Method 15 33 (13 page)

Brad uncovered a pile of sliced meat on a platter and placed two pieces on my plate. I hoped the meat was veal, for the slab looked and smelled as such, although I could no longer trust my senses in this den of insanity. Brad also served a pyramid of glistening green beans, a dollop of mashed potatoes, and a delicate trail of glazed carrots. He cut the meat into tiny bites, leaning in to my side as though he were my doting new mother.

“Panther lady, my brother and I, perhaps just I, are, am, wondering,” and here his high voice switched to a forced, low grumbling, like he was talking funny-serious to a toddler, “why you glare at him with such mean eyes?” He continued in a quick return to a higher voice, “What? You don’t like the food he gives you? Tee-hee-hee. Don’t worry, we don’t let him cook. He couldn’t even hold a job flipping bacon at a diner! Remember, brother? Remember when you tried to get away from your Brady-poo? How’d that work out for you?”

Brad blinked at my captor.

“Ol’ fatty has to work with me. He’s too dumb to do anything else. Anyway, anyway, I prattle on. You probably give him mean eyes because he’s such a fat slob.” Brad nudged my shoulder to laugh along with him. I exerted a short, “Ha,” only to catch my captor’s stare, a cold, dead stare, which was scattered with incessant blinking. This was the first time I noted him blinking, blinking, blinking.

“Shut the fuck up, Brad. Let’s get this over with.” Blink. Blink.

“Now, brother, relax. The girl should enjoy a nice widdle dinny-poo. Right, panther?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir?!” Brad howled. “Yes, sir?! Oh brother, oh brother, she’s a little baby, cute baby panther.”

Brad turned to his plate. My hands were on my lap. He took a bite, his eyes darting to my clenched fists. He scowled, losing his tittering lightness in a flash of squinting eyes.

“Pick your fucking fork up and eat the veal I made you. Now!” Brad screamed in a deep, loathing voice. “Tee-hee-hee,” he added with a returned high tone.

I picked up my fork. I ate the baby calf.

“Now, brother, why is panther here calling me ‘sir’? Is this what you make her call you?”

My captor slumped, shoving mashed potatoes into his open, chewing mouth.

“Brother, brother. You’re never going to get over daddy-poo, are you?” Brad twisted to me. “Pretty panther, my brother here is very scarred. Our daddy, our sweet, sweet daddy, made us call him ‘sir.’ Even when we had the flu and were throwing up in our pressed pajamas, it was, ‘sir, I am so sorry for puking, sir.’ Oh, panther cat, guess what my sweet daddy did to my dumb brother once?”

“Brad, if you don’t shut your shit-spewing mouth right now…” Blink. Blink. Blink, blink, blink.

Brad interrupted with a deafening two-palm slam on the table. The glass teardrop chandelier shook as he stood to lean into a scream.

“Oh, brother, you will shut up,” Brad said, wielding a pointing knife across the table while audibly sucking a shard of meat from his teeth with his tongue.

My captor shut up. Brad sat down and scrunched his nose in a kitten smile to me.

Hmm, strange dynamic. The feminine twin has power over the fat slob twin
. I leaned a fraction closer to Brad, perhaps wanting to forge an unconscious partnership in his mind.

“Brother, brother, brother, so touchy. Tsk, Tsk.” Brad said “touchy” in a higher octave. “Panther cat, listen to this, my sweet baby brother, he had trouble keeping our daddy’s curfew. Oh Daddy, he kept his time on a military watch—one he had since he’d been corporal—and well, I was real good about being punctual. I was Daddy’s favorite. Naturally.”

Brad said “naturally” while inspecting his nails, pleased with himself.

“Anyway, dipshit here, well, he’d miss deadlines by a minute here, thirty seconds there, come in all huffin’ and a’ puffin’ out of breath. One night when we were both eighteen—we’re twins, you know. One night when we were eighteen, the day after high school graduation, in fact, Daddy sent him to get us some milk and Sanka from the corner store. Daddy says, ‘Son, I’m timing you. This is your test. You be back here at 0700 hours and not a second after. You hear?’ And my dear brother goes, ‘Yes, sir,’ which was the right answer. So boy goes running out the door. Me and Daddy watch him tear down the street, and Daddy gnarls under his breath, ‘He’s worthless. Slouch. Running like a moron.’ Something musta happen down at the store though. What was it, brother? What made you a whole two minutes late?”

Pause.

Brothers staring each other into death. Sweat pouring down my captor’s jowels.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Hatred between two men, twins.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

I caged my belly with my arms.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

“Doesn’t matter anyway. My dear, dumb brother walks in the door, and Daddy taps his watch and says, ‘Boy, it is exactly 0702. You’re two minutes late. You’re spending a year in the brig.’”

My captor dropped his fork. This time, however, he glared, no blinking, forcing all of his hatred on me, as though I was the one who sentenced him to the brig. It might have been
because I had stopped eating, stalled enthralled, staring at Brad to feed me more of this story. I fought back asking,
what brig?

“Panthy panther, you know what the brig was? Oh, of course you don’t. Although my brother wailed and begged, Daddy dragged him down the basement stairs, flung open a false wall, pushed him inside a jail cell we’d built the summer before, and locked the door. Was my job to bring ol’ dumb nuts his meals. I really put a lot of care into his food, panther. So, so important to stay healthy when you’re confined. Daddy’s lesson. I hope brother here is feeding you fine. Is he now? Giving you your meals?”

“Yes, sir.” I didn’t look to my captor. I didn’t care to collect his approval.

“If he doesn’t, I’ll step in and take over. So tell me, panther, for real, he’s giving you your meals, yes?”

I don’t want you to step in. I don’t want to start my calculations over. Can’t start over with a new routine. Too late. I’m so close to execution day. No, I will not have you step in
.

“Yes, sir.”

“Sweety, sweetypie, just a’runnin’ a well-oiled ship,” Brad said and clapped like a wind-up monkey with cymbals.

“Anyway, back to my story. Cranky-pants didn’t leave his cell for one full year. Released at exactly 0702, one year later on the nose.” Brad touched his nose. “Every day, Daddy made him write, ‘The devil keeps my time. He has me under his heel when I’m late.’ He filled up 365 notebooks, one a day, with that phrase. When my brother here was set ‘free at last, free at last,’ boy turns to Daddy and says, ‘Thank you, sir,’ which was the right answer.”

My jailer had not released his stare-down on me. His menacing meditation had switched to some deeper level of evil, now that I knew the source of his darkness. Blink. Blink. Blink. His look said he would show no mercy because he didn’t want my pity—pity would mean he was weakened and his daddy was wrong. Blink. Blink. Blink. Pity said he wasn’t good enough,
a lower creature. His blinking burrowed a bit of fear in me, something that took a solid ten seconds to bite back and switch off. And switch off again. Blink. Blink.

Someone pushed my plate.

“Eat your vegetables, pantheon, we need you healthy,” Brad said.

“Eat your food because I’m about ready to carve that baby out of you,” my captor said.

Brad did not rebuke him. Instead, he nodded his head in agreement.

I took a sip of the milk Brad had poured me, wishing I could grab the steak knife under his upturned pinky and jam the blade into his scarf-enshrined neck. The red would blend nicely with the purple silk, I thought.

When dinner was done and cleared, Brad pranced out and back in with a slice of apple pie, just for me. “Panthy pantherton, take this pie on up to your room. And thanks for having this little dinny-poo with me. I like to meet our product-keepers, here and there.” He flopped his free hand to and fro on the “here” and the “there.”

Product-keeper? You mean, a girl-with-child? You mean, a mother? You’re so sick, I can’t even get mad. Sick. So sick it’s hilarious
.

When Brad lifted his hand to rub my earlobe between his thumb and index finger, I contemplated knocking him off his balance and using his forward motion by pulling and twisting his arm so he flipped on his back—all from his very own physics; then I would crush his windpipe with my heel, my physics. Just like my daddy-poo taught me. Once that maneuver was complete, I’d swiftly grab the fire poker at my left flank to impale my captor who would be standing stunned. But again, my condition dampened any chances of this obvious and easy solution, so I took hold of the apple pie as it was offered.

I marched half-blinded, bagged again, carrying my Americana dessert up to my cell, my captor at my back.

Normally he would have shoved me inside. This time he stopped, taking me in from his standing state. “You look at me
like I’m beneath you, bitch. Since Day One, you don’t blink. Let me tell you something, I will gut you. You will not win. Don’t go grinning over that little story my brother told you.”

He left me on this pleasant bedtime wish. Tucked me in with his twinkling, gnashing grin.

I better behave so he sticks with his established patterns
.

As expected, at 7:30 a.m., the smell of baking bread knocked me into my fourth Kitchen People cooking day. Along came the rattle of the shaking floor—the moving ceiling fan below—and the whirs and the churns of their spinning mixer. In my mind’s eye, the apple-green appliance whipped up a batch of brownies. A cloud of baking chocolate filled the room and lingered high in the rafters, making way for the scent of melting cheese and a buttery crust. My nose twitched, my mouth watered, my stomach grumbled. Oh, but to have been afforded a lick of the bowl and a quick nibble of the pie as it came out of the oven. I cowered in a curved position on my jail bed, not wanting to make one single noise. My captor coughed in the hall, his back against the door, which banged with his every wheeze. He’d shown me his gun again earlier in the morning when he threw me and the bucket on the bed. “Stay the fuck put, not one fucking sound, or baby gets a bullet today,” he had said.

The barrel of the gun was on my navel, likely on my baby’s head. Asshole very well could have pulled the trigger for the freezing chill I felt even after he’d left. I didn’t even twitch, shuddering mentally at the thought of metal gorging through my child, a horrid hallucination that would not retreat, like the incessant buzzing of a mosquito.

Sitting here seventeen years later, I have this quote I wrote to myself and taped above my desk: “Whatever you’re waiting for, be ready.” What I mean by this is, if you’re waiting for something,
don’t really wait for it, take the steps to put it in place. One stone, one layer of mortar, another stone, one step at a time toward your goal’s pyramid. Emotion by emotion. Brick by brick. The quote is a constant reminder to myself to live as though whatever I am waiting for is absolutely coming true, regardless of doubt, laws of physics, or worst of all, time.

Time, ticking time, like relentless water over a sharp rock, it dulls resolve. In the dip of the middle, when the seconds pound out their slow-witted mockery, one must think of any knot untied, any map not yet triple-checked, any shadow not yet measured, any task, any task, any, any God-loving task will do, so long as it is toward that one goal—whatever you’re waiting for.

Many an afternoon of mine were almost comatic in the dip of the drip, drip trickle of time. I couldn’t think of any more tasks and I’d turn catatonic, staring at my rough-hewn, barn-board jail cell wall. The beams became tree limbs, the ceiling a white-cloud sky. Then a trumpet call crack of the floor and him moving beyond would rouse me to rummage my mind for a task. With none found, I’d turn to the only routine to give me solace: practice. Whatever I was waiting for required practice, then practice again, then practice ten more times, and to start over a thousand more times.

I love Olympians. Especially solo Olympians who fight not for a team, but their very own souls. The swimmers, the track stars. And I’m a sucker for the back-stories detailing their grueling four a.m. workouts lasting to midnight. Like a Jack-in-the-Box, these athletes pop up and deflate, pop up, deflate, up, down, up, down, up, down, never lifting their feet firmly implanted in the box. At long last the bell blows, the gun fires, and off they go—muscles beating water, pumping over hurdles, splash they’re gone, flash they’re gone. Darting like a stingray past soggy competitors. Bolting beyond the speed of light. Whenever the expected champion wins, I literally scream my approval. They worked for it. They deserve it. Cream rises to the top, especially the self-stirring cream. Driven, determined, dedicated, death-defying, competition-obsessed—the game, they play, to win. I love every one of them.

On Day 30, I lay on my bed, waiting on the Kitchen People to leave so I could resume my practicing and stop the circular daymare of bullets in babies.

Around eleven, there was the familiar kissing-of-the-ass between my bakers and my jailer. As acid rose in my throat, I dry-heaved my displeasure onto my coverlet. But instead of melting somewhere else into the house like he normally did, as soon as the door shut, he pounded back up the stairs toward my room. This was not part of the routine. I hated any shift in my daily plan. A warm sweat rose on the back of my neck. Acid burned my throat. My heart returned to the beat of a hummingbird once again.

In he burst with his customary agitation.

“Get up,” he said.

I got up.

“Put these on.” He threw an old pair of Nikes at my feet. They were two sizes too big. I put them on and tied tight.
Asset #32, a pair of running shoes. Wait, where are my shoes? Have I been without them this whole time? How did I not notice?

“Move,” he said, the gun at my back. We resumed the same gunman’s shuffle we had had the first night of our arrival, me in front, him behind, me not having a clue as to where we were going. The only difference was, I was not bagged or blindfolded this time.