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"I'll have to fuck you both and kill everybody," whispered Oren Rath.
Hope scissored his waist with her good legs and hugged him, knife and all, to her breasts. "Margot!" she screamed. "Grab Nicky and run! Please!" she shrieked. "There's a crazy man who's going to kill us all! Take Nicky, take Nicky!"
Oren Rath lay stiffly against her as if it were the first time he'd ever been hugged. He did not struggle, he did not use his knife. They both lay rigid and listened to Margot dragging Nicky down the hall and out the kitchen door. One leg of the high chair was snapped off against the refrigerator, but Margot didn't stop to remove Nicky from the chair until she was half a block down the street and kicking open her own door.
"Don't kill me," Hope whispered. "Just go, quickly, and you'll get away. She's calling the police, right now."
"Get dressed," said Oren Rath. "I ain't had you yet, and I'm going to." Where he'd butted her with the oval crown of his head, he had split her lip against her teeth and made her bleed. "I mean business," he repeated, but uncertainly. He was as rough-boned and graceless as a young steer. He made her put her dress on without any underwear, he shoved her barefoot down the hall, carrying his boots under his arm. Hope didn't realize until she was beside him in the pickup that he had put on one of her husband's flannel shirts.
"Margot has probably written down the license number of this truck," she told him. She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself; she dabbed at her split lip with the broad, floppy collar of her dress. Oren Rath stiff-armed her in the ear, rapping the far side of her head off the passenger door of the cab.
"I need that mirror to see," he said. "Don't mess around or I'll really hurt you." He'd taken her bra with him and he used it to tie her wrists to the thick, rusty hinges of the glove-compartment door, which gaped open at her.
He drove as if he were in no special hurry to get out of town. He did not seem impatient when he got stuck at the long traffic light near the university. He watched all the pedestrians crossing the street; he shook his head and clucked his tongue when he saw how some of the students were dressed. Hope could see her husband's office window from where she sat in the truck's cab, but she didn't know if he would be in his office or actually, at that moment, teaching a class.
In fact, he was in his office--four floors up. Dorsey Standish looked out his window and saw the lights change; the traffic was allowed to flow, the hordes of marching students were temporarily restrained at the gates to the crosswalks. Dorsey Standish liked watching traffic. There are many foreign and flashy cars in a university town, but here these cars were contrasted with the vehicles of the natives: farmers' trucks, slat-sided conveyors of pigs and cattle, strange harvesting machinery, everything muddy from the farms and county roads. Standish knew nothing about farms, but he was fascinated by the animals and the machines--especially the dangerous, baffling vehicles. There went one, now, with a chute--for what?--and a latticework of cables that pulled or suspended something heavy. Standish liked to try to visualize how everything worked.
Below him a lurid turquoise pickup moved ahead with the traffic; its fenders were pockmarked, its grille bashed in and black with mashed flies and--Standish imagined--the heads of imbedded birds. In the cab beside the driver Dorsey Standish thought he saw a pretty woman--something about her hair and profile reminded him of Hope, and a flash of the woman's dress struck him as a color his wife liked to wear. But he was four floors up; the truck was past him, and the cab's rear window was so thickly caked with mud that he couldn't glimpse more of her. Besides, it was time for his nine-thirty class. Dorsey Standish decided it was unlikely that a woman riding in such an ugly truck would be at all pretty.
"I bet your husband is screwing his students all the time," said Oren Rath. His big hand, with the knife, lay in Hope's lap.
"No, I don't think so," Hope said.
"Shit, you don't know nothing," he said. "I'm going to fuck you so good you won't ever want it to stop."
"I don't care what you do," Hope told him. "You can't hurt my baby now."
"I can do things to you," said Oren Rath. "Lots of things."
"Yes. You mean business," Hope said, mockingly.
They were driving into the farm country. Rath didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, "I'm not as crazy as you think."
"I don't think you're crazy at all," Hope lied. "I think you're just a dumb, horny kid who's never been laid."
Oren Rath must have felt at this moment that his advantage of terror was slipping away from him, fast. Hope was seeking any advantage she might find, but she didn't know if Oren Rath was sane enough to be humiliated.
They turned off the county road, up a long dirt driveway toward a farmhouse whose windows were blurred with plastic insulation; the scruffy lawn was strewn with tractor parts and other metal trash. The mailbox said: R, R, W, E & O RATH.
These Raths were not related to the famous sausage Raths, but it appeared that they were pig farmers. Hope saw a series of outbuildings, gray and slanted with rusted roofs. On the ramp by the brown barn a full-grown sow lay on her side, breathing with difficulty; beside the pig were two men who looked to Hope like mutants of the same mutation that had produced Oren Rath.
"I want the black truck, now," Oren said to them. "People are out looking for this one." He used his knife matter-of-factly to slice through the bra that bound Hope's wrists to the glove compartment.
"Shit," one of the men said.
The other man shrugged; he had a red blotch on his face--a kind of birthmark, which was the color and nub-bled surface of a raspberry. In fact, that is what his family called him: Raspberry Rath. Fortunately, Hope didn't know this.
They had not looked at Oren or at Hope. The hard-breathing sow shattered the barnyard calm with a rippling fart. "Shit, there she goes again," the man without the birthmark said; except for his eyes, his face was more or less normal. His name was Weldon.
Raspberry Rath read the label on a brown bottle he held out toward the pig like a drink: "'May produce excessive gas and flatulence,' it says."
"Don't say anything about producing a pig like this," Weldon said.
"I need the black truck," Oren said.
"Well, the key's in it, Oren," said Weldon Rath. "If you think you can manage by yourself."
Oren Rath shoved Hope toward the black pickup. Raspberry was holding the bottle of pig medicine and staring at Hope when she said to him, "He's kidnapping me. He's going to rape me. The police are already looking for him."
