The Best American Mystery Stories 2001

Joyce Carol Oates The Girl with the Blackened Eye

From Witness

This black eye I had, once! Like a clown’s eye painted on. Both my eyes were bruised and ugly but the right eye was swollen almost shut, people must’ve seen me and I wonder what they were thinking, I mean you have to wonder. Nobody said a word — didn’t want to get involved, I guess. You have to wonder what went through their minds, though.

Sometimes now I see myself in a mirror, like in the middle of the night getting up to use the bathroom, I see a blurred face, a woman’s face I don’t recognize. And I see that eye. Twenty-seven years. In America, that’s a lifetime.

This weird thing that happened to me, fifteen years old and a sophomore at Menlo Park High, living with my family in Menlo Park, California, where Dad was a dental surgeon (which was lucky: I’d need dental and gum surgery, to repair the damage to my mouth). Weird, and wild. Ugly. I’ve never told anyone who knows me now. Especially my daughters. My husband doesn’t know, he couldn’t have handled it. We were in our late twenties when we met, no need to drag up the past. I never do. I’m not one of those. I left California forever when I went to college in Vermont. My family moved, too. They live in Seattle now. There’s a stiffness between us, we never talk about that time. Never say that man’s name. So it’s like it never did happen.

Or, if it did, it happened to someone else. A high school girl in the 1970s. A silly little girl who wore tank tops and jeans so tight she had to lie down on her bed to wriggle into them, and teased her hair into a mane. That girl.

When they found me, my hair was wild and tangled like broom sage. It couldn’t be combed through, had to be cut from my head in clumps. Something sticky like cobwebs was in it. I’d been wearing it long since ninth grade and after that I kept it cut short for years. Like a guy’s hair, the back of my neck shaved and my ears showing.

I’d been forcibly abducted at the age of fifteen. It was something that could happen to you, from the outside, forcibly abducted, like being in a plane crash, or struck by lightning. There wouldn’t be any human agent, almost. The human agent wouldn’t have a name. I’d been walking through the mall parking lot to the bus stop, about 5:30 P.M., a weekday, I’d come to the mall after school with some kids, now I was headed home, and somehow it happened, don’t ask me how, a guy was asking me questions, or saying something, mainly I registered he was an adult my dad’s age possibly, every adult man looked like my dad’s age except obviously old white-haired men. I hadn’t any clear impression of this guy except afterward I would recall rings on his fingers which would’ve caused me to glance up at his face with interest except at that instant something slammed into the back of my head behind my ear, knocking me forward, and down, like he’d thrown a hook at me from in front, I was on my face on the sun-heated vinyl upholstery of a car, or a van, and another blow or blows knocked me out. Like anesthesia, it was. You’re out.

This was the forcible abduction. How it might be described by a witness who was there, who was also the victim. But who hadn’t any memory of what happened because it happened so fast, and she hadn’t been personally involved.

It’s like they say. You are there, and not-there. He drove to this place in the Sonoma Mountains, I would afterward learn, this cabin it would be called, and he raped me, beat me, and shocked me with electrical cords and he stubbed cigarette butts on my stomach and breasts, and he said things to me like he knew me, he knew all my secrets, what a dirty-minded girl I was, what a nasty girl, and selfish, like everyone of my privileged class as he called it. I’m saying these things were done to me but in fact they were done to my body mostly. Like the cabin was in the Sonoma Mountains north of Healdsburg but it was just anywhere for those eight days, and I was anywhere, I was holding onto being alive the way you would hold onto a straw you could breathe through, lying at the bottom of deep water. And that water opaque, you can’t see through to the surface.

He was gone, and he came back. He left me tied in the bed, it was a cot with a thin mattress, very dirty. There were only two windows in the cabin and there were blinds over them drawn tight. It was hot during what I guessed was the day. It was cool, and it was very quiet, at night. The lower parts of me were raw and throbbing with pain and other parts of me were in a haze of pain so I wasn’t able to think, and I wasn’t awake most of the time, not what you’d call actual wakefulness, with a personality.

What you call your personality, you know? — it’s not the actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It’s more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there’s no sign of it, like it had never been.

My eyes had been hurt, he’d mashed his fists into my eyes. The eyelids were puffy, I couldn’t see very well. It was like I didn’t try to see, I was saving my eyesight for when I was stronger. I had not seen the man’s face actually. I had felt him but I had not seen him, I could not have identified him. Any more than you could identify yourself if you had never seen yourself in a mirror or in any likeness.

In one of my dreams I was saying to my family I would not be seeing them for a while, I was going away. I’m going away, I want to say goodbye. Their faces were blurred. My sister, I was closer to than my parents, she’s two years older than me and I adored her, my sister was crying, her face was blurred with tears. She asked where was I going and I said I didn’t know, but I wanted to say goodbye, and I wanted to say I love you. And this was so vivid it would seem to me to have happened actually, and was more real than other things that happened to me during that time I would learn afterward was eight days.

It might’ve been the same day repeated, or it might’ve been eighty days. It was a place, not a day. Like a dimension you could slip into, or be sucked into, by an undertow. And it’s there, but no one is aware of it. Until you’re in it, you don’t know; but when you’re in it, it’s all that you know. So you have no way of speaking of it except like this. Stammering, and ignorant.

Why he brought me water and food, why he decided to let me live, would never be clear. The others he’d killed after a few days. They went stale on him, you have to suppose. One of the bodies was buried in the woods a few hundred yards behind the cabin, others were dumped along Route 101 as far north as Crescent City. And possibly there were others never known, never located or identified. These facts, if they are facts, I would learn later, as I would learn that the other girls and women had been older than me, the oldest was thirty, and the youngest he’d been on record as killing was eighteen. So it was speculated he had mercy on me because he hadn’t realized, abducting me in the parking lot, that I was so young, and in my battered condition in the cabin, when I’d started losing weight, I must’ve looked to him like a child. I was crying a lot, and calling Mommy! Mom-my!

Like my own kids, grown, would call Mom-my! in some nightmare they were trapped in. But I never think of such things.

The man with the rings on his fingers, saying, There’s some reason I don’t know yet, that you have been spared.

Later I would look back and think, there was a turn, a shifting of fortune, when he first allowed me to wash. To wash! He could see I was ashamed, I was a naturally shy, clean girl. He allowed this. He might have assisted me, a little. He picked ticks out of my skin where they were invisible and gorged with blood. He hated ticks! They disgusted him. He went away, and came back with food and Hires Diet Root Beer. We ate together sitting on the edge of the cot. And once when he allowed me out into the clearing at dusk. Like a picnic. His greasy fingers, and mine. Fried chicken, french fries and runny cole slaw, my hands started shaking and my mouth was on fire. And my stomach convulsing with hunger, cramps that doubled me over like he’d sunk a knife into my guts and twisted. Still, I was able to eat some things, in little bites. I did not starve. Seeing the color come back into my face, he was impressed, stirred. He said, in mild reproach, Hey, a butterfly could eat more’n you.

I would remember these pale-yellow butterflies around the cabin. A swarm of them. And jays screaming, waiting to swoop down to snatch up food.

I guess I was pretty sick. Delirious. My gums were infected. Four of my teeth were broken. Blood kept leaking to the back of my mouth, making me sick, gagging. But I could walk to the car leaning against him, I was able to sit up normally in the passenger’s seat, buckled in, he always made sure to buckle me in, and a wire wound tight around my ankles. Driving then out of the forest, and the foothills I could not have identified as the Sonoma hills, and the sun high and gauzy in the sky, and I lost track of time, lapsing in and out of time but noticing that highway traffic was changing to suburban, more traffic lights, we were cruising through parking lots so vast you couldn’t see to the edge of them, sun-blinded spaces and rows of glittering cars like grave markers: I saw them suddenly in a cemetery that went on forever.

He wanted me with him all the time now, he said. Keep an eye on you, girl. Maybe I was his trophy? The only female trophy in his abducting/raping/killing spree of an estimated seventeen months to be publicly displayed. Not beaten, strangled, raped to death, kicked to death and buried like animal carrion. (This I would learn later.) Or maybe I was meant to signal to the world, if the world glanced through the windshield of his car, his daughter. A sign of — what? Hey, I’m normal. I’m a nice guy, see.

Except the daughter’s hair was wild and matted, her eyes were bruised and one of them swollen almost shut. Her mouth was a slack puffy wound. Bruises on her face and throat and arms and her ribs were cracked, skinny body was covered in pus-leaking burns and sores. Yet he’d allowed me to wash, and he’d allowed me to wash out my clothes, I was less filthy now. He’d given me a T-shirt too big for me, already soiled but I was grateful for it. Through acres of parking lots we cruised like sharks seeking prey. I was aware of people glancing into the car, just by accident, seeing me, or maybe not seeing me, there were reflections in the windshield (weren’t there?) because of the sun, so maybe they didn’t see me, or didn’t see me clearly. Yet others, seeing me, looked away. It did not occur to me at the time that there must be a search for me, my face in the papers, on TV. My face as it had been. At the time I’d stopped thinking of that other world. Mostly I’d stopped thinking. It was like anesthesia, you give in to it, there’s peace in it, almost. As cruising the parking lots with the man whistling to himself, humming, talking in a low affable monotone, I understood that he wasn’t thinking either, as a predator fish would not be thinking cruising beneath the surface of the ocean. The silent gliding of sharks, that never cease their motion. I was concerned mostly with sitting right: my head balanced on my neck, which isn’t easy to do, and the wire wound tight around my ankles cutting off circulation. I knew of gangrene, I knew of toes and entire feet going black with rot. From my father I knew of tooth-rot, gum-rot. I was trying not to think of those strangers who must’ve seen me, sure they saw me, and turned away, uncertain what they’d seen but knowing it was trouble, not wanting to know more.

Just a girl with a blackened eye, you figure she maybe deserved it.

He said: There must be some reason you are spared.

He said, in my daddy’s voice from a long time ago, Know what, girl? — you’re not like the others. That’s why.

They would say he was insane, these were the acts of an insane person. And I would not disagree. Though I knew it was not so.

The red-haired woman in the khaki jacket and matching pants. Eventually she would have a name but it was not a name I would wish to know, none of them were. This was a woman, not a girl. He’d put me in the back seat of his car now, so the passenger’s seat was empty. He’d buckled me safely in. OK, girl? You be good, now. We cruised the giant parking lot at dusk. When the lights first come on. (Where was this? Ukiah. Where I’d never been. Except for the red-haired woman I would have no memory of Ukiah.)

He’d removed his rings. He was wearing a white baseball cap.

There came this red-haired woman beside him smiling, talking like they were friends. I stared, I was astonished. They were coming toward the car. Never could I imagine what those two were talking about! I thought He will trade me for her and I was frightened. The man in the baseball cap wearing shiny dark glasses asking the red-haired woman — what? Directions? Yet he had the power to make her smile, there was a sexual ease between them. She was a mature woman with a shapely body, breasts I could envy and hips in the tight-fitting khaki pants that were stylish pants, with a drawstring waist. I felt a rush of anger for this woman, contempt, disgust, how stupid she was, unsuspecting, bending to peer at me where possibly she’d been told the man’s daughter was sitting, maybe he’d said his daughter had a question for her? needed an adult female’s advice? and in an instant she would find herself shoved forward onto the front seat of the car, down on her face, her chest, helpless, as fast as you might snap your fingers, too fast for her to cry out. So fast, you understand it had happened many times before. The girl in the back seat blinking and staring and unable to speak though she wasn’t gagged, no more able to scream for help than the woman struggling for her life a few inches away. She shuddered in sympathy, she moaned as the man pounded the woman with his fists. Furious, grunting! His eyes bulged. Were there no witnesses? No one to see? Deftly he wrapped a blanket around the woman, who’d gone limp, wrapping it tight around her head and chest, he shoved her legs inside the car and shut the door and climbed into the driver’s seat and drove away humming, happy. In the back seat the girl was crying. If she’d had tears she would have cried.

Weird how your mind works: I was thinking I was that woman, in the front seat wrapped in the blanket, so the rest of it had not yet happened.

It was that time, I think, I saw my mom. In the parking lot. There were shoppers, mostly women. And my mom was one of them. I knew it couldn’t be her, so far from home, I knew I was hundreds of miles from home, so it couldn’t be, but I saw her, Mom crossing in front of the car, walking briskly to the entrance of Lord & Taylor.

Yet I couldn’t wave to her, my arm was heavy as lead.

Yes. In the cabin I was made to witness what he did to the red-haired woman. I saw now that this was my importance to him: I would be a witness to his fury, his indignation, his disgust. Tying the woman’s wrists to the iron rails of the bed, spreading her legs and tying her ankles. Naked, the red-haired woman had no power. There was no sexual ease to her now, no confidence. You would not envy her now. You would scorn her now. You would not wish to be her now. She’d become a chicken on a spit.

I had to watch, I could not close my eyes or look away.

For it had happened already, it was completed. There was certitude in this, and peace in certitude. When there is no escape, for what is happening has already happened. Not once but many times.

When you give up struggle, there’s a kind of love.

The red-haired woman did not know this, in her terror. But I was the witness, I knew.

They would ask me about him. I saw only parts of him. Like jigsaw puzzle parts. Like quick camera jumps and cuts. His back was pale and flaccid at the waist, more muscular at the shoulders. It was a broad pimply sweating back. It was a part of a man, like my dad, I would not see. Not in this way. Not straining, tensing. And the smell of a man’s hair, like congealed oil. His hair was stiff, dark, threaded with silver hairs like wires, at the crown of his head you could see the scalp beneath. On his torso and legs hairs grew in dense waves and rivulets like water or grasses. He was grunting, he was making a high-pitched moaning sound. When he turned, I saw a fierce blurred face, I didn’t recognize that face. And the nipples of a man’s breasts, wine-colored like berries. Between his thighs the angry thing swung like a length of rubber, slick and darkened with blood.

I would recall, yes, he had tattoos. Smudged-looking like ink blots. Never did I see them clearly. Never did I see him clearly. I would not have dared as you would not look into the sun in terror of being blinded.

He kept us there together for three days. I mean, the red-haired woman was there for three days, unconscious most of the time. There was a mercy in this. You learn to take note of small mercies and be grateful for them. Nor would he kill her in the cabin. When he was finished with her, disgusted with her, he half-carried her out to the car. I was alone, and frightened. But then he returned and said, OK, girl, goin for a ride. I was able to walk, just barely. I was very dizzy. I would ride in the back seat of the car like a big rag doll, boneless and unresisting.

He’d shoved the woman down beside him, hidden by a blanket wrapped around her head and upper body. She was not struggling now, her body was limp and unresisting for she too had weakened in the cabin, she’d lost weight. You learned to be weak to please him for you did not want to displease him in even the smallest things. Yet the woman managed to speak, this small choked begging voice. Don’t kill me, please. I won’t tell anybody. I won’t tell anybody don’t kill me. I have a little daughter, please don’t kill me. Please, God. Please.

I wasn’t sure if this voice was (somehow) a made-up voice. A voice of my imagination. Or like on TV. Or my own voice, if I’d been older and had a daughter. Please don’t kill me. Please, God.

For always it’s this voice when you’re alone and silent you hear it.

Afterward they would speculate that he’d panicked. Seeing TV spot announcements, the photographs of his “victims.” When last seen and where, Menlo Park, Uriah. There were witnesses’ descriptions of the abductor and a police sketch of his face, coarser and uglier and older than his face which was now disguised by dark glasses. In the drawing he was clean-shaven but now his jaws were covered in several days’ beard, a stubbly beard, his hair was tied in a ponytail and the baseball cap pulled low on his head. Yet you could recognize him in the drawing, that looked as if it had been executed by a blind man. So he’d panicked.

The first car he’d been driving he left at the cabin, he was driving another, a stolen car with switched license plates. You came to see that his life was such maneuvers. He was tireless in invention as a willful child and would seem to have had no purpose beyond such maneuvers and when afterward I would learn details of his background, his family life in San Jose, his early incarcerations as a juvenile, as a youth, as an adult “offender” now on parole from Bakersfield maximum security prison, I would block off such information as not related to me, not related to the man who’d existed exclusively for me as, for a brief while, I’d existed exclusively for him. I was contemptuous of “facts” for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.

Know what, girl? You’re not like the others. You’re special. That’s the reason.

Driving fast, farther into the foothills. The road was ever narrower and bumpier. There were few vehicles on the road, all of them minivans or campers. He never spoke to the red-haired woman moaning and whimpering beside him but to me in the back seat, looking at me in the rearview mirror, the way my dad used to do when I rode in the back seat, and Mom was up front with him. He said, Howya doin, girl? OK. Doin OK, huh?

Yes.

I’m gonna let you go, girl, you know that, huh? Gonna give you your freedom.

To this I could not reply. My swollen lips moved in a kind of smile as you smile out of politeness.

Less you want to trade? With her?

Again I could not reply. I wasn’t certain what the question was. My smile ached in my face but it was a sincere smile.

He parked the car on an unpaved lane off the road. He waited, no vehicles approaching. There were no aircraft overhead. It was very quiet except for birds. He said, C’mon, help me, girl. So I moved my legs that were stiff, my legs that felt strange and skinny to me, I climbed out of the car and fought off dizziness helping him with the bound woman, he’d pulled the blanket off her, her discolored swollen face, her face that wasn’t attractive now, scabby mouth and panicked eyes, brown eyes they were, I would remember those eyes pleading. For they were my own, but in one who was doomed as I was not. He said then, so strangely: Stay here, girl. Watch the car. Somebody shows up, honk the horn. Two-three times. Got it?

I whispered yes. I was staring at the crumbly earth.

I could not look at the woman now. I would not watch them move away into the woods.

Maybe it was a test, he’d left the key in the ignition. It was to make me think I could drive the car away from there, I could drive to get help, or I could run out onto the road and get help. Maybe I could get help. He had a gun, and he had knives, but I could have driven away. But the sun was beating on my head, I couldn’t move. My legs were heavy like lead. My eye was swollen shut and throbbing. I believed it was a test but I wasn’t certain. Afterward they would ask if I’d had any chance to escape in those days he kept me captive and always I said no, no I did not have a chance to escape. Because that was so. That was how it was to me, that I could not explain.

Yet I remember the keys in the ignition, and I remember that the road was close by. He would strangle the woman, that was his way of killing and this I seemed to know. It would require some minutes. It was not an easy way of killing. I could run, I could run along the road and hope that someone would come along, or I could hide, and he wouldn’t find me in all that wilderness, if he called me I would not answer. But I stood there beside the car because I could not do these things. He trusted me, and I could not betray that trust. Even if he would kill me, I could not betray him.

Yes, I heard her screams in the woods. I think I heard. It might have been jays. It might have been my own screams I heard. But I heard them.

A few days later he would be dead. He would be shot down by police in a motel parking lot in Petaluma. Why he was there, in that place, about fifty miles from the cabin, I don’t know. He’d left me in the cabin chained to the bed. It was filthy, flies and ants. The chain was long enough for me to use the toilet. But the toilet was backed up. Blinds were drawn on the windows. I did not dare to take them down or break the window panes but I looked out, I saw just the clearing, a haze of green. Overhead there were small planes sometimes. A helicopter. I wanted to think that somebody would rescue me but I knew better, I knew nobody would find me.

But they did find me.

He told them where the cabin was, when he was dying. He did that for me. He drew a rough map and I have that map! — not the actual piece of paper but a copy. He would never see me again, and I would have trouble recalling his face for I never truly saw it.

Photographs of him were not accurate. Even his name, printed out, is misleading. For it could be anyone’s name and not his.

In my present life I never speak of these things. I have never told anyone. There would be no point to it. Why I’ve told you, I don’t know: you might write about me but you would respect my privacy.

Because if you wrote about me, these things that happened to me so long ago, no one would know it was me. And you would disguise it so that no one could guess, that’s why I trust you.

My life afterward is what’s unreal. The life then, those eight days, was very real. The two don’t seem to be connected, do they? I learned you don’t discover the evidence of any cause in its result. Philosophers debate over that but if you know, you know. There is no connection though people wish to think so. When I was recovered I went back to Menlo Park High and I graduated with my class and I went to college in Vermont, I met my husband in New York a few years later and married him and had my babies and none of my life would be different in any way, I believe, if I had not been “abducted” when I was fifteen.

Sure, I see him sometimes. More often lately. On the street, in a passing car. In profile, I see him. In his shiny dark glasses and white baseball cap. A man’s forearm, a thick pelt of hair on it, a tattoo, I see him. The shock of it is, he’s only thirty-two.

That’s so young now. Your life all before you, almost.