“Get her, Grobian,” William shouted, his voice going up to a squeak.
I heard the heavy steps behind me but still didn’t turn. I was two strides from the door when I heard the click, the hammer going back. I hit the floor just as he fired. I tried to keep hold of my own gun, but my fall sent it spinning out of my hand. He was on top of me before I could get to my feet.
I grabbed Grobian’s left leg and jerked upward. He stumbled, and had to twist around to keep from falling. I sprang upright backing away from him. My head was wet. Blood was pouring down my hair and neck, into my shirt. It made me dizzy, but I tried to concentrate on him. Jacqui and William were helping him, shining their lights on me; Grobian was a shape in the dark, two shapes, two fists swinging at me. I ducked under the first one, but not the second.
45 Down in the Dumps
My father was cutting the grass. He kept running the mower over me. My eyes were bandaged shut, so I couldn’t see him, but I’d hear the wheels rumbling through the grass. They would hit me, go right over me, and then roll back again. It was so cold, why was he mowing the grass when it was so cold out, and why didn’t he see me? The garden smelled terrible, like pee and vomit and blood.
I screamed at him to stop.
“Pepaiola, cara mia.” His only words of Italian, used on my mother and me both, his two pepperpots. “Why are you lying in my path? Get up, get out of my way.”
I tried to stand, but the long grass had wrapped itself around me and tied me, and then he was running the lawn mower over me again. He adored me, why was he tormenting me like this?
“Papa, stop!” I screamed again. He halted briefly, and I tried to sit up. My hands were tied behind me. I rubbed my face against my shoulder, trying to push up the bandages on my eyes. I couldn’t budge them, and I kept rubbing, until I realized that I was rubbing my eyes. I wasn’t bandaged; I was in a black space, so dark I couldn’t even see the gleam of my parka.
I heard a roar, felt a horrible jerk, and then the mower rolled over me again, knocking the breath out of me, so I couldn’t scream. My mind shrank to a pinprick in its retreat from pain. Another halt, and this time I forced myself to think.
I was in a truck. I was in the back of a semi, and something on wheels was rolling back and forth with the jolting of the truck. I remembered Marcena, with the skin missing from a quarter of her body, and tried to shift myself, but the motion of the truck and the assaults from the handcart, or conveyor belt, or whatever it was, made it impossible for me to move.
My hands were tied behind me and my legs were strapped together. I smelled, too, smelled the way Freddy Pacheco did when I attacked him. A hundred years ago, that had been. The vomit and blood and pee, they were all mine. My head ached, and blood had dried in my nose. I needed water desperately. I stuck my tongue up and licked the blood. AB negative, a good vintage, hard to find, don’t lose too much of it.
I didn’t want to be here, I wanted to be back in my other world, where my father was with me, even if he was hurting me. I wanted my mother on the other side of the door, making cocoa for me.
The detective who feels sorry for herself might as well write her own funeral oration. The next time the truck halted, I made a ferocious effort and sat up. I twisted so my feet were at right angles to where they’d been. Now I was leaning with my back against the back of the truck. The next time the wheeled thing came at me, it rammed into the soles of my boots. I felt the jolt all the way up my spine. No good, V. I., no good, a few more hits like that and you’ll be paralyzed.
We stopped again. Wherever we were going, we were on city streets, I guessed, with a lot of stop signs, and my captors were obeying traffic laws-they weren’t going to risk ticketing for running a red light.
I fell forward onto my knees and managed to move them, just a little, just enough to crawl forward until I ran into the wheeled thing. The top was about thigh high, and I flung myself onto it as the truck rocked forward again.
It felt like a victory, a triumph as big as scaling Everest. Yes, I was Junko Tabei; what she’d done, scaling the big mountain, didn’t compare with this scrabbling with bound hands and feet on top of something I couldn’t see. I lay across the wheeled thing, my head throbbing, but the pleasure of getting away from the rollers kept me from losing consciousness again.
We made an abrupt hard turn and the truck bounced. The trailer went up and down on its eighteen wheels and then rocked from side to side. I rolled helplessly up and down with the cart, slamming crazily from one end of the truck to the other, trying to hold my head so it wouldn’t bang up and down with the motion.
I knew where we were going. The knocked-over fence, the track through the marsh, I could picture our route, the gray sky and grass and the end, the end in a pit. I squeezed my eyes shut, not wanting to see the darkness, not wanting to see the end.
When we halted, I lay on my face panting shallowly, feeling the motor rumbling underneath me, too exhausted to brace myself against the next jolt forward. I heard a crash to my right and slowly moved my head to look. The doors to the truck swung open and I was dazzled by light. I thought it was daytime, thought it was the sun, thought I’d go blind.
Grobian strode along the back of the truck. Close your eyes, V. I.; blunk them up: you’re unconscious, the eyes blunk up when you’re unconscious. Grobian thrust a lid up with a rough thumb; he seemed satisfied. He grabbed me around the waist and slung me over his shoulder and thumped back out. I opened my eyes again. It was still night-being locked in total blackness had made even the night sky look bright at first.
“This time we’re in the right spot,” Grobian said. “Jeesh-suburban prick like you, dumping Czernin and the Love woman on the golf course instead of the landfill. This Polish cunt will be under ten feet of garbage by the time the sun comes up.”
“You don’t talk to me like that, Grobian,” Mr. William said.
“Bysen, from now on I talk to you however I please. I want that job in Singapore, running the Asian operations for By-Smart, but I’d consider South America. One of those or I’m talking to the old man. If Buffalo Bill finds out what you’ve been up to with his precious company-”
“If the shock gives him a stroke and kills him, I’ll be singing at his funeral,” William said. “I’m not worried about anything you say to him.”
“Big talk, big talk, Bysen. But if you acted as big as you talk-you’d never have gotten involved in crap like this. Men like your father, if they can’t do their dirty work themselves they’re smart enough to have friends of friends of friends figure it out so no finger ever points to them. You want to know why Buffalo Bill won’t trust you with more of his company? Not because you’re a lying, cheating SOB-he respects lying, cheating SOBs. It’s because you’re a lying, useless weasel, Bysen. If you hadn’t been Buffalo Bill’s son, you’d be lucky to have a job typing figures in your own warehouse.”
Grobian swung me like a hammock and flung me from him. I landed facedown in muck. I heard him dust his hands and then heard him and William head back to the truck, bickering the whole way, not looking back at me, not even talking about me.
I lifted my head just as the truck jerked into gear again. The headlights flooded me for a moment, showing me where I was, the side of one of the giant mounds of earth where Chicago buries its trash. Beyond the By-Smart semi, I could see lights from other trucks, city trucks, a line of beetles moving toward me. Every day, another ten thousand tons comes in, gets emptied, and covered again with more dirt. The city trucks work round the clock, hauling away our refuse.
My stomach was frozen from fear. Grobian was backing the By-Smart semi, starting to turn it in a wide, clumsy circle. When he got out of the way, the line of beetles would crawl on up the hillside and dump their loads on me. I frantically pushed my left foot against my right, bending my toes inside my boot, bracing myself by putting my head into the sludge. I couldn’t waste time watching the semi’s progress. I pushed so hard I screamed from the pain shooting up my spine.