The World According To Garp (51 page)

“I can still see him,” Helen whispered, later.

“All the time,” Garp said. “I know.”

“I just shut my eyes,” said Helen.

“Right,” Garp said. “I know.”

But Duncan said it best. Duncan said that sometimes it was as if his missing right eye was not entirely gone. “It’s like I can still see out of it, sometimes,” Duncan said. “But it’s like memory, it’s not real—what I see.”

“Maybe it’s become the eye you see your dreams with,” Garp told him.

“Sort of,” Duncan said. “But it seems so real.”

“It’s your
imaginary
eye,” Garp said. “That can be very real.”

“It’s the eye I can still see Walt with,” Duncan said. “You know?”

“I know,” Garp said.

Many wrestlers’ children have hardy necks, but not all the children of wrestlers have necks that are hardy enough.

For Duncan and Helen, now, Garp seemed to have an endless reservoir of gentleness; for a year, he spoke softly to them; for a year, he was never impatient with them. They must have grown impatient with his delicacy. Jenny Fields noticed that the three of them needed a year to nurse each other.

In that year, Jenny wondered, what did they do with the
other
feelings human beings have? Helen hid them; Helen was very strong. Duncan saw them only with his missing eye. And Garp? He was strong, but not that strong. He wrote a novel called
The World According to Bensenhaver
, into which all his
other
feelings flew.

When Garp’s editor, John Wolf, read the first chapter of
The World According to Bensenhaver
, he wrote to Jenny Fields. “What in hell is going on out there?” Wolf wrote to Jenny, “It is as if Garp’s grief has made his heart perverse.”

But T. S. Garp felt guided by an impulse as old as Marcus Aurelius, who had the wisdom and the urgency to note that “in the life of a man, his time is but a moment…his sense a dim rushlight.”

HOPE
STANDISH
was at home with her son, Nicky, when Oren Rath walked into the kitchen. She was drying the dishes and she saw immediately the long, thin-bladed fisherman’s knife with the slick cutting edge and the special, saw-toothed edge that they call a disgorger-scaler. Nicky was not yet three; he still ate in a high chair, and he was eating his breakfast when Oren Rath stepped up behind him and nudged the ripper teeth of his fisherman’s knife against the child’s throat.

“Set them dishes aside,” he told Hope. Mrs. Standish did as she was told. Nicky gurgled at the stranger; the knife was just a tickle under his chin.

“What do you want?” Hope asked. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

“You sure will,” said Oren Rath. “What’s your name?”

“Hope.”

“Mine’s Oren.”

“That’s a nice name,” Hope told him.

Nicky couldn’t turn in the high chair to see the stranger who was tickling his throat. He had wet cereal on his fingers, and when he reached for Oren Rath’s hand, Rath stepped up beside the high chair and touched the fine, slicing edge of his fisherman’s blade to the fleshy pouch of the boy’s cheek. He made a quick cut there, as if he were briefly outlining the child’s cheekbone. Then he stepped back to observe Nicky’s surprised face, his simple cry; a thread thin line of blood appeared, like the stitching for a pocket, on the boy’s cheek. It was as if the child had suddenly developed a gill.

“I mean business,” said Oren Rath. Hope started toward Nicky but Rath waved her back. “He don’t need you. He just don’t care for his cereal. He wants a cookie.” Nicky bowled.

“He’ll choke on it, when he’s crying,” Hope said.

“You want to argue with me?” said Oren Rath. “You want to talk about choking? I’ll cut his pecker off and stuff it down his throat—if you want to talk about choking.”

Hope gave Nicky a zwieback and he stopped crying.

“You see?” said Oren Rath. He picked up the high chair with Nicky in it and hugged it to his chest. “We’re going to the bedroom now,” he said; he nodded to Hope. “You first.”

They went down the hall together. The Standish family lived in a ranch house then; with a new baby, they had agreed ranch houses were safer in the case of a fire. Hope went into the bedroom and Oren Rath put down the high chair with Nicky in it, just outside the bedroom door. Nicky had almost stopped bleeding; there was just a little blood on his cheek; Oren Rath wiped this off with his hand, then wiped his hand on his pants. Then he stepped into the bedroom after Hope. When he closed the door, Nicky started to cry.

“Please,” Hope said. “He really might choke, and he knows how to get out of that high chair—or it might tip over. He doesn’t like to be alone.”

Oren Rath went to the night table and slashed through the phone cord with his fisherman’s knife as easily as a man halving a very ripe pear. “You don’t want to argue with me,” he said.

Hope sat down on the bed. Nicky was crying, but not hysterically; it sounded as if he might stop. Hope started crying, too.

“Just take off your clothes,” Oren said. He helped her undress. He was tall and reddish-blond, his hair as lank and as close to his head as high grass beaten down by a flood. He smelled like silage and Hope remembered the turquoise pickup she’d noticed in the driveway, just before he appeared in her kitchen. “You’ve even got a rug in the bedroom,” he said to her. He was thin but muscular; his hands were large and clumsy, like the feet of a puppy who’s going to be a big dog. His body seemed almost hairless, but he was so pale, so very blond, that his hair was hard to see against his skin.

“Do you know my husband?” Hope asked him.

“I know when he’s home and when he ain’t,” Rath said. “Listen,” he said suddenly; Hope held her breath. “You hear? Your kid don’t even mind it.” Nicky was murmuring vowel sounds outside the bedroom door, talking wetly to his zwieback. Hope began crying harder. When Oren Rath touched her, awkward and fast, she thought she was so dry that she wouldn’t even get big enough for his horrible finger.

“Please wait,” she said.

“No arguing with me.”

“No, I mean I can help you,” she said. She wanted him in and out of her as fast as possible; she was thinking of Nicky in the high chair in the hall. “I can make it nicer, I mean,” she said, unconvincingly; she did not know how to say what she was saying. Oren Rath grabbed one of her breasts in such a way that Hope knew he had never touched a breast before; his hand was so cold, she flinched. In his awkwardness, he butted her in the mouth with the top of his head.

“No arguing,” he grunted.

“Hope!” someone called. They both heard it and froze. Oren Rath gaped at the cut phone cord.

“Hope?”

It was Margot, a neighbor and a friend. Oren Rath touched the cool, flat blade of his knife to Hope’s nipple.

“She’s going to walk right in here,” Hope whispered. “She’s a good friend.”

“My God, Nicky,” they could hear Margot say, “I see you’re eating all over the house. Is your mother getting dressed?”

“I’ll have to fuck you both and kill everybody,” whispered Oren Rath. Hope scissored his waist with her good legs and hugged him, knife and all, to her breasts. “Margot!” she screamed. “Grab Nicky and run!
Please!
” she shrieked. “There’s a crazy man who’s going to kill us all! Take Nicky, take Nicky!”

Oren Rath lay stiffly against her as if it were the first time he’d ever been hugged. He did not struggle, he did not use his knife. They both lay rigid and listened to Margot dragging Nicky down the hall and out the kitchen door. One leg of the high chair was snapped off against the refrigerator, but Margot didn’t stop to remove Nicky from the chair until she was half a block down the street and kicking open her own door. “Don’t kill me,” Hope whispered. “Just go, quickly, and you’ll get away. She’s calling the police, right now.”

“Get dressed,” said Oren Rath. “I ain’t had you yet, and I’m going to.” Where he’d butted her with the oval crown of his head, he had split her lip against her teeth and made her bleed. “I mean business,” he repeated, but uncertainly. He was as rough-boned and graceless as a young steer. He made her put her dress on without any underwear, he shoved her barefoot down the hall, carrying his boots under his arm. Hope didn’t realize until she was beside him in the pickup that he had put on one of her husband’s flannel shirts.

“Margot has probably written down the license number of this truck,” she told him. She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself; she dabbed at her split lip with the broad, floppy collar of her dress. Oren Rath stiff-armed her in the ear, rapping the far side of her head off the passenger door of the cab.

“I need that mirror to see,” he said. “Don’t mess around or I’ll really hurt you.” He’d taken her bra with him and he used it to tie her wrists to the thick, rusty hinges of the glove-compartment door, which gaped open at her.

He drove as if he were in no special hurry to get out of town. He did not seem impatient when he got stuck at the long traffic light near the university. He watched all the pedestrians crossing the street; he shook his head and clucked his tongue when he saw how some of the students were dressed. Hope could see her husband’s office window from where she sat in the truck’s cab, but she didn’t know if he would be in his office or actually, at that moment, teaching a class.

In fact, he was in his office—four floors up. Dorsey Standish looked out his window and saw the lights change; the traffic was allowed to flow, the hordes of marching students were temporarily restrained at the gates to the crosswalks. Dorsey Standish liked watching traffic. There are many foreign and flashy cars in a university town, but here these cars were contrasted with the vehicles of the natives: farmers’ trucks, slat-sided conveyors of pigs and cattle, strange harvesting machinery, everything muddy from the farms and county roads. Standish knew nothing about farms, but he was fascinated by the animals and the machines—especially the dangerous, baffling vehicles. There went one, now, with a chute—for what?—and a latticework of cables that pulled or suspended something heavy. Standish liked to try to visualize how everything worked.

Below him a lurid turquoise pickup moved ahead with the traffic; its fenders were pockmarked, its grille bashed in and black with mashed flies and—Standish imagined—the heads of imbedded birds. In the cab beside the driver Dorsey Standish thought he saw a pretty woman—something about her hair and profile reminded him of Hope, and a flash of the woman’s dress struck him as a color his wife liked to wear. But he was four floors up; the truck was past him, and the cab’s rear window was so thickly caked with mud that he couldn’t glimpse more of her. Besides, it was time for his nine-thirty class. Dorsey Standish decided it was unlikely that a woman riding in such an ugly truck would be at all pretty.

“I bet your husband is screwing his students all the time,” said Oren Rath. His big hand, with the knife, lay in Hope’s lap.

“No, I don’t think so,” Hope said.

“Shit, you don’t know
nothing
,” he said. “I’m going to fuck you so good you won’t even want it to stop.”

“I don’t care what you do,” Hope told him. “You can’t hurt my baby now.”

“I can do things to
you
,” said Oren Rath. “Lots of things.”

“Yes. You mean business,” Hope said, mockingly.

They were driving into the farm country. Rath didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “I’m not as crazy as you think.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” Hope lied. “I think you’re just a dumb, horny kid who’s never been laid.”

Oren Rath must have felt at this moment that his advantage of terror was slipping away from him, fast. Hope was seeking
any
advantage she might find, but she didn’t know if Oren Rath was sane enough to be humiliated.

They turned off the county road, up a long dirt driveway toward a farmhouse whose windows were blurred with plastic insulation; the scruffy lawn was strewn with tractor parts and other metal trash. The mailbox said: R, R, W, E and O
RATH
.

These Raths were not related to the famous sausage Raths, but it appeared that they were pig farmers. Hope saw a series of outbuildings, gray and slanted with rusted roofs. On the ramp by the brown barn a full-grown sow lay on her side, breathing with difficulty; beside the pig were two men who looked to Hope like mutants of the same mutation that had produced Oren Rath.

“I want the black truck, now,” Oren said to them. “People are out looking for this one.” He used his knife matter-of-factly to slice through the bra that bound Hope’s wrists to the glove compartment.

“Shit,” one of the men said.

The other man shrugged; he had a red blotch on his face—a kind of birthmark, which was the color and nubbled surface of a raspberry. In fact, that is what his family called him: Raspberry Roth. Fortunately, Hope didn’t know this.

They had not looked at Oren or at Hope. The hard-breathing sow shattered the barnyard calm with a rippling fart. “Shit, there she goes again,” the man without the birthmark said; except for his eyes,
his
face was more or less normal. His name was Weldon.

Raspberry Rath read the label on a brown bottle he held out toward the pig like a drink: ““May produce excessive gas and flatulence”, it says.”

“Don’t say anything about producing a pig like
this
,” Weldon said.

“I need the black truck,” Oren said.

“Well, the key’s in it, Oren,” said Weldon Rath. “If you think you can manage by yourself.”

Oren Rath shoved Hope toward the black pickup. Raspberry was holding the bottle of pig medicine and staring at Hope when she said to him, “He’s kidnapping me. He’s going to rape me. The police are already looking for him.”

Raspberry kept staring at Hope, but Weldon turned to Oren. “I hope you ain’t doing nothing too stupid,” he said.

“I ain’t,” Oren said. The two men now turned their total attention to the pig.

“I’d wait another hour and then give her another squirt,” Raspberry said. “Ain’t we seen enough of the vet this week?” He scratched the mud-smeared neck of the sow with the toe of his boot; the sow farted.