Gargantuan (32 page)

The rain is coming harder and one of the windows starts leaking. A crash of thunder lets loose and Crow howls, compelled to add his song to that of the sky.

Ava has loaned me a cell phone and I take it out of my pocket now, trying Ava’s home number for what seems like the thousandth time in the last twelve hours. Again, no answer. I haven’t talked to her since leaving the track, when I called to tell her about the change of plans and how I’d had to take the girl instead of the jockey. She’d seemed a little surprised by this, but told me to go ahead and take the girl upstate. Ava was supposed to call again though and she hasn’t.

I get up and go into the little bathroom with its ancient blue tiles. I relieve myself and look out the bathroom window toward the cabin. I suppose I have to feed the girl now. I go back into the kitchen
and look into the fridge where I’ve put the few groceries I bought back in Queens. When I open the package of sandwich meat, Crow comes running over and starts doing a dance. When that fails to make me feed him, he jumps straight into the air, then lands and chases his tail. It’s pretty impressive. I give him a piece of bologna. I make a sandwich for the girl, tuck a bottle of water under my arm and then tell Crow to follow me outside. We both trot through the little yard between the house and the cabin, trying to dodge the raindrops that are falling and turning the snow to slush. I have to put the sandwich down so I can pull my keys out of my pocket and I issue a threat to Crow not to eat the prisoner’s sandwich. It takes me a minute to unlock the huge padlock and I manage to get pretty wet.

As I push the door open, I find her standing there, staring at me.

“Please,” she says, “my cats need to be fed, please let me call my neighbor.” She’s obviously pretty worked up about it, has her face all bunched up and there’s no color in her lips. She’d tried this one yesterday afternoon, on the ride up here, piping in every twenty minutes or so about her cats. I figured it was just a ruse but now I’m starting to wonder. She does look like a girl who’d have cats and, to my chagrin, Crow continues to feel drawn to the girl, is in fact nuzzling her right now as she pets his head.

“Crow!” I call out to the disloyal dog.

“It’s fine,” the prisoner says. “I like dogs,” she adds, entirely missing the point, which is that I don’t like my dog kissing up to strangers.

“I’d like for you to imagine you’re in my shoes,” the girl says now. “You’re trapped somewhere and your dog is at home, starving. If the positions were reversed, I’d let you call a neighbor to have them feed your dog.”

She stares at me so hard I’m convinced she’s trying to bend my mind. I stare right back at her, feeling torn—on the one hand worried about her damned cats, on the other hand picturing Darwin and how, however indirectly, this girl could have impact on his well-being.

“Please?” the girl says. She looks down at Crow then back up at me, adding another
please
.

“How about you eat something and we’ll think about it,” I say, offering the sandwich.

She stares down at the sandwich in much the same way she was staring at me a few seconds ago.

“What is that, meat?” she asks.

“Yeah, pastrami and bologna.”

“Thanks, but I’m a vegetarian,” the prisoner says. “I don’t eat anything with a face.”

This takes me by surprise and I look down at the sandwich in my hand, suddenly picturing a face on it.

“This doesn’t have a face,” I say.

“At some point it did.”

I can’t really argue with that even though deli meat is so far removed from animals that it practically is vegetarian.

“So,” I say, feeling like a complete jerk, “you definitely don’t want this?” I indicate the sad-looking sandwich, even though I know the answer and, in fact, wonder if I’ll give up meat. Up till now, I’d always thought vegetarians were just pale people who liked being difficult. But this
face
thing has freaked me out.

“No, I’m not going to be eating that,” the girl affirms.

“Mind if Crow has it?”

“I don’t know if processed meat is good for him,” the girl says, sort of sternly. “I feed my cats raw meat.”

Christ.

“But go ahead,” she adds, “he’s probably used to it.”

I can’t believe this girl, this prisoner, is making me feel like shit about what I feed my dog.

I pick the sandwich up and stuff it into one of my huge pockets. I reach for the bottle of water and give that to the girl. She takes the top off and drinks loudly.

“Thanks,” she says, after draining half the bottle.

I remove my gun and the cell phone out of my other pocket and though I’m not actually pointing the gun at the girl, she takes a step back and turns paler than she already is.

“Oh, sorry,” I say reflexively before remembering that yes, I should be pointing a gun at this girl, particularly right now.

“I’m going to let you call this neighbor of yours, but at the slightest hint of asking for help or letting him know where you are…” I let the sentence trail off and I wave the gun at her a little, trying to act like it means nothing to me to use it. And it wouldn’t have meant anything to me to use it earlier in the day, when I so clearly saw this girl’s jockey boyfriend as an immediate threat to Darwin. But things are a little different now. Though I don’t want her to know that.

“Thank you,” the girl says softly.

“Number?” I ask, keeping the gun pointed at her with one hand while preparing to punch the numbers in with the other.

She recites the number and I dial. It rings once and I hand her the phone, bringing the gun very close to her face. I watch her blink several times.

“Ramirez,” she says into the phone, “it’s Ruby.”

I can tell the guy is asking her where she is and I carefully watch her face.

“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m fine but I won’t be home for a while. I wonder if you could please feed the cats until I get back.”

Her voice sounds pretty tense but she’s not up to any direct funny business that I can see.

“Don’t worry about it,” she’s saying. “Please just feed the cats, okay?”

At that I snatch the phone away from her and hang it up and I’m worried now, feeling like a jackass because surely the neighbor can have the number traced.

“That was bad,” I say, bringing the gun closer to her face. “You sounded upset.”

“I didn’t say anything to make him suspicious,” the girl says, “though maybe the way you snatched the phone away and hung it up might get him wondering.”

“Don’t be a smartass, girl,” I say between my teeth. “This isn’t a game.”

“I’m aware of that. Even though I don’t know what the hell good having me here is doing you.”

“You mentioned that. But I don’t think you know your own value. That jockey of yours is pretty crazy about you.”

“Not anymore he’s not, and anyway I don’t know what you want from him. He’s a powerless person, you know.”

“And powerless people take it out on helpless innocent animals.”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do? No, I don’t. What are you talking about?”

The girl looks genuinely puzzled.

“Your boyfriend is up to no good.”

“I’m not sure what kind of ‘no good’ you mean.”

“I don’t need to discuss this with you,” I say then because I feel myself getting sucked into this girl and her deranged point of view.

I turn my back to her, call to Crow, and go out the door.

She’s protesting as I lock her back up and walk away.

I get back into the main house and start walking around in circles in the living room. Eventually, I try Ava again. At last she answers the phone.

“Ava. What’s going on? I’ve been trying to call you. I’m up here. In Saugerties.”

“I know, Ben, thank you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“But I am. It’s not necessary. The plan is off.”

“What?”

“Attila isn’t going to do anything to your horse. Or any horse.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I misled you, Ben. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I was upset with Attila and wanted to teach him a lesson, but I’m afraid there was never any danger of his actually harming a horse. Or harming anything at all.”

“This is crazy. What’s going on here, Ava?”

“I’m sorry, Ben, forgive me. You can release the girl. There’s no point in any of this.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, Ben, I’m not.”

“I don’t believe you, Ava. I’m not letting this girl go.”

“Ben, you have to. Kidnapping is against the law.”

“It wasn’t my idea.”

“I realize that. But I was wrong. I led you to believe Attila would harm your horse but it’s not true.”

“I just don’t believe you, Ava.”

“Ben, you must. It’s true. Let the girl go.”

“I will not. And that guy’s going to jail. I don’t care what I have to do to bring attention to it. I know these things. I know what he’s planning.”

“Ben, please!” Ava is begging now. I hang the phone up and then turn it off.

Outside, the rain has let up and the thunder is distant.

Crow lies down on his blanket and puts his face on his paws.

I
’m curled under the filthy quilt I found in the cardboard box. It’s very cold in here and I’m starving, which doesn’t help. The tips of my fingers have gone numb and I’m dizzy. It’s gotten dark out and there’s no electricity so I had to stop reading. I finished
Père Goriot
this morning and devoted the afternoon to reading through the children’s books that were in the box. There weren’t any delectable
Dr. Seusses but I did find a copy of
Charlotte’s Web
and a nice book of fairy tales. Pretty weird to be reading
The Princess and the Pea
while some nutjob is holding me prisoner in a cold cabin in the woods and is trying to feed me bologna. To the psycho’s credit, after finding out I’m a vegetarian, he did bring me an orange and two pieces of white bread—which I inhaled—but now the acids from the orange are eating through my mostly empty stomach.

I don’t know if it’s physical discomfort or the onset of some form of confinement-induced psychosis but I find that I just can’t wait anymore. I have to take some sort of action. I have the carpet knife and I certainly considered trying to jab at my captor but a carpet knife doesn’t hold much of a candle to a gun. I would have to take him by surprise and there just hasn’t been any way to do that.

I throw back the quilt and begin pacing the floor, listening to it creaking in protest. After a few minutes of this, I begin noticing where the floor is sagging badly. I jump up and down in one spot, feeling it give. I could probably jump right through but I’m not sure what’s underneath the cabin. I kneel down and start picking at a corner of one of the linoleum squares covering the floor. It’s slow going until I remember my carpet knife. I begin slicing into the stuff, ripping up the squares. Beneath the linoleum are old rotting floorboards. I start kicking at one of these. It gives after a few kicks and I get my whole foot through. I stamp some more until I’ve made a large hole in the floor. I get down on my belly and peer into the darkness. I can’t see anything but I can smell the cold dark earth below. I reach down and I can just touch the dirt with the tips of my fingers. There’s enough space for me to get in there and crawl, but I’m not sure if I can actually crawl to freedom or if I’ll just be trapped under the cabin. It’s not like I have anything to lose though so I push my whole torso through and climb down. I am soon on my belly, under the cabin. It’s pitch dark and I’m sure there are monstrous insects down here if not rats. Thinking about it makes my heart start pounding too fast. But it’s either crawl through this or go back up into the cabin and await my fate. Neither seems an appealing prospect.

M
y wife’s thighs are more generously fleshy than the last time I was between them. She’s put on a few pounds, which is probably the only reason I am here. At her thinnest, she is craziest. At this weight, which I’d wager is about one-twenty she is usually okay, because she has enough meat on her bones to keep her connected to earth but not so much that she feels and acts leaden.