by Greg Barth
“Get a seat, Frankie.”
I brought over a glass for him. He took a bottle out of the sack. He poured some in my glass. “This is for you,” he said. “I know how you like Kentucky bourbon.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t tell him that Southern Comfort was not a Kentucky bourbon.
He brought out another bottle of clear liquor. “This is for me. I like vodka.”
“Well, you can keep it,” I said. We clinked glasses and drank. It was good. I put it down quick.
“Todd really is doing much better. He wanted me to make sure I told you that.” He kept wearing the stiff grin. His mustache stretched across his upper lip like a fox stole.
“I’ve been worried sick,” I said.
He was looking at my chest.
I sighed.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
I swirled my whiskey in my glass. I considered how to broach the subject. “Do your guys cook meth up here this time of year?”
He considered this. “They do. Why?”
“Does one of them have long, scraggly red hair?”
“Yeah. That’s Bishop.” He stared at my tits as he spoke.
I nodded. “Can I have some more of that?” I pointed at the bottle.
“Sure.” He poured. He gestured to my skinning knife and whet stone on the table. “You need any help sharpening your skinning knife?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got it. Another skill I learned from my mountain man.”
He nodded. His eyes didn’t move.
I decided to deal with it. “Hey,” I said. “I’m up here.” I pointed at my face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to look up and not doing a very good job of it. His face blushed. “I’m not good with eye contact.”
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you. It makes me self-conscious when you stare at my tits.”
His grin faded. “You like the whiskey?”
“Pour me another.”
He uncapped the bottle and refilled my glass. “So, did you see Bishop?”
“Frankie, I don’t know how to say this. He and I had a...bit of a...run in yesterday. He was…threatening me, and…”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. It was...violent?”
“Are you okay, Marie?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. I’m fine. This drink is just going to my head. Your guy, uh...Bishop?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s, uh...” I shook my head. “He’s not so okay, I guess.”
Frankie sipped at his vodka. He nodded. “It’s okay, Marie.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“I’ll deal with it. Whatever happened? I’ll deal with it. These guys? They’ve got a skill. But they’re disposable.”
I felt dizzy. “That’s, uh...that’s good to hear,” I said. I took another long drink.
“I can deal with these guys. Clean up any mess.” He reached out his hand and patted mine. “You’re okay. That’s the main thing. I’ll take care of you.”
It sounded as though I was hearing him through ears stuffed with cotton balls. It was getting hard for me to breathe. The air in my chest felt thick and heavy.
“That’s good,” I slurred.
“Drink,” Frankie said.
I did. The glass was heavy in my hand. The liquor was warm in my stomach. Maybe I hadn’t eaten enough lately. I had a hard time getting the glass to my mouth.
“I’m not feeling so good,” I slurred.
“You had a rough couple of days,” he said.
We sat there in silence for a few minutes. My face began to feel warm and numb. Frankie looked like he was a mile away. His mustache looked like something out of a Doctor Seuss book. The Lorax, I thought.
“I brought some cigarettes,” he said. “You want one?”
I opened my mouth to ask him to light me one, but the sound that came out was, “Muuuuuhhhhhhhhh.”
“What’s wrong, Marie?”
I tried to speak. My mouth was open, but I couldn’t form words. I couldn’t close my mouth. My throat felt dry. “Uuuuuhhhhhhhhhh,” I said. It was a low, bass sound that I had never heard come out of my mouth before. Drool spilled over the corner of my mouth and ran down my chin.
“Hand me that skinning knife,” Frankie said.
I looked down at my right hand. I thought about moving it. I tried to move it. My dumb hand sat still on my lap. I had no control over my own body.
“What’s wrong?” Frankie said.
I couldn’t form words.
He leaned across the table and looked me in the eye. “Is this eye contact good enough for you?”
I realized then that he had put something in my drink.
“I hope this is good enough eye contact for you, because...Marie. You. Are. Fucked.
TWENTY-ONE
SELENA
Frankie looked down at me. Everything was muddled and fuzzy. My mind was slow, my muscles relaxed. I was having a hard time drawing breath. My body screamed for more air, but I could only take short, shallow gasps.
“Marie,” he said.
I tried to tell him that I needed help but my words came out as, “Nnuuuuuuuusssssshhhhh.”
“Don’t talk,” he said. “I want to check something. Okay? I wonder if you can bite. I bet you can. I want you to try real hard, okay?”
He pushed a finger into my mouth. My lips and tongue were dry like the desert sand. His finger felt like a stick of dry wood on my tongue.
“Can you bite me? Try hard,” he said.
I smelled the vodka on his breath. His face was going in and out of focus.
He pushed his finger deeper into my mouth. He wiggled his finger at the back of my throat. My gag reflex engaged and I tried to expel it. My throat made an involuntary urk sound. He withdrew his finger.
“You can’t bite me, can you?”
He pushed his finger in and wiggled the tip at the back of my throat again. I urked again, and he withdrew the finger from my mouth.
“Marie. Darling Marie,” he said. “Or should I say Selena. Yes. Selena. From this moment on, you are fucked. No, the fucking itself has not happened yet, but there’s no stopping it. You’ve been had. This is the moment when it all changes. You are fucked. I have complete control over you, my dear.”
Fear spread over me. He had used my name.
He leaned in close. His face pressed against mine. His vodka stink was in my nose. He stuck out his tongue. He licked my lips with his slippery tongue. He licked my cheeks. He licked my eyeball. He opened my mouth wide and spat into it. There was nothing I could do.
He pulled back and laughed at me.
“Do you know what a tease pony is, Selena? A tease pony is a little pony filly in heat, that’s what a tease pony is. At the barns where they keep the stallions for breeding, they keep the tease pony tied up in a corral outside. The stallions stand in their stalls day in and day out with their massive, hard stallion cocks dripping in pure lust for the smell of the tease pony outside. They can’t stand it. They kick at the stall walls trying to bust out, breaking the rough lumber boards with their hooves, their erections swollen, their lust painful and dripping. They want that little pony so bad. They do that so that way when they go to breed, the mare that they’re with gets the full measure of lust that the stallion has for the petite little tease pony. It’s the tease pony that’s in the stallion’s nostrils and in his lustful mind when he penetrates the mare during breeding. You, my dear Selena. You are the tease pony. You are the hot little piece of ass that has all the stallions kicking at their stalls day in and day out. You. And you are mine now. Mine.”
He was getting worked up like he was preaching to me. I felt his hot spittle on my cheeks and eyes. I wanted to ask him why he didn’t just go and fuck some horse, but all that came out was, “Whuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“Oh, baby,” he said. “You have no idea how much you’re wanted. You’re wanted at all levels. Joe Faranacci wants you. The police want you. Hell, even the FBI wants
you. But I, Frankie White, I have you.”
He put his finger in my mouth again. This time he pushed it back to my tonsils hard. He held it there in the back of my throat. He shook my head with the force of it. “Bite me!” he said. I gagged almost to the point of vomiting before he withdrew it.
I decided then that if I ever had the opportunity, I would show him what a bite felt like.
He slapped me hard on the cheek.
“How do you like that, bitch? He slapped me again, hard. My head jerked to the side, my hair falling across my face.
“You like being choked?” he said. “I know some girls that do.”
He clenched my throat with both hands. He tightened his grip. I felt my air cut off, the blood to my brain ceased. My field of vision diminished to a shrinking black tunnel. As his grip tightened, the black circle grew smaller and smaller. Finally, just before I lost consciousness, he released his grip. I drew in a loud breath of air.
“What I put in your drink?” he said. “It would put a Navy Seal in my control. And you drank about twice as much as someone your size should drink. I didn’t think that a little lady like you would put it away so fast. But you’re no lady, are you? You’re just some little whore. You know what, Selena? I think you have a drinking problem.”
I was having a hard time getting my air back. I gasped and wheezed as he droned on and on.
“Yes, my little tease pony, you are so fucked. You killed my men yesterday. My best cooks. I knew you were up here. I knew it from day one, but I let you stay, because there was something about you that I liked. But you didn’t like me back, did you? Thought I was staring at your tits all the time, didn’t you? Thought I was some retard, didn’t you? Well, who’s the smart one now, huh? I can do anything to you that I want.”
I realized that he couldn’t. He thought he could, but I knew that he couldn’t.
He pushed his fly against my mouth. “I could make you suck it. I could piss in your mouth. I could piss in your eyes. I could push it down your throat.”
I knew that he couldn’t.
He unzipped his fly. He took his limp penis out. He pressed it to my open mouth. He rubbed it across my lips. He rubbed it on my cheeks. He poked at my eyes with the tip of his soft penis.
He pulled my shirt up and off over my head. He pinched my nipples hard. He slapped at my breasts. He pushed at the bullet scars on my chest with his thumbs, probing at them. He took his flaccid penis in hand and rubbed the soft head of it around one of my nipples. My thick, brown nipple elongated and stiffened, but his penis remained soft and flaccid.
“You see?” he said. “I could. But this one. This dick. Doesn’t want you. Your stinky, skanky little cunt is not worthy of my dick. You’re not the hot piece of ass that you thought you were, are you?” He spat in my face. “Fucking whore. Stare at them? I don’t even like your tits.”
He pushed his penis into my mouth. It felt like a warm, soft slug sliding along my dry tongue. “I could piss down your throat,” he said.
He couldn’t. Fucking loser.
I felt my stomach churn. Whatever he had given me, I had more of it in my stomach than my system could metabolize. He had given me too much. I felt my gorge rise. My stomach flipped, and I vomited onto his penis. The force of the vomit pushed his cock from my mouth. His hairy pelvic area, his balls and thighs were soaked with the brown fluid. I kept vomiting hard. It was projectile vomit. It still hit him even as he backed away from me. I didn’t feel bad about it. He had it coming.
When everything had come up, I continued to cough and hack with dry heaves. I felt as though I would pass out. I was coughing too hard to draw breath.
Finally, my stomach calmed down and the spasms stopped. I was soaked in vomit. I felt snot draining down from my nose. My mouth burned from the bile I had expelled.
He stepped back up to me. I looked up at him. He slapped me hard on the cheek. “I should pluck your fucking eye out with my finger for that.”
As if he had the balls.
“My cock doesn’t want you. You understand? I could fuck you bloody. I could impale you on my dick. There’s nothing you could do about it. But you are just some skanky, flat-chested whore. You’ve probably got every disease in the medical dictionary. My cock doesn’t want you. I could fuck you raw if I wanted to, but I don’t. I get better than you every single night. You are nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You understand me? You are nothing.”
He didn’t have any original material. I’d already heard better versions of it all before.
TWENTY-TWO
SELENA
He went outside and ran Max off before he put me in his truck.
Nice man that he was, he stripped me of my vomit-soaked jeans and panties.
As he pulled my pants down, he continued to spew insults. “Goddamn, Selena, you’re like the missing link down here, ain’t you? Don’t you ever shave above the knee?” When he pulled my jeans completely off, he said, “Oh, well I guess you don’t shave below the knee either. Todd must have a thing for monkeys, huh? I think I’ve discovered Lucy number two.”
He didn’t bother to dress me in anything else. I guess he wanted to make it look as though the rape had been a roaring success. Impress his friends. Make it look like he had a dick too.
He lifted me off the chair and carried me outside.
The ride down the mountain was a nightmare. I was stark naked in his truck. He had tied my hands behind my back. My drugged up head leaned against the passenger side window. I faded in and out of consciousness. I had drug-induced nightmares that followed me when I regained consciousness. I had strange hallucinations of large beasts running out from the dark forest and crossing the road in front of us.
My bow clattered on the floor of the truck. Frankie had gone back in and grabbed it after he carried me out and put me in the cab. He wanted to show his boss what I had used to kill his men, he said.
It was a long, tedious drive down the mountain. Every bump and lurch down the rough trail to the foot of the mountain pushed my temple against the window glass. It seemed to take forever to get to the bottom of the slope in the dark.
When we got there I was still numb, my face pressed against the glass, my eyes peering up at streetlights along the river road of Asheville, North Carolina The smooth street under our tires felt strange.
The night world of Asheville seemed alien compared to what I had been used to on the mountain.
He took the Interstate 26 across Sam’s Gap and dropped down to Johnson City. At the foot of Sam’s Gap, he pulled off the interstate in Erwin to get gas. After filling the tank, he forced me to drink more GHB-laced liquor. He pinched my nostrils closed, filled my mouth with the liquid from the bottle, and forced my lips shut. He didn’t release me until I had swallowed.
The streets of Erwin were abandoned, so no one witnessed a deranged man at a gas station forcing a naked woman to do his bidding in the cab of a pickup truck. It wasn’t that it was late—it was near dinner time. Night came early that time of year, and Erwin wasn’t an after-dark kind of town.
I grew used to the chemical’s effect as my body metabolized more and more of it. I’d built up a tolerance to a lot of things over my years of recreational use. By the time we got up to Johnson City, I began to regain some sensation in my extremities.
He drove us up to the downtown exits for Johnson City and pulled off the interstate. The old brick buildings grew tall through the passenger side window of the pickup. I felt the jolt of the truck as we crossed the railroad tracks. Johnson City had been a major rail hub in the 1920s. It had been called Little Chicago at the time, because Al Capone had set up operation in the city to run Appalachian-made whiskey up north during prohibition. The architecture of the city was frozen in the 1920s. When Wall Street fell, the town stopped growing.
Faranacci may have had delusions about his relevance; he was no Capone. The city was in decay.
Frankie pulled us up to a loading dock out back of an old warehouse at the edge of town. Much o
f the warehouse had been refurbished into an adult bookstore, but the rest of it was just unused space.
I knew what went on inside these establishments. They had novelties, lingerie, and DVDs for sale up front. In the middle they had had arcade booths, a singles’ theater and a couples’ theater where people could watch adult movies, hook up, and get their rocks off. I had worked a singles’ theater once to support my habits. In what most people thought of as the back of the store, they had live entertainment where girls would give massages, lap dances, and peep show dances fully nude. In what the truck drivers thought of as the true back of the establishment was a robust drug trade and prostitution ring in full swing every night.
What few people knew was that this establishment housed the operating offices of Crazy Joey Faranacci. And I was about to find that out.
Semi-trucks were parked out back. The lot lizards scuttled from cab to cab like cockroaches moving from crumb to crumb in a nasty kitchen, bold in the darkness.
Frankie parked us next to the loading dock. “You stay put. I’ll be right back,” he said. He opened his door and stepped out of the cab.
I sat there in the truck testing my motor skills. I could open and close my fingers. I could move my mouth. I was able to wiggle my toes. My mind felt less fuzzy.
He came back out the dock door a minute later with two other men. I recognized one of them as the tall, long-haired man that had shot me in the chest on the side of the mountain. The man with them was shorter, fit, and had clean-cut white hair.
They opened the passenger side door and pulled me out of the truck. Each of the two men with Frankie grabbed me by a shoulder and an elbow and dragged me through the lot, my bare toes dragging the gravel. They took me up the steps to the loading dock and inside the building. I was still completely naked. No one seemed to care.
They dragged me across the smooth concrete floor of the back of the warehouse, to a door that opened to a small room. One of them flipped a switch and the room was dimly illuminated by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. Inside the room there was a wooden chair with handcuffs affixed to the arms. Sheets of clear plastic covered the walls and floor. Through the clear sheets I could make out the eggshell-carton foam that lined the walls. Dark brown splotches stained the wooden chair in the center of the room. There was a drain grating in the floor.
