The World According to Garp by John Irving
"Mother," said the deputy.
Across the road, Hope Standish looked up at them for the first time. Two swearing men were wallowing toward her out of a muddy field. The blades of the helicopter were slowing down. There was also a man peeping witlessly out the window of his car, but that seemed far away. Hope stepped into her dress. One armhole, where a sleeve had been, was torn open and Hope had to pin a flap of material to her side with her elbow, or else leave her breast exposed. It was then that she noticed how sore her shoulders and her neck were.
Arden Bensenhaver, out of breath and soaked with mud from his knees down, was in front of her suddenly. The mud made his trousers hug his legs so that, to Hope, he looked like an old man wearing knickers. "Mrs. Standish?" he asked. She turned her back to him and hid her face, nodding. "So much blood," he said, helplessly. "I'm sorry we took so long. Are you hurt?"
She turned and stared at him. He saw the swelling around both eyes and her broken nose--and the blue bulge on her forehead. "It's mostly his blood," she said. "But I was raped. He did it," she told Bensenhaver.
Bensenhaver had his handkerchief out; he seemed about to dab at her face with it, as he might wipe the mouth of a child, but then he despaired at what a job it would be to clean her up and he put his handkerchief away. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. We got here as fast as we could. We saw your baby and he's fine," Bensenhaver said.
"I had to put him in my mouth," Hope said to him. Bensenhaver shut his eyes. "And then he fucked me and fucked me," she said. "He was going to kill me, later--he told me he would. I had to kill him. And I'm not sorry."
"Of course you're not," Bensenhaver said. "And you shouldn't be, Mrs. Standish. I'm sure you did the very best thing." She nodded her head to him, then stared down at her feet. She put one hand out toward Bensenhaver's shoulder and he let her lean against him, though she was slightly taller than Bensenhaver and in order to rest her head against him, she had to scrunch down.
Bensenhaver was aware of the deputy then; he had been to the cab to look at Oren Rath and had vomited all over the truck's front fender and in full view of the pilot who was walking the shocked driver of the stuck car across the road. The deputy, with his face the bloodless color of Oren Rath's sunlit feet, was imploring Bensenhaver to come see. But Bensenhaver wanted Mrs. Standish to feel every possible reassurance.
"So you killed him after he raped you, when he was relaxed, not paying attention?" he asked her.
"No, during," she whispered against his neck. The awful reek of her almost got to Bensenhaver, but he kept his face very close to her, where he could hear her.
"You mean, while he was raping you, Mrs. Standish?"
"Yes," she whispered. "He was still inside me when I got his knife. It was in his pants, on the floor, and he was going to use it on me when he was finished, so I had to," she said.
"Of course you did," Bensenhaver said. "It doesn't matter." He meant that she should have killed him anyway--even if he hadn't been planning to kill her. To Arden Bensenhaver there was no crime as serious as rape--not even murder, except perhaps the murder of a child. But he knew less about that; he had no children of his own.
He had been married seven months when his pregnant wife had been raped in a Laundromat while he waited outside for her in the car. Three kids had done it. They had opened one of the big spring-door dryers and sat her ass on the open door, pushed her head into the warm dryer where she could only scream into the hot, muffling sheets and pillowcases and hear her own voice boom and bounce around the great metal drum. Her arms were in the dryer with her head, so she was helpless. Her feet couldn't even reach the floor. The spring door made her jounce up and down under all three of them, although she probably tried not to move. The boys had no idea, of course, that they were raping the police superintendent's wife. And all the bright lighting possible for downtown Toledo on a Saturday night would not have saved her.
They were an early-morning couple, the Bensenhavers. They were young still, and they took their laundry to the Laundromat together, Monday morning before breakfast; they read the newspapers during the wash cycle. Then they put their laundry in the dryer and went home and had breakfast. Mrs. Bensenhaver picked it up on her way downtown to the police station with Bensenhaver. He would wait in the car while she went inside to get it; sometimes, someone would have taken it out of the dryer while they were having breakfast and Mrs. Bensenhaver would have to run it for another few minutes. Bensenhaver then waited. But they liked the early morning because there was rarely anyone else in the Laundromat.
Only when Bensenhaver saw the three kids leaving did he start to worry about how long his wife had been collecting the dry laundry. But it does not take very long to rape someone, even three times. Bensenhaver went into the Laundromat where he saw his wife's legs sticking out of the dryer; her shoes had fallen off. Those were not the first dead feet Bensenhaver had seen, but they were very important feet to him.
She had suffocated in her own clean wash--or she had vomited, and choked--but they had not meant to kill her. That part had been an accident, and at the trial a great deal had been made of the unplanned nature of Mrs. Bensenhaver's death. Their attorney had said that the boys had planned "to just rape her--not kill her, too." And the phrase "just rape"--as in "She was just raped, lucky thing, a wonder she wasn't killed!"--appalled Arden Bensenhaver.
"It's good that you killed him," Bensenhaver whispered to Hope Standish. "We couldn't have done nearly enough to him," he confided to her. "Nothing like he deserved. Good for you," he whispered. "Good for you."
Hope had expected another sort of police experience, a more critical investigation--at least, a more suspicious cop, and certainly a man very different from Arden Bensenhaver. She was so grateful, for one thing, that Bensenhaver was an old man, clearly in his sixties--like an uncle to her, or even more sexually remote: a grandfather. She said she felt better, that she was all right; when she straightened up and stood away from him, she saw she had smeared his shirt collar and his cheek with blood, but Bensenhaver hadn't noticed or didn't care.
"Okay, show me," Bensenhaver said to the deputy, but again he smiled gently at Hope. The deputy led him to the open cab.
"Oh, my God," the driver of the stuck car was saying. "Dear Jesus, look at this, and what's that? Christ, look, I think that's his liver. Isn't that what a liver looks like?" The pilot gawked in mute wonder and Bensenhaver caught both men by their coat shoulders and steered them roughly away. They started toward the rear of the truck, where Hope was composing herself, but Bensenhaver hissed at them, "Stay away from Mrs. Standish. Stay away from the truck. Go radio our position," he told the pilot. "They'll need an ambulance or something here. We'll take Mrs. Standish with us."
"They'll need a plastic bag for him," said the deputy, pointing to Oren Rath. "He's all over the place."
"I can see with my own eyes," said Arden Bensenhaver. He looked inside the cab and whistled admiringly.
The deputy started to ask, "Was he doing it when..."
"That's right," said Bensenhaver. He put his hand into a horrible mess by the accelerator pedal, but he didn't seem to mind. He was reaching for the knife on the floor of the passenger's side. He picked it up in his handkerchief; he looked it over carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief, and put it in his pocket.
"Look," the deputy whispered, conspiratorially. "Did you ever hear of a rapist wearing a rubber?"
"It's not common," Bensenhaver said. "But it's not unknown."
"It's weird to me," said the deputy. He looked amazed as Bensenhaver pinched the prophylactic tight, just below its bulge; Bensenhaver snapped the rubber off and held it, without spilling a drop, up to the light. The sack was as large as a tennis ball. It hadn't leaked. It was full of blood.
Bensenhaver looked satisfied; he tied a knot in the condom, the way you'd knot a balloon, and he flung it so far into the bean field that it was out of sight.
"I don't want someone suggesting that it might not have been a rape
He didn't wait for the deputy to answer; Bensenhaver went to the back of the truck to be with Mrs. Standish.
"How old was he--that boy?" Hope asked Bensenhaver.
"Old enough," Bensenhaver told her. "About twenty-five or twenty-six," he added. He did not want anything to diminish her survival--particularly, in her own eyes. He waved to the pilot, who was to help Mrs. Standish aboard. Then he went to clear things with the deputy. "You stay here with the body and the bad driver," he told him.
"I'm not a bad driver," the driver whined. "Christ, if you'd seen that lady there--in the road..."
"And keep anyone away from the truck," Bensenhaver said.
On the road was the shirt belonging to Mrs. Standish's husband; Bensenhaver picked it up and trotted to the helicopter in his funny, overweight way of running. The two men watched Bensenhaver climb aboard the helicopter and rise away from them. The weak spring sun seemed to leave with the copter and they were suddenly cold and didn't know where to go. Not in the truck, certainly, and sitting in the driver's car meant crossing that field of muck. They went to the pickup, lowered the tailgate, and sat on it.
"Will he call a tow truck for my car?" the driver asked.
"He'll probably forget," the deputy said. He was thinking about Bensenhaver; he admired him, but he feared him, and he also thought that Bensenhaver was not to be totally trusted. There were questions of orthodoxy, if that's what it was, which the deputy had never considered. Mainly, the deputy just had too many things to think about at one time.
The driver paced back and forth in the pickup, which irritated the deputy because it jounced him on the tailgate. The driver avoided the foul, bunched blanket crammed in the corner next to the cab; he cleared a see-through spot on the dusted and caked rear window so that he could, occasionally, squint inside the cab at the rigid and disemboweled body of Oren Rath. All the blood was dry now, and through the mottled rear window the body looked to the driver to be similar, in color and in gloss, to an eggplant. He went and sat down on the tailgate beside the deputy, who got up, walked back in the truck, and peered in the window at the gashed corpse.
"You know what?" the driver said. "Even though she was all messed up, you could tell what a really good-looking woman she was."
"Yes, you could," the deputy agreed. The driver now paced around in the back of the truck with him, so the deputy went to the tailgate and sat down.
"Don't get sore," the driver said.
"I'm not sore," the deputy said.
"I don't mean that I can sympathize with anyone who'd want to rape her, you know," the driver said.
"I know what you don't mean," said the deputy.
The deputy knew he was over his head in these matters, but the simple-mindedness of the driver forced the deputy to adopt what he imagined was Bensenhaver's attitude of contempt for him.
"You see a lot of this, huh?" the driver asked. "You know: rape and murder."
"Enough," the deputy said with self-conscious solemnity. He had never seen a rape or murder before, and he realized that even now he had not actually seen it through his own eyes as much as he'd been treated to the experience through the eyes of Arden Bensenhaver. He had seen rape and murder according to Bensenhaver, he thought. The deputy felt very confused; he sought some point of view all his own.
"Well," said the driver, peering in the rear window again, "I seen some stuff in the service, but nothing like this."
The deputy couldn't respond.
"This is like war, I guess," the driver said. "This is like a bad hospital."
The deputy wondered if he should let the fool look at Rath's body, if it mattered or not, and to whom? Certainly it couldn't matter to Rath. But to his unreal family? To the deputy?--he didn't know. And would Bensenhaver object?
"Hey, don't mind my asking you a personal question," the driver said. "Don't get sore, okay?"
"Okay," said the deputy.
"Well," the driver said. "What happened to the rubber?"
"What rubber?" asked the deputy; he might have had some questions concerning Bensenhaver's sanity, but the deputy had no doubt that, in this case, Bensenhaver had been right. In the world according to Bensenhaver, no trivial detail should make less of rape's outrage.
* * *
--
Hope Standish, at that moment, felt safe at last in Bensenhaver's world. She floated and dipped over the farmlands beside him, trying not to be sick. She was beginning to notice things about her body again--she could smell herself and feel every sore spot. She felt such disgust, but here was this cheerful policeman who sat there admiring her--his heart touched by her violent success.
"Are you married, Mr. Bensenhaver?" she asked him.
"Yes, Mrs. Standish," he said. "I am."
"You've been awfully nice," Hope told him, "but I think I'm going to be sick now."
"Oh, sure," said Bensenhaver; he grabbed a waxy paper bag at his feet. It was the pilot's lunch bag; there were some uneaten french-fried potatoes at the bottom and the grease had turned the waxed paper translucent. Bensenhaver could see his own hand, through the french fries and through the bottom of the bag. "Here," he said. "You go right ahead."
She was already retching; she took the bag from him and turned her head away. The bag did not feel big enough to contain what vileness she was sure she held inside her. She felt Bensenhaver's hard, heavy hand on her back. With his other hand, he held a strand of her matted hair out of her way. "That's right," he encouraged her, "keep it coming, get it all out and you'll feel much better."
Hope recalled that whenever Nicky was being sick, she told him the same thing. She marveled how Bensenhaver could even turn her vomiting into a victory, but she did feel much better--the rhythmic heaving was as soothing to her as his calm, dry hands, holding her head and patting her back. When the bag ripped and spilled, Bensenhaver said, "Good riddance, Mrs. Standish! You don't need the bag. This is a National Guard helicopter. We'll let the National Guard clean it up! After all--what's the National Guard for?"
The pilot flew on, grimly, his expression never changing.
"What a day it's been for you, Mrs. Standish!" Bensenhaver went on. "Your husband is going to be so proud of you." But Bensenhaver was thinking that he'd better make sure; he'd better have a talk with the man. It was Arden Bensenhaver's experience that husbands and other people did not always take a rape in the right way.
16
THE FIRST ASSASSIN
What do you mean, 'This is Chapter One'?" Garp's editor, John Wolf, wrote him. "How can there be any more of this? There is entirely too much as it stands! How can you possibly go on?"
"It goes on," Garp wrote back. "You'll see."
"I don't want to see," John Wolf told Garp on the phone. "Please drop it. At least put it aside. Why don't you take a trip? It would be good for you--and for Helen, I'm sure. And Duncan can travel now, can't he?"
But Garp not only insisted that The World According to Bensenhaver was going to be a novel; he insisted that John Wolf try to sell the first chapter to a magazine. Garp had never had an agent; John Wolf was the first man to deal with Garp's writing, and he managed everything for him, just as he managed everything for Jenny Fields.
"Sell it?" John Wolf said.
"Yes, sell it," Garp said. "Advance publicity for the novel."
This had happened with Garp's first two books; excerpts had been sold to magazines. But John Wolf tried to tell Garp that this chapter was (1) unpublishable and (2) the worst possible publicity--should anyone be fool enough to publish it. He said that Garp had a "small but serious" reputation as a writer, that his first two novels had been decently reviewed--had won him respected supporters and a "small but serious" audience. Garp said he hated the reputation of "small but serious," though he could see that this appealed to John Wolf.
"I would rather be rich and wholly outside caring about what the idiots call 'serious,'" he told John Wolf. But who is ever outside cari
Garp actually felt that he could buy a sort of isolation from the real and terrible world. He imagined a kind of fort where he and Duncan and Helen (and a new baby) could live unmolested, even untouched by what he called "the rest of life."
"What are you talking about?" John Wolf asked him.
Helen asked him, too. And so did Jenny. But Jenny Fields liked the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver. She thought it had all its priorities in order--that it knew whom to heroize in such a situation, that it expressed the necessary outrage, that it made properly grotesque the vileness of lust. Actually, Jenny's fondness for the first chapter was more troubling to Garp than John Wolf's criticism. Garp suspected his mother's literary judgment above all things.
"My God, look at her book," he kept saying to Helen, but Helen, as she promised, would not allow herself to be drawn in; she would not read Garp's new novel, not one word of it.
"Why does he suddenly want to be rich?" John Wolf asked Helen. "What's all this about?"
"I don't know," Helen said. "I think he believes it will protect him, and all of us."
"From what?" John Wolf said. "From whom?"
"You'll have to wait until you read the whole book," Garp said to his editor. "Every business is a shitty business. I am trying to treat this book like business, and I want you to treat it that way, too. I don't care if you like it; I want you to sell it."
"I am not a vulgar publisher," John Wolf said. "And you are not a vulgar writer, either. I'm sorry I have to remind you." John Wolf's feelings were hurt, and he was angry at Garp for presuming to talk about a business that John Wolf understood far better than Garp. But he knew Garp had been through a bad time, he knew Garp was a good writer who would write more and (he thought) better books, and he wanted to continue publishing him.
"Every business is a shitty business," Garp repeated. "If you think the book is vulgar, then you should have no trouble selling it."