In the case of muggings, the wisdom is not to resist, give up your wallet, don’t brazen it out against weapons. Tony Hastings was wondering about the opposite wisdom, at what point does nonresistance become suicide or practical acceptance negligence? Where in the events of the just past was the moment when he could have seized the advantage, or was such a moment still possible?
Two men in the front seat of a car: the one on the right tells the one in the driver’s seat to get out, the other resists. The one in the driver’s seat is in his forties, academic, sedentary, his mind sees many things, but he has not been in a fight since childhood and cannot remember winning one. The other man has a black beard, wears blue jeans, and seems sure of himself. The sedentary man has no weapons except his fountain pen and reading glasses. The man with the beard has shown no weapons either but seems to know he has the resources to enforce his will. Question: how can the sedentary man avoid being thrown out of the car?
“I’m just telling you what to do so we don’t have to have no violence.”
“What violence are you threatening me with?”
The man with the beard got out of the car on the right. He came around the back to the driver’s side. During the few moments it took him, Tony Hastings was marveling at his confidence that Tony would not drive off or run him down. Start up and go—his hand was on the gear shift, the engine was running. Of course he’d have to turn around in the clearing. A metal yelp, the door flung open, it was Lou standing there at his elbow: “Out!” he said.
Tony looked up at him. “I won’t be left here.” It was still not too late, if he moved suddenly enough. The man had him by the arm, bulldog grip, Tony put in the clutch and tried to shift, but the man yanked, and Tony fell backward out of the car onto the ground.
“You’ll get killed if you don’t watch it,” the man said. He got in the car, slammed the door, jerked forward, made a couple of quick turns, then jounced back down the lane up which they had come. Standing in the grass, Tony watched the jolting wash of light flaring in the branches of the trees for a long time after the car was gone before leaving him alone in the stillness and natural dark of the night.
She puts the manuscript down. What a predicament, it gets worse and worse. Annoyed with Tony Hastings, yet what would she have done if it were she? Not be there in the first place, she says.
She wants to get up. Do something before the next harrowing chapter. She’d rather not move, though. Just keep going, see what’s coming.
What’s likely to happen to a man who has just been dumped in the woods, while thugs have run off with his wife, daughter and car? Impossible to answer without knowing the thugs, what they think they are doing. But this is fiction, which changes the question. It’s a path going somewhere, made by Edward up ahead. The question for Susan, do I want to follow? How can she not? She’s caught, just like Tony.
On the Monopoly floor someone farts. Henry’s friend Mike snorts, hee haw, Susan looks, wonders. Sees her dear son Henry from the back, his broad fat behind, much too fat, poor boy. Her golden-haired Dorothy, a year older, slugs him on the arm.
Nothing fits right, everything is askew. I’d better go to the bathroom, Susan says. Whatever else she might add later, she can tell Edward he’s got her hooked, anyway.
FIVE
This is a deliberate interruption of her reading, for she didn’t really have to go to the bathroom. She comes down the stairs out of darkness. The light is out in the upstairs hall, it requires the ladder from the basement. Not tonight. Across the room Henry lies on his back, sweater lifted, scratching his stomach, ruled out of the game, while Mike spots his marker around the board with a villain’s laugh. Henry is crooning: “Who cares, whooo cares?”
“Don’t be a brat,” Dorothy says.
Martha has moved onto the manuscript, makes herself heavy when Susan tries to move her. Susan remembers a graceful stretch of summer highway, the road bending from one hillside down into a valley of farms and up another long curve to a ridge of woods. Herself, she loves that wilderness, she loves the woody ridges and long valleys and comforting snack stops in small friendly restaurants off the highway, especially after the pounding long day of driving across flat Indiana and Ohio. It rests her soul. She remembers the singing in the car, Dorothy, Henry, and Rosie in the back, Jeffrey moving from one lap to another and Martha hidden below. “Tell me why, Camp Hazelnut.”
Dump Martha, who shakes herself, offended, then dashes out to the kitchen. Susan remembers the lake, morning light flashing spider lines under the tree leaning over the water while Arnold and Henry wade out to the float, Arnold up to his collarbone, his red freckled shoulders soft and plump, holding Henry in the water by his two hands under the stomach, while the boy sticks his chin up like a loon and Dorothy submarines twenty feet further out.
She remembers Edward’s cabin in the woods when he wanted to be a writer. Soft impressions. Short confessional poems with everything unsaid. Nostalgic sketches, loss and grief. Father deaths. Haunted harbor scenes. Melancholy sex in the pastoral woods. It was not easy to read Edward in those days.
This is different. She admits it, Susan, this capture is power over her and Edward wields it, whether she likes it or not. As she follows Tony Hastings down his trail of terror she knows she sees what Edward wants her to see, feels what he feels, without a trace of Edward’s offenses as she remembers them. Edward stiff and nervous, prissy and cranky, has yet to appear in this lonely Pennsylvania landscape, where she and Tony face with him the unambiguous horror of what these evil men (conceived by him) are doing. There’s no ground to quarrel with him yet, and she’s grateful for that.
Nocturnal Animals 5
Tony Hastings stood there a long time, looking where the car had gone, now all dark. The night was thick, he tried to see, vaguely aware of differences in the shadows, but he could not distinguish, he felt blind. My God, he said, they went off and left me. What kind of a joke is this?
Now the woods in the night were silent, he heard nothing. After a while the darkness began to clear, not much but some, clearer than before anyway. He was in a small open space between the trees, he could see the sky overhead. He saw a few stars, not many, not brilliant, not what they should be in the mountains. He could distinguish the treetops from the sky, but all below was still unpenetrated black, a curtain around the arena.
Surely they don’t expect me to get out without a flashlight, he said. Some joke.
The silence began to sort out. He distinguished a remote process, not a sound but the copy of a sound, recognized as trucks on the Interstate, miles away. He could not tell whether the faint whistling noises were insects in the grass or in his ear. Around the arena the curtain yielded shapes. He saw tree trunks and open spaces between the trees. He could see a black hole where the car had gone. He could see the road.
What are you waiting for? he said. It was stupid to suppose they would come back. Actually he had never supposed it. The problem was clear, he had been dumped in the wilderness in a prank a college sophomore would think of, and he would have to find his way out. So much for getting to Maine in one night.
The only question was whether he could find his way in the night. No, that was not the only question. Since he could see now, he went into the woods where the road was. He subdued an impulse to run, too far to go. He steadied his pace, he walked.