Clearing away the dirt, she watched a well-shaped ear emerge from the earth, two small silver hoops in the pierced lobe. With the ear came the faint odor of decay. Though she hadn’t thought it consciously, Anna had been expecting a skeleton: dry, brittle, desiccated scraps of skin peeling away from bone, the way old leather peeled from the bindings of ancient books.
The ear was lifelike, plump and pink, yet there wasn’t as much stench as a day-old rat in a subway station. The woman hadn’t been in this hole much longer than Anna.
Memory slammed into the back of her eyes, rocking her onto her heels. The scream had come through the tortured piñon trees; hoping for water, she began to run. The clarity was more than remembering, it was reliving. She saw her abandoned pack, the sun appliqué smiling up from the hard ground as she passed the patch of shade where she’d been sitting; she felt the wadded-up map, crunched in her fingers.
Running was hard, as it often is in dreams. Her thighs ached and her feet struck the ground heavily. A stitch was sewing her ribs to her liver. She slowed to a jog, clutching her side and panting. More screams drew her on. Anna became afraid the woman was in deeper trouble than she could handle.
Self-preservation, learned from a lifetime in the city, stopped her headlong dash. Anna remembered trying to suck hot dry air through a throat closed from lack of moisture. She could see herself, dark clothes, pale with dust, hands on knees, gasping and thinking maybe this wasn’t something she should get involved with.
Had she not wanted a drink of water so desperately, she might have lost her courage. She straightened up and, still breathing hard, pushed up a small rise of stone. The rise gave way to a round depression half the size of a tennis court.
There were four people in it. A tall boy had a girl with long brown hair, wearing cutoff jeans and a bikini top, in a hammerlock, pressing down on her neck. Her arms were flailing. “Stop it,” he was yelling and laughing. “We don’t want to have to hurt you.” A second boy had his back to Anna. She remembered how his muscles rippled as the sun hit the sweat. His shorts were halfway down his butt as if he’d undone the fly to take them off. He was hopping on one foot, laughing like a hyena, trying to pull off his shorts. He staggered and fell. Drunk, she thought. The fall only made him laugh harder. The third boy, not laughing, not undressing, was a plain-looking kid with ragged brown hair and a fury of pimples across a high forehead. He saw Anna and yelled, “Holy shit!”
The man wrestling with the girl glanced up, locking eyes with Anna. The girl must have hit or clawed him. Letting go of her, he shouted, “Fucking bitch!”
Staggering, the girl fell on her hands and knees. He kicked her. Fighting to get to her feet, she grabbed at his shorts, her fist closing on the front of them. He bent double. For a heartbeat Anna thought he was going to help her to stand. Instead he grabbed up a fist-sized rock and slammed it into her temple.
Anna turned and ran.
The earth lurched and folded beneath her feet, scrub and rock jerking in her peripheral vision. Heat burned up through the soles of her sneakers. A steady strong thud, thud, thud of boots pounded behind her.
Then nothing, then this hole, the dislocated shoulder and a knot the size of a tennis ball behind her right ear.
She hadn’t gotten blind drunk and passed out. Bad men had clubbed her from behind. Honor intact, skull not so much. The blow accounted for the patchy memory. “Yay, me,” Anna said.
“Blunt trauma to the head is the only cause of amnesia I know of outside paperback novels,” Molly once said.
Long brown hair.
The girl Anna was disinterring must have been the focus of Buttboy’s attentions. She dug faster. Grit packed the girl’s nostrils. Her lips were parted and sand had been shoved into her mouth; that or she’d tried to breathe after she’d been buried. Her eyes were open, scabbed with grains of sand.
“Damn, damn, damn.” Curse became mantra and finally made its way from Anna’s mouth to her ears. She stopped her frenzied scooping. Clearing the dirt from the girl’s nose and mouth was not going to save her.
“Sorry,” Anna said to the corpse. Using the end of her long braid as a whisk broom, she gently swept at the dirt sticking to the eyes and teeth. “Were you alive when they buried you?”
Ray Milland, Vincent Price, Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum; this girl in the pit—had she awakened to find herself facedown, breathing hard grains of rock into her lungs, sand sandpapering the delicate sclera when she opened her eyes?
Anna had to look away. Her gaze came to rest on the deflated, wrinkled white blossom of the deadly nightshade.
“They hit you in the head,” she murmured, unsure whether she spoke to the girl’s shade or just to keep herself company. “Then they came after me and threw us both down the garbage disposal.” From the wilted flower, her eyes drifted to the walls. With their spin of muted colors spiraling up, she half expected to hear a switch being flipped, a grind begin, and the spiral to move as she and the corpse were ground to mincemeat and sucked into the sewers of hell.
“Young and pretty,” she thought half aloud. “It wouldn’t matter. Young and pretty or old and scrawny, monsters will be monsters. You were dead when they threw you in, weren’t you?” she asked the ghost of the girl. “Otherwise it would be you digging up my grave.”
Buttboy with his pants half down, staggering drunk. Hyena Boy, laughing. Gang rape. Anna shows up, hoping for a refreshing beverage, and they kill the girl instead.
The cuts on Anna’s thigh stung with sweat and sand. Roughly brushing the grit away, she ran a dirty fingernail along the marks, tracing WHORE in dried blood. There’d been three would-be rapists. There were three. One little, two little, three little monster boys.
Her tongue was dry, big, and thick; her lips stuck to her teeth. The drugged canteen beckoned from the other side of the nightshade. Anna crawled to it, fumbled the cap off, and, in thirst and despair, drank too much, drugging herself more than she had to. Water ran from the corners of her mouth and made mud on her breasts. Instantly, she felt the drug flow into her body, felt her muscles loosening. Her head swam, thoughts sloshing like water in a washtub, slamming against the sides of skull bone and bouncing back on one another.
It came to her then that she had to get the girl out, had to.
Having plowed back though the battered weeds, the pain from her injured shoulder driving her as a whip drives a horse, she clawed wildly at the sand. Scratching and scraping like a maniacal cat in a litter box of burning coals.
The dead woman’s head was freed from the dirt.
Sore tendons shoving daggers into her, vision tunneled, Anna scooped and scraped, bulldozed with knees and forearms, kicked and dug with her heels. Sweat poured into her eyes and ran in rivulets between her breasts, leaving trails in the dust and grime. Sand stuck to her skin. Grunts and cries bubbled up the neck of her jar. She scarcely knew if she was standing, kneeling, or lying in the grave with the dead girl. Finally, hips braced against the sandstone, one foot planted on the prone woman’s thigh, the other on her shoulder, Anna rolled the body from its grave with an ungentle shove.
Gasping and sweating, she withdrew her toes from the lifeless flesh and surveyed what she had wrought.
A girl—the girl the boys were attacking—lay facing the scrap of sky eyes open and sand-crusted. Denim shorts were twisted around her scissored legs. A pink and yellow Hawaiian print bikini bra had been hiked up over her left breast, showing a white triangle where she wasn’t tan and a dark brown nipple. Her right sandal had come un-Velcroed during the one-sided struggle and was smashed beneath her knee. Around one ankle was a thin gold chain, K and A and Y in glittery stones dangling from it, the K wedged between chain and skin.