The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  Gordon grinned. It was not at all friendly. For a moment I confused his face and the heron’s face, his eyes with the yellow death eyes.

  “I’ve been sent to fetch you,” Gordon said. “Beth said you weren’t anywhere to be found. Beautiful night for a stroll, isn’t it?”

  I tipped my face. The sky curved in a cupola, containing us like a glass cloche.

  “Others are searching for you,” Gordon said. “Tom Cat, Kathy. Beth, too.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I took a walk.”

  Gordon eyed me up and down, his gaze catching on the tiny bows of my summer nightgown. He followed the curves of my body down to my new shoes and then back up to my chest and face. He was amused. “If I squint, you look a bit like Rita Hayworth.”

  His grin showed the big, dull kernels of his teeth.

  I was flushed in my lace and bows, overexposed. I’d thought about a man seeing me this way, after we were engaged, after we’d been married, but not now, not like this, in this ceremony of darkness.

  “What did you do with the green nightgown?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “Beth’s nightgown. The one you took from her nightstand.”

  “Maybe I still have it,” he said. “Maybe I don’t. Maybe I had some fun with it, if you want to know.”

  I frowned in disgust.

  “Does it bother you, that I took it?”

  “I don’t care about Beth now.”

  “No? I do. I like her a lot.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his trousers and kicked a stone toward the river below us. The heron hunted in the waters there, purposeful, strong. “I’m going to marry her.”

  I laughed in revulsion. “Good luck,” I said. “She’d never marry you.”

  “What if I told you you’re wrong?”

  “Then you’d be a liar.”

  “But you are wrong, Milly. She’s already agreed.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I started to walk forward, brushing past him, but Gordon seized my arm, high up, just beneath my armpit.

  He put his face close to my own. I smelled beer on him, and cigarette smoke. Also the overwhelming male musk of him, the woodsy, dank scent of shot buck. I remembered my father dressing those bucks in the old shed behind our house in Omak. I’d watched every moment of the gory ritual. The intense sights and smells had amazed and dizzied me.

  “You don’t think I’m good enough,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything. It was true: She deserved better. He was handsome, but he was vain and coarse. I wanted to hate Beth. I wanted her to deserve him. But she didn’t. I felt deflated by my perpetual love for her. It made my hate stronger.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Gordon said, and he grabbed my shoulders and shook me, short and violent so that my teeth rattled. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Let go of me,” I said. “I don’t want you touching me.”

  I wasn’t being coy. I was incredulous. But he must have been insulted, because he shook me harder.

  “You’re lucky any man would touch you, let alone me.”

  I searched for the heron. The river was empty. Where had she gone? My loss of control shamed me. This was my place, I thought. I belonged here just like the desert creatures and the river. No one would dare hurt me here.

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  For a moment, Gordon relaxed his grip. I stepped away from him, turning my ankle on a sharp stone, but I didn’t cry out. I held my ground.

  “I don’t understand you at all, Milly,” he said, and he watched me with focused intent, as though I were a deer he had sighted in his rifle. He was quizzical, more confounded than upset. “You flirt with me, you walk around at night half-naked, then you act like you’re too good for everyone. You know what I think? I think you’re bananas. You belong in a loony bin.” He waited a moment. A thought occurred to him. “Mad Mildred,” he said, and laughed. “No one will ever believe a word you say.”

  I stiffened at the familiar moniker. “Leave me alone.”

  “Mad as a rabid dog. I saw you up here talking to yourself, petting your lap. You looked like a lost little kid. You’re bats.”

  His tone wasn’t rude, just matter-of-fact. I didn’t argue with him. I just wanted to return to the barracks, to my cot, to Beth.

  “She won’t marry you,” I said. “You’re nothing. If you weren’t a man, you’d have no power. You don’t know what real power is, and you never will.”

  “Mad Mildred. No one will believe a thing you say about me.”

  He outstretched his fingers. An invitation.

  The gesture alarmed me.

  The idea of my safe place fully shattered. Who had I been fooling? I could have died out here. I could have been maimed, killed, by any number of things.

  My confusion momentarily froze me.

  The sharp lines of his face came together into a mean snout. A wolf, but there were no wolves here, they needed trees, forests. Panic unfroze me. I pictured the deer, their strong legs, thighs firm and big like my own. I gave a shout and then turned and sprinted, leaping, bounding, away from him. I was the deer, wild-eyed, startled, gasping for breath. I ran on my four legs over the rocks and sagebrush, scrambling down the sandy banks to the river, and I heard Gordon cursing, loping behind me. There she was, the heron, wading near the river’s edge, stabbing her beak into the water and spearing a toad, which she choked back in one foul motion. She was interested in her survival just as I was in my own. I fell into the river near her and splashed wildly, and she flew into the sky. I meant to swim for my life, to allow the river to separate me from Gordon by pulling me downstream. I had a head start and felt certain I could outswim him. But then his hands encircled my ankles and he pulled me roughly backward. He grasped my hair and shoved me under the water and held me there while I thrashed. Then he lifted me up for one breath, only to dunk me under again. I flailed uselessly. He dragged me facedown by my thighs onto the bank, cutting my forehead and chest against the earth, and then he rolled me over and pulled up my nightgown. I blinked the water from my eyes and sputtered, “No, please.” I was strong—years of lifting Mother and housework had made me muscular and able. I struck him and kicked and he yelped in pain. He pushed me down by my clavicle and then his hand encircled my throat.

  “Be still, damn it,” he screamed at me.

  He lifted up a rock and held it over me, panting.

  He brought it down on my skull.

  I was a tree hit by lightning. I swam through a flash of lights and pooled blackness and a pain both distant and engulfing. The view from one of my eyes burst and went dim.

  I spoke to him but not with words, only with blood.

  He was on top of me then, tearing my panties aside. Near my face lay my shoes, though I had no memory of taking them off. He couldn’t fit in me so he spit on his hands and rubbed between my legs, pushing and forcing himself. His face flickered, the coyote’s face one moment, Gordon’s next, then Tom Cat’s, Beth’s, the great blue heron’s. My unwillingness deepened the pain. The rattlesnake snaked into me, biting and shaking and splitting me in two. It hurt not there but everywhere and I groaned. If only the wind would come and wipe all of this away. The heron stabbed at my mouth with her beak. I coughed blood. Gordon spit it back at me and stared down at me with cold, satisfied eyes, triumphant.

  I rolled my head to one side and vomited.

  Gordon drew his hands away from my shoulders and backed off, finished now. My body emptied. Flesh, then liquid. It was over. I lay as if dead, not sure if I was in a nightmare or a vision.

  Don’t be the future, don’t be the past. Be nothing.

  I would waken soon beside Beth, her arms wrapped tightly around me, and I would relay the whole nightmare to her and we would laugh about how real it had all seemed. She would tell me that everything she’d said to Kathy was a lie, and she’d make fun of Gordon for talking about marriage, and all would be right again. We would start over.

&
nbsp; I gave a strange sound like a laugh now. Beth, Beth, beautiful Beth! What an awful thing I saw. It was a guttural, low sound that turned into a hoarse scream.

  “You tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you. I’ll go to Omak and do the same to your mom and sister. You know I will.”

  My eyes had almost fully swollen shut, but I could just make out the thick shape of Gordon working at something above me. For a moment I wondered if his arms were lifted in prayer, but then came the bloody rock, his arms dropping again. I relaxed into the blackness of the impact.

  UNDERWORLD

  Kathy above me, speaking.

  Confusion.

  Why is she being so nice to me?

  I moaned. Leave me alone. I need sleep. A tooth fell into my throat and lodged there. Kathy rolled me onto my side and I coughed and swallowed the tooth. I couldn’t see well, but I recognized her voice.

  My mouth was filled with dirt and prairie grass and blood.

  “God, Milly. Oh, shit. Milly, can you hear me?” Then, yelling, “I’ve found her! Over here! Come quick!”

  When the invisible man lifted me, no more than strength and purpose, something jostled in my face and resettled. Not in my face. Behind my face. Two lonely stars frowned down at me, spitting their weak light. Almost dawn. The pink blood of it on the horizon. I could see only in blurry streaks.

  Kathy spoke to me violently, walking beside me where I floated. “Stay awake, Milly, stay awake. We’ll carry you to safety.”

  A wraithlike spider stitched a black web over my field of vision. The web closed in around me with a slight scratching sound.

  HEADLINES

  There was a rattling of papers and in my half dreams it rasped like the rattlesnake’s tail. My eyes flew open. I tried to cry out but there was no sound.

  I was in a large white room, lying on a cot with a thin cotton blanket drawn over my legs and torso. Between the other beds, wearing starched uniforms, nurses bustled, some of them cheerful and chattering lightly, others businesslike, wiping people down, removing bed pans, frowning over an injection.

  A hospital. I was dead but undead.

  “Milly,” a voice said, and my eyes focused painfully on the woman sitting to my right.

  Beth.

  She held the newspaper open in her arms and stared at me with a shocked expression.

  “Milly, you’re awake!”

  I tried to speak to her but my mouth was broken. I drooled, instead. I looked at her with a panic-stricken expression. I could feel the words in my head but I couldn’t express them.

  Beth hurriedly folded up the paper and rested it on my legs, leaning forward with her normal compassionate exigency.

  “Don’t worry yourself, Milly. You’ve had a terrible blow. Your skull was fractured. The fog is normal. You’ve been in a coma for a few days now, Milly, but you’re on your way to recovery. Try not to worry or think too much. You need to heal.”

  I glanced down at the newspaper headlines. With difficulty I read,

  PEACE!

  OUR BOMB CLINCHED IT!

  I looked up at Beth, startled.

  They surrendered.

  “Such good news, Milly,” Beth said tenderly. “We’ve won the war. Isn’t that marvelous?”

  I took up the paper and tried to read more, but when I focused my eyes a wretched pain spread through my head and down the back of my neck.

  Beth took the paper from me. “Milly, you need rest. No reading. No papers. No thinking, for that matter.”

  Next to me on the side table was another newspaper and I pointed to it, and then to Beth.

  “Okay,” she said. “If you want me to. Because it’s happy.” She took it up and read it. “This is older, more than a week ago. I saved it for you. I’ll just read you the headline, okay?”

  The words floated on the backs of my closed eyelids, fully capitalized, thick and black: NEW ATOMIC BOMB LOOSED ON JAPAN.

  “We dropped another one, Milly,” she continued. “On a town called Nagasaki. The first bomb, you know, they named Little Boy, this second bomb was called Fat Man. Isn’t that droll? It was made of our plutonium. Hanford’s own! It was too much for the Japs. They surrendered just a day ago, on the fifteenth. Everyone is over the moon with our work here.”

  Over the moon. Buried in moon stuff.

  I closed my eyes again. I wanted to lie down fully, but my bed was locked in an upright position, perhaps so the blood wouldn’t collect in my face and brain.

  “Those…” I tried to speak but the words were muddled. “Poor…”

  “Milly, don’t strain yourself.”

  “Peep—” I couldn’t say the word people. My eyes remain closed, but the tears flowed down my cheeks, anyway.

  My hands were locked together above my waist. Beth cupped my hands with her own and I concentrated on their warmth. She seemed to understand why I was crying.

  “A small group here has protested,” she said. “They made some signs and marched around but they were threatened and booed. I suppose it was horrible there, for the Japanese. It’s good of you to think of them.”

  She bent fully at the waist and put her head in my lap. She heaved a giant pained sigh, but I couldn’t tell if she was crying or not.

  “Oh, Milly, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. If I could take it all back, I would.”

  * * *

  Later, I awoke from a dream where two rattlesnakes clung to my breasts, dangling from the soft flesh by their fangs. I saw her once. Hop forty paces. Defect perfection. An electrical charge from their venom shot up my spine. I stood straighter, taller. I absorbed the pain and was more formidable for it. Power breathes forth.

  “Mildred Ferret Face Groves,” said a sharp voice above me.

  I didn’t want to hear that voice. I stared at the corner of my bed instead. I daydreamed over and over a scene involving the heron in which she was a fish and I was a river, indifferent to her passing through me. I flourished the more she flailed—soon she would be dead while I swelled, swift and coursing to the fey ocean.

  I’d been fumbling with such reveries since waking. They were useless. I was no river, indifferent and purposeful. I was the dirt, the land, stuck and passive, poisoned by men.

  “Weasel Brain,” the voice said, more tenderly this time, and I slowly dragged my eyes away from the bed corner.

  Mother.

  Martha’s face floated there, too, so that the heads formed two large, wavy-haired orbs, regarding me with desolation and wonder.

  “What have they done to my girl?” Mother cried, bringing a knuckle to her lip. “Poor Ferret Face. They’ve wrecked even your plainness.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Martha said, touching my arm. “It’s just bruises and scabs. She’ll look better soon, you’ll see.”

  “Her left eye, though. That eye is broken. The doctor says they’ll replace it with glass. It’s like your aunt Edna’s eye, Martha, after she was kicked by that mule. Of course, we all know Aunt Edna deserved it. She was a brute to animals.”

  “Why?” I managed, and they leaned forward.

  “What was that, Mildred?” Mother said, in a kind voice I hadn’t heard from her since I was a child. “Can’t you speak up, dear?”

  “Why here?” I asked again.

  “We took the bus from Omak once we heard you woke up,” Martha said. “We’ve been so worried. Did you know it took them more than a week before they notified us? What’s wrong with these people, Mildred?”

  “Richland is a hideous place,” Mother agreed. “Government types are numskulled puppets.”

  I was pleased to see them. I had half a mind to rise from the bed and loop arms with them and show them around the Hanford site. How proud they’d be of me! But I could hardly sit up. The doctors said it would take several weeks to remind my body of how to move, how to walk, how to speak.

  I closed my eyes. I wanted to sleep in my childhood bed.

  “They say you were muddled with,” Martha said in a low voice, glancing
around at the other patients. “They say you were muddled with down there.”

  “You could be pregnant,” Mother said matter-of-factly. “It’s a possibility.”

  “With twins even,” said Martha, and our mother scowled at her.

  Beth never spoke to me of such things. It was easier with her to pretend that nothing untoward had happened. She had given me a bouquet from Tom Cat, saying that he sent his prayers for my healing and that he wanted to come visit me. I shook my head frantically, no no no no no. Beth had made shushing noises at me until I calmed down and then promised me she would relay the message. “You’re not ready,” she said. “And that’s okay.” And only once she mentioned Gordon, saying he felt “awfully sorry” for me, and the words hit me like a nightmare, visceral, full-bodied, the smell of blood and pounded meat, tell her tell her, but I couldn’t tell her the truth, it would make it too real, I’d relive it all, the scabs would tear off and I’d be vulnerable and sick. Maybe Beth wouldn’t believe me. And in my broken brain the whispered threat issued again and again, You know I will. Kill you. Go to Omak. Your mom and sister. I felt myself split in two just as I’d been on the riverbed, the heron’s beak murderously stabbing my mouth. You know I will. Tom Cat and Gordon were men who expected things of me both good and gruesome, and when she mentioned them I moaned and turned away from her. Beth got the message. She stopped bringing them up entirely.

  “Martha, why don’t you go fix your hat?” Mother said irritably.

  “I’m not wearing a hat, Mother, you said at the motel that it fattens my jowls, so I—”

  “Go to the restroom, dear,” Mother ordered, and the stridency of her tone sent Martha scurrying.

  “Did he…” Mother ran a hand through the air just above my face, and I felt a small cool wind from it, her familiar scent, the baby powder she patted into her armpits. “Did he do this to you, too?”

  I nodded.

  Mother’s face firmed with anger.

  She leaned over me. Having a purpose, she was more lithe and agile than I’d seen her in years.

  “They said you were in your nightie. They said you were wandering around mostly naked. Why would you do this, Mildred? Not even you are so dumb.”