None of it would’ve happened if not for the knife. Funny how one small thing can lead to another. Johnny and me, we were standing near a path leading into the woods across the road, a ways down from our trailer, mine and Ma’s, not mine and Johnny’s, when he whipped it out. We’d been screwing around in my room, since Ma and her man-of-the-week were at work and Aunt Evie wasn’t around neither, and he’d swiped the knife when I wasn’t looking. I recognized it right away because of the dragon on the handle. “Hey, that ain’t yours,” I said. “What was you doing in Aunt Evie’s room?”
“The door was open,” he said. “It’s cool, I’ll put it back. Don’t get all worked up about it.”
“I ain’t getting worked up. You just ain’t supposed to help yourself to other people’s property, is all.”
He flicked the blade open at a passing jeep. It swerved and Johnny laughed. Most of the time there weren’t many where we lived. Cars I mean. You could go hours without seeing one. But it was hunting season, and this time of year, people came down into the valley from all over.
“You sure you still ain’t told no one about us?” he said, letting the sunlight catch on the knife blade. He tilted it back and forth, making the light dance on my face so I had to turn away. He always made me promise to keep what we had a secret, what with me being only fourteen and all.
“I promised I wouldn’t,” I said. “No one knows.” It was true, so far as I knew. We’d been extra careful all summer. He was twenty-one, and I’d let him have my virginity on the fourth of July after half a joint and a wine cooler. He’d made me promise then, while he had me up against a tree. Afterward, he’d said it was a mistake and couldn’t happen again. But we’d been sneaking around ever since.
“Good,” he said, “because I ain’t trying to go to prison for no jailbait.”
“That’s all I am, huh?”
He stepped forward and kissed me. “Well, yeah,” he said.
I pulled away from him.
“Hell, don’t be like that, Kara. You know I love you. It’s just it ain’t right in peoples’ eyes.”
“You really love me?”
His blue eyes trailed off past me, down the road. He fiddled with the knife. “Yeah, sure I do.”
A blue truck with an antler rack mounted on the front was grumbling down the road. Johnny flicked the blade of the buck knife at the driver as he passed and the truck screeched to a stop, leaving long twin strips of rubber on the asphalt.
Johnny dropped the knife in the weeds, then shoved me out of the way and hauled ass into the woods. For some reason I decided to make for home, but I’d only made it a little ways when my feet left the ground, the wind squeezed from my chest as the man lifted me. I couldn’t scream but only gasp Johnny’s name. The smell of scorched rubber and body odor and whiskey and tobacco was a cloak surrounding me then. Rough beard and hot breath smothered my neck as the man buried his face into me, whispering in my ear. “Where you off to now, little deer?”
I struggled but couldn’t break from his grip, his arms clamping my arms to my sides. The world started to waver and go sideways. In a last effort, I hooked my leg back and caught him between the legs with my tennis shoe. He released me and I ran, my vision still swarming with black spots. He cursed and groaned. Gaining distance, I heard him retrieve something from his truck, then the ratchet of a bolt-action rifle, and looked back long enough to see him leveling it at me.
I was floating now, arms moving so fast my feet couldn’t keep pace. I dove and tumbled over a box hedge marking our nearest neighbor’s property, which was about a quarter mile from our trailer. Locked behind the false safety of the hedge, I lay still.
For a minute there was only the truck’s idling engine and the chattering of birds in the autumn trees. Then a creaking hinge and the truck door slamming. The engine growling down the hill.
# # #
Aunt Evie was Ma’s sister, and one night some years back, she’d shot and killed her ex-husband in self-defense. This was in Arizona or New Mexico or somewhere. And though there’d been witnesses to testify to his abuse, Evie had fired all six shots into the man, then reloaded and fired three more, so they locked her up for a while. “The judge was a man, no better than the rest,” she’d told me once. “Probably would’ve hung me in the town square if he could’ve got away with it.” She’d come back to Ohio by bus when she got out, and had been staying in the spare room since.
When I got back to the trailer, Aunt Evie’s red Firebird was in the driveway. Inside, Foreigner blared from a small radio on the counter. She was sitting in the kitchen, one cowboy-booted foot kicked up on the table, her long black braid swaying behind her like a serpent. She was drinking a can of Budweiser and smoking a cigarette. When I came in, she sat up.
“What the hell happened?” she said. I was trembling so badly I thought I might collapse and realized I’d wet myself. “Kara, you all right?” I shook my head and broke down sobbing. She left her Camel burning in the ashtray, got up, turned off the radio, and came over to me. She took me by the shoulders and said, “Tell me what’s wrong.”
It was a few minutes before I got myself under control enough to speak, but when I did, I sat across from her and told her what happened. All of it, even the knife. But I left Johnny out of it, telling her instead that I’d gone in her room and taken it.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you mad?”
There was a flash of disappointment in her eyes, but it was gone almost as fast, replaced by concern. She went to the fridge for a beer, handed it to me. “Drink that,” she said. “It’ll help you relax. Then go get yourself washed up. We’s gonna take a little ride.”
# # #
She pulled into the gravel lot of the Lakeside Tavern, which was full of cars and jacked-up trucks with light bars and winches. Some of them had dressed-out deer in their beds. The late afternoon sun hung low in the sky, setting the Pontiac’s yellow bird ablaze and sparkling on the water like a million shards of glass beyond a line of old pines.
“You say you didn’t see his face?” Evie said.
“No.”
“How’s about the truck? You recognize any of them there?”
It only took a second to spot it, once I was looking. “That one,” I said. “The blue one with the American flag on the tailgate and the antler rack on the front.”
“You sure?”
I nodded. “We gonna call the police?”
“That what you wanna do?”
“I don’t know. Should I?”
She stared out at the truck. “You could,” she said. “But they probably won’t do nothing. They never do.”
“So what then?”
She turned to me, her dark brown eyes bloodshot but more sober than I’d ever seen them. “Woman’s gotta be careful,” she said. “There’s men out there that think they can do whatever the hell they want to, and it’s the rest of the world that lets ‘em. Look at them yahoos your ma’s always bringing home.” She kept her eyes on me a moment longer, then looked back out at the truck. I felt like she was trying to teach me something then, but I wasn’t sure what it was or what to say.
She turned around and drove back up the rutted drive and out onto the road. We didn’t talk much on the way back. Aunt Evie seemed to be considering something important, and I didn’t think I should disturb whatever it was, so I just watched the road rolling away behind us in the side mirror until we got home.
When she turned into the driveway, I got out, and she said, “I’ll talk to you later, kid. Tell your ma I might not be back tonight.”
“Where you going?”
“Oh, I just got some things to tend to, is all. Maybe go get me a drink.” She winked at me and backed out. I waved. She tapped the horn and laid rubber, the Firebird a streak of red and yellow in the setting sun.
# # #
That night, as I lay in bed, I pictured Johnny running off into the woods like he had, like he always did, really. He’d fuck me, make me promise, and disappear. Only this time it had been different. I could still feel the man’s breath in my ear, the spot where his beard had chafed my skin, the pressure of his arms around me. What if I hadn’t got away? What if he’d squeezed the trigger? I began to shake again at the thought. I tried to think of other things, anything, but my mind went there, taking me with it. All the awful things that could have happened did happen, and I cried and cried until the darkness, that merciful black, came at last.
It was late when the tapping woke me. I looked out my window, and there was Aunt Evie, face tilted up to the screen.
“Come on,” she said, her voice hushed. “Don’t wake your Ma.”
# # #
We didn’t travel far, maybe a couple miles, and she turned the Firebird off the road and down a narrow track of dirt that seemed to go on forever. When she pulled to a stop near a small log cabin with a dim light in its window, there it was, parked ahead in the cast from her low beams. The truck. I looked at her, my eyes wide.
“It’s all right.”
I shook my head.
She got out, walked over to the truck, and lowered the tailgate. She was looking down at something and waving me over.
I got out and went to her. In the bed lay a man, stripped naked and tied at the wrists and ankles, his mouth gagged. There was a gash on his head, bleeding pretty good, but he appeared to be at least semi-conscious.
“Some men think they can do whatever they want,” she said again. “But they can’t. They like to make you afraid and keep you that way. Most of ‘em make it their whole lives without knowing what it’s like to feel helpless. Now grab his other leg, help me get him out of here.”
“What we gonna do to him?”
“We’s gonna make him afraid, sugar.”
We got him out of the truck, and when he hit the ground, he fully came to. She dragged him to his knees in the rocky dirt and pulled out the buck knife with the dragon on the handle. I wondered how long it had taken her to find it. She opened the blade and held it to the man’s hairy throat, then ran it softly down his flabby belly. Snot ran from his nose into his mustache and beard as he sniveled and cried.
Aunt Evie handed me the knife. “If he moves, cut off his balls.”
She walked around to the cab, opened the door, and came out with the rifle. When she returned, I tried to give the knife back. “It’s yours now,” she said, and hopped up to sit on the tailgate. She patted the spot beside her. I sat. “He’s out here all by himself. Bet he didn’t see this coming, eh?” She laughed and kicked him over onto his face. “Get moving, you sorry sack of shit.”
His ankles were bound loosely enough that he was able to get to his feet and walk in small shuffling steps. Aunt Evie chambered a round, and the man hurried off into the woods, frantically looking around in the great dark thickness of the trees, unsure where to go. She fired wide, like she was deliberately trying not to hit him. Soon his form faded, a ghost among the shadows.
“He seen our faces, though,” I said.
She chambered another round and fired again, high this time, the sound rippling out and echoing back. “He won’t say nothing. He’d never live it down. And that’s assuming he ever makes it out. These woods run deep.” She laughed again, and I laughed with her. Looking through the scope, she said, “Ooh, night vision.”
Then she looked at me, as if waiting for me to make the call. I nodded.
“Yeah, you’re right,” she said, chambering another round. “Best not to take any chances.”
# # #
Johnny finally came back around the next weekend, smelling like beer and saying how sorry he was for leaving me behind like that. He had a twelve-pack, and we went out into the woods. I didn’t drink any of the beer, but he made up for it by drinking most of it himself and getting a little too rough and more than a little mean, calling me a dirty whore and fucking my ass even though I said it hurt and please stop. I told myself he was just drunk, though, and didn’t really mean it. After all, he loved me.
The pain was bad, but as he lay passed out beside me in the leaves, the warm sunlight falling through the copper trees in golden shafts sure was pretty. I watched him, spread out there sleeping, his lean, muscled body so white and bare. Sometimes I wished he’d just go slow, touch me down there the way I do after he’s gone. I straddled him, and he stirred. I kissed him on the mouth and he woke.
“You ready for another go round, huh?”
He ran his hands over my chest and put them around my neck, gentle at first, then not so gentle. His eyes were glassy and cold, and for the first time I saw in them exactly what I was to him, and that was nothing. I was nothing. No, I was something—a thing. Nothing more.
He began to grow hard between my legs, and the tip of the knife made him gasp softly when I reached back and caressed the soft meat of his inner thigh. For a moment, I pictured him spread-eagled, opened up like a deer on the trail, and I pressed harder, the resistance of his skin slowly beginning to give.
“Hey, what the fuck?” he said. “What is that? What are you doing?”
He looked afraid. I smiled and pressed harder.
No one even knew we were out here.
# # #
William R. Soldan lives Youngstown, Ohio, with his wife and two children. He has a BA in Literature from Youngstown State University and an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program. His work has appeared in publications such as Elm Leaves Journal, Econoclash Review, Tough, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, and others. His first book, In Just the Right Light, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in the spring of 2019. Read more here: williamrsoldan.com
Photo: Thanh Tran
