The World According to Garp

15. THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BENSENHAVER

HOPE STANDISH was at home with her son, Nicky, when Oren Rath walked into the kitchen. She was drying the dishes and she saw immediately the long, thin-bladed fisherman's knife with the slick cutting edge and the special, saw-toothed edge that they call a disgorger-scaler. Nicky was not yet three; he still ate in a high chair, and he was eating his breakfast when Oren Rath stepped up behind him and nudged the ripper teeth of his fisherman's knife against the child's throat.

“Set them dishes aside,” he told Hope. Mrs. Standish did as she was told. Nicky gurgled at the stranger; the knife was just a tickle under his chin.

“What do you want?” Hope asked. “I'll give you anything you want.”

“You sure will,” said Oren Rath. “What's your name?”

“Hope.”

“Mine's Oren.”

“That's a nice name,” Hope told him.

Nicky couldn't turn in the high chair to see the stronger who was tickling his throat. He had wet cereal on his fingers, and when he reached for Oren Rath's hand, Rath stepped up beside the high chair and touched the fine, slicing edge of his fisherman's blade to the fleshy pouch of the boy's cheek. He made a quick cut there, as if he were briefly outlining the child's cheekbone. Then he stepped back to observe Nicky's surprised face, his simple cry; a thread thin line of blood appeared, like the stitching for a pocket, on the boy's cheek. It was as if the child had suddenly developed a gill.

“I mean business,” said Oren Rath. Hope started toward Nicky but Rath waved her back. “He don't need you. He just don't care for his cereal. He wants a cookie.” Nicky bowled.

“He'll choke on it, when he's crying,” Hope said.

“You want to argue with me?” said Oren Rath. “You want to talk about choking? I'll cut his pecker off and stuff it down his throat—if you want to talk about choking.”

Hope gave Nicky a zwieback and he stopped crying.

“You see?” said Oren Rath. He picked up the high chair with Nicky in it and hugged it to his chest. “We're going to the bedroom now,” he said; he nodded to Hope. “You first.”

They went down the hall together. The Standish family lived in a ranch house then; with a new baby, they had agreed ranch houses were safer in the case of a fire. Hope went into the bedroom and Oren Rath put down the high chair with Nicky in it, just outside the bedroom door. Nicky had almost stopped bleeding; there was just a little blood on his cheek; Oren Rath wiped this off with his hand, then wiped his hand on his pants. Then he stepped into the bedroom after Hope. When he closed the door, Nicky started to cry.

“Please,” Hope said. “He really might choke, and he knows how to get out of that high chair—or it might tip over. He doesn't like to be alone.”

Oren Rath went to the night table and slashed through the phone cord with his fisherman's knife as easily as a man halving a very ripe pear. “You don't want to argue with me,” he said.

Hope sat down on the bed. Nicky was crying, but not hysterically; it sounded as if he might stop. Hope started crying, too.

“Just take off your clothes,” Oren said. He helped her undress. He was tall and reddish-blond, his hair as lank and as close to his head as high grass beaten down by a flood. He smelled like silage and Hope remembered the turquoise pickup she'd noticed in the driveway, just before he appeared in her kitchen. “You've even got a rug in the bedroom,” he said to her. He was thin but muscular; his hands were large and clumsy, like the feet of a puppy who's going to be a big dog. His body seemed almost hairless, but he was so pale, so very blond, that his hair was hard to see against his skin.

“Do you know my husband?” Hope asked him.

“I know when he's home and when he ain't,” Rath said. “Listen,” he said suddenly; Hope held her breath. “You hear? Your kid don't even mind it.” Nicky was murmuring vowel sounds outside the bedroom door, talking wetly to his zwieback. Hope began crying harder. When Oren Rath touched her, awkward and fast, she thought she was so dry that she wouldn't even get big enough for his horrible finger.

“Please wait,” she said.

“No arguing with me.”

“No, I mean I can help you,” she said. She wanted him in and out of her as fast as possible; she was thinking of Nicky in the high chair in the hall. “I can make it nicer, I mean,” she said, unconvincingly; she did not know how to say what she was saying. Oren Rath grabbed one of her breasts in such a way that Hope knew he had never touched a breast before; his hand was so cold, she flinched. In his awkwardness, he butted her in the mouth with the top of his head.

“No arguing,” he grunted.

“Hope!” someone called. They both heard it and froze. Oren Rath gaped at the cut phone cord.

“Hope?”

It was Margot, a neighbor and a friend. Oren Rath touched the cool, flat blade of his knife to Hope's nipple.

“She's going to walk right in here,” Hope whispered. “She's a good friend.”

“My God, Nicky,” they could hear Margot say, “I see you're eating all over the house. Is your mother getting dressed?”

“I'll have to fuck you both and kill everybody,” whispered Oren Rath. Hope scissored his waist with her good legs and hugged him, knife and all, to her breasts. “Margot!” she screamed. “Grab Nicky and run! Please!” she shrieked. “There's a crazy man who's going to kill us all! Take Nicky, take Nicky!”

Oren Rath lay stiffly against her as if it were the first time he'd ever been hugged. He did not struggle, he did not use his knife. They both lay rigid and listened to Margot dragging Nicky down the hall and out the kitchen door. One leg of the high chair was snapped off against the refrigerator, but Margot didn't stop to remove Nicky from the chair until she was half a block down the street and kicking open her own door. “Don't kill me,” Hope whispered. “Just go, quickly, and you'll get away. She's calling the police, right now.”

“Get dressed,” said Oren Rath. “I ain't had you yet, and I'm going to.” Where he'd butted her with the oval crown of his head, he had split her lip against her teeth and made her bleed. “I mean business,” he repeated, but uncertainly. He was as rough-boned and graceless as a young steer. He made her put her dress on without any underwear, he shoved her barefoot down the hall, carrying his boots under his arm. Hope didn't realize until she was beside him in the pickup that he had put on one of her husband's flannel shirts.

“Margot has probably written down the license number of this truck,” she told him. She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself; she dabbed at her split lip with the broad, floppy collar of her dress. Oren Rath stiff-armed her in the ear, rapping the far side of her head off the passenger door of the cab.

“I need that mirror to see,” he said. “Don't mess around or I'll really hurt you.” He'd taken her bra with him and he used it to tie her wrists to the thick, rusty hinges of the glove-compartment door, which gaped open at her.

He drove as if he were in no special hurry to get out of town. He did not seem impatient when he got stuck at the long traffic light near the university. He watched all the pedestrians crossing the street; he shook his head and clucked his tongue when he saw how some of the students were dressed. Hope could see her husband's office window from where she sat in the truck's cab, but she didn't know if he would be in his office or actually, at that moment, teaching a class.

In fact, he was in his office—four floors up. Dorsey Standish looked out his window and saw the lights change; the traffic was allowed to flow, the hordes of marching students were temporarily restrained at the gates to the crosswalks. Dorsey Standish liked watching traffic. There are many foreign and flashy cars in a university town, but here these cars were contrasted with the vehicles of the natives: farmers' trucks, slat-sided conveyors of pigs and cattle, strange harvesting machinery, everything muddy from the farms and county roads. Standish knew nothing about farms, but he was fascinated by the animals and the machines—especially the dangerous, baffling vehicles. There went one, now, with a chute—for what?—and a latticework of cables that pulled or suspended something heavy. Standish liked to try to visualize how everything worked.

Below him a lurid turquoise pickup moved ahead with the traffic; its fenders were pockmarked, its grille bashed in and black with mashed flies and—Standish imagined—the heads of imbedded birds. In the cab beside the driver Dorsey Standish thought he saw a pretty woman—some thing about her hair and profile reminded him of Hope, and a flash of the woman's dress struck him as a color his wife liked to wear. But he was four floors up; the truck was past him, and the cab's rear window was so thickly caked with mud that he couldn't glimpse more of her. Besides, it was time for his nine-thirty class. Dorsey Standish decided it was unlikely that a woman riding in such an ugly truck would be at all pretty.

“I bet your husband is screwing his students all the time,” said Oren Rath. His big hand, with the knife, lay in Hope's lap.

“No, I don't think so,” Hope said.

“Shit, you don't know nothing,” he said. “I'm going to fuck you so good you won't even want it to stop.”

“I don't care what you do,” Hope told him. “You can't hurt my baby now.”

“I can do things to you,” said Oren Rath. “Lots of things.”

“Yes. You mean business,” Hope said, mockingly.

They were driving into the farm country. Rath didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, “I'm not as crazy as you think.”

“I don't think you're crazy at all,” Hope lied. “I think you're just a dumb, horny kid who's never been laid.”

Oren Rath must have felt at this moment that his advantage of terror was slipping away from him, fast. Hope was seeking any advantage she might find, but she didn't know if Oren Rath was sane enough to be humiliated.

They turned off the county road, up a long dirt driveway toward a farmhouse whose windows were blurred with plastic insulation; the scruffy lawn was strewn with tractor parts and other metal trash. The mailbox said: R, R, W, E and O RATH.

These Raths were not related to the famous sausage Raths, but it appeared that they were pig farmers. Hope saw a series of outbuildings, gray and slanted with rusted roofs. On the ramp by the brown barn a full-grown sow lay on her side, breathing with difficulty; beside the pig were two men who looked to Hope like mutants of the same mutation that had produced Oren Rath.

“I want the black truck, now,” Oren said to them. “People are out looking for this one.” He used his knife matter-of-factly to slice through the bra that bound Hope's wrists to the glove compartment.

“Shit,” one of the men said.

The other man shrugged; he had a red blotch on his face—a kind of birthmark, which was the color and nubbled surface of a raspberry. In fact, that is what his family called him: Raspberry Roth. Fortunately, Hope didn't know this.

They had not looked at Oren or at Hope. The hard-breathing sow shattered the barnyard calm with a rippling fart. “Shit, there she goes again,” the man without the birthmark said; except for his eyes, his face was more or less normal. His name was Weldon.

Raspberry Rath read the label on a brown bottle he held out toward the pig like a drink: “"May produce excessive gas and flatulence", it says.”

“Don't say anything about producing a pig like this,” Weldon said.

“I need the black truck,” Oren said.

“Well, the key's in it, Oren,” said Weldon Rath. “If you think you can manage by yourself.”

Oren Rath shoved Hope toward the black pickup. Raspberry was holding the bottle of pig medicine and staring at Hope when she said to him, “He's kidnapping me. He's going to rape me. The police ate already looking for him.”

Raspberry kept staring at Hope, but Weldon turned to Oren. “I hope you ain't doing nothing too stupid,” he said.

“I ain't,” Oren said. The two men now turned their total attention to the pig.

“I'd wait another hour and then give her another squirt,” Raspberry said. “Ain't we seen enough of the vet this week?” He scratched the mud-smeared neck of the sow with the toe of his boot; the sow farted.

Oren led Hope behind the barn where the corn spilled out of the silo. Some piglets, barely bigger than kittens, were playing in it. They scattered when Oren started the black pickup. Hope started to cry.

“Are you going to let me go?” she asked Oren.

“I ain't had you yet,” he said.

Hope's bare feet were cold and black with the spring muck. “My feet hurt,” she said. “Where are we going?”

She'd seen an old blanket in the back of the pickup, matted and flecked with straw. That's where she imagined she was going: into the cornfields, then spread on the spongy spring ground—and when it was over and her throat was slit, and she'd been disemboweled with the fisherman's knife, he'd wrap her up in the blanket that was lumped stiffly on the floor of the pickup as if it covered some stillborn livestock.

“I got to find a good place to have you,” said Oren Rath. “I would of kept you at home, but I'd of had to share you.”

Hope Standish was trying to figure out the foreign machinery of Oren Rath. He did not work like the human beings she was accustomed to. “What you're doing is wrong,” she said.

“No, it isn't,” he said. “It ain't.”

“You're going to rape me,” Hope said. “That's wrong.”

“I just want to have you,” he said. He hadn't bothered to tie her to the glove compartment this time. There was nowhere she could go. They were driving only on those mile-long plots of county roads, driving slowly west in little squares, the way a knight advances on a chessboard: one square ahead, two sideways, one sideways, two ahead. It seemed purposeless to Hope, but then she wondered if he didn't know the roads so very well that he knew how to cover a considerable distance without ever passing through a town. They saw only the signposts for towns, and although they couldn't have moved more than thirty miles from the university, she didn't recognize any of the names: Coldwater, Hills, Fields, Plainview. Maybe they aren't towns, she thought, but only crude labels for the natives who lived here—identifying the land for them, as if they didn't know the simple words for the things they saw every day.

“You don't have any right to do this to me,” Hope said.

“Shit,” he said. He pumped his brakes hard, throwing her forward against the truck's solid dashboard. Her forehead bounced off the windshield, the back of her hand was mashed against her nose. She felt something like a small muscle or a very light bone give way in her chest. Then he tromped on the accelerator and tossed her back into the seat. “I hate arguing,” he said.

Her nose bled; she sat with her head forward, in her hands, and the blood dripped on her thighs. She sniffed a little; the blood dripped over her lip and filmed her teeth. She tipped her head back so that she could taste it. For some reason, it calmed her—it helped her to think. She knew there was a rapidly blueing knot on her forehead, swelling under her smooth skin. When she ran her hand up to her face and touched the lump, Oren Rath looked at her and laughed. She spit at him—a thin phlegm laced pink with blood. It caught his cheek and ran down to the collar of her husband's flannel shirt. His hand, as flat and broad as the sole of a boot, reached for her hair. She grabbed his forearm with both her hands, she jerked his wrist to her mouth and bit into the soft part where the hairs don't always grow and the blue tubes carry the blood.

She meant to kill him in this impossible way but she barely had time to break the skin. His arm was so strong that he snapped her body upright and across his lap. He pushed the back of her neck against the steering wheel—the horn blew through her head—and he broke her nose with the heel of his left hand. Then he returned that hand to the wheel. He cradled her head with his right hand, holding her face against his stomach; when he felt that she wasn't struggling, he let her head rest on his thigh. His hand lightly cupped her ear, as if to hold the sound of the horn inside her. She kept her eyes shut against the pain in her nose.

He made several left turns, more right turns. Each turn, she knew, meant they had driven one mile. His hand now cupped the back of her neck. She could hear again, and she felt his fingers working their way into her hair. The front of her face felt numb.

“I don't want to kill you,” he said.

“Don't, then,” Hope said.

“Got to,” Oren Rath told her. “After we do it, I'll have to.”

This affected her like the taste of her own blood. She knew he didn't care for arguing. She saw that she had lost a step: her rape. He was going to do it to her. She had to consider that it was done. What mattered now was living; she knew that meant outliving him. She knew that meant getting him caught, or getting him killed, or killing him.

Against her cheek, she felt the change in his pocket; his blue jeans were soft and sticky with farm dust and machine grease. His belt buckle dug into her forehead; her lips touched the oily leather of his belt. The fisherman's knife was kept in a sheath, she knew. But where was the sheath? She couldn't see it; she didn't dare to hunt for it with her hands. Suddenly, against her eye, she felt his penis stiffening. She felt then—for really the first time—almost paralyzed, panicked beyond helping herself, no longer able to sort out the priorities. Once again, it was Oren Rath who helped her.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “Your kid got away. I was going to kill the kid, too, you know.”

The logic of Oren Rath's peculiar version of sanity made everything sharpen for Hope; she heard the other cars. There were not many, but every few minutes or so there was a car passing. She wished she could see, but she knew they were not as isolated as they had been. Now, she thought, before he gets to where we're going—if he even knows where we're going. She thought he did. At least, before he gets off this road—before I'm somewhere, again, where there aren't any people.

Oren Rath shifted in his seat. His erection was making him uncomfortable. Hope's warm face in his lap, his hand in her hair, was reaching him. Now, Hope thought. She moved her cheek against his thigh, just slightly; he did not stop her. She moved her face in his lap as if she were making herself more comfortable, against a pillow—against his prick, she knew. She moved until the bulge under his rank pants rose untouched by her face. But she could reach it with her breath; it stuck up out of his lap near her mouth, and she began to breathe on it. It hurt too much to breathe out of her nose. She drew her lips into an O-shaped kiss, she focused her breathing, and, very softly, she blew.

Oh, Nicky, she thought. And Dorsey, her husband. She would see them again, she hoped. To Oren Rath she gave her warm, careful breath. On him she focused her one, cold thought: I'm going to get you, you son of a bitch.

It was apparent that the sexual experience of Oren Rath had not previously involved such subtleties as Hope's directed breathing. He tried to move her head in his lap so that he would once again have contact with her hot face but at the some time he didn't want to disturb her soft breath. What she was doing made him want more contact, but it was excruciating to imagine losing the teasing contact he now had. He began to squirm. Hope didn't hurry. It was his movement that finally brought the bulge of sour jeans to touch her lips. She closed them there, but didn't move her mouth. Oren Rath felt only a hot wind passing through the crude weave of his clothes; he groaned. A car approached, then passed him; he corrected the truck. He was aware he was beginning to wander across the center of the road.

“What are you doing?” he asked Hope. She, very lightly, applied her teeth to his swollen clothes. He brought his knee up, pumped the brake, jarred her head, hurt her nose. He forced his hand between her face and his lap. She thought he was going to really hurt her but he was struggling with his zipper. “I've seen pictures of this,” he told her.

“Let me,” she said. She had to sit up just a little to get his fly open. She wanted to get a look at where they were; they were still out in the country, of course, but there were pointed lines on the road. She took him out of his pants and into her mouth without looking at him.

“Shit,” he said. She thought she would gag; she was afraid she would be sick. Then she got him into the back of her cheek where she thought she could take a lot of time. He was sitting so stiffly still, but trembling, that she knew he was already far beyond even his imaginary experiences. That steadied Hope; it gave her confidence, and a sense of time. She went ahead with it very slowly, listening for other cars. She could tell he had slowed down. At the first sign she had that he was leaving this road, she would have to change her plans. Could I bite the damn thing off? she wondered. But she thought that she probably couldn't—at least, not quickly enough.

Then two trucks went by them, closely following each other; in the distance she thought she heard another car's horn. She started working faster—he raised his lap higher. She thought their truck had speeded up. A car passed them—awfully close, she thought. Its horn blared at them. “Fuck you!” Oren Rath yelled after it; he was beginning to jounce up and down in the seat, hurting Hope's nose. Hope now had to be careful not to hurt him; she wanted to hurt him very much. Just make him lose his head, she encouraged herself.

Suddenly there was the sound of gravel spraying the underside of the truck. She closed her mouth fast around him. But they were neither crashing nor turning off the road; he was pulling abruptly to the roadside and stopping. The truck stalled out. He put both his hands on either side of her face; his thighs hardened and slapped against her jaw. I'm going to choke on it, she thought, but he was lifting her face up, out of his lap. “No! No!” he cried. A truck, flinging tiny stones, tore by them and cut into his words. “I don't have the thing on,” he said to her. “If you have any germs, they'll swim right up me.”

Hope sat on her knees, her lips hot and sore, her nose throbbing. He was going to put on a rubber, but when he tore it from its little tinfoil package, he stared at it as if it wasn't at all what he expected to see—as if he thought they were bright green! As if he didn't know how to put it on. “Take your dress off,” he said; he was embarrassed that she was looking at him. She could see the cornfields on either side of the road, and the back side of a billboard a few yards away from them. But there were no houses, no signs, no intersecting roads. No cars and trucks were coming. She thought her heart would simply stop.

Oren Rath tore himself out of her husband's shirt; he threw it out his window; Hope saw it flap in the road. He scraped his boots off on the brake pedal, whacking his narrow blond knees on the steering wheel. “Shove over!” he said. She was wedged against the passenger-side door. She knew—even if she could get out the door—that she couldn't outrun him. She didn't have any shoes—and his feet appeared to have a dog's rough pads.

He was having trouble with his pants; he clutched the rolled-up rubber in his teeth. Then he was naked—he'd flung his pants somewhere—and he shoved the rubber down over himself as if his penis were no more sensitive than a turtle's leathery tail. She was trying to unbutton her dress and her tears were coming back, though she was fighting them, when he suddenly caught her dress and began to yank it over her head; it caught on her arms. He jerked her elbows painfully behind her back.

He was too long to fit in the cab. One door had to be open. She reached for the handle over her head but he bit her in the neck. “No!” he hollered. He thrashed his feet around—she saw his shin was bleeding; he'd cut it on the rim of the horn—and his hard heels struck the door handle on the driver's side. With both feet, he launched the door open. She saw the gray smear of the road over his shoulder—his long ankles stuck out into the traffic lane, but there was no traffic now. Her head hurt; she was jammed against the door. She had to wriggle herself back down the seat, farther under him, and her movement made him yell something unintelligible. She felt his rubbered prick slipping over her stomach. Then his whole body braced and he bit into her shoulder fiercely. He'd come!

“Shit!” he cried. “I done it already!”

“No,” she said, hugging him. “No, you can do more.” She knew that if he thought he was through with her, he would kill her.

“Much more,” she said in his ear, which smelled like dust. She had to wet her fingers to wet herself. God, I'll never get him inside me, she thought, but when she found him with her hand, she knew that the rubber was the lubricated kind.

“Oh,” he said. He lay still on top of her; he seemed surprised by where she'd put him, as if he didn't really know what was where. “Oh,” he repeated.

Oh, what now? Hope wondered. She held her breath. A car, a flash of red, whined past their open door—the horn blast and some muffled, derisive hoots fading away from them. Of course, she thought: we look like two farmers fucking off the side of the road; it's probably done all the time. No one will stop, she thought, unless it's the police. She imagined a bread-faced trooper appearing over Roth's lurching shoulder, writing out a ticket. “Not on the road, buddy,” he'd be saying. And when she screamed at him, “Rape! He's raping me,” the trooper would wink at Oren Rath.

The bewildered Rath seemed to be feeling rather cautiously for something inside her. If he's just come, Hope thought, how much time do I have before he comes again? But he seemed more like a goat than a human to her, and the babylike gurgle in his throat, hot against her ear, seemed close to the last sound she imagined she'd hear.

She looked at everything she could see. The keys dangling from the ignition were too for to reach; and what could she do with a set of keys? Her back hurt and she pushed her hand against the dashboard to try to shift his weight on her; this excited him and made him grunt against her. “Don't move,” he said; she tried to do what he said. “Oh,” he said, approvingly. “That's real good. I'll kill you quick. You won't even know it. You just do like that, and I'll kill you good.”

Her hand grazed a metal button, smooth and round; her fingers touched it and she did not even have to turn her face away from him and look at it to know what it was. It opened the glove compartment and she pushed it. The spring-release door was a sudden weight in her hand. She said a long and loud “Aaahhh!” to conceal the sound of the things in the glove compartment that rattled around. Her hand touched cloth, her fingers felt grit. There was a spool of wire, something sharp, but too small—things like screws and nails, a bolt, perhaps a hinge to something else. There was nothing she could use. Reaching around in there was hurting her arm; she let her hand trail to the floor of the cab. When another truck passed them—catcalls and bloops from the air horn, and no sign of even slowing down for a better look—she started to cry.

I got to kill you,” Rath moaned.

“Have you done this before?” she asked him.

“Sure,” he said, and he thrust into her—stupidly, as if his brute lunges could impress her.

“And did you kill them, too?” Hope asked. Her hand, aimless now, toyed with something—some material—on the floor of the cab.

“They were animals,” Rath admitted. “But I had to kill them, too.” Hope sickened, her fingers clutched the thing on the floor—an old jacket or something.

“Pigs?” she asked him.

“Pigs!” he cried. “Shit, nobody fucks pigs,” he told her. Hope thought that probably somebody did. “They was sheep,” Rath said. “And one calf.” But this was hopeless, she knew. She felt him shrinking inside her; she was distracting him. She choked a sob that felt like it would split her head if it ever escaped her.

“Please try to be kind to me,” Hope said.

“Don't talk any,” he said. “Move like you did.”

She moved, but apparently not the right way. “No!” he shouted. His fingers dug into her spine. She tried moving another way. “Yup,” he said. He moved, now, determined and purposeful—mechanical and dumb.

Oh, God, Hope thought. Oh, Nicky. And Dorsey. Then she felt what she held in her hand: his pants. And her fingers, suddenly as wise as a Braille reader's, located the zipper and moved on; her fingers passed over the change in the pocket, they slipped around the wide belt.

“Yup, yup, yup,” said Oren Rath.

Sheep, Hope thought to herself; and one calf. “Oh, please concentrate!” she cried aloud to herself.

“Don't talk!” said Oren Rath.

But now her hand held it: the long, hard, leather sheath. That is the little hook, her fingers told her, and that is the little metal clasp. And that—oh, yes!—is the head of the thing, the bony handle of the fisherman's knife he had used to cut her son.

Nicky's cut was not serious. In fact, everyone was trying to figure out how he got it. Nicky was not talking yet. He enjoyed looking in the mirror at the thin, half-moon slit that was already closed.

“Must have been something very sharp,” the doctor told the police. Margot, the neighbor, had thought she'd better call a doctor, too; she'd found blood on the child's bib. The police had found more blood in the bedroom; a single drop on the cream-white bedspread. They were puzzled about it; there was no other sign of violence, and Margot had seen Mrs. Standish leave. She had looked all right. The blood was from Hope's split lip—from the time Oren Rath had butted her—but there was no way any of them could know that. Margot thought there might have been sex, but she wasn't suggesting it. Dorsey Standish was too shocked to think. The police did not think there had been time for sex. The doctor knew no blow had been connected with Nicky's cut—probably not even a fall. “A razor?” he suggested. “Or a very sharp knife.”

The police inspector, a solidly round and florid man, a year away from his retirement, found the cut phone cord in the bedroom. “A knife,” he said. “A sharp knife with some weight to it.” His name was Arden Bensenhaver, and he had once been a police superintendent in Toledo, but his methods had been judged as unorthodox.

He pointed at Nicky's cheek. “It's a flick wound,” he said. He demonstrated the proper wrist action. “But you don't see many flick knives around here,” Bensenhaver told them. “It's a flick-type of wound, but it's probably some kind of hunting or fishing knife.”

Margot had described Oren Rath as a farm kid in a farm truck, except that the truck's color revealed the unnatural influence of the town and the university upon the farmers: turquoise. Dorsey Standish did not even associate this with the turquoise truck he had seen, or the woman in the cab whom he'd thought had resembled Hope. He still didn't understand anything.

“Did they leave a note?” he asked. Arden Bensenhaver stared at him. The doctor looked down at the floor. “You know, about a ransom?” Standish said. He was a literal man struggling for a literal hold. Someone, he thought, had said “kidnap"; wasn't there ransom in the case of kidnap?

“There's no note, Mr. Standish,” Bensenhaver told him. “It doesn't look like that kind of thing.”

“They were in the bedroom when I found Nicky outside the door,” Margot said. “But she was all right when she left, Dorsey. I saw her.”

They hadn't told Standish about Hope's panties, discarded on the bedroom floor; they'd been unable to find the matching bra. Margot had told Arden Bensenhaver that Mrs. Standish was a woman who usually wore a bra. She had left barefoot; they knew that, too. And Margot had recognized Dorsey's shirt on the farm kid. She'd got only a partial reading of the license plate; it was an in-state, commercial plate, and the first two numbers placed it within the county, but she hadn't gotten them all. The rear plate had been spattered with mud, the front plate was missing.

“We'll find them,” Arden Bensenhayer said. “There's not much in the way of turquoise trucks around here. The county sheriff's boys will probably know it.”

“Nicky, what happened?” Dorsey Standish asked the boy. He sat him on his lap. “What happened to Mommy?” The child pointed out the window. “So he was going to rape her?” Dorsey Standish asked them all.

Margot said, “Dorsey, lets wait until we know.”

“Wait?” Standish said.

“You got to excuse me asking you,” said Arden Bensenhaver, “but your wife wasn't seeing anybody, was she? You know.”

Standish was mute at the question, but it seemed as if he were importantly considering it. “No, she wasn't,” Margot told Bensenhaver. “Absolutely not.”

“I got to ask Mr. Standish,” Bensenhaver said.

“God,” Margot said.

“No, I don't think she was,” Standish told the inspector.

“Of course she wasn't, Dorsey,” Margot said. “Let's go take Nicky for a walk,” she said to him. She was a busy, businesslike woman whom Hope liked very much. She was in and out of the house five times a day; she was always in the process of finishing something. Twice a year she had her phone disconnected, and connected again; it was like trying to stop smoking is for some people. Margot had children of her own but they were older—they were in school all day—and she often watched Nicky so that Hope could do something by herself. Dorsey Standish took Margot for granted; although he knew she was a kind and generous person, those were not qualities that especially arrested his attention. Margot, he realized now, wasn't especially attractive, either. She was not sexually attractive, he thought, and a bitter feeling rose up in Standish: he thought that no one would ever try to rape Margot—whereas Hope was a beautiful woman, anyone could see. Anyone would want her.

Dorsey Standish was all wrong about that; he didn't know the first thing about rape—that the victim hardly ever matters. At one time or another, people have tried to force sex on almost anyone imaginable. Very small children, very old people, even dead people; also animals.

Inspector Arden Bensenhaver, who knew a good deal about rape, announced that he had to get on with his job.

Bensenhaver felt better with lots of open space around him. His first employment had been the nighttime beat in a squad car, cruising old Route 2 between Sandusky and Toledo. In the summers it was a road speckled with beer joints and little homemade signs promising BOWLING! POOL! SMOKED FISH! and LIVE BAIT! And Arden Bensenhaver would drive slowly over Sandusky Bay and along Lake Erie to Toledo, waiting for the drunken carfuls of teen-agers and fishermen to play chicken with him on that unlit, two-lane road. Later, when he was the police superintendent of Toledo, Bensenhaver would be driven, in the daytime, over that harmless stretch of road. The bait shops and beer palaces and fast-food services looked so exposed in the daylight. It was like watching a once-feared bully strip down for a fight; you saw the thick neck, the dense chest, the wristless arms—and then, when the last shirt was off, you saw the sad, helpless paunch.

Arden Bensenhaver hated the night. Bensenhaver's big plea with the city government of Toledo had been for better lighting on Saturday nights. Toledo was a workingman's city, and Bensenhaver believed that if the city could afford to light itself, brightly, on Saturday night, half the gashings and maimings—the general bodily abusings—would stop. But Toledo had thought the idea was dim. Toledo was as unimpressed with Arden Bensenhaver's ideas as it was questioning of his methods.

Now Bensenhaver relaxed in all this open country. He had a perspective on the dangerous world that he always wanted to have: he was circling the flat, open land in a helicopter—above it all, the detached overseer observing his contained, well-lit kingdom. The county deputy said to him, “There's only one truck around here that's turquoise. It's those damn Raths.”

“Raths?” Bensenhaver asked.

“There's a whole family of them,” the deputy said. “I hate going out there.”

“Why?” Bensenhaver asked; below him, he watched the shadow of the helicopter cross a creek, cross a road, move alongside a field of corn and a field of soybeans.

“They're all weird,” the deputy said. Bensenhaver looked at him—a young man, puffy-faced and small-eyed, but pleasant; his long hair hung in a hunk under his tight hat, almost touching his shoulders. Bensenhaver thought of all the football players who wore their hair spilling out under their helmets. They could braid it, some of them, he thought. Now even lawmen looked like this. He was glad he was retiring soon; he couldn't understand why so many people wanted to look the way they did.

“"Weird"?” said Bensenhaver. Their language was all the same, too, he thought. They used just four or five words for almost everything.

“Well, I got a complaint about the younger one just last week,” the deputy said. Bensenhaver noted this casual use of “I"—as in “I got a complaint"—when in fact Bensenhaver knew that the sheriff, or his office, would have received the complaint, and that the sheriff probably thought it was simple enough to send this young deputy out on it. But why did they give me such a young one for this? Bensenhaver wondered.

“The youngest brother's name is Oren,” the deputy said. “They all have weird names, too.”

“What was the complaint?” Bensenhayer asked; his eyes followed a long dirt driveway to what appeared to be a random dropping of barns and outbuildings, one of which he knew was the main farmhouse, where the people lived. But Arden Bensenhaver couldn't tell which one that might be. To him, all the buildings looked vaguely unfit for animals.

“Well,” the deputy said, “this kid Oren was screwing around with someone's dog.”

was “Screwing around"?” Bensenhaver asked patiently. That could mean anything, he thought.

“Well,” the deputy said, “the people whose dog it was thought that Oren was trying to fuck it.”

“Was he?” Bensenhayer asked.

“Probably,” the deputy said, “but I couldn't tell anything. When I got there, Oren wasn't around—and the dog looked all right. I mean, how could I tell if the dog had been fucked?”

“Should've asked it!” said the copter pilot—a kid, Bensenhayer realized, even younger than the deputy. Even the deputy looked at him with contempt.

“One of these half-wits the National Guard gives us,” the deputy whispered to Bensenhaver, but Bensenhaver had spotted the turquoise truck. It was parked out in the open, alongside a low shed. No attempt had been made to conceal it.

In a long pen a tide of pigs surged this way and that, driven crazy by the hovering helicopter. Two lean men in overalls squatted over a pig that lay sprawled at the foot of a ramp to a barn. They looked up at the helicopter, shielding their faces from the stinging dirt.

“Not so close. Put it down over on the lawn,” Bensenhaver told the pilot. “You're scaring the animals.”

“I don't see Oren, or the old man,” the deputy said. “There's more of them than those two.”

“You ask those two where Oren is,” Bensenhaver said. “I want to look at that truck.”

The men obviously knew the deputy; they hardly watched him approach. But they watched Bensenhaver, in his dull dun-colored suit and tie, crossing the barnyard toward the turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver didn't look at them, but he could see them just the same. They are morons, he thought. Bensenhaver had seen all kinds of bad men in Toledo—vicious men, unjustifiably angry men, dangerous men, cowardly and ballsy thieves, men who murdered for money, and men who murdered for sex. But Bensenhaver had not seen quite such benign corruption as he thought he saw on the faces of Weldon and Raspberry Rath. It gave him a chill. He thought he'd better find Mrs. Standish, quickly.

He didn't know what he was looking for when he opened the door of the turquoise pickup, but Arden Bensenhaver knew how to look for unknowns. He saw it immediately—it was easy: the slashed bra, a piece of it still tied to the hinge of the glove-compartment door; the other two pieces were on the floor. There was no blood; the bra was a soft, natural beige; very classy, Arden Bensenhaver thought. He had no style himself, but he'd seen dead people of all kinds, and he could recognize something of a person's style in the clothes. He put the pieces of the silky bra into one hand; then he put both hands into the floppy, stretched pockets of his suit jacket and started across the yard toward the deputy, who was talking to the Rath brothers.

“They haven't seen the kid all day,” the deputy told Bensenhaver. “They say Oren sometimes stays away overnight.”

“Ask them who's the last one who drove that truck,” Bensenhaver said to the deputy; he wouldn't look at the Raths; he treated them as if they couldn't possibly understand him, directly.

“I already asked them that,” the deputy said. “They say they don't remember.”

“Ask them when's the last time a pretty young woman rode in that truck,” Bensenhaver said, but the deputy didn't have time; Weldon Rath laughed. Bensenhaver felt grateful that the one with the blotch on his face, like a wine spill, had kept quiet.

“Shit,” Weldon said. “There's no “pretty young woman” around here, no pretty young woman ever sat her ass in that truck.”

“Tell him,” said Bensenhaver to the deputy, “that he is a liar.”

“You're a liar, Weldon,” the deputy said.

Raspberry Rath said to the deputy, “Shit, who is he, coming in here, telling us what to do?”

Arden Bensenhaver took the three pieces of the bra from his pocket. He looked at the sow lying beside the men; she had one frightened eye, which appeared to be looking at all of them at once, and it was hard to tell where her other eye was looking.

“Is that a boy pig or a girl pig?” asked Bensenhaver. The Raths laughed. “Anyone can see it's a sow,” Raspberry said. “Do you ever cut the balls off the boy pigs?” Bensenhover asked. “Do you do that yourselves or do you have others do it for you?”

“We castrate them ourselves,” said Weldon. He looked a little like a boar himself, with wild tufts of hair sprouting upward, out of his ears. “We know all about castrating. There's nothing to it.”

“Well,” said Bensenhaver, holding up the bra for them and the deputy to see. “Well, that's exactly what the new law provides for—in the case of these sexual crimes.” Neither the deputy nor the Roths spoke. “Any sexual crime,” Bensenhaver said, “is now punishable by castration. If you fuck anybody you shouldn't,” said Bensenhaver, “or if you assist in the act of getting a person fucked—by not helping us to stop it—then we can castrate you.”

Weldon Rath looked at his brother, Raspberry, who looked a little puzzled. But Weldon leered at Bensenhaver and said, “You do it yourselves or do you have others do it for you?” He nudged his brother. Raspberry tried to grin, pulling his birthmark askew.

But Bensenhaver was deadpan, turning the bra over and over in his hands. “Of course we don't do it,” he said. “There's all new equipment for it now. The National Guard does it. That's why we got the National Guard helicopter. We just fly you right out to the National Guard hospital and fly you right back home again. There's nothing to it,” he said. “As you know.”

“We have a big family,” Raspberry Rath said. “There's a lot of us brothers. We don't know from one day to the next who's riding around in what truck.”

“There's another truck?” Bensenhaver asked the deputy. “You didn't tell me there was another truck.”

“Yeah, it's black. I forgot,” the deputy said. “They have a black one, too.” The Raths nodded.

“Where is it?” Bensenhaver asked. He was contained but tense. The brothers looked at each other. Weldon said, “I haven't seen it in a while.”

“Might be that Oren has it,” said Raspberry.

“Might be our father who's got it,” Weldon said.

“We don't have time for this shit,” Bensenhaver told the deputy, sharply. “We'll find out what they weigh—then see if the pilot can carry them.” The deputy, thought Bensenhaver, is almost as much of a moron as the brothers. “Go on!” Bensenhaver said to the deputy. Then, with impatience, he turned to Weldon Rath. “Name?” he asked.

“Weldon,” Weldon said.

“Weight?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Weight?” said Weldon.

“What do you weigh?” Bensenhaver asked him. “If we're going to lug you off in the copter, we got to know what you weigh.”

“One-eighty-something,” Weldon said.

“You?” Bensenhaver asked the younger one.

“One-ninety-something,” he said. “My name's Raspberry.” Bensenhaver shut his eyes.

“That's three-seventy-something,” Bensenhaver told the deputy. “Go ask the pilot if we can carry that.”

“You're not taking us anywhere, now, are you?” Weldon asked. “We'll just take you to the National Guard hospital,” Bensenhaver said. “Then if we find the woman, and she's all right, we'll take you home.”

“But if she ain't all right, we get a lawyer, right?” Raspberry asked Bensenhaver. “One of those people in the courts, right?”

“If who ain't all right?” Bensenhaver asked him.

“Well, this woman you're looking for,” Raspberry said.

“Well, if she's not all right,” Bensenhaver said, “then we already got you in the hospital and we can castrate you and send you back home the same day. You boys know more about what's involved than I do,” he admitted. “I've never seen it done, but it doesn't take long, does it? And it doesn't bleed much, does it?”

“But there's courts, and a lawyer!” Raspberry said.

“Of course there is,” Weldon said. “Shut up.”

“No, no more courts for this kind of thing—not with the new law,” Bensenhover said. “Sex crimes are special, and with the new machines, it's just so easy to castrate someone that it makes the most sense.”

“Yeah!” the deputy hollered from the helicopter. “The weight's okay. We can take them.”

“Shit!” Raspberry said.

“Shut up,” said Weldon.

“They're not cutting my balls off!” Raspberry yelled at him. “I didn't even get to have her!” Weldon hit Raspberry so hard in the stomach that the younger man pitched over sideways and landed on the prostrate pig. It squealed, its short legs spasmed, it evacuated suddenly, and horribly, but otherwise it didn't move. Raspberry lay gasping beside the sow's stenchful waste, and Arden Bensenhaver tried to knee Weldon Rath in the balls. Weldon was too quick, though; he caught Bensenhaver's leg at the knee and tossed the old man over backwards, over Raspberry and the poor pig.

“Goddamnit,” Bensenhaver said.

The deputy drew his gun and fired one shot in the air. Weldon dropped to his knees, holding his ears. “You all right, Inspector?” the deputy asked.

“Yes, of course I am,” Bensenhaver said. He sat beside the pig and Raspberry. He realized, without the smallest touch of shame, that he felt toward them more or less equally. “Raspberry,” he said (the name itself made Bensenhaver close his eyes), “if you want to keep your balls on, you tell us where the woman is.” The man's birthmark flashed at Bensenhaver like a neon sign.

“You keep still, Raspberry,” Weldon said.

And Bensenhaver told the deputy, “if he opens his mouth again, shoot his balls off, right here. Save us the trip.” Then he hoped to God that the deputy was not so stupid that he would actually do it.

“Oren's got her,” Raspberry told Bensenhaver. “He took the black truck.”

“Where'd he take her?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Don't know,” Raspberry said. “He took her for a ride.”

“Was she all right when she left here?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Well, she was all right, I guess,” Raspberry said. “I mean, I don't think Oren had hurt her yet. I don't think he'd even had her yet.”

“Why not?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Well, if he'd already had her,” Raspberry said, “why would he want to keep her?” Bensenhaver again shut his eyes. He got to his feet.

“Find out how long ago,” he told the deputy. “Then fuck up that turquoise truck so they can't drive it. Then get your ass back to the copter.”

“And leave them here?” the deputy asked.

“Sure,” Bensenhaver said. “There'll be plenty of time to cut their balls off, later.”

Arden Bensenhaver had the pilot send a message that the abductor's name was Oren Rath, and that he was driving a black, not a turquoise, pickup. This message meshed interestingly with another one: a state trooper had received a report that a man all alone in a black pickup had been driving dangerously, wandering in and out of his rightful driving lane, “looking like he was drunk, or stoned, or something else.” The trooper had not followed this up because, at the time, he'd thought he was supposed to be more concerned about a turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver, of course, couldn't know that the man in the black pickup hadn't really been alone—that, in fact, Hope Standish had been lying with her head in his lap. The news simply gave Bensenhaver another of his chills: if Rath was alone, he had already done something to the woman. Bensenhaver yelled to the deputy to hurry over to the copter—that they were looking for a black pickup that had last been seen on the bypass that intersects the system of county roads near the town called Sweet Wells.

“Know it?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the deputy said.

They were in the air again, below them the pigs once more in a panic. The poor, medicated pig that had been fallen on was lying as still as when they'd come. But the Rath brothers were fighting—it appeared, quite savagely—and the higher and farther from them that the helicopter moved, the more the world returned to a level of sanity of which Arden Bensenhaver approved. Until the tiny fighting figures, below and to the east, were no more than miniatures to him, and he was so far from their blood and fear that when the deputy said he thought that Raspberry could whip Weldon, if Raspberry just didn't allow himself to get scared, Bensenhaver laughed his Toledo deadpan laugh.

“They're animals,” he said to the deputy, who, despite whatever young man's cruelty and cynicism were in him, seemed a little shocked. “If they both killed each other,” Bensenhaver said, “think of the food they would have eaten in their lifetimes that other human beings could now eat.” The deputy realized that Bensenhaver's lie about the new law—about the instant castration for sexual crimes—was more than a farfetched story: for Bensenhaver, although he knew it was clearly not the law, it was what he thought the law should be. It was one of Arden Bensenhaver's Toledo methods.

“That poor woman,” Bensenhaver said; he wrung the pieces of her bra in his thick-veined hands. “How old is this Oren?” he asked the deputy.

“Sixteen, maybe seventeen,” the deputy said. “Just a kid.” The deputy was at least twenty-four himself.

“If he's old enough to get a hard-on,” Arden Bensenhover said, “he's old enough to have it cut off.”

But what should I cut? Oh, where can I cut him? wondered Hope—the long, thin fisherman's knife now snug in her hand. Her pulse thrummed in her palm, but to Hope it felt as if the knife had a heartbeat of its own. She brought her hand very slowly up to her hip, up over the edge of the thrashed seat to where she could glimpse the blade. Should I use the saw-toothed edge or the one that looks so sharp? she thought. How do you kill a man with one of these? Alongside the sweating, swiveling ass of Oren Rath that knife in her hand was a cool and distant miracle. Do I slash him or stick him? She wished she knew. Both his hot hands were under her buttocks, lifting her, jerking up. His chin dug into the hollow near her collarbone like a heavy stone. Then she felt him slip one of his hands out from under her, and his fingers, reaching for the floor, grazed her hand that held the knife.

“Move!” he grunted. “Now move.” She tried to arch her back but couldn't; she tried to twist her hips, but she couldn't. She felt him groping for his own peculiar rhythm, trying to find the last pace that would make him come. His hand—under her now—spread over the small of her back; his other hand clawed the floor.

Then she knew: he was looking for the knife. And when his fingers found the empty sheath, she would be in trouble.

“Aaahhh!” he cried.

Quick! she thought. Between the ribs? Into his side—and slide the knife up—or straight down as hard as she could between the shoulder blades, reaching all the way through his back to a lung, until she felt the point of the thing poking her own crushed breast? She waved her arm in the air above his hunching back. She saw the oily blade glint—and his hand, suddenly rising, flung his empty pants back toward the steering wheel.

He was trying to push himself up off her, but his lower half was locked into his long-sought rhythm; his hips shuddered in little spasms he couldn't seem to control, while his chest rose up, off her chest, and his hands shoved hard against her shoulders. His thumbs crawled toward her throat. “My knife?” he asked. His head whipped back and forth; he looked behind him, he looked above him. His thumbs pried her chin up; she was trying to hide her Adam's apple.

Then she scissored his pale ass. He could not stop pumping down there, though his brain must have known there was suddenly another priority. “My knife?” he said. And she reached over his shoulder and (faster than she herself could see it happen) she slid the slim-edged side of the blade across his throat. For a second, she saw no wound. She only knew that he was choking her. Then one of his hands left her throat and went to find his own. He hid from her the gash she'd expected to see. But at last she saw the dark blood springing between his tight fingers. He brought his hand away—he was searching for her hand, the one that held the knife—and from his slashed throat a great bubble burst over her. She heard a sound like someone sucking the bottom of a drink with a clogged straw. She could breathe again. Where were his hands? she wondered. They seemed, at once, to loll beside her on the seat and to be darting like panicked birds behind his back.

She stabbed the long blade into him, just above his waist, thinking that perhaps a kidney was there, because the blade went in so easily, and out again. Oren Rath laid his cheek against her cheek like a child. He'd have screamed then, of course, but her first slash had cut cleanly through his windpipe and his vocal cords.

Hope now tried the knife higher up, but encountered a rib, or something difficult; she had to probe and, unsatisfied, withdrew the knife after only a few inches. He was flopping on her now, as if he wanted to get off her. His body was sending distress signals to itself, but the signals were not getting all the way through. He heaved himself against the back of the seat, but his head wouldn't stay up and his penis, still moving, attached him still to Hope. She took advantage of this opportunity to insert the knife again. It slipped into his belly at the side and moved straightaway to within an inch of his navel before engaging some major obstruction there—and his body slumped back on top of her, trapping her wrist. But this was easy; she twisted her hand and the slippery knife came free. Something to do with his bowels relaxed. Hope was overwhelmed with his wetness and with his smell. She let the knife drop to the floor.

Oren Rath was emptying, by quartfuls—by gallons. He felt actually lighter on top of her. Their bodies were so slick that she slipped out from under him easily. She shoved him over on his back and crouched beside him on the truck's puddled floor. Hope's hair was gravid with blood—his throat had fountained over her. When she blinked, her eyelashes stuck to her cheeks. One of his hands twitched and she slapped it. “Stop,” she said. His knee rose, then flopped down. “Stop it, stop now,” Hope said. She meant his heart, his life.

She would not look at his face. Against the dark slime coating his body, the white, translucent condom hugged his shrunken cock like a congealed fluid quite foreign to the human matter of blood and bowel. Hope recalled a zoo, and a gob of camel spit upon her crimson sweater.

His balls contracted. That made her angry. “Stop,” she hissed. The balls were small and rounded and tight; then they fell slack. “Please stop,” she whispered. “Please die.” There was a tiny sigh, as if someone had let out a breath too small to bother taking back. But Hope squatted for some time beside him, feeling her heart pound and confusing her pulse with his own. He had died fairly quickly, she realized later.

Out the open door of the pickup, Oren Rath's clean white feet, his drained toes, pointed upward in the sunlight. Inside the sun-baked cab, the blood was coagulating. Everything clotted. Hope Standish felt the tiny hairs on her arms stiffen and tug her skin as her skin dried. Everything that was slick was turning sticky.

I should get dressed, Hope thought. But something seemed wrong with the weather.

Out the truck windows Hope saw the sunlight flicker, like a lamp whose light is shone through the blades of a fast fan. And the gravel at the roadside was lifted up in little swirls, and dry shards and stubble from last year's corn were whisked along the flat, bare ground as if a great wind was blowing—but not from the usual directions: this wind appeared to be blowing straight down. And the noise! It was like being in the afterblow of a speeding truck, but there was still no traffic on the road.

It's a tornado! Hope thought. She hated the Midwest with its strange weather; she was an Easterner who could understand a hurricane. But tornadoes! She'd never seen one, but the weather forecasts were always full of “tornado watches.” What does one watch for? she'd always wondered. For this, she guessed—this whirling din all around her. These clods of earth flying. The sun turned brown.

She was so angry, she struck the cool, viscid thigh of Oren Rath. After she had lived through this, now there was a fucking tornado, too! The noise resembled a train passing over the pelted truck. Hope imagined the funnel descending, other trucks and cars already caught up in it. Somehow, she could hear, their engines were still running. Sand flew in the open door, stuck to her glazed body; she groped for her dress—discovered the empty armholes where the sleeves had been; it would have to do.

But she would have to step outside the truck to put it on. There was no room to maneuver beside Rath and his gore, now dappled with roadside sand. And out there, she had no doubt, her dress would be torn from her hands and she would be sucked up naked into the sky. “I am not sorry,” she whispered. “I am not sorry!” she screamed, and again she struck at the body of Rath.

Then a voice, a terrible voice—loud as the loudest loudspeaker—shook her in the cab. “IF YOU'RE IN THERE, COME OUT! PUT YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD. COME OUT. CLIMB INTO THE BACK OF THE PICKUP AND LIE THE FUCK DOWN!”

I am actually dead, thought Hope. I'm already in the sky and it's the voice of God. She was not religious and it seemed fitting, to Hope: if there were a God, God would have a bullying, loudspeaker voice.

“COME OUT NOW,” God said. “DO IT NOW.”

Oh, why not? she thought. You big fucker. What can you do to me next? Rape was an outrage even God couldn't understand.

In the helicopter, shuddering above the black truck, Arden Bensenhaver barked into the megaphone. He was sure that Mrs. Standish was dead. He could not tell the sex of the feet he saw protruding from the open door of the cab, but the feet hadn't moved during the helicopter's descent, and they seemed so naked and drained of any color in the sunlight that Bensenhaver was sure that they were dead feet. That Oren Rath could be the one who was dead had not crossed the deputy's or Bensenhaver's mind.

But they couldn't understand why Rath would have abandoned the truck, after performing his foul acts, and so Bensenhaver had told the pilot to hold the helicopter just above the pickup. “if he's still in there with her,” Bensenhaver told the deputy, “maybe we can scare the bastard to death.”

When Hope Standish brushed between those stiff feet and huddled alongside the cab, trying to shield her eyes from the flying sand, Arden Bensenhaver felt his finger go limp against the trigger of the megaphone. Hope tried to wrap her face in her flapping dress but it snapped around her like a torn sail; she felt her way along the truck toward the tailgate, cringing against the stinging gravel that clung to the places on her body where the blood hadn't quite dried.

“It's the woman,” the deputy said.

“Back off!” Bensenhaver told the pilot.

“Jesus, what happened to her?” the deputy asked, frightened. Bensenhaver roughly handed him the megaphone.

“Move away” he said to the pilot. “Set this thing down across the road.” Hope felt the wind shift, and the clamor in the tornado's funnel seemed to pass over her. She kneeled at the side of the road. Her wild dress quieted in her hands. She held it to her mouth because the dust was choking her.

A car come along, but Hope was unaware of it. The driver passed in the proper lane—the black pickup off the road to his right, the helicopter settling down off the road to his left. The bloody, praying woman, naked and caked with grit, took no notice of him driving past her. The driver had a vision of an angel on a trip back from hell. The driver's reaction was so delayed that he was a hundred yards beyond everything he'd seen before he surprisingly attempted a U-turn in the road. Without slowing down. His front wheels caught the soft shoulder and slithered him across the road ditch and into the soft spring earth of a plowed bean field, where his car sank up to his bumpers and he could not open his door. He rolled down his window and peered across the mire to the road—like a man who'd been sitting peacefully on a dock when the dock broke free from the shore, and he was drifting out to sea.

“Help!” he cried. The vision of the woman had so terrified him that he feared there might be more like her around, or that whoever had made her look that way might be in search of another victim.

“Jesus Christ,” said Arden Bensenhaver to the pilot, “you'll have to go see if that fool is all right. Why do they let everyone drive a car?” Bensenhaver and the deputy dropped out of the helicopter and into the same lush muck that had trapped the driver. “Goddamnit,” Bensenhaver said.

“Mother,” said the deputy.

Across the road, Hope Standish looked up at them for the first time. Two swearing men were wallowing toward her out of a muddy field. The blades of the helicopter were slowing down. There was also a man peeping witlessly out the window of his car, but that seemed far away. Hope stepped into her dress. One armhole, where a sleeve had been, was torn open and Hope had to pin a flap of material to her side with her elbow, or else leave her breast exposed. It was then that she noticed how sore her shoulders and her neck were.

Arden Bensenhaver, out of breath and soaked with mud from his knees down, was in front of her suddenly. The mud made his trousers hug his legs so that, to Hope, he looked like an old man wearing knickers. “Mrs. Standish?” he asked. She turned her back to him and hid her face, nodding. “So much blood,” he said, helplessly. “I'm sorry we took so long. Are you hurt?”

She turned and stared at him. He saw the swelling around both eyes and her broken nose—and the blue bulge on her forehead. “It's mostly his blood,” she said. “But I was raped. He did it,” she told Bensenhaver.

Bensenhaver had his handkerchief out; he seemed about to dab at her face with it, as he might wipe the mouth of a child, but then he despaired at what a job it would be to clean her up and he put his handkerchief away. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry. We got here as fast as we could. We saw your baby and he's fine,” Bensenhaver said.

“I had to put him in my mouth,” Hope said to him. Bensenhaver shut his eyes. “And then he fucked me and fucked me,” she said. “He was going to kill me, later—he told me he would. I had to kill him. And I'm not sorry.”

“Of course you're not,” Bensenhaver said. “And you shouldn't be, Mrs. Standish. I'm sure you did the very best thing.” She nodded her head to him, then stared down at her feet. She put one hand out toward Bensenhaver's shoulder and he let her lean against him, though she was slightly taller than Bensenhaver and in order to rest her head against him, she had to scrunch down.

Bensenhaver was aware of the deputy then; he had been to the cab to look at Oren Rath and had vomited all over the truck's front fender and in full view of the pilot who was walking the shocked driver of the stuck car across the road. The deputy, with his face the bloodless color of Oren Rath's sunlit feet, was imploring Bensenhaver to come see. But Bensenhaver wanted Mrs. Standish to feel every possible reassurance.

“So you killed him after he raped you, when he was relaxed, not paying attention?” he asked her.

“No, during,” she whispered against his neck. The awful reek of her almost got to Bensenhaver, but he kept his face very close to her, where he could hear her.

“You mean, while he was raping you, Mrs. Standish?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “He was still inside me when I got his knife. It was in his pants, on the floor, and he was going to use it on me when he was finished, so I had to,” she said.

“Of course you did,” Bensenhaver said. “It doesn't matter.” He meant that she should have killed him anyway—even if he hadn't been planning to kill her. To Arden Bensenhaver there was no crime, as serious as rape—not even murder, except perhaps the murder of a child. But he knew less about that; he had no children of his own.

He had been married seven months when his pregnant wife had been raped in a Laundromat while he waited outside for her in the car. Three kids had done it. They had opened one of the big spring-doored dryers and sat her ass on the open door, pushed her head into the warm dryer where she could only scream into the hot, muffling sheets and pillowcases and hear her own voice boom and bounce around the great metal drum. Her arms were in the dryer with her head, so she was helpless. Her feet couldn't even reach the floor. The spring door made her jounce up and down under all three of them, although she probably tried not to move. The boys had no idea, of course, that they were raping the police superintendent's wife. And all the bright lighting possible for downtown Toledo on a Saturday night would not have saved her.

They were an early-morning couple, the Bensenhavers. They were young still, and they took their laundry to the Laundromat together, Monday morning before breakfast; they read the newspapers during the wash cycle. Then they put their laundry in the dryer and went home and had breakfast. Mrs. Bensenhaver picked it up on her way downtown to the police station with Bensenhaver. He would wait in the car while she went inside to get it; sometimes, someone would have taken it out of the dryer while they were having breakfast and Mrs. Bensenhaver would have to run it for another few minutes. Bensenhaver then waited. But they liked the early morning because there was rarely anyone else in the Laundromat. Only when Bensenhaver saw the three kids leaving did he start to worry about how long his wife had been collecting the dry laundry. But it does not take very long to rape someone, even three times. Bensenhaver went into the Laundromat where he saw his wife's legs sticking out of the dryer; her shoes had fallen off. Those were not the first dead feet Bensenhaver had seen, but they were very important feet to him. She had suffocated in her own clean wash—or she had vomited, and choked—but they had not meant to kill her. That part had been an accident, and at the trial a great deal had been made of the unplanned nature of Mrs. Bensenhaver's death. Their attorney had said that the boys had planned “to just rape her—not kill her, too.” And the phrase “just rape"—as in “She was just raped, lucky thing, a wonder she wasn't killed!"—appalled Arden Bensenhaver.

“It's good that you killed him,” Bensenhaver whispered to Hope Standish. “We couldn't have done nearly enough to him,” he confided to her. “Nothing like he deserved. Good for you,” he whispered. “Good for you.”

Hope had expected another sort of police experience, a more critical investigation—at least, a more suspicious cop, and certainly a man very different from Arden Bensenhaver. She was so grateful, for one thing, that Bensenhaverwas an old man, clearly in his sixties—like an uncle to her, or even more sexually remote: a grandfather. She said she felt better, that she was all right; when she straightened up and stood away from him, she saw she had smeared his shirt collar and his cheek with blood, but Bensenhaver hadn't noticed or didn't care.

“Okay, show me,” Bensenhaver said to the deputy, but again he smiled gently at Hope. The deputy led him to the open cab.

“Oh, my God,” the driver of the stuck car was saying. “Dear Jesus, look at this, and what's that? Christ, look, I think that's his liver. Isn't that what a liver looks like?” The pilot gawked in mute wonder and Bensenhaver caught both men by their coat shoulders and steered them roughly away. They started toward the rear of the truck, where Hope was composing herself, but Bensenhaver hissed at them, “Stay away from Mrs. Standish. Stay away from the truck. Go radio our position,” he told the pilot. “They'll need an ambulance or something here. We'll take Mrs. Standish with us.”

“They'll need a plastic bag for him,” said the deputy, pointing to Oren Rath. “He's all over the place.”

“I can see with my own eyes,” said Arden Bensenhaver. He looked inside the cab and whistled admiringly.

The deputy started to ask, “Was he doing it when...”

“That's right,” said Bensenhaver. He put his hand into a horrible mess by the accelerator pedal, but he didn't seem to mind. He was reaching for the knife on the floor of the passenger's side. He picked it up in his handkerchief; he looked it over carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief, and put it in his pocket.

“Look,” the deputy whispered, conspiratorially. “Did you ever hear of a rapist wearing a rubber?”

“It's not common,” Bensenhaver said. “But it's not unknown.”

“It's weird to me,” said the deputy. He looked amazed as Bensenhaver pinched the prophylactic tight, just below its bulge; Bensenhaver snapped the rubber off and held it, without spilling a drop, up to the light. The sack was as large as a tennis ball, it hadn't leaked. It was full of blood.

Bensenhaver looked satisfied; he tied a knot in the condom, the way you'd knot a balloon, and he flung it so far into the bean field that it was out of sight.

“I don't want someone suggesting that it might not have been a rape,” Bensenhayer said softly to the deputy. “Got it?”

He didn't wait for the deputy to answer; Bensenhaver went to the back of the truck to be with Mrs. Standish.

“How old was he—that boy?” Hope asked Bensenhaver.

“Old enough,” Bensenhaver told her. “About twenty-five or twenty-six,” he added. He did not want anything to diminish her survival—particularly, in her own eyes. He waved to the pilot, who was to help Mrs. Standish aboard. Then he went to clear things with the deputy. “You stay here with the body and the bad driver,” he told him.

“I'm not a bad driver,” the driver whined. “Christ, if you'd seen that lady there-in the road...”

“And keep anyone away from the truck,” Bensenhaver said.

On the road was the shirt belonging to Mrs. Standish's husband; Bensenhaver picked it up and trotted to the helicopter in his funny, overweight way of running. The two men watched Bensenhaver climb aboard the helicopter and rise away from them. The weak spring sun seemed to leave with the copter and they were suddenly cold and didn't know where to go. Not in the truck, certainly, and sitting in the driver's car meant crossing that field of muck. They went to the pickup, lowered the tailgate, and sat on it.

“Will he call a tow truck for my car?” the driver asked.

“He'll probably forget,” the deputy said. He was thinking about Bensenhaver; he admired him, but he feared him, and he also thought that Bensenhaver was not to be totally trusted. There were questions of orthodoxy, if that's what it was, which the deputy had never considered. Mainly, the deputy just had too many things to think about at one time.

The driver paced back and forth in the pickup, which irritated the deputy because it jounced him on the tailgate. The driver avoided the foul, bunched blanket crammed in the corner next to the cab; he cleared a see-through spot on the dusted and caked rear window so that he could, occasionally, squint inside the cab at the rigid and disemboweled body of Oren Rath. All the blood was dry now, and through the mottled rear window the body looked to the driver to be similar, in color and in gloss, to an eggplant. He went and sat down on the tailgate beside the deputy, who got up, walked back in the truck, and peered in the window at the gashed corpse.

“You know what?” the driver said. “Even though she was all messed up, you could tell what a really good-looking woman she was.”

“Yes, you could,” the deputy agreed. The driver now paced around in the back of the truck with him, so the deputy went to the tailgate and sat down.

“Don't get sore,” the driver said.

“I'm not sore,” the deputy said.

“I don't mean that I can sympathize with anyone who'd want to rape her, you know,” the driver said.

“I know what you don't mean,” said the deputy.

The deputy knew he was over his head in these matters, but the simple-mindedness of the driver forced the deputy to adopt what he imagined was Bensenhayer's attitude of contempt for him.

“You see a lot of this, huh?” the driver asked. “You know: rape and murder.”

“Enough,” the deputy said with self-conscious solemnity. He had never seen a rape or murder before, and he realized that even now he had not actually seen it through his own eyes as much as he'd been treated to the experience through the eyes of Arden Bensenhaver. He had seen rape and murder according to Bensenhaver, he thought. The deputy felt very confused; he sought some point of view all his own.

“Well", said the driver, peering in the rear window again, “I seen some stuff in the service, but nothing like this.”

The deputy couldn't respond.

The World According to Bensenhaver

“This is like war, I guess,” the driver said. “This is like a bad hospital.”

The deputy wondered if he should let the fool look at Rath's body, if it mattered or not, and to whom? Certainly it couldn't matter to Rath. But to his unreal family? To the deputy?—he didn't know. And would Bensenhaver object?

“Hey, don't mind my asking you a personal question,” the driver said. “Don't get sore, okay?”

“Okay,” said the deputy.

“Well,” the driver said. “What happened to the rubber?”

“What rubber?” asked the deputy; he might have had some questions concerning Bensenhaver's sanity, but the deputy had no doubt that, in this case, Bensenhaver had been right. In the world according to Bensenhaver, no trivial detail should make less of rape's outrage.

Hope Standish, at that moment, felt safe at last in Bensenhaver's world. She floated and dipped over the farmlands beside him, trying not to be sick. She was beginning to notice things about her body again—she could smell herself and feel every sore spot. She felt such disgust, but here was this cheerful policeman who sat there admiring her—his heart touched by her violent success.

“Are you married, Mr. Bensenhaver?” she asked him.

“Yes, Mrs. Standish,” he said. “I am.”

“You've been awfully nice,” Hope told him, “but I think I'm going to be sick now.”

“Oh, sure,” said Bensenhaver; he grabbed a waxy paper bag at his feet. It was the pilot's lunch bag; there were some uneaten french-fried potatoes at the bottom and the grease had turned the waxed paper translucent. Bensenhaver could see his own hand, through the french fries and through the bottom of the bag. “Here,” he said. “You go right ahead.”

She was already retching; she took the bag from him and turned her head away. The bag did not feel big enough to contain what vileness she was sure she held inside her. She felt Bensenhaver's hard, heavy hand on her back. With his other hand, he held a strand of her matted hair out of her way. “That's right,” he encouraged her, “keep it coming, get it all out and you'll feel much better.”

Hope recalled that whenever Nicky was being sick, she told him the same thing. She marveled how Bensenhaver could even turn her vomiting into a victory, but she did feel much better—the rhythmic heaving was as soothing to her as his calm, dry hands, holding her head and patting her back. When the bag ripped and spilled, Bensenhaver said, “Good riddance, Mrs. Standish! You don't need the bag. This is a National Guard helicopter. We'll let the National Guard clean it up! After all—what's the National Guard for?”

The pilot flew on, grimly, his expression never changing.

“What a day it's been for you, Mrs. Standish!” Bensenhaver went on. “Your husband is going to be so proud of you.” But Bensenhaver was thinking that he'd better make sure; he'd better have a talk with the man. It was Arden Bensenhaver's experience that husbands and other people did not always take a rape in the right way.