With

by Donald Harington

  “What in tarnation are you up to?” he wanted to know.

  “It’s martial arts,” she said. “I’m practicing, and when I get good enough, I’m going to protect myself against you.”

  “I aint done nothing to ye,” he protested. “For one thing I’m just too blame tard. I’m too tard to lift a finger against ye.” And he went out to his blamed garden to get himself more tard. They ate out of cans at every meal because he was too blame tard to work in the kitchen. He kept promising that he’d kill a chicken and fry it and he kept promising to show her how to bake bread and cakes and everything, but he hadn’t yet.

  Eventually, because she had absolutely nothing better to do, she approached him in the garden and said, “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

  “When?” he said.

  “Now,” she said. “Here.” And she spread her hands to indicate the garden. If she didn’t stand too close to him, and practiced holding her breath, she could stand him.

  “It’s time to plant the beans, I reckon,” he said. “And if you don’t like green snaps, we could plant a few yellow snaps.”

  She didn’t know what a snap was, but she followed his directions and together they planted two rows of beans, yellow for her and green for him. It wasn’t very hard. Then they planted shell beans and pinto beans and kidney beans.

  And when they were all finished he said, “Let’s run over to the pond for a dip.” She didn’t know what a dip was, but she followed him when he fetched towels and a bar of Palmolive soap from the house and they hiked to the beaver pond. The dog followed them, but she didn’t mind too much. When they arrived at the pond, the man took off all his clothes and jumped in. She had to turn her head aside during the few seconds between his removing his underpants and his submersion in the water. She caught just a glimpse of this thing, the very first time she’d ever seen one.

  “It’s just a mite chilly,” he said. “Come on in.”

  “I can’t swim,” she said.

  “You don’t have to swim. It’s shaller enough to wade in, over yonder.”

  “No,” she said. She was not going to take off her clothes even if the afternoon was almost hot.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. He gave himself a bath with the soap, which she was glad to see. No, not see, because she tried not to watch, but she was glad that he was getting himself clean for the first time since she’d known him. He looked funny, suntanned on his arms and face but still white on the other parts, including his fat belly. While he was exposing himself, she strolled down where the dam was and searched for any sign of the beavers, but she knew that they’d built what was called a “lodge,” and they were sleeping all day in the lodge unless the man’s jumping into the water had waked them up.

  When he was finished and dried himself off and had his clothes back on, and didn’t stink so much, he said to her, “If you’d like to go over there where it’s shaller and give yourself a bath, I won’t watch.”

  She really needed a bath. “Take your dog,” she said, and she waited until they had wandered off out of sight, and then she removed her jeans and shirt and, taking a look around to see if even the beavers were watching, she pulled off her panties and she stepped into the shallow water with the bar of soap. But it was cold! She quickly stepped out of the water, shivering. She took a deep breath and stuck one foot back in and got it wet enough that she could rub some of the soap on it. She liked the clean smell of the Palmolive. She reached her hand down and got a handful of water and rubbed it on her upper body, and soaped a bit. Bit by bit she got accustomed to the cold water and managed to reach the point where she could splash enough of it on herself to get the soap off. If her mother had been here she would have made Robin wash her hair, or have washed it for her, and Robin would have had to say, “But, Mommy…” which was something she said nearly every day of her life but had not had to say for a long time now, and this made her smile. She missed her mother so much but did not miss having to say “But, Mommy…” all the time. Then she toweled herself dry and dressed again. He came out of the woods with the dog and they went home.

  “Looks to be some rain coming up maybe,” he observed. “We sure could use it.”

  He declared that it was time they had a real supper and he wanted to show her how. He led her out into the yard. He picked up the axe in one hand and with the other hand he grabbed a passing chicken by the neck. The dog yelped. “Bitch, hush, I aint about to harm you,” he said, and swung the axe and chopped off the chicken’s head but it didn’t kill the chicken, who went on flopping headless around all over the yard, while Robin screamed and the dog whined and whimpered, and off in the distance it began to thunder. After a while the chicken stopped its headless dance and lay trembling, and the man said to her, “Quit your squealing and help me pluck it.” He showed her how to pull the feathers off the chicken, and then he took a butcher knife and cut the chicken up into pieces and showed her how to dredge it with flour and fry it properly. She felt really sick to her stomach.

  He had to eat most of it himself. Or several pieces, and said he’d keep the leftovers in the springhouse. Then he toasted her with Hawaiian Punch and said, “Since it’s our first real honest-to-God supper together, don’t you think it’s time you told me your name?”

  She didn’t want to tell him her name but she knew he’d pester it out of her eventually. “Wobbin,” she said.

  “Robin, huh?” he said. “That’s a right perty name. Glad to know you, Robin.” And he offered his hand. She took it and gave it a little shake.

  By bedtime the thunder was booming, and she could hear the rain falling on the roof and all around. It grew steadily harder. One of her teeth had been working itself loose for many days and she reached into her mouth and wobbled it and pulled it and finally got it out. She put it under her pillow on the pallet for the Tooth Fairy to find.

  Then the lightning bolts started hitting all around, and the thunder sounded like it was coming in the front door, right into the house. It was terrible. She had never seen such lightning nor heard such thunder. Was this the end of the world? The whole house would disappear with her and him and everything. She was shaking uncontrollably. Between peals of thunder she could hear that damned dog whimpering horribly outside the front door, and finally she heard the man get up from his bed on the davenport and open the door for the dog. She didn’t want the dog in the house but almost felt sorry for the poor thing, having to endure such a thunderstorm as this. She felt sorry for herself. She even felt sorry for Sugrue Alan and wondered if he too was just a little bit scared. Anybody in their right mind would be terrified in a storm like this. But maybe he didn’t have a right mind.

  The next horrendous flash of light and peal of thunder lifted her right up from the pallet as if it had hit her. It was unbearable. She ran from the bedroom into the living room, desperate to be comforted and hugged. He was there on the davenport waiting for her.

  The next morning she knew only two things: one, that she had spent the rest of the night cuddled against him on the davenport, and two, that she had had a long uncomfortable dream about finding herself at school in her pajamas.

  Chapter fifteen

  Mr. Purvis was kind enough to set up an area in a corner of the warehouse room, screened behind the cereals and the condiments, where she could go for privacy when she felt an uncontrollable need to cry. Or she thought it was a kindness at first, until Liz, one of the other checkers, told her that Mr. Purvis simply didn’t want her using the employee’s lounge for her crying.

  The attacks came on her suddenly, triggered by almost anything, such as a customer coming through the aisle with a little girl, and sometimes Karen couldn’t make it to the warehouse corner before she broke down. Sometimes the tears started streaming down her face while she was ringing up the items on the counter, and this disturbed the customers, although many of them recognized her because they’d seen her on television several times, and if they recognized her they’d say something sympathetic while she
signaled for Liz to come and take over so she could run to the warehouse room.

  The first uncontrolled fit of crying had of course occurred at the roller rink itself, that terrible place, that goddamned place which, one of these nights, she was going to set on fire and burn to the ground (although every day various people left bouquets of fresh flowers on that little balcony). The second fit had hit her not long afterward when she’d been required to find a good recent photograph of Robin for the officers, and she didn’t know whether she was crying simply at the sight of Robin’s face in the photo or out of embarrassment at the realization that she had so very few pictures of her daughter; neither Billy nor she had ever owned a camera.

  And the third time the fit had wracked her with helpless sobs was when, at the police station, they had made her take a polygraph test. Her! Did they think she would do something to her own daughter?! The cop had tried to explain that it was “just by the book,” as he put it, part of routine procedure. They had to delay the test for a whole hour until she could get control of herself.

  “If you ask me just one more question I’m going to start screaming,” she had said, several times that night and the next day, to several people, not just the cops but the television people and the reporters. But they had not stopped asking her. And she had stifled her screams. She had broken into tears again when they had asked her to describe what Robin had been wearing, and she was almost ashamed that Robin’s jacket was cheap and too small for her. She had really bawled when they had made her show them Robin’s room. They had “secured” the room and wouldn’t let her touch anything in it, although again she was embarrassed that her whole house was a mess and needed straightening at least. They had taken several items of Robin’s dirty clothes to be used for the bloodhounds to sniff. They had practically moved into her house and for several days she was a stranger in her own home.

  The time she had cried the hardest was the worst, in the sense that it screwed up her first carefully planned television appearance. They had given her several hours to prepare her “message” and to rehearse it, but those hours hadn’t been sufficient to prepare her against the possibility that she would break down so completely in front of the television cameras.

  “Whoever you are,” she had said into the camera, clutching the stuffed bear that Robin had called Paddington, “wherever you are, I know that you are listening, and I want to say just a few things to you. Robin Lee Kerr was my daughter, my only child. She is my daughter, my only child, and I say ‘is’ because I know that you are keeping her alive, that you have not done any harm to her. Not yet. I can imagine what you plan to do with her, and I can only believe with all of my heart that you are going to keep her alive. I know why you selected her, of all the girls her age in this world. Because she is so beautiful. Oh, she is also full of mischief and spunk and humor, as you are discovering every minute she’s in your company, but most of all she is so very, very beautiful….” At that point Karen had lost it. The cameras had had to avert their eyes and go to the announcer, who had tried to finish the message for her, begging him, whoever he was, wherever he was, to let Robin go.

  Her doctor had given her sedatives for the first week only. After that, he said, the Lord would take care of it. Her doctor was also an elder in her church, and when she told him how much and how helplessly she was crying, he told her that her tears were necessary for her to come to terms with her grief.

  She had thought she had cried so much that she simply had no tears left, and after a week off from work, the week when she was drugged with the sedatives and assaulted every day by contacts with strangers, she had needed to go back to work to pay the bills. But she had cried again when her fellow employees presented her with a check in the amount of the wages she had lost during her week off. They had taken up a collection for her.

  And she had cried when she realized that if Robin were here, Robin would call her a “crybaby.” Karen couldn’t remember the last time that Robin herself had cried, although she had a fairly good guess: when Robin was about three, and they (including Billy) were at the supermarket (not the one where she eventually went to work), and Robin was crying about something she wanted to get, in the typical fashion that three-year-olds learn to cry for whatever they crave, and Billy, who wasn’t in good humor for having been dragged out to help with the grocery shopping, had snapped at Robin, “If you don’t stop that crying, I’ll give you something to really cry about!” Karen didn’t believe that those simple words were enough to have turned the trick, but for whatever reason Robin had never cried again.

  “Are you crying now, Baby?” Karen asked of her missing child, having acquired the habit of talking aloud to Robin. “Is he doing something to you, and making you cry?” Karen waited for an answer with a real hope that somehow the words of Robin’s answer might come back to her, but they did not. And once again Karen would see Robin at a younger age, lying in bed asleep, or sucking her thumb, or both. “Have you started sucking your thumb again?” she asked. But there was no answer.

  Robinsville still lay untouched on the table where she had left it. Karen took literally the instructions not to disturb anything, and Robinsville was still spread out with its crudely cut and labeled store and school and post office and its houses with the dozens of people young and old in their paper clothes that Robin had designed and cut out for them. Karen would pause to stare down at the village, and would think it was a ghost town now despite its paper citizens. The thought gave her something else to cry about.

  But she also remembered that the whole idea of Robinsville had been prompted by a gift of reams of paper and pasteboard and even scissors from Leo, and Karen hated to think of Leo. She had not seen that bastard again since chewing him out at the roller rink. Her mother said that her husband had simply disappeared, which reawakened suspicion that Leo was either responsible for Robin’s abduction or was in cahoots with whoever had done it. Karen hated the thought that her mother had been married for a number of years to such a man…although she had often told herself that Leo was precisely what her mother deserved. Her mother offered to move in with Karen temporarily until Leo returned or was captured, but Karen didn’t want it, couldn’t stand the thought. For one thing, she was very resentful of her mother, because her mother had always had such a let-well-enough-alone attitude toward Robin’s upbringing, chiding Karen for being such a worrier. Just recently Karen had lost it with her mother and had yelled, “You told me not to worry and look where it got me!” It was very hard not to blame Louisa Spurlock for Robin’s misfortune; if she was not directly to blame, she was married to a louse who was conceivably at this very moment holding Robin captive somewhere.

  And that “sketch” which Leo had provided for the police artist, which indeed reminded Karen somewhat of that jerk state cop Sergeant Alan, was obviously just a clever ruse that Leo had devised to divert suspicion from himself. State Police Lieutenant Samples, the specialist in child mistreatment, didn’t think that the sketch was valid, and therefore they didn’t have anything to go on.

  The FBI agent assigned to the case, Henry Knight, out of the Little Rock office, seemed to Karen to be the only one who knew, as the expression had it, the distinction between his ass and a hole in the ground. He was efficient and knowledgeable and industrious, and in addition to all that he was kind and good-looking. Mr. Knight—or Hal as he insisted she call him—was the nicest, or the least unpleasant, of all the men she had had to deal with since it happened. She felt close enough to him to make her complaints about the other men to him. There had been a lot of rudeness and thoughtlessness and downright stupidity on the part of so many of the officers she’d had to deal with and answer a thousand questions for. Hal Knight understood her problems and her feelings so well that she wondered if perhaps he himself had lost a child. Finally she came right out and asked him, but he said he’d never had any children of his own.

  It was Agent Knight who suggested to her that she keep a journal, and he even provided her with
a spiral notebook. He told her the journal would not only be a good outlet for her feelings but it might also accidentally provide a key word or passage that might give a clue to something she’d previously forgotten. She was so touched at his thoughtfulness that she broke into tears, and he held her while she cried; it was the very first time that anyone held her while she cried. But it was also the last time, because she never cried again after that. Whenever she felt like crying, she would just whip out her journal and write something in it.

  She leaned on Agent Knight and couldn’t have done without him. She couldn’t lean on her mother, or her doctor, or her minister. Billy came back to Harrison briefly at the request of the police, and spent the night at a motel, and she saw him for only a few minutes. They spoke but didn’t touch. She was surprised to see how grief-stricken he was, but she couldn’t lean on him. Somehow she got the feeling that he blamed her for Robin’s disappearance.

  A couple of weeks after her first dismal performance on television, she was invited back to try again, and she willed herself not to cry, and took her precious journal with her just in case. Agent Knight went with her and helped her get ready for it. She confided to Agent Knight her fear of repeating the break-down she’d had the first time she’d gone before the TV cameras, and was surprised to learn that he had been watching that.

  “Don’t dwell on your loss,” Hal advised her. “Don’t think about what a swell kid Robin is. Think about what a scumbag her abductor is. Get angry. Let it all out.”

  It was good advice. Instead of trying a placating tone as she had in the first TV message, she delivered a tirade. She even imagined she was addressing Leo directly. “We’re going to find you,” she said into the camera. “We’re going to catch you, and if you have harmed a hair on that girl’s head we are going to make you pay for it. You had better be taking very good care of her, and doing all you can to make her happy, because she is going to tell us everything you did, and you are going to be severely punished for every little wrong thing you did to her. The only way you can possibly prevent the terrible reckoning that awaits you is to bring her back now! We have no pity for you, none whatsoever, but if you search your heart you might find just enough common decency to allow you to lessen your hideous crime by ensuring her safe return.” She paused, glowering fiercely at the camera for a long moment, and then she went on. “Now if you have her there with you and she is watching this, I want to say something to her too. Robin? Can you see me, Robin? Can you imagine how much I miss you? Not a moment goes by that I don’t ache to hear your laugh and see your bright eyes and smile. Paddington misses you too, and everybody in Robinsville is counting the seconds until you return. I know you are brave and clever and nothing can hurt you. If only you knew how many people are spending every minute hunting for you. We will find you. We will never stop trying to find you. I love you.”