Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  In another room, a bit more comfortable than the first, people sat on threadbare, mismatched furniture. They were mostly men, Carl’s age or younger, casually dressed and fit, with short hair. Barry noted a lot of camo pants and tattoos. Two women completed the group, about the same age as the men, also casual and muscular. A few people huddled around a TV; others played video games on yet another set; still others sat by themselves nursing bottled beers or canned sodas and reading books or playing quiet card games. If the other room had looked like something from a residential care facility, this one looked like the common room in a jail. Several people smoked, and the room stank like an overflowing ashtray.

  “These are some of our guys,” Carl told him. “Our heroes, I call ’em. Guys, this is Barry. Barry, gentlemen and ladies, has recently been fucked over twice, once by his Mexican boss and once by the personnel guy at Wal-Mart—another individual of the Mexican-American persuasion, I might add.”

  “That’s fucked up,” someone said.

  “I thought Wal-Mart was a good American company,” another added.

  “Used to be,” Carl replied. “Now they sell cheap foreign-made crap, and if you’ve been inside the one in Douglas lately you’d be lucky to have heard anyone speaking English. They pay for shit and they won’t even hire decent folks like Barry here.”

  Carl turned to Barry and lowered his voice. “Not that I have anything against Mexicans.” He pointed at two men, one sitting by the TV, the other under a floor lamp with a thick book on his lap. “Nestor and Raimundo are both Mexican,” he said. “Nestor’s from Juarez, and Raimundo, he’s from…Where you from, Raimundo?”

  “Detroit,” Raimundo said. The room erupted in laughter.

  “Mexican-American, whatever,” Carl said. “Point is I got nothing against them.”

  “Hell, no,” Raimundo agreed. He was the one watching TV. “Carl ain’t no hater. Or if he is, he hates everyone just the same.”

  “Damn straight. I hate someone, it’s because I got a good reason to. You can’t judge people because of where they’re from or what color their skin is, not in this world.” Carl’s gaze seemed to bore through Barry’s eyes, right into his brain. “You got to give people a chance, trust that they’ll do the right thing. Then if they don’t, if they fail you, then you cut them loose or do whatever has to be done. Someone fucks you over, you have to deal with them in kind, right? But not because someone’s Mexican or German or black or whatever.”

  Barry felt like he was being preached to, as if Carl were some kind of evangelical on a Sunday morning TV show he had accidentally flipped to while looking for sports scores. Everything the man said made sense—or was that the many beers, the unfamiliar surroundings, the empty stomach?—but why he made the effort remained a mystery. Carl had, for all intents and purposes, picked Barry up at the Rusty Spur. Bought him booze, brought him to the ranch, showed him around. In Barry’s experience, someone only treated you like that if they wanted something. Since he didn’t yet know what Carl wanted, he moved hesitantly, taking shallow breaths, not allowing himself to relax completely.

  “I know a lot of good Mexican folks,” he said, aware that it came off halfhearted after Carl’s articulate sermon.

  “Listen, I’ve dragged you all over the place without offering you anything,” Carl said, abruptly changing the subject. “You want another beer? Something stronger?”

  “I could maybe use a Coke,” Barry said, aware that he had reached his limit and wanting to hang on to some semblance of control. “Or maybe some coffee?”

  Carl flashed a warm, reassuring smile. “Good idea,” he said.

  Fifteen minutes later, Barry and Carl sat at the big institutional table. Four of the others had joined them, including Nestor from Juarez, Bob Worthy, Hank Elbert and Connie McKay, one of the two women, who sat close to Barry. She had short brown hair that hugged her scalp, hanging just about to chin level, a narrow, pinched face and brown eyes. Firm breasts bulged a plain orange T-shirt tucked into snug jeans. Barry had seen Bob Worthy before, tall and gangly with black hair tied back in a short ponytail, and after several minutes he remembered that the guy worked at the gas station where he often filled his truck. Hank Elbert, short, swarthy and muscular, was new to him.

  Carl held court, sitting at the table’s head, and the others sat like students gathered around their teacher. “The thing is,” he said, “the little guy can’t compete against the giant corporation, and he can’t compete against the government. Both of those entities are only out for themselves, to increase their own wealth and power, and the average American gets smashed in the middle, like the cream in an Oreo cookie.”

  “But that’s the free enterprise system at work, right?” Connie asked. “Isn’t that, like, the fucking American way?”

  “It used to be,” Carl answered quickly. “But it’s been corrupted. There was a social compact that existed. You’d go to work for a company like GM or Bethlehem Steel, and you’d do your job eight hours a day for thirty years, with a couple weeks a year for vacation. In return you’d be paid a fair wage, and then when you retired, you’d get a guaranteed pension, along with your Social Security. Somewhere along the way, that social compact got thrown out the window. Now you got guys like Barry here, working at a country market instead of for a big corporation, because any corporation in this part of the country has moved to Mexico. And if they have a branch here at all, they’re hiring Mexicans and Asians and Pakistanis or what-have-you instead of someone like Barry. And they’ve given up on the pension idea, defaulted on their promises, and left hardworking Americans in the lurch.”

  Bob Worthy’s cigarette, forgotten on the lip of an ashtray, burned a long tail of ash, its smoke inscribing silent curlicues above the table. Barry nodded, thinking of his brother Stu’s situation, retired without a pension. No one spoke as Carl took a breath and continued.

  “It’s all because unchecked immigration has swollen our population with too many people willing to work for too little money and benefits. Look at who’s having the most babies these days. Hispanics, blacks and Asians, not whites. They come here and then they reproduce, and their kids take our jobs and reproduce again, and before you know it, who’s being squeezed out? The corporations put their bottom lines ahead of their responsibility to the country that gave them everything, and they hire people willing to work part-time for shit wages and forget about benefits. The government doesn’t mind because they still rake in their tax dollars every which way. And what’s the result? Massive white unemployment, people trying to get by on Social Security and collecting aluminum cans by the highway, an exploding population of meth-heads and car thieves, hopelessness and heartache.”

  He stopped. Barry didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone say so much so fast. He thought the man made sense, but his head spun despite the strong coffee, and he figured he’d have to think it over for a bit.

  Barry felt pressure against the outside of his thigh as Connie leaned into him, reaching for a bowl of sugar packets. She had a cup of coffee too, which had gone neglected during Carl’s tirade. As Barry glanced at her, she met his gaze, smiling. He glanced quickly away, then back. She hadn’t moved, eyes on him, lips curled in a private grin, upper leg pressing against his. “He’s something, ain’t he?” she said quietly, meant just for Barry.

  “Can’t deny that,” Barry said. He felt nervous, as if this woman might be coming on to him. But earlier, he thought, you believed Carl was. You’re not so handsome as all that. Don’t go thinking you are.

  In truth, since Clarice had passed he had only been with two women. One had been a drunken nighttime fumbling in her car outside the Rusty Spur, with a woman whose name he hadn’t even been able to remember when he’d run into her at Safeway two weeks later. The other, more satisfying but also pricier, had been with a working girl up in Phoenix. Working woman, more like. She had been in her forties, still young as far as Barry was concerned, with a model’s lean figure and bottle-blond hair, but she knew how to
make a man feel like he’d been through the wringer, in the good way.

  He didn’t think Connie really was interested—she was just being friendly, the same way that Carl had been. This was an amiable group. It didn’t seem like a real ranch, and Barry hadn’t decided what to make of it, although he was developing an idea.

  He knew that groups of self-styled Border Patrol types, amateur militias, watched the borders to keep out illegal immigrants. They had become particularly well known when they organized as “minutemen” and brought in volunteers from around the country. Even before that, and certainly since, there had been smaller groups, each staking out a portion of the border to watch. Barry suspected that’s what the American Pride Ranch really was. The armed guards at the gate had tipped him off first, and since then nothing had happened to change his mind.

  He didn’t have a problem with it. He didn’t know why they had let him inside—did they want him to join their group? He couldn’t see why. His military experience was a long time back.

  But he did know, as he sat at the table surrounded by people he had never met before this night, embraced in unfamiliar warmth, that he had not felt this appreciated in a very long time.

  17

  He is an odd-looking man. She realizes this only today, when the blindfold slips enough for her to get a good view of him. In fact, everything about him is odd, Lulu thinks. He speaks to her only in precise, formal diction, using few contractions, never stammering or hemming. Even when his sentences contain only a single word, they are clear and that word is carefully chosen. At the same time, he almost never responds to her, even when she asks a direct question. It’s as if he doesn’t hear her, or chooses not to, like a puppy ignoring its name when it’s called. He can be looking right at her with his strangely hooded eyes, and she will speak and he will not even register that he is being spoken to. Sometimes she loses patience and screams right in his face, but unless he has initiated conversation he refuses to respond.

  He is not a large man, although she can’t tell exactly how tall—it’s hard to judge from her position on the floor with her hands tied. He’s wiry, and appears to be stronger than his build would indicate. His chest seems almost concave instead of convex, for instance, and his arms are thin, not muscular. But he has no problem lifting Lulu when he wants to move her. Like his arms, his fingers are long and tapered but lacking in definition, with seemingly no knuckles at all.

  His hair is dark and wispy, like that of a desiccated corpse after a few years in the grave. The skin of his face is pale, dry, parchmentlike, and flakes off his scalp, his forehead and his prominent nose. Veins show blue beneath it. Protruding from that thin hair like a misshapen balloon is that bulbous, peeling brow, split across the middle by a deep crevasse. Shaded by his brow are those almost black eyes. His mouth is wide, with thin lips so red they look lipsticked. Below that his chin tapers to a scrawny neck with an Adam’s apple nearly the size of a Granny Smith jutting out of a thatch of black fur.

  He wears clothes, Lulu believes, chosen off the rack at discount stores. They don’t fit him well, because nothing would unless it was custom made to his odd proportions.

  Just now, he’s away from the cabin. He left once and returned with groceries—he’s a bad cook, leaning heavily toward canned soups, beans and meat, even for breakfast, but he keeps her fed and keeps plastic bottles of water for her—or fast food, or other supplies; sometimes she can’t tell why he has left.

  The fact that he has begun to stock up on supplies makes her think he intends to keep her here for some time.

  What seems like once every hour or so, he asks the same question, the same thing he’s been asking since he brought her here.

  “When is she coming?”

  “I don’t know who you mean,” Lulu says.

  “When is she coming?”

  “Who?”

  “The white girl. When is the white girl coming?”

  After this happened a few times, Lulu figured out who he meant. Still, she hasn’t let on to him that she knows, continues to play ignorant. At first she might have told him, but not now. Now she has had time to reconsider that idea. As long as he wants something from her, she judges, he will keep her alive. When he has the information he wants, then he will kill her like she believes he did the rest of her family.

  He has been gone for almost an hour this time. For the first thirty or forty minutes, Lulu was afraid to move. She’s already sore from sitting for however many hours it’s been—she can almost lie down to sleep, but the chains hold her arms above her. Her shoulders are screaming with pain, her legs and ass chafed from sitting. More than anything, she wants to stand, to walk, to move around. He hates it when she tries, though, except for three times when he led her to the cabin’s bathroom and stood over her while she, blindfolded, did her business. This is an improvement over the first night and morning, when he expected her to do it where she sat, in a metal bowl like a dog dish.

  She relaxes somewhat when he doesn’t come back for so long. She works the blindfold against her shoulder, pushing it up so she can see a tiny wedge of her surroundings. She is in a room that is probably a bedroom. He always leaves the door open, and she can see into the kitchen and a little bit of a big front room, where he often lets the TV play all day long. From her place on the floor she can’t see anything out the bedroom window except the upper branches of nearby trees, but the kitchen door has a four-paned window she can see through. Still, there’s nothing out there to look at except more trees.

  The cabin is a mess. He hasn’t thrown anything away—she guessed that, from the smells, but now confirms her hunch. Food wrappers, empty cans, newspapers he’s read are all strewn around the floor. You’d think it would take a week to make that much trash, she thinks. It’s like there’s something broken in him, something that has never really learned how to be human.

  The floor and walls are both of knotty pine, unpainted. Most of the furniture, what little there is of it, is the same. The chain that holds her in place is looped around a radiator pipe that comes out of the wall and attached to shackles clasping her wrists. The radiator hasn’t been turned on, and it got cold during the night, but he tossed her a thin wool blanket with which to cover herself when he heard her teeth clacking together. The pipe is solid—she has tried yanking against it, and though the chain rattles, the pipe always holds firm.

  Now that he’s been gone for a while, she tries again. This time she can see what she’s doing, see that the pipe’s weakest point is probably a welded joint a few inches down from where the wall pipe meets the first coil of radiator. She maneuvers the chain to that point and yanks as hard as she can, throwing all of her weight away from the wall and radiator.

  It doesn’t give a centimeter. Her muscles howl in pain, the jarring shock of her effort like slicing into them with a dull knife.

  She blinks back tears, then decides what the fuck and lets them flow. Great wet sobs burst from her chest. Tears roll down her face and plop onto the floor, and she knows she’s going to have to pee, crying always does it, but what can she do about that? It won’t be the first time since he took her that she has done it in her pants, and probably not the last either.

  She’s just getting control of her breathing again when she hears a noise outside the cabin. At first she tenses, afraid that it’s him, returning at last. He’ll go into his usual routine, asking about the white girl, and he’ll get mad when she refuses to tell him, and he’ll slap her.

  But the front door doesn’t open. Lulu hears the sound of something, or someone, moving around the cabin. Leaves rustling, branches snapping. A stray dog, maybe, or depending on how far out in the wilderness they are, maybe a bear. Definitely not him—he moves quietly, like a ghost.

  Lulu’s attention is drawn to the kitchen door by the noises outside, and as she watches a face appears in the window. It’s a woman, older, white, with red hair and big blue eyes. Lulu has never seen her. The woman peers in through the window cautiously, as if sh
e knows she’s trespassing, pressing her hands against the glass to cut the glare. But then she sees Lulu and her mouth falls open, eyes going wide. One hand drops to her mouth as if she’s afraid she might scream.

  She shouts something through the glass and Lulu thinks she’s saying, “Are you all right? Do you need help?”

  Lulu doesn’t know whether to nod or shake her head, since the two questions are contradictory. But the gag is gone so she cries, “Help me, please! Get me out of here!”

  The woman tugs at the door, yanks at it, but can’t get it open. “Try the front!” Lulu shouts. “Hurry!”

  The woman hears and understands. She nods. “I’ll be right there!” she calls. Lulu hears the sounds as she runs around the cabin, hears the rattle of the front door, also locked.

  Then for a long moment, silence. Did she give up? Maybe she went for help, to call the police. But no, after another few seconds there’s another sound at the door. A key rasping in the lock. The woman has a key, or she fetched it from someplace. Maybe this is her cabin and he’s only renting or borrowing it.

  The door swings open with a squeak and footsteps clomp across the wooden floor, and the first thing Lulu sees when she comes into view is the red hair, catching a stray shaft of sunlight from a window so that it blazes like flame. But there’s something wrong, it’s entering at a strange angle, and Lulu realizes that the woman is being tossed inside, not walking in. And he follows her, an expression of fury on that strange and horrible face.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” the woman says. Her voice is deep, gravelly, and her figure is lush, Lulu sees as she sits up on the cabin floor, and with that pretty face this woman was a knockout in her younger days—even now in her sixties maybe she’s a looker—and Lulu thinks that finally she’s going to see him do what she’s been dreading. Sexualpredator—the two words have merged together in the modern vocabulary, and so far he hasn’t expressed any sexual urges whatsoever, but maybe just because Lulu is too young for him, and now that he has this older woman, this poor woman whose mistake was trying to rescue Lulu, he’ll let it out.