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Raspberry kept staring at Hope, but Weldon turned to Oren. "I hope you ain't doing nothing too stupid," he said.
"I ain't," Oren said. The two men now turned their total attention to the pig.
"I'd wait another hour and then give her another squirt," Raspberry said. "Ain't we seen enough of the vet this week?" He scratched the mud-smeared neck of the sow with the toe of his boot; the sow farted.
Oren led Hope behind the barn where the corn spilled out of the silo. Some piglets, barely bigger than kittens, were playing in it. They scattered when Oren started the black pickup. Hope started to cry.
"Are you going to let me go?" she asked Oren.
"I ain't had you yet," he said.
Hope's bare feet were cold and black with the spring muck. "My feet hurt," she said. "Where are we going?"
She'd seen an old blanket in the back of the pickup, matted and flecked with straw. That's where she imagined she was going: into the cornfields, then spread on the spongy spring ground--and when it was over and her throat was slit, and she'd been disemboweled with the fisherman's knife, he'd wrap her up in the blanket that was lumped stiffly on the floor of the pickup as if it covered some stillborn livestock.
"I got to find a good place to have you," said Oren Rath. "I would of kept you at home, but I'd of had to share you."
Hope Standish was trying to figure out the foreign machinery of Oren Rath. He did not work like the human beings she was accustomed to.
"What you're doing is wrong," she said.
"No, it isn't," he said. "It ain't."
"You're going to rape me," Hope said. "That's wrong."
"I just want to have you," he said. He hadn't bothered to tie her to the glove compartment this time. There was nowhere she could go. They were driving only on those mile-long plots of county roads, driving slowly west in little squares, the way a knight advances on a chessboard: one square ahead, two sideways, one sideways, two ahead. It seemed purposeless to Hope, but then she wondered if he didn't know the roads so very well that he knew how to cover a considerable distance without ever passing through a town. They saw only the signposts for towns, and although they couldn't have moved more than thirty
miles from the university, she didn't recognize any of the names: Coldwater, Hills, Fields, Plainview. Maybe they aren't towns, she thought, but only crude labels for the natives who lived here--identifying the land for them, as if they didn't know the simple words for the things they saw every day.
"You don't have any right to do this to me," Hope said.
"Shit," he said. He pumped his brakes hard, throwing her forward against the truck's solid dashboard. Her forehead bounced off the windshield, the back of her hand was mashed against her nose. She felt something like a small muscle or a very light bone give way in her chest. Then he tromped on the accelerator and tossed her back into the seat. "I hate arguing," he said.
Her nose bled; she sat with her head forward, in her hands, and the blood dripped on her thighs. She sniffed a little; the blood dripped over her lip and filmed her teeth. She tipped her head back so that she could taste it. For some reason, it calmed her--it helped her to think. She knew there was a rapidly blueing knot on her forehead, swelling under her smooth skin. When she ran her hand up to her face and touched the lump, Oren Rath looked at her and laughed. She spit at him--a thin phlegm laced pink with blood. It caught his cheek and ran down to the collar of her husband's flannel shirt. His hand, as flat and broad as the sole of a boot, reached for her hair. She grabbed his forearm with both her hands, she jerked his wrist to her mouth and bit into the soft part where the hairs don't always grow and the blue tubes carry the blood.
She meant to kill him in this impossible way but she barely had time to break the skin. His arm was so strong that he snapped her body upright and across his lap. He pushed the back of her neck against the steering wheel--the horn blew through her head--and he broke her nose with the heel of his left hand. Then he returned that hand to the wheel. He cradled her head with his right hand, holding her face against his stomach; when he felt that she wasn't struggling, he let her head rest on his thigh. His hand lightly cupped her ear, as if to hold the sound of the horn inside her. She kept her eyes shut against the pain in her nose.
He made several left turns, more right turns. Each turn, she knew, meant they had driven one mile. His hand now cupped the back of her neck. She could hear again, and she felt his fingers working their way into her hair. The front of her face felt numb.
"I don't want to kill you," he said.
"Don't, then," Hope said.
"Got to," Oren Rath told her. "After we do it, I'll have to."
This affected her like the taste of her own blood. She knew he didn't care for arguing. She saw that she had lost a step: her rape. He was going to do it to her. She had to consider that it was done. What mattered now was living; she knew that meant outliving him. She knew that meant getting him caught, or getting him killed, or killing him.
Against her cheek, she felt the change in his pocket; his blue jeans were soft and sticky with farm dust and machine grease. His belt buckle dug into her forehead; her lips touched the oily leather of his belt. The fisherman's knife was kept in a sheath, she knew. But where was the sheath? She couldn't see it; she didn't dare to hunt for it with her hands. Suddenly, against her eye, she felt his penis stiffening. She felt then--for really the first time--almost paralyzed, panicked beyond helping herself, no longer able to sort out the priorities. Once again, it was Oren Rath who helped her.
"Look at it this way," he said. "Your kid got away. I was going to kill the kid, too, you know."
The logic of Oren Rath's peculiar version of sanity made everything sharpen for Hope; she heard the other cars. There were not many, but every few minutes or so there was a car passing. She wished she could see, but she knew they were not as isolated as they had been. Now, she thought, before he gets to where we're going--if he even knows where we're going. She thought he did. At least, before he gets off this road--before I'm somewhere, again, where there aren't any people.
Oren Rath shifted in his seat. His erection was making him uncomfortable. Hope's warm face in his lap, his hand in her hair, was reaching him. Now, Hope thought. She moved her cheek against his thigh, just slightly; he did not stop her. She moved her face in his lap as if she were making herself more comfortable, against a pillow--against his prick, she knew. She moved until the bulge under his rank pants rose untouched by her face. But she could reach it with her breath; it stuck up out of his lap near her mouth, and she began to breathe on it. It hurt too much to breathe out of her nose. She drew her lips into an O-shaped kiss, she focused her breathing, and, very softly, she blew.
Oh, Nicky, she thought. And Dorsey, her husband. She would see them again, she hoped. To Oren Rath she gave her warm, careful breath. On him she focused her one, cold thought: I'm going to get you, you son of a bitch.
* * *
