Chimera, page 33
“You try to run and your friend here dies,” Roger said. “Walk. Over there, hurry it up.” He indicated with a nod of his head in the direction of the building.
There was no light, except for the moon, and I had a hard time walking in the thick tufted weeds. When the heel of my boot got hung up on a piece of barbed wire hidden in the overgrown grass he reached out and pushed me from behind.
“Don’t touch her,” I heard Catherine say from behind me.
I turned at the sound of her voice and Roger momentarily stopped walking. “Wait, what is this? Are you two…are you, is she your girlfriend?”
I said nothing. Catherine said nothing.
“Oh this is going to be even better than I thought.” He laughed, then roughly yanked Catherine like a ragdoll from side to side then motioned once again for me to keep walking.
It wasn’t until I was only five feet away from the door that I saw what the building was. A barn. A dark, lopsided, abandoned barn.
“Open it up,” he said. I took one last look at Catherine, who was looking now, like she was close to vomiting. She nodded her head once again, and I turned, lifted the plank of wood used to keep the two wide doors shut and walked into the smell of hay, horse, and leather. Judging from the sounds, or lack of sounds rather, it was empty. I heard the two doors close behind me, and then a light flicked on. Roger had turned on an electric lantern hidden somewhere near the entrance. He fumbled with it though, as he tried to hold on to it, the knife, and Catherine at the same time. It fell from his hands, down to the ground on its side, sending the beam of light across the floor, making the shadows on the back of the wall elongate.
Before my eyes could fully adjust to the light, he pushed Catherine away from him, grabbed me by the wrist, pulled me to him, and held me the way he’d held Catherine moments before. His arm around my shoulders, the knife to my throat. I guess he figured I was the one he’d have an easier time with.
His disgusting odor had grown stronger, his skin damp, and I could feel the warmth of his sour breath brush past my ear as his breathing became heavier, like a bull. Snorting. In and out, in and out. I could also feel his excitement on the small of my back. That, finally angered me. That he was getting some sort of sick sexual pleasure out of this.
He’d made a mistake, however, either because he was drunk, excited, or just plain stupid. It wasn’t the blade he had against my throat, but the dull side.
Catherine, standing just three feet away, watched us both, calculating. Keeping her eyes on the knife.
“Let her go. Now,” she said.
“Shut the fuck up,” Roger replied, and then made his second mistake. He looked down, fumbling with his belt buckle, the zipper of his jeans.
It happened too fast for me to react. She grabbed the knife by the blade with one hand, my wrist with the other. Roger, caught by surprise, loosened his grip on me enough so that she easily yanked me away from him. She threw the knife off to her side and shoved him, her forearm against his neck up against the wall.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled.
“Emile. Go wait by the truck.” She had her back to me. I couldn’t see her face, but he could. His eyes were bulging, his mouth open, opening and closing like a fish, trying to yell.
“Emile, go. Take the lantern. Out. To the truck.”
She wouldn’t turn her head, and though her voice was calm and low and still hers, it resonated so that it almost echoed even in this barn full of noise absorbing hay.
“Get the fuck off of me!” Roger finally found his voice. He turned to me as I bent over to pick up the light.
“No. No, no, where are you going? Don’t…go get help. Oh fuck. What…what are…” I looked back one last time before I opened the door to leave. Catherine banged him again up against the wall. He had both his hands on her arms, trying to push her away. By now the heels of his boots were no longer on the ground and I could hear choking noises coming from his still open mouth. He looked towards me, reached out his hand like a drowning man, asking for help.
For a moment, I thought of turning back. Of telling Catherine to release him but I thought about what would happen if she did. If she let him go, then someone else, some other woman would be in this situation a week from now. Maybe even a day from now. A woman who wouldn’t be able to fight back.
Instead of turning, I walked straight ahead, picked up the lantern, opened the door, and walked out into the night.
Halfway to the truck I heard him scream.
You go your whole life thinking you’ve heard the sound of terror. Probably from movies. Maybe a Youtube video. But it was nothing compared to this. I winced at the length of it, high pitched, like a cat’s yowl, as it stopped and started twice. Then stopped. And everything was quiet once again.
I stood, with my back against the passenger side door of the truck. The doors must have automatically locked when we left it. And I began to get a little nervous again. There were no more screams, no more noises, only the sound of crickets. Happily rubbing their legs together in the dark, oblivious to human dramas. This is taking too long, I thought. What is she doing?
Finally, the barn doors opened and Catherine walked out. I stepped forward, away from the truck, meaning to walk towards her but stopped when she turned from the door and looked my way. She was different somehow. Not like Samuel, but different. Her eyes, illuminated by the lantern I was still holding looked unusually dark. Shiny. Larger. Her jaw was set. Her hands balled up into fists. When she started walking toward me, at a fast pace, I stumbled away, my back hitting the door of the truck. Holy crap, what’s wrong with her? She said she wouldn’t hurt me, but who the hell knows how this thing works. What if it’s something akin to pack animals in a feeding frenzy, like hyenas? They’ve been known to rip the ears off of another hyena when snapping at the carcass of the dead animal they’re consuming. In my panic, I reached behind me for the door handle, forgetting that it was locked, but she reached me before I could locate it.
“What are you—“
The kiss was not an ordinary first kiss. It was a mixture of anger and frustration, of urgency and neediness. Yet it was the best thing I’d ever felt in my life. There were no thoughts running through my head as they usually were the first time I’d kiss a man. Thoughts of teeth or too much saliva, dry lips. There were no thoughts at all. Just sensations. Wonderful, amazing sensations as one of her hands, cold, ran up my shirt, up my spine, as she pulled me closer to her.
“Let’s go,” she said, breathlessly, her hand still under my shirt, the other in my hair, her legs tangled between mine.
“What?”
“Home. Let’s go home. Samuel and Joshua can find their own way back.”
“Where’s home?”
“You don’t want me to say something corny do you?” she asked, smiling. “Like home is wherever you are.”
I smiled, shook my head, and pulled her back to me. Kissing her again, this time softly, enjoying it, feeling her spine underneath my fingertips, the ridge that went from her shoulder blades down to the small of her back.
She pulled away, staring at me, then pushed my hair away from my neck.
“He didn’t hurt you did he?” she asked, examining my neck.
“No, I’m fine.”
She kissed the place he’d held the knife to. Then my lips again, her breath, becoming more rapid as she started to unbutton my jeans. But she stopped herself, pulled away and said “We’re going to have to go back for them aren’t we? You’re not going to go along with leaving them there are you?”
“As much as I would like to hop in this truck and go home, wherever that is, be with you, alone, no. We have to go get them.”
“Damn it,” she said, jokingly. She pulled Roger’s keys out of her pocket, clicked a button, opened the door for me, and walked around to the driver’s side.
“Did you, is he…” I asked as she started the truck.
“No, he’s not. I knew you wouldn’t have approved of it. I should have, I wanted to, but he’ll live. Only whatever fun he decides to get up to from now on, he’ll have to do it from a wheelchair.”
“But he’s, won’t he…”
“Don’t worry, his breathing isn’t compromised. It’s only from the waist down. I left him his phone, he can call for help once he wakes up.”
When we parked, in the same spot back in the parking lot of the club, Catherine turned off the ignition, exhaled deeply, then turned and pulled me once again to her, kissing me.
“Before we left, earlier,” I said, once we pulled apart, ”Samuel said he was going to explain some things to Manuel. He’s not really going to tell him that you’re, that all of you are…”
“No,” she said, “nobody would believe him. He likes to tell people I was in the Israeli army.”
chapter thirty
joshua’s good shirt
The bar had grown noisier, smokier, and more crowded, but none of it mattered.
Mine. I thought, as I walked next to Catherine in and between tables.
I had become, first a dirty old man, and now, one of those women who, after only just a few kisses, has images in her head about the days and weeks to come. One of those women I’d always secretly derided as they went on and on about their first date and how soon, did I think, should she introduce him to her parents? I was giddy for the first time in my life. I’d always hated giddy people. But then again, I think everyone hates giddy people. Except other giddy people.
Well, I thought, enjoy it while you can because it’s not going to last forever. Eventually I was going to have to see Abby again. I felt a tug of sadness for her, even after all her hostility. She’d probably had the same images I now had in my head in hers at one time, until I came along. I knew it wasn’t my fault. Whether I came along or not, Catherine said it wasn’t going to happen regardless, but that’s probably not the way Abby saw it. I thought about her, for the first time since we left, alone there at the junkyard with Joshua gone, Kam and Daniel off for days at a time. She probably spends her time sticking needles into voodoo dolls. Dolls with auburn hair and greenish eyes. What was going to happen when we met up again?
Manuel looked at us as we approached the same table we’d been sitting at before, relief and amazement in his eyes.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, rising to his feet. “He really took you to buy a car?”
“Not exactly,” Catherine said, “but everything turned out just fine.”
“Gracias a Dios,” Manuel said, quickly making the sign of the cross.
“Told you,” Samuel said. “Sit, I’ll go get us some more drinks.”
Manuel reached in his back pocket for his wallet but Catherine put a hand on his shoulder. “No, please, sit. Right now, I want to buy everybody in this bar, in this town, a drink.”
“But I won’t. These,” she said quietly so that Manuel could not hear, and pulled out a wallet from one of her front pockets, “are on Roger.”
She handed the wallet to Samuel and he walked away to the bar.
“So Manuel, what do you do?” Catherine asked him. I had taken the chair next to her, and she placed her hand lightly on my thigh underneath the table as we sat and I could feel the blood rush out of my head. In the past, when I’d gone out on dates, it would annoy me to no end when a guy would try to hold my hand, or put his hand on the small of my back to lead me somewhere. So needy, I used to think, so proprietary. Clues. Just another couple of occupations to knock off my possible career list. Detective. Private Investigator.
“I build houses,” Manuel was saying, pride in his voice, “not expensive ones, not, what do you say, luxurious? But good ones.”
Catherine was about to reply but I cut her off.
“Roger might have woken up by now won’t he? He’s going to direct the police here.”
“Excuse me,” she said to Manuel, who nodded his head. “That was rude, Ms. Manners.”
“Sorry. Sorry, Manuel. But shouldn’t we leave?”
“We’ve got a little time. The man is a drunk, who’s going to believe him? They’ll probably just think he climbed up into the loft and fell over.”
Samuel returned, drinks in hand, and sat. I let myself relax, though Catherine’s hand on my leg was distracting. I thought Samuel would have noticed something immediately. The goofy grin plastered on my face, the glances down at my lap, the rapid breathing. But he noticed nothing. Instead, he focused his attention on Manuel, who was doing most of the talking, gushing about his wife and two daughters. Samuel listened intently, a serene look on his face, and I thought I knew what was going through his head. Family life. A wife. Children. Something he’d never be able to have but probably desperately wanted. Joshua was right, their lives do have some disadvantages.
When the doors behind us slammed open twenty minutes later, Catherine turned quickly to see who it was. Not the police, just a group of rowdy young guys, probably teenagers. Arms around each other’s shoulders, stumbling towards the bar, shouting about something or other.
Catherine picked up my hand to look at my watch.
“We should get going,” she said to Samuel.
Samuel pointed a finger at the tall table Catherine had pointed to earlier. Across the room, through the thick smoke, I could see Joshua, standing, listening to a girl with blonde hair who was gesticulating with her hands as she talked. Another woman was standing on the other side of him, closely, their shoulders touching. Across the small round tabletop were three men, standing shoulder to shoulder, unsmiling. One of them was staring at Joshua, his upper lip ever so slightly curled, the grip on his beer bottle, tight.
“Good luck dragging Joshua away from them,” Samuel said.
“Well Manuel, it was very nice meeting you but I think it’s time for us to go,” Catherine said, getting up, shaking Manuel’s hand as he too rose, and smiled at the three of us.
“Yes, you too, and no more leaving with strangers yes?”
“Yes,” Catherine said to him and he looked satisfied with that. An honest man believes everyone is telling the truth.
“Joshua, it’s time to go,” Catherine said, interrupting one of the girls as soon as we made it to Joshua’s table. The girl automatically knitted her brow, crinkled her nose, opened her mouth to say something but Catherine hadn’t even bothered to look at her, so she shut it, and instead turned to her friend, who let her know she was indignant as she was.
“What? Already?” Joshua looked at his wrist, though he was not wearing a watch.
“Yes, Joshua, come on.”
“Yeah,” said the man who obviously resented Joshua for all the attention he was getting, slamming his beer down on the table where it fizzed up and ran over the rim. “Run along now little boy, I was getting tired of your mouth anyway.”
He was at least fifty pounds heavier than Joshua but no taller. He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, starched jeans with a white crease down both legs, and a large silver belt buckle just like the man at the truck stop wore.
Joshua only glanced at him, then turned to the woman who had been gesturing with her hands and said something to her that I couldn’t hear.
“Hey. You heard your momma here little boy, it’s past your bedtime,” the man said, a little unclearly because of a large wad of what I assumed was chewing tobacco in his mouth.
“What’s your problem?” Joshua asked, turning back to him.
“You. You’re my problem,” he said, walking around the table. He stopped a foot away from Joshua and spit on the ground at Joshua’s feet. What is it with men and spitting?
“Come on Joshua, we don’t have time for this,” Catherine said, tugging on his sleeve, but he couldn’t help getting one last jibe in.
“You know if you bothered listening once in a while instead of going on and on about yourself and your rodeo days,” he said, using air quotes, “these ladies might be a little more interested. Just a little advice for next time fat man.”
The man looked around toward Samuel, then at Manuel, who had followed us, then back to his two friends who were both as big as he was, and decided he had sufficient backup.
“Boy,” he said, smiling, the bulge in his cheek bobbing up and down, ”I’m about to slap that silly hat off your head. I’m giving you a chance to walk away before I embarrass you in front of these girls.”
Joshua, who had started to walk away, stopped. “Go ahead then. Try it.”
Instead of knocking off Joshua’s hat, the man chuckled, smiled, and then spat out the large wad of chewing tobacco out of his mouth and onto Joshua’s boot.
Joshua looked down at his foot. The tobacco, dark and slimy, sat on top of his boot, brown rivulets of saliva ran down the sides, onto the stitches where the leather met the sole.
Joshua looked up slowly, smiling from underneath his hat. He raised his leg off the ground, knee bent, then started to hop around in a circle, balancing the tobacco on top of his foot. He raised his arms as he did it and it made him look like the Karate Kid in the last scene of the movie. The man who had spit on him took a step back, looking confused. Joshua, still hopping, his back to the man now, was attracting a lot of attention. People who had stopped to watch what they thought was going to be a fight were now looking at each other with quizzical expressions on their faces. Some of the women were giggling, some were shaking their heads as if they pitied him. I couldn’t really blame them. I had no idea what he was doing and by all appearances, it looked like he was a little insane.
He made it all the way around, still smiling, then stopped, perfectly still and the smile on his face faded. He kicked his leg out, the wad of wet tobacco flew from his boot onto the man’s bleached white shirt, stuck like spackle for a second, then fell off, leaving a big brown stain.
“You got something on your shirt there, fat man.”
The man looked down at his shirt then back up and flew at Joshua, arms raised.
Joshua easily took a step back and pivoted his body so that the man missed him and went stumbling forward. He regained his balance quickly, turned around, walked back, and threw a punch. Joshua ducked it and laughed.
