Playing Dead

CHAPTER 19

Punk Girl was fiddling with her skull earring and doodling a pretty good caricature of Rod Blagojevich in prison stripes when I approached her with my load of paper and film.

“I see you were successful,” she said. “Just leave the film canisters here. I’ll put them back. I need to earn my minimum wage.”

“Good job on his hair,” I replied, pointing to the puffy black mop on her piece of paper.

“I’m doing a paper on corrupt Chicago politicians and their early childhoods. Did you know this dude shined shoes as a kid to pay the family bills? You’d think he’d be a better person.”

You’d think. Or not. Some kids think they deserve more, and others think they deserve nothing. I haven’t figured it out yet.

“Can you direct me to the bathroom?” I asked.

“The bathroom of the day is in Humanities on the seventh floor. There are plumbing problems in several of the closer ones, so it will be worth the walk.”

She pinched her nose to make the point and when she released it I could see a tiny hole where another skull might live sometimes.

“Take the center staircase. Go up four flights. Turn left and head back through the stacks. The bathroom’s in the corner.”

I walked up the four flights slowly. No one followed. I wandered through the stacks, breathing in a deep whiff of old leather and paper, feeling safer, as if the books were saying, Calm down, we are still your friends. In better circumstances, I’d love to bring a sleeping bag and live here for a month. I also said that about Daddy’s barn. My hand ran down a copy of Ulysses, which caught my eye, like it always did. Maybe someday I’d read it and a thousand other works of great literature not included in the Ponder High School curriculum.

“Excuse me.” A man appeared suddenly, brushing across my body to reach for a book on the top shelf.

He smelled sexy, like expensive cologne and untamed hormones. He was twentyish, with a slender athletic build. He smiled at me under the brim of a Chicago Cubs hat. I liked the Cubs. Everybody liked the Cubs. Except the White Sox. And the Cardinals.

“How ya doin’, Tommie? I’m Louie.”

Before I could ask how he knew my name, he provided a full frontal view, and I wondered, dizzily, if a villain had leapt out of the dusty pages of a noir novel.

“I’m not so pretty, eh?” A vivid red scar ran from his right eye halfway down his cheek. Whatever unlucky thing had happened, the lucky thing for Louie was that it didn’t happen a millimeter to the left. He would be blind in one eye.

He leaned back, relaxed, against the shelf. “The first thing I tell people in your situation is that this is an old high school football injury. Not everybody believes it. The second thing I tell ’em is that I made the most of it. Ask the bastard who chop-blocked me at the goal line in the game against Hubbard South. Knocked off my helmet. Five guys piled on. I couldn’t see for the blood.” He drew a finger lazily down his scar. “There was a cleat. Stuck in my face. Got it pictured?”

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I felt sure he knew he was breaking library rules, so I kept my mouth shut.

“I held on to the fuckin’ ball, though,” he said, lighting up. “And the jerk-off who hit me… I own that asshole. Still. His girlfriend. His money. His life. His face don’t look too good, either.”

A disfigured lunatic hiding out in Modernist literature. Who knew my name. Possibly related to a Bubba I encountered not so long ago in a parking garage.

“I don’t have a gun on me,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “Great.” I glanced around uneasily, hoping to catch sight of a motherly woman in pink. Hoping the smoke detector would go off.

“I think you’re gonna do what I want anyways. People usually do.” He slid behind me and draped an arm around my neck like a lover.

I nodded mutely, filled with a powerful desire to pee.

“I know where that cute little niece of yours is. At the skating rink. Wearing purple shorts that say ‘Cheer’ across her butt. Tell me, why do mothers let little girls out of the house in shorts that advertise their butts?” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew it into my face, which wasn’t a problem because I had involuntarily stopped breathing five seconds ago.

“She’s got on a Tweety Bird shirt,” he continued cheerfully. “Her hair’s in a ponytail. My friend thinks she’s a cutie. His type. But I’m pretty sure every little girl’s his type.”

He smashed his cigarette out into a green book binding, making a small dark O, like a tiny terrified mouth.

With his free hand, he pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. “Let’s check in with my buddy. See how it’s goin’ there in Texas.”

I had a flashback to Maddie’s body in a hospital bed with tubes feeding in and out right after doctors first discovered the tumor in her brain. Now, thinking of a stranger touching her, I was overcome with the same sickening, helpless rush. Louie removed his arm from around my shoulders, pressing me against the shelves with his body.

“I’ll give you anything you want,” I said. “Money. Just leave Maddie alone.”

His arm gripped me tighter, enough to make it uncomfortable, but not enough that anyone walking by would think it was anything more than a boyfriend’s casual embrace, a little prelude to sex in the stacks.

He pressed “redial.” My bladder lurched again and I regretted the coffee and a trip to the Coke machine. Fear for Maddie squirmed like an alien life-form in my gut.

“Hey, there,” he said into the phone. “What’s our little kiddo doing? She’s at the concession stand… ordering fried dill pickles, a Dr Pepper… and sour gummi worms. Oh, come on. Tommie here is not going to believe that one. Who would eat that?”

Maddie.

Maddie would.

She had a weird thing for pickles. She even put them in macaroni and cheese.

Tears stung my eyes. “Please stop,” I begged. “Please tell your friend to go home. I’ll pay him. I’ll pay you.”

He tilted my chin up and scraped a rough, nail-bitten finger along a trail of my tears. He stuck his finger in his mouth and tasted them. Then, with one slow, sensual movement, he pulled the pencils from my hair and let it fall, arranging it around my breasts. A simple act, but it was the most violated I’d ever felt.

I couldn’t speak. I stood there. Frozen. His eyes and the lump in his crotch confirmed a sexual power trip. No wonder rape victims felt guilty. How could I be letting this happen? I was from Texas. I was a card-carrying member of the NRA. My senior class voted me “Most Likely to Kick A-.”

Because, I reminded myself, he held the glittering key to my world above his head and was about to drop it in the ocean. He had Maddie.

My tormentor abruptly mutated, as if he knew he’d gotten off track.

“Anthony Marchetti went down for those hits, you little bitch. That’s the way it needs to stay. You and your mother leave it the fuck alone.”

He wrenched the canvas bag off my shoulder and tossed all the work of the last four hours onto the floor. Marchetti’s unsmiling face stared up from a mimeographed photo that fell near my foot, not looking as fierce as I remembered. Could he possibly be innocent? And why did this brute care?

But Louie was done sharing. “You came in looking one way,” he said. “You’ll go out looking another.”

He pulled my hair straight up, until the rest of it fell in a shorter loop at my shoulders. He took off his cap and placed it on my head to hold it in place.

“Instant haircut.” He grinned, as if he’d invented something that hadn’t been practiced by pre-teen girls for years.

He yanked his bright red T-shirt over his head, revealing a white Cubs T-shirt with a sweat stain down the front. He watched my eyes travel to the outline of a gun tucked inside his jeans.

“I lied.” He shrugged. “Bad habit. I used to get beat for it. Put this on, over your shirt.”

I hesitated.

“Do it NOW.”

Here’s what I was desperate enough to think: Pink Lady might have needed a pee herself. She might notice me walking stiffly, awkwardly, down the center staircase with Scarface and postulate that he might not be the love of my life. She might spot his gun. Call a security guard.

“Don’t say shit, got it? Hold my hand. Keep your head down.”

We merged awkwardly into the open reading area in the center of the floor, boyfriend and girlfriend. Loyal Cubs fans. Then he tugged me toward the stacks on the opposite side of the floor. Not to the staircase. He watched my expression morph.

“Oh, come on, you didn’t think I had a plan?” A man at the table in front of us gave us a hard stare.

“Smile at him,” my kidnapper crooned into my ear. “Do it for Maddie.” So I did. We both smiled at him, and the man smiled back.

“It’s their year,” the man said, in library sotto voce, pointing to my hat, and returned to reading his paper.

My hope drained away as we moved out of the man’s sightline, traveling at Louie’s quickened pace through the stacks to the far wall. He pushed open a door labeled “Authorized Personnel Only,” and we entered a chilly concrete stairwell.

“My father can get the floor plan of any building he wants with a single phone call,” he bragged. “There’s a bomb shelter under this place.”

He wasn’t lying this time. He led me down to the basement, a huge, brightly lit room containing countless locked cages of books and artifacts. Shivering, I imagined a closed-door session with Louie in the bomb shelter, but my escort had other ideas. He made a direct line for the heavy black door on the far right wall marked “Tunnel. Emergencies Only.”

I peered into the shadows of the dimly lit corridor and felt a wave of optimism. The playing field would be more even in the dark. Louie read my mind better than Sadie could. In a second, I was down, my cheek pressed against the gritty floor, my arm twisted excruciatingly high behind my back.

“Don’t even think about it.”

He forced me up, stuck the gun in my back, and I stumbled ahead of him, the muffled sounds of honking and construction shaking the ceiling above us. Louie worked in focused silence, pushing me through the narrow tunnel. In minutes, we stepped into the basement of the building across the street, piled high with office supplies.

Louie quickly found the stairs, shoved me up two flights, through a door and out into the blinding sun, and we were instantly lost in a crowd of tourists on Michigan Avenue. I felt a momentary, unreasonable flash of anger at Hudson, who I’d never bothered to tell I was leaving the state. How could he let this happen?

Louie gripped my arm and urged me through the wall of bodies on the crowded sidewalk. What would happen to Maddie if I escaped? What would happen to her if I didn’t?

“What do you expect to learn from me?” I asked desperately, stumbling beside him. “At least tell me that.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know. Mothers and daughters yap about everything.”

“Are you going to kill me?” I purposely stopped at a store window and faked interest in a thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton purse, spotlighted on a pedestal like a rare da Vinci sculpture.

“Shut up!” This time, it came out in a hiss, and a woman passing us shot Louie a dirty look. To me, the abused girlfriend, she offered a sympathetic one.

“You don’t have to take it,” she said. “There are places that will help you.”

“Mind your own business, lady.” He tightened his grip on my arm, dragging me away. “Come on, we’re crossing here.”

Actually, I had looked forward to coming “here,” to Millennium Park, Chicago’s most divine public place, replete with a stunning open-air band shell that looked like a spaceship had landed. I wished my first view of the Bean sculpture wasn’t under such duress, but, still, it awed me: 110 tons of shiny stainless steel in the shape of a giant kidney bean. Blue sky, floating clouds, the city skyline, tiny figures of gawkers-all of it reflected back at me in the beautiful distortion.

But the most beautiful thing of all? Staring into the Bean, I swore I glimpsed a tiny pink tracksuit standing out in the crowd of about fifty people behind us. I didn’t know whether pink tracksuits were as popular in Chicago as bright red American Girl bags, but, ludicrously, preposterously, hope surged.

“Stop fuckin’ turnin’ around,” Louie said, glancing behind him. “Move it. Under here.” We stood with about twenty other people under the bottom curve of the Bean, gazing up at our reflections. I looked very far away. And skinny. Like a sad potato stick.

“Do you see how easy this was?” Louie asked me softly. “In the daytime. Out in the open. Imagine me coming at you in the dark.” His arm held me close. “I’m going to let you go this time. But give your mother a message. If she doesn’t keep her mouth shut, if you don’t stop your digging, your little Maddie won’t be doing her cheerleader jumps anymore.”

He was going to let me go?

Inspired, I twisted his crotch as hard as I could, and my other hand reached for his gun. But his T-shirt, soaked with sweat, stuck to his ribs and I only succeeded in pushing the gun farther into his jeans.

I hadn’t dug so awkwardly down a guy’s pants since the senior prom, and I nearly knocked over an elderly woman as I wrestled Louie to the ground.

“Jesus! There are children here,” said a father, who clearly thought our fantasy perversion was a hand-job in the reflection of the Bean. He tugged his two small daughters away in disgust.

Louie yanked my hair back, knocked my face into the concrete, and for an instant I saw my frantic expression contorted back at me like a funhouse mirror.

And then pink. Oh blessed pink.