Winter Study (57 page)

Bob’s
inner man was this stomping, sniffing brute, a beast that preyed on
women, for whom the physical rape was merely the appetizer. Control by
fear and humiliation was the main course. Hate rose from him with the
sweat smell, hate and a darker odor. Shame, Anna guessed. Not for what
he did; he was proud of that. Shame for not doing it well enough, for
letting Anna and who knows what other women see him afraid, for
whatever had been done to him that made him what he was, shame that
every witness in the world who had seen it was not yet dead.

Suddenly
Anna knew what the wild shaking had been about. She was scared to death
of Menechinn. Occasionally there had been those who wanted to kill her.
That she could understand. Occasionally there’d been those she’d wished
to kill. The difference between her and the people she arrested was
that she didn’t do it. Violence was a passing thought, not a way of
life. Violent people scared her, but they didn’t terrify her, not like
Bob did.

Bob
didn’t merely want her dead. He wanted her, like Katherine and Cynthia
and Robin, disgraced, ruined, savaged. He wanted them shamed, their
memory shamed and the memory of their deaths in those still living to
crush out the life and sow their souls with salt that nothing green
could ever grow there again.

Bob needed to annihilate women.

Burning
holes in his too-fleshy face, his eyes scanned across the bough she sat
beneath. They remained dead. He’d not seen her. Turning full circle, he
began to whistle “Pop Goes the Weasel” under his breath.

Anna’d
never liked the tune, and she’d never liked jack-in-the boxes. When the
clown popped out, she did not squeal with childish delight; she smacked
the clown down again.

Pivoting,
he searched the circumference of their shared landscape. Blue tarp
twisted beneath his heels and rucked up in a ridge around his boots.
The big gloved hands opened and closed at his sides. The eyes passed
Anna’s tree again, lower down this time. The shaking started, and she
fought it back with the clench of her jaws and the wall of her teeth
and will. Another full circle, the volcano neck of blue plastic rose to
his knees as he churned the fabric.

For
the third round, he dropped his gaze to the ground. When he faced
Anna’s hiding place, his eyes followed the trail she’d not had time to
completely erase; they followed it, climbed the branches and bored into
the slit in the army blanket that camouflaged her.

His chin pulled back. The slow, tucked-in smile started, then metastasized.

“Gotcha,” he said.

35

“Hi,
Bob,” Anna said. By rights, her voice should have been squeaky and
high, the voice of a mouse being swooped up out of a meadow by a hawk,
but the world-class screaming she’d indulged in trying to run Menechinn
down with the sled, then hurtling down the switchbacks, had given it a
nice brave, gravelly quality. “You should put a hat on. Your ears and
nose are frostbitten. They’ll rot away and leave black holes. Hard to
get a date, once the ears and nose go.” She didn’t lower the army
blanket. She didn’t even widen the gap through which she looked at him
with one eye.

Bob’s
smile pulled another half inch back toward his spine, his eyes
momentarily invisible behind the slabs of cheek. Rictus apparently set
in; the smile stayed exactly the same as the eyes came back out a
fraction, and Anna had the weird feeling that she was watching the
thing that was Bob Menechinn, the thing that wasn’t human at all,
peeking out from under the rock of his brow bone.

“Didn’t
your mother ever tell you if you make a face, it will freeze like
that?” Anna snapped to make the thing go back inside Bob’s skull.

“Did your mother ever tell you you’re a fucking cunt?” he asked with the same razor-edged merriment he’d used with Katherine.

He
had to be in pain. His brain had to be crashing from the cat
tranquilizer. The parts of him that weren’t past feeling the cold must
ache with it. Still, it was clear he was beginning to enjoy himself.

Tucking
her chin against her chest so the blanket wouldn’t fall, Anna loosened
her fingers where they clutched the rough wool over her face and let
her hand slide slowly down her chest till it rested on top of the arm
dislocated at the shoulder. “No,” she said. “‘Fucking cunt’ doesn’t
ring any bells. Once in a while she called me ‘knucklehead,’ but I
think she meant it in a loving way.”

Bob
seemed to suck her words through the screen of spruce needles and into
his nose. Against the gray static of snow and clouds, his head was
enormous, and Anna believed she saw it swell when her words were
vacuumed into his brain. It bobbed, balloonlike, and she had to remind
herself to stay in her skin, stay alert, when what she most wanted to
do was close her eyes and let it all be a dream.

“What did Katherine say?” Anna asked conversationally. “The night she died, she called you. What did she say?”

“You
think if you keep me talking long enough, somebody will come and rescue
you?” Bob put his hands on his knees and bent forward, the better to
peer into her hiding place. “They won’t. The girl never gets rescued.
Nobody fucking cares about you — any of you.”

“That
has crossed my mind a time or two,” Anna admitted. The blanket started
to fall away from her head and face. She clamped her chin down more
tightly to hold it in place.

“Aaaaw,” Bob crooned. “You’re all shy and virginal now, got your blankie covering your face? Gonna hide under the covers?”

“Yes,”
Anna said. “Hiding under the covers never fails. Monsters can’t find
you under the covers. What did Katherine say when she called you?”

“She said, ‘Anna Pigeon is a cunt.’ Nobody likes you, Danger Ranger.”

“It seems we have something in common after all,” Anna said.

“What
did she say after the cunt proclamation?” A searing flare of agony
fired her shoulder as she moved her damaged arm. Pride touched through
the pain when she did not let her hurts show, not in her voice, not in
any untoward disturbance of the blanket covering her from head to toe.
The story of the Spartan boy, the stolen fox held tight to his middle,
showing such stoicism the guard questioning him never suspected until
the fox had eaten so far into the boy’s innards that the kid died on
his feet, flickered in her mind. Anna wished the story had ended
better. The guard adopting the little boy; fox and the lad becoming
fast friends, chasing goats together through the Grecian hills; maybe
the fox saving little Timmy Tchopotoulis from some Greek variation of a
well.

“Bobby,” she said in her sharpest schoolmarm voice. “Tell me what Katherine said or you’ll be in big trouble.”

Bob blinked twice, his face lost all tension as if she’d slapped him. “She thought she’d broken her ankle,” he said quickly.

“And?”

Bob
was stoned and traumatized and a wretched excuse for a man, but he
wasn’t stupid. Two more blinks and he dragged himself out of whatever
place Anna’s authoritarian voice had taken him.

“Why do women ask so many questions?” he asked, his terrifying bonhomie back in place.

“For
the sheer joy of hearing men talk,” Anna replied. Wrestling with her
metaphorical fox, she accidentally dislodged the blanket and it began
to slip away from her face. “What else did Katherine say?” she managed
before she caught it and held it between her teeth. Half her face was
exposed, and the overwhelming relief startled her. Maybe women had to
be raised in burkas before they could seem like protection instead of
prison. The wool tasted of motor oil and its coarse fuzz drew the
moisture from her mouth.

Bob
shook his head from side to side as if trying to clear it. His hands
slid from his knees up his thighs as he pushed himself upright. He was
tiring of the game. Anna wondered how Scheherezade had managed to keep
her train of thought going a thousand and one nights when a misstep
meant her death.

She
unclenched her teeth. The blanket slid a couple of inches down her
chest but didn’t fall off of her shoulders. The cold felt clean and
good on her neck. “Katherine thought you’d killed the wolf, shot it
with a tranquilizer, then cut its throat,” she said, desperate to put
off whatever was coming for another minute. “She figured you for the
kind of guy who liked other people out cold, didn’t have the balls to
deal with the conscious — woman or wolf. At least that’s what she said
to me. ‘Everything’s big about Bob but his heart and his cock,’ I think
she said. Yeah, that was it, verbatim. Shrinkage: cold heart, shriveled
cock. Makes sense, you know. Based in language: cockles of the heart,
warm the cockles, cock—” Anna was babbling, but she was doing so in
such a reasonable tone of voice that for half a moment she listened to
what she was saying, thinking it might actually make sense.

“I
told her it served her right,” Bob snarled. “She said, ‘Send somebody,
you fat fuck,’ and I threw her to the wolves. Literally,” he said and
laughed.

Anna
wished she’d changed the subject before he’d gotten to the “fat fuck”
part. Choking on the insult, his throat puffed the way a frog’s will
before it sings. In a second, he would realize he’d told Anna about it
and thus been twice shamed.

“Not literally,” Anna said, drenching her voice with scorn. “Figuratively.

Literally

you hung up on her.

Literally

you did nothing.

Literally

you
showed what a spineless, pathetic excuse for a man you are.” The
impromptu cowl fell from her shoulders, sliding down to pool behind her
and in her lap. She made no attempt to stop it or retrieve it this
time. “You don’t rape women. That’s way too scary for little Bobby,
isn’t it? You rape

unconscious

women. Whole different thing, Bobsie. Whole different thing.”

Anna
was finding it extraordinarily easy to go off on Menechinn. She didn’t
have to waste a moment’s time thinking up horrible words to say, words
she hoped would cut all the deeper for being true. Bob’s face shook
minutely, the way she’d seen it do each time a woman had the
unmitigated gall to awaken him from his happy coma of Bobness. The
miniature tsunami made him look young for a brief second — very young;
the face of a toddler the first time Mommy punches him or Daddy burns
him with his cigarette — and, for an even shorter second, Anna felt
pity for him.

Not him,

she told herself.

That little boy.