John Irving - The World According to Garp

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.

“Much more,” she said in his ear, which smelled like dust. She had to wet her fingers to wet herself. God, I'll never get him inside me, she thought, but when she found him with her hand, she knew that the rubber was the lubricated kind.

“Oh,” he said. He lay still on top of her; he seemed surprised by where she'd put him, as if he didn't really know what was where. “Oh,” he repeated.

Oh, what now? Hope wondered. She held her breath. A car, a flash of red, whined past their open door—the horn blast and some muffled, derisive hoots fading away from them. Of course, she thought: we look like two farmers fucking off the side of the road; it's probably done all the time. No one will stop, she thought, unless it's the police. She imagined a bread-faced trooper appearing over Roth's lurching shoulder, writing out a ticket. “Not on the road, buddy,” he'd be saying. And when she screamed at him, “Rape! He's raping me,” the trooper would wink at Oren Rath.

The bewildered Rath seemed to be feeling rather cautiously for something inside her. If he's just come, Hope thought, how much time do I have before he comes again? But he seemed more like a goat than a human to her, and the babylike gurgle in his throat, hot against her ear, seemed close to the last sound she imagined she'd hear.

She looked at everything she could see. The keys dangling from the ignition were too for to reach; and what could she do with a set of keys? Her back hurt and she pushed her hand against the dashboard to try to shift his weight on her; this excited him and made him grunt against her. “Don't move,” he said; she tried to do what he said. “Oh,” he said, approvingly. “That's real good. I'll kill you quick. You won't even know it. You just do like that, and I'll kill you good.”

Her hand grazed a metal button, smooth and round; her fingers touched it and she did not even have to turn her face away from him and look at it to know what it was. It opened the glove compartment and she pushed it. The spring-release door was a sudden weight in her hand. She said a long and loud “Aaahhh!” to conceal the sound of the things in the glove compartment that rattled around. Her hand touched cloth, her fingers felt grit. There was a spool of wire, something sharp, but too small—things like screws and nails, a bolt, perhaps a hinge to something else. There was nothing she could use. Reaching around in there was hurting her arm; she let her hand trail to the floor of the cab. When another truck passed them—catcalls and bloops from the air horn, and no sign of even slowing down for a better look—she started to cry.

I got to kill you,” Rath moaned.

“Have you done this before?” she asked him.

“Sure,” he said, and he thrust into her—stupidly, as if his brute lunges could impress her.

“And did you kill them, too?” Hope asked. Her hand, aimless now, toyed with something—some material—on the floor of the cab.

“They were animals,” Rath admitted. “But I had to kill them, too.” Hope sickened, her fingers clutched the thing on the floor—an old jacket or something.

“Pigs?” she asked him.

“Pigs!” he cried. “Shit, nobody fucks pigs,” he told her. Hope thought that probably somebody did. “They was sheep,” Rath said. “And one calf.” But this was hopeless, she knew. She felt him shrinking inside her; she was distracting him. She choked a sob that felt like it would split her head if it ever escaped her.

“Please try to be kind to me,” Hope said.

“Don't talk any,” he said. “Move like you did.”

She moved, but apparently not the right way. “No!” he shouted. His fingers dug into her spine. She tried moving another way. “Yup,” he said. He moved, now, determined and purposeful—mechanical and dumb.

Oh, God, Hope thought. Oh, Nicky. And Dorsey. Then she felt what she held in her hand: his pants. And her fingers, suddenly as wise as a Braille reader's, located the zipper and moved on; her fingers passed over the change in the pocket, they slipped around the wide belt.

“Yup, yup, yup,” said Oren Rath.

Sheep, Hope thought to herself; and one calf. “Oh, please concentrate!” she cried aloud to herself.

“Don't talk!” said Oren Rath.

But now her hand held it: the long, hard, leather sheath. That is the little hook, her fingers told her, and that is the little metal clasp. And that—oh, yes!—is the head of the thing, the bony handle of the fisherman's knife he had used to cut her son.

Nicky's cut was not serious. In fact, everyone was trying to figure out how he got it. Nicky was not talking yet. He enjoyed looking in the mirror at the thin, half-moon slit that was already closed.

“Must have been something very sharp,” the doctor told the police. Margot, the neighbor, had thought she'd better call a doctor, too; she'd found blood on the child's bib. The police had found more blood in the bedroom; a single drop on the cream-white bedspread. They were puzzled about it; there was no other sign of violence, and Margot had seen Mrs. Standish leave. She had looked all right. The blood was from Hope's split lip—from the time Oren Rath had butted her—but there was no way any of them could know that. Margot thought there might have been sex, but she wasn't suggesting it. Dorsey Standish was too shocked to think. The police did not think there had been time for sex. The doctor knew no blow had been connected with Nicky's cut—probably not even a fall. “A razor?” he suggested. “Or a very sharp knife.”

The police inspector, a solidly round and florid man, a year away from his retirement, found the cut phone cord in the bedroom. “A knife,” he said. “A sharp knife with some weight to it.” His name was Arden Bensenhaver, and he had once been a police superintendent in Toledo, but his methods had been judged as unorthodox.

He pointed at Nicky's cheek. “It's a flick wound,” he said. He demonstrated the proper wrist action. “But you don't see many flick knives around here,” Bensenhaver told them. “It's a flick-type of wound, but it's probably some kind of hunting or fishing knife.”

Margot had described Oren Rath as a farm kid in a farm truck, except that the truck's color revealed the unnatural influence of the town and the university upon the farmers: turquoise. Dorsey Standish did not even associate this with the turquoise truck he had seen, or the woman in the cab whom he'd thought had resembled Hope. He still didn't understand anything.