Foreign Enemies and Traitors (31 page)

The American spoke in the foreign tongue, and Jenny’s most recent pair of captors pushed her from behind, through the revelers and the other captive girls, to where the new arrivals stood in the opening to the living room.  She straightened up to look the American in the eye, not wanting to cower or cringe in his presence.  In spite of herself, she was almost glad to see him.  At least he was an American, someone who spoke her language.  This took away just a bit of her fear, somehow.

“So, blondie, you’ve learned better manners now?”  He raised his open hand as if to strike her, and Jenny reflexively flinched but held her ground.  He guffawed, and his companions laughed with him while he translated his remark for them.  She was just as tall as this American traitor, who was no more than her five foot ten, even with his fur hat and combat boots on.  Although no taller, he was much larger; Jenny guessed that he outweighed her by at least eighty pounds.  Wherever he came from, there was certainly no famine.  All of the soldiers had thick, fleshy faces while the girls were gaunt and hollow-eyed.

The American spoke again in their foreign language, slowly and loudly, and the men in the room burst out laughing and raised their cups in toast.  Then he reached out to Jenny with his left hand and slid rough fingers behind her neck, pulling her in close, nose to nose, eye to eye.  He had the beginning of a bristly mustache like most of the others, heavy whisker stubble, and cold, dark eyes.  He could have passed for one of the foreign soldiers except for his unaccented English. 

While looking into her eyes with his hand still squeezing her neck, he said quietly, “I just told them that I have chosen you, blondie, and that now I’m going to teach you better manners.  You know, believe it or not, I’m doing you a favor—it’ll just be you and me tonight.  The rest of these babes are going to pull trains, all night tonight and on into tomorrow.  Do you know what that means?  Once the officers have had their fun, the rest of the battalion will march through and take their turns.  Fifty North American Dollars a pop, all for the battalion recreation fund.  There’s hundreds of troops in the battalion—just do the math.  So if you’re smart, blondie, you’ll want to make me
real
happy tonight.  If I’m happy enough, maybe you’ll be the one special girl in this house that doesn’t get laid twenty times.  Who knows, maybe you’ll even get to be my Tennessee sweetheart.  Maybe.  If I like you good enough.”  He grinned a chipped-tooth smile and winked, close enough for her to be repelled by his bad breath, stinking of garlic, onions and liquor.

“Okay,” he finished.  “Enough small talk.  Enough polite chitchat.  Come on, blondie, let’s go upstairs and find the master bedroom in this dump before the colonel grabs it for himself.”  Still smiling, he pulled her through the opening into the living room by her neck and then pushed her toward the front hall and the stairs.  Behind them the soldiers roared their approval, whistling and stomping their boots, then once again they broke into a verse of their drunken song.  He pushed her upstairs with one hand clamped around the back of her neck and the other clutching her left upper arm tightly enough to hurt.

****

He shoved Jenny through the door,
toward a king-size four-poster bed.  He pulled out his pistol; a bright mini-flashlight was attached beneath its barrel.  He scanned the room with the light until he found an oil lamp standing on an antique bureau.  He gave Jenny one more hard push, and she landed on her face on the bed.  The bed was piled high with quilts and blankets; the room temperature was nearly comfortable, not bitterly cold.  He pulled off his fur hat, dropped his pack, and kicked the bedroom door closed behind him with a boot.  He lifted the lamp’s glass and lit the wick with a butane lighter.  With the wick adjusted, the room was suffused in a soft glow.  It was burning real lamp oil, with a nice scent, not the foul smelling motor oil she was accustomed to.  He reholstered his pistol, its harsh electric light no longer needed.

Expensively framed antique oil paintings of pastoral equestrian scenes hung on the walls.  The room had a white brick fireplace across from the foot of the bed.  A large painting of horses and riders preparing for a fox hunt hung above the fireplace mantle.  It was a working fireplace, not merely decorative.  There were half-burnt logs on an iron grate, and fireplace tools in a rack on the side.  She carefully noted the iron tools: she might get a chance to use them as weapons if her captor let down his guard.  There was a large window on either side of the fireplace, their shades pulled down.  Between the fireplace and the windows were low bookshelves.  The sounds of the bacchanal came up through the floor: men singing and shouting, and girls screaming.  Jenny wondered if she was indeed luckier than the girls remaining below.

Her captor breezily said, “You have to admit, they really knew how to build these old places.  More earthquake-proof than houses built ten years ago.  It must have been built before they had central heat—lots of fireplaces.”  He grabbed some bound books from the low shelf to the right of the fireplace, ripped pages out and threw them into the hearth, and then threw in entire books.  He ignited the paper with his lighter.  He picked up an antique mahogany chair, and using only his upper body strength, broke it into pieces by pulling the legs apart.  He tossed its solid wood legs and arms into the fireplace, and repeated the process with another antique chair, and then the four mahogany posts from the bed, which lifted easily out of slots.  The paper was already burning brightly, and he fed additional open books into the flames until the wood began to catch fire. 

“There, that should do it.  It’ll be warming up in here in no time.”  He went to his pack, opened a side compartment, and extracted a thick sausage wrapped in plastic film, already opened at one end.  He waved the long reddish-brown cylinder in the air.  “Here’s what you’re playing for, blondie.  Make me a happy man, and we’ll have a nice romantic dinner together—afterwards.”  Jenny could smell its greasy, spicy aroma and her mouth began to water.  He said, “Summer sausage, from Wisconsin.  Not too many problems up there—the cheeseheads have all they want, just about.  Not like down here in Tennessee.  I’ll bet you’re just
starving
, eh?”  He laughed at his own joke.  He set the meat within her sight, on the edge of the bureau under the lamp, then removed a plastic bottle from his pack, unscrewed the cap, and took a drink.

Jenny lay on the bed on her side, her knees drawn to her chest, looking at him as he first unbuckled his outer belt with its pistol and other gear, then unzipped his camouflage jacket and dropped it to the floor, followed by his uniform shirt.  He left on his brown T-shirt.  He sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his boots, taking his time, staring at her with his mouth agape.  Finally he stood and unfastened his belt, and let his pants drop to the floor.  He was a huge, thickly muscled man, with hairy gorilla arms and short bandy legs.

“Okay, blondie, your turn now.”  He stood above her by the edge of the bed and clapped his hands together.  “Come on, honey; get with the program.  Take off that vest—let’s see what you’re hiding under there.” 

Jenny wondered if he was possibly a foreign soldier, trained to speak flawless English.  He was wearing the foreign uniform, but his English was perfect.  Maybe he was a foreigner who had lived for a long time in America.  She had also heard him speak the foreign tongue.  There were so many groups of foreigners living in the USA, it was hard to keep track of them all.  She was repulsed by him and didn’t want to join in his one-way conversation, but she felt compelled to ask him a single question.  “Are you really an American?”

He smiled, his face softening slightly.  “As American as apple pie, blondie.  Born and raised in the Land of Lincoln.  Now, here’s the deal: I’m getting cold waiting for you to get in the mood.  I want you naked under the covers, right now.  Got it?  Come on, it’s still too chilly in this room.  Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle,” he laughed.  “You’re going to love what I’m going to give you, I promise.  Then if I like it too, well…I’ll try to forget what you did back there in Mannville.  That was rude—you
really
pissed me off.  You embarrassed me in front of my colleagues from Kazakhstan.  Now I’m giving you a chance to make it up to me.  Then we’ll have dinner.”

Jenny crossed her arms tightly and looked away.  “No.”

“No?  You don’t understand.  ‘No’ is not an option for you tonight.”

“No—I won’t,” she repeated, quietly but with conviction.

“Oh, yes you will!  He gave her a cruel smile and then launched hiself on her, still wearing his brown T-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks.  She rolled quickly to the far side of the wide bed and half slid off it, but he crawled after her, grabbed her by an ankle and easily dragged her back into the middle.  He laughed and playfully smacked her on her rump, then pulled the sneakers off her feet and tossed them aside.  Jenny rolled onto her back, trying to get into a defensive posture where she could fend him off.     

“So you’re a fighter, are you?  Well, I like spirit in a girl, but don’t push your luck.”  Without warning, he turned and slapped her hard across the face and Jenny’s hands flew up.  Still laughing, he grabbed the edge of her plaid wraparound skirt in both hands and yanked it upward until she rolled out of it.  Then he straddled her bare legs at the thighs, grabbed both sides of her black insulated vest and yanked them apart, sending the gold buttons flying, and then pulled up the bottom of her yellow sweater. 

He was extremely powerful, but Jenny clutched her arms to her chest tightly and for a moment they were at an impasse, until he gave her another open-handed blow to the other side of her face.  The shock of it stunned her, and in that instant he forced the sweater and open vest up over her head and off.  When the sweater came up, it took her cotton undershirt with it.  She wore no bra, she did not own one anymore; bras that fit her were impossible to find.  He flung her clothes aside and she clasped her arms back across her bare breasts.  She had never been exactly busty, and after a year of near starvation, she was even less so.  Naked now except for her panties and socks, she felt furious, powerless and terrified all at the same time.  Her face was scarlet both from humiliation and from his slaps.

He carefully grasped both of her wrists, easily peeling her arms away from her chest, and pinned them under his hands against the mattress, on either side of her head.  “Come on, blondie, I like a frisky little filly now and then, but enough is enough.  Make it easy for yourself—I don’t want to mark up your pretty little face.  You can’t be my Tennessee girlfriend if you look like you just went ten rounds in the octagon.”  All of his upper body weight now bore down upon her slender wrists, his hips crushing hers, his knees battering her thighs, forcing her legs apart.

Then he lowered his chest against her while Jenny squirmed and thrashed to no effect, his greasy whiskered face only inches away, his breath stinking, his tongue darting out and wiggling like some perverted lizard.  He licked her neck, her cheeks, probed her ear as she turned her head to the side and clamped her eyes shut.  She was crushed, pinned and helpless.  While he licked and kissed her neck, his whisker stubble grating like sandpaper, the back of his ear brushed against her lips.  Without thinking, she bit into it as hard as she had ever bitten anything in her life.  It was like biting a dried apricot, with a piece of beef jerky inside.  She held onto his ear with her teeth, like a crazed pit bull clamping down on a rawhide chew toy.

He shrieked in pain and released his hold on her wrists, his meaty hands going for her throat, but she maintained her bite on his ear.  His thick fingers snaked up to her neck, one hand found her windpipe and began to clamp down, but her hands were now also free and her fingernails flew to his eyes like ten daggers.  Then his head was suddenly loose from her and he pulled away.  Most of his ear was still in her mouth, and she spat it out on the bed between them, their eyes locked together.  He rolled away from her to gain some distance from the source of his pain, then raised himself up on one arm and drew his other hand back in a fist to strike her. 

His face was a twisted contortion of blind rage, there were deep red scratches running from his eyes down his cheeks.  The ragged stump of his ear gushed hot red blood down his neck and onto her.  His right fist came down, but Jenny darted away toward the side of the bed as the punch narrowly missed.  He pursued her, hitting her on her buttocks, grabbing at her flailing legs as she went over the edge, kicking backward at him.  He was right behind her as she shot head first down to the floor, but she just managed to scramble ahead of him toward the foot of the bed, slipping on the small rug in front of the fireplace.

He sprang up to leap on her, and as she rolled onto her back she grabbed at the brass fireplace poker that leaned against the bricks, point upward.  There was no time or space to swing it as a weapon.  As he came hurtling down, she turned slightly, guiding the poker’s iron tip.  In his rage and animal excitement he focused on her naked body, not seeing what she held in her hands.

As he threw his bulk onto her, his full weight came down on the poker.  The bottom of the brass and iron spear held fast where the hardwood floor met the raised bricks of the fireplace hearth.  The harpoon point tore into his throat, piercing his windpipe.  The poker’s outward curving hook, the complement to its spear tip, prevented it from completely impaling him.  His forward motion vaulted his body over Jenny into the fireplace.  The top of his head slammed into the bricks at the back of the hearth, his face, chest and shoulders landing across the blazing wood.  His still-pumping feet and legs found no purchase on the small rug and smooth hardwood.  He jerked and tried to roll out, but he was trapped in the fireplace by the iron poker jammed deeply into his neck, its shaft caught backward among the burning wood and the iron hearth grate.  His back arched and stiffened, his legs gave a few more kicks and shivering spasms—and then he was motionless, with his black hair and T-shirt already aflame.