“Hemingway?” The cop stood. His equipment clanked like a machine that needed oil. He gave the doctor another stare. They didn’t believe her.
“Yes, works in IT. Follows me wherever I go.”
“You’re saying the guy on the bike who assaulted you was this IT guy you know?”
“I remember that guy,” Heimlich said, hearing the story. “A bully. I wish I had been there to help you translate.”
As she lay on the path catching her breath, waiting for help, the back of her head soggy like muskmelon rind—talk and die, she recalled, head trauma—she heard the shriek of an afternoon freight clatter through town, the clunk-clunk-clunk of steel wheels on iron rattling her ribs, two of which, it turned out, were broken.
“Admit it,” he said on the bike trail, assaulting her, one of his bike’s wheels still spinning. “You want me so much, you want to be me.”
Hearing the story, Heimlich felt his own bile rise.
She fell into a dream, feverish, thirsty, thinking of the nearby Red River with its green scum. The image of Hemingway on his bike gave way at the hospital to a memory. She tried not to say it; it made her sound woozy, stupid. “He put me in a vise,” she said, “a brace made of metal and wood, concrete. It had a lever; a jaw opened and closed. He stretched his lips out thin. Big white teeth. He enjoyed my pain. A sadist. With his bike chain. He wanted to eat me. ‘You’re my sadist,’” he said. ‘Start dominating.’ I told him we were done. ‘If you leave me,’ he said, ‘I’ll shoot you.’”
She stopped. Time was tangled in her head. Cop turned to doc and shook his head. They were both men. What did she expect? One gave the other a male gaze. She didn’t make sense, eyes cloudy, face hot with blood, and she didn’t make much more sense when she told it to Heimlich. The man with the vise came from a dream she had after her abortion, nothing to do with Hemingway on the bike, but how to backtrack? How could they understand her pain? Hemingway, the man who made her pregnant, enjoyed pain. Or was that the IT guy? Were they one and the same? She gave up thinking and closed her eyes.
It was a sweltering afternoon. He biked so fast he couldn’t stop, only he wasn’t the IT guy until she remembered it in the hospital, with nurse and doctor, then doctor and cop, then cop and lawyer. “Look, Cinderella,” the cop said; “I don’t follow. Who’s Hemingway? Who’s IT guy? You’re concussed.”
“It’s Cindy.”
“Yeah, okay. Whatever. Cindy. Same questions. I’m trying to help here.”
A relay race; she was the baton passed from one man to the next, one season of life to the next, walking two dogs, one a high-strung poodle named Wolf, the dog she hated yet now was hers, or she was responsible for it. The other, a schnauzer named Schnitzel, was a wiry miniature the color of salt and cinnamon. Both on leashes. She lived on a leash too, she tried to say to Heimlich, but he scratched his head and pulled at his hair, confused. Walking the dogs, she was caterwauling, songs without sense, just to hear her voice above the racket in her ears, coaxing each dog on the trail along the Red River to do its business so she could walk up the hill to the house where she sat over summer for owners stuck in Europe when the new pandemic struck. Whenever anyone asked—hardly ever—she said they were people who named a poodle Wolf and a schnauzer Schnitzel.
“I’m having trouble following you,” Heimlich said, his own head jangly with a mild, chronic case of the virus. “You’re conflating two experiences. Remember you told me the Marauders raped you and put you in an old rusted cage intended for bears? You think you might be getting what happened then tangled up with the bully you call Hemingway? Or with hallucinations? Nothing wrong with that, given what you’ve been through. But I’m woozy myself. I can’t follow.”
Ear-jangling music by a new alternative band, Noble Rot, in her ears. She believed they would break through. She wanted a strong drink with the vocalist’s high-pitched wail, maybe a G&T or a buck-naked margarita. She worked on a computer terminal for the arts section of a weekly paper; gathered information, organized it, put it out, mostly just listing acts but sometimes reviewing. Her wrists were sore most nights, required medication. Some kind of condition, sore capillaries or something.
Carpal tunnel! That was it. Head injury! Lucky to be here. Isn’t that what the doc told her? “Cinderella.” He said her full name. Grinned it at her
“It’s Cindy.”
“No prince yet? No shoe that fits?” The doc smirked. Goddamn asshole.
A strong drink was the best medication. Hemingway—the writer, not her attacker—had called it the giant killer. She rather liked that, remembered it when she drank, remembered her aborted child, the IT impregnator who told her about Hemingway the writer, whom he said he resembled, and made her pregnant and became Hemingway, name and all, by osmosis—a middle-aged IT guy with a gut who did IT stuff at the local university and had a reputation for bearing down on women until they did things they didn’t particularly want to do. “I always get my way,” he told her on their first date. “You should file that for safekeeping.” She knew two women who had been involved with him. The three met once a year to drink and trade Hemingway stories. A kind of club. It kept all of them sane. Well, maybe the others didn’t need it the way she did. They had partners; she didn’t.
He cultivated a Hemingway mustache, the one the writer had. He was a big strapping boy in his mid-fifties. Maybe sixty. Full of literary fantasy, one woman said, still indignant. This IT guy who wrote on the side believed the corrupt establishment had not yet discovered him. He belonged in the pantheon with Joyce, Faulkner, Rushdie, Knausgård, those types. Cormac McCarthy. He liked to hold up the back cover of a Hemingway book and stare, studying himself as if staring into a mirror.
Heimlich just listened, biding his time, letting her talk. He could tell she had to get it all out, a kind of verbal constipation finally breaking loose like the crap after a virus that indicates one might be on the mend. He knew how to listen, he even thought, sometimes, that it was his superpower.
The other women laughed and clinked their beer steins with Cindy, who carried his image in her empty womb and knew she had to put him behind her. Such bitter thoughts and jangled music walking the dogs. Noble Rot would be in town, and she had a ticket—close to the front, middle-aged herself, surrounded by kids so young they might belong to her. None did.
The walk on the river would be pleasant without dogs. The cottonwoods and oaks and green ash, an occasional surviving elm, gave shade. Birds and squirrels, music and nature. She was almost happy, though she would feel the same if weeping. And it would be nice to be there without dogs.
She loved to weep, she told Heimlich. It gave her hope when tears stopped.
In middle age she was a weeper. It was her one indulgence. She had become one of those people who wept at movies. Tears trickled. She wiped them off when the child said “I love you” to the returning mother; when the husband, a philanderer, apologized and was forgiven as the house lights blazed in an empty theater. The men she met were too kind or not kind enough. Hemingway was never too kind, but then he was never kind enough. Two for one. Her men were mean after first dates. Maybe she brought it out in them with sarcastic wit, but only the IT guy who imagined himself Hemingway had made her pregnant, forced the abortion, given her a bouquet taken from the cemetery across the street from the clinic. Or was that somebody else? In the hospital, it was all a blur.
Just before the bike smashed into her, she smelled creosote and crepe myrtle, or some perfume, a scent released by the morning rain, cold enough to predict snow; or could it be a disinfectant used at the coal-fired electric plant whose white smokestacks and rusty water tower dominated the horizon?
Sweat dripped from his forehead as he came fast around the curve. He leered at her, his face stretched in a grimace of self-disgust. He had no control over the bike. Its front wheel, with a narrow gauge, wobbled. Schnitzel barked and pulled hard on the leash. She lost the leash but clung to Wolf’s, took a step back, saw the man still pump the pedals, try to right himself. The pedals gleamed in the sun. She tried backing to higher ground and fell. Vertigo. He too lost control and, surrendering to fate, flew over handlebars as the day turned: fairy-tale weather, clear, chalky, the beginning of the long fog in her deepest brain, a different kind of shipwreck in a world filled with lost souls.
The jangling music a soundtrack. She couldn’t remember lyrics. High mercury music. Wasn’t that what somebody called it? He landed on top of her and she cried out. The back of her head thudded: concrete. Something gave. She blacked out. The bike clattered. A wheel spun and clicked as though a playing card clipped to it with a clothespin riffled in rhythm with the spokes.
Wolf yelped.
“Shit,” Hemingway said. He moaned. “Goddamn bitch. Watch where you walk.” He said it from some hollow place and buried his face in her crotch, her legs spread-eagled. He was topsy-turvy on her, as though prepared for cunnilingus. Was that the word?
In the hospital, the words came hard. She tasted his sweat, felt his nose tunnel into her crotch, searching for something lost, forgotten. He grunted. She was dazed on the bike path, thoughts like chalk. In the hospital they came clear. He was Hemingway, who made her pregnant—and raped her. The back of her head ached. She was nauseous with his weight, her pain. Somebody pried open her skull with a crowbar. She pushed him aside, retched, puked up bile, tasted its scent, groaned, tried to say “Get off.” He dug into her, breathing hard, as though his nose was a penis and he would leave snot instead of seed.
Schnitzel was long gone, maybe home, maybe in the trees, but Wolf still yelped. He was all over Hemingway. He planted his nails in the man’s back and jerked his pelvis against a strip of exposed skin, pale and visible where the T-shirt bunched. She could see the tail twitch and the dog’s hindquarters rotate.
It could have been funny.
Heimlich tried to keep it all straight. She wasn’t making it easy. The story jumped on him, coming from three directions at once. He wasn’t even certain he knew who was who.
Hemingway pulled himself from her crotch with a groan, she told him, and reached behind for the dog. “So here we are,” he mumbled, sitting up. “Together again. The happy couple.” He tossed the dog like a plush toy to the bike path, where tiny nails clicked on wet pavement. It tried to run; its paws couldn’t find purchase on concrete slick with perspiration and bicycle grease. It ran in place like a comic book imposter. Hemingway grabbed it and stood up holding it tight. It quivered and yelped in his muscled hands. All she could see was a ball of hair jerk and squirm in panic. He lowered his head, swung Wolf in half circles as though waltzing with it, then made a sigh, dropped it and sat on top of it as though it was a pillow. It yipped, once, twice—a muffled sound, asthmatic even—and then the cawing of a crow, grass keening in wind, labored breathing, and Noble Rot’s tinny guitar riffs spilling insect-like from the headphone in the grass.
The world swung like a carnival ride. “Get up,” she said, or thought she said, but it came out the way someone might mumble in sleep. The concussion was taking its toll.
“Up?” he said, staring. On his T-shirt a devil, some kind of Satan, was raping from behind a woman who wore a bonnet. She looked like Little Red Riding Hood. “Who’s your daddy?” the devil asked in a balloon of dialogue. In the hospital she mentioned none of this, because Hemingway would not wear such an item of clothing, and it was Hemingway who had raped her, who had grunted into her crotch and raped her. The memory must be false.
“Didn’t you hear me yell?” he said. “Didn’t you hear me shout? I lost control. You didn’t get the hell out of my way.”
“Wolf,” she gestured, too weak and dizzy to pull him off the dog. “You’re sitting on Wolf.”
The man frowned and wiped blood from his face, though she did not tell the doctor or detective about his blood. When he stood up, it was too late. The ball of fur had flattened on the sidewalk as though air had been let out of it.
