Tony and Susan, page 4
“Yeah,” Lou said.
He slowed down. “Listen,” he said. “Where the hell is Bailey?”
“Keep going,” the man said.
A crossroads, a somewhat bigger road, a sign to WHITE CREEK, a cluster of garages and roadside restaurants and stores, all closed. “Left,” Lou said, and they left that settlement behind too. A straightaway, then a fork, one road going down, they took the other, climbing again in hills and woods. “There’s the church,” Lou murmured.
“What?” It was a small church in a clearing with a little white spire. The woods closed in on both sides of the road. There was a light-colored car parked in a turnout on a curve. It looked like his car, then he was sure, by God. “That’s my car!” he said, and he stopped beyond it.
“Don’t stop on the goddamn curve.”
“That’s my car.”
Whatever it was, it was empty. There was a lane into the woods and a house trailer above among the trees with a dim light in one of its windows.
“That ain’t your car,” the man said.
Tony Hastings tried to back up to look at the license plate, but he had difficulty getting the car in reverse.
“Don’t back on the curve, for Chrissake!” Tony thought, I haven’t met a single car on the road since we left the Interstate. “That ain’t your car. Your car’s a four door.”
He looked. “Isn’t that?”
“What’s the matter with you, can’t you see?”
Looking, trying to see the car beyond the man sitting on his right, who was telling him the car was not a four door, asking him to look and see for himself—he recognized panic distorting his judgment and perhaps his eyesight, and he resumed driving.
A winding road making a slow ascent through woods, then descending to a T intersection without signs, they turned right to climb some more. The man asked, “What made you think that car was yours?”
“It looked like it.”
“Ain’t nobody in it. What you think, they went to a party in that there trailer?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“You scared, mister?”
“I’d like to know where we’re going.”
“You fraid my pals ain’t playing straight?”
“I’d like to know where Bailey is.”
“Well my pal Ray, it’s best to humor him, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Here, slow down here.”
The road was straight, with a deep ditch and woods on both sides.
“Watch out, you gotta make a turn up here.”
“What do you mean, there’s nothing here.”
“Here it is, turn here.” An unmarked dirt road, a lane into the woods to the right. Tony Hastings stopped the car. “What’s going on?” he said.
“You turn down here, like I said.”
“The hell with you, I’m not going down that road.”
“Listen mister. Nobody hates violence like I do.”
The man with the beard was leaning back in the passenger seat, arm over the seatback, relaxed, looking at Tony.
“You want to see your wife and kid?”
The road, the lane, dwindled quickly to a narrow track with a grass ridge in the middle. It wound around big trees and rocky outcrops in the woods, while the car jounced and squeaked over rocks and pits. I have never been in a situation resembling this, Tony said to himself, nothing remotely this bad. He had a vague memory of what it was like to be hijacked by neighborhood boys bigger than himself, a memory which he created in order to prove how different this was, that nothing in all his civilized life had ever been anything like this.
“What are you doing to us?” he said.
The headlights flashed on the trunks of the trees sweeping from one to another as they turned. The man didn’t say anything.
Tony asked again: “What are you doing to us?”
“Hell mister, I don’t know. Ask Ray.”
“Ray isn’t here.”
“He sure ain’t.” The man laughed. “Well mister, I’ll tell you. I really don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. Like I said, it’s up to Ray.”
“Did Ray tell you to bring me down this road?”
The man didn’t answer.
“Ray’s a funny fellow,” he said. “You got to admire him.”
“You admire him? What for?”
“His guts. He does what he’s got to do.”
“I’ll tell you something,” Tony said. “I don’t admire him. I don’t admire him one little bit.” He wondered if the man with the beard would admire his guts for saying this.
“Don’t worry. He don’t expect you to.”
“He’d better not.”
He saw a fox standing in the leaves, colored jewels in its eyes, caught momentarily in the headlight flood before it turned and disappeared.
“I don’t think you need to worry about your wife and kid.”
“What do you mean?” There were waves of shock in everything tonight. “What is there to worry about?”
“You ain’t scared?”
“Sure I’m scared. I’m scared as hell.”
“Well I can see how you might be.”
“What’s he doing with them? What does he want with them?”
“Damned I know. He likes to see what he can do. Like I say, you don’t need to worry.”
“You mean it’s all a game. A big practical joke.”
“It ain’t exactly a game. I wouldn’t call it that.”
“What is it, then?”
“Hell mister, don’t ask me what he’s got up his sleeve. It’s always different. It’s always something new.”
“Then why do you say I don’t have to worry?”
“He ain’t never killed anybody yet, that’s all I mean. At least as far as I know he ain’t.”
The nature of this assurance gave Tony still another shock. “Killed! Are you talking about killing?”
“I said he ain’t killed,” Lou said. His voice was very quiet. “If you’d a listen to me, you’d hear what I was saying.”
They came to a clearing where the tracks of the road disappeared into grass. “Well well,” Lou said. “Looks like we run out of road.” Tony stopped the car.
“They ain’t here,” he said. “Wonder if I made a mistake. Guess you’d better get out.”
“Out? What for?”
“It’s time for you to get out. Okay?”
“Suppose you tell me why.”
“We got trouble enough already. Just do what I say, right?”
In the case of muggings, the wisdom is not to resist, give up your wallet, don’t brazen it out against weapons. Tony Hastings was wondering about the opposite wisdom, at what point does nonresistance become suicide or practical acceptance negligence? Where in the events of the just past was the moment when he could have seized the advantage, or was such a moment still possible?
Two men in the front seat of a car: the one on the right tells the one in the driver’s seat to get out, the other resists. The one in the driver’s seat is in his forties, academic, sedentary, his mind sees many things, but he has not been in a fight since childhood and cannot remember winning one. The other man has a black beard, wears blue jeans, and seems sure of himself. The sedentary man has no weapons except his fountain pen and reading glasses. The man with the beard has shown no weapons either but seems to know he has the resources to enforce his will. Question: how can the sedentary man avoid being thrown out of the car?
“I’m just telling you what to do so we don’t have to have no violence.”
“What violence are you threatening me with?”
The man with the beard got out of the car on the right. He came around the back to the driver’s side. During the few moments it took him, Tony Hastings was marveling at his confidence that Tony would not drive off or run him down. Start up and go—his hand was on the gear shift, the engine was running. Of course he’d have to turn around in the clearing. A metal yelp, the door flung open, it was Lou standing there at his elbow: “Out!” he said.
Tony looked up at him. “I won’t be left here.” It was still not too late, if he moved suddenly enough. The man had him by the arm, bulldog grip, Tony put in the clutch and tried to shift, but the man yanked, and Tony fell backward out of the car onto the ground.
“You’ll get killed if you don’t watch it,” the man said. He got in the car, slammed the door, jerked forward, made a couple of quick turns, then jounced back down the lane up which they had come. Standing in the grass, Tony watched the jolting wash of light flaring in the branches of the trees for a long time after the car was gone before leaving him alone in the stillness and natural dark of the night.
She puts the manuscript down. What a predicament, it gets worse and worse. Annoyed with Tony Hastings, yet what would she have done if it were she? Not be there in the first place, she says.
She wants to get up. Do something before the next harrowing chapter. She’d rather not move, though. Just keep going, see what’s coming.
What’s likely to happen to a man who has just been dumped in the woods, while thugs have run off with his wife, daughter and car? Impossible to answer without knowing the thugs, what they think they are doing. But this is fiction, which changes the question. It’s a path going somewhere, made by Edward up ahead. The question for Susan, do I want to follow? How can she not? She’s caught, just like Tony.
On the Monopoly floor someone farts. Henry’s friend Mike snorts, hee haw, Susan looks, wonders. Sees her dear son Henry from the back, his broad fat behind, much too fat, poor boy. Her golden-haired Dorothy, a year older, slugs him on the arm.
Nothing fits right, everything is askew. I’d better go to the bathroom, Susan says. Whatever else she might add later, she can tell Edward he’s got her hooked, anyway.
FIVE
This is a deliberate interruption of her reading, for she didn’t really have to go to the bathroom. She comes down the stairs out of darkness. The light is out in the upstairs hall, it requires the ladder from the basement. Not tonight. Across the room Henry lies on his back, sweater lifted, scratching his stomach, ruled out of the game, while Mike spots his marker around the board with a villain’s laugh. Henry is crooning: “Who cares, whooo cares?”
“Don’t be a brat,” Dorothy says.
Martha has moved onto the manuscript, makes herself heavy when Susan tries to move her. Susan remembers a graceful stretch of summer highway, the road bending from one hillside down into a valley of farms and up another long curve to a ridge of woods. Herself, she loves that wilderness, she loves the woody ridges and long valleys and comforting snack stops in small friendly restaurants off the highway, especially after the pounding long day of driving across flat Indiana and Ohio. It rests her soul. She remembers the singing in the car, Dorothy, Henry, and Rosie in the back, Jeffrey moving from one lap to another and Martha hidden below. “Tell me why, Camp Hazelnut.”
Dump Martha, who shakes herself, offended, then dashes out to the kitchen. Susan remembers the lake, morning light flashing spider lines under the tree leaning over the water while Arnold and Henry wade out to the float, Arnold up to his collarbone, his red freckled shoulders soft and plump, holding Henry in the water by his two hands under the stomach, while the boy sticks his chin up like a loon and Dorothy submarines twenty feet further out.
She remembers Edward’s cabin in the woods when he wanted to be a writer. Soft impressions. Short confessional poems with everything unsaid. Nostalgic sketches, loss and grief. Father deaths. Haunted harbor scenes. Melancholy sex in the pastoral woods. It was not easy to read Edward in those days.
This is different. She admits it, Susan, this capture is power over her and Edward wields it, whether she likes it or not. As she follows Tony Hastings down his trail of terror she knows she sees what Edward wants her to see, feels what he feels, without a trace of Edward’s offenses as she remembers them. Edward stiff and nervous, prissy and cranky, has yet to appear in this lonely Pennsylvania landscape, where she and Tony face with him the unambiguous horror of what these evil men (conceived by him) are doing. There’s no ground to quarrel with him yet, and she’s grateful for that.
Nocturnal Animals 5
Tony Hastings stood there a long time, looking where the car had gone, now all dark. The night was thick, he tried to see, vaguely aware of differences in the shadows, but he could not distinguish, he felt blind. My God, he said, they went off and left me. What kind of a joke is this?
Now the woods in the night were silent, he heard nothing. After a while the darkness began to clear, not much but some, clearer than before anyway. He was in a small open space between the trees, he could see the sky overhead. He saw a few stars, not many, not brilliant, not what they should be in the mountains. He could distinguish the treetops from the sky, but all below was still unpenetrated black, a curtain around the arena.
Surely they don’t expect me to get out without a flashlight, he said. Some joke.
The silence began to sort out. He distinguished a remote process, not a sound but the copy of a sound, recognized as trucks on the Interstate, miles away. He could not tell whether the faint whistling noises were insects in the grass or in his ear. Around the arena the curtain yielded shapes. He saw tree trunks and open spaces between the trees. He could see a black hole where the car had gone. He could see the road.
What are you waiting for? he said. It was stupid to suppose they would come back. Actually he had never supposed it. The problem was clear, he had been dumped in the wilderness in a prank a college sophomore would think of, and he would have to find his way out. So much for getting to Maine in one night.
The only question was whether he could find his way in the night. No, that was not the only question. Since he could see now, he went into the woods where the road was. He subdued an impulse to run, too far to go. He steadied his pace, he walked.
The road crossed a narrow stream on a log bridge and then went on, winding through the trees, turning and turning back, up and down hills, past thick brushy places and open stands of pines. Laura and Helen were waiting for him in a police office in Bailey, wherever that was. Worrying about him, deserted by him. The thought drove him wild, how to get a message to them. I’m all right, I’m coming, I’m in the woods, you’d better get some sleep because it will take a while. Eventually they’ll send someone to look for him, but it will be hours before they realize the need, and no one will think of looking down a hidden lane like this.
They will never come for me, he said. I’m coming I’m coming. If he sat down to wait he would never get out. As if his life itself depended on this walk through the woods.
He slogged on, steady as he could. Steady was not easy because the track of the road was rough and hidden in the night, he stumbled on rocks, landed his foot in pits and irregularities, sometimes the trees closed in so that the road almost disappeared. He remembered nothing from the drive in. He came to a maze, strayed off, knew the straying from the spring of matted brush under his feet, found and kept the road only by the feel of his feet as he rebounded cautiously from one side to the other, hands out to protect his eyes. It would be easier to sleep too and wait for daylight. But he had so far just to get out of the woods, and then so far again, while Laura and Helen waited.
Insulted and grotesquely humiliated. Rage concentrated in his fists, steadied his pace, defied the blindness of his feet, his toes and heels. He catalogued the idiocies of hoods and punks, the kind who would play chicken with real cars on a highway and kidnap a college professor and dump him in the woods. Who think that sort of thing is funny. Manly. Tough.
Tony Hastings was insulted but refused to be humiliated. My name is Tony Hastings, he said. I teach mathematics at the university. Last week I gave three students F for the course. I gave great pleasure to fifteen others with the grade of A. I have a Ph.D. The law will have something to say to Ray and Lou and Turk. God knows I am a peaceful person, I dislike conflict, but if the law doesn’t. Guys who play pirate on the road may find out from me what it is like.
Outrage stiffened him against the danger of crying. From childhood, where the big boys snatched his hat and pushed him into the brook and ran away while he clambered out. They shall find out what it’s like.
Distance weights his feet, step by step stumbling to unravel the miles of driving rolled up between him and his destination. Time locks him in a cell and borrows from itself hours hidden from the world. If he permits the morning to come before he gets out, if he lies down and closes his eyes.
What if they decide they can’t wait any longer? What if they think he has run away? He must get the message to them before they leave.
Steady, man. Speak to him, calm him down. There’s nothing you can do but what you are doing. They will wait. Hope them some blessed sleep while you slog your way back.
Back where? That’s the question what police station? which he said you have not been thinking very clearly about. Knowing full well they weren’t waiting for him in any police station. Knowing all along but his mind deflected to other things. Now the reasons come. They won’t take Laura and Helen to the police station for the same reason they left you in the woods. They left you in the woods because they were not taking Laura and Helen to the police station. What Tony Hastings knew all along but only now understood, injecting mercury into his veins shooting everything cold, turning rage to terror. For if they were not taking Laura and Helen to the police station, where were they taking them to?
Steady, man, he said. Nothing to do but what you’re doing.
A few moments later he saw rays of white light through the woods ahead, rising and vanishing like someone swinging a flashlight. Then he heard a car, whining around the bumps and turns of the road. Yes, the car, they were coming back. The stupid long joke was over, they were coming back—as he had known they would, if he had only had the patience—and all his rage and terror dissolved into relief. Thank God! he said.
