Even rigged with chains and on a plowed dirt road, the Oldsmobile’s tires spun climbing the grade. The driver yanked the steering wheel, trying to wrestle the tires out of ruts. He was slender and so tall his sandy hair scraped the headliner. He cussed and grimaced. His face was all angles, as though sculpted out of wooden blocks.
“She talking to herself or what?” he snapped.
The man in back next to Wendy leaned forward, to make his whispery voice heard over the clatter of chains and springs. “Praying, I think. Don’t that beat all?”
He wore a hat pulled low, almost touching his thick wire-framed glasses. Though his hair showed gray at the temples, his skin was smooth as a pampered woman’s and his lips appeared molded into a permanent, boyish smirk.
“We got us a real character, Tersh. I’m not so sure she’s got eyes. All I’ve seen so far is eyelids. Say, you ever notice how pretty eyelids are? Prettier than legs, I think.”
“Depends on whose legs and whose eyelids, don’t it?”
“Could be.”
Near the crest of the grade, the driver commanded, “Shut her up, Bud. This drive’s bad enough without her squealing. How far we got to go?”
“How far’ve we gone since the pavement?”
“Damned if I know.”
“It’s right over the hump, I think,” the man in back said, “then a ways around the pond. Mile or so, I guess.” He fell back into the seat, reached over, and touched Wendy’s lips with a finger. “Keep it to yourself, cutie.”
Wendy sat wrapped in the patchwork quilt Claire had given her and Tom last Christmas. When the men had bashed through her door and she’d sprung from the bed, she’d dragged the quilt with her and thrown it around herself.
Even though she’d burrowed her feet into the quilt, they’d gone numb, except her toes burned. Every few seconds, the cramp in her belly pinched tighter. Her ears felt hard as ice. When the man touched her lips, she pressed them tightly together and continued her prayer in silence, asking God for a pair of warm socks and for the men to hurry to wherever they were taking her, out of this freezing car. She thought about Claire, rushing around the cabin aimlessly, her hair disheveled, her face bruised because one of the men must’ve smacked her. Something had made a noisy thump just before the time Claire screamed loudest.
The baby kicked. Wendy laid both hands on her belly and drummed her fingers. She pictured the baby listening intently, his hands cupped at his ears. Big hands like Tom’s.
She imagined Tom in his car, pounding the dashboard like he did when they drove to San Francisco last summer and got stopped on a bridge by a line of cars, when he needed to use a toilet awfully. He was chewing on the stem of his pipe and lighting the tobacco even though it already burned. A truck going the other way whizzed past, bellowing its horn. Because Tom had crossed the white line.
She prayed he wouldn’t cross the white line again. What if he couldn’t think about driving straight while he worried so awfully over her and Clifford? She asked God to hold the steering wheel for Tom. And to steer other cars out of his way.
The Olds made a leap and tossed Wendy into the air. Slamming back down, a pain shot across her middle, front to rear, as she hit the seat. Clifford must’ve socked her bladder or something.
“Our Father,” she murmured, “maybe you could make me a little softer inside.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth and sat still, feeling God’s spirit wash through her like a fever, chilling her skin and heating her blood until the cramp loosened. “Thanks so much,” she whispered, then silently begged God to hold Clifford safe inside her until Tom came and rescued them like before, when he’d snatched her away from the Nazis and the devil. Her blood seemed to thicken and seep like molasses; her spine hardened from its base to the top of her skull, as she realized that these men might be servants of the devil named Zarp, the Nazi who’d sworn that she and him would live and die together. This road didn’t look like the way to Tijuana, but tonight or tomorrow they might drive her there, and lock her upstairs in the bar called Hell.
The past eight years dissolved. As though the earth had gotten yanked from beneath her, she fell through a blizzard of lights into the room where the devil had made her stab George and pour blood on the penitentes. Once again, she sat with her arms bound and a sack over her head, cinched around her neck.
A rumbling started in her belly. In her throat it became a low growling noise. By the time it escaped through her constricted throat, it had turned to the squeal of a tormented pig.
“Knock it off!” the driver shouted.
The other man clapped his paw over her mouth. “Hush, sweetheart.”
When she opened her eyes, the window beside her glittered with dew. Dim morning lights and shadows through the cedar forest looked subtly glorious. The needles glimmered dark green under the shelves of new snow. They passed a clearing of logged stumps. The ground sparkled as if the whole earth were a black diamond. A wolf with dark bluish fur streaked across the clearing. Wendy smiled in admiration.
“Get a load of this! One second she bleats, now she’s grinning like a chorus girl. I think we got us a real screwball here, Tersh.”