Mind Prey

I-35, heading south, Andi thought. They were on I-35 for several minutes, then exited to an unfamiliar two-lane highway, out through the whiskey billboards and into the pastel suburbs south of the Cities, as the kids screamed and beat at the sides of the truck and then fell into an alternating, spasmodic weeping.
    Andi was still bleeding inside her mouth, where her teeth had cut into her lip. The taste of blood and the smell of exhaust nauseated her; fighting to get to her hands and knees as Mail dodged through the side streets, she eventually crawled into a corner and vomited. The stench set Genevieve off; she began to retch, and Grace began to weep and shudder, shaking uncontrollably. Andi took all of it in but was unable to focus on it, unable to sort it out and react, until finally, dumbly, she simply took the children in her arms and held them and let them scream.
    Mail paid no attention.
    After a while, they all got to their knees and looked out the windows as the suburbs dwindled, and the truck entered the great green sea of corn, beans, and alfalfa outside the Cities.
    Up front, Mail punched buttons on the radio, seemingly without purpose: he went from Aerosmith to Toad the Wet Sprocket to Haydn to George Strait to three, four, five talk shows.
    Listen, most of these criminals are weaklings; the only thing that makes them anything is that we give them a gun. Take the gun away, and they’ll crawl back to the gutters where they came from…
    They spent five minutes on a rural highway, bumping over long, snaky tar joints in the cracked concrete; then Mail took them off the highway onto a gravel road, and they left a spiraling cloud of gray dust in their wake. Red barns and white farmhouses flicked past the windows, and a black rural mailbox in a cluster of orange daylilies, dusty from the gravel.
    Grace staggered to her feet and grabbed the chain-link fence separating them from Mail, and screamed, “Let me out of here, you fuck, let me out of here let me out…”
    Genevieve panicked when her sister began to scream and wailed, a high, sirenlike keening, and her eyes rolled up into her head. She fell back and Andi thought for a moment that she’d had a stroke and crawled toward her, but Genevieve’s eyes rolled and got straight and she started again, the keening, and Andi put her hands over her ears and Grace shouted, Let me out of here…
    Mail put a hand over the ear closest to Grace, and, without looking back at her, shouted, shut up shut up shut up , and spit sprayed down the length of the windshield.
    Andi grabbed her daughter and pulled her down, shook her head, held her daughter’s face close and said, “Don’t make him mad,” then gathered up Genevieve and held her, squeezed her until the keening died away.
    Then came a moment, just a moment, when Andi thought something different could happen, a streak of possibility rolling through her bloodied mind. They’d turned off the gravel road and started up a dirt lane.
    Ragweed and black-eyed Susans grew in the middle of the track, and along both sides; farther away to the right, ancient, gray-barked apple trees stood with branches crabbed like scarecrow fingers.
    An old farmhouse waited at the end of the lane: a dying house, shot through with rot, the paint peeling off the clapboard siding, a front porch falling off to one side. Behind it, down the far side of the hill, a barn’s foundation crouched in a hollow. The barn itself was gone, but the lower level remained, covered by what had been the floor of the old structure and by a blue plastic tarp tied at the corners with yellow polypropylene rope. An open doorway poked into the dark interior, like the entrance to a cave. Around the barn foundation, two or three other crumbling outbuildings subsided into the soil.
    When they stopped, Andi thought in the recesses of her mind there would be three of them, only one of him. She could take him on, hold him while the girls ran. A cornfield bordered the farmhouse plot. There was no fence. Grace was fast and smart, and once in the cornfield, which was as dense as a rain forest, she could escape…
    John Mail stopped the truck and they all rocked back and forth once, and Grace got to her knees and looked out the dirty window. Mail turned in his seat. He had an oddly high-pitched voice, almost childlike, and said to Andi: “If you try to run, I’ll shoot the little kid first, then the next one, then you.”
    And the streak of possibility died.
     
    G