THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BENSENHAVER

 

HOPE STANDISH was at home with her son, Nicky, when Oren Rath walked into the kitchen. She was drying the dishes and she saw immediately the long, thin-bladed fisherman's knife with the slick cutting edge and the special, saw-toothed edge that they call a disgorger-scaler. Nicky was not yet three; he still ate in a high chair, and he was eating his breakfast when Oren Rath stepped up behind him and nudged the ripper teeth of his fisherman's knife against the child's throat.

“Set them dishes aside,” he told Hope. Mrs. Standish did as she was told. Nicky gurgled at the stranger; the knife was just a tickle under his chin.

“What do you want?” Hope asked. “I'll give you anything you want.”

“You sure will,” said Oren Rath. “What's your name?”

“Hope.”

“Mine's Oren.”

“That's a nice name,” Hope told him.

Nicky couldn't turn in the high chair to see the stronger who was tickling his throat. He had wet cereal on his fingers, and when he reached for Oren Rath's hand, Rath stepped up beside the high chair and touched the fine, slicing edge of his fisherman's blade to the fleshy pouch of the boy's cheek. He made a quick cut there, as if he were briefly outlining the child's cheekbone. Then he stepped back to observe Nicky's surprised face, his simple cry; a thread thin line of blood appeared, like the stitching for a pocket, on the boy's cheek. It was as if the child had suddenly developed a gill.

“I mean business,” said Oren Rath. Hope started toward Nicky but Rath waved her back. “He don't need you. He just don't care for his cereal. He wants a cookie.” Nicky bowled.

“He'll choke on it, when he's crying,” Hope said.

“You want to argue with me?” said Oren Rath. “You want to talk about choking? I'll cut his pecker off and stuff it down his throat—if you want to talk about choking.”

Hope gave Nicky a zwieback and he stopped crying.

“You see?” said Oren Rath. He picked up the high chair with Nicky in it and hugged it to his chest. “We're going to the bedroom now,” he said; he nodded to Hope. “You first.”

They went down the hall together. The Standish family lived in a ranch house then; with a new baby, they had agreed ranch houses were safer in the case of a fire. Hope went into the bedroom and Oren Rath put down the high chair with Nicky in it, just outside the bedroom door. Nicky had almost stopped bleeding; there was just a little blood on his cheek; Oren Rath wiped this off with his hand, then wiped his hand on his pants. Then he stepped into the bedroom after Hope. When he closed the door, Nicky started to cry.

“Please,” Hope said. “He really might choke, and he knows how to get out of that high chair—or it might tip over. He doesn't like to be alone.”

Oren Rath went to the night table and slashed through the phone cord with his fisherman's knife as easily as a man halving a very ripe pear. “You don't want to argue with me,” he said.

Hope sat down on the bed. Nicky was crying, but not hysterically; it sounded as if he might stop. Hope started crying, too.

“Just take off your clothes,” Oren said. He helped her undress. He was tall and reddish-blond, his hair as lank and as close to his head as high grass beaten down by a flood. He smelled like silage and Hope remembered the turquoise pickup she'd noticed in the driveway, just before he appeared in her kitchen. “You've even got a rug in the bedroom,” he said to her. He was thin but muscular; his hands were large and clumsy, like the feet of a puppy who's going to be a big dog. His body seemed almost hairless, but he was so pale, so very blond, that his hair was hard to see against his skin.

“Do you know my husband?” Hope asked him.

“I know when he's home and when he ain't,” Rath said. “Listen,” he said suddenly; Hope held her breath. “You hear? Your kid don't even mind it.” Nicky was murmuring vowel sounds outside the bedroom door, talking wetly to his zwieback. Hope began crying harder. When Oren Rath touched her, awkward and fast, she thought she was so dry that she wouldn't even get big enough for his horrible finger.

“Please wait,” she said.

“No arguing with me.”

“No, I mean I can help you,” she said. She wanted him in and out of her as fast as possible; she was thinking of Nicky in the high chair in the hall. “I can make it nicer, I mean,” she said, unconvincingly; she did not know how to say what she was saying. Oren Rath grabbed one of her breasts in such a way that Hope knew he had never touched a breast before; his hand was so cold, she flinched. In his awkwardness, he butted her in the mouth with the top of his head.

“No arguing,” he grunted.

“Hope!” someone called. They both heard it and froze. Oren Rath gaped at the cut phone cord.

“Hope?”

It was Margot, a neighbor and a friend. Oren Rath touched the cool, flat blade of his knife to Hope's nipple.

“She's going to walk right in here,” Hope whispered. “She's a good friend.”

“My God, Nicky,” they could hear Margot say, “I see you're eating all over the house. Is your mother getting dressed?”

“I'll have to fuck you both and kill everybody,” whispered Oren Rath. Hope scissored his waist with her good legs and hugged him, knife and all, to her breasts. “Margot!” she screamed. “Grab Nicky and run! Please! ” she shrieked. “There's a crazy man who's going to kill us all! Take Nicky, take Nicky!”

Oren Rath lay stiffly against her as if it were the first time he'd ever been hugged. He did not struggle, he did not use his knife. They both lay rigid and listened to Margot dragging Nicky down the hall and out the kitchen door. One leg of the high chair was snapped off against the refrigerator, but Margot didn't stop to remove Nicky from the chair until she was half a block down the street and kicking open her own door. “Don't kill me,” Hope whispered. “Just go, quickly, and you'll get away. She's calling the police, right now.”

“Get dressed,” said Oren Rath. “I ain't had you yet, and I'm going to.” Where he'd butted her with the oval crown of his head, he had split her lip against her teeth and made her bleed. “I mean business,” he repeated, but uncertainly. He was as rough-boned and graceless as a young steer. He made her put her dress on without any underwear, he shoved her barefoot down the hall, carrying his boots under his arm. Hope didn't realize until she was beside him in the pickup that he had put on one of her husband's flannel shirts.

“Margot has probably written down the license number of this truck,” she told him. She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself; she dabbed at her split lip with the broad, floppy collar of her dress. Oren Rath stiff-armed her in the ear, rapping the far side of her head off the passenger door of the cab.

“I need that mirror to see,” he said. “Don't mess around or I'll really hurt you.” He'd taken her bra with him and he used it to tie her wrists to the thick, rusty hinges of the glove-compartment door, which gaped open at her.

He drove as if he were in no special hurry to get out of town. He did not seem impatient when he got stuck at the long traffic light near the university. He watched all the pedestrians crossing the street; he shook his head and clucked his tongue when he saw how some of the students were dressed. Hope could see her husband's office window from where she sat in the truck's cab, but she didn't know if he would be in his office or actually, at that moment, teaching a class.

In fact, he was in his office—four floors up. Dorsey Standish looked out his window and saw the lights change; the traffic was allowed to flow, the hordes of marching students were temporarily restrained at the gates to the crosswalks. Dorsey Standish liked watching traffic. There are many foreign and flashy cars in a university town, but here these cars were contrasted with the vehicles of the natives: farmers' trucks, slat-sided conveyors of pigs and cattle, strange harvesting machinery, everything muddy from the farms and county roads. Standish knew nothing about farms, but he was fascinated by the animals and the machines—especially the dangerous, baffling vehicles. There went one, now, with a chute—for what?—and a latticework of cables that pulled or suspended something heavy. Standish liked to try to visualize how everything worked.

Below him a lurid turquoise pickup moved ahead with the traffic; its fenders were pockmarked, its grille bashed in and black with mashed flies and—Standish imagined—the heads of imbedded birds. In the cab beside the driver Dorsey Standish thought he saw a pretty woman—some thing about her hair and profile reminded him of Hope, and a flash of the woman's dress struck him as a color his wife liked to wear. But he was four floors up; the truck was past him, and the cab's rear window was so thickly caked with mud that he couldn't glimpse more of her. Besides, it was time for his nine-thirty class. Dorsey Standish decided it was unlikely that a woman riding in such an ugly truck would be at all pretty.

“I bet your husband is screwing his students all the time,” said Oren Rath. His big hand, with the knife, lay in Hope's lap.

“No, I don't think so,” Hope said.

“Shit, you don't know nothing ,” he said. “I'm going to fuck you so good you won't even want it to stop.”

“I don't care what you do,” Hope told him. “You can't hurt my baby now.”

“I can do things to you ,” said Oren Rath. “Lots of things.”

“Yes. You mean business,” Hope said, mockingly.

They were driving into the farm country. Rath didn't say anything for a while. Then he said, “I'm not as crazy as you think.”

“I don't think you're crazy at all,” Hope lied. “I think you're just a dumb, horny kid who's never been laid.”

Oren Rath must have felt at this moment that his advantage of terror was slipping away from him, fast. Hope was seeking any advantage she might find, but she didn't know if Oren Rath was sane enough to be humiliated.

They turned off the county road, up a long dirt driveway toward a farmhouse whose windows were blurred with plastic insulation; the scruffy lawn was strewn with tractor parts and other metal trash. The mailbox said: R, R, W, E and O RATH.

These Raths were not related to the famous sausage Raths, but it appeared that they were pig farmers. Hope saw a series of outbuildings, gray and slanted with rusted roofs. On the ramp by the brown barn a full-grown sow lay on her side, breathing with difficulty; beside the pig were two men who looked to Hope like mutants of the same mutation that had produced Oren Rath.

“I want the black truck, now,” Oren said to them. “People are out looking for this one.” He used his knife matter-of-factly to slice through the bra that bound Hope's wrists to the glove compartment.

“Shit,” one of the men said.

The other man shrugged; he had a red blotch on his face—a kind of birthmark, which was the color and nubbled surface of a raspberry. In fact, that is what his family called him: Raspberry Roth. Fortunately, Hope didn't know this.

They had not looked at Oren or at Hope. The hard-breathing sow shattered the barnyard calm with a rippling fart. “Shit, there she goes again,” the man without the birthmark said; except for his eyes, his face was more or less normal. His name was Weldon.

Raspberry Rath read the label on a brown bottle he held out toward the pig like a drink: “"May produce excessive gas and flatulence", it says.”

“Don't say anything about producing a pig like this ,” Weldon said.

“I need the black truck,” Oren said.

“Well, the key's in it, Oren,” said Weldon Rath. “If you think you can manage by yourself.”

Oren Rath shoved Hope toward the black pickup. Raspberry was holding the bottle of pig medicine and staring at Hope when she said to him, “He's kidnapping me. He's going to rape me. The police ate already looking for him.”

Raspberry kept staring at Hope, but Weldon turned to Oren. “I hope you ain't doing nothing too stupid,” he said.

“I ain't,” Oren said. The two men now turned their total attention to the pig.

“I'd wait another hour and then give her another squirt,” Raspberry said. “Ain't we seen enough of the vet this week?” He scratched the mud-smeared neck of the sow with the toe of his boot; the sow farted.

Oren led Hope behind the barn where the corn spilled out of the silo. Some piglets, barely bigger than kittens, were playing in it. They scattered when Oren started the black pickup. Hope started to cry.

“Are you going to let me go?” she asked Oren.

“I ain't had you yet,” he said.

Hope's bare feet were cold and black with the spring muck. “My feet hurt,” she said. “Where are we going?”

She'd seen an old blanket in the back of the pickup, matted and flecked with straw. That's where she imagined she was going: into the cornfields, then spread on the spongy spring ground—and when it was over and her throat was slit, and she'd been disemboweled with the fisherman's knife, he'd wrap her up in the blanket that was lumped stiffly on the floor of the pickup as if it covered some stillborn livestock.

“I got to find a good place to have you,” said Oren Rath. “I would of kept you at home, but I'd of had to share you.”

Hope Standish was trying to figure out the foreign machinery of Oren Rath. He did not work like the human beings she was accustomed to. “What you're doing is wrong,” she said.

“No, it isn't,” he said. “It ain't .”

“You're going to rape me,” Hope said. “That's wrong.”

“I just want to have you,” he said. He hadn't bothered to tie her to the glove compartment this time. There was nowhere she could go. They were driving only on those mile-long plots of county roads, driving slowly west in little squares, the way a knight advances on a chessboard: one square ahead, two sideways, one sideways, two ahead. It seemed purposeless to Hope, but then she wondered if he didn't know the roads so very well that he knew how to cover a considerable distance without ever passing through a town. They saw only the signposts for towns, and although they couldn't have moved more than thirty miles from the university, she didn't recognize any of the names: Coldwater, Hills, Fields, Plainview. Maybe they aren't towns, she thought, but only crude labels for the natives who lived here—identifying the land for them, as if they didn't know the simple words for the things they saw every day.

“You don't have any right to do this to me,” Hope said.

“Shit,” he said. He pumped his brakes hard, throwing her forward against the truck's solid dashboard. Her forehead bounced off the windshield, the back of her hand was mashed against her nose. She felt something like a small muscle or a very light bone give way in her chest. Then he tromped on the accelerator and tossed her back into the seat. “I hate arguing,” he said.

Her nose bled; she sat with her head forward, in her hands, and the blood dripped on her thighs. She sniffed a little; the blood dripped over her lip and filmed her teeth. She tipped her head back so that she could taste it. For some reason, it calmed her—it helped her to think. She knew there was a rapidly blueing knot on her forehead, swelling under her smooth skin. When she ran her hand up to her face and touched the lump, Oren Rath looked at her and laughed. She spit at him—a thin phlegm laced pink with blood. It caught his cheek and ran down to the collar of her husband's flannel shirt. His hand, as flat and broad as the sole of a boot, reached for her hair. She grabbed his forearm with both her hands, she jerked his wrist to her mouth and bit into the soft part where the hairs don't always grow and the blue tubes carry the blood.

She meant to kill him in this impossible way but she barely had time to break the skin. His arm was so strong that he snapped her body upright and across his lap. He pushed the back of her neck against the steering wheel—the horn blew through her head—and he broke her nose with the heel of his left hand. Then he returned that hand to the wheel. He cradled her head with his right hand, holding her face against his stomach; when he felt that she wasn't struggling, he let her head rest on his thigh. His hand lightly cupped her ear, as if to hold the sound of the horn inside her. She kept her eyes shut against the pain in her nose.

He made several left turns, more right turns. Each turn, she knew, meant they had driven one mile. His hand now cupped the back of her neck. She could hear again, and she felt his fingers working their way into her hair. The front of her face felt numb.

“I don't want to kill you,” he said.

“Don't , then,” Hope said.

“Got to,” Oren Rath told her. “After we do it, I'll have to.”

This affected her like the taste of her own blood. She knew he didn't care for arguing. She saw that she had lost a step: her rape. He was going to do it to her. She had to consider that it was done. What mattered now was living ; she knew that meant outliving him. She knew that meant getting him caught, or getting him killed, or killing him.

Against her cheek, she felt the change in his pocket; his blue jeans were soft and sticky with farm dust and machine grease. His belt buckle dug into her forehead; her lips touched the oily leather of his belt. The fisherman's knife was kept in a sheath, she knew. But where was the sheath? She couldn't see it; she didn't dare to hunt for it with her hands. Suddenly, against her eye, she felt his penis stiffening. She felt then—for really the first time—almost paralyzed, panicked beyond helping herself, no longer able to sort out the priorities. Once again, it was Oren Rath who helped her.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “Your kid got away. I was going to kill the kid, too, you know.”

The logic of Oren Rath's peculiar version of sanity made everything sharpen for Hope; she heard the other cars. There were not many, but every few minutes or so there was a car passing. She wished she could see, but she knew they were not as isolated as they had been. Now , she thought, before he gets to where we're going—if he even knows where we're going. She thought he did. At least, before he gets off this road—before I'm somewhere, again, where there aren't any people.

Oren Rath shifted in his seat. His erection was making him uncomfortable. Hope's warm face in his lap, his hand in her hair, was reaching him. Now , Hope thought. She moved her cheek against his thigh, just slightly; he did not stop her. She moved her face in his lap as if she were making herself more comfortable, against a pillow—against his prick , she knew. She moved until the bulge under his rank pants rose untouched by her face. But she could reach it with her breath; it stuck up out of his lap near her mouth, and she began to breathe on it. It hurt too much to breathe out of her nose. She drew her lips into an O-shaped kiss, she focused her breathing, and, very softly, she blew.

Oh, Nicky, she thought. And Dorsey, her husband. She would see them again, she hoped. To Oren Rath she gave her warm, careful breath. On him she focused her one, cold thought: I'm going to get you, you son of a bitch.

It was apparent that the sexual experience of Oren Rath had not previously involved such subtleties as Hope's directed breathing. He tried to move her head in his lap so that he would once again have contact with her hot face but at the some time he didn't want to disturb her soft breath. What she was doing made him want more contact, but it was excruciating to imagine losing the teasing contact he now had. He began to squirm. Hope didn't hurry. It was his movement that finally brought the bulge of sour jeans to touch her lips. She closed them there, but didn't move her mouth. Oren Rath felt only a hot wind passing through the crude weave of his clothes; he groaned. A car approached, then passed him; he corrected the truck. He was aware he was beginning to wander across the center of the road.

“What are you doing?” he asked Hope. She, very lightly, applied her teeth to his swollen clothes. He brought his knee up, pumped the brake, jarred her head, hurt her nose. He forced his hand between her face and his lap. She thought he was going to really hurt her but he was struggling with his zipper. “I've seen pictures of this,” he told her.

“Let me,” she said. She had to sit up just a little to get his fly open. She wanted to get a look at where they were; they were still out in the country, of course, but there were pointed lines on the road. She took him out of his pants and into her mouth without looking at him.

“Shit,” he said. She thought she would gag; she was afraid she would be sick. Then she got him into the back of her cheek where she thought she could take a lot of time. He was sitting so stiffly still, but trembling, that she knew he was already far beyond even his imaginary experiences. That steadied Hope; it gave her confidence, and a sense of time. She went ahead with it very slowly, listening for other cars. She could tell he had slowed down. At the first sign she had that he was leaving this road, she would have to change her plans. Could I bite the damn thing off? she wondered. But she thought that she probably couldn't—at least, not quickly enough.

Then two trucks went by them, closely following each other; in the distance she thought she heard another car's horn. She started working faster—he raised his lap higher. She thought their truck had speeded up. A car passed them—awfully close, she thought. Its horn blared at them. “Fuck you!” Oren Rath yelled after it; he was beginning to jounce up and down in the seat, hurting Hope's nose. Hope now had to be careful not to hurt him; she wanted to hurt him very much. Just make him lose his head, she encouraged herself.

Suddenly there was the sound of gravel spraying the underside of the truck. She closed her mouth fast around him. But they were neither crashing nor turning off the road; he was pulling abruptly to the roadside and stopping. The truck stalled out. He put both his hands on either side of her face; his thighs hardened and slapped against her jaw. I'm going to choke on it, she thought, but he was lifting her face up, out of his lap. “No! No!” he cried. A truck, flinging tiny stones, tore by them and cut into his words. “I don't have the thing on,” he said to her. “If you have any germs, they'll swim right up me.”

Hope sat on her knees, her lips hot and sore, her nose throbbing. He was going to put on a rubber, but when he tore it from its little tinfoil package, he stared at it as if it wasn't at all what he expected to see—as if he thought they were bright green! As if he didn't know how to put it on. “Take your dress off,” he said; he was embarrassed that she was looking at him. She could see the cornfields on either side of the road, and the back side of a billboard a few yards away from them. But there were no houses, no signs, no intersecting roads. No cars and trucks were coming. She thought her heart would simply stop.

Oren Rath tore himself out of her husband's shirt; he threw it out his window; Hope saw it flap in the road. He scraped his boots off on the brake pedal, whacking his narrow blond knees on the steering wheel. “Shove over!” he said. She was wedged against the passenger-side door. She knew—even if she could get out the door—that she couldn't outrun him. She didn't have any shoes—and his feet appeared to have a dog's rough pads.

He was having trouble with his pants; he clutched the rolled-up rubber in his teeth. Then he was naked—he'd flung his pants somewhere—and he shoved the rubber down over himself as if his penis were no more sensitive than a turtle's leathery tail. She was trying to unbutton her dress and her tears were coming back, though she was fighting them, when he suddenly caught her dress and began to yank it over her head; it caught on her arms. He jerked her elbows painfully behind her back.

He was too long to fit in the cab. One door had to be open. She reached for the handle over her head but he bit her in the neck. “No!” he hollered. He thrashed his feet around—she saw his shin was bleeding; he'd cut it on the rim of the horn—and his hard heels struck the door handle on the driver's side. With both feet, he launched the door open. She saw the gray smear of the road over his shoulder—his long ankles stuck out into the traffic lane, but there was no traffic now. Her head hurt; she was jammed against the door. She had to wriggle herself back down the seat, farther under him, and her movement made him yell something unintelligible. She felt his rubbered prick slipping over her stomach. Then his whole body braced and he bit into her shoulder fiercely. He'd come!

“Shit!” he cried. “I done it already!”

“No,” she said, hugging him. “No, you can do more .” She knew that if he thought he was through with her, he would kill her.

“Much more,” she said in his ear, which smelled like dust. She had to wet her fingers to wet herself. God, I'll never get him inside me, she thought, but when she found him with her hand, she knew that the rubber was the lubricated kind.

“Oh,” he said. He lay still on top of her; he seemed surprised by where she'd put him, as if he didn't really know what was where. “Oh,” he repeated.

Oh, what now? Hope wondered. She held her breath. A car, a flash of red, whined past their open door—the horn blast and some muffled, derisive hoots fading away from them. Of course, she thought: we look like two farmers fucking off the side of the road; it's probably done all the time. No one will stop, she thought, unless it's the police. She imagined a bread-faced trooper appearing over Roth's lurching shoulder, writing out a ticket. “Not on the road, buddy,” he'd be saying. And when she screamed at him, “Rape! He's raping me,” the trooper would wink at Oren Rath.

The bewildered Rath seemed to be feeling rather cautiously for something inside her. If he's just come, Hope thought, how much time do I have before he comes again? But he seemed more like a goat than a human to her, and the babylike gurgle in his throat, hot against her ear, seemed close to the last sound she imagined she'd hear.

She looked at everything she could see. The keys dangling from the ignition were too for to reach; and what could she do with a set of keys? Her back hurt and she pushed her hand against the dashboard to try to shift his weight on her; this excited him and made him grunt against her. “Don't move,” he said; she tried to do what he said. “Oh,” he said, approvingly. “That's real good. I'll kill you quick. You won't even know it. You just do like that, and I'll kill you good.”

Her hand grazed a metal button, smooth and round; her fingers touched it and she did not even have to turn her face away from him and look at it to know what it was. It opened the glove compartment and she pushed it. The spring-release door was a sudden weight in her hand. She said a long and loud “Aaahhh!” to conceal the sound of the things in the glove compartment that rattled around. Her hand touched cloth, her fingers felt grit. There was a spool of wire, something sharp, but too small—things like screws and nails, a bolt, perhaps a hinge to something else. There was nothing she could use. Reaching around in there was hurting her arm; she let her hand trail to the floor of the cab. When another truck passed them—catcalls and bloops from the air horn, and no sign of even slowing down for a better look—she started to cry.

I got to kill you,” Rath moaned.

“Have you done this before?” she asked him.

“Sure,” he said, and he thrust into her—stupidly, as if his brute lunges could impress her.

“And did you kill them, too?” Hope asked. Her hand, aimless now, toyed with something—some material—on the floor of the cab.

“They were animals,” Rath admitted. “But I had to kill them, too.” Hope sickened, her fingers clutched the thing on the floor—an old jacket or something.

“Pigs?” she asked him.

“Pigs!” he cried. “Shit, nobody fucks pigs,” he told her. Hope thought that probably somebody did. “They was sheep,” Rath said. “And one calf.” But this was hopeless, she knew. She felt him shrinking inside her; she was distracting him. She choked a sob that felt like it would split her head if it ever escaped her.

“Please try to be kind to me,” Hope said.

“Don't talk any,” he said. “Move like you did.”

She moved, but apparently not the right way. “No!” he shouted. His fingers dug into her spine. She tried moving another way. “Yup,” he said. He moved, now, determined and purposeful—mechanical and dumb.

Oh, God, Hope thought. Oh, Nicky. And Dorsey. Then she felt what she held in her hand: his pants. And her fingers, suddenly as wise as a Braille reader's, located the zipper and moved on; her fingers passed over the change in the pocket, they slipped around the wide belt.

“Yup, yup, yup,” said Oren Rath.

Sheep, Hope thought to herself; and one calf. “Oh, please concentrate!” she cried aloud to herself.

“Don't talk!” said Oren Rath.

But now her hand held it: the long, hard, leather sheath. That is the little hook, her fingers told her, and that is the little metal clasp. And that—oh, yes!—is the head of the thing, the bony handle of the fisherman's knife he had used to cut her son.

Nicky's cut was not serious. In fact, everyone was trying to figure out how he got it. Nicky was not talking yet. He enjoyed looking in the mirror at the thin, half-moon slit that was already closed.

“Must have been something very sharp,” the doctor told the police. Margot, the neighbor, had thought she'd better call a doctor, too; she'd found blood on the child's bib. The police had found more blood in the bedroom; a single drop on the cream-white bedspread. They were puzzled about it; there was no other sign of violence, and Margot had seen Mrs. Standish leave. She had looked all right. The blood was from Hope's split lip—from the time Oren Rath had butted her—but there was no way any of them could know that. Margot thought there might have been sex, but she wasn't suggesting it. Dorsey Standish was too shocked to think. The police did not think there had been time for sex. The doctor knew no blow had been connected with Nicky's cut—probably not even a fall. “A razor?” he suggested. “Or a very sharp knife.”

The police inspector, a solidly round and florid man, a year away from his retirement, found the cut phone cord in the bedroom. “A knife,” he said. “A sharp knife with some weight to it.” His name was Arden Bensenhaver, and he had once been a police superintendent in Toledo, but his methods had been judged as unorthodox.

He pointed at Nicky's cheek. “It's a flick wound,” he said. He demonstrated the proper wrist action. “But you don't see many flick knives around here,” Bensenhaver told them. “It's a flick-type of wound, but it's probably some kind of hunting or fishing knife.”

Margot had described Oren Rath as a farm kid in a farm truck, except that the truck's color revealed the unnatural influence of the town and the university upon the farmers: turquoise. Dorsey Standish did not even associate this with the turquoise truck he had seen, or the woman in the cab whom he'd thought had resembled Hope. He still didn't understand anything.

“Did they leave a note?” he asked. Arden Bensenhaver stared at him. The doctor looked down at the floor. “You know, about a ransom ?” Standish said. He was a literal man struggling for a literal hold. Someone, he thought, had said “kidnap"; wasn't there ransom in the case of kidnap?

“There's no note, Mr. Standish,” Bensenhaver told him. “It doesn't look like that kind of thing.”

“They were in the bedroom when I found Nicky outside the door,” Margot said. “But she was all right when she left, Dorsey. I saw her.”

They hadn't told Standish about Hope's panties, discarded on the bedroom floor; they'd been unable to find the matching bra. Margot had told Arden Bensenhaver that Mrs. Standish was a woman who usually wore a bra. She had left barefoot; they knew that, too. And Margot had recognized Dorsey's shirt on the farm kid. She'd got only a partial reading of the license plate; it was an in-state, commercial plate, and the first two numbers placed it within the county, but she hadn't gotten them all. The rear plate had been spattered with mud, the front plate was missing.

“We'll find them,” Arden Bensenhayer said. “There's not much in the way of turquoise trucks around here. The county sheriff's boys will probably know it.”

“Nicky, what happened?” Dorsey Standish asked the boy. He sat him on his lap. “What happened to Mommy?” The child pointed out the window. “So he was going to rape her?” Dorsey Standish asked them all.

Margot said, “Dorsey, lets wait until we know.”

“Wait?” Standish said.

“You got to excuse me asking you,” said Arden Bensenhaver, “but your wife wasn't seeing anybody, was she? You know.”

Standish was mute at the question, but it seemed as if he were importantly considering it. “No, she wasn't,” Margot told Bensenhaver. “Absolutely not.”

“I got to ask Mr. Standish,” Bensenhaver said.

“God,” Margot said.

“No, I don't think she was,” Standish told the inspector.

“Of course she wasn't, Dorsey,” Margot said. “Let's go take Nicky for a walk,” she said to him. She was a busy, businesslike woman whom Hope liked very much. She was in and out of the house five times a day; she was always in the process of finishing something. Twice a year she had her phone disconnected, and connected again; it was like trying to stop smoking is for some people. Margot had children of her own but they were older—they were in school all day—and she often watched Nicky so that Hope could do something by herself. Dorsey Standish took Margot for granted; although he knew she was a kind and generous person, those were not qualities that especially arrested his attention. Margot, he realized now, wasn't especially attractive, either. She was not sexually attractive, he thought, and a bitter feeling rose up in Standish: he thought that no one would ever try to rape Margot—whereas Hope was a beautiful woman, anyone could see. Anyone would want her.

Dorsey Standish was all wrong about that; he didn't know the first thing about rape—that the victim hardly ever matters. At one time or another, people have tried to force sex on almost anyone imaginable. Very small children, very old people, even dead people; also animals.

Inspector Arden Bensenhaver, who knew a good deal about rape, announced that he had to get on with his job.

Bensenhaver felt better with lots of open space around him. His first employment had been the nighttime beat in a squad car, cruising old Route 2 between Sandusky and Toledo. In the summers it was a road speckled with beer joints and little homemade signs promising BOWLING! POOL! SMOKED FISH! and LIVE BAIT! And Arden Bensenhaver would drive slowly over Sandusky Bay and along Lake Erie to Toledo, waiting for the drunken carfuls of teen-agers and fishermen to play chicken with him on that unlit, two-lane road. Later, when he was the police superintendent of Toledo, Bensenhaver would be driven, in the daytime, over that harmless stretch of road. The bait shops and beer palaces and fast-food services looked so exposed in the daylight. It was like watching a once-feared bully strip down for a fight; you saw the thick neck, the dense chest, the wristless arms—and then, when the last shirt was off, you saw the sad, helpless paunch.

Arden Bensenhaver hated the night. Bensenhaver's big plea with the city government of Toledo had been for better lighting on Saturday nights. Toledo was a workingman's city, and Bensenhaver believed that if the city could afford to light itself, brightly, on Saturday night, half the gashings and maimings—the general bodily abusings—would stop. But Toledo had thought the idea was dim. Toledo was as unimpressed with Arden Bensenhaver's ideas as it was questioning of his methods.

Now Bensenhaver relaxed in all this open country. He had a perspective on the dangerous world that he always wanted to have: he was circling the flat, open land in a helicopter—above it all, the detached overseer observing his contained, well-lit kingdom. The county deputy said to him, “There's only one truck around here that's turquoise . It's those damn Raths.”

“Raths?” Bensenhaver asked.

“There's a whole family of them,” the deputy said. “I hate going out there.”

“Why?” Bensenhaver asked; below him, he watched the shadow of the helicopter cross a creek, cross a road, move alongside a field of corn and a field of soybeans.

“They're all weird,” the deputy said. Bensenhaver looked at him—a young man, puffy-faced and small-eyed, but pleasant; his long hair hung in a hunk under his tight hat, almost touching his shoulders. Bensenhaver thought of all the football players who wore their hair spilling out under their helmets. They could braid it, some of them, he thought. Now even lawmen looked like this. He was glad he was retiring soon; he couldn't understand why so many people wanted to look the way they did.

“"Weird"?” said Bensenhaver. Their language was all the same, too, he thought. They used just four or five words for almost everything.

“Well, I got a complaint about the younger one just last week,” the deputy said. Bensenhaver noted this casual use of “I"—as in “I got a complaint"—when in fact Bensenhaver knew that the sheriff, or his office, would have received the complaint, and that the sheriff probably thought it was simple enough to send this young deputy out on it. But why did they give me such a young one for this ? Bensenhaver wondered.

“The youngest brother's name is Oren,” the deputy said. “They all have weird names, too.”

“What was the complaint?” Bensenhayer asked; his eyes followed a long dirt driveway to what appeared to be a random dropping of barns and outbuildings, one of which he knew was the main farmhouse, where the people lived. But Arden Bensenhaver couldn't tell which one that might be. To him, all the buildings looked vaguely unfit for animals.

“Well,” the deputy said, “this kid Oren was screwing around with someone's dog.”

was “Screwing around"?” Bensenhaver asked patiently. That could mean anything, he thought.

“Well,” the deputy said, “the people whose dog it was thought that Oren was trying to fuck it.”

“Was he?” Bensenhayer asked.

“Probably,” the deputy said, “but I couldn't tell anything. When I got there, Oren wasn't around—and the dog looked all right. I mean, how could I tell if the dog had been fucked?”

“Should've asked it!” said the copter pilot—a kid, Bensenhayer realized, even younger than the deputy. Even the deputy looked at him with contempt.

“One of these half-wits the National Guard gives us,” the deputy whispered to Bensenhaver, but Bensenhaver had spotted the turquoise truck. It was parked out in the open, alongside a low shed. No attempt had been made to conceal it.

In a long pen a tide of pigs surged this way and that, driven crazy by the hovering helicopter. Two lean men in overalls squatted over a pig that lay sprawled at the foot of a ramp to a barn. They looked up at the helicopter, shielding their faces from the stinging dirt.

“Not so close. Put it down over on the lawn,” Bensenhaver told the pilot. “You're scaring the animals.”

“I don't see Oren, or the old man,” the deputy said. “There's more of them than those two.”

“You ask those two where Oren is,” Bensenhaver said. “I want to look at that truck.”

The men obviously knew the deputy; they hardly watched him approach. But they watched Bensenhaver, in his dull dun-colored suit and tie, crossing the barnyard toward the turquoise pickup. Arden Bensenhaver didn't look at them, but he could see them just the same. They are morons, he thought. Bensenhaver had seen all kinds of bad men in Toledo—vicious men, unjustifiably angry men, dangerous men, cowardly and ballsy thieves, men who murdered for money, and men who murdered for sex. But Bensenhaver had not seen quite such benign corruption as he thought he saw on the faces of Weldon and Raspberry Rath. It gave him a chill. He thought he'd better find Mrs. Standish, quickly.

He didn't know what he was looking for when he opened the door of the turquoise pickup, but Arden Bensenhaver knew how to look for unknowns. He saw it immediately—it was easy: the slashed bra, a piece of it still tied to the hinge of the glove-compartment door; the other two pieces were on the floor. There was no blood; the bra was a soft, natural beige; very classy, Arden Bensenhaver thought. He had no style himself, but he'd seen dead people of all kinds, and he could recognize something of a person's style in the clothes. He put the pieces of the silky bra into one hand; then he put both hands into the floppy, stretched pockets of his suit jacket and started across the yard toward the deputy, who was talking to the Rath brothers.

“They haven't seen the kid all day,” the deputy told Bensenhaver. “They say Oren sometimes stays away overnight.”

“Ask them who's the last one who drove that truck,” Bensenhaver said to the deputy; he wouldn't look at the Raths; he treated them as if they couldn't possibly understand him, directly.

“I already asked them that,” the deputy said. “They say they don't remember.”

“Ask them when's the last time a pretty young woman rode in that truck,” Bensenhaver said, but the deputy didn't have time; Weldon Rath laughed. Bensenhaver felt grateful that the one with the blotch on his face, like a wine spill, had kept quiet.

“Shit,” Weldon said. “There's no “pretty young woman” around here, no pretty young woman ever sat her ass in that truck.”

“Tell him,” said Bensenhaver to the deputy, “that he is a liar.”

“You're a liar, Weldon,” the deputy said.

Raspberry Rath said to the deputy, “Shit, who is he, coming in here, telling us what to do?”

Arden Bensenhaver took the three pieces of the bra from his pocket. He looked at the sow lying beside the men; she had one frightened eye, which appeared to be looking at all of them at once, and it was hard to tell where her other eye was looking.

“Is that a boy pig or a girl pig?” asked Bensenhaver. The Raths laughed. “Anyone can see it's a sow,” Raspberry said. “Do you ever cut the balls off the boy pigs?” Bensenhover asked. “Do you do that yourselves or do you have others do it for you?”

“We castrate them ourselves,” said Weldon. He looked a little like a boar himself, with wild tufts of hair sprouting upward, out of his ears. “We know all about castrating. There's nothing to it.”

“Well,” said Bensenhaver, holding up the bra for them and the deputy to see. “Well, that's exactly what the new law provides for—in the case of these sexual crimes.” Neither the deputy nor the Roths spoke. “Any sexual crime,” Bensenhaver said, “is now punishable by castration. If you fuck anybody you shouldn't,” said Bensenhaver, “or if you assist in the act of getting a person fucked—by not helping us to stop it—then we can castrate you.”

Weldon Rath looked at his brother, Raspberry, who looked a little puzzled. But Weldon leered at Bensenhaver and said, “You do it yourselves or do you have others do it for you?” He nudged his brother. Raspberry tried to grin, pulling his birthmark askew.

But Bensenhaver was deadpan, turning the bra over and over in his hands. “Of course we don't do it,” he said. “There's all new equipment for it now. The National Guard does it. That's why we got the National Guard helicopter. We just fly you right out to the National Guard hospital and fly you right back home again. There's nothing to it,” he said. “As you know.”

“We have a big family,” Raspberry Rath said. “There's a lot of us brothers. We don't know from one day to the next who's riding around in what truck.”

“There's another truck ?” Bensenhaver asked the deputy. “You didn't tell me there was another truck.”

“Yeah, it's black. I forgot,” the deputy said. “They have a black one, too.” The Raths nodded.

“Where is it?” Bensenhaver asked. He was contained but tense. The brothers looked at each other. Weldon said, “I haven't seen it in a while.”

“Might be that Oren has it,” said Raspberry.

“Might be our father who's got it,” Weldon said.

“We don't have time for this shit,” Bensenhaver told the deputy, sharply. “We'll find out what they weigh—then see if the pilot can carry them.” The deputy, thought Bensenhaver, is almost as much of a moron as the brothers. “Go on!” Bensenhaver said to the deputy. Then, with impatience, he turned to Weldon Rath. “Name?” he asked.

“Weldon,” Weldon said.

“Weight?” Bensenhaver asked.

“Weight?” said Weldon.

“What do you weigh?” Bensenhaver asked him. “If we're going to lug you off in the copter, we got to know what you weigh.”

“One-eighty-something,” Weldon said.

“You?” Bensenhaver asked the younger one.

“One-ninety-something,” he said. “My name's Raspberry.” Bensenhaver shut his eyes.

“That's three-seventy-something,” Bensenhaver told the deputy. “Go ask the pilot if we can carry that.”

“You're not taking us anywhere, now, are you?” Weldon asked. “We'll just take you to the National Guard hospital,” Bensenhaver said. “Then if we find the woman, and she's all right, we'll take you home.”

“But if she ain't all right, we get a lawyer, right?” Raspberry asked Bensenhaver. “One of those people in the courts, right?”

“If who ain't all right?” Bensenhaver asked him.

“Well, this woman you're looking for,” Raspberry said.

“Well, if she's not all right,” Bensenhaver said, “then we already got you in the hospital and we can castrate you and send you back home the same day. You boys know more about what's involved than I do,” he admitted. “I've never seen it done, but it doesn't take long, does it? And it doesn't bleed much, does it?”

“But there's courts, and a lawyer!” Raspberry said.

“Of course there is,” Weldon said. “Shut up.”

“No, no more courts for this kind of thing—not with the new law,” Bensenhover said. “Sex crimes are special, and with the new machines, it's just so easy to castrate someone that it makes the most sense.”

“Yeah!” the deputy hollered from the helicopter. “The weight's okay. We can take them.”

“Shit!” Raspberry said.

“Shut up,” said Weldon.

“They're not cutting my balls off!” Raspberry yelled at him. “I didn't even get to have her!” Weldon hit Raspberry so hard in the stomach that the younger man pitched over sideways and landed on the prostrate pig. It squealed, its short legs spasmed, it evacuated suddenly, and horribly, but otherwise it didn't move. Raspberry lay gasping beside the sow's stenchful waste, and Arden Bensenhaver tried to knee Weldon Rath in the balls. Weldon was too quick, though; he caught Bensenhaver's leg at the knee and tossed the old man over backwards, over Raspberry and the poor pig.

“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.

Hope now tried the knife higher up, but encountered a rib, or something difficult; she had to probe and, unsatisfied, withdrew the knife after only a few inches. He was flopping on her now, as if he wanted to get off her. His body was sending distress signals to itself, but the signals were not getting all the way through. He heaved himself against the back of the seat, but his head wouldn't stay up and his penis, still moving, attached him still to Hope. She took advantage of this opportunity to insert the knife again. It slipped into his belly at the side and moved straightaway to within an inch of his navel before engaging some major obstruction there—and his body slumped back on top of her, trapping her wrist. But this was easy; she twisted her hand and the slippery knife came free. Something to do with his bowels relaxed. Hope was overwhelmed with his wetness and with his smell. She let the knife drop to the floor.

Oren Rath was emptying, by quartfuls—by gallons. He felt actually lighter on top of her. Their bodies were so slick that she slipped out from under him easily. She shoved him over on his back and crouched beside him on the truck's puddled floor. Hope's hair was gravid with blood—his throat had fountained over her. When she blinked, her eyelashes stuck to her cheeks. One of his hands twitched and she slapped it. “Stop,” she said. His knee rose, then flopped down. “Stop it, stop now,” Hope said. She meant his heart, his life.

She would not look at his face. Against the dark slime coating his body, the white, translucent condom hugged his shrunken cock like a congealed fluid quite foreign to the human matter of blood and bowel. Hope recalled a zoo, and a gob of camel spit upon her crimson sweater.

His balls contracted. That made her angry. “Stop,” she hissed. The balls were small and rounded and tight; then they fell slack. “Please stop,” she whispered. “Please die.” There was a tiny sigh, as if someone had let out a breath too small to bother taking back. But Hope squatted for some time beside him, feeling her heart pound and confusing her pulse with his own. He had died fairly quickly, she realized later.

Out the open door of the pickup, Oren Rath's clean white feet, his drained toes, pointed upward in the sunlight. Inside the sun-baked cab, the blood was coagulating. Everything clotted. Hope Standish felt the tiny hairs on her arms stiffen and tug her skin as her skin dried. Everything that was slick was turning sticky.

I should get dressed, Hope thought. But something seemed wrong with the weather.

Out the truck windows Hope saw the sunlight flicker, like a lamp whose light is shone through the blades of a fast fan. And the gravel at the roadside was lifted up in little swirls, and dry shards and stubble from last year's corn were whisked along the flat, bare ground as if a great wind was blowing—but not from the usual directions: this wind appeared to be blowing straight down. And the noise! It was like being in the afterblow of a speeding truck, but there was still no traffic on the road.

It's a tornado! Hope thought. She hated the Midwest with its strange weather; she was an Easterner who could understand a hurricane. But tornadoes! She'd never seen one, but the weather forecasts were always full of “tornado watches.” What does one watch for? she'd always wondered. For this , she guessed—this whirling din all around her. These clods of earth flying. The sun turned brown.

She was so angry, she struck the cool, viscid thigh of Oren Rath. After she had lived through this , now there was a fucking tornado, too! The noise resembled a train passing over the pelted truck. Hope imagined the funnel descending, other trucks and cars already caught up in it. Somehow, she could hear, their engines were still running. Sand flew in the open door, stuck to her glazed body; she groped for her dress—discovered the empty armholes where the sleeves had been; it would have to do.

But she would have to step outside the truck to put it on. There was no room to maneuver beside Rath and his gore, now dappled with roadside sand. And out there, she had no doubt, her dress would be torn from her hands and she would be sucked up naked into the sky. “I am not sorry,” she whispered. “I am not sorry!” she screamed, and again she struck at the body of Rath.

Then a voice, a terrible voice—loud as the loudest loudspeaker—shook her in the cab. “IF YOU'RE IN THERE, COME OUT! PUT YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD. COME OUT. CLIMB INTO THE BACK OF THE PICKUP AND LIE THE FUCK DOWN!”

I am actually dead, thought Hope. I'm already in the sky and it's the voice of God. She was not religious and it seemed fitting, to Hope: if there were a God, God would have a bullying, loudspeaker voice.

“COME OUT NOW,” God said. “DO IT NOW.”

Oh, why not? she thought. You big fucker. What can you do to me next? Rape was an outrage even God couldn't understand.

In the helicopter, shuddering above the black truck, Arden Bensenhaver barked into the megaphone. He was sure that Mrs. Standish was dead. He could not tell the sex of the feet he saw protruding from the open door of the cab, but the feet hadn't moved during the helicopter's descent, and they seemed so naked and drained of any color in the sunlight that Bensenhaver was sure that they were dead feet. That Oren Rath could be the one who was dead had not crossed the deputy's or Bensenhaver's mind.

But they couldn't understand why Rath would have abandoned the truck, after performing his foul acts, and so Bensenhaver had told the pilot to hold the helicopter just above the pickup. “if he's still in there with her,” Bensenhaver told the deputy, “maybe we can scare the bastard to death.”

When Hope Standish brushed between those stiff feet and huddled alongside the cab, trying to shield her eyes from the flying sand, Arden Bensenhaver felt his finger go limp against the trigger of the megaphone. Hope tried to wrap her face in her flapping dress but it snapped around her like a torn sail; she felt her way along the truck toward the tailgate, cringing against the stinging gravel that clung to the places on her body where the blood hadn't quite dried.

“It's the woman,” the deputy said.

“Back off!” Bensenhaver told the pilot.

“Jesus, what happened to her?” the deputy asked, frightened. Bensenhaver roughly handed him the megaphone.

“Move away ” he said to the pilot. “Set this thing down across the road.” Hope felt the wind shift, and the clamor in the tornado's funnel seemed to pass over her. She kneeled at the side of the road. Her wild dress quieted in her hands. She held it to her mouth because the dust was choking her.

A car come along, but Hope was unaware of it. The driver passed in the proper lane—the black pickup off the road to his right, the helicopter settling down off the road to his left. The bloody, praying woman, naked and caked with grit, took no notice of him driving past her. The driver had a vision of an angel on a trip back from hell. The driver's reaction was so delayed that he was a hundred yards beyond everything he'd seen before he surprisingly attempted a U-turn in the road. Without slowing down. His front wheels caught the soft shoulder and slithered him across the road ditch and into the soft spring earth of a plowed bean field, where his car sank up to his bumpers and he could not open his door. He rolled down his window and peered across the mire to the road—like a man who'd been sitting peacefully on a dock when the dock broke free from the shore, and he was drifting out to sea.

“Help!” he cried. The vision of the woman had so terrified him that he feared there might be more like her around, or that whoever had made her look that way might be in search of another victim.

“Jesus Christ,” said Arden Bensenhaver to the pilot, “you'll have to go see if that fool is all right. Why do they let everyone drive a car?” Bensenhaver and the deputy dropped out of the helicopter and into the same lush muck that had trapped the driver. “Goddamnit,” Bensenhaver said.

“Mother,” said the deputy.

Across the road, Hope Standish looked up at them for the first time. Two swearing men were wallowing toward her out of a muddy field. The blades of the helicopter were slowing down. There was also a man peeping witlessly out the window of his car, but that seemed far away. Hope stepped into her dress. One armhole, where a sleeve had been, was torn open and Hope had to pin a flap of material to her side with her elbow, or else leave her breast exposed. It was then that she noticed how sore her shoulders and her neck were.

Arden Bensenhaver, out of breath and soaked with mud from his knees down, was in front of her suddenly. The mud made his trousers hug his legs so that, to Hope, he looked like an old man wearing knickers. “Mrs. Standish?” he asked. She turned her back to him and hid her face, nodding. “So much blood,” he said, helplessly. “I'm sorry we took so long. Are you hurt?”

She turned and stared at him. He saw the swelling around both eyes and her broken nose—and the blue bulge on her forehead. “It's mostly his blood,” she said. “But I was raped. He did it,” she told Bensenhaver.

Bensenhaver had his handkerchief out; he seemed about to dab at her face with it, as he might wipe the mouth of a child, but then he despaired at what a job it would be to clean her up and he put his handkerchief away. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm so sorry. We got here as fast as we could. We saw your baby and he's fine,” Bensenhaver said.

“I had to put him in my mouth,” Hope said to him. Bensenhaver shut his eyes. “And then he fucked me and fucked me,” she said. “He was going to kill me, later—he told me he would. I had to kill him. And I'm not sorry.”

“Of course you're not,” Bensenhaver said. “And you shouldn't be, Mrs. Standish. I'm sure you did the very best thing.” She nodded her head to him, then stared down at her feet. She put one hand out toward Bensenhaver's shoulder and he let her lean against him, though she was slightly taller than Bensenhaver and in order to rest her head against him, she had to scrunch down.

Bensenhaver was aware of the deputy then; he had been to the cab to look at Oren Rath and had vomited all over the truck's front fender and in full view of the pilot who was walking the shocked driver of the stuck car across the road. The deputy, with his face the bloodless color of Oren Rath's sunlit feet, was imploring Bensenhaver to come see . But Bensenhaver wanted Mrs. Standish to feel every possible reassurance.

“So you killed him after he raped you, when he was relaxed, not paying attention?” he asked her.

“No, during ,” she whispered against his neck. The awful reek of her almost got to Bensenhaver, but he kept his face very close to her, where he could hear her.

“You mean, while he was raping you, Mrs. Standish?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “He was still inside me when I got his knife. It was in his pants, on the floor, and he was going to use it on me when he was finished, so I had to,” she said.

“Of course you did,” Bensenhaver said. “It doesn't matter.” He meant that she should have killed him anyway—even if he hadn't been planning to kill her. To Arden Bensenhaver there was no crime, as serious as rape—not even murder, except perhaps the murder of a child. But he knew less about that; he had no children of his own.

He had been married seven months when his pregnant wife had been raped in a Laundromat while he waited outside for her in the car. Three kids had done it. They had opened one of the big spring-doored dryers and sat her ass on the open door, pushed her head into the warm dryer where she could only scream into the hot, muffling sheets and pillowcases and hear her own voice boom and bounce around the great metal drum. Her arms were in the dryer with her head, so she was helpless. Her feet couldn't even reach the floor. The spring door made her jounce up and down under all three of them, although she probably tried not to move. The boys had no idea, of course, that they were raping the police superintendent's wife. And all the bright lighting possible for downtown Toledo on a Saturday night would not have saved her.

They were an early-morning couple, the Bensenhavers. They were young still, and they took their laundry to the Laundromat together, Monday morning before breakfast; they read the newspapers during the wash cycle. Then they put their laundry in the dryer and went home and had breakfast. Mrs. Bensenhaver picked it up on her way downtown to the police station with Bensenhaver. He would wait in the car while she went inside to get it; sometimes, someone would have taken it out of the dryer while they were having breakfast and Mrs. Bensenhaver would have to run it for another few minutes. Bensenhaver then waited. But they liked the early morning because there was rarely anyone else in the Laundromat. Only when Bensenhaver saw the three kids leaving did he start to worry about how long his wife had been collecting the dry laundry. But it does not take very long to rape someone, even three times. Bensenhaver went into the Laundromat where he saw his wife's legs sticking out of the dryer; her shoes had fallen off. Those were not the first dead feet Bensenhaver had seen, but they were very important feet to him. She had suffocated in her own clean wash—or she had vomited, and choked—but they had not meant to kill her. That part had been an accident, and at the trial a great deal had been made of the unplanned nature of Mrs. Bensenhaver's death. Their attorney had said that the boys had planned “to just rape her—not kill her, too.” And the phrase “just rape"—as in “She was just raped, lucky thing, a wonder she wasn't killed!"—appalled Arden Bensenhaver.

“It's good that you killed him,” Bensenhaver whispered to Hope Standish. “We couldn't have done nearly enough to him,” he confided to her. “Nothing like he deserved. Good for you,” he whispered. “Good for you.”

Hope had expected another sort of police experience, a more critical investigation—at least, a more suspicious cop, and certainly a man very different from Arden Bensenhaver. She was so grateful, for one thing, that Bensenhaverwas an old man, clearly in his sixties—like an uncle to her, or even more sexually remote: a grandfather. She said she felt better, that she was all right; when she straightened up and stood away from him, she saw she had smeared his shirt collar and his cheek with blood, but Bensenhaver hadn't noticed or didn't care.

“Okay, show me,” Bensenhaver said to the deputy, but again he smiled gently at Hope. The deputy led him to the open cab.

“Oh, my God,” the driver of the stuck car was saying. “Dear Jesus, look at this, and what's that ? Christ, look, I think that's his liver . Isn't that what a liver looks like?” The pilot gawked in mute wonder and Bensenhaver caught both men by their coat shoulders and steered them roughly away. They started toward the rear of the truck, where Hope was composing herself, but Bensenhaver hissed at them, “Stay away from Mrs. Standish. Stay away from the truck. Go radio our position,” he told the pilot. “They'll need an ambulance or something here. We'll take Mrs. Standish with us.”

“They'll need a plastic bag for him ,” said the deputy, pointing to Oren Rath. “He's all over the place.”

“I can see with my own eyes,” said Arden Bensenhaver. He looked inside the cab and whistled admiringly.

The deputy started to ask, “Was he doing it when...”

“That's right,” said Bensenhaver. He put his hand into a horrible mess by the accelerator pedal, but he didn't seem to mind. He was reaching for the knife on the floor of the passenger's side. He picked it up in his handkerchief; he looked it over carefully, wrapped it in the handkerchief, and put it in his pocket.

“Look,” the deputy whispered, conspiratorially. “Did you ever hear of a rapist wearing a rubber?”

“It's not common,” Bensenhaver said. “But it's not unknown.”

“It's weird to me,” said the deputy. He looked amazed as Bensenhaver pinched the prophylactic tight, just below its bulge; Bensenhaver snapped the rubber off and held it, without spilling a drop, up to the light. The sack was as large as a tennis ball, it hadn't leaked. It was full of blood.

Bensenhaver looked satisfied; he tied a knot in the condom, the way you'd knot a balloon, and he flung it so far into the bean field that it was out of sight.

“I don't want someone suggesting that it might not have been a rape,” Bensenhayer said softly to the deputy. “Got it?”

He didn't wait for the deputy to answer; Bensenhaver went to the back of the truck to be with Mrs. Standish.

“How old was he—that boy?” Hope asked Bensenhaver.

“Old enough,” Bensenhaver told her. “About twenty-five or twenty-six,” he added. He did not want anything to diminish her survival—particularly, in her own eyes. He waved to the pilot, who was to help Mrs. Standish aboard. Then he went to clear things with the deputy. “You stay here with the body and the bad driver,” he told him.

“I'm not a bad driver,” the driver whined. “Christ, if you'd seen that lady there-in the road...”

“And keep anyone away from the truck,” Bensenhaver said.

On the road was the shirt belonging to Mrs. Standish's husband; Bensenhaver picked it up and trotted to the helicopter in his funny, overweight way of running. The two men watched Bensenhaver climb aboard the helicopter and rise away from them. The weak spring sun seemed to leave with the copter and they were suddenly cold and didn't know where to go. Not in the truck, certainly, and sitting in the driver's car meant crossing that field of muck. They went to the pickup, lowered the tailgate, and sat on it.

“Will he call a tow truck for my car?” the driver asked.

“He'll probably forget,” the deputy said. He was thinking about Bensenhaver; he admired him, but he feared him, and he also thought that Bensenhaver was not to be totally trusted. There were questions of orthodoxy, if that's what it was, which the deputy had never considered. Mainly, the deputy just had too many things to think about at one time.

The driver paced back and forth in the pickup, which irritated the deputy because it jounced him on the tailgate. The driver avoided the foul, bunched blanket crammed in the corner next to the cab; he cleared a see-through spot on the dusted and caked rear window so that he could, occasionally, squint inside the cab at the rigid and disemboweled body of Oren Rath. All the blood was dry now, and through the mottled rear window the body looked to the driver to be similar, in color and in gloss, to an eggplant. He went and sat down on the tailgate beside the deputy, who got up, walked back in the truck, and peered in the window at the gashed corpse.

“You know what?” the driver said. “Even though she was all messed up, you could tell what a really good-looking woman she was.”

“Yes, you could,” the deputy agreed. The driver now paced around in the back of the truck with him, so the deputy went to the tailgate and sat down.

“Don't get sore,” the driver said.

“I'm not sore,” the deputy said.

“I don't mean that I can sympathize with anyone who'd want to rape her, you know,” the driver said.

“I know what you don't mean,” said the deputy.

The deputy knew he was over his head in these matters, but the simple-mindedness of the driver forced the deputy to adopt what he imagined was Bensenhayer's attitude of contempt for him .

“You see a lot of this, huh?” the driver asked. “You know: rape and murder.”

“Enough,” the deputy said with self-conscious solemnity. He had never seen a rape or murder before, and he realized that even now he had not actually seen it through his own eyes as much as he'd been treated to the experience through the eyes of Arden Bensenhaver. He had seen rape and murder according to Bensenhaver, he thought. The deputy felt very confused; he sought some point of view all his own.

“Well", said the driver, peering in the rear window again, “I seen some stuff in the service, but nothing like this.”

The deputy couldn't respond.

The World According to Bensenhaver

“This is like war, I guess,” the driver said. “This is like a bad hospital.”

The deputy wondered if he should let the fool look at Rath's body, if it mattered or not, and to whom? Certainly it couldn't matter to Rath. But to his unreal family? To the deputy?—he didn't know. And would Bensenhaver object?

“Hey, don't mind my asking you a personal question,” the driver said. “Don't get sore, okay?”

“Okay,” said the deputy.

“Well,” the driver said. “What happened to the rubber?”

“What rubber?” asked the deputy; he might have had some questions concerning Bensenhaver's sanity, but the deputy had no doubt that, in this case, Bensenhaver had been right. In the world according to Bensenhaver, no trivial detail should make less of rape's outrage.

Hope Standish, at that moment, felt safe at last in Bensenhaver's world. She floated and dipped over the farmlands beside him, trying not to be sick. She was beginning to notice things about her body again—she could smell herself and feel every sore spot. She felt such disgust, but here was this cheerful policeman who sat there admiring her—his heart touched by her violent success.

“Are you married, Mr. Bensenhaver?” she asked him.

“Yes, Mrs. Standish,” he said. “I am.”

“You've been awfully nice,” Hope told him, “but I think I'm going to be sick now.”

“Oh, sure,” said Bensenhaver; he grabbed a waxy paper bag at his feet. It was the pilot's lunch bag; there were some uneaten french-fried potatoes at the bottom and the grease had turned the waxed paper translucent. Bensenhaver could see his own hand, through the french fries and through the bottom of the bag. “Here,” he said. “You go right ahead.”

She was already retching; she took the bag from him and turned her head away. The bag did not feel big enough to contain what vileness she was sure she held inside her. She felt Bensenhaver's hard, heavy hand on her back. With his other hand, he held a strand of her matted hair out of her way. “That's right,” he encouraged her, “keep it coming, get it all out and you'll feel much better.”

Hope recalled that whenever Nicky was being sick, she told him the same thing. She marveled how Bensenhaver could even turn her vomiting into a victory, but she did feel much better—the rhythmic heaving was as soothing to her as his calm, dry hands, holding her head and patting her back. When the bag ripped and spilled, Bensenhaver said, “Good riddance, Mrs. Standish! You don't need the bag. This is a National Guard helicopter. We'll let the National Guard clean it up! After all—what's the National Guard for ?”

The pilot flew on, grimly, his expression never changing.

“What a day it's been for you, Mrs. Standish!” Bensenhaver went on. “Your husband is going to be so proud of you.” But Bensenhaver was thinking that he'd better make sure; he'd better have a talk with the man. It was Arden Bensenhaver's experience that husbands and other people did not always take a rape in the right way.

 

THE FIRST ASSASSIN

 

WHAT do you mean, “This is Chapter One"?” Garp's editor, John Wolf, wrote him. “How can there be any more of this ? There is entirely too much as it stands! How can you possibly go on?”

“It goes on,” Garp wrote back. “You'll see.”

“I don't want to see,” John Wolf told Garp on the phone. “Please drop it. At least put it aside. Why don't you take a trip? It would be good for you—and for Helen, I'm sure. And Duncan can travel now, can't he?”

But Garp not only insisted that The World According to Bensenhaver was going to be a novel; he insisted that John Wolf try to sell the first chapter to a magazine. Garp had never had an agent; John Wolf was the first man to deal with Garp's writing, and he managed everything for him, just as he managed everything for Jenny Fields.

“Sell it?” John Wolf said.

“Yes, sell it,” Garp said. “Advance publicity for the novel.”

This had happened with Garp's first two books; excerpts had been sold to magazines. But John Wolf tried to tell Garp that this chapter was (1) unpublishable and (2) the worst possible publicity—should anyone be fool enough to publish it. He said that Garp had a “small but serious” reputation as a writer, that his first two novels had been decently reviewed—had won him respected supporters and a “small but serious” audience. Garp said he hated the reputation of “small but serious,” though he could see that this appealed to John Wolf.

“I would rather be rich and wholly outside caring about what the idiots call “serious,"” he told John Wolf. But who is ever outside caring about that?

Garp actually felt that he could buy a sort of isolation from the real and terrible world. He imagined a kind of fort where he and Duncan and Helen (and a new baby) could live unmolested, even untouched by what he called “the rest of life.”

“What are you talking about?” John Wolf asked him.

Helen asked him, too. And so did Jenny. But Jenny Fields liked the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver . She thought it had all its priorities in order—that it knew whom to heroize in such a situation, that it expressed the necessary outrage, that it made properly grotesque the vileness of lust . Actually, Jenny's fondness for the first chapter was more troubling to Garp than John Wolf's criticism. Garp suspected his mother's literary judgment above all things.

“My God, look at her book,” he kept saying to Helen, but Helen, as she promised, would not allow herself to be drawn in; she would not read Garp's new novel, not one word of it.

“Why does he suddenly want to be rich ?” John Wolf asked Helen. “What's all this about?”

“I don't know,” Helen said. “I think he believes it will protect him, and all of us.”

“From what ?” John Wolf said. “From whom ?”

“You'll have to wait until you read the whole book,” Garp said to his editor. “Every business is a shitty business. I am trying to treat this book like business, and I want you to treat it that way, too. I don't care if you like it; I want you to sell it.”

“I am not a vulgar publisher,” John Wolf said. “And you are not a vulgar writer, either. I'm sorry I have to remind you.” John Wolf's feelings were hurt, and he was angry at Garp for presuming to talk about a business that John Wolf understood far better than Garp. But he knew Garp had been through a bad time, he knew Garp was a good writer who would write more and (he thought) better books, and he wanted to continue publishing him.

“Every business is a shitty business,” Garp repeated. “If you think the book is vulgar, then you should have no trouble selling it.”

“That's not the only way it works,” Wolf said, sadly. “No one knows what makes books sell.”

“I've heard that before,” Garp said.

“You have no call to speak to me like this,” John Wolf said. “I'm your friend.” Garp knew that was true, so he hung up the telephone and answered no mail and finished The World According to Bensenhaver two weeks before Helen delivered, with only Jenny's help, their third child—a daughter, who spared Helen and Garp the problem of having to agree upon a boy's name that in no way resembled the name of Walt. The daughter was named Jenny Garp, which was the name Jenny Fields would have had if she had gone about the business of having Garp in a more conventional way.

Jenny was delighted to have someone at least partially named after her. “But there's going to be some confusion,” she warned, “with two of us around.”

“I've always called you “Mom,"” Garp reminded her. He did not remind his mother that a fashion designer had already named a dress after her. It was popular in New York for about a year: a white nurse's uniform with a bright red heart sewn over the left breast. A JENNY FIELDS ORIGINAL, the heart said.

When Jenny Garp was born, Helen said nothing. Helen was grateful; she felt for the first time since the accident that she was delivered from the insanity of grief that had crushed her with the loss of Walt.

The World According to Bensenhaver , which was Garp's deliverance from the same insanity, resided in New York, where John Wolf read it over and over again. He had arranged to have the first chapter published in a porno magazine of such loathsome crudity that he felt sure even Garp would be convinced of the book's doom. The magazine was called Crotch Shots , and it was full of exactly that—those wet, split beavers of Garp's childhood, between the pages of his story of violent rape and obvious revenge. At first Garp accused John Wolf of deliberately placing the chapter there, of not even trying the better magazines. But Wolf assured Garp that he had tried them all; that this was the bottom line of the list—this was exactly how Garp's story was interpreted. Lurid, sensational violence and sex of no redeeming value whatsoever.

“That's not what it's about,” Garp said “You'll see.”

But Garp often wondered about the first chapter of The World According to Bensenhaver , which had been published in Crotch Shots . If it had been read at all. If anyone who bought those magazines ever looked at the words.

“Perhaps they read some of the stories after they masturbate to the pictures,” Garp wrote to John Wolf. He wondered if that was a good mood to be read in: after masturbation, the reader was at least relaxed, possibly lonely ("a good state in which to read,” Garp told John Wolf). But maybe the reader felt guilty, too, and humiliated, and overwhelmingly responsible (that was not such a good condition in which to read, Garp thought). In fact, he knew, it was not a good condition in which to write .

The World According to Bensenhaver is about the impossible desire of the husband, Dorsey Standish, to protect his wife and child from the brutal world; thus Arden Bensenhaver (who is forced to retire from the police, for repeated unorthodoxy in his methods of arrest) is hired to live like an armed uncle in the house with the Standish family—he becomes the lovable family bodyguard, whom Hope must finally reject. Though the worst of the real world has been visited upon Hope, it is her husband who fears the world most. After Hope insists that Bensenhaver not live with them, Standish continues to support the old policeman as a kind of hovering angel. Bensenhaver is paid to tail the child, Nicky, but Bensenhaver is an aloof and curious kind of watchdog, subject to fits of his own awful memories; he gradually seems more of a menace to the Standishes than he seems a protector. He is described as “a lurker at the last edge of light—a retired enforcer, barely alive on the rim of darkness.”

Hope counters her husband's anxiety by insisting they have a second child. The child is born, but Standish seems destined to create one monster of paranoia after another; now more relaxed about possible assaults upon his wife and children, he begins to suspect that Hope is having an affair. Slowly, he realizes that this would wound him more than if she were raped (again). Thus he doubts his love for her, and doubts himself; guiltily, he begs Bensenhaver to spy on Hope and determine if she is faithful. But Arden Bensenhaver will no longer do Dorsey's worry work for him. The old policeman argues that he was hired to protect Standish's family from the outside world—not to restrict the free choices of the family to live as it wants. Without Bensenhaver's support, Dorsey Standish panics. One night he leaves the house (and the children) unprotected while he goes out to spy on his wife. While Dorsey is gone, the younger child chokes to death on a piece of Nicky's chewing gum.

Guilt abounds. In Garp's work, guilt always abounds. With Hope, too—because she was seeing someone (although who could blame her). Bensenhaver, morbid with responsibility, has a stroke. Partially paralyzed, he moves back in with the Standishes; Dorsey feels responsible for him. Hope insists they have another child, but the events have made Standish determinedly sterile.

He agrees that Hope should encourage her lover—but merely to “impregnate” herself, as he puts it. (Ironically, this was the only part of the book that Jenny Fields called “farfetched.")

Once again, Dorsey Standish seeks “a control situation—more like a laboratory experiment at life than life itself,” Garp wrote. Hope cannot adjust to such a clinical arrangement; emotionally, either she has a lover or she doesn't. Insisting that the lovers meet for the sole purpose of “impregnating” Hope, Dorsey tries to control the whereabouts, the number and length of their meetings. Suspecting that Hope is meeting her lover clandestinely, as well as according to plan, Standish alerts the senile Bensenhaver to the existence of a prowler, a potential kidnapper and rapist, whose presence in the neighborhood has already been detected.

Still not satisfied, Dorsey Standish takes to sudden, unannounced visits at his own house (at times when he's least expected home); he never catches Hope at anything, but Bensenhaver, armed and deadly with senility, catches Dorsey. A cunning invalid, Arden Bensenhaver is surprisingly mobile and silent in his wheelchair; he is also still unorthodox in his methods of arrest. In fact, Bensenhaver shoots Dorsey Standish with a twelve-gauge shotgun from a distance of less than six feet. Dorsey had been hiding in the upstairs cedar closet, stumbling among his wife's shoes, waiting for her to make a phone call from the bedroom, which—from the closet—he could overhear. He deserves to be shot, of course.

The wound is fatal. Arden Bensenhaver, thoroughly mad, is taken away. Hope is pregnant with her lover's child. When the child is born, Nicky—now twelve—feels unburdened by the relaxing tension in the family. The terrible anxiety of Dorsey Standish, which has been so crippling to all their lives, is at last lifted from them. Hope and her children live on, even cheerfully dealing with the wild rantings of old Bensenhaver, too tough to die, who goes on and on with his versions of the nightmarish world from his wheelchair in an old-age home for the criminally insane. He is seen, finally, as belonging where he is. Hope and her children visit him often, not merely out of kindness—for they are kind—but also to remind themselves of their own precious sanity. Hope's endurance, and the survival of her two children, make the old man's ravings tolerable, finally even comic to her.

That peculiar old-age home for the criminally insane, by the way, bears an astonishing resemblance to Jenny Fields' hospital for wounded women at Dog's Head Harbor.

It is not so much that “The World According to Bensenhaver” is wrong , or even misperceived, as it is out of proportion to the world's need for sensual pleasure, and the world's need and capacity for warmth. Dorsey Standish “is not true to the world,” either; he is too vulnerable to how delicately he loves his wife and children; he is seen, together with Bensenhaver, as “not well suited for life on this planet.” Where immunity counts.

Hope—and, the reader hopes, her children—may have better chances. Somehow implicit in the novel is the sense that women are better equipped than men at enduring fear and brutality, and at containing the anxiousness of feeling how vulnerable we are to the people we love. Hope is seen as a strong survivor of a weak man's world.

John Wolf sat in New York, hoping that the visceral reality of Garp's language, and the intensity of Garp's characters, somehow rescued the book from sheer soap opera. But, Wolf thought, one might as well call the thing Anxiousness of Life ; it would make a fantastic series for daytime television, he thought—if suitably edited for invalids, senior citizens, and preschool children. John Wolf concluded that The World According to Bensenhaver , despite the “visceral reality of Garp's language,” and so forth, was an X-rated soap opera.

Much later, of course, even Garp would agree; it was his worst work. “But the fucking world never gave me credit for the first two,” he wrote to John Wolf. “Thus I was owed.” That, Garp felt, was the way it worked most of the time.

John Wolf was more basically concerned: that is, he wondered if he could justify the book's publication. With books he did not absolutely take to, John Wolf had a system that rarely failed him. At his publishing house, he was envied for his record of being right about those books destined to be popular. When he said a book was going to be popular—distinct from being good or likable or not—he was almost always right. There were many books that were popular without his saying so, of course, but no book he'd ever claimed would be popular was ever unpopular .

Nobody knew how he did it.

He did it first for Jenny Fields—and for certain, surprising books, every year or two, he had been doing it ever since.

There was a woman who worked in the publishing house who once told John Wolf that she never read a book that didn't make her want to close it and go to sleep. She was a challenge to John Wolf, who loved books, and he spent many years giving this woman good books and bad books to read; the books were alike in that they put this woman to sleep. She just didn't like to read, she told John Wolf; but he would not give up on her. No one else in the publishing house ever asked this woman to read anything at all; in fact, they never asked this woman's opinion of anything . The woman moved through the books lying all around the publishing house as if these books were ashtrays and she was a nonsmoker. She was a cleaning woman. Every day she emptied the wastebaskets; she cleaned everyone's office when they went home at night. She vacuumed the rugs in the corridors every Monday, she dusted the display cases every Tuesday, and the secretaries' desks on Wednesdays; she scrubbed the bathrooms on Thursdays and sprayed air freshener on everything on Fridays—so that, she told John Wolf, the entire publishing house had the whole weekend to gather up a good smell for the next week. John Wolf had watched her for years and he'd never seen her so much as glance at a book.

When he asked her about books and she told him how unlikable they were to her, he kept using her to test books he wasn't sure of—and the books he thought he was very sure of, too. She was consistent in her dislike of books and John Wolf had almost given up on her when he gave her the manuscript of A Sexual Suspect , the autobiography of Jenny Fields.

The cleaning woman read it overnight and asked John Wolf if she could have a copy of her very own to read—over and over again—when the book was published.

After that, John Wolf sought her opinion scrupulously. She did not disappoint him. She did not like most things, but when she liked something, it meant to John Wolf that nearly everybody else was at least sure to be able to read it.

It was almost by rote that John Wolf gave the cleaning woman The World According to Bensenhaver . Then he went home for the weekend and thought about it; he tried to call her and tell her not even to try to read it. He remembered the first chapter and he didn't want to offend the woman, who was somebody's grandmother, and (of course) somebody's mother, too—and, after all, she never knew she was paid to read all the stuff John Wolf gave her to read. That she had a rather whopping salary for a cleaning lady was known only to John Wolf. The woman thought all good cleaning ladies were well paid, and should be.

Her name was Jillsy Sloper, and John Wolf marveled to note that there was not one Sloper with even the first initial of J. in the New York phone directory. Apparently Jillsy didn't like phone calls any more than she liked books. John Wolf made a note to apologize to Jillsy the first thing Monday morning. He spent the rest of a miserable weekend trying to phrase to himself exactly how he would tell T. S. Garp that he believed it was in his own best interests, and certainly in the best interests of the publishing house, NOT to publish The World According to Bensenhaver .

It was a hard weekend for him, because John Wolf liked Garp and he believed in Garp, and he also knew that Garp had no friends who could advise him against embarrassing himself—which is one of the valuable things friends are for. There was only Alice Fletcher, who so loved Garp that she would love, indiscriminately, everything he uttered—or else she would be silent. And there was Roberta Muldoon, whose literary judgment, John Wolf suspected, was even more newfound and awkward (if existent at all) than her adopted sex. And Helen wouldn't read it. And Jenny Fields, John Wolf knew, was not biased toward her son in the way a mother is usually biased; she had demonstrated the dubious taste to dislike some of the better things her son had written. The problem with Jenny, John Wolf knew, was one of subject matter. A book about an important subject was, to Jenny Fields, an important book. And Jenny Fields thought that Garp's new book was all about the stupid male anxieties that women are asked to suffer and endure. How a book was written never mattered to Jenny.

That was one thread that interested John Wolf in publishing the book. If Jenny Fields liked The World According to Bensenhaver , it was at least a potentially controversial book. But John Wolf, like Garp, knew that Jenny's status as a political figure was due largely to a general, hazy misunderstanding of Jenny.

Wolf thought and thought about it, all weekend, and he completely forgot to apologize to Jillsy Sloper the first thing Monday morning. Suddenly there was Jillsy, red-eyed and twitching like a squirrel, the ratted manuscript pages of The World According to Bensenhaver held fast in her rough brown hands.

“Lawd,” Jillsy said. She rolled her eyes; she shook the manuscript in her hands.

“Oh, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I'm sorry.”

“Lawd!” Jillsy crowed. “I never had a worse weekend. I got no sleep, I got no food, I got no trips to the cemetery to see my family and my friends.”

The pattern of Jillsy Sloper's weekend seemed strange to John Wolf but he said nothing; he just listened to her, as he had listened to her for more than a dozen years.

“This man's crazy ,” Jillsy said. “Nobody sane ever wrote a book like this.”

“I shouldn't have given it to you, Jillsy,” John Wolf said. “I should have remembered that first chapter.”

“First chapter ain't so bad,” Jillsy said. “That first chapter ain't nothin' . It's that nineteenth chapter that got me,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd!” she crowed.

“You read nineteen chapters?” John Wolf asked.

“You didn't give me no more than nineteen chapters,” Jillsy said. “Jesus Lawd, is there another chapter? Do it keep goin' on ?”

“No, no,” John Wolf said. “That's the end of it. That's all there is.”

“I should hope so,” Jillsy said. “Ain't nothin' left to go on with . Got that crazy old cop where he belongs—at long last—and that crazy husband with his head blowed off. That's the only proper state for that husband's head, if you ask me: blowed off.”

“You read it?” John Wolf said.

“Lawd!” Jills screamed. “You'd think it was him who got raped, the way he went on and on. If you ask me,” Jillsy said, “that's just like men: rape you half to death one minute and the next minute go crazy fussin' over who you're givin' it to—of your own free will! It's not their damn business, either way, is it?” Jillsy asked.

“I'm not sure,” said John Wolf, who sat bewildered at his desk. “You didn't like the book.”

“Like it?” Jillsy cawed. “There's nothin' to like about it,” she said.

“But you read it,” John Wolf said. “Why'd you read it?”

“Lawd,” Jillsy said, as if she were sorry for John Wolf—that he was so hopelessly stupid. “I sometimes wonder if you know the first thing about all these books you're makin',” she said; she shook her head. “I sometimes wonder why you're the one who's makin' the books and I'm the one who's cleanin' the bathrooms. Except I'd rather clean the bathrooms than read most of them,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, Lawd.”

“If you hated it, why'd you read it, Jillsy?” John Wolf asked her.

“Same reason I read anythin' for,” Jillsy said. “To find out what happens .”

John Wolf stared at her.

“Most books you know nothin's gonna happen,” Jillsy said. “Lawd, you know that. Other books,” she said, “you know just what's gonna happen, so you don't have to read them, either. But this book,” Jillsy said, “this book's so sick you know somethin's gonna happen, but you can't imagine what . You got to be sick yourself to imagine what happens in this book,” Jillsy said.

“So you read it to find out?” John Wolf said.

“There surely ain't no other reason to read a book, is there?” Jillsy Sloper said. She put the manuscript heavily (for it was large) on John Wolf's desk and hitched up the long extension cord (for the vacuum cleaner) which Jillsy wore on Mondays like a belt around her broad middle. “When it's a book,” she said, pointing to the manuscript, “I'd be happy if I could have a copy of my own. If it's okay,” she added.

“You want a copy?” John Wolf asked.

“If it's no trouble,” Jillsy said.

“Now that you know what happens,” John Wolf said, “what would you want to read it again for?”

“Well,” Jillsy said. She looked confused; John Wolf had never seen Jillsy Sloper look confused before—only sleepy. “Well, I might lend it,” she said. “There might be someone I know who needs to be reminded what men in this world is like,” she said.

“Would you ever read it again yourself?” John Wolf asked.

“Well,” Jillsy said. “Not all of it, I imagine. At least not all at once, or not right away.” Again, she looked confused. “Well,” she said, sheepishly, “I guess I mean there's parts of it I wouldn't mind readin' again.”

“Why?” John Wolf asked.

“Lawd,” Jillsy said, tiredly, as if she were finally impatient with him. “It feels so true ,” she crooned, making the word true cry like a loon over a lake at night.

“It feels so true,” John Wolf repeated.

“Lawd, don't you know it is?” Jillsy asked him. “If you don't know when a book's true ,” Jillsy sang to him, “we really ought to trade jobs.” She laughed now, the stout three-pronged plug for the vacuum-cleaner cord clutched like a gun in her fist. “I do wonder, Mr. Wolf,” she said, sweetly, “if you'd know when a bathroom was clean .” She went over and peered in his wastebasket. “Or when a wastebasket was empty,” she said. “A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book's true when you can say, “Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.” Then you know it's true,” Jillsy said.

Leaning over the wastebasket, she seized the one scrap of paper lying alone on the bottom of the basket; she stuffed it into her cleaning apron. It was the crumpled-up first page of the letter John Wolf had tried to compose to Garp.

Months later, when The World According to Bensenhaver was going to the printers, Garp complained to John Wolf that there was no one to dedicate the book to. He would not have it in memory of Walt, because Garp hated that kind of thing: “that cheap capitalizing,” as he called it, “on one's autobiographical accidents—to try to hook the reader into thinking you're a more serious writer than you are.” And he would not dedicate a book to his mother, because he hated, as he called it, “the free ride everyone else gets on the name of Jenny Fields.” Helen, of course, was out of the question, and Garp felt, with some shame, that he couldn't dedicate a book to Duncan if it was a book he would not allow Duncan to read. The child wasn't old enough. He felt some distaste, as a father, for writing something he would forbid his own children to read.

The Fletchers, he knew, would be uncomfortable with a book dedicated to them, as a couple; and to dedicate a book to Alice, alone, might be insulting to Harry.

“Not to me ,” John Wolf said. “Not this one.”

“I wasn't thinking of you,” Garp lied.

“How about Roberta Muldoon?” John Wolf said.

“The book has absolutely nothing to do with Roberta,” Garp said. Though Garp knew that Roberta, at least, wouldn't object to the dedication. How funny to write a book really no one would like to have dedicated to them!

“Maybe I'll dedicate it to the Ellen Jamesians,” Garp said, bitterly.

“Don't make trouble for yourself,” John Wolf said. “That's just plain stupid.”

Garp sulked.

For Mrs. Ralph?

he thought. But he still didn't know her real name. There was Helen's father—his good old wrestling coach, Ernie Holm—but Ernie wouldn't understand the gesture; it would hardly be a book Ernie would like. Garp hoped, in fact, that Ernie wouldn't read it. How funny to write a book you hope someone doesn't read!

To Fat Stew

he thought.

For Michael Milton

In Memory of Bonkers

He bogged down. He could think of no one.

“I know someone,” John Wolf said. “I could ask her if she'd mind.”

“Very funny,” Garp said.

But John Wolf was thinking of Jillsy Sloper, the person, he knew, who was responsible for getting this book of Garp's published at all.

“She's a very special woman who loved the book,” John Wolf told Garp. “She said it was so “true.”

Garp was interested in the idea.

“I gave her the manuscript for one weekend,” John Wolf said, “and she couldn't put it down.”

“Why'd you give her the manuscript?” Garp asked.

“She just seemed right for it,” John Wolf said. A good editor will not share all his secrets with anyone.

“Well, okay,” Garp said. “It seems naked , having no one. Tell her I'd appreciate it. She's a close friend of yours?” Garp asked. Garp's editor winked at him and Garp nodded.

“What's it all mean, anyway?” Jillsy Sloper asked John Wolf, suspiciously. “What's it mean, he wants to “dedicate” that terrible book to me?”

“It means, that your response was valuable to him,” John Wolf said. “He thinks the book was written almost with you in mind.”

“Lawd,” Jillsy said. “With me in mind? What's that mean?”

“I told him how you responded to his book,” John Wolf said, “and he thinks you're the perfect audience, I guess.”

“The perfect audience?” Jillsy said. “Lawd, he is crazy, isn't he?”

“He's got no one else to dedicate it to,” John Wolf admitted.

“Kind of like needin' a witness for a weddin'?” Jillsy Sloper asked.

“Kind of,” John Wolf guessed.

“It don't mean I approve of the book?” Jillsy asked.

“Lord, no,” John Wolf said.

“Lawd, no, huh?” Jillsy said.

“No one's going to blame you for anything in the book, if that's what you mean,” John Wolf said.

“Well,” said Jillsy.

John Wolf showed Jillsy where the dedication would be; he showed her other dedications in other books. They all looked nice to Jillsy Sloper and she nodded her head, gradually pleased by the idea.

“One thing,” she said. “I won't have to meet him, or anythin', will I?”

“Lord, no,” said John Wolf, so Jillsy agreed.

There remained only one more stroke of genius to launch The World According to Bensenhaver into that uncanny half-light where occasional “serious” books glow, for a time, as also “popular” books. John Wolf was a smart and cynical man. He knew about all the shitty autobiographical associations that make those rabid readers of gossip warm to an occasional fiction.

Years later, Helen would remark that the success of The World According to Bensenhaver lay entirely in the book jacket. John Wolf was in the habit of letting Garp write his own jacket flaps, but Garp's description of his own book was so ponderous and glum that John Wolf took matters into his own hands; he went straight to the dubious heart of the matter.

“The World According to Bensenhaver ,” the book jacket flap said, “is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.

“T. S. Garp,” the jacket flap went on, “is the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields.” John Wolf shivered slightly when he saw this in print, because although he had written it, and although he knew very well why he had written it, he also knew that it was information Garp never wanted mentioned in connection with his own work. “T. S. Garp is also a father,” the jacket flap said. And John Wolf shook his head in shame to see the garbage he had written there. “He is a father who has recently suffered the tragic loss of a five-year-old son. Out of the anguish that a father endures in the aftermath of an accident, this tortured novel emerges...” And so forth.

It was, in Garp's opinion, the cheapest reason to read of all. Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was “true"—how much of it was based on “personal experience.” True —not in the good way that Jillsy Sloper used it, but true as in “real life.” Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would always say that the art of fiction was the act of imagining truly—was, like any art, a process of selection. Memories and personal histories—"all the recollected traumas of our unmemorable lives"—were suspicious models for fiction, Garp would say. “Fiction has to be better made than life,” Garp wrote. And he consistently detested what he called “the phony mileage of personal hardship"—writers whose books were “important” because something important had happened in their lives. He wrote that the worst reason for anything being part of a novel was that it really happened. “Everything has really happened, sometime!” he fumed. “The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it's the perfect thing to have happen at that time.

“Tell me anything that's ever happened to you,” Garp told an interviewer once, “and I can improve upon the story; I can make the details better than they were.” The interviewer, a divorced woman with four young children, one of whom was dying of cancer, had her face firmly fixed in disbelief. Garp saw her determined unhappiness, and its terrible importance to her, and he said to her, gently, “If it's sad—even if it's very sad—I can make up a story that's sadder.” But he saw in her face that she would never believe him; she wasn't even writing it down. It wouldn't even be a part of her interview.

And John Wolf knew this: one of the first things most readers want to know is everything they can about a writer's life . John Wolf wrote Garp: “For most people, with limited imaginations, the idea of improving on reality is pure bunk.” On the book jacket flap of The World According to Bensenhaver , John Wolf created a bogus sense of Garp's importance ("the only child of the noted feminist Jenny Fields") and a sentimental sympathy for Garp's personal experience ("the tragic loss of a five-year-old son"). That both pieces of information were essentially irrelevant to the art of Garp's novel did not deeply concern John Wolf. Garp had made John Wolf sore with all his talk about preferring riches to seriousness.

“It's not your best book,” John Wolf wrote Garp, when he sent the galleys for Garp to proofread. “One day you'll know that, too. But it is going to be your biggest book; just wait and see. You can't imagine, yet, how you're going to hate many of the reasons for your success, so I advise you to leave the country for a few months. I advise you to read only the reviews I send to you. And when it blows over—because everything blows over—you can come back home and pick up your considerable surprise at the bank. And you can hope that Bensenhaver's popularity is big enough to make people go back and read the first two novels—for which you deserve to be better known.

“Tell Helen I am sorry , Garp, but I think you must know: I have always had your own interests at heart. If you want to sell this book, we'll sell it. “Every business is a shitty business,” Garp. I am quoting you .”

Garp was very puzzled by the letter; John Wolf, of course, had not shown him the jacket flaps.

“Why are you sorry ?” Garp wrote back. “Don't weep; just sell it.”

“Every business is a shitty business,” Wolf repeated.

“I know, I know ,” Garp said.

“Take my advice,” Wolf said.

“I like reading the reviews,” Garp protested.

“Not these, you won't,” John Wolf said. “Take a trip. Please.” Then John Wolf sent the jacket flap copy to Jenny Fields. He asked her for her confidence, and her help in getting Garp to leave the country.

“Leave the country,” Jenny said to her son. “It's the best thing you can do for yourself and your family.” Helen was actually keen on the idea; she'd never been abroad. Duncan had read his father's first story, “The Pension Grillparzer,” and he wanted to go to Vienna.

“Vienna's not really like that,” Garp told Duncan, but it touched Garp very much that the boy liked the old story. Garp liked it, too. In fact, he was beginning to wish that he liked everything else he had written half as much.

“With a new baby, why go to Europe?” Garp complained. “I don't know. It's complicated. The passports—and the baby will need lots of shots, or something.”

“You need some shots yourself,” said Jenny Fields. “The baby will be perfectly safe.”

“Don't you want to see Vienna again?” Helen asked Garp.

“Ah, just imagine, the scene of your old crimes!” John Wolf said heartily.

“Old, crimes?” Garp mumbled. “I don't know.”

“Please, Dad,” Duncan said. Garp was a sucker to what Duncan wanted; he agreed.

Helen cheered up and even took a glance at the galleys of The World According to Bensenhaver , though it was a quick, nervous glance, and she had no intention of doing any real reading therein. The first thing she saw was the dedication.

For Jillsy Sloper

“Who in God's name is Jillsy Sloper?” she asked Garp.

“I don't know, really,” Garp said; Helen frowned at him. “No, really ,” he said. “It's some girl friend of John's; he said she loved the book—couldn't put it down. Wolf took it as a kind of omen, I guess; it was his suggestion, anyway,” Garp said. “And I thought it was nice.”

“Hm,” said Helen; she put the galleys aside.

They both imagined John Wolf's girl friend in silence. John Wolf had been divorced before they met him; though the Garps had gotten to meet some of Wolf's grown-up children, they had never met his first and only wife. There had been a conservative number of girl friends, all smart and sleekly attractive women—all younger than John Wolf. Some working girls, in the publishing business, but mostly young women with divorces of their own, and money—always money, or always the look of money. Garp remembered most of them by how nicely they smelled, and how their lipstick tasted—and the high-gloss, touchable quality of their clothes.

Neither Garp nor Helen could ever have imagined Jillsy Sloper, the offspring of a white person and a quadroon—which made Jillsy an octoroon, or one eighth Negro. Her skin was a sallow brown, like a lightly stained pine board. Her hair was straight and short and waxy-black, beginning to gray at her bangs, which were coarsely chopped above her shining, wrinkled forehead. She was short, with long arms, and her ring finger was missing from her left hand. By the deep scar on her right cheek, one could imagine that the ring finger had been cut off in the same battle, by the same weapon—perhaps during a bad marriage, for she had certainly had a bad marriage. Which she never spoke of.

She was about forty-five and looked sixty. She had the trunk of a Labrador retriever about to have puppies, and she shuffled whenever and wherever she walked because her feet killed her. In a few years she would so long ignore the lump she could feel in her own breast, which no one else ever felt, that she would die needlessly of cancer.

She had an unlisted phone number (as John discovered) only because her former husband threatened to kill her every few months, and she tired of hearing from him; the reason she had a phone at all was that her children needed a place to call collect so that they could ask her to send them money.

But Helen and Garp, when they imagined Jillsy Sloper, did not for a moment see anyone approximating this sad, hard-working octoroon. “John Wolf seems to be doing everything for this book except writing it,” Helen said.

“I wish he had written it,” Garp suddenly said. Garp had reread the book, and he felt full of doubt. In “The Pension Grillparzer,” Garp thought, there was a certainty concerning how the world behaved. In The World According to Bensenhaver , Garp had felt less certain—an indication he was getting older, of course; but artists, he knew, should also get better .

With baby Jenny and one-eyed Duncan, Garp and Helen left for Europe out of a cool New England August; most transatlantic travelers were headed the other way.

“Why not wait until after Thanksgiving?” Ernie Holm asked them. But The World According to Bensenhaver would be published in October. John Wolf had received various responses to the uncorrected proofs he circulated through the summer; they had all been enthusiastic responses—enthusiastically praising the book, or enthusiastically condemning it.

He'd had difficulty keeping Garp from seeing the advance copies of the actual book—the book jacket, for example. But Garp's own enthusiasm for the book was so sporadic, and generally low, that John Wolf had been able to stall him.

Garp was now excited about the trip, and he was talking about other books he was going to write. ("A good sign,” John Wolf told Helen.)

Jenny and Roberta drove the Garps to Boston, where they took a plane to New York. “Don't worry about the airplane,” Jenny said. “It won't fall.”

“Jesus, Mom,” Garp said. “What do you know about airplanes? They fall all the time.”

“Keep your arms in constant motion, like wings,” Roberta told Duncan.

“Don't scare him, Roberta,” Helen said.

“I'm not scared,” Duncan said.

“If your father keeps talking , you can't fall,” Jenny said.

“If he keeps talking,” Helen said, “we'll never land .” They could see that Garp was all wound up.

“I'll fart all the way, if you don't leave me alone,” Garp said, “and we'll go in a great explosion.”

“You better write often,” Jenny said.

Remembering dear old Tinch, and his last trip to Europe, Garp told his mother, “This time I'm just going to ab-ab-absorb a lot, Mom. I'm not going to write a w-w-word.” They both laughed at this, and Jenny Fields even cried a little, although only Garp noticed; he kissed his mother good-bye. Roberta, whose sex reassignment had made her a dynamite kisser, kissed everyone several times.

“Jesus, Roberta,” Garp said.

“I'll look after the old girl while you're gone,” Roberta said, her giant arm dwarfing Jenny, who looked so small and suddenly very gray beside her.

“I don't need any looking after,” Jenny Fields said.

“It's Mom who looks after everyone else,” Garp said.

Helen hugged Jenny, because she knew how true that was. From the airplane, Garp and Duncan could see Jenny and Roberta waving from the observation deck. There had been some seat changes because Duncan had wanted a window seat on the left-hand side of the plane. “The right-hand side is just as nice,” a stewardess said.

“Not if you don't have a right eye,” Duncan told her, pleasantly, and Garp admired how the boy was feeling so bold about himself.

Helen and the baby sat across the aisle from them. “Can you see Grandma?” Helen asked Duncan.

“Yes,” Duncan said.

Although the observation deck was suddenly overrun with people wanting to see the takeoff, Jenny Fields—as always—stood out in her white uniform, even though she was short. “Why does Nana look so tall?” Duncan asked Garp, and it was true: Jenny Fields towered head and shoulders above the crowd. Garp, realized that Roberta was lifting his mother up as if his mother were a child. “Oh, Roberta's got her!” Duncan cried. Garp looked at his mother hefted up in the air to wave goodbye to him, safe in the arms of the old tight end; Jenny's shy, confident smile touched him, and he waved out the window to her, although Garp knew that Jenny couldn't see inside the plane. For the first time, his mother looked old to him; he looked away—across the aisle, at Helen with their new child.

“Here we go,” Helen said. Helen and Garp held hands across the aisle when the plane lifted off, because, Garp knew, Helen was terrified of flying.

In New York, John Wolf put them up in his apartment; he gave Garp and Helen and baby Jenny his own bedroom and graciously offered to share the guest room with Duncan.

The grownups had a late dinner and too much cognac. Garp told John Wolf about the next three novels he was going to write.

“The first one is called My Father's Illusions ,” Garp said. “It's about an idealistic father who has many children. He keeps establishing little utopias for his kids to grow up in, and after his kids grow up he becomes a founder of small colleges. But all of them go broke—the colleges and the kids. The father keeps trying to give a speech at the U.N., but they keep throwing him out; it's the same speech—he keeps revising and revising it. Then he tries to run a free hospital; it's a disaster. Then he tries to institute a nationwide free-transportation system. Meanwhile, his wife divorces him and his children keep growing older, and turning out unhappy, or fucked-up—or just perfectly normal, you know. The only thing the children have in common are these dreadful memories of the utopias their father tried to have them grow up in. Finally, the father becomes the governor of Vermont.”

“Vermont?” John Wolf asked.

“Yes, Vermont,” Garp said. “He becomes governor of Vermont, but he really thinks of himself as a king. More utopias, you see.”

“The King of Vermont! ” John Wolf said. “That's a better title.”

“No, no,” Garp said. “That's another book. No relation. The second book, after My Father's Illusions , will be called The Death of Vermont .”

“Same cast of characters?” Helen asked.

“No, no,” Garp said. “Another story. It's about the death of Vermont.”

“Well, I like something that is what it says it is,” John Wolf said. “One year spring doesn't come,” Garp said.

“Spring never does come to Vermont, anyway,” Helen said.

“No, no,” Garp said, frowning. “This year summer doesn't come, either. Winter never stops. It warms up one day and all the buds appear. Maybe in May. One day in May there are buds on the trees, the next day there are leaves, and the next day the leaves have all turned. It's fall already. The leaves fall off the trees.”

“A short foliage season,” Helen said.

“Very funny,” Garp said. “But that's what happens. It's winter again; it will be winter forever.”

“The people die?” John Wolf asked.

“I'm not sure about the people,” Garp said. “Some leave Vermont, of course.”

“Not a bad idea,” Helen said.

“Some stay, some die. Maybe they all die,” Garp said.

“What's it mean?” John Wolf asked.

“I'll know when I get there,” Garp said. Helen laughed.

“And there's a third novel, after that?” John Wolf asked.

“It's called The Plot against the Giant ,” Garp said.

“That's a poem by Wallace Stevens,” Helen said.

“Yes, of course,” Garp said, and he recited the poem for them.

 

The Plot against the Giant

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,

Whetting his hacker,

I shall run before him,

Difusing the civilest odors

Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.

It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,

Arching cloths besprinkled with colors

As small as fish-eggs.

The threads

Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la... le pauvre!

I shall run before him,

With a curious puffing.

He will bend his ear then.

I shall whisper

Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

It will undo him.

 

“What a nice poem,” Helen said.

“The novel is in three parts,” Garp said.

“Girl One, Girl Two, Girl Three?” John Wolf asked.

“And is the giant undone?” Helen asked.

“Is he ever,” Garp said.

“Is he a real giant, in the novel?” John Wolf asked.

“I don't know, yet,” Garp said.

“Is he you ?” Helen asked.

“I hope not,” Garp said.

“I hope not, too,” said Helen.

“Write that one first,” John Wolf said.

“No, write it last,” Helen said.

“The Death of Vermont seems the logical one to write last,” John Wolf said.

“No, I see The Plot against the Giant as last,” Garp said.

“Wait and write it after I'm dead,” Helen said.

Everyone laughed.

“But there are only three,” John Wolf said. “What then? What happens after the three?”

“I die,” Garp said. “That will make six novels altogether, and that's enough.”

Everyone laughed again.

“And do you also know how you die?” John Wolf asked him.

“Let's stop this,” Helen said. And to Garp she said, “If you say, “In an airplane,” I will not forgive you.” Behind the lightly drunk humor in her voice, John detected a seriousness; it made him stretch his legs. “You two better go to bed,” he said. “And get rested for your trip.”

“Don't you want to know how I die?” Garp asked them.

They didn't say anything.

“I kill myself,” Garp said, pleasantly. “In order to become fully established, that seems almost necessary. I mean it, really ,” Garp said. “In the present fashion, you'll agree this is one way of recognizing a writer's seriousness? Since the art of the writing doesn't always make the writer's seriousness apparent, it's sometimes necessary to reveal the depth of one's personal anguish by other means. Killing yourself seems to mean that you were serious after all. “It's true ,” Garp said, but his sarcasm was unpleasant and Helen sighed; John Wolf stretched again. “And thereafter,” Garp said, “much seriousness is suddenly revealed in the work—where it had escaped notice before.”

Garp had often remarked, irritably, that this would be his final duty as a father and provider—and he was fond of citing examples of the middling writers who were now adored and read with great avidity because of their suicides. Of those writer-suicides whom he, too—in some cases—truly admired, Garp, only hoped that, at the moment the act was accomplished, at least some of them had known about this lucky aspect of their unhappy decision. He knew perfectly well that people who really killed themselves did not romanticize suicide in the least; they did not respect the “seriousness” that the act supposedly lent to their work—a nauseating habit in the book world, Garp thought. Among readers and reviewers.

Garp also knew he was no suicide; he knew it somewhat less surely after the accident to Walt, but he knew it. He was as distant from suicide as he was from rape; he could not imagine actually doing it. But he liked to imagine the suicidal writer grinning at his successful mischief, while once more he read and revised the last message he would leave—a note aching with despair, and appropriately humorless. Garp liked to imagine that moment, bitterly: when the suicide note was perfect, the writer took the gun, the poison, the plunge—laughing hideously, and full of the knowledge that he had at last got the better of the readers and reviewers. One note he imagined was: “I have been misunderstood by you idiots for the last time.”

“What a sick idea,” Helen said.

“The perfect writer's death,” said Garp.

“It's late,” John Wolf said. “Remember your flight.”

In the guest room, where John Wolf wanted to fall asleep, he found Duncan Garp still wide-awake.

“Excited by the trip, Duncan?” Wolf asked the boy.

“My father's been to Europe before,” Duncan said. “But I haven't.”

“I know,” John Wolf said.

“Is my father going to make a lot of money?” Duncan asked.

“I hope so,” John Wolf said.

“We don't really need it, because my grandmother has so much,” Duncan said.

“But it's nice to have your own,” John Wolf said.

“Why?” Duncan asked.

“Well, it's nice to be famous,” John Wolf said.

“Do you think my father's going to be famous?” Duncan asked.

“I think so,” John Wolf said.

“My grandmother's already famous,” Duncan said.

“I know,” John Wolf said.

“I don't think she likes it,” Duncan said.

“Why?” John Wolf asked.

“Too many strangers around,” Duncan said. “That's what Nana says; I've heard her. “Too many strangers in the house.”

“Well, your dad probably won't be famous in quite the same way that your grandmother is,” John Wolf said.

“How many different ways are there to be famous?” Duncan asked. John Wolf expelled a long, restrained breath. Then he began to tell Duncan Garp about the differences between very popular books and just successful ones. He talked about political books, and controversial books, and works of fiction. He told Duncan the finer points of book publishing; in fact, he gave Duncan the benefit of more of his personal opinions about publishing than he had ever given Garp. Garp wasn't really interested. Duncan wasn't, either. Duncan would not remember one of the finer points; he fell asleep rather quickly after John Wolf started explaining.

It was simply John Wolf's tone of voice that Duncan loved. The long story, the slow explanation. It was the voice of Roberta Muldoon—of Jenny Fields, of his mother, of Garp—telling him stories at night in the house at Dog's Head Harbor, putting him to sleep so soundly that he wouldn't have any nightmares. Duncan had gotten used to that tone of voice, and he had been unable to fall asleep in New York without it.

In the morning, Garp and Helen were amused by John Wolf's closet. There was a pretty nightgown belonging, no doubt, to one of John Wolf's recent, sleek women—someone who had not been asked to spend last night. There were about thirty dark suits, all with pinstripes, all quite elegant, and all failing to fit Garp by about three extra inches in the pantlegs. Garp wore one he liked to breakfast, with the pants rolled up.

“Jesus, you have a lot of suits,” he said to John Wolf.

“Take one,” John Wolf said. “Take two or three. Take the one you're wearing.”

“It's too long,” Garp said, holding up a foot.

“Have it shortened,” John Wolf said.

“You don't have any suits,” Helen told Garp.

Garp decided he liked the suit so well that he wanted to wear it to the airport, with the pantlegs pinned up.

“Jesus,” Helen said.

“I'm slightly embarrassed to be seen with you,” John Wolf confessed, but he drove them to the airport. He was making absolutely certain that the Garps got out of the country.

“Oh, your book,” he said to Garp, in the car. “I keep forgetting to get you a copy.”

“I noticed,” Garp said.

“I'll send you one,” John Wolf said.

“I never even saw what went on the jacket,” Garp said. “A photograph of you, on the back,” John Wolf said. “It's an old one—it's one you've seen, I'm sure.”

“What's on the front?” Garp said.

“Well, the title,” John Wolf said.

“Oh, really?” Garp said. “I thought maybe you decided to leave the title off.”

“Just the title,” John Wolf said, “over a kind of photograph.”

“"A kind of photograph",” Garp said. “What kind of photograph?”

“Maybe I have one in my briefcase,” Wolf said. “I'll look, at the airport.”

Wolf was being careful; he had already let it slip that he thought The World According to Bensenhaver was an “X-rated soap opera.” Garp hadn't seemed bothered. “Mind you, it's awfully well written ,” Wolf had said, “but it's still, somehow, soap opera; it's too much , somehow.” Garp, had sighed. “Life ,” Garp had said, “is too much, somehow. Life is an X-rated soap opera, John,” Garp had said.

In John Wolf's briefcase was a snip-out of the front cover of The World According to Bensenhaver , missing the back-jacket photograph of Garp and, of course, the jacket flaps. John Wolf planned to hand this snip-out to Garp just moments before they said good-bye. This snipout of the front cover was sealed in an envelope; the envelope was sealed in another envelope. John Wolf felt pretty certain that Garp would not be able to undo the thing and look at it until he was safely seated in the plane.

When Garp got to Europe, John Wolf would send him the rest of the book jacket for The World According to Bensenhaver . Wolf felt certain that it would not make Garp quite angry enough to fly home.

“This is bigger than the other plane,” Duncan said, at the window on the left-hand side, a little in front of the wing.

“It has to be bigger because it's going all the way across the ocean,” Garp said.

“Please don't mention that again,” Helen said. Across the aisle from Duncan and Garp, a stewardess was fashioning an intriguing sling for baby Jenny, who hung on the back of the seat in front of Helen like someone else's baby or a papoose.

“John Wolf said you were going to be rich and famous,” Duncan told his father.

“Hm,” Garp said. He was involved in the tedious process of opening the envelopes John Wolf had given him; he was having a hell of a time with them.

“Are you?” Duncan asked.

“I hope so,” Garp said. At last he looked at the cover of The World According to Bensenhaver . He could not tell if it was the sudden, apparent weightlessness of the great airplane, leaving the ground, that gave him such a chill—or if it was the photograph.

Blown up in black and white, with grains as fat as flakes of snow, was a picture of an ambulance unloading at a hospital. The glum futility on the gray faces of the attendants expressed the fact that there was no need to hurry. The body under the sheet was small and completely covered. The photograph had the quick, fearful quality of the entrance marked EMERGENCY at any hospital. It was any hospital, and any ambulance—and any small body arriving too late.

A kind of wet finish glazed the photograph, which—with its grainy aspect, and the fact that this accident appeared to have happened on a rainy night—made it a picture out of any cheap newspaper; it was any catastrophe. It was any small death, anywhere, anytime. But of course it only reminded Garp of the gray despairing on all their faces when they were struck by the sight of Walt lying broken.

The cover of The World According to Bensenhaver , an X-rated soap opera, shouted a grim warning: this was a disaster story. The cover called for your cheap but immediate attention; it got it. The cover promised you a sudden, sickening sadness; Garp knew that the book would deliver it. If he could have read the jacket-flap description of his novel and his life, at that time, he might very well have taken the next plane back to New York as soon as he landed in Europe. But he would have time to resign himself to this kind of advertising—just as John Wolf had planned. By the time Garp read the jacket flaps, he'd already have absorbed that horrible front-cover photograph.

Helen would never absorb it, and she never forgave John Wolf for it, either. Nor would she ever forgive him for the back-cover photograph of Garp. It was a picture, taken several years before the accident, of Garp with Duncan and Walt. Helen had taken the picture, and Garp had sent it to John Wolf instead of a Christmas card. Garp was on a dock in Maine. He was wearing nothing but a bathing suit and he looked in terrific physical shape. He was. Duncan stood behind him, his lean arm rested on his father's shoulder. Duncan also wore a bathing suit, he was very tan, with a white sailor's cap cocked jauntily on his head. He grinned into the camera, staring it down with his beautiful eyes.

Walt sat on Garp's lap. Walt was so fresh out of the water that he was as slick as a seal puppy, Garp was trying to wrap him warmly in a towel, and Walt was squirming. Wildly happy, his clownish, round face beamed at the camera—at his mother taking the picture.

When Garp looked at that picture, he could feel Walt's cold, wet body growing warm and dry against him.

Beneath the photograph, the caption cashed in on one of the least noble instincts of human beings.

T. S. GARP WITH HIS CHILDREN (before THE ACCIDENT)

The implication was that if you read the book, you would find out what accident. Of course, you wouldn't. The World According to Bensenhaver would tell you nothing about that accident, really —although it is fair to say that accidents play an enormous part in the novel. The only thing you would really learn about the accident referred to under the photograph was contained in the garbage that John Wolf wrote on the jacket flap. But, even so, that photograph—of a father with his doomed children—had a way of hooking you.

People bought the book by the sad son of Jenny Fields in droves.

On the airplane to Europe, Garp had only the picture of the ambulance to use his imagination on. Even at that altitude, he could imagine people buying the book in droves. He sat feeling disgusted at the people he imagined buying the book; he also felt disgusted that he had written the kind of book that could attract people in droves.

“Droves” of anything, but especially of people, were not comforting to T. S. Garp. He sat in the airplane wishing for more isolation and privacy—for himself and for his family—than he would ever know again.

“What will we do with all the money?” Duncan asked him suddenly.

“All the money?” Garp said.

“When you're rich and famous,” Duncan said. “What will we do?”

“We'll have lots of fun,” Garp told him, but his handsome son's one eye pierced him with doubt.

“We'll be flying at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet,” the pilot said.

“Wow,” said Duncan. And Garp reached for his wife's hand across the aisle. A fat man was making his unsure way down the aisle to the lavatory; Garp and Helen could only look at each other and convey a kind of hand-in-hand contact with their eyes.

In his mind's eye, Garp saw his mother, Jenny Fields, all in white, held up in the sky by the towering Roberta Muldoon. He did not know what it meant, but his vision of Jenny Fields raised above a crowd chilled him in the same way that the ambulance on the cover of The World According to Bensenhaver had chilled him. He began talking to Duncan, about anything at all.

Duncan began talking about Walt and the undertow—a famous family story. For as far back as Duncan could remember, the Garps had gone every summer to Dog's Head Harbor, New Hampshire, where the miles of beach in front of Jenny Fields' estate were ravaged by a fearful undertow. When Walt was old enough to venture near the water, Duncan said to him—as Helen and Garp had, for years, said to Duncan—"Watch out for the undertow.” Walt retreated, respectfully. And for three summers Walt was warned about the undertow. Duncan recalled all the phrases.

“The undertow is bad today.”

“The undertow is strong today.”

“The undertow is wicked today.” Wicked was a big word in New Hampshire—not just for the undertow.

And for years Walt watched out for it. From the first, when he asked what it could do to you, he had only been told that it could pull you out to sea. It could suck you under and drown you and drag you away.

It was Walt's fourth summer at Dog's Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water's edge to have a word with him.

“What are you doing, Walt?” Helen asked.

“What are you looking for, dummy?” Duncan asked him.

“I'm trying to see the Under Toad,” Walt said.

“The what?” said Garp.

“The Under Toad,” Walt said. “I'm trying to see it. How big  is it?”

And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad , lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.

Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ("Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!” Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy—when depression had moved in overnight—they said to each other, “The Under Toad is strong today.”

“Remember,” Duncan asked on the plane, “how Walt asked if it was green or brown?”

Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

In Vienna, Garp felt, the Under Toad was strong. Helen did not seem to feel it, and Duncan, like an eleven-year-old, passed from one feeling to the next. The return to the city, for Garp, was like returning to the Steering School. The streets, the buildings, even the paintings in the museums, were like his old teachers, grown older; he barely recognized them, and they did not know him at all. Helen and Duncan saw everything. Garp was content to walk with baby Jenny; he strolled her through the long, warm fall in a carriage as baroque as the city itself—he smiled and nodded to all the tongue-clucking elderly who peered into the carriage and approved of his new baby. The Viennese appeared well fed and comfortable with luxuries that looked new to Garp; the city was years away from the Russian occupation, the memory of the war, the reminders of ruins. If Vienna had been dying, or already dead, in his time there with his mother, Garp felt that something new but common had grown in the old city's place.

At the same time, Garp liked showing Duncan and Helen around. He enjoyed his personal history tour, mixed with the guidebook history of Vienna. “And this is where Hitler stood when he first addressed the city. And this is where I used to shop on Saturday mornings.

“This is the fourth district, a Russian zone of occupation; the famous Karlskirche is here, and the Lower and Upper Belvedere. And between the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, on your left, and the Argentinierstrasse is the little street where Mom and I...”

They rented some rooms in a nice pension in the fourth district. They discussed enrolling Duncan in an English-speaking school, but it was a long drive, or a long Strassenbahn ride every morning, and they didn't really plan on staying even half the year. Vaguely, they imagined Christmas at Dog's Head Harbor with Jenny and Roberta and Ernie Holm.

John Wolf finally sent the book, complete book jacket and all, and Garp's sense of the Under Toad grew unbearably for a few days, then kicked deeper, beneath the surface. It appeared to be gone. Garp managed a restrained letter to his editor; he expressed his sense of personal hurt, his understanding that this had been done with the best intentions, businesswise. But...and so forth. How angry could he really be—at Wolf? Garp had provided the package; Wolf had only promoted it.

Garp heard from his mother that the first reviews were “not nice,” but Jenny—on John Wolf's advice—did not enclose any reviews with her letter. John Wolf clipped the first rave from among the important New York reviews: “The women's movement has at last exhibited a significant influence on a significant male writer,” wrote the reviewer, who was an associate professor of women's studies somewhere. She went on to say that The World According to Bensenhaver was “the first in-depth study, by a man, of the peculiarly male neurotic pressure many women are made to suffer.” And so forth.

“Christ,” Garp said, “it sounds as if I wrote a thesis . It's a fucking novel , it's a story , and I made it up!”

“Well, it sounds as if she liked it,” Helen said.

“It's not it she liked,” Garp said. “She liked something else.”

But the review helped to establish the rumor that The World According to Bensenhaver was “a feminist novel.”

“Like me,” Jenny Fields wrote her son, “it appears you are going to be the beneficiary of one of the many popular misunderstandings of our time.”

Other reviews called the book “paranoid, crazed, and crammed with gratuitous violence and sex.” Garp was not shown most of those reviews, but they probably didn't hurt the sales, either.

One reviewer admitted that Garp was a serious writer whose “tendencies toward baroque exaggeration have run amuck.” John Wolf couldn't resist sending Garp that review—probably because John Wolf agreed with it.

Jenny wrote that she was becoming “involved with” New Hampshire politics.

“The New Hampshire gubernatorial race is taking all our time,” Roberta Muldoon wrote.

“How could anyone give all her time to a New Hampshire governor?” Garp wrote back.

There was, apparently, some feminist issue at stake, and some generally illiberal nonsense and crimes the incumbent governor was actually proud of. The administration boasted that a raped fourteen-year-old had been denied an abortion, thus stemming the tide of nationwide degeneracy. The governor truly was a crowing, reactionary moron. Among other things, he appeared to believe that poor people should not be helped by the state or federal government, largely because the condition of the poor seemed to the governor of New Hampshire to be a deserved punishment—the just and moral judgment of a Superior Being. The incumbent governor was obnoxious and clever; for example, the sense of fear that he successfully evoked: that New Hampshire was in danger of being victimized by teams of New York divorcees.

The divorced women from New York allegedly were moving into New Hampshire in droves. Their intentions were to turn New Hampshire women into lesbians, or at the very least to encourage them to be unfaithful to their New Hampshire husbands; their intentions also included the seduction of New Hampshire husbands, and New Hampshire high school boys. The New York divorcees apparently represented widespread promiscuity, socialism, alimony, and something ominously referred to, in the New Hampshire press, as “Group Female Living.”

One of the centers for this alleged Group Female Living was Dog's Head Harbor, of course, “the den of the radical feminist Jenny Fields.”

There had also been a widespread increase, the governor said, of venereal disease—"a known problem among these Liberationists.” He was a terrific liar. The candidate running for governor against this well-liked fool was, apparently, a woman. Jenny and Roberta and (Jenny wrote) “teams of New York divorcees” were running her campaign.

Somehow, in the sole New Hampshire newspaper of statewide distribution, Garp's “degenerate” novel was referred to as “the new feminist Bible.”

“A violent hymn to the moral depravity and sexual danger of our time,” wrote one West Coast reviewer.

“A pained protest against the violence and sexual combat of our groping age,” said another newspaper, somewhere else.

Whether it was liked or disliked, the novel was largely looked upon as news . One way for novels to be successful is for the fiction to resemble somebody's version of the news. That is what happened to The World According to Bensenhaver ; like the stupid governor of New Hampshire, Garp's book became news.

“New Hampshire is a backwoods state with base politics,” Garp wrote his mother. “For God's sake, don't get involved.”

“That's what you always say,” Jenny wrote. “When you come home, you're going to be famous. Then let me see you try not to get involved.”

“Just watch me,” Garp wrote her. “Nothing could be easier.”

His involvement with the transatlantic mail had momentarily distracted Garp from his sense of the awesome and lethal Under Toad, but now Helen told him that she detected the presence of the beast, too. “Let's go home,” she said. “We've had a nice time.”

They got a telegram from John Wolf. “Stay where you are,” it said. “People are buying your book in droves.”

Roberta sent Garp a T-shirt.

NEW YORK DIVORCEES ARE GOOD

FOR NEW HAMPSHIRE

the T-shirt said.

“My God,” Garp said to Helen. “If we're going home, let's at least wait until after this mindless election.”

Thus he missed, thankfully, the “dissenting feminist opinion” of The World According to Bensenhaver , published in a giddy, popular magazine. The novel, the reviewer said, “steadfastly upholds the sexist notion that women are chiefly an assemblage of orifices and the acceptable prey of predatory males.... T. S. Garp continues the infuriating male mythology: the good man is the bodyguard of his family, the good woman never willingly lets another man enter her literal or figurative door.”

Even Jenny Fields was cajoled into “reviewing” her son's novel, and it is fortunate that Garp never saw this, either. Jenny said that although it was her son's best novel—because it was his most serious subject—it was a novel “marred by repeated male obsessions, which could become tedious to women readers.” However, Jenny said, her son was a good writer who was still young and would only get better. “His heart,” she added, “is in the right place.”

If Garp had read that, he might have stayed in Vienna a lot longer. But they made their plans to leave. As usual, anxiousness quickened the Garps' plans. One night Duncan was not home from the park before dark and Garp, running out to look for him, called back to Helen that this was the final sign; they would leave as soon as possible. City life, in general, made Garp too fearful for Duncan.

Garp ran along the Prinz-Eugen-Strasse toward the Russian War Memorial at the Schwarzenbergplatz. There was a pastry shop near there, and Duncan liked pastry, although Garp had repeatedly warned the child that it would ruin his supper. “Duncan!” he ran calling, and his voice against the stolid stone buildings bounced back to him like the froggy belching of the Under Toad, the foul and warty beast whose sticky nearness he felt like breath.

But Duncan was munching happily on a Grillparzertorte in the pastry shop.

“It gets dark earlier and earlier,” he complained. “I'm not that late.”

Garp had to admit it. They walked home together. The Under Toad disappeared up a small, dark street—or else it's not interested in Duncan, Garp thought. He imagined he felt the tug of the tide at his own ankles, but it was a passing feeling.

The telephone, that old cry of alarm—a warrior stabbed on guard duty, screaming his shock—startled the pension where they lived and brought the trembling landlady like a ghost to their rooms.

“Bitte, bitte, ” she came pleading. She conveyed, with little shakes of excitement, that the call was from the United States.

It was about two in the morning, the heat was off, and Garp shivered after the old woman, down the corridor of the pension. “The hall rug was thin,” he recalled, “the color of a shadow.” He had written that, years ago. And he looked for the rest of his cast: the Hungarian singer, the man who could only walk on his hands, the doomed bear, and all the members of the sad circus of death he had imagined.

But they were gone; only the old woman's lean, erect body guided him—her erectness unnaturally formal, as if she were overcorrecting a stoop. There were no photographs of speed-skating teams on the walls, there was no unicycle parked by the door to the W.C. Down a staircase and into a room with a harsh overhead light, like a hasty operating room set up in a city under siege, Garp felt he followed the Angel of Death—midwife to the Under Toad whose swampy smell he sniffed at the mouthpiece of the phone.

“Yes?” he whispered.

And for a moment was relieved to hear Roberta Muldoon—another sexual rejection; perhaps that was all. Or perhaps an update on the New Hampshire gubernatorial race. Garp looked up at the old, inquiring face of the landlady and realized that she had not taken the time to put in her teeth; her cheeks were sucked into her mouth, the loose flesh drooped below her jawline—her whole face was as slack as a skeleton's. The room reeked of toad.

“I didn't want you to see it on the news,” Roberta was saying. “If it would be on TV over there—I couldn't know for sure. Or even the newspapers. I just didn't want you to find out that way.”

“Who won?” Garp asked, lightly, though he knew that this call had little to do with the new or old governor of New Hampshire.

“She's been shot —your mother,” Roberta said. “They've killed her, Garp. A bastard shot her with a deer rifle.”

“Who?” Garp whispered.

“A man! ” Roberta wailed. It was the worst word she could use: a man. “A man who hated women,” Roberta said. “He was a hunter,” Roberta sobbed. “It was hunting season, or it was almost hunting season, and no one thought there was anything wrong about a man with a rifle. He shot her.”

“Dead?” Garp said.

“I caught her before she fell,” Roberta cried. “She never struck the ground, Garp. She never said a word. She never knew what happened, Garp. I'm sure.”

“Did they get the man?” Garp asked.

“Someone shot him, or he shot himself,” Roberta said.

“Dead?” Garp asked.

“Yes, the bastard,” Roberta said. “He's dead, too.”

“Are you alone, Roberta?” Garp asked her.

“No,” Roberta wept. “There are a lot of us here. We're at your place.” And Garp could imagine them all, the wailing women at Dog's Head Harbor—their leader murdered.

“She wanted her body to go to a med school,” Garp said. “Roberta?”

“I hear you,” Roberta said. “That's just so awful.”

“That's what she wanted,” Garp said.

“I know,” Roberta said. “You've got to come home.”

“Right away,” Garp said.

“We don't know what to do ,” Roberta said.

“What is there to do?” Garp asked. “There's nothing to do.”

“There should be something ,” Roberta said, “but she said she never wanted a funeral.”

“Certainly not,” Garp said. “She wanted her body to go to a med school. You get that accomplished, Roberta: that's what Mom would have wanted.”

“But there ought to be something ,” Roberta protested. “Maybe not a religious service, but something.”

“Don't you get involved in anything until I get there,” Garp told her.

“There's a lot of talk,” Roberta said. “People want a rally, or something.”

“I'm her only family, Roberta,” Garp said. “You tell them that.”

“She meant a lot to a lot of us, you know,” Roberta said, sharply.

Yes, and it got her killed! Garp thought, but he said nothing.

“I tried to look after her!” Roberta cried. “I told her not to go in that parking lot!”

“Nobody's to blame, Roberta,” Garp said, softly.

“You think somebody's to blame, Garp,” Roberta said. “You always do.”

“Please, Roberta,” Garp said. “You're my best friend.”

“I'll tell you who's to blame,” Roberta said. “It's men , Garp. It's your filthy murderous sex! If you can't fuck us the way you want to, you kill us in a hundred ways!”

“Not me , Roberta, please,” Garp said.

“Yes, you too,” Roberta whispered. “No man is a woman's friend.”

“I'm your friend, Roberta,” Garp said, and Roberta cried for a while—a sound as acceptable to Garp as rain falling on a deep lake.

“I'm so sorry,” Roberta whispered. “If I'd seen the man with the gun—just a second sooner—I could have blocked the shot. I would have, you know.”

“I know you would have, Roberta,” Garp said; he wondered if he would have. He felt love for his mother, of course; and now an aching loss. But did he ever feel such devotion to Jenny Fields as the followers among her own sex?

He apologized to the landlady for the lateness of the phone call. When he told her that his mother was dead, the old woman crossed herself—her sunken cheeks and her empty gums were mute but clear indications of the family deaths she had herself outlived.

Helen cried for the longest time; she would not let Jenny's namesake, little Jenny Garp, out of her arms. Duncan and Garp searched the newspapers, but the news would be a day getting to Austria—except for the marvel of television.

Garp watched his mother's murder on his landlady's TV.

There was some election nonsense at a shopping plaza in New Hampshire. The landscape had a vaguely seacoast appearance, and Garp recognized the place as being a few miles from Dog's Head Harbor.

The incumbent governor was in favor of all the same, swinish, stupid things. The woman running against him seemed educated and idealistic and kind; she also seemed to barely restrain her anger at the same, swinish, stupid things the governor represented.

The parking lot at the shopping plaza was circled by pickup trucks. The pickups were full of men in hunting coats and caps; apparently they represented local New Hampshire interests—as opposed to the interest in New Hampshire taken by the New York divorcees.

The nice woman running against the governor was also a kind of New York divorcee. That she had lived fifteen years in New Hampshire, and her children had gone to school there, was a fact more or less ignored by the incumbent governor, and by his supporters who circled the parking lot in their pickup trucks.

There were lots of signs; there was a steady jeering.

There was also a high school football team, in uniform—their cleats clacking on the cement of the parking lot. One of the woman candidate's children was on the team and he had assembled the football players in the parking lot in hopes of demonstrating to New Hampshire that it was perfectly manly to vote for his mother.

The hunters in their pickup trucks were of the opinion that to vote for this woman was to vote for faggotry—and lesbianism, and socialism, and alimony, and New York. And so forth. Garp had the feeling, watching the telecast, that those things were not tolerated in New Hampshire.

Garp and Helen and Duncan, and baby Jenny, sat in the Viennese pension about to watch the murder of Jenny Fields. Their bewildered old landlady served them coffee and little cakes; only Duncan ate anything.

Then Jenny Fields had her turn to speak to the assembled people in the parking lot. She spoke from the back of a pickup truck; Roberta Muldoon lifted her up to the tailgate and adjusted the microphone for her. Garp's mother looked very small in the pickup truck, especially beside Roberta, but Jenny's uniform was so white that she stood out, bright and clear.

“I am Jenny Fields,” she said—to some cheers and some whistles and some hoots. There was a blaring of horns from the pickup trucks circling the parking lot. The police were telling the pickup trucks to move on; they moved on, and came back, and moved on again. “Most of you know who I am,” Jenny Fields said. There were more hoots, more cheers, more blowing of horns—and a single sharp gunshot as conclusive as a wave breaking on the beach.

No one saw where it came from. Roberta Muldoon held Garp's mother under her arms. Jenny's white uniform seemed struck by a small dark splash. Then Roberta dropped down from the tailgate with Jenny in her arms and knifed through the breaking crowd like an old tight end carrying the ball for a hard first down. The crowd parted; Jenny's white uniform was almost concealed in Roberta's arms. There was a police car moving to intercept Roberta; when they neared each other, Roberta held out the body of Jenny Fields toward the squad car. For a moment Garp saw his mother's unmoving white uniform lifted above the crowd and into the arms of a policeman, who helped her and Roberta into the car.

The car, as they say, sped away. The camera was distracted by an apparent shoot-out taking place among the circling pickup trucks and several more police cars. Later, there was the still body of a man in a hunting coat lying in a dark puddle of what looked like oil. Later still, there was a closeup of what the newsmen would only identify as “a deer rifle.”

It was pointed out that the deer season had not officially opened.

Except for the fact that there had been no nudity in the telecast, the event was an X-rated soap opera from start to finish.

Garp thanked the landlady for allowing them to watch the news. Within two hours they were in Frankfurt, where they changed planes for New York. The Under Toad was not on the plane with them—not even for Helen, who was so afraid of planes. For a while, they knew, the Under Toad was elsewhere.

All Garp could think, somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, was that his mother had delivered some adequate “last words.” Jenny Fields had ended her life saying, “Most of you know who I am.” On the airplane, Garp tried out the line.

“Most of you know who I am,” he whispered. Duncan was asleep, but Helen overheard him; she reached across the aisle and held Garp's hand.

Thousands of feet above sea level, T. S. Garp cried in the airplane that was bringing him home to be famous in his violent country.

 

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