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.
