Method 15 33 (14 page)

Oh God, please help me. Where are we going? Butterfly, you did not warn me. Why? Maybe you did. I was looking at the wall all morning. Why didn’t I watch the window? Where is he taking me?

We went down the three flights of stairs but did not turn left, which would have brought us through the kitchen. We forged straight ahead to a back door that opened to a dirt patch, the grass having been worn away by people who must have once occupied a weathered picnic table outside the door. Cigarette butts carpeted the area.
A break spot for employees?
I yearned to turn around to see what the building looked like, but he heel kicked me forward, and I was not afforded even a glance.

The dirt patch was about fifteen feet in circumference, then began a long stretch of unmowed grass parallel to the building
we’d just exited; the grass strip was about four feet wide before tumbling over a ridge. He gun prodded me to the ridge. Over the edge was a steep hill leading to a forest behind. One narrow path, about a foot wide, led down the hill and through the woods. We took the path. It was the middle of the day.

Where is he taking me? Is this the end? I’m eight months pregnant. If they had the equipment, the baby is viable. But would they risk Caesarean birth after all of this trouble? Where is he taking us?
I rubbed my stomach with the fury of a castaway rubbing sticks to start a fire. This was when I realized something about myself: whenever there was a direct threat to my child, the fear switch in me turned itself on. I’d never had this trouble before pregnancy. Having realized this glitch, going forward, I was more self-aware—better at tempering, or tamping, the unwelcome, woefully useless emotion of fear. Interesting though, psychologically, medically, and perhaps even philosophically, at least to me. Sometimes I wonder if my baby’s emotions—his fetal fear—transferred to me in those moments. I was giving him life, but was he giving me life?

It had rained earlier in the morning, and the cold spring wetness clung to the ground and to every leaf. The buds on the trees stalled in the moisture. Not one sign of life stretched to unfurl in such weather. The sun slept, unwilling to fight the chill in the air. Thick clouds were a wet blanket overhead. I shivered without a coat.

“You’re worthless. Cheap. A whore. Look at you. Slutting up yourself. Banging in heat and pregnant with sin. You’re scum, you mean nothing, you mean nothing to this world,” he said. He kept the gun on my back and slithered his face around my neck, keeping his lips close to my cheek. After exhaling two hot breaths, he spit in my face and added, “Worthless bitch.”

If I’ve taken responsibility, if I intend to work hard to make this work, is this not my journey? Yes, I am lucky to have resources, help, love, but do these benefits not make it my journey, still? A flawed and unique journey, but mine? Why is it up for universal discussion?
Brought up by who, him? This criminal? Wait. Wait. This is not about me. Focus. This is about him justifying his depravity. Focus. Please. Focus. Breathe
.

I was not sure what I had done to deserve his sanctimony, except be a woman and get myself pregnant—and so young. But arguing about the morality of it all, apologizing to him, to the world? To God? The woods, the trees, the morphing molecules of right and wrong in the air? None of that would temper him. I had followed his every command so far; all he wished to do was harm me. I lowered my head, steadying for more of his sermon of judgment, which he seemed so primed to give. His saliva slid slowly down my skin.

“Yeah, you heard me, you’re fucking worthless. All these other girls, they cry and they beg me to help them. What are you? Some fucking crazy bitch? You just sit there, like nothing. You don’t even want this baby, do you? You don’t give a shit.”

Wrong. I wanted my baby more than I wanted to be rescued. Much more. Many a time I fantasized about the butterfly giving me a choice: would I choose to remain in the house of horrors and keep the baby or be rescued and lose the baby? Always I imagined this choice and immediately planned where I would place my born child on the bed while we slept in our eternal jail cell. My hand would cup his puffed belly, and I would kiss his sweet peach cheek.

“I bet you’ll talk when we get to the quarry. Won’t be so brave then.”

Why is he taking me to the quarry?

“Yeah, I bet you’ll scream, bitch. What? What’s that? What?”

I didn’t know how to respond. Here I was, walking in front of him on a thin, twisted path, which took all my faculties to maneuver without tripping, and he’s behind me asking
What?
Was this a rhetorical question? Sarcasm? How did he expect me to respond? Was he talking to himself?

I stopped, my head bent, my body still forward, my right foot hugging a fist-size stone at the arch, my left flat upon a root.
He slowly crept up and became flush with my body, angling his arm with the gun around my midsection as though he were my lover hugging me from behind. He seethed in my ear like a mad, hissing snake, “You answer my questions when I ask them, bitch. What, what do you think we’re doing today?”

“I have no idea, sir.”

“Ah. Okay. Well, let me tell you something. You’re going to climb this hill up there, a few more steps, yeah. And then you’re going to see where I throw all you bitches. I am sick to shit of you lounging like you own the place. I want you to know what’s coming to you and then maybe you won’t sit so smug up in that room of yours. Looking like you might kill me any minute. You’re such a dumb bitch.”

His breath still smelled like shit.

The warm sweat that had beaded up on my neck when we started this journey had cooled to freezing, but with his menacing breath now on it, the sweat warmed and flowed once more. A fever rose in me. I vomited. Bile spilled upon my right foot and the rock beneath.

He backed away. “Move it,” was the only tenderness he gave to me being sick. He jabbed the gun at my back.

I climbed the hill he had mentioned, and the path became no more. We came upon a series of huge granite slabs, natural rock mountains. Green moss and lichen-covered spots, puberty fuzz on a teenage boy. I walked, stooped at an incline, an angle made more dramatic given my top-heavy state and unsure footing in my too-big shoes.

I slid backwards and into him once, but caught myself by planting my palms on the prickly lichen, which embedded and scraped my skin.

“Get up. Get up. Move,” he said. He didn’t lend one hand to help me stand.

At the crest of the crop of rocks, we arrived.

We stood upon the top of a doughnut ring; carved in the middle was a hole filled with black water. Dynamited ridges cut
vertical from the top of the rock wall into the water.
So they mined this once. A quarry. The quarry
.

The quarry was about the size of eight aboveground pools.

“They say it’s forty feet deep in some spots. You want to dive on down there and find out, bitch?”

“No, sir.”

“No, sir? No, sir! Is that all you got? You fucking little bitch. Come down here. You’ll cry once and for all.”

So he has unraveled. He’s gone mad. All this sitting around, guarding me, being my food slave, has gotten to him more than me. He’s sick. He’s a sick man. Sick men are unpredictable. I can’t calculate events on this. Listen. Listen. Do as he says
.

I followed him before he could grab me by the neck and pull me.

We walked the rim of the quarry and down a gradual decline to a puddle spilling off the lower edge. While keeping one arm extended with the gun in my direction, he bent to retrieve a coiled, wet rope.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

Once I did as told, he placed the gun on the ground and, like a practiced sailor securing a boat to a bollard, wrapped the rope around my wrists and took the long end to a tree at the edge of the quarry, securing me in place as though I were his junkyard dog.

“Stand there and watch this,” he said.

He reached from the puddle into the darkness of the quarry, searching with his hands the side of the rock wall. He seemed to unhook something. Another rope, a slack rope. He pushed past me and found a boulder behind which he sat, placing his feet against the boulder so as to form a cantilever out of himself. He pulled the rope, straining his biceps, his legs, his jaw, in an effort to extract what seemed to be a rather heavy object tied to the end of the rope.

Panting, he took one break mid-pull and said, “I strapped this one to an expensive, competition-grade wakeboard, the kind for
oceans, yeah.” His chest heaved as he breathed, yet he smiled, pleased with himself in providing these insane details. “On the bottom of the wakeboard, I tied a huge cement block. I pushed the whole thing, her on the wakeboard and the block, off the edge up there.” He arched his head to indicate the top of the quarry and paused to pant in his heavy breath before resuming his crazy speech and his pulling on the rope. “At first, the board tilted headfirst, with her on it, under water, but then righted itself as the cement yanked it down and down. Oh, but she floats just below the surface all right. You’ll see soon enough. Just as soon as I get this block off the bottom. Yeah, bitch, kept this one tied on in case I needed to convince one of you bitches of something. And wasn’t that smart of me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Um, so…..Um? You? And then you? What?

Part of me, the unemotional side, was, admittedly, a bit intrigued by the details, the bizarre steps he’d taken to retrieve one of his victims. It was as though he’d built himself an elaborate underwater trophy. Frankly, I’m not quite sure of the physics of his contraption. Standing there, listening to him, I figured this trophy of his must not be too old. The tension of the pull between wakeboard, which would want to rise, and the cement block, which would want to stay put in the bottom muck of the quarry, would constantly pull on her continually decaying flesh. Thus, eventually, the very rope holding her tethered underwater would tear through her muscles, her organs, and her skeleton and her corpse would be torn apart. Pieces of her would either float to the surface or sink to the bottom.

Must have just thrown her in?

“Moved this bitch to the basement when I brought you here. She was on her way out. Yeah, bitch. Cut her baby out a few days ago, right up there on top of that rock, all while you sat on your ass, staring at your wall.”

I cannot even begin to explain my emotions in that moment. I don’t normally allow many emotions at all, but when he actually showed me the spot where he took a baby, when he pulled to give
me proof, I experienced the only prolonged time in my life of involuntary fear, a five-minute period, give or take three minutes, when the fear switch turned itself on. I must have been in a state of shock, unable to flip any off switch in any lobe of my brain, for the horror of watching him pull an unknown girl out of the murky black knocked me into a void of pure oblivion. I do recall fixing on just one thing, a red cardinal, high on the highest limb of an oak at the top of the quarry. I kept waiting for him to swoop down and pick me up. I believe it was my only thought.

My captor resumed his effort, his body a heaving machine. A gurgling of the surface of water began, bubbles flooded the middle, as though a cauldron from hell boiled over. The cardinal flew away.

With a quick plunk, a rotting head of long hair broke the surface. Soon followed her whole bloated, decomposing corpse. The rope tied in a harness around her chest was, as he said, tied to a wakeboard, purple with black lettering. I assumed the cinder block was beneath her torso, waiting to plummet into the water grave just as soon as he let go the rope. He held her suspended as though he were a magician who had raised a straight-laying lady above a long steel table. Nausea overcame me in a hot wave from my belly, through my lungs and heart, riveting my shoulders, my neck, and swallowed my face.

Floating right before my eyes was the corpse of a girl with her abdomen sliced open, hip to hip. The gash, having festered in the water, appeared burnt at the edges, like paper burned in a fire. But these weren’t burn marks, they were the stigmata of rotting flesh, the bacteria of the still water eating away at her open wound.

“Cut that baby out. Baby was dead. The doctor was too drunk to get his ass over here. So I did it. Yeah. Threw the bitch in here. Baby too. He’s tied to a rock himself, way down there at the bottom with the others. She was still crying, bleeding all over my tarp. I’ll have to buy a new one just for you, bitch. You’re almost ready now.” He pointed to the top of the rock wall. “Did it all out here so she wouldn’t spill her trail of blood all over the house. Learned the hard way the first time. Doctor wants you to
deliver naturally. Thinks we don’t have to cut the babies out. But, we’ll see about that. I’m so sick to shit of you. Not sure I want to wait much longer. So don’t go giving me your evil fucking eye anymore.” He let go the rope. She sank.

And since I allowed the emotion in, I wobbled. I fainted.

There is a sweet grayness that comes upon waking from deep unconsciousness. It’s like a blank slate, with nothing coming before and nothing expected. There is a weightless feeling in this space, the mind not clinging to any past of any sort and not planning either, not sure if it should sink back into a black or allow the white to wake it whole. There are no colors, only a gray fading to white, and with the white comes the beginnings of sounds, fading in and fading out, with an undulation back to gray, then the littlest of sounds again with a return of white.