Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood Page B

station.” Tracey finished the sandwich and rinsed the plate, leading Marie to suspect that someone had at least taught her to clean up after herself. The worst parent in the world can at least do that. James had lovely manners, and she suddenly got a comforting vision of him placing his scraped plate in a cafeteria sink.
    “The nearest police station is twenty miles from here,” Marie said.
    “Well, that’s good news, Marie, because look who’s back.”
    Creeping into the driveway, one headlight out, was a low-slung, mud-colored Valiant with a cracked windshield. The driver skulked behind the wheel, blurry as an inkblot. When Tracey raced out to greet him, the driver opened the door and emerged as a jittery shadow. The shadow flung itself toward the cabin as Marie fled for the back door and banged on the lock with her fists.
    In moments he was upon her, a wiry man with a powerful odor and viselike hands. He half-carried her back to the kitchenas she fell limp with panic. Then, like a ham actor in a silent movie, he lashed her to a kitchen chair with cords of filthy rawhide.
    “You wanna tell me how the fuck we get rid of her?” he snarled at Tracey, whose apparent fright gave full flower to Marie’s budding terror. That he was handsome—dark-eyed, square-jawed, with full, shapely lips—made him all the more terrifying.
    “What was I supposed to do?” Tracey quavered. “Listen, I kept her here for a whole day with no—”
    “Where’s your keys?” he roared at Marie.
    “Here, they’re here,” Tracey said, fumbling them out of her pocket. “Let’s go, Mike, please, let’s just go.”
    “You got money?” he asked, leaning over Marie, one cool strand of his long hair raking across her bare arm. She could hardly breathe, looking into his alarming, moist eyes.
    “My purse,” she gasped. “In the car.”
    He stalked out, his dirty jeans sagging at the seat, into which someone had sewn a facsimile of the American flag. He looked near starving, his upper arms shaped like bedposts, thin and tapering and hard. She heard the car door open and the contents of her purse spilling over the gravel.
    “The pre-med was a lie,” Tracey said. “I met him at a concert.” She darted a look outside, her lip quivering.
    “Do something,” Marie murmured. “Please.”
    “You know how much power I have over my own life, Marie?” She lifted her hand and squeezed her thumb and index finger together. “This much.”
    He was in again, tearing into the fridge, cramming food into his mouth. The food seemed to calm him some. He looked around.He could have been twenty-five or forty-five, a man weighted by bad luck and a mean spirit that encased his true age like barnacles on a boat. “Pick up our stuff,” he said to Tracey. “We’re out of this dump.”
    Tracey did as he said, gathering the sleeping bag and stuffing it into a sack. He watched her body damply as she moved; Marie felt an engulfing nausea but could not move herself, not even to cover her mouth at the approaching bile. Her legs were lashed to the chair legs, her arms tied behind her, giving her a deeply discomfiting sensation of being bound to empty space. She felt desperate to close her legs, cross her arms over her breasts, unwilling to die with her most womanly parts exposed. “I’m going to be sick,” she gulped, but it was too late, a thin trail of spit and bile lolloping down her shirtfront.
    Mike lifted his forearm, dirty with tattoos, and chopped it down across Marie’s jaw. She thumped backward to the floor, chair and all, tasting blood, seeing stars, letting out a squawk of despair. Then she fell silent, looking at the upended room, stunned. She heard the flick of a switchblade and felt the heat of his shadow. She tried to snap her eyes shut, to wait for what came next, but they opened again, fixed on his; in the still, shiny irises she searched for a sign of latent goodness, or regret, some long-ago time that defined him. In the sepulchral