Tony and Susan (4 page)

This is a deliberate interruption of her reading, for she didn’t really have to go to the bathroom. She comes down the stairs out of darkness. The light is out in the upstairs hall, it requires the ladder from the basement. Not tonight. Across the room Henry lies on his back, sweater lifted, scratching his stomach, ruled out of the game, while Mike spots his marker around the board with a villain’s laugh. Henry is crooning: ‘Who cares, whooo cares?’

‘Don’t be a brat,’ Dorothy says.

Martha has moved onto the manuscript, makes herself heavy when Susan tries to move her. Susan remembers a graceful stretch of summer highway, the road bending from one hillside down into a valley of farms and up another long curve to a ridge of woods. Herself, she loves that wilderness, she loves the woody ridges and long valleys and comforting snack stops in small friendly restaurants off the highway, especially after the pounding long day of driving across flat Indiana and Ohio. It rests her soul. She remembers the singing in the car, Dorothy, Henry, and Rosie in the back, Jeffrey moving from one lap to another and Martha hidden below. ‘Tell me why, Camp Hazelnut.’

Dump Martha, who shakes herself, offended, then dashes out to the kitchen. Susan remembers the lake, morning light flashing spider lines under the tree leaning over the water while Arnold and Henry wade out to the float, Arnold up to
his collarbone, his red freckled shoulders soft and plump, holding Henry in the water by his two hands under the stomach, while the boy sticks his chin up like a loon and Dorothy submarines twenty feet further out.

She remembers Edward’s cabin in the woods when he wanted to be a writer. Soft impressions. Short confessional poems with everything unsaid. Nostalgic sketches, loss and grief. Father deaths. Haunted harbor scenes. Melancholy sex in the pastoral woods. It was not easy to read Edward in those days.

This is different. She admits it, Susan, this capture is power over her and Edward wields it, whether she likes it or not. As she follows Tony Hastings down his trail of terror she knows she sees what Edward wants her to see, feels what he feels, without a trace of Edward’s offenses as she remembers them. Edward stiff and nervous, prissy and cranky, has yet to appear in this lonely Pennsylvania landscape, where she and Tony face with him the unambiguous horror of what these evil men (conceived by him) are doing. There’s no ground to quarrel with him yet, and she’s grateful for that.

Tony Hastings stood there a long time, looking where the car had gone, now all dark. The night was thick, he tried to see, vaguely aware of differences in the shadows, but he could not distinguish, he felt blind. My God, he said, they went off and left me. What kind of a joke is this?

Now the woods in the night were silent, he heard nothing. After a while the darkness began to clear, not much but some, clearer than before anyway. He was in a small open space between the trees, he could see the sky overhead. He saw a
few stars, not many, not brilliant, not what they should be in the mountains. He could distinguish the treetops from the sky, but all below was still unpenetrated black, a curtain around the arena.

Surely they don’t expect me to get out without a flashlight, he said. Some joke.

The silence began to sort out. He distinguished a remote process, not a sound but the copy of a sound, recognized as trucks on the Interstate, miles away. He could not tell whether the faint whistling noises were insects in the grass or in his ear. Around the arena the curtain yielded shapes. He saw tree trunks and open spaces between the trees. He could see a black hole where the car had gone. He could see the road.

What are you waiting for? he said. It was stupid to suppose they would come back. Actually he had never supposed it. The problem was clear, he had been dumped in the wilderness in a prank a college sophomore would think of, and he would have to find his way out. So much for getting to Maine in one night.

The only question was whether he could find his way in the night. No, that was not the only question. Since he could see now, he went into the woods where the road was. He subdued an impulse to run, too far to go. He steadied his pace, he walked.

The road crossed a narrow stream on a log bridge and then went on, winding through the trees, turning and turning back, up and down hills, past thick brushy places and open stands of pines. Laura and Helen were waiting for him in a police office in Bailey, wherever that was. Worrying about him, deserted by him. The thought drove him wild, how to get a message to them. I’m all right, I’m coming, I’m in the woods, you’d better get some sleep because it will take a while.

Eventually they’ll send someone to look for him, but it will be hours before they realize the need, and no one will think of looking down a hidden lane like this.

They will never come for me, he said. I’m coming I’m coming. If he sat down to wait he would never get out. As if his life itself depended on this walk through the woods.

He slogged on, steady as he could. Steady was not easy because the track of the road was rough and hidden in the night, he stumbled on rocks, landed his foot in pits and irregularities, sometimes the trees closed in so that the road almost disappeared. He remembered nothing from the drive in. He came to a maze, strayed off, knew the straying from the spring of matted brush under his feet, found and kept the road only by the feel of his feet as he rebounded cautiously from one side to the other, hands out to protect his eyes. It would be easier to sleep too and wait for daylight. But he had so far just to get out of the woods, and then so far again, while Laura and Helen waited.

Insulted and grotesquely humiliated. Rage concentrated in his fists, steadied his pace, defied the blindness of his feet, his toes and heels. He catalogued the idiocies of hoods and punks, the kind who would play chicken with real cars on a highway and kidnap a college professor and dump him in the woods. Who think that sort of thing is funny. Manly. Tough.

Tony Hastings was insulted but refused to be humiliated. My name is Tony Hastings, he said. I teach mathematics at the university. Last week I gave three students F for the course. I gave great pleasure to fifteen others with the grade of A. I have a Ph.D. The law will have something to say to Ray and Lou and Turk. God knows I am a peaceful person, I dislike conflict, but if the law doesn’t. Guys who play pirate on the road may find out from me what it is like.

Outrage stiffened him against the danger of crying. From childhood, where the big boys snatched his hat and pushed him into the brook and ran away while he clambered out. They shall find out what it’s like.

Distance weights his feet, step by step stumbling to unravel the miles of driving rolled up between him and his destination. Time locks him in a cell and borrows from itself hours hidden from the world. If he permits the morning to come before he gets out, if he lies down and closes his eyes.

What if they decide they can’t wait any longer? What if they think he has run away? He must get the message to them before they leave.

Steady, man. Speak to him, calm him down. There’s nothing you can do but what you are doing. They will wait. Hope them some blessed sleep while you slog your way back.

Back where? That’s the question what police station? which he said you have not been thinking very clearly about. Knowing full well they weren’t waiting for him in any police station. Knowing all along but his mind deflected to other things. Now the reasons come. They won’t take Laura and Helen to the police station for the same reason they left you in the woods. They left you in the woods because they were not taking Laura and Helen to the police station. What Tony Hastings knew all along but only now understood, injecting mercury into his veins shooting everything cold, turning rage to terror. For if they were not taking Laura and Helen to the police station, where were they taking them to?

Steady, man, he said. Nothing to do but what you’re doing.

A few moments later he saw rays of white light through the woods ahead, rising and vanishing like someone swinging a flashlight. Then he heard a car, whining around the bumps and turns of the road. Yes, the car, they were coming back.

The stupid long joke was over, they were coming back – as he had known they would, if he had only had the patience – and all his rage and terror dissolved into relief. Thank God! he said.

The white flood approaching, making grotesque shadows of sticks and pikes up into the branches, contracted suddenly into a fierce white eye visible for a second before hidden again, a second which lit up all the woods around him, trunks, bushes, boulders, and Tony Hastings himself like lightning, and in the same instant illuminated a warning in his mind: Hide!

He ran to the tree which the lightning had shown, hurrying before the headlights could reappear, then dashed across a space to the boulder beyond, while the lightflood bounced behind an intervening outcrop. Then for a moment all the woods were lit again but only for a moment, for suddenly it was pitch dark and he heard the car stop, lights off. They saw me, he said.

He stood behind the boulder, fright beating inside him. Saw me in that first flash of the headlight, and now they are waiting for me to show myself. I was right to be afraid.

‘Hey mister!’ The voice was close, resonant in the trees. ‘Your wife wants you.’

He held still. Wondered, could that be true? It ought to be, for if she wasn’t there, where was she?

‘Mister? Your wife wants you.’

The voice had the music of a trap in it.

‘Mister?’

‘Ah shit!’

The lights snapped on, the forest floor was illuminated like a movie stage, and he was concealed behind the boulder in its shadow. The car started, and after a moment went on up the lane in the direction from which he had just come.

It looked like his own car. He watched its silhouette before the wash of light cast upon the woods beyond. He peered, strained his eyes, are they there? He saw the two men’s heads, knobs against the light, the two, just two, he was sure it was just two.

Yet he might have been wrong, it was hard to tell how much life was in that car, peering against the light while trying not to be seen. He stepped out to the lane, listening to the diminishing sound while the silence and clarity of the darkness gradually returned. What’s the matter with you? he said. Why didn’t you go to meet them?

He cursed himself for cowardice, then listened to the silence. Paralyzed, wondering, now which way?

The brutal telephone invades her reading, violating Susan in the woods. It’s Arnold checking in from his New York hotel, making her heart pound. Says he loves her, as if he thinks it necessary. Two minutes of awkward conversation with nervous pauses, strangers married twenty-five years. His interview is tomorrow. Write this down: The Cedar Hall Institute for Cardiac Research and Practice in Washington. Known as Chickwash. A directorship. When she hangs up, she’s as shaky as a fight, though there’s no fight she knows of. Should be relieved, right?

Meanwhile, Tony Hastings is alone on the grassy road in the woods, which a mere telephone call has caused her to forget. She sinks into the couch, tries to reenter Edward’s woods, but she’s still trembling from Arnold’s call. She reads a paragraph and takes in nothing. She tries again.

Think, he said. You’re not thinking. Which way? Because if that was his car they were driving. And if Laura and Helen were last seen going off in it. And if Laura and Helen were in it now. Mister, your wife wants you.

Think. Why the guys in his car would be going to the same lonely place where they had left him. They were bringing his
wife and daughter to meet him. He should have waited for them. Stayed on the grass back where he was dumped. Instead here, his craven hiding behind the boulder, his failure to come out and meet them. Laura and Helen waiting in the car for him to come, and he did not. And so they went on up the road into the deeper wilderness with their captors, betrayed, abandoned. Shame, then grief, as if he had denied them and lost them for good.

Go after them. Hurry. He looked where they had gone, whence he had come. It was impossible, he could not move. Wordless, like instinct, like the light that had flashed saying ‘Hide.’ You’re crazy, he said.

Some words followed, explaining why he could not go. They aren’t there, they said. You’d only be trailing Ray and Turk, back into their sadistic hands. You’d have it all to walk out of again. There were only two heads in the car, Ray and Turk.

So he turned and continued as he had. The road was easier now, broader with fewer holes and rocks, not crowded so close by saplings and brush. But he was dragging a heavy chain of grief that tried to pull him back. He argued against it. He said, if they had been in the car they would have called too. She would have said, ‘Tony?’

He walked faster now, talking. Proof of the menace, he said, was how they tried to lure you in just now. Proof of stupidity too: did they think turning off the lights and engine would fool you into thinking they weren’t there after the thunder and lightning of their approach?

He felt them behind him, silent in the dark. Catching up. It made him walk faster. It made him wonder why they had gone in there, as if the question had not occurred to him until now. It surprised him. Yes, he said, why? What is in that grassy
spot to make one of them leave me there and bring the other two after?

Rendezvous? Stash? He looked for explanations, but his mind resisted the effort. Come back to get him? That was ruled out when they kept going after spotting him by the road. More questions followed, which he had not known were there. The question of what their game really was. To steal his car? Maybe there was a place in the woods where they intended to secrete the car until later. Okay, that’s a theory, but why did they take you there?

Simple meanness, a sadistic thrill, that’ll do it, he said. The sheer devilish fun of dividing a family and putting them down in the wilderness as far apart from each other as the night will allow. See how long it takes them to find each other. Something like that. There were worse possibilities.

There were. He knew that, he knew it well, it was the habit of his mind to know the worst case, the ultimate. His life was a scenario of disasters that never took place. Because, if it really was just Ray and Turk in his car back there, then where were Laura and Helen?

The foolish image of the police station was still in his mind, of his wife and daughter sitting at a table, drinking coffee, waiting for news, but no, it was another image, image of the trailer over the curve in the road in the woods, with the dim light behind the curtain in the window. It was hard not to cry in his talk, which was a kind of pleading now, like a prayer. If it is rape, he prayed, if it must be rape, oh God, let that be the worst, let it not be worse than that.

Echo to God: let them be mean and cruel if they must, but give them some restraint, some limit beyond which they will not go, even them, let them not be mad, not psychopaths.

He noticed the thinning of trees ahead, an open space, flat
and bare, realized it was the paved road, he was almost out. In a moment he was in the clear. He stepped onto the pavement and looked around. The road ran straight in both directions above the floor of the woods on both sides. He noticed a broken gate by the entrance of the wood lane, a white board canted diagonally against a post, and tried to fix it in his mind, thinking, identify the place, it may be useful. He turned to the left to retrace his ride with Lou, though he knew it would be a long walk before he came to any people. Then behind him in the woods he heard the car. He saw the distant approach of light once again in the trees. Once again the fright warning, hide in the ditch. He resisted. You must face them, you must ask them, he said. You must not be so intimidated. He stood in the road and waited. The car came out of the woods and turned right, away from him. He was disappointed and relieved.

Then it stopped. They’ve seen me, he said. The car turned around and came toward him. He waited by the road. I’ll ask where Laura and Helen are, he said. I’ll ask what they intend to do with my car. The car approached slowly, then suddenly it wasn’t slow, the tires screeched, it was coming at high speed, the headlights spreading like jaws. He leaped blind into the ditch and landed in the knives while the car threw gravel at him.

The car shrieked and stopped. Around its red and white light a cloud of smoke rose and dissolved. A door opened. A man got out, stood at the edge of the shoulder, looked back, a shadow, indistinguishable. Tony Hastings did not move. He did not know if he could. The knives held him, branches, barbed wire. Thorns scratched around his eyes. The man walked a few steps toward him. He looked, it seemed a long time. He went back to the car. ‘Fuck him,’ he said, The words were far off and not said loudly, but Tony heard them clearly.

He was afraid they would turn the car around and find him with the headlights, while he was still unable to move. But the car U-turned away from him and passed above him gaining speed.

He wondered if he was badly hurt. He was scratched on the forehead and around the eyes, and the palms of both hands were cut. Something had gashed at his shin through the trouser, and something like a fence post had struck him in the gut.

He spread the barbed wire that held him, tried his legs, stood up. After a few moments he scrambled up the gravel. The road, the woods, the night sky hazy with only a few stars, everything was quiet with only the barely perceptible sound of trucks on the Interstate.

They were trying to kill me, he whispered. The thought cut through the surface layers of his brain into deeper hollows where he had never known a thought could go. He repeated it: really trying. And if they were really trying to kill me, he added. He did not finish. These must be the worst thoughts he had ever had, and all around him he saw the sleeping world, road, woods, sky, doom.