by Shobha Rao
Now, along with the falling light, the wind had picked up. It wasn’t particularly cold, but it whipped her hair, her loose clothes pulled taut in the gusts. She stood undecided, watching the road, which was empty, and the hills to the northeast, which no longer seemed low, but towering and severe. A truck pulled into the parking lot, but no one got out. She looked up and saw the first stars; beyond the pools of the gas station lights, there was only cold, unnerving night. She decided it was best to walk back into town and at least find cover in the small park. She gathered her knapsack and started past the gas pumps. The door of the truck opened. Two men got out. Savitha didn’t particularly notice them, only saw that there were two of them as she walked past; she was chilled suddenly, Padma’s sweater hardly thick enough to hold back the night. She’d cleared the farthest pump when she heard footsteps running up behind her.
She turned; she’d nearly passed through the last pool of light, but she turned.
3
The baby-faced one smiled first. His smile so genuine and carefree, his approach so guileless, that Savitha thought he might embrace her, as if they were long-lost friends. “Don’t go,” he yelled out. “Hey, where you going? Don’t go.”
“Let her go, Charlie,” came a bored voice. Savitha then saw the second man, behind the baby-faced Charlie. The second man was bony, with a thin face and long hair, stringy and to his shoulders, and dark hollows for eyes. They came toward her slowly, but with an electric charge in their walk; she had the sudden impulse to run, and she nearly did.
But then, in the next moment, the baby-faced one was beside her. She smelled the alcohol, even before he grabbed her arm. “Don’t go,” he said, the words no longer a request but an order. Savitha tried to squirm out of his grip, but he tightened it and smiled again. “Look at her, Sal. She’s a pretty little thing. You a lot lizard? Whoa, now. My, my. Feisty. My uncle Buck gave me a hamster just like you. When I was five. Shot himself in the head. Uncle Buck, I mean, not the hamster.” And then he laughed, and then the man named Sal came up beside them, into the pool of light, and it was only now that Savitha saw it was not just alcohol, it was something else that drove them, that seemed a ruthless engine inside them.
“What’s your name?” the baby-faced one asked.
Savitha understood the question, but was too panicked to answer.
“Where you from?”
Savitha shook her head. “No English,” she said.
She realized instantly that it was the wrong thing to say.
Charlie’s smile widened, though his face took on a quieter, sinister quality. “Is that right? No English? Hey, Sal, did you hear that? No English.”
They all three stood like that, looking at one another, and Savitha, for the flash of the tiniest moment, thought the baby-faced one would simply let go of her arm, and she would continue on into town, back to the small park. But it wasn’t true: something glimmered in Sal’s eyes. He said, “Hold on, now. What do we have here,” and then he said, “Lift up that arm, Charlie.” It was her left arm, her stub, and when Charlie twisted it up toward the night sky, they both howled with laughter. “Who was it? Who bit your hand off?” Sal asked.
“I bet it was a tiger,” Charlie said, still laughing, still painfully gripping her arm. “Don’t you all have tigers over there?”
“Shut up, Charlie,” Sal said, his face suddenly serious. “Come on. Get her over to the truck.”
Charlie yanked on Savitha’s arm. She jerked forward; her eyes snapped to the empty road, to the inside of the gas station, the counter. The large man who’d given her the key was turned away. She opened her mouth to shout, but Charlie was quicker: he slapped his hand over her face. Her head came to his chest, and his hand was so big that it covered her mouth and most of her eyes. He pushed her against the truck, and when the long-haired one opened the door, she thought they would force her inside, but instead, he yanked the knapsack from her shoulder. He rummaged until he found the money, then threw the knapsack into the cab of the truck. He then reached for something she couldn’t see, closed the door, and said, “Come on.”
“Where to?”
“You want Mel to call the cops?”
“But the truck.”
“We won’t be long. Let’s go.”
They dragged her to the back of the gas station. By now, Savitha couldn’t breathe. She twisted her head this way and that, until a gap between his fingers let in air. She tried to bite and got the inside of a finger, but he yelled, “Goddammit,” and clobbered the side of her head. Savitha’s ears rang. “Will you shut up,” Sal said, and led them to a clump of cottonwoods, a little distance behind the station. They entered the thickets, and within three or four steps came to a small clearing. Beer cans shone in the moonlight; a fire had once been built—she saw even in the low light that they’d been here many times before. “Let me see it,” Sal said.
“What you going to do, Sal?”
“I said, pass her over.”
It was now Sal who clenched her left arm with his own left arm, bony and cold compared to the baby-faced one’s arm. He didn’t bother with the hand over her mouth. Instead, he reached somewhere under his shirt, and there, in the moonlight, was something black and gleaming. He held the gun to her face. “You make a noise. One fucking noise. You understand that?”
Savitha stared at him, her thoughts stilled, her eyes wide. She was looking into it, but inside her—inside her was the long and dark tunnel.
“I said, do you understand?”
No, no, she didn’t understand, but evil had its own vocabulary, its own language. She nodded.
“And you try to run. You try to take a fucking step.”
She understood.
He let go of her arm; she stumbled back and fell to the ground. She hadn’t even known he was holding her up. “Get up,” he said, and when she did, he said, “Now go ahead. Put it in your mouth.”
She looked at him, no longer understanding, and then she looked at the baby-faced one. And they stood like that, neither truly understanding.
“I said, put it in your mouth.”
When she still stood, unmoving, not knowing what he wanted, he grabbed her arm again and shoved her stub against her mouth. It knocked her teeth into her bottom lip, drawing blood, but he kept shoving. What did he want? “Open it,” he seethed into her face, his acrid breath greater than air. “Open it, and put it in.” He pushed the gun up to her face, between her eyes, and she heard a click. “Put it in.”
Now she understood. The whole night now a violence of understanding. The stars blazing like bullets.
He let go of her arm and took a step back. He waited.
She opened her mouth. She wrapped her lips around the stub.
The baby-faced one whooped with delight, but the long-haired one only watched. He nodded. His bony face white against the black of the gun, still held at the ready, pointed at her face.
After a moment, he lurched with irritation. “Not like that,” he said. “Bitch, not that. You know better.” And he reached over, grabbed her by the hair, and rammed her face into the stub. She choked on her own arm. Tears filled her eyes. He then pulled her head back up, and then back down, and then back up. “Like that,” he said.
And so she did.
By now, the baby-faced one had unzipped his pants and was moaning at the edge of Savitha’s blurred vision. She saw the movement of his hand.
But the gun. The gun didn’t move. It was motionless in the moonlight, black, lustrous, untroubled, its feathers unruffled. It laughed.
You’re alive, Savitha said.
The crow watched her, still laughing, in the silver and starry night. Its beak rose into the air, and there it stayed, its stillness mocking her movement.
They’ve taken you, haven’t they? the crow said. They’ve taken you piece by piece. And this—this is the last piece. Now, in this clearing, with these strangers. I warned you, it said. I warned you all those years ago. In Indravalli. I said, Make sure they take you w
hole. But you didn’t listen. You didn’t listen. And now look at you. You are nothing. You are a girl. You are a girl in a clearing.
The baby-faced one let out a long groan, and the bony-faced one laughed, and the crow pulled back, opened its wings, and flew up and away, and Savitha followed it with her eyes, but the rest of her dropped to her knees.
* * *
And so it was: that the fabric of something she’d never understood, had never even tried to understand, was what had enclosed her heart, what had held it with its soft and wrinkled and cottony hands; it was this cloth that was now ripped wide open. The two men left her there, in the clearing, and she heard the turning of the truck’s ignition and then the sound of the engine going up the road, becoming, at last, only the night. Silent and unforgiving.
But how was I to know? she thought, lying on the ground. How was I to know: that it was always this: always the boll to the loom to the cloth, and then, finally, and with such fragility, to the heart.
4
There was lightning to the west. She raised her head, and at first she smiled, thinking it a gathering of fireflies, synchronized in their mirth. But when she stood up, she saw the dark clouds racing toward her. Toward Spearfish. It was not as dark as she remembered. Was it morning? The thunder rumbled. It spoke. And then one drop, and then two. She lifted herself up, saw the discarded beer cans, the old circle of fire, and she wondered, Which way is east?
She straightened her clothes, but when she took a step, she crashed to the ground in a heap. Her legs were numb. And her mind was terribly empty.
Had she fallen asleep?
The storm was coming fast now. The thunderclouds racing across the prairie, over the Black Hills, into the Dakotas. She watched them with such interest, such longing, that they seemed as if they might bend down to her, the clouds, low and rushing, and carry her off in their embrace. But they paid her no attention and gathered ominously, growing darker and heavier with deluge. The lightning now struck from the west and the south, some from the north. Savitha watched it; the lightning her father’s hands, reaching for her. Nanna, she said, was I ever the one with wings? But then the thunder crashed, and she stumbled out of the clearing, around the back of the gas station—the wind whipping around her, swirling with the strength of a sea—holding on to the walls, blinded as she was by wind, by rain, by sudden storm.
There was no one behind the counter. The key was where she’d left it.
She opened the door of the bathroom, saw her reflection in the mirror, in the light through the open door, and slammed it closed as she crumpled to the floor. And here, then: another clearing. Her money was gone. Her clothes were gone. The photo and the small white rectangle of paper were gone. Even the remaining loaf of bread and the potato chips and the apple were gone. But of all the things that were gone, that they had taken, it was Poornima’s half-made sari that pinned her to the floor.
The rain started. She could hear it, clambering like little feet over the metal roof, hurrying on their way. To where?
East, she thought, east.
And what was there to the east? Nothing. Just as there had been nothing to the west.
She began to sob, and the sobs became a wail, and the wail became a low and gentle hum. She looked over, humming. Another toilet. It, too, was humming. She crawled over to it and put her arms around the cool porcelain. She smiled. But then the strong stench of urine reached into her head, cut her reverie with a knife, and it snapped her back—or was it the jiggling of the door handle that snapped her back? She didn’t know, but she saw now that there was so little to be done. The single naked bulb above her ached, in its lonely, buzzing way. Her skin, illuminated by the bulb, shrieked with sorrow. Her thoughts folded and unfolded in pain. For it was here, under this white light and in this horrible stench, that Savitha realized how lost she was. How mislaid. How all the beacons of the world, standing all in a row, couldn’t save her.
Poornima
1
It came down to this: her only chance of finding Savitha was to invoke her. Talking about poetry was well and good, but Poornima was running out of time, and what was the worst Mohan could do? Ignore her? Throw her out of the apartment? Deny knowing Savitha? Put her on an earlier flight back to India? Quarantine her until that flight?
None of those was worse than neglecting to use the last and only weapon she had.
That evening, she dispensed with preparing dinner, and when Mohan arrived, she simply handed him a glass. She waited for him to take his first sip of whiskey, pushed her gaze toward him, and said, “I became a shepherd for one reason. And one reason alone. To find someone.”
Mohan studied her, nonplussed. He gestured toward her face. “Him? The guy who did that to you?”
Poornima hardly heard him. She spoke out into the room, dauntless now, insentient, and as if she were alone. “He doesn’t exist for me. No, the person I’m looking for is my friend. Her name is Savitha. That’s who I’m looking for, why I’m here.”
Mohan seemed to shudder at something she didn’t understand, and though his face was lost in the gray gloom of the far wall, Poornima felt his shudder through the floor, suspended in the air between them. Into that air, he said, “How do you know her?”
Poornima looked up. “She’s from my village. The last time I saw her was four years ago.”
He held his face against the light, away from it, as if they were locked in battle.
“Do you?”
“No,” he said, and Poornima knew he did.
“I have to find her,” she continued. “I need your help.”
He swirled the whiskey in his glass. His body stiffened. He looked at the floor. “She left.”
“What?”
“Two days ago.”
“Two days?” Poornima felt a scream, a hot pulsing pain, rise to her throat. Two days! “Where? Where did she go?”
Silence.
“You have to know something.”
“She took a bus. That’s my guess.”
“But to where? Where? These, these girls—they don’t know anybody, any other places. They don’t even know English. Where could she go? And without money.”
Silence again.
Poornima’s mind raced. Her plane ticket was through JFK. In one week’s time. What was better, to stay here or to go to New York? What if Mohan didn’t let her stay? What was the point of staying? When Savitha was gone? She knew, she knew already: if he made her go, she would simply walk out of the airport when she got to New York. And she would keep walking. Would anybody stop her? Could they? And even if they didn’t, what then? Where would she go? How would she begin? Such a big country—how long would a thousand dollars last? No matter: she would meet her from the other end. And then she thought, enraged, She was here. She was here the whole time and I didn’t find her. I was looking in the wrong places, walking the wrong streets. For two weeks.
“Money, she had.”
She looked up at him, as if waking from a deep sleep and surprised to find him there. What was he talking about?
“What money?”
“She took it. From my wallet. Not much. Won’t get her very far.”
“But how far? Where?”
“And half a photograph.”
“Where would it get her? Tell me.”
“I don’t know why she took that,” he said.
“A photograph? Of what?”
“Some place I told her about. Me as a kid.”
“What place?”
“Spearfish Canyon.”
“Is that a city?”
“Near a city. In South Dakota.”
“Where is that?”
“Midway. Not quite.”
Poornima looked away, and then she looked back at him. “What did you tell her about it?”
Mohan shrugged. He said shyly, “I don’t know. Nothing much. Just what I remembered. That it was a perfect place. That’s how I remember it from when I was a kid. That it was perfect. That’s what I told her. But
then—but then she asked me the strangest thing.”
“What?”
“She asked me whether it was like flute song.”
“Flute song?”
Poornima’s voice trailed off. Her face hardened into a kind of resolve, a purpose, a slow cooling, as of lava, a firming, as of the desert after a rain. And so it was: her face took on the characteristics of landscape, of natural forces, of tectonic plates and pressure and finding of place, of settling into a destiny. It no longer mattered: the logic of a thing. What mattered was the conviction in the pit of her stomach, burning its way through her body: Savitha was there. If she wasn’t there, she was nowhere. And that Poornima could not abide. She had traveled half the circumference of the earth, and traveled all these many, many years. And for what? To miss her by two days? No. No, that she would not abide. Out of the darkness, she said to him, “I have one week left here. And then I get on a plane to New York. And you will never see me again. But I will pay you. I will give you my entire savings. Will you take me? Will you take me to this Spearfish Canyon? You don’t have to, I know that. But will you?”
Mohan began to chuckle, but then his face pulled back. He was quiet. He eyed her with disbelief, but also with a kind of awe. “I can’t. I have to be here. You know that. You’re talking about leaving in a few days. I couldn’t possibly.”
“Not a few days. Tomorrow. Tonight, if you can manage it.”
Now he did laugh out loud. But it was a sad person’s laugh, not very deep, as thin and unconvincing as pond ice in spring. Afterward, there was silence again. They sat on the floor, facing each other, in a silence that was heavy, that hung like mercury. “You’re not serious,” he finally said.
She’d been wrong: She had one weapon left. She had the poem.
“These are the stairs, Mohan. She’s two days gone. There is no time. There is no time.”
The room spun. It spun like a charkha. He rose unsteadily, took his car keys from where he’d placed them on the counter. He said, “Twenty hours, give or take. Pack a bag.”
