The World According to Garp

He made several left turns, more right turns. Each turn, she knew, meant they had driven one mile. His hand now cupped the back of her neck. She could hear again, and she felt his fingers working their way into her hair. The front of her face felt numb.

“I don't want to kill you,” he said.

“Don't, then,” Hope said.

“Got to,” Oren Rath told her. “After we do it, I'll have to.”

This affected her like the taste of her own blood. She knew he didn't care for arguing. She saw that she had lost a step: her rape. He was going to do it to her. She had to consider that it was done. What mattered now was living; she knew that meant outliving him. She knew that meant getting him caught, or getting him killed, or killing him.

Against her cheek, she felt the change in his pocket; his blue jeans were soft and sticky with farm dust and machine grease. His belt buckle dug into her forehead; her lips touched the oily leather of his belt. The fisherman's knife was kept in a sheath, she knew. But where was the sheath? She couldn't see it; she didn't dare to hunt for it with her hands. Suddenly, against her eye, she felt his penis stiffening. She felt then—for really the first time— almost paralyzed, panicked beyond helping herself, no longer able to sort out the priorities. Once again, it was Oren Rath who helped her.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “Your kid got away. I was going to kill the kid, too, you know.”

The logic of Oren Rath's peculiar version of sanity made everything sharpen for Hope; she heard the other cars. There were not many, but every few minutes or so there was a car passing. She wished she could see, but she knew they were not as isolated as they had been. Now, she thought, before he gets to where we're going—if he even knows where we're going. She thought he did. At least, before he gets off this road—before I'm somewhere, again, where there aren't any people.

Oren Rath shifted in his seat. His erection was making him uncomfortable. Hope's warm face in his lap, his hand in her hair, was reaching him. Now, Hope thought. She moved her cheek against his thigh, just slightly; he did not stop her. She moved her face in his lap as if she were making herself more comfortable, against a pillow—against his prick, she knew. She moved until the bulge under his rank pants rose untouched by her face. But she could reach it with her breath; it stuck up out of his lap near her mouth, and she began to breathe on it. It hurt too much to breathe out of her nose. She drew her lips into an O-shaped kiss, she focused her breathing, and, very softly, she blew.

Oh, Nicky, she thought. And Dorsey, her husband. She would see them again, she hoped. To Oren Rath she gave her warm, careful breath. On him she focused her one, cold thought: I'm going to get you, you son of a bitch.

It was apparent that the sexual experience of Oren Rath had not previously involved such subtleties as Hope's directed breathing. He tried to move her head in his lap so that he would once again have contact with her hot face but at the some time he didn't want to disturb her soft breath. What she was doing made him want more contact, but it was excruciating to imagine losing the teasing contact he now had. He began to squirm. Hope didn't hurry. It was his movement that finally brought the bulge of sour jeans to touch her lips. She closed them there, but didn't move her mouth. Oren Rath felt only a hot wind passing through the crude weave of his clothes; he groaned. A car approached, then passed him; he corrected the truck. He was aware he was beginning to wander across the center of the road.

“What are you doing?” he asked Hope. She, very lightly, applied her teeth to his swollen clothes. He brought his knee up, pumped the brake, jarred her head, hurt her nose. He forced his hand between her face and his lap. She thought he was going to really hurt her but he was struggling with his zipper. “I've seen pictures of this,” he told her.

“Let me,” she said. She had to sit up just a little to get his fly open. She wanted to get a look at where they were; they were still out in the country, of course, but there were pointed lines on the road. She took him out of his pants and into her mouth without looking at him.

“Shit,” he said. She thought she would gag; she was afraid she would be sick. Then she got him into the back of her cheek where she thought she could take a lot of time. He was sitting so stiffly still, but trembling, that she knew he was already far beyond even his imaginary experiences. That steadied Hope; it gave her confidence, and a sense of time. She went ahead with it very slowly, listening for other cars. She could tell he had slowed down. At the first sign she had that he was leaving this road, she would have to change her plans. Could I bite the damn thing off? she wondered. But she thought that she probably couldn't—at least, not quickly enough.

Then two trucks went by them, closely following each other; in the distance she thought she heard another car's horn. She started working faster—he raised his lap higher. She thought their truck had speeded up. A car passed them—awfully close, she thought. Its horn blared at them. “Fuck you!” Oren Rath yelled after it; he was beginning to jounce up and down in the seat, hurting Hope's nose. Hope now had to be careful not to hurt him; she wanted to hurt him very much. Just make him lose his head, she encouraged herself.

Suddenly there was the sound of gravel spraying the underside of the truck. She closed her mouth fast around him. But they were neither crashing nor turning off the road; he was pulling abruptly to the roadside and stopping. The truck stalled out. He put both his hands on either side of her face; his thighs hardened and slapped against her jaw. I'm going to choke on it, she thought, but he was lifting her face up, out of his lap. “No! No!” he cried. A truck, flinging tiny stones, tore by them and cut into his words. “I don't have the thing on,” he said to her. “If you have any germs, they'll swim right up me.”

Hope sat on her knees, her lips hot and sore, her nose throbbing. He was going to put on a rubber, but when he tore it from its little tinfoil package, he stared at it as if it wasn't at all what he expected to see—as if he thought they were bright green! As if he didn't know how to put it on. “Take your dress off,” he said; he was embarrassed that she was looking at him. She could see the cornfields on either side of the road, and the back side of a billboard a few yards away from them. But there were no houses, no signs, no intersecting roads. No cars and trucks were coming. She thought her heart would simply stop.

Oren Rath tore himself out of her husband's shirt; he threw it out his window; Hope saw it flap in the road. He scraped his boots off on the brake pedal, whacking his narrow blond knees on the steering wheel. “Shove over!” he said. She was wedged against the passenger-side door. She knew—even if she could get out the door—that she couldn't outrun him. She didn't have any shoes—and his feet appeared to have a dog's rough pads.

He was having trouble with his pants; he clutched the rolled-up rubber in his teeth. Then he was naked—he'd flung his pants somewhere—and he shoved the rubber down over himself as if his penis were no more sensitive than a turtle's leathery tail. She was trying to unbutton her dress and her tears were coming back, though she was fighting them, when he suddenly caught her dress and began to yank it over her head; it caught on her arms. He jerked her elbows painfully behind her back.

He was too long to fit in the cab. One door had to be open. She reached for the handle over her head but he bit her in the neck. “No!” he hollered. He thrashed his feet around—she saw his shin was bleeding; he'd cut it on the rim of the horn—and his hard heels struck the door handle on the driver's side. With both feet, he launched the door open. She saw the gray smear of the road over his shoulder—his long ankles stuck out into the traffic lane, but there was no traffic now. Her head hurt; she was jammed against the door. She had to wriggle herself back down the seat, farther under him, and her movement made him yell something unintelligible. She felt his rubbered prick slipping over her stomach. Then his whole body braced and he bit into her shoulder fiercely. He'd come!

“Shit!” he cried. “I done it already!”

“No,” she said, hugging him. “No, you can do more.” She knew that if he thought he was through with her, he would kill her.

“Much more,” she said in his ear, which smelled like dust. She had to wet her fingers to wet herself. God, I'll never get him inside me, she thought, but when she found him with her hand, she knew that the rubber was the lubricated kind.

“Oh,” he said. He lay still on top of her; he seemed surprised by where she'd put him, as if he didn't really know what was where. “Oh,” he repeated.

Oh, what now? Hope wondered. She held her breath. A car, a flash of red, whined past their open door—the horn blast and some muffled, derisive hoots fading away from them. Of course, she thought: we look like two farmers fucking off the side of the road; it's probably done all the time. No one will stop, she thought, unless it's the police. She imagined a bread-faced trooper appearing over Roth's lurching shoulder, writing out a ticket. “Not on the road, buddy,” he'd be saying. And when she screamed at him, “Rape! He's raping me,”