The World According to Garp by John Irving
"Don't kill me," Hope whispered. "Just go, quickly, and you'll get away. She's calling the police, right now."
"Get dressed," said Oren Rath. "I ain't had you yet, and I'm going to." Where he'd butted her with the oval crown of his head, he had split her lip against her teeth and made her bleed. "I mean business," he repeated, but uncertainly. He was as rough-boned and graceless as a young steer. He made her put her dress on without any underwear, he shoved her barefoot down the hall, carrying his boots under his arm. Hope didn't realize until she was beside him in the pickup that he had put on one of her husband's flannel shirts.
"Margot has probably written down the license number of this truck," she told him. She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself; she dabbed at her split lip with the broad, floppy collar of her dress. Oren Rath stiff-armed her in the ear, rapping the far side of her head off the passenger door of the cab.
"I need that mirror to see," he said. "Don't mess around or I'll really hurt you." He'd taken her bra with him and he used it to tie her wrists to the thick, rusty hinges of the glove-compartment door, which gaped open at her.
He drove as if he were in no special hurry to get out of town. He did not seem impatient when he got stuck at the long traffic light near the university. He watched all the pedestrians crossing the street; he shook his head and clucked his tongue when he saw how some of the students were dressed. Hope could see her husband's office window from where she sat in the truck's cab, but she didn't know if he would be in his office or actually, at that moment, teaching a class.
In fact, he was in his office--four floors up. Dorsey Standish looked out his window and saw the lights change; the traffic was allowed to flow, the hordes of marching students were temporarily restrained at the gates to the crosswalks. Dorsey Standish liked watching traffic. There are many foreign and flashy cars in a university town, but here these cars were contrasted with the vehicles of the natives: farmers' trucks, slat-sided conveyors of pigs and cattle, strange harvesting machinery, everything muddy from the farms and county roads. Standish knew nothing about farms, but he was fascinated by the animals and the machines--especially the dangerous, baffling 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--something 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 ever 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 & 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 nub-bled surface of a raspberry. In fact, that is what his family called him: Raspberry Rath. 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 are 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
"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.
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 same 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 painted 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 t
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.