• • •
Bradshaw resumes pacing, pounding his heels. At last he says to Lori, “So where is it?” and she doesn’t know why she does this but she says, “I’ve got it. I was getting ready to call and tell you.” She is trying to get his eyes, to share a look, to go to that place where he will do what she wants him to do.
“I got it for us,” she says.
“That is so great,” he says.
He yawns, hugely. He will not join her in that look.
• • •
What in the fuck are they talking about? Jason wants Loretta to look at him, but she does not. Her eyes follow Baker, and she is terrified, and she does not give Jason a glance.
“I don’t know,” Baker says. He comes over, pulls Loretta to her feet by an arm. “I’m sorely disappointed, Lori, but maybe you can make it up to me.”
Now she looks at Jason, and then Boyd, and her face crumbles. Her look makes Jason feel like one of her captors.
“Upstairs,” Baker says.
• • •
She heads toward the stairs. She’s in her socks. She wishes she could grab her shoes. They are right there, in the doorway. But she goes up. Behind her, Bradshaw pauses. He says, “I don’t really care what you shitheels do,” and Loretta speeds up a tiny bit, and Bradshaw’s still behind her, at the base of the stairs, saying to the boys, “Maybe you ought to just walk on out of here,” and now she’s at the top of the stairs, and now she’s in the hallway, and now she’s sprinting toward her room.
• • •
Jason thinks: Just leave?
“Lori and I are going to take it from here,” Baker says, smiling, and then, as if he cannot help himself, adds, “If you know what I mean,” and he winks and clicks his tongue, like he’s spurring a horse into motion, and starts up the steps.
• • •
She shuts and locks the door, and runs to the window, but it won’t slide open. The thick wooden dowel that Dean had put there blocks it. The doorknob rattles furiously. “Lori?” Bradshaw calls. She takes up the stool from the dresser.
• • •
Jason and Boyd do not move. Jason says, “Come on. It’s two against one.”
Boyd snorts. “That’s right, big shot. Two of us, one of him.” Upstairs, Baker is howling her name and banging banging banging, and then there is a sharp, brittle shatter.
• • •
Loretta sets the stool back down before the window and steps up on it. Thick, icy air seeps into the room. Bradshaw is pounding, pounding, now kicking the door. She can hear it splinter. She steps onto the windowsill, feels the glass sink hotly into her foot as she ducks through the window and pushes off into the sky.
She feels it in her left ankle when she lands. An explosion. A demolition. She rolls away from it, breath punched out of her. One foot bloody, one broken. The LeBaron sits fifteen yards away. The keys are in her hand. She stands and begins to hop.
• • •
Something whooshes onto the front lawn outside. Baker howls, “God-damn it!” and now come his thundering boot heels down the stairs. Jason says to Boyd, “Come on.”
Jason rises. Baker is racing toward the front door, and Jason, without thinking, without making a decision, cuts toward him, Baker glancing in his direction in irritated surprise, and Jason hurls himself toward Baker’s legs, and wraps them up as Baker bowls him over.
• • •
Loretta hops and hops on her cut foot. She waits for the door to burst open behind her. In her broken ankle, she can feel the pieces of bone shift with each hop. It screams with a pain that is almost a comfort, a hot distraction, a welcome elsewhere. She makes it to the LeBaron and puts her hand on it, hops, hops, reaches for the door.
• • •
Jason holds Baker’s struggling thighs, his right hand gripping his left wrist, while Baker rains down blows on his back. “You’re dead, you little fucker,” Baker spits, and he grabs Jason’s ear and turns it hard again, sending a bright flame of pain along Jason’s scalp along with the certainty that what he says is true, that Jason really is now going to be dead, and soon. “You are super fucking dead.” Outside, the LeBaron chugs into life. The engine noise rises, and then it begins to diminish, and Jason feels that he will lose control of Baker’s legs at any moment. His knees, loosening, are knocking Jason in the chest, and soon he will be fucked, truly fucked. Baker starts to heave his knees powerfully, and one cracks Jason in the mouth, and the iron taste of blood arrives, and Jason thinks that Baker will get loose now, and he’ll be in his car in seconds, following, and Loretta will never get away. Then he feels a heavy thump. Boyd. Boyd has a knee on Baker’s back and one on his neck, mashing Baker’s face into the carpet. Baker stops flailing and Jason gets a better grip around his thighs, face pressed against his hip. Baker says, “Guys,” into the carpet, smush-mouthed, and then again, “Guys,” and the LeBaron is already distant, already who knows where, and Baker screams like an animal into the carpet. They sit there like that, the three of them locked together, until all Jason knows for sure is that they can no longer hear the LeBaron anywhere. It’s all the way gone.
• • •
She can do this with one foot. It is just a matter of deciding to do it. Like Ruth would do. She presses the gas pedal to the floor with her blood-damp sock, ignoring the pain. Gravel growls under the tires. Dust fills the cab. She breathes and breathes and breathes. Loretta reaches the paved county road, and turns onto it. She can’t stop shivering, though she isn’t registering the cold. The LeBaron’s heater is blasting and she knows it will soon be too warm in here. She passes through Short Creek at just above the speed limit — the huge brick church, the walls of the prophet’s compound, the small post office and store, the United Order warehouse. She thinks about the kids. She wishes she could see Benjamin one more time. Read The Poky Little Puppy. When she reaches the outskirts she presses the accelerator and the car surges loosely. Her ankle howls. It rests at an impossible angle, swollen tight. The pierced sticky bottom of her pedal foot burns and throbs. The first pink signs of day are lining those dusky orange walls of stone that rise from the desert. The rear end fishtails and stabilizes, and she holds down the pedal. Her left ankle is a bag of bones, and sometime — out far away, in the time that comes after this time — she knows she will need to do something about it, but for now she tells herself just this: She can do this with one foot. It’s an automatic, this old boat. She can drive it forever with just one foot.
• • •
Jason thinks the end might come any minute. Once Baker is free, he will kill them. With his own two hands. He told them he would, and Jason believes him. Carpet fibers tickle his face. He can feel his arms and hands weakening, but Boyd has Baker perfectly pinned, facedown, one knee on the back of his neck and one in the middle of his back. Jason lies on his side, arms wrapped around Baker’s thighs and face against his hip. Jason and Boyd don’t talk until not talking seems like the way to do it. They lie there for what feels like hours, the scent of mud and old oatmeal and dirty socks and homemade bread radiating. Baker’s anger dies second by second, then surges, fades, surges. Jason stares at the bundle of electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. His shoulders rage. He feels far away from himself.
Baker says, “Guys. Come on. It’s over. Just let me up. Seriously now. Come on.” Then he tries thrashing violently. Boyd tips and catches himself on his hands, but keeps his weight on Baker’s neck, and Baker stops. “All right,” he says. “Enough. I give. Just let me up.” Nobody answers him. “I can’t breathe,” he says.