John Irving - The World According to Garp

“Goddamnit,” Bensenhaver said.

The deputy drew his gun and fired one shot in the air. Weldon dropped to his knees, holding his ears. “You all right, Inspector?” the deputy asked.

“Yes, of course I am,” Bensenhaver said. He sat beside the pig and Raspberry. He realized, without the smallest touch of shame, that he felt toward them more or less equally. “Raspberry,” he said (the name itself made Bensenhaver close his eyes), “if you want to keep your balls on, you tell us where the woman is.” The man's birthmark flashed at Bensenhaver like a neon sign.

“You keep still, Raspberry,” Weldon said.

And Bensenhaver told the deputy, “if he opens his mouth again, shoot his balls off, right here. Save us the trip.” Then he hoped to God that the deputy was not so stupid that he would actually do it.

“Oren's got her,” Raspberry told Bensenhaver. “He took the black truck.”

“Where'd he take her?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Don't know,” Raspberry said. “He took her for a ride.”

“Was she all right when she left here?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Well, she was all right, I guess,” Raspberry said. “I mean, I don't think Oren had hurt her yet. I don't think he'd even had her yet.”

“Why not?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Well, if he'd already had her,” Raspberry said, “why would he want to keep her?” Bensenhaver again shut his eyes. He got to his feet.

“Find out how long ago,” he told the deputy. “Then fuck up that turquoise truck so they can't drive it. Then get your ass back to the copter.”

“And leave them here?” the deputy asked.

“Sure,” Bensenhaver said. “There'll be plenty of time to cut their balls off, later.”

Arden Bensenhaver had the pilot send a message that the abductor's name was Oren Rath, and that he was driving a black, not a turquoise, pickup. This message meshed interestingly with another one: a state trooper had received a report that a man all alone in a black pickup had been driving dangerously, wandering in and out of his rightful driving lane, “looking like he was drunk, or stoned, or something else.” The trooper had not followed this up because, at the time, he'd thought he was supposed to be more concerned about a turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver, of course, couldn't know that the man in the black pickup hadn't really been alone—that, in fact, Hope Standish had been lying with her head in his lap. The news simply gave Bensenhaver another of his chills: if Rath was alone, he had already done something to the woman. Bensenhaver yelled to the deputy to hurry over to the copter—that they were looking for a black pickup that had last been seen on the bypass that intersects the system of county roads near the town called Sweet Wells.

“Know it?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the deputy said.

They were in the air again, below them the pigs once more in a panic. The poor, medicated pig that had been fallen on was lying as still as when they'd come. But the Rath brothers were fighting—it appeared, quite savagely—and the higher and farther from them that the helicopter moved, the more the world returned to a level of sanity of which Arden Bensenhaver approved. Until the tiny fighting figures, below and to the east, were no more than miniatures to him, and he was so far from their blood and fear that when the deputy said he thought that Raspberry could whip Weldon, if Raspberry just didn't allow himself to get scared, Bensenhaver laughed his Toledo deadpan laugh.

“They're animals,” he said to the deputy, who, despite whatever young man's cruelty and cynicism were in him, seemed a little shocked. “If they both killed each other,” Bensenhaver said, “think of the food they would have eaten in their lifetimes that other human beings could now eat.” The deputy realized that Bensenhaver's lie about the new law—about the instant castration for sexual crimes—was more than a farfetched story: for Bensenhaver, although he knew it was clearly not the law, it was what he thought the law should be. It was one of Arden Bensenhaver's Toledo methods.

“That poor woman,” Bensenhaver said; he wrung the pieces of her bra in his thick-veined hands. “How old is this Oren?” he asked the deputy.

“Sixteen, maybe seventeen,” the deputy said. “Just a kid.” The deputy was at least twenty-four himself.

“If he's old enough to get a hard-on,” Arden Bensenhover said, “he's old enough to have it cut off.”

But what should I cut? Oh, where can I cut him? wondered Hope—the long, thin fisherman's knife now snug in her hand. Her pulse thrummed in her palm, but to Hope it felt as if the knife had a heartbeat of its own. She brought her hand very slowly up to her hip, up over the edge of the thrashed seat to where she could glimpse the blade. Should I use the saw-toothed edge or the one that looks so sharp? she thought. How do you kill a man with one of these? Alongside the sweating, swiveling ass of Oren Rath that knife in her hand was a cool and distant miracle. Do I slash him or stick him? She wished she knew. Both his hot hands were under her buttocks, lifting her, jerking up. His chin dug into the hollow near her collarbone like a heavy stone. Then she felt him slip one of his hands out from under her, and his fingers, reaching for the floor, grazed her hand that held the knife.

“Move!” he grunted. “Now move.” She tried to arch her back but couldn't; she tried to twist her hips, but she couldn't. She felt him groping for his own peculiar rhythm, trying to find the last pace that would make him come. His hand—under her now—spread over the small of her back; his other hand clawed the floor.

Then she knew: he was looking for the knife. And when his fingers found the empty sheath, she would be in trouble.

“Aaahhh!” he cried.

Quick! she thought. Between the ribs? Into his side—and slide the knife up—or straight down as hard as she could between the shoulder blades, reaching all the way through his back to a lung, until she felt the point of the thing poking her own crushed breast? She waved her arm in the air above his hunching back. She saw the oily blade glint—and his hand, suddenly rising, flung his empty pants back toward the steering wheel.

He was trying to push himself up off her, but his lower half was locked into his long-sought rhythm; his hips shuddered in little spasms he couldn't seem to control, while his chest rose up, off her chest, and his hands shoved hard against her shoulders. His thumbs crawled toward her throat. “My knife?” he asked. His head whipped back and forth; he looked behind him, he looked above him. His thumbs pried her chin up; she was trying to hide her Adam's apple.

Then she scissored his pale ass. He could not stop pumping down there, though his brain must have known there was suddenly another priority. “My knife?” he said. And she reached over his shoulder and (faster than she herself could see it happen) she slid the slim-edged side of the blade across his throat. For a second, she saw no wound. She only knew that he was choking her. Then one of his hands left her throat and went to find his own. He hid from her the gash she'd expected to see. But at last she saw the dark blood springing between his tight fingers. He brought his hand away—he was searching for her hand, the one that held the knife—and from his slashed throat a great bubble burst over her. She heard a sound like someone sucking the bottom of a drink with a clogged straw. She could breathe again. Where were his hands? she wondered. They seemed, at once, to loll beside her on the seat and to be darting like panicked birds behind his back.

She stabbed the long blade into him, just above his waist, thinking that perhaps a kidney was there, because the blade went in so easily, and out again. Oren Rath laid his cheek against her cheek like a child. He'd have screamed then, of course, but her first slash had cut cleanly through his windpipe and his vocal cords.