The Boys from Santa Cruz

2

Skip was marched stumbling out of the barn. He could tell he was outside even with the rubber sack over his head.

Dull as his mind had grown from the ordeal and the unrelenting fear, he was still capable of forming coherent thoughts. Schmuck, he told himself, you’re letting him walk you to your death.

For like many American Jews of his generation, Skip Epstein had at one time or another blithely measured himself against the victims of the Holocaust, and had convinced himself, however naively, that if it ever happened here, he wouldn’t allow himself to be led like a lamb to the slaughter the way they had. No way they take me without a fight, he’d always promised himself-and yet here he was, letting himself be marched along by a single psychopath with a gun.

When the path, if it was a path, turned uphill, Skip found the ankle-high grass tough going. At times only his captor’s firm grasp on his bound wrists kept him upright. Both hips were screaming as he stumbled along, and beneath the stifling hood the sweat pouring into his eyes stung like liniment. Do something, Skip told himself. For God’s sake, do-

“Down you go,” said the other man, swiping Skip’s legs out from under him. Unable to break his fall, he landed hard on his side, on his elbow, knocking the air out of his lungs.

When you can’t breathe, everything else is irrelevant. It wasn’t until his diaphragm had begun functioning again and he’d managed a few exploratory sips of air that Skip became aware of the stench creeping in under the hood-it smelled as if he were lying next to an open cesspool filled with roadkill.

Distracted first by the struggle to breathe, then by the terrible odor, Skip was only vaguely conscious of the way his body was being manhandled, rocked and shoved, lifted and dropped. Eventually, though, he managed to piece it all together, and concluded that he was being tied up again-and this time he was not alone. His captor had knocked him down alongside some other poor bastard and was now lashing the two of them together, back to back, with coils of rope.

Once he was securely bound, Skip’s hood was removed. After being blinded by darkness for so long, he was suddenly blinded by the light. He quickly shut his eyes, but not before the hulking, round-shouldered silhouette of his departing captor was imprinted in negative behind his eyelids.

“Hey,” Skip whispered after a few minutes of silence. “Hey, I think he’s gone.”

No response from whomever he was tied to.

“Man, what a stink. You know where it’s coming from?”

No answer.

“Say something, man. Grunt if you can’t talk.”

Nothing.

One last try: “Can you hear me?”

Apparently not. Skip opened his eyes again. The terrain ahead of him was pretty much what he’d expected-a sideways view of a grassy, green-gold hillside that could have been almost anywhere in Northern California. Leaning back, Skip wiggled his shoulders, trying to jostle his new companion awake. “Hey, wake up-maybe we can untie each other.”

Still no response. “C’mon, man,” he said, more urgently. But when he closed his fingers around his fellow captive’s wrists and began rubbing and chafing them to bring him around, the flesh-the dead man’s rotting flesh-had the texture of crackling pig at a luau, and slid loosely over the bone.

At least now you know where that god-awful smell is coming from, Skip told himself, when his diaphragm finally stopped spasming. By then, however, the vultures were already circling overhead, so the realization was far from comforting.