TWENTY-ONE

Brank dragged Alex higher into the woods. He hauled her up the mountain without speaking, stealing little glances at her over his shoulder, his eyes glittering beneath the Yankees cap. After a time he seemed to relax about her escaping; from then on he would turn and ogle her breasts with a slack-jawed gape, as if he’d never seen a human female before. At first his leering humiliated her, then it made her mad. By late afternoon she wished she could sharpen her nipples and poke out his eyes with them.

After twisting through a dense growth of buckeyes and sugar maples, they turned onto something that had once been a kind of road. Waist-high weeds and scrub cedar trees choked most of it now, but a faint flat bed was still discernible. She figured it was probably pointless, but she began walking slew-footed, dragging her feet through the long grass, trying to mark a trail. Her brothers would be proud, she thought, picturing the three of them as she surreptitiously bent the thorny stalk of a thistle. Alexandra bought the farm, but she left a hell of a good trail buying it.

But then a current of excitement sizzled through her. How could she be so stupid? She had a weapon! She had something the Snake Man knew nothing about! Right this moment she was carrying the tiny cell phone that Charlie had slipped in the bottom of her pack. If she could somehow hold on to it until this maniac fell asleep, she’d be able to call for help. All right, she told herself as she continued to bend thistles with her feet. Just thirty seconds alone with that phone and this little kidnapping will be over.

When the western horizon turned fuchsia, they stopped on a ridge where a narrow river boiled thirty feet below them. The man dropped his sack and gun, but he did not loosen the leather cord that bound them together. He moved closer to Alex and grinned. “Now we’ll see what you’ve got in your little bag.”

He turned her by her shoulders and opened her pack. Not the phone, she pleaded silently, wincing as his hands nudged the straps against her blistered back. Please don’t let him dig deep enough to find the phone. . . .

“Hey!”

She froze.

He pulled out a fistful of candy bars and several packets of freeze-dried food. “We’ve got candy, lasagna, chicken titty-something. Gosh, Trudy, you were gonna eat like a queen up here.”

I sure was, Alex thought, holding her breath as he rummaged deeper in the pack. Regular five-star dining alfresco.

“Here’s some little underpanties and some little makeup things and—lookee here! What’s this?” His hand plunged deeper into the pack. She closed her eyes.

“Uh-oh,” he said in a singsongy voice. “Look what I found!”

She opened her eyes. The small red cell phone waggled before them.

With a great sagging in her chest, she watched as he unfolded the phone.

“Sorry,” he giggled, holding the thing to his ear, and miming a conversation. “Trudy’s not here. I don’t know where she went, but she won’t be back for a long, long time.”

Stop. She wanted to beg him. Just let me make one call. Let me tell my Mom good-bye. But he took the phone away from his ear, cocked his arm back like a baseball pitcher, and threw it toward the river. It riffled through leaves, then she heard nothing but her own breathing, as if she were the last person left alive on earth.

He untied her hands, yanked off her backpack and loosened the cord from her waist. He pulled the sour bandana from between her lips, then he began to speak. “Now, Trude,” he said, his beard tickling her cheek, his breath hot in her ear. “Even though you can’t talk on your pretty phone, you can still scream as loud as you want. There isn’t anything to hear you up here but chipmunks and meadow mice. Verstehen?” He tied her ankles together with rope. Of course she understood that. She could scream, but no one would hear. She could run, but only in hobbled strides that would carry her nowhere.

Alex slumped on the ground as the man pawed through the rest of her supplies. After finding Mary’s fire starter, he dragged a pine log and some twigs together and soon a bright orange blaze crackled into the chilly blue air. Though the log popped with resin and sent fiery sparks exploding up like tiny rockets, Alex scooted as close to it as she dared, seeking to warm away the damp cold that had seeped into her bones. He looked up as he tinkered with the backpacker’s stove and saw her shivering.

“Here,” he said, plucking her denim jacket from her pack. He tossed it toward her. “That should warm you up.”

She nestled into it gratefully, drawing her legs close to her chest and tucking her chin beneath the collar. The jacket smelled of the cedar closet under her mother’s stairs, and without warning she was back in Texas, in the old house on the edge of a cottonwood grove where the earth lay white and flat as a biscuit. The sounds of her family in a spring twilight came to her clearly: her mother clattering pots on the stove while Jacinta the cockatiel shrieked a commentary of the news on TV. The screen door banged and her father clomped into the kitchen, his barn boots covered with dust. Outside, the dry desert wind that whispered all the way from Mexico rattled the windows, carrying with it the sound of her brothers’ backyard football game. “Go long, Jack!” David yelled. “Go long and cut right!” Alex smiled. It all seemed distant as a fairy tale. Tears dampened her eyelashes as she pulled the coat close against the dankness. Though she had lived most of her adult life trying to scrub away the yellow dust of Texas, she would give everything right this minute if she could go back and breathe that dry air and tell them all how much she loved them.

“You get spaghetti tonight, Trudy.” The man thrust a pouch of hot food at her, then sat down. “I get lasagna. Eat it before it eats you.”

They ate to the sound of the fire crackling and popping. The man shoveled the sticky pasta into his mouth. Alex ate slowly with her fingers, forcing down little bites.

After they finished, the man sipped what she assumed was moonshine, offering the jar to her with a wink and a tipsy display of his yellow incisors. She shook her head and said:

“I want some water.” Her voice squeaked like a rusty hinge.

“Why, Trudy!” The man’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You can talk. Here I was thinking the cat permanently got your tongue.” He pulled the water bottle off her pack and handed it to her. She uncapped it and drank. The water cooled her parched throat and made her feel suddenly sharper, as if she’d awakened from a deep sleep. Maybe now would be a good time for a little voir dire, she decided. Find out the truth, so you’ll know what you’re up against. She lowered the water bottle from her lips and cleared her throat.

“Who exactly are you?” She flinched at the bluntness of her question, but she couldn’t call her words back.

“Who am I?” The man grinned. “You know who I am. We left Pennsylvania on the same day. And you’ve dogged my trail for the past thirty years. ’Course mostly you’ve had four legs and big teeth instead of those big tits.”

Schizophrenic, Alex thought. Truly nuts. Still, she had to keep going. “Refresh my memory, then,” she told him, forcing a smile. “Changing from one species to another takes a toll. A lot of brain cells die in the process.”

“I bet they do,” he chortled. “Surprised you have any left at all.”

Alex took another sip of water. “You say we lived in Pennsylvania?” she asked tentatively.

The man nodded. “Papa was Herr Fleischman’s butcher.”

“Are we German?”

“Papa had been a POW. He spent most of the war raising hogs in Alabama.”

“I can’t remember our last name.”

“Brank,” the man replied. “Papa was Rudy, Mama was Anna. You were Gertrude but we called you Trudy. Remember what you called me?”

“What?”

“Esel. Dumpfbacke. Queer. You thought all those names were a scream. You know what I thought?”

“No.”

Brank gave a low chuckle. “I’m gonna show you what I thought,” he promised, with a leer. “Later.”

She was about to ask him about Martha Crow when abruptly he leapt to his feet. “Time for something else now.”

He tossed the water bottle over by the pile of clothes and jerked the jacket from her shoulders. Slowly, his eyes riveted to hers, he began to remove his clothes. First his boots and socks, then his pants, then he pulled the snake from his shirt.

It’s not poisonous. The realization stung her as he flung the reptile back into his sack. He conned Joan and me. He snookered us with some harmless thing you’d find in a garden.

Finally he stood before her naked, with his knife in his right hand.

Her heart raced like a hummingbird’s. It was her turn now. He was going to get even with her for everything this Trudy had ever done to him.

He pushed her backwards on the grass and pulled her feet-first over to the fire. Then he balanced the knife on a stone, suspending the blade over the hot embers. The skin above his beard glowed like some ancient bronze mask.

“Now,” he said softly. “Raise your arms over your head. And don’t try any of your tricks, Trudy. I can slit your throat a lot faster than you can grow fangs and a tail.”

She stared at him, mesmerized and unable to move.

“I said get ’em up!” He jerked her arms above her head. The blisters on her bare back burned like a hundred tiny flames.

“There,” he muttered, when he’d positioned her to his satisfaction. “That’s better.” He straddled her and sat down, resting his whole weight on her stomach. His scrotum felt like a sack of clammy dough against her belly, and his greasy, curdled smell made her gag.

He smiled. “You probably pick up a lot of these things, living in the trees and all.” He put his thumbs together and spread his hands like a fan. Then he placed his fingertips at her hairline and slowly combed through her scalp, stopping once at the crown of her head, then traveling down to the nape of her neck. Alex squeezed her eyes shut and bit back a scream.

“None there!” he announced. He ran his fingers over her face, then down her neck and over each clavicle, ruffling the pale stubble in her armpits. He continued down both arms, then returned via her shoulders. When he reached her breasts he scooted down so he straddled her hips.

She opened her eyes and watched him fondling her flesh. He stared, grinning, at her breasts, caught up in some interior fantasy of his own design. “Good old Trudy,” he whispered. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long.”

He rolled off her and worked his way down her legs to her feet, then back up the inside of her thighs. She felt his breath on her pudenda, then his fingers explored her pubic hair. She clenched her jaw, waiting for him to jab his penis inside her, but that did not happen. Instead, he left her and spread out on the other side of the fire and repeated the entire process on himself. At last he sat up, disappointed.

“No tick dances tonight,” he said wistfully.

Alex lowered her arms then. Whatever he had just done, he had apparently finished. She kept one eye on him as she sat up and pulled her jacket back on. Curling herself into a tight ball, she watched as Brank stared into the fires; then the dancing, hypnotic flames pulled her in, too.

She remembered the night before—how irritated she’d been when Joan had pressed Mary about Jonathan, then how happy when Mary had told them both the whole story. How many lifetimes ago had that been? If she closed her eyes she could hear the happy, brandy-tinged laughter of their campfire, yesterday, when they were whole and safe and unaware that this Brank creature even existed. Suddenly she almost laughed out loud. Before they went to sleep she’d wanted to tell them ghost stories, for God’s sake.

Brank stood up and stumbled over to her. “You need anything?”

She shook her head.

“Then I’ll just tuck you in for the night.” Grinning, he tied her ankles tighter together and bound her hands in front of her. “See what a good brother I am?” He threw her jacket on top of her.

“Tomorrow we’ll talk more.” He raised one eyebrow at her and chuckled. “I hate for anybody to think there was a serious case of sibling rivalry between us.”

Alex watched as he moved to the other side of the fire and folded himself into his bedroll. “Sweet Jesus,” she said softly. “I am in so much trouble.”