Slag Attack (7 page)

   
The woman gives him the total and asks him to please pull around. He gets to the first window and pays, giving Amber a stern look of warning in between the first and second windows. At the second window, two things happen nearly simultaneously and Amber feels like she is going to be murdered for sure. Wait, make that
raped
and murdered. Vincent was very clear about the rape.

   
The first thing that happens is that the worker woman must not have put the lid on the cup of coffee very tightly. She leans out to hand the cup to Vincent and he takes it quickly, severely, and the steaming hot coffee sloshes out into his crotch. At that exact moment, Amber shouts, “Morrissey!” Vincent looks over at her, but she can tell he is seething about the coffee. The woman leans out the window and apologizes profusely. Vincent pinches his face up into a snarl, holding the coffee cup in his right hand before flinging its contents into the woman’s face. Screaming, she immediately retreats back through the window.

   
Vincent wastes no time at all. He pounds the accelerator and the car (or is it a truck?) lurches into the street and they speed away through town. He laughs sarcastically, mockingly, beneath his breath and the back of his hand lashes across Amber’s face. Her head snaps back and cracks into the window. He reaches down between her legs and grabs, shaking her crotch vigorously. His fingers dig against her perineum and the heel of his hand is heavy on her pubic mound.

   “
Mmmmm...” he snarls. “You got lucky back there, bitchy miss. If that nigger hadn’t fucked with my coffee I would tear you apart right now. She deserved that though. She deserved all of it. Don’t you think for a second she didn’t. I’m a very severe man. She should have known I was a severe man. Then I woulda got the service I deserved.”

   
He pulls his hand out of her sweaty crotch and pushes his fingertips beneath her nose.

   “
Smell that? That’s the smell of a bitch in heat. All bitches are in heat. Look at you, squirmin around in that seat just beggin to be fucked. I bet you ain’t never been fucked, have ya?”

   
He is wrong. She has had a boyfriend since she was seventeen and he has fucked her often since they started going out. But she doesn’t think that is what Vincent wants to hear so she shakes her head.

   “
Well, bitchy Sue, you can talk now. Guess it don’t make no fuckin difference. I
told
you not to say a word! What was that shit you was shoutin?”

   “
I couldn’t help it.”

   “
What do you mean you couldn’t help it?”

   “
I have a condition.”

   “
A condition?”

   “
Yeah.”

   “
What kinda condition?”

   “
I guess it’s like Tourette’s. I have to shout the names of male vocalists.”

   “
You mean like singers?”

   “
Yeah.”

   “
How long you had that?”

   “
Ever since I can remember. Ever since I heard The Beatles for the first time.”

   “
You’re crazy,” he pronounces as though this topic is not up for speculation. “Besides, The Beatles were a bunch of fags. I’m glad someone plugged John Lennon.”

   “
Kurt Cobain!”

   
Vincent cringes visibly.

   “
Where are you taking me?”

   “
You should stop talking now.”

   
Vincent bends toward the wheel, his head quickly ticking up to make sure the McDonald’s incident hasn’t resulted in someone calling the police on him. Soon they are on an ill-maintained country road and, the sun bloated and fat on the horizon, they pull up a long gravel driveway. There is a house up at the top. It is a small ranch house and Amber can tell, even from this distance, that it is not kept up very well. The neighboring houses are very far away.

   
Out of shouting distance, she thinks. Watching the huge ball of the sun, she also thinks she is now probably about five hours away from home.

5.

Reaching the top of the driveway, Vincent pulls the car behind the house. Probably so no one would be able to see it from the road, Amber thinks. He kills the engine and gets out, walking purposefully around the front of the car and slinging the passenger side door open. He drags her out. This time he doesn’t bother slinging her over his shoulder. He just grabs the tape between her hands and drags her along behind him. She notices a large pile of rusted junk, another El Camino up on blocks, and a tire swing hanging from a dead-looking tree.

   “
We gotta get inside so I can change my pants,” he says. Then he turns to a skeletal dog skulking around the yard and barks at it. The dog runs up to Amber and begins licking her face and lips. She wants to puke. The dog’s breath smells horrible.

   
Instead, she screams, “Jim Morrison!”

   “
You gotta stop doing that, Amber.” Vincent drags her up the stairs, the cement scraping against the backs of her calves, and searches through the myriad keys on his ring until he finds the one that fits the door. He opens the door and drags her in behind him. Once in the house, he grabs the tape tightly and slings her into the middle of the floor of a dimly lit room. Amber looks around but the room is mostly bare. There are a lot of pictures on the wall of a trashy-looking woman with very tan skin and blond starchy hair that fills most of the frame. The woman looks drunk or possibly drugged, both in her heavily shadowed, half-open eyes and in her positioning. Like she’s getting ready to fall out of whatever chair the photographer put her on. Vincent pulls a chair up beside Amber and slides his knife out, playing with it.

   “
See them pictures on the wall?”

   
Amber nods.

   “
That’s Wanda. She was perfection. She stayed around a pretty long time. She had real stamina. I was never, never too severe to her.”

   
Amber continues to study the pictures. As she does, she realizes they are not all the same woman. They can’t be. They all have the hair and the tan but some of them are fat and some of them are thin. Some look like teenagers while others look ready for a nursing home.

   “
She was always faithful,” he says. “It wasn’t easy, bein with someone in my line of work.”

   “
What’s that?”

   “
I worked in the restaurant industry.”

   
Amber looks at him, trying to make eye contact. He looks familiar.

   “
Pizza,” he says, and she knows who it is.

   “
Vinnie’s.”

   “
Yep. Best pizza in Celine. Don’t tell me you’re a Tony’s person.”

   
She shakes her head. She would never tell him that. It’s the first time he seems human to her.

   “
Yeah, she had to put up with all kinds of crazy hours. Tony was always tryin to steal her away.”

   
For a brief moment, Amber thinks about the seedy underbelly of pizzerias. She almost laughs. She focuses and tries not to think about the names.

   “
What happened to her?” Amber asks, trying to somehow connect to this lunatic as a person.

   “
She passed.”

   “
How?”

   
This makes him explode. He stands up, knocking the chair back. “It don’t make no fuckin diff’rence
how
! She passed! Okay!”

   “
David Bowie!”

   
This sends him even further into his rage. He throws himself on her, covering her in his cloying scent now mixed with the smell of old coffee. His breath is harsh against her ears. “You gotta stop sayin them names.” He gets up on his knees, straddling her. He lifts her shirt and darts the knife’s tip across a few inches of her stomach. It hurts but the only thing she can do is squirm against his immovable mass. “You gotta stop sayin them names or I’m gonna cut you again and again. And if I cut you so many times you ain’t gonna be pretty to me no more and when you ain’t pretty no more you won’t be no use to me at all. So the only name you’re gonna say is mine, ‘Vincent Severity.’ Got that?!”

   
She tries to nod but starts crying instead. “I don’t think I can.” How can she not say the names? If she doesn’t say the names then the plague gods are going to rain down on them.

   “
You’ll try,” he says. “If you don’t try, you’re gonna get cut a lot. Do you understand that?”

   
This time she nods.

   “
See that woman there on the wall?”

   
Amber nods again.

   “
That’s Wanda. You wanna know what you got in common?”

   
She isn’t even going to tell him he has just told her about Wanda.

   
This time he doesn’t even wait for her to respond before saying, “The chin. You both have the same chin.” He gets back up and paces around the room. “When I lost her I thought I’d lost everything and then I seen you one day in the parlor. You couldn’ta been more than ten at the time but you better believe how I noticed your chin and I thought to myself, She could be Wanda. She’s got that chin and maybe that’s the closest thing I’ll ever find. And I waited. I waited ‘cause there ain’t really ever been a ten-year-old yet that’s turned me on and I waited ‘cause I thought I might find somebody closer but nobody ever came along and I waited ‘cause Wanda was still alive. Take off your clothes. I’m gonna make you pretty.”

   “
I can’t,” she says. “My hands are tied.”

   “
And they’ll stay tied!” he screams. Then he’s on her again, his knife cutting through her layers of clothes. He does it with such harsh quickness she feels for sure he’s going to cut her. With just her panties on he looks down at her and breathes appreciatively.

   “
Yeah, you got a real nice body,” he says. “But you’re too pale. Wanda wasn’t pale. You look like a fuckin corpse. You almost match your undies, you’re so white.” Now he cuts those off too and stands back up. “But I knew you was white. So I got somethin to show ya.”

   
He grabs her by the hair and pulls her to her feet. He lifts her by the hips and carries her toward the back of the house, into what would probably have been a family room if there was any furniture in it. In the far wall is a door that looks like it belongs in a slaughterhouse or a prison. Heavy and metal, with no window and a slide-action bolt. He sits her down to open the door. It doesn’t open in or out, it slides into the wall.

   
Amber is blinded by the exposed room. It’s like looking directly at the sun, it’s so bright. She wants to shield her eyes but can’t raise her arms.

   “
Elliot Smith!”

   
He scratches the knife across her lower back. She feels the stinging burn and wishes she could keep her mouth closed.

   “
Say it,” he seethes into her ear. “Say it.”

   “
Vincent Severity!” she shouts. But it’s half-hearted. It isn’t
his
name that stops the plague gods. Shouting his name doesn’t make her feel good on the inside. It makes her feel tainted.

   “
See that?” he says. “See how much I love you? You know how long I spent makin this room? Makin it just for you. Them’s fifty sun lamps up there on the ceilin all ready to make you as tan as my Wanda. Know how long it took to wire all that shit up? Get on in there.”

   
He shoves her into the room and points the knife between her legs. “And Wanda never had no landin strip either. Nope. She liked a big ole bush. So we’ll have to fix that up to.” Then he slams the door and shoots the bolt into place.

   
She collapses into the middle of the floor, thinking she has never felt so lost, alone, and humiliated. Drowning in doom on the surface of the sun. She wonders how crazy Vincent really is. And she wonders how she is going to get out. The room is very hot and she feels the sweat that has never stopped continue to pour out of her.

6.

She has no idea how long she’s been in the room. The lights come on and go off at irregular intervals, Vincent controlling them with an outside switch. Although Amber figures he is in a hurry to make her tan, presumably so he can fuck her and convince himself he is fucking Wanda, he apparently does not want her to get sunburned. Over time, she feels her skin grow warm and taut. Sometimes he comes in and throws bite-size food at her as hard as he can. She never eats it in front of him. But when he leaves the room, she crawls around and gobbles it up, eating it like a wild and starving animal which, in a sense, she has become.

   
She can’t stop shouting the names and she has many small cuts to prove it. And when he turns on the lights and she starts to sweat, the sweat runs into the cuts and she has to toss around on the floor because she can’t wipe it away with her hand. Somewhere along the line the duct tape was replaced with actual hand and ankle cuffs. For a long time, the thought of escaping the tape had been the only thing keeping her from giving up all hope. Now she doesn’t even have that to look forward to.

   
She hates the sight of Vincent and can’t stand to say his name. Every day, sometimes a few times a day, he comes in—sliding the door open and squinting against the harsh light and he reaches behind himself, his hand first missing the door handle before finally seizing it and pulling it just closed enough so she can’t go charging out. And he shouts at her while the pelted food smacks against her burning skin, “You ain’t tan! You ain’t nearly tan enough!”