The Captive Condition (18 page)

“The barn,” Lorelei breathed.

“The barn?”

“In the valley.”

Morgan frowned. “A barn in the valley?”

“They threatened me.”

“Who threatened you? What are you saying?”

“The twins…”

Lorelei cringed as though anticipating a blow. In a place like Normandy Falls, where trust was a hard thing to come by and people seldom risked their feelings by revealing too much of themselves, Lorelei knew to brace herself for rejection and began to tell the whole story, slowly and with many false starts.

After listening to the tale, Morgan asked, “Do you still have the gun?”

“No, I left it in the hayloft.” Lorelei was silent for a moment and then said, “There is one other thing I haven't told you. Haven't told anyone. But I can't disguise it anymore. It happened last summer. Before I ran away.”

Beneath her cloak Lorelei's belly was beginning to resemble a giant egg, hugely spherical, something an ostrich might lay, the taut skin around the navel pitted and cratered and turning faintly blue. Morgan was stunned. Someone her size wasn't carrying one child but a litter. It was true that by the end of summer Lorelei had gained a little weight, some noticeable swelling around the middle, and while Morgan may have had suspicions, it never seriously occurred to her that Lorelei might be in the family way. Maybe the degenerates who came to watch her dance at the cabaret suspected as much, too. Those sexually frustrated, henpecked, closet fetishists, how they must have enjoyed ogling the trashy, gravid girl as she straddled the stripper pole, swinging her sturdy, child-bearing hips round and round.

Morgan lit another cigarette. “Who…”

“The Gonk,” Lorelei said. “He was on the lookout for a good, reliable womb.”

“How do you feel?”

“Physically or mentally? I have different answers for each.”

“What do you plan to do?”

“I plan to get rid of it.”

“You mean adoption?”

“I mean get rid of it.”

Morgan wasn't opposed in any philosophical sense to abortion, but even she had a few principles and knew she had a moral obligation to set things straight, to make certain something positive came from this bleak situation. Moved by profound pity and feeling less like an overworked waitress and more like a harried keeper holding the mortification chains of some drooling idiot on display at the annual county fair, she took a final drag on her cigarette, flicked the butt onto the pavement, and then led Lorelei inside.

I stepped away from the window and crawled on hands and knees across the floor. Pressing my ear against the dusty vent and trying to suppress my cynical laughter, I envisioned the touching scene next door. Only then did it occur to me that I wasn't even sure if Lorelei was this woman's real name or her stage name.

“In the beginning,” said Lorelei, “when I still lived with Sadie, I didn't mind it when he came to my room. I thought it was funny how the Gonk seemed to want me more than my sister. For a while I actually thought he was a little in love with me. But he is incapable of love. And he isn't an adulterer, either. Not in the usual sense of the word. He didn't seduce me because he thought I was easy or convenient. We possess a very special kind of pedigree, you know. We're like royalty in this town. The Gonk and I share some of the same blood and can trace our family trees back to the founder of the college, the last of an ancient line of Wakefields. But when he found out Sadie couldn't provide him with an heir, he decided a surrogate was in order. Just before I fell asleep, he would knock on my bedroom door. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe. It was like a dark power had me tied to the bed. He made me feel like I was fulfilling some kind of sacred obligation. ‘We must put forth an enduring branch,' he would whisper. But after a while I couldn't stand the sight of him, the smell of cigarettes on his fingertips. Turned my stomach, if you want to know the truth. Probably had something to do with my mother. She was a chain smoker. Esophageal cancer finally got her in the end. That's how I came to live with Sadie in the first place.”

I pictured the horrified expression on Morgan's face. At the start and the end of each day, she tried to remember her practice, how one should always focus on something positive and peaceful, and as she took this all in she began to meditate on an image of Delacroix Cay. Aside from Xavier's brochures, she'd never seen photographs of the island, had never read any books or articles about its people and culture; in fact, she didn't know if the place actually existed; for all she knew it could have been just another of Xavier's sick jokes, one more way for him to manipulate her; but it was late and she was tired and she chose to believe there was such a place and that it was the most beautiful island in all the world and that one day very soon she would go there and spend many glorious hours swimming in the blue sea, far from the biting cold and the demoniac doings of the dumb, greedy men of this wretched town. But most of all she thought about the tidy stacks of cash that Xavier kept in the safe hidden behind a Toulouse-Lautrec poster in that oppressive sty above the bistro.

“Poor Mom,” Lorelei continued in a dreamy voice, “she didn't live long enough to escape from this town. She could barely scrape together enough money for a weekend getaway. In the summertime she rented a cabin on the lake. The place smelled musty and closed up. The beach didn't smell much better. It was littered with dead fish and big clumps of algae. And you couldn't build sandcastles, not on a stony beach like that. When the waves broke against the strand they left a brown and frothy residue. The county posted signs warning people not to swim in the lake because of the high bacteria count. In the afternoons I'd sit under an umbrella and watch the bulk carriers crossing the horizon, some of them a thousand feet long, and I started to wonder what life was like for the crew. I imagined a working-class Sinbad sailing the Seven Seas. What kinds of places did he see? What kinds of people did he meet?”

Morgan thought for a moment, troubled by the arrangement she was about to propose, but now she understood that the family unit, like everything else in this world, was constantly evolving into something that, at least initially, may have struck some people as strange, weird, unnatural, but it only proved that, over time, human beings were capable of adaptation. The important thing was that couples found a way to cope with unforeseen circumstances and learned to endure.

“A few of those ships,” said Morgan, “actually take on passengers. From what I hear the cabins are pretty basic, but it's an affordable way to travel. They go all over the world, too. Even the Caribbean. I know about an island in the French Antilles where we can rent a grass shack on a hilltop overlooking the ocean. Why don't we buy tickets and sail away on one of those ships? We'll find jobs serving drinks or selling trinkets to tourists, and every night we'll eat fresh lobster tail. A perfect place to forget about the squalor of small-town America. We're survivors, Lorelei. Maybe we can learn to live as one big, happy family.”

Lorelei shook her head. “I thought you were a hard-bitten realist, not a dreamer.”

“This idea isn't as crazy as it sounds. Listen, I know where we can get a little startup money. Are you game?”

Lorelei said flatly, “Be serious. I'm already taking a class at the college this semester. Remedial English. I'm going to earn a degree in nursing or something.”

“But you
can't
take classes there.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Gonk runs the Department of Plant Operations. Sooner or later he'll see you on campus. And if the Gonk doesn't see you, then one of his spies will. Those men must know who you are, must have watched you dancing at the cabaret.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“But I'd like to take care of you.” Morgan kissed Lorelei on the forehead. “Will you let me? I have plenty of room here.”

Lorelei shrugged and answered rather demurely, “It's still too early to tell.”

That same night, as an uneasy gloom settled over the town, I fell asleep on my futon and dreamed that the men of the Bloated Tick, possessed by some criminal, anarchic force, discovered that it wasn't just possible but a rather simple thing to capture and cage an owl. The twelve marched across the campus and removed a screen from one of the windows at the Department of Plant Operations. In the dark they trooped into the lunchroom with all their swagger and waited for the owl to accept their humble offering and provide them with wise counsel; for animals, as is well known, briefly gain the power of speech during certain enchanted times of year, and for the past several days the owl had been communicating secretly with them, hooting and screeching an alluring promise of a grand life in a faraway South Seas paradise.

After thirty minutes, the bird swooped down from the rafters to devour the mouse. Fascinated by the ferocity of nature, they watched as the tail of the mouse thrashed wildly in its powerful beak. They studied the owl and the owl studied them, the fearsome goddess of the Bloated Tick, its large black eyes brimming with concentrated fury and frightful accusation. On one talon it hopped along the floor and then in two swift jerks of its head gobbled down its crippled quarry.

Taking this as their cue, the men acted quickly. One of the ticks, wearing a pair of leather welding gloves, swatted the owl over the head with the screen, momentarily stunning it, and managed to snag the warm and trembling creature by its silky wings. He smoothed back its gray-tinged feathers and placed it inside a small chicken coop.

With their goddess safely enthroned inside her majestic new temple of plywood and chicken wire, the men returned to the river, where they made final preparations for the sailboat's maiden voyage. In the biting cold, one hour before daybreak on Sunday morning, they checked the rigging, fastened the sails, and then untied the lines from the pylon. They puttered ten miles downriver, and at dawn they reached the harbor, by which time powerful gusts whipped the waves on the lake into a cauldron of whitecaps that crashed violently against long jetties of jumbled granite blocks. In the marina few boats remained in their slips:
Disco Volante, Busted Flush, Orca, Nellie, Discovery One, Bounty, Argo.
Taking note of these well-worn names, the men smashed a jar of moonshine against the green barnacled bow of their vessel and proclaimed, “We christen thee
Be Knot Afraid
!” But the men were very afraid.

Below deck, huddled on bowed cross benches, they studied distant clouds that portended disaster and debated the wisdom of listening to the goddess and sailing in such wicked weather. They carried no compass or charts and had never piloted a ship in their lives. Had they noted the absence of the Pleiades, they would have known, like any competent navigator, that the seafaring season had come to an end. But now the owl peered into the hold of the vessel freighted with its insane cargo of unclean men and shouted terse commands: “The full brunt of the storm won't hit for hours. Look alive, ye hearties! This ain't some pleasure cruise! I'll not be cheated of my life by a company of idle drunkards!”

Transfixed by the owl's huge, immobile eyes, the men bowed humbly, sprang to orders, and with braided halyards hoisted the white sails high and wide. A bracing following wind hit full, the canvas bellied out, and through the polluted harbor the boat dragged its poisonous brown wake. Beyond the breakwater the lake turned filthy and horrible, each wave like a piece of warped sheet metal rippling with dim sunlight. Unlike the river where each ripple seemed significant and charged with meaning, out here in the immensity of open water, a single ripple was soon lost in a thousand others, one overlapping and blending with the next so that there was never any clear distinction between them. The chaos, or perhaps the order of it, failed to mesmerize, and the men turned their attention instead to the clouds ramming together and building high on the horizon. They quaked at the sight of the black tendrils unleashing their spinning helixes of snow that, like massive augers, bored holes deep into the leaping waves. The sloop made wild progress toward the immense wall of clouds, and darkness swept over the earth.

The voice boomed, “There's no time to waste, you deck apes! A perfect day for a maiden voyage. The winds are north-northwest. Watch those lines! Batten down those hatches!”

The prow plunged low in the water, goring the heaving swells. White foam flew over the bulwarks, spraying the small deckhouse and blinding the men. With a terrible roar the gale winds struck full force, driving the boat yawingly across rolling seas. The cables frayed and snapped, and the wind ripped the patched mainsail from the mast, sending it flying like a ghost through the nightmare sky. For a while the men drifted, the wheel wrenched free of their grasp, and the white, curling crests rocked the boat violently back and forth, spinning it round and round. From afar the vessel must have looked like the last surviving ship of a doomed armada escaped from unknown cannibal lands, a skeleton crew of raving maniacs trying to keep her afloat.

The hull didn't begin taking on water until the snow started falling and the sea and sky became uniformly gray and the coast was little more than a hopeful smudge of soft shale cliffs, the craggy headlands thrashed by shrieking gusts. The men did not break into a buoyant sea shanty or dance a spirited jig. Their piety had limits, and a few blasphemers dared to mutiny, their wills shaken by the tempest. They abandoned the helm and with quick sidelong strides made their way across the creaking deck.

“As leaky as an unstaunched wench!” they cried and retched over the side, clinging to ropes and rails and to distant, happy memories they knew would be their last. There were no life jackets aboard and no radio to make a distress call—these provisions, the goddess had assured them, were unnecessary—and in great haste the men used the rigging to lash themselves to the mast.