The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  Denis was mildly obsessive compulsive, of course, and knew it—he was neither sheltered nor stupid. He counted, and he found deep comfort in routines, and tiny imperfections distracted him, which was why he kept his apartment so austere. The compulsivity was a point of secret pride for him, in fact: He was careful, he was a perfectionist, he did things right. He was self-aware. He didn’t—

  But he had.

  He thought back to the night—just two days before!—when he’d last seen Jane. They hadn’t been on a date in weeks, having broken up after a particularly vicious disagreement over the role of the Dadaists in the development of contemporary art. It was a stupid misunderstanding, really—Jane mistook Denis’s admiration for certain qualities in Duchamp’s and Rauschenberg’s works for a wholehearted endorsement of their artistic philosophies. She should have known better than that, and Denis told her so, and it only went downhill from there. The discussion had gone from the philosophical to the personal, and they’d parted after exchanging heated, or, in Denis’s case, terribly cold, words.

  Jane had returned two nights ago bearing a bottle of passable white wine and an apology, wearing a short white dress, thigh-high stockings, and no panties. “I brought a peace offering,” she said, and laughed. “A piece of ass offering, you might say.”

  Denis thought puns were the lowest form of humor, but he refrained from saying so, eager to make up—and make out—with Jane.

  Jane’s vaguely goddess-related quasi-spiritual posturings gave her a taste for sex in the outdoors, so they took her Datsun hatchback and drove into the hills. Jane took a winding back road and finally parked beside a steep, muddy slope, concealed from the road by a stand of young redwood trees. They spread a blanket on the ground and drank wine from plastic cups, talking together, laughing. Jane had also brought a loaf of French bread and a wedge of brie. Denis picked up the butcher knife and frowned. “You don’t have a bread knife? This is going to destroy the bread.”

  “It’s the only knife my housemate had. You know we don’t cook.” She picked up the loaf of bread and tore off a hunk with her hands, offering it to him. “There, is that better?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, reassuring himself that Jane’s fingernails were generally quite clean, he took the bread and ate. They made themselves comfortable, sipped wine, and after a while Jane stripped off her dress, reclining on the blanket, wearing nothing but her stockings. She smiled at him fetchingly. Denis admired her body, her smooth, almost entirely unblemished skin, the long lines of her limbs. Jane was not perfect—in his fantasies, Denis coupled with seamless, wrinkle-free women, with flesh more like water than meat, and orgasm came with no spurts or convulsions—but she was the closest he’d ever found.

  Denis went down on her, and she made a small sound of pleasure. He’d studied the techniques of cunnilingus since he was a teenager. Erections were unpredictable things, and he never wanted a too-early orgasm or an uncooperative member to keep him from satisfying a sexual partner—it wouldn’t do to have people say he was a bad lover. He’d heard from mutual friends that Jane considered him the best lover she’d ever had, and Denis took pride in that, as well.

  Besides, if his mind wandered when he was going down on a woman, it wasn’t obvious—he could let his tongue work on autopilot while he thought about abstract geometries, or the sculptural possibilities inherent in PVC, latex, and Lucite, and his lovers wouldn’t notice, since they couldn’t see the faraway look on his face.

  After a while, Jane touched Denis on the top of his head. He looked up, and she smiled devilishly. “I’ve got an idea,” she said, and inclined her head toward the steep slope of the hill. There had been an unseasonable rain shower the week before, triggering a minor mudslide, and raw, still-wet earth glistened at the base of the hill. “Have you ever made love in the mud?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, cautiously.

  She sat up. “I have, at an arts festival, a few years ago. We painted one another with mud, and then . . .” Another smile. “It was amazing, so cool and sensual—I’ve never felt anything like it, all that squishy goodness against my skin. I felt so connected to the earth, to the natural rhythms of the world—I swear, the goddess moved through me that day.”

  “It sounds like a breeding ground for infection,” Denis said, mostly to keep himself from making an acid comment about her absurd quasi-paganism.

  Jane rolled her eyes, an insufferable habit of hers. “You’re so dramatic. Come on.” She grabbed his hand and stood up, pulling him to his feet. He protested, and she kissed him, putting her talented tongue into his mouth. Her hands went to the buttons on his clothes, and she began stripping and fondling him with gusto.

  Denis was astonished. She really wanted him to fuck her in the mud. She didn’t know him at all; that, or she was being willfully stupid, choosing to be blind. Much like the way she’d accused him of being a closet Dadaist—anyone who knew Denis at all would have recognized the idiocy inherent in such an assertion.

  But she had come to him and apologized, had made the first gesture of reconciliation. Perhaps she was simply demanding a sacrifice of his in return, as a way of maintaining balance in their relationship. Could she be doing so unconsciously, or was it a deliberate act? Jane was a student of psychology, and should thus recognize her own mechanisms, but Denis knew that not everyone possessed his own degree of self-knowledge.

  She stripped off her stockings and led him to the mud, stepping into the patch of wet earth and digging in her toes. Denis thought about putting his feet in there, about the filth that would get in under his toenails where he’d never be able to clean it, and he returned to the blanket. He put on his socks and boots and returned to the mud, knowing he looked ridiculous in just his shoes, preferring that to filthiness.

  Jane laughed. “You don’t know what you’re missing. The connection to the earth, the feel of it between your toes; it’s remarkable, it’s like the goddess is singing just to me.”

  Denis shook his head.

  She held out her arms. “Come on, cowboy. Fuck me with your boots on, then.”

  They weren’t cowboy boots, only hiking boots, but Denis appreciated the general sentiment behind her words, and he didn’t correct her.

  The mud wasn’t so bad at first, really—it was surprisingly smooth, not rocky as he’d expected, and it did feel good against his skin, as long as Jane kept him distracted from the fact that he was, basically, rolling in wet dirt. She drew patterns on his chest, runes and circles and stars. She cajoled him into painting her, and Denis actually became fairly interested in drawing certain patterns on her back. He’d never considered mud as an artistic medium before, for obvious reasons. Finally she demanded that he mount her, and Denis moved to oblige. The mud on his body was drying uncomfortably, starting to itch, and he wanted to get this over with. Jane was on all fours in the mud, looking back at him over her shoulder coyly. Denis knew he could penetrate her and finish in a few thrusts, and tell her later that the whole mud-covered experience had gotten him so hot he couldn’t contain himself for a more respectable duration. She’d be more flattered than annoyed, and all would be well.

  Just as he entered her, his knees deep in the mud, he saw something come crawling out of the dirt just a foot away from Jane. It was a large beetle, disgusting, caked with mud. Denis could clearly discern the beetle’s antennae. They were filthy.

  Denis suddenly realized, deeply and all the way through, that he was in a repulsive situation. This was filth; this was the lowest rung on the ladder of degradation. There were insects in the mud, bugs crawling past his knees, crawling over Jane’s hands and feet, spreading filth and disease—which was taking coals to Newcastle in this case, taking silicon to San José, because this was a sea of filth, a citadel of filth.

  His erection wilted, and he withdrew, shuddering.

  Jane looked over her shoulder, her expression dangerous and displeased. “What?”

  He shook his head and backed out of the mud. “I’m sorry.
I can’t.”

  She stood up, crossing her arms over her breasts. “This is so fucking typical,” she spat. “I come to you, swallow my pride, and take you back even though you behaved like a spoiled child, but when I ask you to do something for me, to help me connect with the spirit of the earth, to transform our lovemaking into something spiritually significant—oh, no, that’s too much to ask, that’s imposing on you.” She stalked toward him, looking lethal as a jungle cat, horribly primal with the mud smeared on her body. The sight of her sparked some deep, almost archetypal terror in Denis—this was Woman, in a dangerous way.

  “Fuck you, Denis Reardon,” she continued, standing with her feet planted in the mud. “You can walk your selfish ass back to town.” She stalked past him.

  Denis grabbed her arm, but she wrenched free, shooting him a murderous glare. She stooped and snatched up his clothes, her clothes, and the blanket, running for the car, leaving behind the remains of the bread and cheese, and the knife. Denis had a momentary vision, absolutely clear, of himself snatching up the knife and running her down before she could get in the car. He would drive the blade between her shoulder blades.

  He would stab her, nine times, and leave her dead in the mud.

  Denis shook it off, shocked at his own thoughts. He was not a murderer, despite occasional bright flashes of temper, and he ran after her without the knife. He grabbed her shoulder, pulling her up short, and tore his clothes away from her grasp. She swung at him with her fist, and he stepped back, having rescued his belongings. “You bitch,” he said, surprised by his own fury. Denis usually kept his anger under better control than this. He thought of stabbing her again, and this time even turned his head and looked at the knife on the ground.

  She stood by her open car door. “I hope your dick falls off, Denis. It’s not doing you any good anyway, though I have to admit, I like it better than having you slobber all over my cunt.” She got into her car and started the engine.

  A great rumble filled the air, and Denis stumbled. The earth had moved, as if someone had shoved the firmament. An earthquake. Not a big one, but—

  The hillside was moving. Already loosened from the recent mudslide, and now jostled by the quake, it began to slide down.

  The earth was falling. That shouldn’t happen. The ground should be trustworthy, dependable—something you could count on.

  Denis ran away from the slope.

  Jane’s car started to back up, but she’d parked on a patch of mud, and the back wheels just spun. Once Denis was a good distance from the hillside, he turned and watched as the mud came down.

  The mudslide buried the car completely.

  Denis could hear Jane screaming. It was muffled and very far away. She shouldn’t scream like that, he thought, shock lending him a comfortable detachment. She’ll use up all her air.

  No one else would hear her, he knew. They were far from any houses, far from anything but occasional passing cars.

  Denis had a cell phone in his coat pocket; the coat was draped over his arm. He could call the police, give them directions. They could bring earth-moving equipment, even a crew of men working with shovels and buckets. The car wasn’t buried deeply. The top of the mudslide couldn’t be more than a foot above the roof. Jane could still be saved. She had enough air to last a while. The windows had been closed, and since he could still hear her screaming, he could assume the windows hadn’t been broken by the mudslide. She wasn’t suffocated, or crushed, just . . . entombed.

  If she’d gotten into the car with my clothes, she’d be doomed, he thought. I wouldn’t have my cell phone.

  Denis thought about that for a long while. Her screams went on, more quietly, with longer pauses in between bursts.

  Jane was . . . messy. She would be trouble in his life, he knew, even if he took steps to save her. She would not be grateful; being saved by Denis would infuriate and offend her. She would spread stories about him to her friends, ruin his reputation, become a nuisance. Jane was opinionated and loud. He didn’t know what he’d ever seen in her, truly, apart from her modest physical charms.

  She stopped screaming. Must have gotten tired, Denis thought. She still had a fair bit of air, probably.

  Denis remembered his fantasy of stabbing Jane, gouging her out of his life with swift penetrations. That was no good. That was messy.

  This was better. Seamless. Clean, in its way, despite the mud.

  Besides, it wasn’t his fault. She’d tried to steal his clothes, his phone. If she had succeeded, she would have been doomed just the same. “Far be it from me to interfere with your choices,” he said aloud. “I won’t impose my patriarchal paradigm on you. A man rescuing a woman is such an antiquated notion anyway, isn’t it?” He dressed methodically, brushed dirt from his jeans, and began the long walk back down the hill to town. She’d told him to walk back, hadn’t she? He was only doing what she wanted.

  Two days after leaving his lover to die, Denis sat down on the tile of his kitchen floor, leaning back against the white refrigerator. He wondered if Jane was dead. He wondered how he could have done such a thing to her—but in a way, he didn’t regret it. He hadn’t taken the knife, after all, hadn’t stabbed her in the back, hadn’t given in to his homicidal urges. If he was guilty of anything, he told himself, it was simple negligence.

  His cell phone probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. Wireless service was spotty in the hills. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t tried to make the call, did it? Not really.

  Denis got up from the floor and went into his living room. He looked at his reproduction of Rauschenberg’s famous 1951 White Painting, the triptych of blank white panels. Rauschenberg had been making a statement about content in art, but Denis just liked the idea that something so clean and simple and unadorned—indeed, anti-adorned—could hang in museums, be reproduced in art books, be talked about by critics for decades. He disliked most of Rauschenberg’s other work, especially the horrendous goat-with-a-tire sculpture, but this one . . . this was something special.

  Normally, looking at the triptych soothed him, as much as counting to nine did.

  Not tonight. It reminded him, in a melodramatic way, of Jane’s pale skin.

  He suddenly remembered that he’d left the knife, the blanket, and their trash in the hills, so close to Jane’s tomb. What if the police found those things, and suspected foul play, and somehow traced it back to him? He couldn’t let a loose end like that dangle.

  Denis sighed. He would have to go back. Take his car up into the hills, to the site of the mudslide, the site of Jane’s burial alive. Not just to get the things he’d left behind, but to stand by the mud and think. That might provide closure for him. It was such a painful cliché, returning to the scene of a crime—but he hadn’t actually committed a crime, he reminded himself, not in any real way. So it would be more like . . . visiting a grave.

  And he could try his cell phone, just to prove to himself that it wouldn’t have worked anyway, even if he’d tried.

  Denis got his coat, put on his muddy boots, and headed for the hills.

  Fireguard

  * * *

  Marzi sat at her drafting table and worked on inking the next issue of her comic. She was winding up a major story arc in this issue: Rangergirl had finally found the rattlesnake sphinx, and now she was faced with its peculiar riddles, which would give her the key to stopping the Outlaw’s latest assault on reality.

  But Marzi couldn’t concentrate. She kept thinking of Jane, covered in mud, reaching for her with clawed hands. She’d washed her hands in the bathroom at Genius Loci, and showered when she got home, but she still felt dirty. And afraid, which was worse. Being afraid had caused her serious problems in the past. She found it too easy to hunker down and hide from the fear, rather than go out into the world and face it. When she managed to stop thinking about Jane, she found herself thinking about Jonathan, which was almost as uncomfortable, for entirely different reasons. It wasn’t even him, particularly—it was the very possibi
lity of closeness.

  Marzi sighed and pushed herself back from the table. Maybe she could go out . . . though it was cozy at home, too. She lived in a small apartment on Rosewood Street, just a couple of blocks from Genius Loci and the downtown core of Santa Cruz. She liked living downtown; she hardly ever had to drive anywhere, since her job, grocery stores, bookstores, and bars were all within easy walking distance. Marzi had lived in the apartment for four years, since her sophomore year in college. The landlord lived down in Florida somewhere, and was apparently unaware of the way rents in Santa Cruz had skyrocketed in recent years. Marzi hoped he never got clued in. The cheap rent was the only way she could afford to live by herself and have a job that paid as little as managing the coffee shop did.

  The apartment was cluttered and jumbled, caught between coziness and chaos, with a blue thrift-store couch, a cedar chest, and brightly painted bookshelves filled with trade paperback and hardcover comics: almost everything by Alan Moore, the whole run of Preacher, Tomine’s Optic Nerve, McCloud’s illustrated nonfiction, Sandman, some Frank Miller, Will Eisner, R. Crumb, Dori Seda, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Richard Moore’s Far West, and scores more, shelved and stacked in most of the available space. Her single issues of comics were boxed and stacked under the long dinner table she’d gotten for a steal at Goodwill. Most of her noncomic books were Westerns by Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, and Joe Lansdale, along with a formidable collection of nonfiction about the West. Most of the reference was piled around her drafting table, so she could reach it easily when working.

  She did her drawing in the living room, at a drafting table that faced away from the windows, to keep her from staring into the world outside when she should be working. If there were windows, she would look out of them. Sitting at the table, though, with nothing before her but the walls, forced her to open the windows in her head, and look out on stranger vistas. A land of tumbleweeds, painted deserts, wagon trains, dusty-robed necromancers, rainmakers, gullies filled with gold, treachery, cowardice, and heroism. The world of her comic, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl.