. She had been wrong about Tanner; or she had been right and hadn’t trusted her instincts. They were trapped now with these two men. She wanted to yell for help, but there was no one to hear. Those two college boys had been driven off; the young couple was gone. She should have left with them, dragging Isabella along like Ernst had dragged his girlfriend. But every time that thought entered her head, Tanner turned on her, his eyes bolting her to the wall.
She whispered her sister’s name in the dark, as she once had when they were girls, two beds in the same room. She waited for an answer, a lifeline, Misty’s hushed voice in the night.
“Everything all right in there?”
An old man’s voice, gray and twangy, called up the next morning from the southern approach, the direction of that abandoned army base.
“Some boys came by,” the old man said, his voice closer now. “Told me there was trouble up here.”
Danny moved to the door, grabbing the handle. When the old man pulled, Danny pulled back. Just the thinnest sliver of light in the doorway and then it shut tight again.
“All right now, open up.”
Dull thuds of a fist on the door.
“This is my property.”
Bootsteps in the dirt, the dry crunch of pebbles outside the room. Izzy and Martha sat under the western opening, Tanner under the southern. The old man appeared in the opening just above Tanner, peering. Under a battered rancher’s hat his face was furrowed, a farmer’s field in a lifetime of drought. Bushy white eyebrows, pinprick pupils. Izzy wondered what he saw. Just the darkness of the room, maybe Danny’s broad back at the door.
“Hey,” the rancher said, the kind of call into nothingness that sounded as if it should echo. He couldn’t see a thing.
“I can get my rifle,” he said.
“I’m sure you already have your rifle.” Tanner’s voice came from just below the rancher’s face. The man stepped back, spooked.
Tanner said, “You don’t want to see what we have.”
The rancher’s face receded, small and brown in the morning sun. “The woman who built this thing called the sheriff,” he called back. “You should move on before he gets here.”
Tanner stood, looking out the southern opening, watching the man shrink into the distance. Then he turned to Danny and said, “Bar the door.”
The police arrived at nightfall. Sheriff’s deputies, a voice called out. Flashlight beams played through the openings, garish yellow streaks in the dark room.
“Stay back,” Tanner called.
“We’re back,” the deputy said. “Why don’t you come out so we can talk?”
This was the voice Martha was waiting for. She crawled close to Izzy and whispered, “Let’s go, let’s tell them we need help.”
Izzy set a finger on Martha’s lips, keeping her silent.
“It’s okay,” Izzy said. “We’re almost there.”
How many days had it been? How many nights? Izzy passed in and out of a shallow sleep and woke in a panic that the police had broken in. But Tanner and Danny were always there, keeping watch.
Danny tore the bench from the concrete and used it to force the door closed. The food was gone, the water almost gone. There was a bucket in the corner that they were using for a bathroom but even that stopped hours ago. Another inessential stripped away.
She was no longer hungry, but she was thirsty in a way that exposed the obscene insufficiency of the word. It felt like her body was made of sand. When she slept she dreamed of water on her face, in her mouth. Each afternoon the new sun appeared and moved closer but she couldn’t quite pull it through.
Izzy heard little squawks from the police radios back at the base, car doors opening and closing, a helicopter circling overhead. They’re trying to break us, she thought.
A man spoke through a megaphone and Tanner told them to ignore it. “They’re trying to break us,” Tanner said, and Izzy heard the repetition of her own thought and knew it to be true. She felt such hatred for the man and his megaphone. She wanted to crawl out through an opening and walk down to the line of police cars and bash the man like Danny had bashed Oklahoma State, using the megaphone like a giant fist.
“If you let the women go,” the man with the megaphone called, “we can all take a breath.”
“Leave us alone!” Izzy yelled back, standing and shaking, strong again, her rage like an earthquake.
The air around them pumped in and out suddenly, as if in concussive response, the deafening chop of the helicopter’s blades right overhead, filling the room’s openings with dust, roaring past before returning to its original height.
They gagged and wretched and coughed, and when Izzy could breathe she screamed at them again, dust in her eyes and mouth, the copter’s throb still racking her chest.
The air shuddered, folding back. It had heard her. It was here, finally. The room filled with light. Izzy raised her arms, ready to finally burn free.
Martha heard the loud metallic clank of something slamming against the outside wall. There was a loud hiss and the air twisted with an acidic burn. It felt like she’d taken a face full of pepper. She clawed at her eyes, shouted for the police: Help us!
Another shot clanked against the outside wall. More gas filled the room. Someone outside yelled and the room flooded white. Martha was blind: she could only hear Danny shouting, Izzy shouting, the men outside shouting, Move move move.
The door burst in. Izzy felt Danny rush by, as if sucked into the vacuum of that opening. A man shouted, Get down, get down, and then there were gunshots. Izzy had never heard real gunshots before, the fast chain of tight explosions. With each blast a part of Danny’s chest burst open, spurting blood. Her hearing dropped away. In the silence, she reached for Danny, but then he collapsed, hitting the ground beside her, and in the moment of impact the sun flared out, leaving the room strangled with smoke, men shouting, Martha screaming, Danny lying motionless in the doorway, Tanner with his hands raised to the police saying, Thank God you’re here.
The man on the megaphone barked, Kneel kneel kneel. It all rushed back now, everything she thought she’d let go: shame, fear, rage. Two men grabbed her. She kicked and bit and thrashed. Martha reached for her but was pulled through the door. Izzy screamed again, the muscles in her throat tearing, her voice giving out, dragging her fingertips across the wall, leaving skin as she was wrenched away from the room.