“Hello, Andrew,” said the older man. He had a nice smile. It made his dark eyes crinkle at the corners. “I’m Dave, and this is Enoch.” He waved a hand in the direction of the blond man perched on the counter. “Why don’t you sit down?”
Shelby took a half step back. Her chest felt tight, her mouth dry. There was a high-pitched ringing in her ears. “Tyler?” He still wouldn’t look at her. “Tyler, what’s going on? Who are these people?”
Dave’s hand left Tyler’s shoulder. He came toward her, moving around the table. He had a slight limp in his left leg. “Your parents are worried about you, Andrew.”
She broke for the hall in a desperate sprint. Four yards. Three. Her heart pounding in her chest, her chafed thighs burning. Her hand closed on the doorknob. Enoch caught her from behind just as she yanked the door open. He kicked it shut and hauled her away, pushing her back against the wall. She could smell the milk on his breath. Milk and something else, meaty and pungent. “Take it easy,” he grunted, dragging her wrists to the small of her back as she tried to push off from the mold-spotted drywall. Cold metal against her skin. The click of a mechanism locking. “We’re here to help you.”
“Rape!” she screamed, her voice cracking. “Rape, rape!”
Enoch put a palm against her head and thumped it hard against the wall, cratering the sheetrock. She blinked. Stars swam in her field of vision and then he was shoving her and she was stumbling toward the door as behind them in the kitchen Dave spoke to Tyler in hushed tones. “… won’t press charges,” he was saying, “but man to man I’d give serious thought to finding help. You don’t want this life.”
“Yeah,” Tyler mumbled. “Thanks.”
“Tyler!” Shelby shrieked as Enoch reached around her to open the door. The stairwell yawned below, and at the bottom another man stood holding the inner door open and looking up at them. He wore sunglasses and a light, faded denim jacket. A car was idling outside. Shelby could hear the low, insistent rumble of its engine. She tasted vomit at the back of her throat as Enoch forced her out onto the steps, her bare feet sliding on the worn carpeting. “Tyler, help me!”
But he didn’t. Not as Enoch shoved her down the stairs, vertigo stretching the front hall into a dark canyon, and not as he and the other man bundled her into the back of a white van while the old man sleeping in the chair snored fitfully and a thin, nervous-looking woman out walking her dog cried, “What are you doing to her?” and Dave slipped between them, soothing and explaining, saying things like “parental consent” and “accreditation” until the woman shrank into herself and the van’s doors slammed shut, plunging Shelby into blackness with only her screams for company.
For the first hour she could still hear the sounds of the city through the van’s padded walls. She tried scooting up against it and tearing at the foam padding, but it was thick and spongy and impossible to get a grip on between the constant jouncing and the angle. If anyone could hear her screaming through the insulation, they didn’t do anything about it. When the van stopped at what she assumed were traffic lights she threw herself against the wall until her shoulder was raw and nearly numb. She screamed until her voice cracked and gave out.
When they hit highway, their stop-and-start progress smoothing out into the roar of the open road, she began to cry. It started in her throat, a lump she could hardly swallow past, and then she was sobbing so hard that she nearly retched, her whole body bent over by the force of her misery. No matter how many times Ruth had threatened her with reform school or the cops or wilderness retreats way out in the linty navel of Nebraska, she’d never really believed the hammer would come down. She’d heard them arguing at night, Stel sniffling and saying “It’s just a phase, it’s just a phase” while Ruth ranted about gender roles and autogynephilia, and somehow she’d thought it would just blow over, that ten years later it would be an ugly memory.
Even the night she’d left for Tyler’s, her great escape, when Ruth cornered her in the kitchen shrieking You want to be a woman? You want to be a woman? See how you like it, see if you can take it and hit her again and again, vicious little slaps across her face, her throat, her chest and shoulders, she hadn’t really believed it. It would just end, sooner or later, and they would pretend it had never happened at all, like they had when Stel caught her trying on Ruth’s pantyhose or the time on the Cape with Julian Donner. Now here it was. She’d guessed wrong, so unbelievably wrong, and she was going to pay for it.
She cried herself out after a while, lapsing into a dull, sticky half consciousness to avoid the infuriating itching of her snot-coated upper lip, the pins and needles creeping up her arms. With her ear against the van’s metal bed she could hear the rolling hiss of the tires, feel the vibration of the engine. She thought of the How Things Work picture book Ruth’s sister, Jean, had bought for her when she was little. Pistons and turbines and the little deaths of controlled explosions flashing in the heart of the hidden machine. A cutaway of everything unspoken and ignored that drove the world onward, onward, faster, with everything exactly where it was supposed to be and moving at terrible speed.
Sleep came somewhere in the long, monotonous hum. Shelby dreamed of babies crawling over an abandoned kitchen, cutting their little fingers on broken glass and cookware, and of their unformed heads collapsing when she tried to take them in her arms. When she woke her mouth was parched, her nose stuffed and running. She could feel the little puddle of snot under her cheek. The car wasn’t moving. The engine was off and she could hear the muffled sounds of gas pumping, the hiss of the pneumatic grip, the thrum of the pump building suction. Voices, too. Men talking. Laughing.
“Help,” she croaked, rolling onto her stomach. Her face itched where her stubble was coming in, thin and wispy as pubes. She squirmed forward a few inches, dragging herself like a worm toward the rear doors. “Help me.”
The doors are going to open, she thought as she heaved herself up onto her knees and leaned against the cold metal. Tyler’s going to be there. He’s going to say baby, I’m so sorry, and he’ll pull me out, or my moms, we couldn’t go through with it, we made a mistake.
It had to open. Something had to happen to make sense of the day’s long, dark blur. She was dead. She’d had a stroke. She’d fallen asleep on the LIRR and this was all a dream, just an angry ghost whispering in her ear that Whitey was coming for her, that Whitey had gotten her before she could talk, before she could crawl, and now she couldn’t get out of the stainless white sheet they’d sewn her into, couldn’t be anything but a fat, smudged carbon copy of the women—the real women—who’d reached halfway across the world and plucked her from her crib.
“Help me,” she cried, her voice cracking. “They kidnapped me. Please, please, help me.”
The voices outside fell silent. There was a loud chunk as the pump shut off, and then footsteps circling the van. A man’s voice came, flatter and harsher than Enoch’s or Dave’s. “You got someone in the back there, Davey?”
“Let me out,” wailed Shelby. She banged her head against the door, hard enough that a squirming gray thread of nausea crawled from the pit of her stomach up into her throat. “Please, mister, please, help me! They dragged me in here, I’m from New York, from Long Island, I don’t know where I am.”
The man snarled. “You didn’t say nothing about a girl.”
He knows them. She started to cry even before Dave could clear his throat and answer: “It’s a transvestite, Jimmy. Didn’t think you’d be interested.”
There was a short silence.
“Show it to me,” Jimmy said.
Shelby squirmed back from the door as Enoch threw the left-hand panel open, then the right. Cold artificial light flooded the van’s interior. Three men stood silhouetted against it, and behind them a semitruck idled at the edge of a huge expanse of cracked and broken pavement. A weigh station, maybe, not a regular gas station. No one would hear her screaming here. No one would find her if they dragged her out and raped her under the light of the moon and put a bullet in her head.
“Fat,” said Jimmy, once a moment had passed. “Little titties and everything. Coulda fooled me, tell you the truth.”
As Enoch tossed a package of crackers and a bottle of warm Poland Spring into the van and slammed the doors again, Shelby felt a flush of perverse pride, pride she clung to as she unscrewed the bottle with her teeth and choked on lukewarm water, as she tore open the package of smashed peanut butter crackers and ate them like a pig, face-first, snorting and snuffling. The cab’s doors slammed and the van pulled away from the pump, creaking and thumping back onto the open road. Those eyes, nested deep in leathery skin, going wide.
Coulda fooled me.
Blossom, Kansas
Nadine slammed the back of her head into the woman’s face again, relishing the crack of breaking bone and cartilage. Her mother was screaming. Her sisters, too, all held back by the bulwark of her father’s bulk. There were tears in Mark Donovan’s eyes and somehow that was the worst part, his indulgence in his own weakness as he did this to her, as he let it happen, wet and weepy as though he hadn’t paid to have her socked away in whatever funny farm or backwater revivalist rapist reserve the people who’d been waiting for them in the rest stop parking lot were running. As though he had no more choice in how her life went than the wind howling through the desolate visitor center and the derelict cars at the edge of the dusty, gritty lot.
“We’re trying to help you,” the woman holding her snarled, snaking an arm around Nadine’s throat. She had a tattoo on her thick forearm. Names and dates. Nadine hoped her kids had died. “Stop fighting me.”
Nadine twisted, bared her teeth, and bit her. The woman howled, wrapping a fist in Nadine’s hair and trying to drag her off her other arm. Her skin tasted like sweat. It stretched between Nadine’s teeth. Her mother was screaming “Do something, Mark!” as though the whole mess weren’t his fault, and her little sister Alice, four years old, kept wailing “Naddy!” in her lisping voice as Nina, eight since her birthday three days earlier—white sheet cake with pink icing, Happy Birthday Princess in big bubble letters—and wide-eyed with terror, held her back.
The other muscle, the bearded man in the Orioles cap who’d been waiting with Names-and-Dates by the unmarked van when they pulled up, ducked down to grab Nadine’s legs, wrapping his thick arms around her calves. “You’re doing the right thing,” he growled to her family as he lifted her bodily into the air. Names-and-Dates took a half step back, her grip loosening, and Nadine dug a shoulder into her side and wrenched her head back with all her strength, the flesh between her teeth stretching, stretching. With a sickening squelch it tore away from the woman’s arm in a long, ragged strip, snapping taut again as the screaming started and the woman lost her hold. Blood flooded Nadine’s mouth. She thought of Tess’s pussy, of the deep iron stink of the other girl’s period as she pressed her nose into the slit, and spat, laughing. A closed fist slammed into her cheek and rocked her head back like a speed bag. She saw stars.
“Oh Jesus, Mark,” her mother screamed. “Do something.”
Names-and-Dates, retching and gasping, a string of bloody skin swinging loose from her forearm, shoved Nadine at the Beard, who wrapped her in a crushing bear hug from behind. He twisted her arms behind her back and snapped a cuff on her right wrist. He did it easily, by rote, like tying off a garbage bag or hefting firewood. Names-and-Dates, gray-faced and swaying a little, followed them toward the van. She’d wrapped a handkerchief around her wounded arm. Nadine kicked, spat, went limp, and finally forced herself to piss, a urine stain darkening the crotch of her overalls, but the Beard was unfazed.
“Why don’t you just fucking kill me?” Nadine screeched as they manhandled her into the back of their van and onto a bench seat bolted to the side panel. Names-and-Dates snapped the other end of the cuff around the bench’s left support as the Beard let Nadine go and climbed down over the tailgate. Nadine kicked out at the older woman, clipping her shin. “Don’t let them take me!” she screamed, ashamed of the way her voice cracked, of the hot piss running down her legs, of how afraid she was. “Don’t do this! It was just a joke, we didn’t mean it, please, please, Mom, please!”
Nadine couldn’t see her family, but she could hear her mother and her sisters crying, and she could see her father’s white-faced horror as he walked into the garage at three a.m. to find her tangled up with Tess behind his tarped Harley panhead. He’d dragged her across the cold concrete by her hair, bruising her tailbone on the edge of the step up to the kitchen, where he dialed Tess’s mother while she cried, begged, groveled.
The Beard slammed the van’s rear doors. The sounds of Nadine’s family being sad about what they were doing to her, what they’d paid other people to do to her, faded to a wet and distant blubbering as the overheads flickered weakly to life. A moment later the van rocked, another door slammed, and the engine growled awake.
“You fucked my arm up pretty good there,” said Names-and-Dates, crouching down just outside Nadine’s reach. “You’re scared. I get that. And you’re all fucked up in there, too.” She jabbed Nadine’s forehead with two stiffened fingers. “Dykes, man. They’ll drive you crazy. Get you chasing your tail.” They rumbled into motion, jouncing over broken pavement and potholes toward the highway cutting flat and straight across the featureless void of the desert. Light and dark jumped over the woman’s sweaty face as they went over a speed bump. She was pretty, in an average sort of way, and had a little pit in her nose where she might have had a piercing once.
Names-and-Dates straightened up, shifting her balance easily with the sway and rattle of the van beneath her feet. “Anyway,” she said, tugging the bandana wrapped around her oozing arm a little tighter, “I’m gonna show you what that kind of shit’ll get you at the camp, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends once we’re evened up.” She made a fist, knuckles cracking.
