Those Who Hunger, page 11
"Take a long one," her mother said, smiling, and drying a coffee cup. She turned from the door.
Hadassah carried the bucket back to the bathhouse, cold well-water sloshing over her bare feet as she walked. The smell of cinnamon and coffee coming from the kitchen told her that her mother was already preparing breakfast for the next morning and her father’s cup for the night.
Hadassah opened the door to the bathhouse and was enveloped in steam. The heat coming from the wood stove by the bath was enough to wilt her. Still, she fed another log into its mouth and set the kettle on it.
When she'd poured the last drop from the last kettle into the bath, she stood, watching her distorted reflection on the surface of the rippling water.
Hadassah pulled at the bow that fastened her apron around her. She laid it on the floor. Then she reached behind her neck, slowly. Her finger twitched when it touched the clasp at the top of her dress, as though it were the tip of a needle. She pinched it and worked it apart. She proceeded to the next and the next until it hung loose on her shoulders.
In a moment of fear, she pulled the shoulders of the dress down past her arms like a snake shedding its skin and let it slide from her body into a heap at the floor. She stood, staring at the unpainted wooden boards ahead of her, at the chaotic swirls of grain making dark spots on the smooth, tanned pine. She breathed out a shuddering breath. Her kapp came off last, letting her long, auburn hair tumble down her back. The steam clung to her skin, from where her thighs stood at the edge of the tub up to her collar bones. She felt the condensation beginning to form on the underside of her breasts, on her chin, and just below her eyes.
Hadassah looked down. Her hands came to her stomach and slid up from there, stretching the skin taught between them. She lifted each breast and looked at the crease between it and her ribs. Her abdomen was white, spotless, as were the undersides of her arms. Below the elbow, though, the sun had tanned her and freckles spotted her skin here and there. She scanned her arms, then lifted them and pulled the skin at her ribs towards the front. Then she pushed her shoulders forward and craned her head as far as it would go to look down her back. Having finished there, she sat on the lip of the tub and cast her eyes down to her feet.
Lifting her right leg and laying across the left, Hadassah probed at the skin, twisting it, pulling it, scanning it for something, she wasn't quite sure. She followed her leg all the way up to where it met her hips, then set it back down. She started to do the same with the other, but before it even left the ground, she saw it. There, high on the inside of her left thigh, the skin was mottled and red in the shape of a ragged crescent moon.
Hadassah exhaled, her lungs trembling gently at first, then more violently, as she stared at the mark. Her fingers touched it, feeling where it was raised and where it was depressed upon her skin, as her breaths came faster and faster. The heat in her eyes brimmed until she couldn't see, and she dropped her face forward into her other hand. She slumped to the floor, scraping vertebrae after vertebrae along the edge of the tub, but she didn't care. All that she'd been taught was a lie. It was empty and hollow and shit, and there was that voice in her head that screamed that she was a whore and a slut and that she wanted it, and she had killed him, and she had wanted to do that, and she could never tell anyone, and that secret was eating away at her and now it was real. She had it—the mark. She was cursed forever, shunned. Damned. Tears poured through her fingers. She trembled in soul-smothering grief and lifted her face to a God who wasn't there. Laying her head back on the hard lip of the bathtub, Hadassah wept.
15
In the Alley
The woman in the alley was dead—had been only a few hours. She lay, her head and shoulders resting on the rusted green dumpster, the rest of her in what seemed like a small pond of her own blood. Jacobo pushed the young woman’s blood-matted weave away from her face. “Looks like you got your wish,” he said.
“How’s that?” Keith replied, using a toothpick to pry between his teeth. They’d been down at Roman’s Philly Cheesesteaks in Philadelphia when the call for this one had come in. Miranda, their chief, had wanted an update in person, so they’d left Mt. Clemence and headed back to the city the night before to stop by and fill her in on their progress. As they were passing through Harrisburg, they picked up the call and got to the crime scene even before the ambulance and CSI’s.
“This isn’t one of ours,” Jacobo said. “No purse, no jewelry, place like this? Here’s your mugging.”
“Yeah, but she’s a prostitute, though,” Keith said, turning to one of the cops standing by.
“Yep,” he answered, “Girls down the street said she goes by the name ‘Katrice’. Real name’s Latasha Cole. She’s a rough one. Last month we brought her in for solicitation. She almost clawed another whore’s eye out in the cell.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jacobo said, pointing a finger at her neck where it had been opened. Her brown skin was coated in a sheen of blood that ran over her shoulder and down her chest into the fold of her cleavage. “No teeth marks,” Jacobo said.
Keith leaned in to take a closer look at the woman’s neck. Jacobo knew he’d see it. This wasn’t their guy. The cut was small, on the left side. It probably would have only needed a few stitches if her attacker hadn’t sliced through her carotid artery. “Yeah,” he leaned back. “She’s got some skin under her nails too,” he said, noticing the white shavings under her teal-painted fingernails. “Pimp got rough or mugger didn’t know her. She decided she wasn’t going to pay up. Struggles. He cuts her. Blood starts pouring. He runs like hell. She bleeds out here with the garbage. Thanks,” Keith said, turning to the four cops gathered near the wall. “You ca-”
Just then, a screech sounded out on the street, followed by a pop and a crunching of metal. The two cops closer to the entrance of the alley started running. The other two looked back at Jacobo and Keith.
“We can sit tight,” Keith said. “You go take care of that.”
They nodded and ran.
“How hard is it, really?” Keith said. “You gonna drink? Give your keys to someone else. You see a stoplight? You stop. People friggin’ amaze me sometimes.”
“You’ve never crashed?” Jacobo asked, looking over the woman’s body again.
“Back in high-school, when I thought the rules didn't apply to me. Kind of like you." Keith said. "Then I wised up and realized that rules are rules for a reason. So shit like that," he waved his hand towards the empty alley opening, "doesn't happen. Listen, this might take awhile. I'm gonna go pull the car up."
"I'll stick around," Jacobo said. "Don't want to leave the body unattended. Rules, you know." He shrugged.
Keith eyed him, then looked at the body of the prostitute slumped against the dumpster. He tucked the toothpick between his teeth and said, “Suit yourself," before turning to leave.
Jacobo watched his partner's jacket flap around the corner of the alley, then looked back down at the girl at his feet. Her blood pooled around his scuffed, brown oxfords. So much blood. He wondered, himself, whether he had been wrong. Maybe it hadn't just been a mugging. Maybe whoever had left her had wanted it to look like one. His hand rested on the lid of the dumpster. Opening it, he used the other to fish around through the discarded pizza boxes, a broken baby's crib, bags of wet garbage stinking of soured fruit and milk, and clinking bottles of beer.
A shard of glass poked through one of the garbage bags. His fingers pried open the hole, grasped it, and pulled it through. Letting the lid slam shut, he inspected the cup. It had been a wine glass, and it was only broken on one side. He used a gloved forefinger to wipe out the cloudy, dried stain of wine and whatever had spilled into it when it had been bagged with the rest of the garbage. Then, turning his back to the alley entrance, he crouched down and dipped the lip of the cup into the puddle of blood. He did not look at the girl—did not want to see her face or to think about where the vivid red stream that filled his glass was coming from. So much blood. The smell was intoxicating.
16
Arnie Miller
It was nearing two in the morning in Hager's Valley when Arnie Miller’s pair of white high-beams crested the southeastern ridge and started to make the descent down into the farmland. The sixteen wheels that followed the headlights hummed over the faded, black asphalt, hauling a trailer that read, Roadway. Inside the cabin of the rig, Arnie sat and steered, his eyelids feeling like they’d been welded open. He was pushing his load up Front Mountain Road between Huntingdon and Tyrone, staying off the highway, clear of bear traps where highway patrol cars waited to give tickets to late night haulers like him.
The radio played, and he sang along, his gravelly West Virginian accent stretching the words to one of his old favorites: Sisqo’s “Thong Song”.
“…Dumps like a truck, truck, truck,” the rapper sang, “Thighs like what, what, what. Baby move your butt, butt, butt.”
The syncopated beat and shaker throbbed in the cabin. Arnie scratched the three-day-old red and blonde beard that had grown up around his cheeks and neck. He opened a bottle of what he called “high-speed chicken feed” and popped another zinger into his mouth, chasing it with a few tugs on the straw of his Big Gulp Mountain Dew.
His CB radio crackled. “Slappy, this is Mudhumper. You copy?”
Arnie turned down the volume on Sisqo as the rapper whined about his sexual frustration over a large-bottomed and scantily clad woman, and reached for the CB handset. “Ten-two, Mudhumper.” His thumb clicked off the receiver.
“Bear traps up and down seventy-six,” came the rough, Maine accent. “Thought I’d let you know. You’re gonna wanna back off the hammer, unless you don’t mind gettin’ bit in the britches.”
“Ten Roger,” Arnie said, undoing the third button above his belt so that his belly could breathe. “D’you make it through?”
“Fer sure. Pulling in to a flopbox and looking at some foxy lot lizards up here. Gonna be on beaver patrol for the next few hours. Down and out.”
Arnie laughed. “Clear after you, Mudhumper.”
“Keep your rubber down and your metal up.”
“You too,” Arnie said.
“Think I’ll keep my rubber up, if it’s all the same to you.” Mudhumper said, his voice cracking into a laugh.
Arnie joined him, then heard the other trucker’s CB click off. He replaced the handset into the radio above his console and touched the picture of his wife and eight-month-old daughter taped to his visor.
He took another sip of the Big Gulp. The sweet, slightly citrus taste fizzed over his tongue and down into his throat. Wheat fields buzzed by on his right. The yellow lane divider clipped along on his left. “Holidae In” by Chingy and Snoop Dogg came on over his satellite radio player, and his finger reached for the dial to turn it up just as, out of the corner of his eye, a patch of the field separated from it and blurred into the middle of the road.
“Shi-” Arnie shouted as the Mack truck jolted with the impact, and he lost his grip on the Mountain Dew. The cup floated in slow motion right into the dashboard, where the lid popped off, and the neon yellow soda splashed over the windshield and dials, then sluiced across the dash and back onto the camouflaged-upholstered seats as the truck came to a screeching halt.
“Dammit,” Arnie said, his heart pounding, his hand resting on his steering wheel and the other on his emergency brake. He reached for the cup, which was under the gas pedal, and used the ridge of his hand to push what was left on the dash into it. Then he punched his emergency lights and opened his door.
Arnie climbed out into the still night air, his sticky hands leaving imprints on the chrome handle he used to lower himself down. The truck breathed beside him, a sleeping dragon: its hazard lights like nostrils flaring with each breath. He walked around the front, hand on his lower back where a numb, warm ache sat. “That thong, thong, thong, thong, thong,” he muttered absent-mindedly.
The grill was dented, smeared with blood and chunks of meat. Sharp brown hair clung to it in a few small patches. “Just what I needed,” Arnie said, bending down to look under the rig. There was a lump, lying halfway down the truck, two twigs of legs stuck into the undercarriage. It was closer to the road than to the ditch, so Arnie walked around that side and bent low to see if he could reach under. His back creaked, and he groaned. He looked at the face of the doe, half pounded into chuck by the grill of the Mack. On his hands and knees, he stretched forward and grabbed ahold of her ear, the only thing he could reach. He tugged. The head rolled to the side, but her legs were wedged in there good, and she was at least ninety pounds. Arnie reached farther, putting his hands around her neck, warm blood squishing through his fingers. He pulled back, straining against her legs, which kept her levered into place.
The clop of hooves and jostle of a carriage startled Arnie. He scooted back out from under the truck to see the horse and buggy that had just ridden past him. They pulled over on the side of the road in front of his truck.
Arnie pushed himself up and wiped his bloody hand on his jeans. That’s gonna take some explaining, he thought, imagining himself walking through the door of his house and his wife, Barbie seeing that blood smear. Boy, would that raise her eyebrows. Eight hundred miles more. He pictured the green and white highway signs in his head as he walked towards the buggy. Akron. Toledo. Detroit. Columbus. Lancaster. Belle. Mt. Nebo. Home. A warm feeling washed over him as he thought of the last sign, the numbers 451 posted on the side of his safety-orange-painted mailbox on Carpenter’s Lane. Barbie had done that and slapped reflector stickers all over it so he could see it a mile down the road and know he was home. He stepped up to the open window of the buggy and peered inside.
“Thanks for stopping,” he said. “Got a deer-” was all he was able to get out before he was pulled in through the window, the force tearing the shoe from his foot.
By the slumbering field of wheat, the carriage rocked, and under the starry sky, Arnie’s screams punctuated the stillness of the night.
17
The Ark
Sunlight lanced through the window at the Zook's house, blinding Nehemiah as he sat with his family at the supper table. He stood up, chair squealing over the floor, and walked around to draw the curtain. He passed his wife without touching her and only distantly heard the clattering of silverware on plates as his children devoured their chicken pot pie. His mind was elsewhere. Out there. Hand on the curtain, squinting out into the valley, he paused. The mountains on either side rolled down in waves of green until they broke on the barns and farm houses that pushed up on their sides. Corn silos stood like lighthouses, marking each man's claim of the land. He saw the Jones’, the Graber’s, and the Lancaster’s. Closer, lying in the basin, the silos of Sol Kuhns and Husker Lapp jutted out of the ground. Kuhns’ was dark in a square section of the top, a missing piece of siding that Nehemiah would help him repair on Thursday.
He looked at the road that ran crossways from his house, black asphalt turned to pearl by sheen of the sun that lay across it. For years he'd wished to see his son, his boy, come walking up that road. Nehemiah had longed to glimpse Nathaniel's shadow falling before him as his steps carried him home. For a long time, he would hear Nathaniel call out in the midst of his tilling the fields. He would stop the horses and turn in his seat to see him, but he was never there. It was a phantom voice of memory called up by the ache in his heart that only grew stronger with the ache in his arm.
At the end of a long day like today, he would ice his arm, massaging just below the elbow, his fingers reading the two scars his son had left him like braille. Nathaniel, they read, and reminded him of the day when he'd grabbed at his son to keep him from leaving, and Nathaniel, his boy, had snapped the bones in his arm and sent them through his skin. He'd looked for him every day, at first, but then a hard certainty began to settle in Nehemiah that he wasn't coming home. And now? And now he feared that he had.
"Nehemiah?" Esther called from the table.
He turned to see her placid smile.
"Will you be joining us sometime tonight?"
He grinned at her humor and pulled the curtain closed, then kissed his children on the head and his wife on the cheek as he walked back to his seat at the far end of the table.
“Hadassah,” Nehemiah said, “how was teaching today?”
Hadassah was a natural teacher and had already begun apprenticing under Priscilla Whetstone so that she might be prepared to teach on her own if ever she moved to another community.
“It was good, Papa,” Hadassah answered.
Nehemiah noticed Rachel looking at her older sister from across the table. “Oh?” he asked.
Hadassah nodded.
“And you, Rachel?” he turned his attention towards his younger daughter. “What did you do at school today?”
Rachel’s gaze reluctantly peeled from Hadassah to her father. “I wrote a story, Papa.”
“Is that so?” he asked. “What about?”
“About Mary and how she was sick and how God healed her.”
Nehemiah smiled at his daughter, but felt a heaviness on his forehead. “That’s nice,” he said. He looked at Mary, who sat by Esther and was busy stabbing peas and carrots and bringing them to her mouth.
“Obadiah drew a picture,” Rachel added.
“Did you now?” Esther bent towards her son, sitting beside Rachel.
“I did it because,” the little boy said, “it was about our family.”
“Well, do you have it?” Esther asked.
“Haddie took it,” he answered, seeming a little wary of his sister.
“Only because it was so good that I wanted to make sure we showed it to Mama and Papa first thing, Obi,” she said. That was the name she had given him.
“Well, Haddie?” Esther said.
