Nevada Barr - Winter Study

“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.

“I told her it served her right,” Bob snarled. “She said, ‘Send somebody, you fat fuck,’ and I threw her to the wolves. Literally,” he said and laughed.

Anna wished she’d changed the subject before he’d gotten to the “fat fuck” part. Choking on the insult, his throat puffed the way a frog’s will before it sings. In a second, he would realize he’d told Anna about it and thus been twice shamed.

“Not literally,” Anna said, drenching her voice with scorn. “Figuratively. Literally you hung up on her. Literally you did nothing. Literally you showed what a spineless, pathetic excuse for a man you are.” The impromptu cowl fell from her shoulders, sliding down to pool behind her and in her lap. She made no attempt to stop it or retrieve it this time. “You don’t rape women. That’s way too scary for little Bobby, isn’t it? You rape unconscious women. Whole different thing, Bobsie. Whole different thing.”

Anna was finding it extraordinarily easy to go off on Menechinn. She didn’t have to waste a moment’s time thinking up horrible words to say, words she hoped would cut all the deeper for being true. Bob’s face shook minutely, the way she’d seen it do each time a woman had the unmitigated gall to awaken him from his happy coma of Bobness. The miniature tsunami made him look young for a brief second – very young; the face of a toddler the first time Mommy punches him or Daddy burns him with his cigarette – and, for an even shorter second, Anna felt pity for him.

Not him, she told herself. That little boy.

To Bob she said: “Since we’ve been doing business together, I’ve been meaning to tell you what a pompous ass you are, with your pouffed hair and oily smile. Women have to be drugged to keep from laughing in your face. And a hypocrite! Sheesh! It would be scary, if it wasn’t so obvious. Expert. Lord! You’re a whore, Menechinn, a prostitute; you screw whoever hands you a dollar. This time, Homeland Security; next time… well, anybody with a buck and a quarter. You’re not even a good whore. You can’t get it up personally or professionally. You’re a limp dick.

“Your raping is like your killing: no balls in it. You rape women who are not there, and you’re not there when you kill. You don’t literally kill anybody, do you, Bobby boy? You literally do nothing. If you’re going to kill me, you many-chinned fat fuck, you’re going to have to do it personally, because, unless you do, I won’t die.

“I. Won’t. Die.”

That was her best shot. She had been as vicious and mean and ugly as it was possible to be without using a thesaurus. Smiling in what she hoped was a damning and disdainful manner, she settled the last of her strength in her wrists and waited.

Through the curtain of spruce needles, she watched him, trying to read her future in his stance, the way his eyes seemed to grow larger as his face relaxed and the cheek flab melted in a grim facsimile of the melting of one of Madame Tussauds wax madmen.

She realized she was seeing his eyes for the first time. Her revulsion and his grin-narrowed gaze had kept her out till now. His irises were dark, but the color was indistinct: blue or brown or hazel, or all three mixed together. He wasn’t more than five feet away, yet Anna couldn’t have reported the color with any more accuracy than that. They were the color of old water moccasins, the thick, unpretty snakes that took on the greenish brown shades of the muddy water of the Mississippi ditches where they thrived. Like the moccasin’s eyes, Menechinn’s had a flatness. In the snake, Anna knew it to be myopia and dullness of mind. In Menechinn, she wasn’t sure what it indicated but doubted it boded well for her continued good health.

Time wasn’t in its petty-paced persona. It had ceased to be linear, and Anna watched Menechinn’s face for a moment, then an hour, then a heartbeat. She waited for the look of sly craftiness to take it the way it had before he’d gone into a berserker rage and stomped the life out of the National Park Service’s tarp. She waited for it to grow still and raw-beef red as it had when he’d walked over to slap her on the cliff top. She waited for the gleam of joy and triumph to come into his eyes as it had when he hefted the wrench to smash her ankle.

She was growing old waiting and yet scarcely more than fifteen seconds passed before the waiting was over.

Bob Menechinn’s face crumpled and tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes. They froze before they’d traveled halfway down his face. His jaws yawned wide, rows of teeth bleached too white by the dentist’s art appearing false in the black of his mouth. He ducked his head and brought his forearms up to hide his face like a child ashamed of its tears but too broken to keep them from falling. Maybe he had regressed to a childhood state, when he’d been abused. Maybe he’d had a psychotic break and thought Anna was his dead puppy, Spot or Toughie or whatever.

A better person might have felt sorry for him, but, as far as Anna was concerned, whatever hell he was going through was way too good for him.

Then he charged, head down, mucus and tears streaming, and he crashed through the ephemeral defenses of her spruce bower and was on her. Though she’d been watching, waiting for it, the onslaught took her by surprise. Not even slowed by the tree branches, he came down in an avalanche of snow and rage, in the reckless flying tackle of a high school football player too young to know how frail the human body is.