Think. Why the guys in his car would be going to the same lonely place where they had left him. They were bringing his wife and daughter to meet him. He should have waited for them. Stayed on the grass back where he was dumped. Instead here, his craven hiding behind the boulder, his failure to come out and meet them. Laura and Helen waiting in the car for him to come, and he did not. And so they went on up the road into the deeper wilderness with their captors, betrayed, abandoned. Shame, then grief, as if he had denied them and lost them for good.
Go after them. Hurry. He looked where they had gone, whence he had come. It was impossible, he could not move. Wordless, like instinct, like the light that had flashed saying “Hide.” You’re crazy, he said.
Some words followed, explaining why he could not go. They aren’t there, they said. You’d only be trailing Ray and Turk, back into their sadistic hands. You’d have it all to walk out of again. There were only two heads in the car, Ray and Turk.
So he turned and continued as he had. The road was easier now, broader with fewer holes and rocks, not crowded so close by saplings and brush. But he was dragging a heavy chain of grief that tried to pull him back. He argued against it. He said, if they had been in the car they would have called too. She would have said, “Tony?”
He walked faster now, talking. Proof of the menace, he said, was how they tried to lure you in just now. Proof of stupidity too: did they think turning off the lights and engine would fool you into thinking they weren’t there after the thunder and lightning of their approach?
He felt them behind him, silent in the dark. Catching up. It made him walk faster. It made him wonder why they had gone in there, as if the question had not occurred to him until now. It surprised him. Yes, he said, why? What is in that grassy spot to make one of them leave me there and bring the other two after?
Rendezvous? Stash? He looked for explanations, but his mind resisted the effort. Come back to get him? That was ruled out when they kept going after spotting him by the road. More questions followed, which he had not known were there. The question of what their game really was. To steal his car? Maybe there was a place in the woods where they intended to secrete the car until later. Okay, that’s a theory, but why did they take you there?
Simple meanness, a sadistic thrill, that’ll do it, he said. The sheer devilish fun of dividing a family and putting them down in the wilderness as far apart from each other as the night will allow. See how long it takes them to find each other. Something like that. There were worse possibilities.
There were. He knew that, he knew it well, it was the habit of his mind to know the worst case, the ultimate. His life was a scenario of disasters that never took place. Because, if it really was just Ray and Turk in his car back there, then where were Laura and Helen?
The foolish image of the police station was still in his mind, of his wife and daughter sitting at a table, drinking coffee, waiting for news, but no, it was another image, image of the trailer over the curve in the road in the woods, with the dim light behind the curtain in the window. It was hard not to cry in his talk, which was a kind of pleading now, like a prayer. If it is rape, he prayed, if it must be rape, oh God, let that be the worst, let it not be worse than that.
Echo to God: let them be mean and cruel if they must, but give them some restraint, some limit beyond which they will not go, even them, let them not be mad, not psychopaths.
He noticed the thinning of trees ahead, an open space, flat and bare, realized it was the paved road, he was almost out. In a moment he was in the clear. He stepped onto the pavement and looked around. The road ran straight in both directions above the floor of the woods on both sides. He noticed a broken gate by the entrance of the wood lane, a white board canted diagonally against a post, and tried to fix it in his mind, thinking, identify the place, it may be useful. He turned to the left to retrace his ride with Lou, though he knew it would be a long walk before he came to any people. Then behind him in the woods he heard the car. He saw the distant approach of light once again in the trees. Once again the fright warning, hide in the ditch. He resisted. You must face them, you must ask them, he said. You must not be so intimidated. He stood in the road and waited. The car came out of the woods and turned right, away from him. He was disappointed and relieved.
Then it stopped. They’ve seen me, he said. The car turned around and came toward him. He waited by the road. I’ll ask where Laura and Helen are, he said. I’ll ask what they intend to do with my car. The car approached slowly, then suddenly it wasn’t slow, the tires screeched, it was coming at high speed, the headlights spreading like jaws. He leaped blind into the ditch and landed in the knives while the car threw gravel at him.
The car shrieked and stopped. Around its red and white light a cloud of smoke rose and dissolved. A door opened. A man got out, stood at the edge of the shoulder, looked back, a shadow, indistinguishable. Tony Hastings did not move. He did not know if he could. The knives held him, branches, barbed wire. Thorns scratched around his eyes. The man walked a few steps toward him. He looked, it seemed a long time. He went back to the car. “Fuck him,” he said, The words were far off and not said loudly, but Tony heard them clearly.
He was afraid they would turn the car around and find him with the headlights, while he was still unable to move. But the car U-turned away from him and passed above him gaining speed.
He wondered if he was badly hurt. He was scratched on the forehead and around the eyes, and the palms of both hands were cut. Something had gashed at his shin through the trouser, and something like a fence post had struck him in the gut.
He spread the barbed wire that held him, tried his legs, stood up. After a few moments he scrambled up the gravel. The road, the woods, the night sky hazy with only a few stars, everything was quiet with only the barely perceptible sound of trucks on the Interstate.
They were trying to kill me, he whispered. The thought cut through the surface layers of his brain into deeper hollows where he had never known a thought could go. He repeated it: really trying. And if they were really trying to kill me, he added. He did not finish. These must be the worst thoughts he had ever had, and all around him he saw the sleeping world, road, woods, sky, doom.
SEVEN
The chapter break, Susan wanting no pause looks up to see where she is. In the next room on the floor, Dorothy with the golden hair flat on her back with arms up, dirty elbow. Breasts. Henry’s friend Mike looks at her with slit eyes. Wish she would move, do something. The rasp in Mike’s voice sounds like Ray in the book. In three years Dorothy goes to college. In New York Arnold in the bamboo lounge with who? Dr. Medstud?
Nocturnal Animals 6
He walked fast on the pavement because he knew if he did not, it would be this road forever. Empty dark and despite the black foliage on the trees, blasted. The road turned, it descended, the woods rose over. He came to a fork, which he could not remember from his ride with Lou. Guessing, he took the turn to the right, down the hill, not familiar. He heard a car laboring up. He saw the approaching light and stepped into the woods until it went by. It was not Lou’s car, nor his own, but it could have been, and he thought it wise not to take more risks. Yet wise seemed like nothing in this ravaged world as he walked along, fugitive, afraid of cars and men, as if he had been exiled from his species.