In The Forest Of Harm

by Sallie Bissell

  But then a current of excitement sizzled through her. How could she be so stupid? She had a weapon! She had something the Snake Man knew nothing about! Right this moment she was carrying the tiny cell phone that Charlie had slipped in the bottom of her pack. If she could somehow hold on to it until this maniac fell asleep, she’d be able to call for help. All right, she told herself as she continued to bend thistles with her feet. Just thirty seconds alone with that phone and this little kidnapping will be over.

  When the western horizon turned fuchsia, they stopped on a ridge where a narrow river boiled thirty feet below them. The man dropped his sack and gun, but he did not loosen the leather cord that bound them together. He moved closer to Alex and grinned. “Now we’ll see what you’ve got in your little bag.”

  He turned her by her shoulders and opened her pack. Not the phone, she pleaded silently, wincing as his hands nudged the straps against her blistered back. Please don’t let him dig deep enough to find the phone. . . .

  “Hey!”

  She froze.

  He pulled out a fistful of candy bars and several packets of freeze-dried food. “We’ve got candy, lasagna, chicken titty-something. Gosh, Trudy, you were gonna eat like a queen up here.”

  I sure was, Alex thought, holding her breath as he rummaged deeper in the pack. Regular five-star dining alfresco.

  “Here’s some little underpanties and some little makeup things and—lookee here! What’s this?” His hand plunged deeper into the pack. She closed her eyes.

  “Uh-oh,” he said in a singsongy voice. “Look what I found!”

  She opened her eyes. The small red cell phone waggled before them.

  With a great sagging in her chest, she watched as he unfolded the phone.

  “Sorry,” he giggled, holding the thing to his ear, and miming a conversation. “Trudy’s not here. I don’t know where she went, but she won’t be back for a long, long time.”

  Stop. She wanted to beg him. Just let me make one call. Let me tell my Mom good-bye. But he took the phone away from his ear, cocked his arm back like a baseball pitcher, and threw it toward the river. It riffled through leaves, then she heard nothing but her own breathing, as if she were the last person left alive on earth.

  He untied her hands, yanked off her backpack and loosened the cord from her waist. He pulled the sour bandana from between her lips, then he began to speak. “Now, Trude,” he said, his beard tickling her cheek, his breath hot in her ear. “Even though you can’t talk on your pretty phone, you can still scream as loud as you want. There isn’t anything to hear you up here but chipmunks and meadow mice. Verstehen?” He tied her ankles together with rope. Of course she understood that. She could scream, but no one would hear. She could run, but only in hobbled strides that would carry her nowhere.

  Alex slumped on the ground as the man pawed through the rest of her supplies. After finding Mary’s fire starter, he dragged a pine log and some twigs together and soon a bright orange blaze crackled into the chilly blue air. Though the log popped with resin and sent fiery sparks exploding up like tiny rockets, Alex scooted as close to it as she dared, seeking to warm away the damp cold that had seeped into her bones. He looked up as he tinkered with the backpacker’s stove and saw her shivering.

  “Here,” he said, plucking her denim jacket from her pack. He tossed it toward her. “That should warm you up.”

  She nestled into it gratefully, drawing her legs close to her chest and tucking her chin beneath the collar. The jacket smelled of the cedar closet under her mother’s stairs, and without warning she was back in Texas, in the old house on the edge of a cottonwood grove where the earth lay white and flat as a biscuit. The sounds of her family in a spring twilight came to her clearly: her mother clattering pots on the stove while Jacinta the cockatiel shrieked a commentary of the news on TV. The screen door banged and her father clomped into the kitchen, his barn boots covered with dust. Outside, the dry desert wind that whispered all the way from Mexico rattled the windows, carrying with it the sound of her brothers’ backyard football game. “Go long, Jack!” David yelled. “Go long and cut right!” Alex smiled. It all seemed distant as a fairy tale. Tears dampened her eyelashes as she pulled the coat close against the dankness. Though she had lived most of her adult life trying to scrub away the yellow dust of Texas, she would give everything right this minute if she could go back and breathe that dry air and tell them all how much she loved them.

  “You get spaghetti tonight, Trudy.” The man thrust a pouch of hot food at her, then sat down. “I get lasagna. Eat it before it eats you.”

  They ate to the sound of the fire crackling and popping. The man shoveled the sticky pasta into his mouth. Alex ate slowly with her fingers, forcing down little bites.

  After they finished, the man sipped what she assumed was moonshine, offering the jar to her with a wink and a tipsy display of his yellow incisors. She shook her head and said:

  “I want some water.” Her voice squeaked like a rusty hinge.

  “Why, Trudy!” The man’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You can talk. Here I was thinking the cat permanently got your tongue.” He pulled the water bottle off her pack and handed it to her. She uncapped it and drank. The water cooled her parched throat and made her feel suddenly sharper, as if she’d awakened from a deep sleep. Maybe now would be a good time for a little voir dire, she decided. Find out the truth, so you’ll know what you’re up against. She lowered the water bottle from her lips and cleared her throat.

  “Who exactly are you?” She flinched at the bluntness of her question, but she couldn’t call her words back.

  “Who am I?” The man grinned. “You know who I am. We left Pennsylvania on the same day. And you’ve dogged my trail for the past thirty years. ’Course mostly you’ve had four legs and big teeth instead of those big tits.”

  Schizophrenic, Alex thought. Truly nuts. Still, she had to keep going. “Refresh my memory, then,” she told him, forcing a smile. “Changing from one species to another takes a toll. A lot of brain cells die in the process.”

  “I bet they do,” he chortled. “Surprised you have any left at all.”

  Alex took another sip of water. “You say we lived in Pennsylvania?” she asked tentatively.

  The man nodded. “Papa was Herr Fleischman’s butcher.”

  “Are we German?”

  “Papa had been a POW. He spent most of the war raising hogs in Alabama.”

  “I can’t remember our last name.”

  “Brank,” the man replied. “Papa was Rudy, Mama was Anna. You were Gertrude but we called you Trudy. Remember what you called me?”

  “What?”

  “Esel. Dumpfbacke. Queer. You thought all those names were a scream. You know what I thought?”

  “No.”

  Brank gave a low chuckle. “I’m gonna show you what I thought,” he promised, with a leer. “Later.”

  She was about to ask him about Martha Crow when abruptly he leapt to his feet. “Time for something else now.”

  He tossed the water bottle over by the pile of clothes and jerked the jacket from her shoulders. Slowly, his eyes riveted to hers, he began to remove his clothes. First his boots and socks, then his pants, then he pulled the snake from his shirt.

  It’s not poisonous. The realization stung her as he flung the reptile back into his sack. He conned Joan and me. He snookered us with some harmless thing you’d find in a garden.

  Finally he stood before her naked, with his knife in his right hand.

  Her heart raced like a hummingbird’s. It was her turn now. He was going to get even with her for everything this Trudy had ever done to him.

  He pushed her backwards on the grass and pulled her feet-first over to the fire. Then he balanced the knife on a stone, suspending the blade over the hot embers. The skin above his beard glowed like some ancient bronze mask.

  “Now,” he said softly. “Raise your arms over your head. And don’t try any of your tricks, Trudy. I can slit your thr
oat a lot faster than you can grow fangs and a tail.”

  She stared at him, mesmerized and unable to move.

  “I said get ’em up!” He jerked her arms above her head. The blisters on her bare back burned like a hundred tiny flames.

  “There,” he muttered, when he’d positioned her to his satisfaction. “That’s better.” He straddled her and sat down, resting his whole weight on her stomach. His scrotum felt like a sack of clammy dough against her belly, and his greasy, curdled smell made her gag.

  He smiled. “You probably pick up a lot of these things, living in the trees and all.” He put his thumbs together and spread his hands like a fan. Then he placed his fingertips at her hairline and slowly combed through her scalp, stopping once at the crown of her head, then traveling down to the nape of her neck. Alex squeezed her eyes shut and bit back a scream.

  “None there!” he announced. He ran his fingers over her face, then down her neck and over each clavicle, ruffling the pale stubble in her armpits. He continued down both arms, then returned via her shoulders. When he reached her breasts he scooted down so he straddled her hips.

  She opened her eyes and watched him fondling her flesh. He stared, grinning, at her breasts, caught up in some interior fantasy of his own design. “Good old Trudy,” he whispered. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long.”

  He rolled off her and worked his way down her legs to her feet, then back up the inside of her thighs. She felt his breath on her pudenda, then his fingers explored her pubic hair. She clenched her jaw, waiting for him to jab his penis inside her, but that did not happen. Instead, he left her and spread out on the other side of the fire and repeated the entire process on himself. At last he sat up, disappointed.

  “No tick dances tonight,” he said wistfully.

  Alex lowered her arms then. Whatever he had just done, he had apparently finished. She kept one eye on him as she sat up and pulled her jacket back on. Curling herself into a tight ball, she watched as Brank stared into the fires; then the dancing, hypnotic flames pulled her in, too.

  She remembered the night before—how irritated she’d been when Joan had pressed Mary about Jonathan, then how happy when Mary had told them both the whole story. How many lifetimes ago had that been? If she closed her eyes she could hear the happy, brandy-tinged laughter of their campfire, yesterday, when they were whole and safe and unaware that this Brank creature even existed. Suddenly she almost laughed out loud. Before they went to sleep she’d wanted to tell them ghost stories, for God’s sake.

  Brank stood up and stumbled over to her. “You need anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then I’ll just tuck you in for the night.” Grinning, he tied her ankles tighter together and bound her hands in front of her. “See what a good brother I am?” He threw her jacket on top of her.

  “Tomorrow we’ll talk more.” He raised one eyebrow at her and chuckled. “I hate for anybody to think there was a serious case of sibling rivalry between us.”

  Alex watched as he moved to the other side of the fire and folded himself into his bedroll. “Sweet Jesus,” she said softly. “I am in so much trouble.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Mary’s eyes flew open. She lay flat on her back in the trench, shivering in only her sweatshirt and underpants. All night she’d struggled to stay awake and listen for the snapping of a twig or the rustling of leaves, but exhaustion finally relegated her to a jittery no-man’s-land between sleep and reality, where she was buffeted between a dark nothingness and the feeling that fat, black spiders were crawling up her legs.

  Now she lay fully awake, but she was unable to bring herself to look at Joan. She was terrified that she’d failed again, and the living, breathing woman she’d tried to keep warm last night would now be a corpse—a dead thing whose soul had been sucked away by the deep forest cold. And what will you do then, Mary Crow? the Old Men seemed to murmur.

  Taking a deep breath, she extended her left hand. Her fingers crackled through their leaf-blanket, then she felt Joan’s shoulder. Her skin still felt warm. Gently, Mary touched her arm. Almost imperceptibly, a muscle twitched.

  Thank God. However damaged Joan might be, at least she’s still alive.

  She got up quietly and stretched her cramped arms and legs, then started to make her way back down to the spring. She had to make sure the trail she’d glimpsed yesterday hadn’t been some wishful hallucination. When she reached Atagahi, she hobbled over to the willow tree and peered into the woods. In the morning light, the tamped-down grass still beckoned like a ribbon, leading up the mountain. Her heart flopped in her chest. Alex’s trail. Mary knew it as surely as if someone had lettered a sign with an arrow pointing straight ahead.

  Troubled, she walked back to the spring and sat down beside the water. She needed to think. That Joan needed to get back to civilization was clear. Doctors and rape counselors could surely salvage the rest of her life. But what about Alex? If Mary took Joan back to Little Jump Off now, it would be at least eighteen hours before any kind of official search could be launched for her, and Mary already knew how most official searches ended. A sudden, cold realization blew through her. If she took the time to take care of Joan, she would never see Alex again.

  “I can’t let that happen,” she said aloud. Alex had never deserted her. Never. She couldn’t just walk Joan back to Little Jump Off and leave Alex stranded here alone.

  And yet, if Joan was still in the terrible state she’d been in last night, how could she do otherwise? What could you do with someone who could barely pull up her own underpants?

  She gazed up at the mountains. Now the color of dusty plums, they seemed to be mocking her. Little Mary Crow has really gotten herself in a fix this time. Here she sat in the middle of a half-million-acre forest with one friend gone in body, the other gone in mind. Could she possibly save both? Little Mary Crow, the Old Men seemed to sneer, would more likely save neither.

  She watched as the sun glittered over the top of the highest Atagahi boulder. It would be hard, perhaps impossible, but she had brought Joan and Alex to this place. It was up to her to bring them home. “Both,” she vowed, glaring at the Old Men as she rose to her feet. “I’m going to save them both.”

  She drank some water, then climbed back up to the maple. Joan slept on, her position unchanged. She breathed with her mouth open, blood crusted on both nostrils. Her right eye was swollen shut, the left one caked with mucus. Mary touched Wynona in her pocket for luck, then crawled close to whisper her name.

  “Joan?”

  “Stop!” Joan’s legs twisted in the trench, as if trying to squirm away from something.

  “Joan . . .” Mary whispered again.

  “Stop!” Joan wailed. She began to slap at Mary, flailing her face and shoulders.

  “Joan.” Mary grabbed her hands. “Wake up. You’re having a dream.”

  Joan jerked her hands away, then turned toward Mary and tried to open her eyes. “I can’t see!” she cried, sitting up, feeling her face. “My eyes! He’s done something to my eyes!”

  “It’s okay,” Mary soothed. “Hold still.” She pulled the waistband of her sweatshirt up, spit on it, and gently wiped Joan’s good eye. Slowly, the lids parted and revealed a slit of pupil.

  “What’s wrong with my eyes?” Joan’s cry tore at Mary’s heart.

  “Nothing.” Mary stroked her cheek. “Your right eye is swollen because your nose is probably broken. Your left eye had crusted with some mucus.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Your eyes will be fine.”

  Joan crawled away from her and huddled in a tight knot at the edge of the trench, trembling. “These leaves itch. I’m cold.”

  Mary leaned over and pulled off a leaf that dangled from Joan’s matted hair. “Let’s go down to the spring,” she suggested. “We can wash. That’ll make us warmer. You’ll feel better then.”

  Joan made no further protests as she rose from the trench. Mary helped her shake more leaves
from under her sweatshirt, then, with Joan clutching her arm like a frail old woman, the two picked their way down through the boulders.

  At Atagahi, tendrils of steam curled into the chilly morning air. Mary heard the familiar trill of a warbler, and farther off, the cawing of a crow.

  “I’m going to wash off now,” she told Joan as she pulled off her sweatshirt. “You might want to do it, too.”

  Mary knelt and rinsed her chest and neck, watching to see what Joan would do. Her friend did not move.

  “Here.” Mary stood up and reached for Joan’s sweatshirt. “Let me help you.”

  “I can do it myself,” Joan snapped. She pulled off her sweatshirt and dropped to her knees, splashing water clumsily over her neck and arms. Mary noticed that red streaks now radiated from the bites on her bruised breasts. The barefoot man had marked her.

  “They say Atagahi will heal you if you get your wounds in battle,” Mary said as Joan rinsed underneath her arms.

  Joan’s laugh sounded like splintering glass. “I hate to break it to you, Mary, but I think they lied.”

  Joan began to feel her face with her fingers, tentatively exploring the newly arranged contours of her nose. Once pert, it had become a bulging topography of angry red tissue, topping the purple bruise that stained most of her throat and jaw. She looked at Mary.

  “How bad am I?”

  “It probably feels worse than it looks,” Mary lied, feeling like some absurdly optimistic nurse in a field hospital.

  Joan’s bloodshot eye glittered. “Mary, tell me the truth.”

  “It looks bad.” This time Mary answered honestly, but she still did not tell Joan that it looked far worse than bad; that it really looked like some cleanup hitter for her beloved Yankees had mistaken her face for a fastball. “But it’s fixable.”

  “Yeah, right.” Joan’s chin began to tremble. “Maybe with enough plastic surgery, I might someday approach human again.”