The Captive (23 page)

She woke the instant she felt Bill get into the bed, tense and wide awake as if she had not been asleep at all. He moved close to her and she stiffened as he put his arm over her, stroking her back.

"Don't you pull away from me," he whispered, taking the back of her nightdress in his fist.

"What do you expect?" she hissed at him. "You've kidnapped  me by force, hit me whenever it pleased you, almost raped me in public, and did once in private." She held  herself away from him as well as she could, hating him.

"You liked it the other day in your bedroom, you know you did," he said, sliding his other arm under her. "A little knockin' around is just what a woman needs." He pulled her body against his. "You don't have to feel anything like mushy love for me. I want what a woman has for a man. And you are my woman." He began to pull at the nightdress.  "You're going to be a part of the New Order, a new life. You'll have my children for the New World and be a real woman again." He rolled on top of her, holding her down.

She, heard the part about his children and the New Order with no particular emotion. It meant nothing to her. She simply held herself together as well as she could, taking what had to be taken, saying no word, not even betraying by a sound when he hurt her, which he did when he found he could not make her respond in any way. He went ahead anyway while she thought about the various ways she might escape, and once when he hit her on the thigh with his fist because she could not cooperate, she thought very coolly about how it might feel to kill him.

Later, the little girl slipped out of the trundle bed, pulled the leather thong to unlatch the door and tiptoed past the two sleeping men in the bigger room. She was so quiet, knowing each piece of the floor that creaked and how far to pull the door open before it made a noise, that a mouse gnawing his way into a loaf of bread on the table was not disturbed by her passage. She walked out onto the porch and looked across at the thin slice of orange-colored moon sitting on top of the mountain crest and thought about how very much she needed to talk to the Big Pussy Cat, so she thought about him again, and soon she was talking to him, just like the night before, but better. Then, after the moon went down behind the mountain, she couldn't hear him  anymore, so she went back to bed.

That morning, Monday, all the men gathered around the smaller cabin so that Renee saw there were about fifteen altogether. She watched them, thinking it strange they were all dressed in about the same thing, as if they were wearing a uniform: white shirts, dark ties, black pants or jodhpurs like Bill's, and for some of them the high, horsey boots. They did have the look of a militia troop of some kind, a poorly disciplined one, she thought, watching them lounging about against the car fenders or on the porch or leaning against the trees smoking cigarettes.

And then a strange thing happened. The fat man had gone into the little room she was forbidden to enter and had  carried outside a small bundle. She watched as they unfurled it, attached it to the lines of the little flag pole in front of the cabin and hauled it to the top. It was instantly recognizable from newsreels, magazines and newspapers. When she saw what it was, she knew instantly what was happening, and she stood there at the cabin window transfixed, wondering, if she should laugh or be more afraid than she was. She had thought they were a bunch of gangsters planning a big job, and here came the flag, scarlet ground, white circle, black crooked cross. The men had formed a ragged line facing the flag pole. Ludwig stood at the end of the line and at the signal of his raised arm, they all raised their arms and shouted, "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!"

Mina looked at her mother quizzically. "Have those bad men been drinking beer again?" she said.

Barry lay exhausted in the big empty bed, listening to the frogs out in the ditch and cursing futilely, as he had been doing steadily all day. He had covered maybe half the gas stations in town that were open on Sunday, but had not got to the ones outside the city limits. Frank had helped by doing 85 north while he got 66 east and west, but it was probably 85 south, if they stopped for gas at all. Towns were scarce in New Mexico, and chances were they had stopped somewhere in town while they were here. He rolled over, thinking about what else he could do. It was a long time before he fell asleep.

I shift now that Barry is asleep. I almost forced him out of the way, for I feel Mina is trying to contact me again. I trot out the door and look for the position of the moon. It is hanging low, no more than an outline, going into its new phase. I sit on my haunches beneath the cottonwood and make my mind quiet, imagining the inside of a stone again to still even the sound of blood, and I listen.

Almost at once her voice cries to me from an enormous distance, "Where are you, you bad Pussy Cat?"

"I am here now," I think, very still and so silent inside that I feel that my body has ceased to exist and is nothing but an empty shape in the dark.

"I'm lonesome for you and for Barry, and Daddy is being mean, and I'm going to run away if we don't leave pretty soon," she says all in a burst, the angry emotions spilling over into my mind like hot drafts from a furnace door. Her words flit as lightly as ripples made by wings over water, but the emotion is strong enough to make my hackles rise if I were anything but an emptiness attuned to her voice.

"Stay with your mother," I say, holding quiet. "I cannot find you unless you help me, Mina. Tell me now, when you left home, did you go through the mountains or did you go along the river, or through flat desert?"

"We went in some all-twisty roads in mountains and Daddy made Mommy throw up in the car."

So, they must have gone east, through the canyon. "Did you go all the way through the mountains and on flat roads again?"

"We just kept going through and going through mountains and then I lost Bruno and then I went to sleep. There's lots of big trees here where we are now, like on the picnic."

"Is it hot or cool during the day?"

"It's kind of cool and cold at night, like now. I'm cold now. And Mommy and I get to play only one time in the day, and the fat man shot his gun at us today when I ran down the hill." Her voice faded, only the wash of hot  emotion remaining in my mind. I wait, but nothing further is said.

"Mina? Tell me more. Mina!"

I listen for a long time. Nothing. She is gone, and I see that the moon has slipped down past the volcanoes. I sit for a long time in the cool darkness, using Barry's knowledge of the area to figure where they could be. Unless she is a terrible observer, they had to go into Tijeras Canyon, but did they go straight east toward Texas or turn off north or south into the Santa Fe range? Still, I am depending on the observations of a precocious seven year old, who fell asleep half way along the journey. But they could be on the east slope somewhere. I put the problem into Barry's memory for his waking up and wander around the yard again, hoping to nose something new, but it is early Monday morning now and the scents are all cold, I walk back and sniff the fading scent of Mina's hands on the trunk of the cottonwood where she hid the note. Her scent comforts me for a time and then I feel a great rage against my enemy and have to run for a while to calm myself. I find myself about to kill a dog I have cornered down in the river bottom, and I stop, just giving him a swipe that makes him scream but leaves him alive. I pace about for an hours in the moonless desolation of the sand hills before I give in and go back to Barry's bed.

***

"Frank, this is Barry, yeah. Hey, have you got a map, a good map of the east slope area of the Sandias and Manzanos?"

"That's thousands of square miles, son," the editor said, sounding fuzzy at 6:30 Monday morning. "I haven't got anything like that. A road map would help, I suppose, but there aren't many auto roads in that area. People want to go that way they go 85 and turn off, like to get to  Mountainaire, and the same going north." He was mumbling, and Barry let him go on, knowing he was waking himself up.

"Isn't there a geodetic survey or something like that, Corps of Engineers or something, what the hell kind of  outfit?" Barry said, prodding his memory.

"Well, let's see, Tom Browning is a great deer hunter; maybe he'd know. Oh wait a min, Barry. It's the U.S.  Forest Service has those maps."

"Yeah, I remember now too. OK, thanks Frank, and you can stop trying service stations. I'm going to try a hunch I got last night."

"You got a new lead?"

"Yeah, sort of, but it's nothing I could show those melon heads down at the police department." He talked for another  minute to Frank, then hung up and got himself breakfast.

The Forest Service had an office in town, Barry found, but he got no answer until eight-thirty. He was told "certain areas were fully mapped and the maps could be bought for fifty cents each." Barry slammed the receiver back on the hook and sailed out the door, almost colliding with the old Spanish mail carrier who was limping up the side walk. His dented blue Chevy sat on the street at the mailbox, and Barry wondered why the old man was waiking to the door.

"You owe me for this card," the old man said, holding out a crumpled piece of gray cardboard that looked like part of a candy wrapper. Barry took it and smoothed it against the side of the house, and his heart gave a lunge as he  recognized the handwriting. It was written in smeared red crayon or lipstick, and besides his address it said:

66 E

Mich 449-281

R. <3

The scrawled little heart after the initial was like those she would sometimes put on tiny cards in the pocket of his shirts or in his lunch sack. He felt himself shaking with emotion and leaned his head against the house.

"You owe me a penny. Ain't a stamp on the card, Mister Golden."

"Here, Mr. Pena, sorry."

"Your family is gone on a vacation, Mister Golden? I have not seen them since last week."

"Yeah, a vacation," Barry said, putting the card in his pocket.

"Vacations are a fine thing. I have not had a vacation for these several years now," the old man said, limping away toward his car. Barry stopped at the police station downtown before going to the Forest Service office. He found old "slope head," which was how he remembered the man sitting  at a desk in a back room to which he was directed by the desk sergeant. The detective looked at the gray piece of cardboard so long Barry thought he had missed something about it and was looking at it again himself over the older man's shoulder. Finally the detective tossed it onto his desk as if it were a piece of trash.

"So that came through the U.S. Mail," he said as if talking  to himself.

"This morning, just as I was leaving. Mr. Pena, our mailman,  gave it to me."

"Without a stamp, too."

"He collected for it." Barry felt growing irritation at the man who sat with his fingers together looking into space.

"That's lipstick it's written in, cheap lipstick. Your wife use cheap lipstick, Mr. Golden?"

"Hell, I don't know, maybe it was some she picked up on the road."

The detective reached forward and picked up the card between the extreme ends of his fingers. "Looks like it would have got more smeared coming through the U.S. Mail like that." He began to rub the card, the soft lipstick  smearing out into a blur.

"Hey, you're rubbing it all out," Barry said, reaching for it. "It says 66 East, and that's where I was going. I figure they might be on the east slope of the Manzanos or the Sandias, one of the two."

"Man from Michigan comes all the way out to New Mexico  to kidnap his ex-wife and child, and then holes up on the east slope of the nearest mountain," the detective said,  looking at Barry and raising his lip so his yellow teeth showed. "Must be a maniac."

"He is," Barry said, but he closed his mouth after that and turned to leave.

He felt a plucking at his sleeve and turned to find the detective right at his elbow, still with his lip lifted in what passed for a smile.

"Better stick close to home, Mr. Golden," the detective said. And Barry felt the man's bony hand take his elbow in a firm grip. "I got a feeling we're going to get a break on this case, so you hang around, now you hear?" He felt the elbow squeezed between two sharp fingers.

"Sure," Barry said. "Bet your boots."

He pushed aside the fury he felt inside him at the stupid cop. Down Central at the Forest Service office he bought three dollars and fifty cents worth of east slope maps and threw the rolls of them into the car. On the way home he picked up a road map at Max's gas station to supplement these, and at home, on the living room floor, he used milk bottles, rocks, and some of Mina's toys to piece all the maps into a mosaic of the area. it made an impressive display of territory, more than an army could search in a month, he thought, standing like a giant over the brown, white and green areas marked with contour lines close together on the west slopes, spreading out on the east slopes. He had hunted in that area once, he remembered, when they opened up the peaks for doe that one year. There was a saddle between those two peaks where he had got his one good shot and missed. And that little town marked there, Chilili, didn't even have a gas station. He went on, surveying the area for some time before the incongruity of his thinking caught up with him and he stopped, feeling a chill make his neck-hair raise up. What did he mean, he had been hunting in that area? How could he know about that little town? And yet there were memories coming through, just a few, memories of its being awfully cold, of walking with companions with rifles, of the shot he had missed, downhill across that saddle, even the sound of the echo from the shot as it came back from the opposite peak, and being years younger! He sat down on the floor among the maps and milk bottles, unable to grasp what that meant. He had only been in the world a year, the creation of the Beast to serve its own ends, a creation that had developed a will and life of its own. Were these, then, the fake memories, like the necessary knowledge  of language and custom? Were they the buried fossils that God put there to fool the poor scientist into thinking the earth was so much older than its Creator had said? The question stood in his mind, ahead of everything else: was he a real person? Was he more than just a facet of the  super-natural Beast who lived with him, inside him? His mind whirled about, trying to remember more, family in the past, experiences, other people, friends: nothing. A blank before one year ago. Goddammit to hell, he said under his breath. Shut up and get on with the job.