Tony and Susan (3 page)

‘I’m not going to leave my family.’

‘I said, mister, you ain’t got no choice.’

So now the coercion was overt. With Ray’s two partners, one with his foot in the door of Tony’s car, looking at Ray waiting for some decision or order what to do. The man thought a while. He released Tony and said, ‘You go with Lou.’

When Ray went over to Tony’s car, Tony tried to follow, but the man with the beard touched him. ‘Better not,’ he said. He had something in his hand, Tony could not tell what. Tony shook him off and went after Ray. He saw the man with his foot in the door reach inside to unlock the back, which Helen sitting there tried to prevent. He saw a struggle with Helen trying to bite the hand of the man with glasses, who got the door open and got in. He ran after Ray thinking I’ll hit him in the back, I’ll knock him down and get in the car, but something heavy sliced across his shins, he plunged forward and fell with hands and knees scraping the pavement, his chin hit, and he looked up and saw Ray getting into the driver’s seat.

With a violent roar the car started up, then a shriek of the tires as it pulled onto the highway and sped away. He saw the horrified faces of his wife and daughter looking at him as the car rushed by, and he heard the rushed diminuendo of the car’s speed as it went down the road, the little red lights shrinking and getting closer together until they were gone.

For a few moments then there was only the silence of the woods and some distant roar of a truck almost indistinguishable from silence, while Tony looked down the invisible road where all he loved had disappeared, trying to find some way to deny what the words in his mind said had happened.

The man with the beard, whose name was Lou, was looking down at him. He held the tire iron in his hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’d better get in the car.’

Susan is shocked. They have kidnapped Tony’s family while she, helpless, anticipated everything. She resists, she should have prevented it. They should have got into the car when Helen ran up the road, driven off before the men could react, picked her up as they went by. They knocked him down, tripped him up. They blocked him just as Edward is blocking her. She watches Tony’s car disappear down the road with its precious load and shares his shame and dread.

She wakes up in the warm small living room, the game in the next room, a long way from that roadside wilderness. She feels a gap, someone missing. Not Arnold, she knows where he is. It’s Rosie, my child Rosie, where is she? The cold night shoots an icicle of panic through her heart, why isn’t she here? But Susan Morrow knows where Rosie is, she’s spending the night with Carol. So that’s not it. As for Arnold in his bamboo underground lounge. Relaxing (not with Marilyn Linwood) with Dr. Oldfriend and Dr. Famous and Dr. Newcomer and Dr. Medstud after a day of papers and panel discussions.

She would like to know, do such terrible things actually happen? She hears Edward’s answer: you read it in the papers every day. Her dear ex-husband has plans for us. She dreads Edward’s plans, but she’s not afraid.

‘You drive,’ the man named Lou said.

‘Me?’

‘Yeah you.’

The peculiarity of a stranger’s car, the wounded metal of the screeching door, the driver’s seat with torn seat back, the floor pedals too close. The man handed him the key. Tony Hastings was trembling, frantic with haste, he groped for the ignition. ‘To your right,’ the man said. The car didn’t want to start, and when Tony finally put it in gear it was long since he had driven with a manual shift, and the car stalled.

There was Lou beside him, the man with the black beard, not saying anything. When Tony finally got going he drove as fast as he could, with plenty of speed in this car, rattling and squealing in the wind, but he knew with despair that mere speed would not catch the tail lights of the other car with their big start.

The luminous green sign for an exit. He eased up. The second sign specified Bear Valley and Grant Center. ‘This exit?’ he asked.

‘I dunno, I guess so.’

‘Is this the way to Bailey? Why doesn’t the sign say Bailey?’

‘What you want Bailey for?’

‘Isn’t that where we’re going? Isn’t that where we’re going to report?’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right,’ Lou said.

‘Well, is this the way?’ They had come to the beginning of the exit ramp, and were almost stopped.

‘Yeah, I guess so.’

A stop sign. ‘Left or right?’ The road was rural. There was a darkened gas station, and black fields merging into woods.

It took the man a while to decide. ‘Try right,’ he said.

‘I thought Bailey was the nearest town,’ Tony said. ‘How come the signs mention Bear Valley and Grant Center and not Bailey?’

‘That’s strange, ain’t it?’ the man said.

The road was narrow, winding through fields and patches of woods, up and down hills, past occasional darkened farmhouses. Tony drove as fast as he could, hitting the brakes for unexpected curves, chasing a car he could not see, while the distance extended to miles and more miles. In all that time, he met no other cars. They came to a reduced speed sign and another sign, CASPAR, and a small village all dark, nothing open. ‘There’s a telephone booth,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ Lou said.

He slowed down. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Where the hell is Bailey?’

‘Keep going,’ the man said.

A crossroads, a somewhat bigger road, a sign to WHITE CREEK, a cluster of garages and roadside restaurants and stores, all closed. ‘Left,’ Lou said, and they left that settlement behind too. A straightaway, then a fork, one road going down, they took the other, climbing again in hills and woods. ‘There’s the church,’ Lou murmured.

‘What?’ It was a small church in a clearing with a little white spire. The woods closed in on both sides of the road. There was a light-colored car parked in a turnout on a curve. It looked like his car, then he was sure, by God. ‘That’s my car!’ he said, and he stopped beyond it.

‘Don’t stop on the goddamn curve.’

‘That’s my car.’

Whatever it was, it was empty. There was a lane into the woods and a house trailer above among the trees with a dim light in one of its windows.

‘That ain’t your car,’ the man said.

Tony Hastings tried to back up to look at the license plate, but he had difficulty getting the car in reverse.

‘Don’t back on the curve, for Chrissake!’ Tony thought, I haven’t met a single car on the road since we left the Interstate. ‘That ain’t your car. Your car’s a four door.’

He looked. ‘Isn’t that?’

‘What’s the matter with you, can’t you see?’

Looking, trying to see the car beyond the man sitting on his right, who was telling him the car was not a four door, asking him to look and see for himself – he recognized panic distorting his judgment and perhaps his eyesight, and he resumed driving.

A winding road making a slow ascent through woods, then descending to a T intersection without signs, they turned right to climb some more. The man asked, ‘What made you think that car was yours?’

‘It looked like it.’

‘Ain’t nobody in it. What you think, they went to a party in that there trailer?’

‘I don’t know what to think.’

‘You scared, mister?’

‘I’d like to know where we’re going.’

‘You fraid my pals ain’t playing straight?’

‘I’d like to know where Bailey is.’

‘Well my pal Ray, it’s best to humor him, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Here, slow down here.’

The road was straight, with a deep ditch and woods on both sides.

‘Watch out, you gotta make a turn up here.’

‘What do you mean, there’s nothing here.’

‘Here it is, turn here.’ An unmarked dirt road, a lane into the woods to the right. Tony Hastings stopped the car. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.

‘You turn down here, like I said.’

‘The hell with you, I’m not going down that road.’

‘Listen mister. Nobody hates violence like I do.’

The man with the beard was leaning back in the passenger seat, arm over the seatback, relaxed, looking at Tony.

‘You want to see your wife and kid?’

The road, the lane, dwindled quickly to a narrow track with a grass ridge in the middle. It wound around big trees and rocky outcrops in the woods, while the car jounced and squeaked over rocks and pits. I have never been in a situation resembling this, Tony said to himself, nothing remotely this bad. He had a vague memory of what it was like to be hijacked by neighborhood boys bigger than himself, a memory which he created in order to prove how different this was, that nothing in all his civilized life had ever been anything like this.

‘What are you doing to us?’ he said.

The headlights flashed on the trunks of the trees sweeping from one to another as they turned. The man didn’t say anything.

Tony asked again: ‘What are you doing to us?’

‘Hell mister, I don’t know. Ask Ray.’

‘Ray isn’t here.’

‘He sure ain’t.’ The man laughed. ‘Well mister, I’ll tell you. I really don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. Like I said, it’s up to Ray.’

‘Did Ray tell you to bring me down this road?’

The man didn’t answer.

‘Ray’s a funny fellow,’ he said. ‘You got to admire him.’

‘You admire him? What for?’

‘His guts. He does what he’s got to do.’

‘I’ll tell you something,’ Tony said. ‘I don’t admire him. I don’t admire him one little bit.’ He wondered if the man with the beard would admire his guts for saying this.

‘Don’t worry. He don’t expect you to.’

‘He’d better not.’

He saw a fox standing in the leaves, colored jewels in its eyes, caught momentarily in the headlight flood before it turned and disappeared.

‘I don’t think you need to worry about your wife and kid.’

‘What do you mean?’ There were waves of shock in everything tonight. ‘What is there to worry about?’

‘You ain’t scared?’

‘Sure I’m scared. I’m scared as hell.’

‘Well I can see how you might be.’

‘What’s he doing with them? What does he want with them?’

‘Damned I know. He likes to see what he can do. Like I say, you don’t need to worry.’

‘You mean it’s all a game. A big practical joke.’

‘It ain’t exactly a game. I wouldn’t call it that.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘Hell mister, don’t ask me what he’s got up his sleeve. It’s always different. It’s always something new.’

‘Then why do you say I don’t have to worry?’

‘He ain’t never killed anybody yet, that’s all I mean. At least as far as I know he ain’t.’

The nature of this assurance gave Tony still another shock. ‘Killed! Are you talking about killing?’

‘I said he ain’t killed,’ Lou said. His voice was very quiet. ‘If you’d a listen to me, you’d hear what I was saying.’

They came to a clearing where the tracks of the road
disappeared into grass. ‘Well well,’ Lou said. ‘Looks like we run out of road.’ Tony stopped the car.

‘They ain’t here,’ he said. ‘Wonder if I made a mistake. Guess you’d better get out.’

‘Out? What for?’

‘It’s time for you to get out. Okay?’

‘Suppose you tell me why.’

‘We got trouble enough already. Just do what I say, right?’

In the case of muggings, the wisdom is not to resist, give up your wallet, don’t brazen it out against weapons. Tony Hastings was wondering about the opposite wisdom, at what point does nonresistance become suicide or practical acceptance negligence? Where in the events of the just past was the moment when he could have seized the advantage, or was such a moment still possible?

Two men in the front seat of a car: the one on the right tells the one in the driver’s seat to get out, the other resists. The one in the driver’s seat is in his forties, academic, sedentary, his mind sees many things, but he has not been in a fight since childhood and cannot remember winning one. The other man has a black beard, wears blue jeans, and seems sure of himself. The sedentary man has no weapons except his fountain pen and reading glasses. The man with the beard has shown no weapons either but seems to know he has the resources to enforce his will. Question: how can the sedentary man avoid being thrown out of the car?

‘I’m just telling you what to do so we don’t have to have no violence.’

‘What violence are you threatening me with?’

The man with the beard got out of the car on the right. He came around the back to the driver’s side. During the few moments it took him, Tony Hastings was marveling at his
confidence that Tony would not drive off or run him down. Start up and go – his hand was on the gear shift, the engine was running. Of course he’d have to turn around in the clearing. A metal yelp, the door flung open, it was Lou standing there at his elbow: ‘Out!’ he said.

Tony looked up at him. ‘I won’t be left here.’ It was still not too late, if he moved suddenly enough. The man had him by the arm, bulldog grip, Tony put in the clutch and tried to shift, but the man yanked, and Tony fell backward out of the car onto the ground.

‘You’ll get killed if you don’t watch it,’ the man said. He got in the car, slammed the door, jerked forward, made a couple of quick turns, then jounced back down the lane up which they had come. Standing in the grass, Tony watched the jolting wash of light flaring in the branches of the trees for a long time after the car was gone before leaving him alone in the stillness and natural dark of the night.

She puts the manuscript down. What a predicament, it gets worse and worse. Annoyed with Tony Hastings, yet what would she have done if it were she? Not be there in the first place, she says.

She wants to get up. Do something before the next harrowing chapter. She’d rather not move, though. Just keep going, see what’s coming.

What’s likely to happen to a man who has just been dumped in the woods, while thugs have run off with his wife, daughter and car? Impossible to answer without knowing the thugs, what they think they are doing. But this is fiction, which changes the question. It’s a path going somewhere, made by Edward up ahead. The question for Susan, do I want to follow? How can she not? She’s caught, just like Tony.

On the Monopoly floor someone farts. Henry’s friend Mike snorts, hee haw, Susan looks, wonders. Sees her dear son Henry from the back, his broad fat behind, much too fat, poor boy. Her golden-haired Dorothy, a year older, slugs him on the arm.

Nothing fits right, everything is askew. I’d better go to the bathroom, Susan says. Whatever else she might add later, she can tell Edward he’s got her hooked, anyway.