Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Marie knew her kidnapper’s name was really Hashilli, but she preferred to call him Dr. Moon. Titles keep a man off-balance, make him feel like he has something to prove. Doctors are intelligent. Doctors are patient. Doctors are restrained.

  “How fascinating,” she told the doctor. It didn’t matter what he said. Marie would find everything about him fascinating, even the dirty little cabin in the woods he thought of as his shrine.

  “This is the place where my life really started.” Dr. Moon made grand gestures with his hands as if he were showing her a gothic cathedral instead of a rude little shotgun shack on the wrong side of the Kiamichi River. He’d promised to buy Marie a six pack of Sprite to settle her uneasy stomach, but so far all he’d done was walk her through four small rooms that really hadn’t changed much since she hid out in them with her outlaw boyfriend before Sarah was born.

  “How fascinating.” The doctor wasn’t so different from other men in Marie’s life. More educated and more successful than most, but he still abducted her and took her to a little shanty in the woods. What was it about her that made the owners of that pesky Y chromosome behave so rashly?

  Marie sent a thought to Archie. Find me quickly. She broadcast the message on the frequency of love. Robert Collins had told her all emotional messages carried on the wind, even those spoken in the mind. She’d believed it then, and she still believed it—sort of.

  Archie would find her, given time. But she wasn’t sure just how much time she had before Dr. Moon noticed something was amiss. He was a psychiatrist, after all, an MD with special training in the processes of the human mind. But the man was as irrational as a Czech art film. Nothing he did made any sense. She wondered if psychosis could be spread from person to person like the common cold. That would explain

  Dr. Moon’s insanity. A hospital infection, a sort of MRSA of the mind, an occupational hazard for a psychiatrist.

  Dr. Moon was proud of the pump in the kitchen sink. He showed her how it worked. There was a wood cook stove, probably picked up at an Amish yard sale, and an honest-to-god icebox.

  “You have to go for ice soon,” she demanded. “And I still need my Sprite. That drive through the woods made me nauseated.” Marie felt that way a lot lately. Nausea was a common symptom in the early stages of her manic phase, but she didn’t feel the least bit manic. She felt normal. She could not remember feeling quite so normal since giving birth to Sarah.

  Dr. Moon laid a reassuring hand on Marie’s shoulder and then pulled it away as if she were hot to the touch. Terrified of women. Not an uncommon type. Simple to manipulate such men, just alternate between bitchiness and flirtation, like a downhill slalom race. It could be complex and somewhat risky maneuver if carried on too long. At some point she’d have to cross the finish line. Then what?

  “Ice!” She kissed him on the cheek and watched his face turn red. Sooner or later he would overcome his ambivalence and then his thoughts would turn to sex or murder—or maybe both. One thing was about as likely as the other. Men were like pet tigers. They’d nuzzle you one minute and maul you the next.

  “They’ll have ice in Tuskahoma,” said Marie. “And Sprite. You’d better get moving soon, before I have to throw up in that stinky outhouse.” She put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot. Surely a psychiatrist would recognize that as a sure sign of impatience.

  Men never seemed to listen to Marie unless they believed they were on the verge of taking her to bed, and afterward, they hardly seemed to listen at all. Dr. Moon was in his bragging mode. He’d fixed the cabin up so that she would be comfortable. He wanted praise.

  Sorry, doctor. Fresh out of kidnapper treats. She could see he’d cleaned the place up a bit, repaired the roof, mopped the floor, maybe even washed the walls, but that could hardly be characterized as comfort. No electricity, no plumbing, not even a real road. Motel Six would be a vast improvement.

  “Most of the family lived in a big house just across the river,” Dr. Moon said. “It burned years ago, just after Grandfather died.” The Maytubbys still owned the land, but no one lived here anymore. “This cabin is all that’s left.”

  Dr. Moon thought of the place as a shrine, but as far as Marie was concerned, it was just a little shack so nasty even termites wouldn’t touch it.

  “We could go to a hotel,” she suggested, “where they have restaurants and bathtubs and cable television.” You could pretend to be interested in sports. I could pretend to be interested in you.

  Dr. Moon shook his head. Archie had escaped from jail, and the wild Indian would be looking for Marie. “He’ll never find you here. People don’t remember this place anymore.”

  Marie looked out over the river through one of Dr. Moon’s reglazed windows. He could be right. Archie might never stumble on this place, no matter how many romantic vibrations she sent into the wind. Dr. Moon told her there were four bridges. Only a vehicle with the proper wheelbase could cross them.

  “Just thick planks supported by railroad ties,” he said. “Easy to dismantle. I’ll take care of that today.” Then a boat would be the only way to get to the cabin. Dr. Moon had bought a brand new aluminum jon boat, complete with a battery-powered trolling motor.

  “The old wooden flat-bottom still looks good.” He’d found it on the other side of the Kiamichi where the family abandoned it after the fire, still supported on cinder blocks, covered by Virginia creeper.

  “Unreliable after all these years,” he said. “And, of course, it never had a motor.” This section of the Kiamichi wasn’t very deep and the water ran slowly. In the old days, the Maytubbys poled their boats through the shallows to and from their family enclave that didn’t appear on any map.

  “It was a secret place,” he said. “The most secret place in all the world.”

  Marie’s eyes found the bullet hole in the kitchen wall. She started to explore it with her pinky finger, but Dr. Moon gently pulled her hand away.

  “Not for you to touch,” he said. “Not for anyone to touch.” He had told Marie all about the magic bullet. The true starting point of his personal legend. He repeated the story word for word, as though it were recorded on a microchip. Even the spaces between the words were exactly the same as the first time he told it.

  Too perfect to be true. Marie wondered which parts were made up. The stains on the floor looked authentic enough. She looked at her shadow on the wall. The hole was centered on her shadow’s head. Marie was exactly the same size as the woman whose life had been taken instead of the baby witch’s. Could that have something to do with his attraction to her?

  “I won’t touch your magic bullet,” Marie promised, “but we need ice, and Sprite and other things as well.”

  Dr. Moon gave her a pen and paper and told her to make a list.

  Marie was not good at grocery shopping, but her list was thorough. Supplies enough to last a month—that would convince this man she was resigned to stay with him. If Archie didn’t come for her soon, she’d find a way to escape all by herself.

  Come soon, Archie. Her lips moved as she broadcast that thought, but Dr. Moon didn’t notice. She had a thought that might keep her abductor off-balance a little while longer.

  Marie added Trojan condoms, ribbed for her pleasure, to the list. She underlined it twice. She pointed the item out to Dr. Moon, in case he hadn’t already noticed. “Be sure and get the lubricated kind.”

  He accepted the grocery list as if it were a death warrant.

  “Don’t forget the Sprite,” she reminded him as he stumbled out the cabin door.

  Marie turned her attention once again to the magic bullet hole. It didn’t look quite right to her, but she couldn’t say why.

  When Dr. Moon returned with the groceries, he no longer wanted to talk about the cabin. He loaded the icebox with provisions and bagged ice. He arranged canned goods and paper plates and plastic cutlery in the pantry.

  In addition to the party size bags of chips, soft drinks and bottled wat
er on Marie’s list, he’d bought boxed cereal, fresh vegetables, Spam, Vienna sausages, and canned beans. He described each item as if it were a treasure rescued from the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but words failed him when he handed Marie the condoms still wrapped in their discrete Homeland pharmacy bag.

  He stepped back when she exposed the box.

  She said, “A gross of lubricated rubbers. Someone has big plans.” She held the box of condoms in front of her, using them the way a vampire hunter might use a crucifix. Dr. Moon stumbled against the little cabin’s front door, fumbled with the latch, then tripped down the single step, and fell into the yard.

  “Perhaps you’d like to try one on for size.” Marie perched like a bird of prey in the open doorway. “Maybe we’ll have more luck this time.” If a woman doesn’t remind a man of his previous inadequacies, he starts rewriting history.

  Dr. Moon wasn’t ready to stand up quite yet. He crawled backward without bothering to roll over, moving away from the cabin toward his new jon boat like a four-legged, upside-down-spider. He made sputtering noises, but could not form words until he’d put twelve feet between himself and the cabin door. When he finally spoke, he used an emotionally uncharged voice, completely inconsistent with his means of locomotion.

  “Not right now.” No listener would ever guess this voice was owned by a man who had been undone by a box of condoms.

  In a graceful, athletic twist that seemed to defy gravity, Dr. Moon moved his body into the standing posture of an alpha male. He tipped his chin toward the sky so that he seemed to be looking down at Marie, even though her position in the cabin doorway gave her a six-inch advantage in elevation. He dusted off his pants and smoothed the wrinkles from his shirt.

  “I have business in the city.” Dr. Moon didn’t bother to specify the name of the city or the nature of his business. He reached behind him and removed a black boxy-looking pistol from a holster he wore in the small of his back.

  Marie’s face betrayed no fear. She smiled and leaned against the doorframe, striking a line that best displayed the curves men found so irresistible. She tossed the box of condoms into the cabin with a skill of a stage magician. She moistened her lips with her tongue and composed a beguiling smile she’d practiced in bathroom mirrors since her teenage years. This was not her first armed and dangerous man.

  But the others weren’t so fearful. Marie would have to move carefully with this one. If she pushed him too far, too fast, he might decide she simply wasn’t worth the trouble.

  But he hadn’t made that decision yet. Dr. Moon blew gentle puffs of air over every dusty surface of his pistol. He removed the magazine and checked the breech for debris. He re-inserted the clip, touched the barrel of the gun to his lips and then returned it to its holster.

  This would not be Marie’s day to die.

  Dr. Moon said, “We need to talk when I return.”

  A clear sign of trouble. In Marie’s experience, talking was something men rarely did with women unless they were laying the groundwork for antisocial behavior.

  “About our relationship.” Dr. Moon’s voice still sounded calm, but he took two more steps away from Marie.

  “About our future.” He stumbled slightly as he took another backward step toward the jon boat.

  “About the restless spirit of a child waiting to be born.”

  Marie was certain all the color drained from her face, but by then, Dr. Moon was too far away to see. She watched him climb into his aluminum flat-bottomed boat and push it into the river. He kept his eyes fixed on her as the current carried him down stream.

  Marie realized that Hashilli wasn’t just a sexually frustrated man tempted by desires he pretended didn’t exist. This man wanted something from her that he could not have, something she could not give him. She had no idea what he might do when he found out, but she could no longer wait around for Archie.

  Sometimes a woman had to take care of business all by herself. It was not an idea that Marie Ferraro found all that palatable, but necessity was the mother of invention, and she was a mother, too.