Chapter 29

Natalie found herself back where she had been all day. Nothing had changed. Hank’s head was in her lap and she continued the limited nursing care she had been giving. Tony hadn’t spoken a word to anyone since the failed car abduction and, about an hour into the drive, he pulled off the highway and backed into a stand of fir trees. Unlike the last time he had done this in the almond orchard, she was tied hands and feet, so tight her fingers throbbed and ached. Rudy, too, was bound with his hands behind the seat. After Tony shut the van’s engine off, the vehicle became silent except for the heavy rasp from Hank as he labored for breath and, minutes later, Tony’s rhythmic breathing.

Natalie didn’t know if Hank would live much longer without a doctor; his doom—and hers—imminent. She had run out of ways to keep him alive and didn’t know if the pressure she had applied for the last twenty-some hours had prolonged his life by even a minute. One thing she did know, nature would take its course in its own time. Her dad used to say, “There’s always hope,” but any ray of optimism for her future beyond the next few hours had disappeared behind the darkest cloudbank.

Within a few minutes, a repetitious buzzing sound started low and then began to build in intensity. Natalie realized it came from the driver’s seat. Tony snored. She decided to take the opportunity to work further on Rudy. She had caught him glance toward her several times in the last few minutes but he hadn’t spoken.

“Do you have any family?” Natalie kept her voice just above a whisper.

“Aunt in California,” Rudy said and turned to his left as much as his restraints allowed, “but you know that from the newspaper story. Most of the rest are back home.”

“Where’s home?”

“Detroit.”

She hoped to engage him in personal conversation, to further endear herself to him. Her real priority, though, was the search for ammunition to continue to drive a wedge between him and Tony.

“So, your family still lives there?”

“Yeah, son of an automaker. Family has worked in the industry for years and Father has made his career on the assembly line.”

Something in the way he referred to his dad as “Father” and not “my dad” struck her as odd. It came across as a name and not a title of respect. Even though she couldn’t read his face in the darkness, she sensed Rudy feared his father. She kept her thoughts to herself for now, though, to see where the conversation might lead.

“And your mother?”

“Don’t have a mother. She died a short while back.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said and looked toward the dark figure in the passenger seat.”

Her attitude toward her parents had mellowed while she struggled to get her life and career started. They may have always been strict and rule-bound, but she realized now it was because they were trying to protect her. They loved her in their own way after all. Although it often chafed, she always knew it. Even with her mom’s well-meaning— teaching her to recite a bedtime prayer, dragging her to youth Bible studies, her dogmatic demands that Natalie commit her life to the heavenly trio: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—Natalie missed her mom. Now, looking back, the issues she had made mountains of seemed petty little insignificant things—emotional outbursts she should have been able to control but for some reason seemed unable to predict, not to mention stop. She had even taken to calling her mother once a week on Saturday morning.

A call she just realized she failed to make this morning.

Natalie’s heart broke. Last Saturday they had a minor fight over Cindy’s choice of friends—a familiar theme to Natalie. Cindy, now age fourteen, had decided to turn Goth and that came with a collection of friends in black clothes, black hair, black makeup, and piercings in places they had no business. Mom didn’t like the looks of them. Natalie said, “It’s just a phase, Mom. Cindy will grow out of it in a couple of years.” Her mother, though, was too horrified of being seen with her “gussied up” daughter, let alone at church, and wouldn’t accept what Natalie had said. “It reminds me so much of you when you ran off after school with some boy we didn’t know,” her mother said, the hurt in her voice still palpable even though it had been almost two years since the day she left home “To this day I don’t know what happened.” That was the day Natalie lost her virginity but she had never been able to admit that, so she concluded the call with an abrupt, “Mom, I have to go.”

But I didn’t call today. What’s she thinking? Did she believe Natalie too angry to carry on a civil conversation? Had her mom tried to call her? Did she even know Natalie was missing?

A pool of tears she didn’t try to contain choked her voice as she continued the conversation with Rudy. “I can’t imagine losing my mother. You miss her, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but it’s a good thing she’s dead.”

She realized this wasn’t the easy conversation she had contemplated but chose to pursue it. “Why would you say that?”

“’Cause when this comes out,” he said, “if she wasn’t dead, the grief would kill her. It’s better she’ll never know.”

“You’re probably right,” she said. She couldn’t imagine how she’d feel if a child of hers, if she lived to have children, turned criminal. The decision not to tell her parents about the movie roles she played since she turned eighteen had been her way to cover the guilt of her nude onscreen appearances. She couldn’t imagine her mother calling her friends at State Street Church to boast about the nude scene her daughter had done.

She needed to move the conversation forward to explore anything she could use. “Tell me about your father?”

“Father?” he asked. “He didn’t care much about me when I was home and he sure the hell won’t care about me now. Between the assembly line and the bars, he was rarely home when I was a kid and, when he was home, it wasn’t good news.”

“Why’s that?”

“He had what me and my brothers called a ‘pitcher meter,’”

“A ‘pitcher meter?’”

“Yeah, we could tell just how many pitchers Father had drunk by his temper when he got home. The more beer, the more the meter rose and the angrier he got.”

“Was he violent?”

“Not until after my two brothers left home. I’m quite a bit younger than them and take after my mom. I think that’s why he’d pick on me. When he’d get home at night after drinking, if he was particularly plastered, he’d come looking for me first, even if I was already asleep, and beat me for no reason. When mom pleaded for him to stop, he’d go after her.”

“Your brothers never stepped in?”

“Nah, as far as I know, they didn’t know about it. Mom suffered in silence and I never let on.”

“Why didn’t she leave him?”

“Mom didn’t believe in divorce. She knew he wasn’t well and she’d vowed ‘in sickness or health’ on their wedding day.”

“That’s so sad. No one should have to put up with that. I’m really sorry, Rudy.” It took her by surprise she felt even the slightest spasm of anything for him. No matter how Rudy turned out, no child—no woman for that matter—deserved to be treated like that. “Abusive men should be sent to a prison colony on the dark side of the moon where they can’t escape. No guards, no women, no children. They could have the run of the place, vent their rage on each other, but bring no harm to the innocent.”

“That’s why I left Detroit.”

“When was that, after your mom died?”

“No, last year, she died six months later.”

“You left your mother alone with him?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I kinda ran away, dropped out of school in my junior year. With her blessing, though.”

“Then, what, your father beat her to death?”

“No, nothing like that. They say her heart gave out and it’s probably true. Deep inside I think she just couldn’t take the abuse anymore and, with me leaving, she gave up.”

“So, what, you’re seventeen now. I was seventeen when I left home.”

“Yeah, it’s been rough . . . and now it’s worse.”

“My parents always warned me about hanging with the wrong crowd,” she said.

“I guess I found mine.”

The conversation withered like a desert wildflower in a summer drought and she decided to use the lull to think about how she could use the information. It was clear Rudy felt powerless against the men in his life, yet he seemed drawn to strong-willed men. Why some people seek the very thing that damns them was a mystery she knew she could never comprehend. For now though, if they had any hope of getting away from Tony, she needed Rudy to take control of their situation.

That wasn’t likely as Rudy ran from adversity. He escaped from an abusive father, left his battered mother, and, just before Tony ran over the man on the bike, he had admitted he wanted to run away from this now. To try to gain Tony’s trust would prove pointless. Men like Tony only trusted themselves. In Tony’s case, she feared, everyone else was expendable.

She expected Rudy to ask her something about her life but when he didn’t, after five silent minutes, she was about to speak again when Tony, with a loud snort, suddenly sat upright and then got out of the van.

“What’s he doing?” Natalie asked. From her position on the floor behind the driver’s seat, she couldn’t see out the windshield.

“I don’t know. He just walked off towards the road.”

“Can you still see him?”

“No, he disappeared in the dark.”

“If I could untie your hands, do you think you could start this truck and get us out of here?”

“Do you think that’s a good idea? What if he comes back?”

“We both know he’ll kill us sooner or later. We have to try to get away. This could be our only chance.”

“I know you’re right but he scares the shit out of me, Nat.”

“That gun scares me and he’s proven he’s not afraid to use it. I know he shot the clerk and the newspaper story said he was a suspect in a murder in Reno. Did he do it?”

“Yeah, just walked up to the guy and blew him away.”

“He’ll do the same to us, Rudy.” With her new assumptions, she decided to appeal to what she had reasoned to be his life pattern. “This is your chance to run away. Can you get the truck started?”

“Maybe … I … I think so. I’ve watched Tony several times but my hands are tied pretty tight.”

Natalie slid out from under Hank and got to her knees. They were still swollen from the scrapes she suffered while Tony stole the van last night and new grit from the cold steel floor ground into the wounds. She pushed aside the pain and began to work on the knots. The cloth from the bedspread wasn’t as easy to work her fingers into as a rope would have been but she persisted and after a few minutes finally found an edge. She slipped a broken fingernail under it and began to ease the fabric free.

“Hurry,” Rudy said.

“I’m working as fast as I can. It’s beginning to come loose. You keep watching for Tony.”

As she continued, she asked, “Do you know what Tony’s plan is?”

“Yeah, we’re heading to Canada.”

“Canada? What’s in Canada?”

Tony had tied several overhand knots on top of each other and her fingers were tired and sore. She had broken more than one fingernail trying to slip them under the fabric.

“My uncle’s hunting cabin. He rarely uses it. Tony and Hank plan to hide out, but I know the woods around it really good. If we don’t get away now, we can look for a chance then and hide out just about forever.”

I don’t want to hide out forever, I want my life back, she thought.

Then, she had an idea. Why it hadn’t come before, she could only excuse by mental fatigue. Rudy’s hands didn’t come together behind the seat. So Tony had looped the shreds of cloth around Rudy’s wrists and tied it together in one large knot. She found a section of the fabric between the knot and Rudy’s left hand. She grabbed it between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, she tried to rip it. At first, it was stubborn but when she heard the first tear, she pulled harder until it came in two. Once she got it loose, she freed his left wrist.

“Quick, slide over and try to start this thing.”

Rudy changed seats and, after a moment, the engine roared.

Natalie’s heart leaped knowing they were almost free. They just needed to drive back to the road and put some distance between them and Tony. On her knees, she peered out from behind the passenger seat. The headlights come to life.

Caught in the beam, Tony pointed the Colt at Rudy.