Authors: Howard Owen
He wondered, hiding as best he could in the back seat, behind the driver, how long he'd have to wait, and whether she would be alone. He didn't really care, he told himself. Maybe that little Indian asshole would be with her, too, and he'd just take them both out right here, with the snub-nose .38, or maybe shoot him in the balls and make him watch what happened after that.
His father had tried to convince him that she didn't mean him any harm, that she just wanted to be left alone. Well, the old bastard couldn't be right all the time, could he?
Georgia thinks later that she said something, at least part of a word, in that terrible second of recognition before the pain came. She thought her head must have been split open like a ripe watermelon, the first blow was so hard and unforgiving.
She is actually surprised that she still seems to be breathing, her heart still beating, although she feels as if she is drowning in blood. She gradually comes to understand that her mouth is taped shut, so that what air she gets is through her broken, blood-clogged nose. She can feel hard pieces of what she knows must be some of her teeth, loose in the sticky, metallic-tasting mess she tries to keep from sliding down her throat.
She can't move her arms and legs; she is prone across the back seats, and the van is moving, bumping across something that is definitely not paved.
She knows who is driving, as much by his sweat-and-stale-beer smell, which she didn't even know she recognized until now, as by the back of his obscenely wide head silhouetted in front of her as she looks up.
She knows she isn't dead but wonders if she soon will be, or wish to be.
He hasn't bothered to blindfold her. Even through the pain and terror, she knows how bad this is.
Each jolt of the truck's suspension seems designed to add to her pain. She is distracted from this by the fear that she will suffocate.
By force of will, she makes herself breathe in and out as slowly and regularly as she can through her ruined nose. She remembers taking lifeguard lessons, when she was 19. She had to beat back the panic and learn to live with a certain rhythm which would not fail her as long as she didn't abandon it. Head to the side. Breathe in. Head into the water. Up again and breathe out. She gets into such rhythm as she can and tells herself that she isn't dead yet, she can still survive this. She is still able to appreciate the irony: As her life seems to be passing before her eyes, the thing she first remembers is life-saving lessons.
Other things seem to be broken, too. Ropes that are tied too tight bind her awkwardly, but most of the damage feels as if it is on various parts of her head and her left shoulder.
The truck stops suddenly, throwing her against the front seat face-first and ratcheting the pain up to another level. Her muffled scream makes Pooh look back.
“You think that hurts, bitch?” he asks, his voice floating somewhere above her. “You don't know what pain is. But you will.”
She thinks she hears him laugh.
The van door slides open, then, and she is yanked out. It feels as if her shoulder is being ripped from its socket. She staggers and is half-dragged away from the truck.
Ahead of her is an open darkness. She thinks at first it must be a large field, cleared for winter. But then she feels and smells the breeze off it and knows it is water.
He grabs the duct tape and rips it from her mouth, causing her to scream in pain before he puts his large, meaty hand over her face, covering her mouth and nose at the same time. When he takes it off, he replaces it with a gag of some sort so she can breathe.
“Don't want you to suffocate, ma'am,” he says, grinning. “I don't want nothin' to happen to you, not yet. You and me are gonna have some fun.”
To her amazement, he unties her arms from behind her, but it is only meant to be a temporary reprieve. He pushes her face-down on what appears to be a rotted-out picnic table and is reaching for her left wrist, set on retying her to metal rods that seem to be part of a shelter, when she remembers the Ladysmith.
She is somehow able to reach into the coat with her free right hand. It is still there. She fumbles it, then knows she has it in her grip. She makes herself wait until Pooh moves in front of her, working on tying her other hand.
She will never know how she was able to pull the little gun out of her coat and point it at the large mass in front of her. Her shoulder, as mangled as her nose and cheekbone, should have made her pass out from the pain. Somehow, though, she does it. She tries to do just what Kenny told her. Don't hesitate. If you have to use it, use it.
The noise startles them both, and then she hears Pooh howling in pain. Her heart sinks as she realizes the animal she has shot sounds very much alive, more angry than mortally injured.
She aimed at his considerable gut, but somehow the shot managed to hit him in his right forearm, which he is now rubbing, looking for blood. She fires a second time, amazed as she does at how fast a man that large can duck and scramble. Before she can fire again, he has her wrist and has taken the Ladysmith, her last hope, away from her.
There is a large red stain through his work shirt and jacket, but she hasn't done what she meant to do. She has not killed him.
He curses as he flings the little gun away with his left hand and slaps her. It sounds so inconsequential as it lands almost soundlessly in the sandy soil beside the water. How could she have thought such a tiny thing could save her?
Before Georgia can get her partially tied left wrist free, Pooh has secured it again and bound her other one as well. He then ties her ankles to something behind and beneath her. Despite the gag, she can make noises, although not loud enough to draw anyone's attention to this lonely, God-forsaken place. She has the sense that he wants to hear the noises she will make.
She looks to the side, wanting to get some image of the last terrain she will ever see, trying to focus on something other than the terror. Her eyes are adjusted to the dark, and she realizes she knows this place.
People used to come here to fish or to pick huckleberries, although she was forbidden to go anywhere near it by her father, who said it was a place for bootleggers and other ne'er-do-wells. The tea-colored water wasn't really fit for swimming, he said, only drowning. When she was a teenager, it was a popular place to go parking, if you had a vehicle that could get back here without getting stuck.
Maxwell's Millpond. He has taken her into the swamp that borders the Geddies to the east, on the edge of Kinlaw's Hell, the place Scots County residents have always gone to do business that will not stand the light of day.
She can't beg him, and she hardly knows what she would say if she were allowed that luxury. Certainly nothing that would change his mind.
She is shivering from fear and from the cold. The temperature has dropped below freezing, and when she feels him cut her dress and panties off her from behind, she feels burned as the air hits her naked skin.
Pooh is on top of her now, half-leaning into her. He whispers obscenities as he applies more and more of his weight. He has already entered her when he presses down on the broken left shoulder. She blacks out from the pain, relieved at last.
At some point, either dreaming or dead, she's sure, she sees a face looming above her, hard and cold but somehow, she senses, meaning her no harm.
When she comes to, she is aware of footsteps fading in the distance. She is not able to determine for some time whether she is alive.
Only the pain, increasing as she regains consciousness, makes her think she might not yet be dead.
Weighed against that, though, is the surreal world to which she awakens.
Her wrists have been cut free, but the suffocating weight on top of her makes it impossible to move at first. She is finally, an inch at a time, able to extract herself from underneath it enough to understand that the weight is Pooh Blackwell, and that he is dead.
His pants are still unzipped, she sees after she is able to roll him sideways enough for gravity to carry his 350 pounds off the edge of the table and on to the bench and then the ground. She has an urge to cover him up, but then she is distracted by what used to be his face.
She had thought at first that she was bleeding too profusely for any hope of survival, but now she realizes that the stickiness in her hair, and the sickly, soft pieces she touched when she was able to reach it with her one good arm, are part of the late Pooh Black-well's brains.
She is finally able to reach back and free her legs, one at a time. As she rolls herself to a sitting position atop the picnic table, she almost passes out again from the pain. Then her head clears and she sees the gun, much larger than the one she carried. It is lying on the ground, next to Pooh's body. Beside that is a cellular phone. She is struck with the incongruity of Pooh Blackwell carrying a cell phone.
It takes her at least five minutes to get to it, and then she finds she can't remember the phone number at the farm. Somehow, though, she recalls Kenny's. Even then, it takes her five minutes more to dial it correctly, she is shaking so badly. She alternates between thinking she might freeze to death, bleed to death or just die from the sheer outrageousness that has overtaken her world.
Kenny answers.
“Hello,” she says, surprised at how strangled and strange her voice sounds, but taking it as proof that she is still somehow among the living. “Kenny? I'm sorry to call you. Could you come get me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
December 21
Whatever they're giving me, I hope they don't run out.
The drugs seem to be my main topic of conversation when the occasional visitor catches me awake. They just tell me to get some sleep, that everything's going to be OK.
Well, that could be. Anything's possible.
The doctor told me I have a fractured skull, a broken nose and cheekbone, a somewhat dysfunctional shoulder, and a couple fewer teeth than I had last week.
Everybody's tiptoeing around mentioning the r-a-p-e, as if that was the worst of it. Maybe that would have been so when I was younger and a little more precious and fragile. Maybe if it had lasted longer or I hadn't passed out. Maybe if what the police detective called “the perpetrator” hadn't been missing a large part of his head the last time I saw him.
The worst was just thinking I was going to die there, being almost sure of it at times, some goddamn victim violated and butchered on the shore of Maxwell's Millpond.
The terror hasn't completely receded. I don't want to be alone, and I haven't been for the most part. Kenny and Justin, even Leeza, have taken turns, and the women from the churchâorganized by Forsythia, of courseâhave filled in when those three had to be elsewhere. I look over nowâturning my head is no mean feat, believe meâand there's Alberta Horne, snoring away in the chaise lounge the hospital provides for those willing to spend the night in them so someone won't have to die alone, or even be alone.
I didn't really think I was going to die, once the rescue squad and Kenny found me. I didn't know until later that he hadn't called them until he was almost there, to the only part of the pond to which you can drive. But he told me, to my puzzlement, that they were already on their way when he called, that they got there at the same time as he did.
These drugs are supposed to make you sleep like the dead, but I have been having the damnedest dreams.
I've been carrying on the most delightful interchange with my late father. I can't say that we are actually talking, but somehow, we get our messages across to each other.
In the dream, he's always out there at that rock. The Rock of Ages. I stand close enough to touch him, and he makes me know that it's OK, that I am absolvedâat least by himâof everything for which I've been beating myself up these past 11 years. Maybe that's just one part of my brain conspiring to give the rest of me a free pass I don't deserve. Maybe it's the fractured skull, or the trauma.
Whatever it is, I've had this dream three times now, and it seems to go pretty much the same.
Daddy is slouched against that rock, his eyes twinkling, trying to suppress a smile, the way he did. I want to know so much, about what happened that last day, about Rose and him, about the Big Questions.
The first time, I awakened just as he was starting to wave his hand in some kind of expansive gesture that encompassed the three parts of what used to be his farm.
The second time, the reel went a little farther, to where he leaned toward me and kissed my forehead. I swear I could smell him, not just the Pinaud aftershave and Old Spice, but
him
, the way I had forgotten he smelled. Can you smell in dreams?
The last time, just a few minutes ago, he gave me a little hug and then turned and walked away. I didn't try to follow him; I knew not to. He looked back one last time and waved, and then he was gone, fading into the near woods.
And when I woke up, I knew he really was gone, and that everything was all right, although there are so many ways in which the casual observer would dispute that assessment.
I mean, what you have here is a woman who, some might say, is a little too finely tuned, a bit too high-maintenance, someone who is trying to recover, without benefit of professional help, from a breakdown, who has lost three husbands and a couple of parents in less than 12 years.
Then, pile on this fall, the fall of my free fall. (Today, the Weather Channel's happy moron tells me, is the first day of winter, the shortest day of the year.) Add the stress of trying to sell the farm, plus dealing with an imminent first grandchild whose father is not married. Then throw in Pooh Blackwell.
Everything definitely should not be all right. Everything should be more in the general neighborhood of all wrong.
Somehow, though, it is all right.
I don't know if this was nature's own little shock therapy or just the peace that passeth understanding like it's standing still, the kind you get from knowing that you have taken life's best Sunday punch and you're still standing, figuratively.