The World According To Garp (55 page)

Oren Rath was emptying, by quartfuls—by gallons. He felt actually lighter on top of her. Their bodies were so slick that she slipped out from under him easily. She shoved him over on his back and crouched beside him on the truck’s puddled floor. Hope’s hair was gravid with blood—his throat had fountained over her. When she blinked, her eyelashes stuck to her cheeks. One of his hands twitched and she slapped it. “Stop,” she said. His knee rose, then flopped down. “Stop it, stop now,” Hope said. She meant his heart, his life.

She would not look at his face. Against the dark slime coating his body, the white, translucent condom hugged his shrunken cock like a congealed fluid quite foreign to the human matter of blood and bowel. Hope recalled a zoo, and a gob of camel spit upon her crimson sweater.

His balls contracted. That made her angry. “Stop,” she hissed. The balls were small and rounded and tight; then they fell slack. “Please stop,” she whispered. “
Please
die.” There was a tiny sigh, as if someone had let out a breath too small to bother taking back. But Hope squatted for some time beside him, feeling her heart pound and confusing her pulse with his own. He had died fairly quickly, she realized later.

Out the open door of the pickup, Oren Rath’s clean white feet, his drained toes, pointed upward in the sunlight. Inside the sun-baked cab, the blood was coagulating. Everything clotted. Hope Standish felt the tiny hairs on her arms stiffen and tug her skin as her skin dried. Everything that was slick was turning sticky.

I should get dressed, Hope thought. But something seemed wrong with the weather.

Out the truck windows Hope saw the sunlight flicker, like a lamp whose light is shone through the blades of a fast fan. And the gravel at the roadside was lifted up in little swirls, and dry shards and stubble from last year’s corn were whisked along the flat, bare ground as if a great wind was blowing—but not from the usual directions:
this
wind appeared to be blowing straight down. And the noise! It was like being in the afterblow of a speeding truck, but there was still no traffic on the road.

It’s a tornado! Hope thought. She hated the Midwest with its strange weather; she was an Easterner who could understand a hurricane. But tornadoes! She’d never seen one, but the weather forecasts were always full of “tornado watches.” What does one
watch
for? she’d always wondered. For
this
, she guessed—this whirling din all around her. These clods of earth flying. The sun turned brown.

She was so angry, she struck the cool, viscid thigh of Oren Rath. After she had lived through
this
, now there was a fucking tornado, too! The noise resembled a train passing over the pelted truck. Hope imagined the funnel descending, other trucks and cars already caught up in it. Somehow, she could hear, their engines were still running. Sand flew in the open door, stuck to her glazed body; she groped for her dress—discovered the empty armholes where the sleeves had been; it would have to do.

But she would have to step outside the truck to put it on. There was no room to maneuver beside Rath and his gore, now dappled with roadside sand. And out there, she had no doubt, her dress would be torn from her hands and she would be sucked up naked into the sky. “I am not sorry,” she whispered. “I am
not
sorry!” she screamed, and again she struck at the body of Rath.

Then a voice, a terrible voice—loud as the loudest loudspeaker—shook her in the cab. “IF
YOU’RE
IN
THERE
,
COME
OUT!
PUT
YOUR
HANDS
OVER
YOUR
HEAD
.
COME
OUT
.
CLIMB
INTO
THE
BACK
OF
THE
PICKUP
AND
LIE
THE
FUCK
DOWN!”

I am actually dead, thought Hope. I’m
already
in the sky and it’s the voice of God. She was not religious and it seemed fitting, to Hope: if there were a God, God
would
have a bullying, loudspeaker voice.

“
COME
OUT
NOW
,” God said. “DO IT
NOW
.”

Oh, why not? she thought. You big fucker. What can you do to me next? Rape was an outrage even God couldn’t understand.

In the helicopter, shuddering above the black truck, Arden Bensenhaver barked into the megaphone. He was sure that Mrs. Standish was dead. He could not tell the sex of the feet he saw protruding from the open door of the cab, but the feet hadn’t moved during the helicopter’s descent, and they seemed so naked and drained of any color in the sunlight that Bensenhaver was sure that they were
dead
feet. That Oren Rath could be the one who was dead had not crossed the deputy’s or Bensenhaver’s mind.

But they couldn’t understand why Rath would have abandoned the truck, after performing his foul acts, and so Bensenhaver had told the pilot to hold the helicopter just above the pickup. “if he’s still in there with her,” Bensenhaver told the deputy, “maybe we can scare the bastard to death.”

When Hope Standish brushed between those stiff feet and huddled alongside the cab, trying to shield her eyes from the flying sand, Arden Bensenhaver felt his finger go limp against the trigger of the megaphone. Hope tried to wrap her face in her flapping dress but it snapped around her like a torn sail; she felt her way along the truck toward the tailgate, cringing against the stinging gravel that clung to the places on her body where the blood hadn’t quite dried.

“It’s the woman,” the deputy said.

“Back off!” Bensenhaver told the pilot.

“Jesus, what happened to her?” the deputy asked, frightened. Bensenhaver roughly handed him the megaphone.

“Move
away
” he said to the pilot. “Set this thing down across the road.” Hope felt the wind shift, and the clamor in the tornado’s funnel seemed to pass over her. She kneeled at the side of the road. Her wild dress quieted in her hands. She held it to her mouth because the dust was choking her.

A car come along, but Hope was unaware of it. The driver passed in the proper lane—the black pickup off the road to his right, the helicopter settling down off the road to his left. The bloody, praying woman, naked and caked with grit, took no notice of him driving past her. The driver had a vision of an angel on a trip back from hell. The driver’s reaction was so delayed that he was a hundred yards beyond everything he’d seen before he surprisingly attempted a U-turn in the road. Without slowing down. His front wheels caught the soft shoulder and slithered him across the road ditch and into the soft spring earth of a plowed bean field, where his car sank up to his bumpers and he could not open his door. He rolled down his window and peered across the mire to the road—like a man who’d been sitting peacefully on a dock when the dock broke free from the shore, and he was drifting out to sea.

“Help!” he cried. The vision of the woman had so terrified him that he feared there might be more like her around, or that whoever had made her look that way might be in search of another victim.

“Jesus Christ,” said Arden Bensenhaver to the pilot, “you’ll have to go see if that fool is all right. Why do they let everyone drive a car?” Bensenhaver and the deputy dropped out of the helicopter and into the same lush muck that had trapped the driver. “Goddamnit,” Bensenhaver said.

“Mother,” said the deputy.

Across the road, Hope Standish looked up at them for the first time. Two swearing men were wallowing toward her out of a muddy field. The blades of the helicopter were slowing down. There was also a man peeping witlessly out the window of his car, but that seemed far away. Hope stepped into her dress. One armhole, where a sleeve had been, was torn open and Hope had to pin a flap of material to her side with her elbow, or else leave her breast exposed. It was then that she noticed how sore her shoulders and her neck were.

Arden Bensenhaver, out of breath and soaked with mud from his knees down, was in front of her suddenly. The mud made his trousers hug his legs so that, to Hope, he looked like an old man wearing knickers. “Mrs. Standish?” he asked. She turned her back to him and hid her face, nodding. “So much blood,” he said, helplessly. “I’m sorry we took so long. Are you hurt?”

She turned and stared at him. He saw the swelling around both eyes and her broken nose—and the blue bulge on her forehead. “It’s mostly
his
blood,” she said. “But I was raped. He did it,” she told Bensenhaver.

Bensenhaver had his handkerchief out; he seemed about to dab at her face with it, as he might wipe the mouth of a child, but then he despaired at what a job it would be to clean her up and he put his handkerchief away. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. We got here as fast as we could. We saw your baby and he’s fine,” Bensenhaver said.

“I had to put him in my mouth,” Hope said to him. Bensenhaver shut his eyes. “And then he fucked me and fucked me,” she said. “He was going to kill me, later—he told me he would. I
had
to kill him. And I’m not sorry.”

“Of
course
you’re not,” Bensenhaver said. “And you
shouldn’t
be, Mrs. Standish. I’m sure you did the very best thing.” She nodded her head to him, then stared down at her feet. She put one hand out toward Bensenhaver’s shoulder and he let her lean against him, though she was slightly taller than Bensenhaver and in order to rest her head against him, she had to scrunch down.

Bensenhaver was aware of the deputy then; he had been to the cab to look at Oren Rath and had vomited all over the truck’s front fender and in full view of the pilot who was walking the shocked driver of the stuck car across the road. The deputy, with his face the bloodless color of Oren Rath’s sunlit feet, was imploring Bensenhaver to come
see
. But Bensenhaver wanted Mrs. Standish to feel every possible reassurance.

“So you killed him after he raped you, when he was relaxed, not paying attention?” he asked her.

“No,
during
,” she whispered against his neck. The awful reek of her almost got to Bensenhaver, but he kept his face very close to her, where he could hear her.

“You mean,
while
he was raping you, Mrs. Standish?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “He was still inside me when I got his knife. It was in his pants, on the floor, and he was going to use it on me when he was finished, so I
had
to,” she said.

“Of course you did,” Bensenhaver said. “It doesn’t matter.” He meant that she should have killed him anyway—even if he hadn’t been planning to kill her. To Arden Bensenhaver there was no crime, as serious as rape—not even murder, except perhaps the murder of a child. But he knew less about that; he had no children of his own.

He had been married seven months when his pregnant wife had been raped in a Laundromat while he waited outside for her in the car. Three kids had done it. They had opened one of the big spring-doored dryers and sat her ass on the open door, pushed her head into the warm dryer where she could only scream into the hot, muffling sheets and pillowcases and hear her own voice boom and bounce around the great metal drum. Her arms were in the dryer with her head, so she was helpless. Her feet couldn’t even reach the floor. The spring door made her jounce up and down under all three of them, although she probably tried not to move. The boys had no idea, of course, that they were raping the police superintendent’s wife. And all the bright lighting possible for downtown Toledo on a Saturday night would not have saved her.

They were an early-morning couple, the Bensenhavers. They were young still, and they took their laundry to the Laundromat together, Monday morning before breakfast; they read the newspapers during the wash cycle. Then they put their laundry in the dryer and went home and had breakfast. Mrs. Bensenhaver picked it up on her way downtown to the police station with Bensenhaver. He would wait in the car while she went inside to get it; sometimes, someone would have taken it out of the dryer while they were having breakfast and Mrs. Bensenhaver would have to run it for another few minutes. Bensenhaver then waited. But they liked the early morning because there was rarely anyone else in the Laundromat. Only when Bensenhaver saw the three kids leaving did he start to worry about how long his wife had been collecting the dry laundry. But it does not take very long to rape someone, even three times. Bensenhaver went into the Laundromat where he saw his wife’s legs sticking out of the dryer; her shoes had fallen off. Those were not the first dead feet Bensenhaver had seen, but they were very important feet to him. She had suffocated in her own clean wash—or she had vomited, and choked—but they had not meant to kill her. That part had been an accident, and at the trial a great deal had been made of the unplanned nature of Mrs. Bensenhaver’s death. Their attorney had said that the boys had planned “to just rape her—not kill her, too.” And the phrase “
just
rape”—as in “She was
just
raped, lucky thing, a wonder she wasn’t killed!”—appalled Arden Bensenhaver.

“It’s
good
that you killed him,” Bensenhaver whispered to Hope Standish. “We couldn’t have done nearly enough to him,” he confided to her. “Nothing like he deserved. Good for you,” he whispered. “Good for you.”

Hope had expected another sort of police experience, a more critical investigation—at least, a more suspicious cop, and certainly a man very different from Arden Bensenhaver. She was so grateful, for one thing, that Bensenhaver was an
old
man, clearly in his sixties—like an uncle to her, or even more sexually remote: a grandfather. She said she felt better, that she was all right; when she straightened up and stood away from him, she saw she had smeared his shirt collar and his cheek with blood, but Bensenhaver hadn’t noticed or didn’t care.

“Okay, show me,” Bensenhaver said to the deputy, but again he smiled gently at Hope. The deputy led him to the open cab.

“Oh, my God,” the driver of the stuck car was saying. “Dear Jesus, look at this, and what’s
that
? Christ, look, I think that’s his
liver
. Isn’t that what a liver looks like?” The pilot gawked in mute wonder and Bensenhaver caught both men by their coat shoulders and steered them roughly away. They started toward the rear of the truck, where Hope was composing herself, but Bensenhaver hissed at them, “Stay away from Mrs. Standish. Stay away from the truck. Go radio our position,” he told the pilot. “They’ll need an ambulance or something here. We’ll take Mrs. Standish with us.”