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Briefcase
A woman gets on an airplane. Crowded flight, bumpy, full of crying babies. The landing rattles her teeth and pops open the overhead bins. Stuff flies out. A man across from her crosses himself; someone else a few rows away noisily vomits. The woman doesn’t look up from her papers. Later, as they taxi to a halt at the terminal, the man who crossed himself smiles at her: "Cheated the grim reaper again, hey?"
Inside, she collects her luggage and picks up the keys to her rental car. The motel, large and new, is in a suburb thirty miles away. Signs in the lobby welcome conventioneers, list meetings and other events; a little knot of grey-haired men trade jokes by the door. No one she recognizes. At the desk she learns she has been given a single room instead of the suite she asked for. Check again, she tells the receptionist. A folded twenty passes between them.
On the way to the elevator she runs into Hank and Stan from the Chicago office, and Tippy Tappett from San Francisco where, because of the merger, heads have recently rolled. You ready? they ask. Of course she's ready, she doesn't say. She doesn't need to say anything, they know she's ready, she's always ready, their ace in the hole, their late-inning stopper. Good-looking, too, in her red suit with the little boxy jacket, black piping on the sleeves and collar, her not-quite stiletto heels. Sexy, dark, a little mysterious. What is she, Hawaiian? Here come Josh and Todd, from Denver, and Mick from the home office in Atlanta, everyone glad to see her, there's work to be done. Join us for a drink before dinner, Mick says, say half an hour. It isn't a question, with him it never is so she nods, sure thing, just let me lose my bags. As if on cue the elevator pings, the door sighs open. "Later, guys," she says, and remembers to add, "later, Tippy."
Damn good thing she got the suite, she thinks. That extra room is not a luxury, especially in these godforsaken burbs — why can't they hold their conventions in town, so you're not trapped? Suburban motels are the pits. Never enough meeting space, so meetings happen in people's rooms. It's awkward in more ways than one to spread your reports out across some semi-stranger's pillow, still rumpled from his afternoon nap or god knows what, and there's always the jerk who takes off his smelly Guccis and sprawls on the bed to prove how relaxed he is, how loose, while her stomach digests itself and flowcharts and pie charts and annual reports that she knows by heart because she did the studies all run together in her mind and she knows for a certainty that by tomorrow morning when she has to stand up in front of 20 or 200 people her mind will be full of howling monkeys and her voice will be gone. Of course she knows for an equal certainty that by tomorrow morning when she has to etc. her mind will be clear and orderly, facts and figures lined up neatly for instant retrieval. As for her voice, after her smile and her dark mysterious maybe-Hawaiian eyes it's probably her greatest gift. Husky but clear, authoritative but feminine. Snowballs to Eskimos, her thesis advisor used to say. Overcoats at the gateway to Hell.
With a suite, you can sit around in easy chairs and spread your papers on a table and, with your bed more or less out of sight there's a reasonable chance you won't get one of those phone calls from Rob or Hank late-late-late at night after everyone else has closed the bar. And where is Rob? she wonders. Maybe he isn't coming. Maybe he's dropped dead and wouldn't that be nice?
Her window looks out across the parking lot toward the interstate. Cars and trucks whiz past. Most have their lights on already, though it isn't really dark. The only point of interest is the distant range of mountains, black against the violet sky. They remind her, briefly, of ... not home. Home is Philadelphia. These mountains remind her, briefly and not pleasantly, of the place where she grew up. She turns her back, but there they still are, there the whole scene is, reflected in the mirror.
She switches on the TV. Almost time to join Mick & Co for cocktails, rubber chicken to follow. Should she call Charles? Glancing at the phone, she wishes for a cigarette. She doesn't smoke and she's not calling Charles, not tonight and maybe never. Time for a shower? She'll make time. A shower for sure. Go over the charts one more time too. She strips off the red suit, hanging the jacket over the back of a chair, unlocks her attaché case, pulls out the color coded folders, sets them on the table. TV voices mutter in the background, white noise, a German movie or something. Throat-clearing sounds. Could be Dutch.
The phone rings. Rob hasn't dropped dead, alas. He purrs boozily into her ear, mutter mumble. "In a little while," she tells him. "No no, I'll be down. See you in the bar." Mumble mutter. She hangs up.
She doesn't want to be here. Lately her mind’s been — no time to think of that now. Sighing, she pulls reports from folders: what the fuck? She stares, blinks, blinks again. Lines and curves without meaning clump as if magnetized on the page. They re-form themselves quickly into columns of words and numbers, but the columns are wrong. Company names are scrambled, figures don't add up. As she watches in fascinated disbelief, two columns of numbers snake themselves around a third, forming a caduceus.
Something has happened, her mind informs her, even as the columns uncoil, totals settling themselves again into the sums of their parts, just as they were when she read through them on the plane this afternoon. Something has happened. Her chest feels tight. Her head too, and her ears. Not just tight, squeezed between the heels of two big hands. Or she's underwater, submerged in the deep end of the pool. Irrational thought. She pushes it away. Fatigue, that's rational. After-effect of her flight, maybe the cabin wasn’t pressurized properly. That’s probably it. She'll be okay. She is okay. A little burned out, in need of some R&R, but really, she's okay.
Her ears pop when she swallows, the pop followed by a click and then a rushing sound, her pulse maybe, faint, rhythmic and raspy, barely audible over the gutturals of the Dutch/Germans still holding forth on the tube.
She does not want to be here. Distant mountains darken in her mirror. Not there either, no. Not ever, though the sky is purple velvet and she remembers fireflies in the trees. How about Paris or Rome? The phone rings again. Bad connection, or blame it on her ears: Mick's voice, but she can't understand a word. She doesn't have to. Get your ass down here, do the company shuffle.
"Ten minutes," she says. "Okay?"
Babel
Shiny, high-tech bar. Packed and jumping. Wednesday night, hump night in the hinterlands. Young execs, heartland-suburban style, wrap legs around the legs of tall shiny chrome stools, serious-looking drinks at their elbows on the Lucite slab. Very young men, last year's haircut, last year's tie. Locals. Local women, younger still, and numerous and on the make. Pastel power suits, dear lord.
The out of town crowd, the conference folks, are older, better dressed, having less fun but that will change as the evening wears on. Right now they're still working, most of them, confabulating in corners and booths, doing deals, talking about doing deals, arguing and interrupting, explaining, complaining, insisting, contradicting, wheedling, mouths working nonstop and oh! the jokes. Lawyer jokes, blonde jokes, priest-and-rabbi jokes, then a quick flick of the eye, checking out present company, and then — depending on present company — Jew jokes, wop jokes, Polish and nigger jokes, queer jokes. She's heard them all.
The noise is painful. Two TV's, one at each end of the bar, tuned to different channels: stock car race and some kind of political food-fight, thin-lipped whiteguys yelling at each other full-volume over the howl of supercharged V8s. She can't understand a word. Someone's beeper peeps. A cellphone twitters. Two guys, maybe six feet apart, pluck cunning little handsets from pockets. Are they texting each other? She hears Tippy's whinnying laugh, sees Rob waving. Waves back — just a minute! — and heads toward the bar.
Over the blare of the televisions and the spiky hum of all that ethnic humor quote unquote and all that office who's-screwing-whom and hostile-takeover gossip she hears a raw discordant rhythmic scratching sound. Ratcha-ratcha, it goes, ratcharatcharatch, alternating with a nasal angry chant: Nah-na-na-na-na nah-na-na-na-na-nah. She wants a drink. A cigarette and a drink. She hasn't smoked in years but she wants to smoke now. The bartender quirks an eyebrow at her. His lips move but she can't hear him. "Scotch," she says. Her voice sounds raw and scratchy: "Scorch," it comes out. "Scorch. Durble. Strettup."
The bartender's lips are thick and pink, the lower one a cushion puckered and damp in the center. Another time she might have flirted a little, but she's worried about her voice, she's worried about her sabotaged reports. She wants a cigarette and a double shot of Scotch, no rocks, and for Rob to quit grinning like he doesn't have a wife, like she doesn't have Charles — except that she doesn't have Charles, of course. But Rob doesn't know about that.
Bartender slides her drink toward her. She sips. Scotch; at least that much got through, but ice cubes knock against her teeth. She's sure she said straight up; beckons to the bartender, stares at the outline of the cigarette pack in the pocket of his bright white shirt. "Nerrrmind," she manages, drags her eyes away and there's Rob, all wavery like she's the one who's drunk, not he. Mouth-calisthenics, random sounds, but then her name: "Susanna."
The man on her right barks into his cellphone. "Roof-roof," he says. "Roof-roof-roof."
Ozark Overdrive
The road spills toward the mountains like a ribbon off a spool. Susanna's heart races; she feels cold, then hot then cold again as the dark land all around her starts to rise, humps up, grows big shoulders lumpy with boulders and black shaggy pines, sudden green eye-flash in the rental car's high beams. The reeky breath of some nameless nightmare brushes the back of her neck; her own breath rasps as she drops to a lower gear, pressing as hard as she dares through the curves. The tires moan. Even on the straight-aways they moan and then she realizes it isn't the tires but her ownself, the sound coming from down in her chest somewhere, or her belly or her toes, a sound without words because there aren't words anymore. She's been abandoned by language. The world around her is speaking in tongues.
Tears stream down her cheeks. Angrily she wipes them away, as ashamed as if she'd wet her pants. That's how it feels: deeply, deeply shameful. What galls the worst is her inability to stop crying, to control herself. Something has happened, she tells herself, trying to get used to the idea.
She isn't the kind of woman to whom things happen. She's a doer, not a done-to. Otherwise she wouldn't have gotten where she is today. Even without the deck stacked against her, which it has been all her life. Not a drop of Hawaiian blood but that's about all she's missing: Irish, German, Mexican, Cherokee, Swedish, Black, her family dirt poor Ozark Arkies. She's the second oldest of ten and she knows about deck-stacking, in spades.
Once again she thinks of calling Charles: Honey, something weird is going on. Not an option. Calling for help isn't what she does. Others call her. For eight years she's been solving problems at Glossy HiTech, putting out fires, stopping leaks, socking away a hefty bonus every year at Christmas. The firm's recent acquisition by EvenGlossier HiTech won't affect her, not negatively at least. Her name's in the hat for a VP slot, Mick has strongly hinted. She'll be the youngest ever. Would have been, she corrects herself, not liking the sound of that at all. Would have been the youngest. One of only two women, the only person of color. She knows they're bean-counting but she's also knows she's qualified. More than. Don't even think about their motives, girl. What's wrong with being their poster child? Just put their money in the bank.
Lord knows she has expenses: mortgage, car payments; rehab and therapy for her brother Tim. Season tickets to symphony and theater. Clothes of course. She likes silk and nubbly linen; antique velvet from a certain London shop. Is she really ready to chuck it all, just drive away? Now, instead of in ten years as she planned?
No choice, it seems. But there has to be an explanation. Surely she is dreaming. From time to time she checks the radio: Ratcha-ratcha ratcharatcharatch.
Teeth clenched, she presses on, into the foothills and down, up again and down, the road narrow and winding. Ratcharatch, nah-na-na-nah. Her rental, a four-door Chrysler for godsake, isn't designed for this. The body sways, rear end threatens to break loose and nah-na-na-nah she almost wishes it would. But then the road levels out and straightens; she's down into a gentler landscape of rolling pinewoods and grassy fields, the mountains still looming ahead ratcharatch. The sun vaults golden out of a cloudbank in the rearview mirror and suddenly it's morning, pine needles silvery with dew. Susanna wipes her face and finds it dry.
The road climbs again and runs the top of a ridge, feathery deep-green pines on one side, broad pale-green and brown checkerboard valley on the other. A river parts the valley in neat halves, and a road runs beside the river. In the distance, houses and a white-spired church cluster at the edge of the woods that rise to meet the next range of hills. A town. Stores, she thinks. Gas station, rest room, coffee shop. She wants pancakes, she wants a Belgian waffle. She wants a cigarette, unfiltered, and about four cups of coffee, black. Her stomach knots and her tongue moves awkwardly in her mouth, stiff as the clapper of a bell. When she checks the radio again, yodeling contests have replaced the scratching sounds on every station.
Mid-morning. Well into the foothills now and the gas gauge flirting with empty. Ratcharatch goes the radio; so much for yodeling. Then, from the depths of her purse, her cellphone jingles. She reaches to answer it, but then doesn't. Her heart thuds. The phone jingles again. Mick of course: What's going on and where in hell are you? Or Dr. Witter from the halfway house, something about her brother, some question she doesn't want to admit she knows the answer to.
Or Charles. Intuitive Charles, reaching-out-to-you-baby Charles: "I know what we decided, I just thought ..." Jingle-jangle. She thumbs the window button. Warm pine-scented wind rushes in. Flowering bushes crowd the roadside. A flip of her wrist. The phone hovers, turns slowly end over end, silvery skin flashing, and disappears.
She needs to pee. Pulls onto the shoulder, leaves the car running and climbs a rail fence into an unmowed field, wades through knee-high grass, wades through flowers that look like white poppies and some kind of tiny pink asters to a bush large enough to squat behind. She squats behind it, steadying herself with one hand and, suddenly exhausted, thinks of falling asleep. The sun warms her shoulders and the top of her head and the world looks weirdly bright, as if she's watching her life in early Technicolor. A foreign film, botched dubbing job, na-na-na-na-nah ratcharatch ratcharatch. Huge white clouds bumble stupidly across a Crayola sky. Bushes and trees alive with birds. Nesting season. Their songs are miracles of coherence and clarity.
I could stay here forever, Susanna thinks. Bare-ass, jeans around my ankles. I could turn to stone, just crumble into the landscape. A short distance away the rental car waits patiently, purring to itself, steadily consuming the last of its gas. Voices in the distance gabblegabble. Humans or a flock of geese. Susanna yanks up her pants and returns to the car. The gas gauge reads empty. But the road ahead slopes downhill. She shuts off the engine, shifts into neutral and releases the brake. Let gravity do it: Ozark overdrive.
Smoke
At the foot of the long descent there is a town and on the outskirts of the town is a gas station, self-serve thank you Jesus, pay with plastic right there at the pump. Through the dirty window she sees the attendant, faceless and shadowy, reading a magazine. She fills the tank, sluices most of the bug carcasses from the windshield with the water hose, there being no squeegee. Cleans up a bit in the restroom, stocks up on drinks and snacks from machines, thinks how easy it is to get along without speech so long as you have Visa and a supply of quarters and don't mind junk food. She was raised on junk food; she figures she'll be okay.
She'll be okay, she figures, and she drives on through the morning, into the afternoon and evening, no sound but the hum of tires, the whoosh of trucks passing, she knows better than to bother with the radio. Once she hears the bleating of a train whistle, once the drawn-out dopplered rise and fall of a siren or horn.
At eight p.m. she stops for gas again. Gas and Cokes and Fritos, searching out a modern-looking station where she can charge her purchase at the pump, then she drives on into the darkness, eyes burning, it's been 16 hours give or take.
Mountain Vista MOTOWAY, the motel is called. Vaguely familiar or maybe just a familiar type, a low, paint-peeling sunbleached building facing patched asphalt; small forlorn pool, dim flickering neon. Plenty of rooms on a Thursday night.
The office smells of air freshener. Why do they call it that? Susanna wonders as she taps the bell on the counter. She's sweating; how much will she have to speak? If there are questions, will she understand? Behind the counter is a door with a sign that says MANAGEMENT. It opens on kitchen smells and the ratchratcha and canned laughter of a television. Management appears, a grey-haired man in a brown sweater. His eyebrows swoop up and aggressively forward, just as her Uncle Billy's had. She smiles and slides her credit card across. Holds up one finger: one person, one night.
"Moch?" he asks.
She processes this, then nods.
She used to smoke. She also used not to smoke. Then she used to smoke again. Nicotine still sneaks up sometimes, perches on her shoulder, gets right up next to her ear and whispers her name, its voice a languid stroke that weakens her knees. Susanna, purrs nicotine. Sssu-san-nnah, we're good together, don't pretend you don't remember.
Nicotine is patient as a fisherman. Knows how to play her, how to pay out the line, then haul her in. She hears it now, calling her name. Sssssssusannah, whispers nicotine. Sssssssusannah. Curling closer, so close the hair stands up on her arms. Don't you remember, Ssssusannnnahhhhh?
She'll smoke if she wants to. Even though she doesn't anymore. She wants a room with ashtrays in it, and isn't it odd to find a little out of the way cheap motel in who knows what little town in she isn't even sure what state but certainly not California, where Management asks if you want a smoking or non-smoking room. Smoking, definitely. Even though she doesn't anymore she'll sit with her nose pressed to a corner of the bedspread or a curtain, and breathe in the dregs of someone else's weakness. If she wants to.
Mirrors
Even with all the ambient light from the shopping center just down the road, the sky is full of stars. Susanna leans her forehead against the cool windowpane, watching red and white strands, headlights and taillights, stream past on the highway. The black shoulders of the mountain range shrug up against the sky. She doesn't want to go to the mountains. The mountains are where she came from, if not these mountains others enough like them as to make no difference. Sighing, she sits down on her bed. Her room in this motel is exactly what she expected, a single room like a lot of others she hasn't stayed in lately but remembers all too well. It smells of cheap perfume and disinfectant, tobacco and disinfectant, poverty and dampness and disinfectant. Clean, though. Dear lord is it clean, chenille bedspread bald and colorless from years of industrial-machine heavy-soil cycles, and curtains the same. Big mirror on the wall across from the bed.
From the wall above the headboard a predatory-looking Jesus in a severe black plastic frame sizes her up. I'm too tough for you, she tells him but it's reflex, she doesn't feel tough at all. She takes Jesus down and leans his face against the wall by the door and then flops back on the bed again, plumping pillows behind her, watching the clean curtains belly in the breeze, and the neon sign flickering YAWOTOM, which scares her at first because up to now reading's been no problem. But like the blowing curtain the sign is in the mirror; it's supposed to be backward. Everything is backward in mirrors, flipped left to right so that your face in a photo isn't the face you look at every morning as you brush your teeth.
For example. The highway she can see reflected, head and taillights streaming red and white, is the highway from, not the highway to, and the place she left last night to arrive here at this place was not the convention motel where even now Mick & Co could be talking to the police if they haven't already. The place she left last night was her family's steep 10 acres in Cottonmouth County. She has stepped into a seam. She's 18 again, holed up in this very room after 24 hours on the road. No sleep, 15 dollars to her name and a borrowed car that will turn into stolen as soon as her Uncle Billy gets back from Fayetteville and finds it gone.
In the Seam
She won’t go. Won’t take that trip down nightmare lane; thank God you can’t go home again. Home is Philadelphia, or was. She has a feeling she won’t be heading back there either, anytime soon. Concerns, concerns, logistics, bills coming due. Mortgage, car payment, gym. Someone else will deal. Charles or someone. Or not.
She will not go. Been there, done that once five years ago, because Charles wanted to see where she came from (though she’d told him all about it), who her people were (ditto), simply couldn’t understand why she’d cut herself off from her roots. He’d actually said that; those very words. Big on roots, is Charles, which Susanna figures must be a case of perversely misplaced envy, his own roots being deep in the South Carolina plantation class. Liberal guilt, she thinks: it doth make assholes of a lot of folks. Charles got off on her roots. Well, all but the tall pale Swedes and the pasty-faced krauts and micks. They didn’t interest him. White trash, she could almost hear him thinking. She herself tried not to think of her family, ever. Of their poverty, their shiftlessness, their endless forgiveness of what should never be forgiven.
Charles got off on her Cherokee great-great-grandma Lorene and her great-great uncle Hiram who’d been a slave and other her great-great-uncle Thad who’d been a free Creole Negro until someone cut his throat in a fight over ownership of a pedigreed China White sow. Charles loved that story, made her tell it again and again, as if there were something noble and romantic about a man being knifed to death over a pig.
The way she saw it, by the time it all came down to her generation, any nobility and romanticism there might once have been had been pretty well buried, alcoholism piled upon madness piled upon ignorance, heaped upon robbery, theft and manslaughter, lies and betrayals, wrecked cars, suicides, one tragic end after another. It’s in my genes, she thinks now. I thought I got out, thought I was the one that got away. But I’m nutty as a squirrel. Looks like the joke (is there a joke?) is on me.
When she and Charles first got together he’d insisted: got to meet your family. He thought they’d be quaint no doubt, salt of the earth like the mother in that Alice Walker story about the quilts. She tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen. Not possible, he’d said. “Look at you!” (They were in bed, naked; he raised up on one elbow and smiled into her face with such love and sweetness that she’d nearly wept.) “Just look at you, look how beautiful, how smart. You’re the youngest Regional Manager at Glossy HiTech, you’ll be VP before you’re 40….”
“Thirty-five,” she’d interrupted. “I want it before I’m 35.” By 40 she’d be retired, she told him, kicked back on some beach somewhere with a tall drink in her hand.
She was ambitious. That’s what he loved about her. That and her mysterious maybe Hawaiian darkness that he knew wasn’t Hawaiian of course, but when his parents asked he said yes. She could see how much it meant to him to shake hands, no, embrace and break bread with her beige and brown kin; the whiter ones could stand aside. And although at the time she couldn’t, she now can see what it meant to her to show up — scattering skinny dogs, chickens and kids in front of her father’s derelict house — in a nearly-new Mercedes driven by slim, elegant, tennis-tanned-&-toned Charles. Massa’s son & heir, y’all. He wants to marry me.
It hadn’t gone well. And the one positive-seeming note had later proved to be the sourest of all. As they were leaving, her youngest brother hung on Charles’s arm, eyes welling: “Take me with you!” Tim, her favorite, the other smart one; the one most like herself. He had to get away, he said. He’d die here, he said, and anyone could see it was the truth. Tim the arty one, the one called sissy and fag, could draw and paint, even as a little boy. Had a feel for color and texture; wanted to study fashion design.
They didn’t take him with them then, but she sent money for art supplies, and bail when he started down the same road as the others, all the while wondering how to work a half-educated possibly gay mixed-breed teenaged hillbilly who was already smoking weed and joyriding in other people’s cars into her Glossy HiTech life. Because he had talent. He did have that. Like her, he had talent. Maybe he deserved to be given the chance she’d reached up and grabbed for herself. He had a little bit of drive, maybe it would be enough.
In the end of course she took him in — him and his fondness not just for weed, for coke, crank, party drugs, whatever he could lay hands on. He stole from her. Right into her bedroom, right into her purse, her pockets, into the Swiss music box on her dresser for her collection of antique cameos. Couldn't understand what she'd gone through to get where she was; couldn't see he'd never get anywhere at all if he didn't stand on his own feet. She couldn't bear to see him fail. And so she threw him out.
Almost a year ago now.
Blood may be thicker than water, she thinks, stripping off the nightgown she just put on and stuffing it back into the plastic laundry bag that is all she brought with her from the conference motel. Blood may be thicker than water, but so is engine oil. She’s not going to that place that is not home, and she’s not staying here either, with Jesus watching around the edge of the picture frame even though she made him stand in the corner with his face to the wall. She throws the bag into the Chrysler’s trunk and settles behind the wheel again, rubbing her tired eyes. She’ll press on toward the west, since that’s the way she seems to be headed, and drive till she runs out of road or the law comes down and stops her, one or the other. After that, she decides as she slides key into ignition and turns it, she doesn’t much care.
Plan B
The law comes down, or starts to, in JoJoJean’s Café in a mountain town called Nevis. Paying for her breakfast with her credit card she sees the cashier’s eyes narrow, flick toward her and quickly away. The purchase goes on through, but outside, Susanna is suspicious, watches through the grimy front window as the cashier reaches for the phone. And when she rounds the corner of the street where she left her car, there’s a town-cop cruiser angled in behind. Towncop himself, little short square chunk of a guy with a red mustache, hand on holstered gun-butt, peers in through the Avis Chrysler’s windshield as if he expects to see her murdered body slumped sideways on the seat.
She keeps on walking, right on past, noting with dismay/annoyance/amusement that she parked in the Handicapped zone in front of a senior residence, as towncop scribbles in his notebook too busy to look up. She’s getting a ticket, it seems, and if towncop runs a check on her plates — even here in the boonies they probably do that — there’s a good chance that car will turn up on some list. Fear stabs through her, clean and sharp, the first thing she has felt since she can’t remember when, and for a moment the pressure on her ears eases. She can hear the radio in the cruiser, not clearly enough to understand — she’s too far away — but it is definitely a human voice, speaking ordinary human words, not that ratcharatcha shit.
She keeps on walking. Surprised — she really thought she’d just give up when push came to shove; had almost thought she’d welcome it: Okay, you got me, now someone else take charge. But her life is still streaming past like a movie under someone else’s direction. The script doesn’t call for her capture, not just yet. Towncop finishes writing her ticket, tucks it under the windshield wiper and returns to his cruiser. She walks on past, eyes straight ahead, ears crackling with static, thinking with eerie satisfaction, I’m a fugitive now, it’s official. At the corner she turns right and just keeps going, expecting the blue and white cruiser to pull up beside her but it doesn’t. She walks on, out of the business district past little faded-stucco houses then storage sheds, auto repair, muffler shops, a salvage yard, all nearly deserted, almost to the edge of town. Gas stations with their signs on high poles, visible from the freeway she came in on last night. Now she can’t find the freeway, isn’t sure that matters, other than to help her get her bearings.
Everything she has with her except the clothes on her back and the wallet in the pocket of her coat is in the trunk of the Chrysler. Cold weather clothes — knit cap, down vest and gloves, wool sox — purchased just yesterday. Most of a box of peanut energy bars, bought yesterday too. Her Visa has apparently been flagged. She still has her Amex, that might or might not still be okay, her ATM ditto, and about eight dollars cash. It’s early April. Springtime where the convention is winding up without her, but here in the mountains it’s cold at night. Not chilly, cold. There’s still snow on the peaks. The loss of her clothes is no joke.
Ten minutes later there’s still no freeway on-ramp, but there is a small café, similar to the one where she ate not long ago. Coffee, she thinks, a cigarette machine. If she’s a fugitive she’s going to smoke. Then she thinks: cops. Cops take coffee breaks in places like this. She needs a Plan B. Three or four cars are parked in front, among them an old Ford pick-up. She approaches it cautiously. It’s turquoise and white, a late-‘60’s relic like the one the Preacher Lady used to drive in Arkansas when Susanna was a girl. Susanna liked the Preacher Lady, and the old truck gives her a good feeling now. In its bed are a couple of hay bales with a tarp tossed carelessly over them. No guns in the racks in the rear window of the truck’s cab, and no dogs. She glances up and down the empty street. A moment later she’s in the back of the truck, squeezed between two bales, covered by the tarp. It ought to be warm in there, like a cave or a nest, but it’s not. Cold seeps up from the steel bed of the truck, into her feet, into her butt, up her legs and into her body. She blows on her hands to warm them and then waits, shivering in the dark, for whatever happens next.
This is it, a voice says clearly. You’re going to freeze to death ratcha ratch.
I’ll make a fire, she tells the voice.
Got no matches ratcharatcha.
I’ll rub sticks.
They’ll rape you nah nana nah they’ll kill you.
No they won’t, she says, and then stops breathing, tries to stop shaking, and listens. Boots crunch on asphalt, a man’s voice calls clearly (!) “See ya!” Then the truck’s doors open, both sides, and its body shifts under the weight as one-two-three men climb into the cab. Susanna knows they’re men by their laughter, their voices. In the clarity of her fear she can understand them perfectly: three ordinary oldish-sounding guys, one with a slight Spanish accent. The truck bed shudders beneath her as the engine turns over and catches.
She had no plan when she got into the truck but planning is what she does, what she’s good at and used to be paid so well to do. It’s what she finds herself reflexively doing as the truck sways and lurches along over what feels like an ill-paved country road, prickly hay bales on either side of her and a tarp over her head. Plan A was No Plan: watch the movie. Plan B is what will come next, whatever she will do to keep from dying of cold or being hurt by these men, if that’s the kind of men they turn out to be. After awhile she works the tarp back so there’s a little triangle of daylight, blue sky and occasionally clouds, every so often the triangle darkens as the truck winds its way among trees. Without a plan she’s dead — good chance, anyway. She notes, without any particular feeling one way or another, that clearly she does not want to die.
The Plot Thickens
An hour into the mountains the truck leaves the paved road and jounces over ruts and gravel, climbing steeply through thick pines. Susanna is in the seam again, riding forward, a stowaway, toward some unknown destination, and backward, without Charles this time, to the place that is not home. Is this the Preacher Lady’s truck? She hopes so. If she’s with the Preacher Lady, nothing bad will happen. Even Uncle Billy is afraid of the Preacher Lady. Susanna watches the tops of pine trees wipe across the sky ratcharatcha, sees a hawk tilt up on one wing, its tail fanned wide, and hears its cry: kee-ree! kee-ree!
Wee-heee! Wee-heee! At first she thinks it’s laughter, the long E’s a laughing vowel (her father’s and her uncles’ wheezing hee-hee-hee), unlike aah, which she associates with pain and grief. But this high keening has nothing to do with mirth, and the figure racing toward her through the mist, the figure rapidly resolving itself, becoming her brother Tim, isn’t laughing. Definitely not laughing. Also definitely not laughing, two other, bigger boys in hot pursuit.
With a gnashing of gears the truck lumbers down into a dry wash, rattles over loose stones, humps itself up and out again. Moments later, it clatters across a cattle guard. The treetops drop away. Susanna sees windmill blades, not turning. The hawk hovers, unnaturally large, unnaturally still, like a target in a shooting arcade. All that’s missing is a white circle on its belly. Kee-ree!
Wee-heee! One of the bigger boys bends down, still in full stride, scoops a stone from the path and throws it. Even though it goes wide, Tim shrieks again, and covers his head with both hands.
If she’s eighteen and still there, she can do this over. That will be the proof she needs. But there is nothing she can do but watch as her brother is overtaken, knocked to the ground, punched, kicked, his pants pulled down. She can’t see what it is, exactly, that the older boys do to him, but when they are finished and have trotted away, laughing and punching each other on the arm, he lies there, silent, not crying now but fetally curled half-naked in the path. Ten or 15 minutes he lies there without moving before he slowly stands, wipes nose and eyes on his wrist, arranges his clothing. Ten or 15 minutes. Where is she all this time? In the seam. There but not there. The story of her life.
The truck jolts over rocks or roots, still climbing. No more trees. The sun crawls higher, the sky is empty, the hawk is gone. Cautiously Susanna shoves the tarp farther to the side, risks raising her head a little. They’re running along a ridge. She sees, far behind and far below, a ranch house, barn, scatter of outbuildings. The windmill still not turning, though here on the ridge a stiff breeze tugs at corner of the tarp, which has started to flap. She pins it with one foot; doesn’t want it catching the eye of anyone in the pickup’s cab.
The Preacher Lady was old and fat, a potato-shaped no-neck woman, thin white hair held back by a beaded rawhide thong. She raised chickens and vegetables in a clearing in the hills near Lassie Creek. Some said she was Mexican, some said Cherokee, some called her a Black Irish witch. She knew the old spells and potions, could work roots and read the face of the moon, tell you when to plant and when to harvest. But the True Spirit spoke through her too, some said. And when it did, her voice seemed to rise not from her own throat but from a silvery light that shimmered and glowed behind her. Her mouth would move, but her voice came from the light, and it didn’t sound like the voice she used when she ordered laying mash at the feed store, or even the voice that counseled the lovelorn or advised the farmers on their crops. When she spoke in the voice that came from the light, she could heal the sick and cause the blind to see.
It wasn’t her own voice, she said. Susanna had heard her talking in the post office one afternoon. “Ain’t mine, and I got no control over it.” Susanna couldn’t decide if the Preacher Lady sounded proud of this or not. “It just come over me, and when it do….” Missus Logan, the postmistress, leaned through her window and smiled encouragingly, but the Preacher Lady was licking stamps like any ordinary person and had nothing more to say.
It just come over me. Susanna had seen it happen. She was one of those who believed in the Preacher Lady’s powers. This made no sense, because Susanna didn’t believe in God, didn’t believe in any True Spirit, but she had seen with her own eyes the light flickering behind the Preacher Lady and had heard how the Preacher Lady’s voice was not her own. She reasoned that the Preacher Lady’s own spirit, or her mind, or whatever it was that made her who she was, was so strong that from time to time it built up in her, like an electric charge, and when it got to a certain point it had to go somewhere, do something. Why not a shimmery light and a voice like a radio preacher’s? Why not the power to heal?
Susanna was fascinated by power, even the blunt, brute big-fist and back-of-hand power of her father and her uncles, of all the men she knew. Even as a child she understood this kind was stupid, and ultimately boring, but she paid attention anyway. You could learn from it, she reckoned. If all you learned was how to dodge and stay alive … well, that was useful enough. Other strengths held far more interest. The strength of weakness, for example. She watched her mother, studied her aunts to learn — and reject — the martyr’s sigh, the barely held-back tears, the headaches and fainting spells. The Preacher Lady had the power of knowledge. Susanna could see the value of that, and took early to reading, sitting straight and eager every day at school, always the first to raise her hand. She understood that like the Preacher Lady she had still another kind of power. She couldn’t name it, didn’t expect it to cloak her in light or turn her into a healer. That wasn’t going to be her way. But she thought it just might get her the hell out of where she was, get her the hell out of Arkansas and into the world.
Trees close in around her again, dense then sparse then dense again, orange sunlight angling through high branches. Have they been driving all day? The truck is barely moving, clambering over rough and broken ground. Susanna hears voices, loud and sudden over the groan and rumble of the engine, as if one of the men has rolled his window down. A few minutes later they come to a stop. The engine falls silent. Doors open; the men get out. Huddled under the tarp, barely daring to breathe, she waits to learn what they do. Footsteps, grass or pine-needle quiet. Receding, thank god. She waits some more, till she can’t hear anything but wind in the trees, then raises herself up from between the hay bales. The truck is parked at the edge of a small clearing. There’s no one in sight.
In the seam again, not thinking, her mind not forming conscious thoughts, she loosens the tarp from the bales, wraps it around her shoulders like a stiff bulky cloak, and climbs awkwardly out of the truck. Her legs are numb as logs and she stands for a moment, shuffling her feet until some feeling returns. Not thinking, mind empty as the sky, she snugs the tarp around her. Let the men wonder what happened to it; let them think the wind blew it away. Head down — the wind has risen; damp, with an icy edge — she starts walking, back the way they came, until the clearing and the parked truck are hidden by the trees. She has no plan, no destination, only an unspoken certainty that the Preacher Lady’s truck has brought her here, and now she must go on alone.
Cabin
Perhaps it isn’t accurate to say her mind is empty. Perhaps, at some sub-verbal level there’s a picture: house, barn, sheds. Tri-blade windmill like a stopped clock: ten till two. Lighted windows, warmth. Sun slipping nearer and nearer to the jagged western ridgeline, brushing the glaciers with rose and apricot. Down and down, ink-blue shadows spilling out before it. Her toes and fingers tingle.
Or perhaps that’s not the ranch she almost-sees. Some other place, her father, Uncle Billy and Aunt Wren on the porch, fiddle, dobro and guitar, Uncle Billy with his head thrown back, adam’s apple jumping as the wild, hoarse tenor pours from his throat, the essence of grief and loneliness. Rank Stranger. Man of Constant Sorrow. It just come over me, the Preacher Lady said. Susanna guessed it just come over Uncle Billy too, from time to time. It could drive you to your knees, the way he sang. It could put you right down on your face in the dirt. Of course, he had other ways of driving you to your knees. Belt buckle, fist, much more frequent than song. She’d seen him break a man’s leg once, with a tire iron. And she herself carried, nearly invisible at the hairline now that she was grown, a three-cornered scar from the time he slapped her down in the barnyard and she’d hit her forehead on the edge of a shovel.
If she could have the music and leave the rest. If only. She tries never to think of the old songs, has cultivated a taste for jazz, shares a box at the symphony. Wouldn’t go to Newport with Charles for the Folk Festival, afraid of what she’d find there, or what might find her. Now, stumbling along a mountain trail in rapidly-gathering dusk, she says to herself, perhaps even aloud: “You’re a fool. You should have gone.”
The temperature is dropping. It falls like a curtain weighted with rocks as the sun disappears behind the western peaks and the sky darkens and begins to fill with stars. The moon is nearly full and casts a chilly blue light, enough to see by now that she’s out of the trees again. She pauses, adjusts the tarp to make a hood as well as a cape, sees herself as if from a distance: a misshapen dark figure lurching along behind the silver cloud of its breath. Off in the distance, a coyote howls, one and then another and then others, a chorus. She can almost see them too, muzzles to the sky, their animal breath the same ice color as her own.
She should be frightened, but she is not. She follows the trail along the ridge, numb feet stumbling over the rocky ground. Soon enough she sees a light winking yellow among the trees in the valley below. She leaves the trail and heads toward it, chesting her way through thickets of brush.
The creek is too wide to jump; too cold, too fast to cross on foot. A path runs beside it, so she follows that downstream till she reaches a wooden bridge. She can hear her footsteps on the planks as she crosses, stump stump stump, but between her knees and the soles of her shoes is nothing but a sense of thickness. Stump stump stump she crosses the bridge, close enough now that she can see it isn’t the ranch that she has reached. No windmill, no warm prosperous barn (where, it occurs to her, she had plans to sleep), no chicken house or machine shed. The house itself is small, a cabin with a porch, car parked in front. There’s an outhouse barely visible, a black familiar shape at the edge of a stand of trees.
Wherever you go, there you are, she thinks, and almost laughs aloud — where did that come from? She’s outside herself again, understanding that the tarp-wrapped woman had better do something pretty quick, hypothermia comes in on little cat feet, she doesn’t have long. From outside herself, from inside the seam, she can hear her own teeth rattling, feel the blood congealing in her veins. Do something, she tells herself; she wants to grab herself by the shoulders, give herself a good hard shake. Instead she imagines all the crazy people living in the woods. Survivalists. Gun nuts. Son of Unabomber, Aryan Nation kooks — won’t they be pleased to see her!
On this side, another path runs beside the creek, then angles toward the cabin. A waterwheel catches her eye, a working waterwheel, plashing softly, its wet blades glinting in the moonlight. No dogs, so far at least. What are the chances? What are the odds? she wonders from the safety of the seam, even as alarm pangs tighten her stomach: Don’t sit down! Don’t do it! she wants to cry. Instead, her analytical Glossy about to become EvemGlossier HiTech mind tries to calculate the odds of three cowboys in a pickup without an Aussie to their name, plus a dogless cabin in the boonies, all in one day. She tries to remember any country folks she ever knew who didn’t keep hounds or a herding dog or two. Nope. Dogs and kids, all of them skinny, scared and sly, swarmed on every porch and in every front yard she could recall. Reach out to pet either and you’d likely get bit, as Charles had found out, or pick up fleas or lice.
Don’t sit down! Her tarp-wrapped self ignores her. Next to the waterwheel is another small building, not much bigger than a doghouse. Some kind of pumping mechanism, maybe. She watches in dismay as un-seamed Susanna sinks down, legs stiff and straight in front of her, shoulders against the pump-house wall. Not 20 yards away the cabin floats like an ark, a rescue vessel, its warm window glowing. Get up, you fool, you weakling! Get up, loser; get up, trash! A pause. Aw hell, stay where you are, you shif’less no-good. Faked it for awhile I guess, fooled a few people, but this is who you are. For all your puttin’ on airs, you ain’t no diff’rent. You wa’n’t ever worth a shit, and you ain’t changed.
From deep in the seam she reaches, groping with numb fingers for whatever she can find. I am different. It’s true I haven’t changed, because I was never like you!
A silhouette appears in the cabin window. A female shape, looking out. Susanna wants to weep with relief but her eyes are frozen. All of her is frozen. I’m a popsicle: her mind forms this thought, and squeals hee-hee-hee with laughter at its own wit. That woman will find me in the morning and think I’m just a corpse.
At the window, the silhouetted woman starts to turn away. Help! cries Susanna, deep inside her mind. Suddenly a stone next to her right knee lights up. Like a small fluorescent bulb it gives off a cold fluttering light. “You are in a fix,” it says in the Preacher Lady’s healing voice. “Ain’t got but once chance, better use it good.” Susanna feels her dead right arm begin to levitate. It’s a weird sensation, like a log being winched onto a truck, she imagines. Then somehow the lighted stone arcs like a tiny long-tailed comet toward the house. Farther than she can throw on a good day, but she hears it thunk against the cabin wall; sees it flicker one last time and then go out.
Tea
She wakes from a dream of storm-tossed branches, winter branches, black and naked against a grey-white sky. No dream, just mistake, the branches not branches but antlers, a spreading 8-point rack perched ridiculously on the head of a small brown deer. She likes the shape of the antlers, their black-spiked upreaching silhouette, and she likes the rounded horizontal ears like handles to cling to. She is still here, still alive beside the creek — she can hear it — that runs past the cabin that she can no longer see because the deer — the buck — is in the way.
How long has she been here? Not so long, it seems. The three-quarter moon has drifted high and casts a thin cold light down through holes in the cloud cover. The buck’s eyes gleam, and the tips of his branching antlers and the wet edges of his nostrils, flaring gently as he breathes.
Then another buck appears, and another and another still, until there are four or five at least, some young, some mature, with antlers ranging from adolescent spikes to hunting trophies. She sees them drift out of the shadows, hears their hooves ticking over the stony ground. Shoulder to shoulder they line up beside the first, all of them regarding her steadily. She returns their gaze.
They don’t look dangerous. But they don’t look helpful either. If there’s a script, Disney didn’t write it.
Look here, Susanna says, I’m dying. I need help. Are you just going to stand there?
They stand there. The youngest one lowers his head, bends himself sideways, scratches his ear with a hind foot, like a dog.
Why couldn’t they be dogs? Why couldn’t they be Lassie, or a St. Bernard with a little keg of something potent and restorative? Why doesn’t one of them bound over there to the cabin where — she can see now that the line-up has shifted a little — the window still glows with
light, with life, and bang on the door with its antlers? Why don’t they blow their horns? Why doesn’t one of them bark?
Wind rustles the treetops. Curdled grey clouds scud and the moon breaks open, splashing down a great gout of cold fluorescence that startles the deer. Their hooves rattle stones, their antlers knock together as they jostle and spin and then scatter toward the trees. Don’t go! she calls, her voice hoarse and cracking. Don’t leave me! Miraculously, one turns back. She can’t see him, but his antlers hook beneath her arms and drag her down the path toward the cabin. She is not a big woman but the deer are small and she can hear this one’s uneven labored breathing as he heaves her along, her seat and lower back bumping the ground; feet, hands and legs too she assumes but she can’t feel them.
Then bump! bump! she’s being hoisted up, once, twice, then bump! once more and light surrounds her, not the cold moon but warm-honey lanternlight all thanks and praise to Disney after all. The deer has brought her inside. Thank you Bambi, she tries to say but nothing works. Then Bambi’s antlers in her armpits flex and soften, turn into hands and then they’re gone and she’s lying on blankets, under blankets, none too clean and smelling strongly of mice but she doesn’t care, and the warm sweet light has melted to liquid and trickles down her throat. She swallows. It’s tea.
Saved by Deer
Ain’t no more than she deserves, says Uncle Billy’s voice.
Nothin but trouble, agrees Aunt Wren, but Aunt Wren always agrees with Uncle Billy and what she says doesn’t always have a whole lot to do with what she really thinks.
Lay down with dogs, says Uncle Billy, get up with fleas.
I don’t itch, Susanna protests. She smells woodsmoke, sweat, whisky, moldy blanket. She thinks: come so far through so much struggle, end up in the same damn place. And anyway they weren’t dogs, they were deer. And I wasn’t exactly lying down, more like sitting. It sounds pretty
lame, she has to admit. I guess I fell. What are you doing here?
Too damn mean to get bit, mutters Billy. Girl, I ought to slap you sideways.
What for — this time — she doesn’t know. She knows only that she’s floating, hundreds of miles from the possibility of these voices in Cottonmouth County, many more hundreds maybe thousands of miles from Philadelphia where Charles and her brother Tim and weasel-eyed Dr. Witter are going on about their lives without her; maybe thousands of miles from terror and failure, from success and the prospect of more. She’s been saved by deer and that has changed everything. She’s been fed tea, bundled in dirty blankets. She has no arms and legs that she’s aware of, no body but a fading trail of warmth where the tea slid down.
Nothin but trouble, Aunt Wren repeats. Tried to raise her up right but she run off anyways, and now she’s gon die on us.
Susanna listens, trying to read her aunt’s voice for feeling, emotion. If she, Susanna, were to die, which seems perfectly possible, would Aunt Wren care?
And where, she wonders, are her parents? Where are her brothers and sisters, the whole stairstep crew scratching their flea-bitten ankles? Be careful what you lie with, who you lie to, she thinks. If they were here, she would give them that advice, not that they’d take it.
Bright morning stars are rising, Aunt Wren sings. Bright morning stars are rising, 12 steel strings ringing behind her voice. Bright morning stars are rising, and day is breaking in my soul.
Don’t die, says another voice, one she doesn’t recognize. Shift in smell, in feel of the air around her. She opens her eyes. The light in the room has gone yellow and strange. A table towers beside her, tall chrome legs stretching up to a sort of bracket fastened with mismatched screws, two Philips, one slot. A red chair, painted edges aglow, also shows her its underside, unpainted and blotched with something that might be wads of chewing gum. Peculiar angle, she thinks, then understands that she is lying on the floor.
Don’t die, says the voice again. Don’t you dare. Susanna can see no one. She can’t move; can’t turn her head. The table and the glowing red chair fill her view. The table’s oilcloth cover hangs unevenly, blue and white checks but she sees mainly underneath, a coarse drab gray. Far above: peeled-log rafters, the smoke-dark planks of an uninsulated roof. Nothing moves in the weird yellow light except, faintly, a flicker of shadow: fireplace perhaps, or lanterns or woodstove with its mouth open.
Aunt Wren is singing again, humming really, some tune Susanna knows in her blood but can’t remember the words to. She doesn’t have to see her aunt to picture the gnarled black-nailed fingers light and quick on the neck of her guitar. She wishes Uncle Billy would join in. He hasn’t spoken in awhile and she’s lost track of him, not a good idea. He’s in the room somewhere. She can feel him floating ominously at the periphery of her consciousness.
Couldn’t hold him, his voice says spitefully, as low and close as if he’s dropped to all fours beside her. Rub our noses in that city lawyer, but where is he now? Gone, that’s where. Long gone. You don’t have to tell me, I know I’m right.
Not so long gone, she starts to retort, but she’s too cold, too tired, it doesn’t matter anymore. She wants to go to sleep.
And Timmy? Aunt Wren wants to know. Where’s my Timmy, where’s my boy?
A year on the streets, six months in jail, now he's in a halfway house. Doing well, she's told. She should call him. It's important to keep contact. Personal contact, not just through Dr. Witter. Blood being thicker, etc. Charles calls him; she’s sure that even now Charles will continue to call him. Charles, who can forgive Tim when she, his own flesh and blood, can not.
“Drink this,” says a woman’s voice into her ear. She feels her head being raised, the hard hot curve of a cup against her lips. More tea, strong and sweet. She swallows gratefully. The room tightens, firms up. The light loses its sulphurous tinge and details appear: shelves, stocked with canned goods; a window half-hidden behind a yellow curtain. In the stove or fireplace, a log burns through and breaks; she hears it, and sees the walls brighten as embers flare and sparks fly up. She still can’t move. She half-sits, someone’s arm behind her head, someone’s hand holding a cup to her lips. “Drink,” the voice repeats. Susanna drinks. She drains the cup, then feels herself being lowered to the blanket again. Somehow she understands that Uncle Billy and Aunt Wren are no longer here.
She hears footsteps, the sound of water running, clink of glass or china in a metal pan. The tea has thawed the frozen hinge of her neck enough that her head turns just a little, so that she can see the tea-maker, a tall woman in jeans and a striped sweater, bent, her back to Susanna, over a galvanized steel sink. Cropped gray-streaked brown hair, feet in fuzzy red socks. Hiking boots neatly side by side on the floor not far away.
Susanna works her lips, curls her tongue experimentally, pushing against her upper teeth. If she tries to speak, what will happen? “Thank you,” she manages in the voice of a dry leaf.
The woman turns, wiping her hands on a rag. And as she turns, she disappears. From the back, she’s an ordinary woman, solid. You could touch her shoulder and there’d be bone and flesh under the sweater beneath your hand. But as she faces Susanna, bone and flesh, even sweater, simply fade from sight. What’s left is a woman-shaped absence surrounded by a faint glow. Aura? Susanna wonders. She doesn’t believe in auras, but she doesn’t believe in disappearing women, either.
She doesn’t believe in most of the things that have happened in the past … 72? hours. But refusal to believe doesn’t change anything, she’s found. She’s reminded of a college friend, Dexter something, a hard-science guy who during an acid trip felt his body atomize and mingle with the rest of the essential universe. That’s what he said. And while his body was mingling, his consciousness had a heart-to-heart with God. It made a believer of him. Not a nut — all he did was join a synagogue — but a believer. He didn’t care that the conversation had taken place under the influence of hallucinogenic chemicals. It happened, he told Susanna; it happened to me. I was there.
“Good thing I found you when I did,” says the woman-shaped absence. Her voice is flat, laconic. Susanna finds this comforting.
“I can’t feel my hands and feet.”
The absence turns away, becomes the back of a woman in sweater and jeans poking up the fire in the stove, shoving in another log. “Don’t worry. When they start to thaw you’ll feel them more than you want to.” She pours steaming water from a teapot into a large basin, adds water from the tap. Susanna watches carefully as the woman turns toward her again. There’s probably a trick to this, and she wants to see how it’s done. But the woman just disappears. Becomes absent. Susanna is interested in the fact that, wherever she has gone, she has taken the basin with her. Nevertheless she can hear water sloshing, and when some spills, a perfectly normal wet spot appears on the floor close to Susanna’s head. “Sorry,” says the absence. “Almost got you.”
Susanna closes her eyes. That way it doesn’t matter if her rescuer is a woman or a not-woman. That way she can drift, float, give it up and let someone else take over. She feels things being done to her legs. It’s like being a telephone pole or chunk of granite, she imagines. You’re heavy and stupid and sometimes you have to be moved. Someone has to move you. It’s hard work. She hears the woman breathing, every now and then a grunt of exertion. Susanna is grateful, but she’s also afraid. She’s had frostbite before, frozen her fingers and toes. This rescued by deer business is something else. When she starts to thaw, the pain will be fierce.
“I could have stayed a popsicle,” she says in her papery hoarse voice.
“What?”
But it has started. The first red-yellow-white-hot tendril unfurls from her left big toe, shoots up her calf and pools in a molten pocket behind her knee.
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