The World According to Garp

vehicles. There went one, now, with a chute—for what?—and a latticework of cables that pulled or suspended something heavy. Standish liked to try to visualize how everything worked.

Below him a lurid turquoise pickup moved ahead with the traffic; its fenders were pockmarked, its grille bashed in and black with mashed flies and—Standish imagined—the heads of imbedded birds. In the cab beside the driver Dorsey Standish thought he saw a pretty woman—some thing about her hair and profile reminded him of Hope, and a flash of the woman's dress struck him as a color his wife liked to wear. But he was four floors up; the truck was past him, and the cab's rear window was so thickly caked with mud that he couldn't glimpse more of her. Besides, it was time for his nine-thirty class. Dorsey Standish decided it was unlikely that a woman riding in such an ugly truck would be at all pretty.

“I bet your husband is screwing his students all the time,” said Oren Rath. His big hand, with the knife, lay in Hope's lap.

“No, I don't think so,” Hope said.

“Shit, you don't know nothing,” he said. “I'm going to fuck you so good you won't even want it to stop.”

“I don't care what you do,” Hope told him. “You can't hurt my baby now.”

“I can do things to you,” said Oren Rath. “Lots of things.”

“Yes. You mean business,” Hope said, mockingly.

They were driving into the farm country. Rath didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, “I'm not as crazy as you think.”

“I don't think you're crazy at all,” Hope lied. “I think you're just a dumb, horny kid who's never been laid.”

Oren Rath must have felt at this moment that his advantage of terror was slipping away from him, fast. Hope was seeking any advantage she might find, but she didn't know if Oren Rath was sane enough to be humiliated.

They turned off the county road, up a long dirt driveway toward a farmhouse whose windows were blurred with plastic insulation; the scruffy lawn was strewn with tractor parts and other metal trash. The mailbox said: R, R, W, E and O RATH.

These Raths were not related to the famous sausage Raths, but it appeared that they were pig farmers. Hope saw a series of outbuildings, gray and slanted with rusted roofs. On the ramp by the brown barn a full-grown sow lay on her side, breathing with difficulty; beside the pig were two men who looked to Hope like mutants of the same mutation that had produced Oren Rath.

“I want the black truck, now,” Oren said to them. “People are out looking for this one.” He used his knife matter-of-factly to slice through the bra that bound Hope's wrists to the glove compartment.

“Shit,” one of the men said.

The other man shrugged; he had a red blotch on his face—a kind of birthmark, which was the color and nubbled surface of a raspberry. In fact, that is what his family called him: Raspberry Roth. Fortunately, Hope didn't know this.

They had not looked at Oren or at Hope. The hard-breathing sow shattered the barnyard calm with a rippling fart. “Shit, there she goes again,” the man without the birthmark said; except for his eyes, his face was more or less normal. His name was Weldon.

Raspberry Rath read the label on a brown bottle he held out toward the pig like a drink: “'May produce excessive gas and flatulence', it says.”

“Don't say anything about producing a pig like this,” Weldon said.

“I need the black truck,” Oren said.

“Well, the key's in it, Oren,” said Weldon Rath. “If you think you can manage by yourself.”

Oren Rath shoved Hope toward the black pickup. Raspberry was holding the bottle of pig medicine and staring at Hope when she said to him, “He's kidnapping me. He's going to rape me. The police ate already looking for him.”

Raspberry kept staring at Hope, but Weldon turned to Oren. “I hope you ain't doing nothing too stupid,” he said.

“I ain't,” Oren said. The two men now turned their total attention to the pig.

“I'd wait another hour and then give her another squirt,” Raspberry said. “Ain't we seen enough of the vet this week?” He scratched the mud-smeared neck of the sow with the toe of his boot; the sow farted.

Oren led Hope behind the barn where the corn spilled out of the silo. Some piglets, barely bigger than kittens, were playing in it. They scattered when Oren started the black pickup. Hope started to cry.

“Are you going to let me go?” she asked Oren.

“I ain't had you yet,” he said.

Hope's bare feet were cold and black with the spring muck. “My feet hurt,” she said. “Where are we going?”

She'd seen an old blanket in the back of the pickup, matted and flecked with straw. That's where she imagined she was going: into the cornfields, then spread on the spongy spring ground—and when it was over and her throat was slit, and she'd been disemboweled with the fisherman's knife, he'd wrap her up in the blanket that was lumped stiffly on the floor of the pickup as if it covered some stillborn livestock.

“I got to find a good place to have you,” said Oren Rath. “I would of kept you at home, but I'd of had to share you.”

Hope Standish was trying to figure out the foreign machinery of Oren Rath. He did not work like the human beings she was accustomed to. “What you're doing is wrong,” she said.

“No, it isn't,” he said. “It ain't.”

“You're going to rape me,” Hope said. “That's wrong.”

“I just want to have you,” he said. He hadn't bothered to tie her to the glove compartment this time. There was nowhere she could go. They were driving only on those mile-long plots of county roads, driving slowly west in little squares, the way a knight advances on a chessboard: one square ahead, two sideways, one sideways, two ahead. It seemed purposeless to Hope, but then she wondered if he didn't know the roads so very well that he knew how to cover a considerable distance without ever passing through a town. They saw only the signposts for towns, and although they couldn't have moved more than thirty miles from the university, she didn't recognize any of the names: Coldwater, Hills, Fields, Plainview. Maybe they aren't towns, she thought, but only crude labels for the natives who lived here— identifying the land for them, as if they didn't know the simple words for the things they saw every day.

“You don't have any right to do this to me,” Hope said.

“Shit,” he said. He pumped his brakes hard, throwing her forward against the truck's solid dashboard. Her forehead bounced off the windshield, the back of her hand was mashed against her nose. She felt something like a small muscle or a very light bone give way in her chest. Then he tromped on the accelerator and tossed her back into the seat. “I hate arguing,” he said.

Her nose bled; she sat with her head forward, in her hands, and the blood dripped on her thighs. She sniffed a little; the blood dripped over her lip and filmed her teeth. She tipped her head back so that she could taste it. For some reason, it calmed her—it helped her to think. She knew there was a rapidly blueing knot on her forehead, swelling under her smooth skin. When she ran her hand up to her face and touched the lump, Oren Rath looked at her and laughed. She spit at him—a thin phlegm laced pink with blood. It caught his cheek and ran down to the collar of her husband's flannel shirt. His hand, as flat and broad as the sole of a boot, reached for her hair. She grabbed his forearm with both her hands, she jerked his wrist to her mouth and bit into the soft part where the hairs don't always grow and the blue tubes carry the blood.

She meant to kill him in this impossible way but she barely had time to break the skin. His arm was so strong that he snapped her body upright and across his lap. He pushed the back of her neck against the steering wheel— the horn blew through her head—and he broke her nose with the heel of his left hand. Then he returned that hand to the wheel. He cradled her head with his right hand, holding her face against his stomach; when he felt that she wasn't struggling, he let her head rest on his thigh. His hand lightly cupped her ear, as if to hold the sound of the horn inside her. She kept her eyes shut against the pain in her nose.