The World According To Garp (52 page)

Oren led Hope behind the barn where the corn spilled out of the silo. Some piglets, barely bigger than kittens, were playing in it. They scattered when Oren started the black pickup. Hope started to cry.

“Are you going to let me go?” she asked Oren.

“I ain’t had you yet,” he said.

Hope’s bare feet were cold and black with the spring muck. “My feet hurt,” she said. “Where are we going?”

She’d seen an old blanket in the back of the pickup, matted and flecked with straw.
That’s
where she imagined she was going: into the cornfields, then spread on the spongy spring ground—and when it was over and her throat was slit, and she’d been disemboweled with the fisherman’s knife, he’d wrap her up in the blanket that was lumped stiffly on the floor of the pickup as if it covered some stillborn livestock.

“I got to find a good place to
have
you,” said Oren Rath. “I would of kept you at home, but I’d of had to share you.”

Hope Standish was trying to figure out the foreign machinery of Oren Rath. He did not
work
like the human beings she was accustomed to. “What you’re doing is wrong,” she said.

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “It
ain’t
.”

“You’re going to rape me,” Hope said. “That’s wrong.”

“I just want to
have
you,” he said. He hadn’t bothered to tie her to the glove compartment this time. There was nowhere she could go. They were driving only on those mile-long plots of county roads, driving slowly west in little squares, the way a knight advances on a chessboard: one square ahead, two sideways, one sideways, two ahead. It seemed purposeless to Hope, but then she wondered if he didn’t know the roads so very well that he knew how to cover a considerable distance without ever passing through a town. They saw only the signposts for towns, and although they couldn’t have moved more than thirty miles from the university, she didn’t recognize any of the names: Coldwater, Hills, Fields, Plainview. Maybe they
aren’t
towns, she thought, but only crude labels for the natives who lived here—identifying the land for them, as if they didn’t know the simple words for the things they saw every day.

“You don’t have any right to do this to me,” Hope said.

“Shit,” he said. He pumped his brakes hard, throwing her forward against the truck’s solid dashboard. Her forehead bounced off the windshield, the back of her hand was mashed against her nose. She felt something like a small muscle or a very light bone give way in her chest. Then he tromped on the accelerator and tossed her back into the seat. “I hate arguing,” he said.

Her nose bled; she sat with her head forward, in her hands, and the blood dripped on her thighs. She sniffed a little; the blood dripped over her lip and filmed her teeth. She tipped her head back so that she could taste it. For some reason, it calmed her—it helped her to think. She knew there was a rapidly blueing knot on her forehead, swelling under her smooth skin. When she ran her hand up to her face and touched the lump, Oren Rath looked at her and laughed. She spit at him—a thin phlegm laced pink with blood. It caught his cheek and ran down to the collar of her husband’s flannel shirt. His hand, as flat and broad as the sole of a boot, reached for her hair. She grabbed his forearm with both her hands, she jerked his wrist to her mouth and bit into the soft part where the hairs don’t always grow and the blue tubes carry the blood.

She meant to kill him in this impossible way but she barely had time to break the skin. His arm was so strong that he snapped her body upright and across his lap. He pushed the back of her neck against the steering wheel—the horn blew through her head—and he broke her nose with the heel of his left hand. Then he returned that hand to the wheel. He cradled her head with his right hand, holding her face against his stomach; when he felt that she wasn’t struggling, he let her head rest on his thigh. His hand lightly cupped her ear, as if to hold the sound of the horn inside her. She kept her eyes shut against the pain in her nose.

He made several left turns, more right turns. Each turn, she knew, meant they had driven one mile. His hand now cupped the back of her neck. She could hear again, and she felt his fingers working their way into her hair. The front of her face felt numb.

“I don’t want to kill you,” he said.

“
Don’t
, then,” Hope said.

“Got to,” Oren Rath told her. “After we do it, I’ll
have
to.”

This affected her like the taste of her own blood. She knew he didn’t care for arguing. She saw that she had lost a step: her rape. He was going to do it to her. She had to consider that it was done. What mattered now was
living
; she knew that meant outliving him. She knew that meant getting him caught, or getting him killed, or killing him.

Against her cheek, she felt the change in his pocket; his blue jeans were soft and sticky with farm dust and machine grease. His belt buckle dug into her forehead; her lips touched the oily leather of his belt. The fisherman’s knife was kept in a sheath, she knew. But where was the sheath? She couldn’t see it; she didn’t dare to hunt for it with her hands. Suddenly, against her eye, she felt his penis stiffening. She felt then—for really the first time—almost paralyzed, panicked beyond helping herself, no longer able to sort out the priorities. Once again, it was Oren Rath who helped her.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “Your kid got away. I was going to kill the kid, too, you know.”

The logic of Oren Rath’s peculiar version of sanity made everything sharpen for Hope; she heard the other cars. There were not many, but every few minutes or so there was a car passing. She wished she could see, but she knew they were not as isolated as they had been.
Now
, she thought, before he gets to where we’re going—if he even knows where we’re going. She thought he did. At least, before he gets off this road—before I’m somewhere, again, where there aren’t any people.

Oren Rath shifted in his seat. His erection was making him uncomfortable. Hope’s warm face in his lap, his hand in her hair, was reaching him.
Now
, Hope thought. She moved her cheek against his thigh, just slightly; he did not stop her. She moved her face in his lap as if she were making herself more comfortable, against a pillow—against his
prick
, she knew. She moved until the bulge under his rank pants rose untouched by her face. But she could reach it with her breath; it stuck up out of his lap near her mouth, and she began to breathe on it. It hurt too much to breathe out of her nose. She drew her lips into an O-shaped kiss, she focused her breathing, and, very softly, she blew.

Oh, Nicky, she thought. And Dorsey, her husband. She would see them again, she hoped. To Oren Rath she gave her warm, careful breath. On him she focused her one, cold thought: I’m going to
get
you, you son of a bitch.

It was apparent that the sexual experience of Oren Rath had not previously involved such subtleties as Hope’s directed breathing. He tried to move her head in his lap so that he would once again have contact with her hot face but at the some time he didn’t want to disturb her soft breath. What she was doing made him want
more
contact, but it was excruciating to imagine losing the teasing contact he now had. He began to squirm. Hope didn’t hurry. It was his movement that finally brought the bulge of sour jeans to touch her lips. She closed them there, but didn’t move her mouth. Oren Rath felt only a hot wind passing through the crude weave of his clothes; he groaned. A car approached, then passed him; he corrected the truck. He was aware he was beginning to wander across the center of the road.

“What are you doing?” he asked Hope. She, very lightly, applied her teeth to his swollen clothes. He brought his knee up, pumped the brake, jarred her head, hurt her nose. He forced his hand between her face and his lap. She thought he was going to really hurt her but he was struggling with his zipper. “I’ve seen pictures of this,” he told her.

“Let me,” she said. She had to sit up just a little to get his fly open. She wanted to get a look at where they were; they were still out in the country, of course, but there were pointed lines on the road. She took him out of his pants and into her mouth without looking at him.

“Shit,” he said. She thought she would gag; she was afraid she would be sick. Then she got him into the back of her cheek where she thought she could take a lot of time. He was sitting so stiffly still, but trembling, that she knew he was already far beyond even his imaginary experiences. That steadied Hope; it gave her confidence, and a sense of time. She went ahead with it very slowly, listening for other cars. She could tell he had slowed down. At the first sign she had that he was leaving this road, she would have to change her plans. Could I bite the damn thing off? she wondered. But she thought that she probably couldn’t—at least, not quickly enough.

Then two trucks went by them, closely following each other; in the distance she thought she heard another car’s horn. She started working faster—he raised his lap higher. She thought their truck had speeded up. A car passed them—awfully close, she thought. Its horn blared at them. “Fuck you!” Oren Rath yelled after it; he was beginning to jounce up and down in the seat, hurting Hope’s nose. Hope now had to be careful not to hurt him; she wanted to hurt him very much. Just make him lose his head, she encouraged herself.

Suddenly there was the sound of gravel spraying the underside of the truck. She closed her mouth fast around him. But they were neither crashing nor turning off the road; he was pulling abruptly to the roadside and stopping. The truck stalled out. He put both his hands on either side of her face; his thighs hardened and slapped against her jaw. I’m going to choke on it, she thought, but he was lifting her face up, out of his lap. “No! No!” he cried. A truck, flinging tiny stones, tore by them and cut into his words. “I don’t have the
thing
on,” he said to her. “If you have any germs, they’ll swim right up me.”

Hope sat on her knees, her lips hot and sore, her nose throbbing. He was going to put on a rubber, but when he tore it from its little tinfoil package, he stared at it as if it wasn’t at all what he expected to see—as if he thought they were bright green! As if he didn’t know how to put it on. “Take your dress off,” he said; he was embarrassed that she was looking at him. She could see the cornfields on either side of the road, and the back side of a billboard a few yards away from them. But there were no houses, no signs, no intersecting roads. No cars and trucks were coming. She thought her heart would simply stop.

Oren Rath tore himself out of her husband’s shirt; he threw it out his window; Hope saw it flap in the road. He scraped his boots off on the brake pedal, whacking his narrow blond knees on the steering wheel. “Shove over!” he said. She was wedged against the passenger-side door. She knew—even if she could get out the door—that she couldn’t outrun him. She didn’t have any shoes—and his feet appeared to have a dog’s rough pads.

He was having trouble with his pants; he clutched the rolled-up rubber in his teeth. Then he was naked—he’d flung his pants somewhere—and he shoved the rubber down over himself as if his penis were no more sensitive than a turtle’s leathery tail. She was trying to unbutton her dress and her tears were coming back, though she was fighting them, when he suddenly caught her dress and began to yank it over her head; it caught on her arms. He jerked her elbows painfully behind her back.

He was too long to fit in the cab. One door had to be open. She reached for the handle over her head but he bit her in the neck. “No!” he hollered. He thrashed his feet around—she saw his shin was bleeding; he’d cut it on the rim of the horn—and his hard heels struck the door handle on the driver’s side. With both feet, he launched the door open. She saw the gray smear of the road over his shoulder—his long ankles stuck out into the traffic lane, but there was no traffic now. Her head hurt; she was jammed against the door. She had to wriggle herself back down the seat, farther under him, and her movement made him yell something unintelligible. She felt his rubbered prick slipping over her stomach. Then his whole body braced and he bit into her shoulder fiercely. He’d come!

“Shit!” he cried. “I
done
it already!”

“No,” she said, hugging him. “No, you can do
more
.” She knew that if he thought he was through with her, he would kill her.

“Much more,” she said in his ear, which smelled like dust. She had to wet her fingers to wet herself. God, I’ll never get him inside me, she thought, but when she found him with her hand, she knew that the rubber was the lubricated kind.

“Oh,” he said. He lay still on top of her; he seemed surprised by where she’d put him, as if he didn’t really know what was where. “Oh,” he repeated.

Oh, what now? Hope wondered. She held her breath. A car, a flash of red, whined past their open door—the horn blast and some muffled, derisive hoots fading away from them. Of course, she thought: we look like two farmers fucking off the side of the road; it’s probably done all the time. No one will stop, she thought, unless it’s the police. She imagined a bread-faced trooper appearing over Roth’s lurching shoulder, writing out a ticket. “Not on the road, buddy,” he’d be saying. And when she screamed at him, “Rape! He’s
raping
me,” the trooper would wink at Oren Rath.

The bewildered Rath seemed to be feeling rather cautiously for something inside her. If he’s just come, Hope thought, how much time do I have before he comes again? But he seemed more like a goat than a human to her, and the babylike gurgle in his throat, hot against her ear, seemed close to the last sound she imagined she’d hear.

She looked at everything she could see. The keys dangling from the ignition were too for to reach; and what could she do with a set of keys? Her back hurt and she pushed her hand against the dashboard to try to shift his weight on her; this excited him and made him grunt against her. “Don’t move,” he said; she tried to do what he said. “Oh,” he said, approvingly. “That’s real good. I’ll kill you quick. You won’t even know it. You just do like that, and I’ll kill you good.”