Charlie’s smile widened, though his face took on a quieter, sinister quality. “Is that right? No English? Hey, Sal, did you hear that? No English.”
They all three stood like that, looking at one another, and Savitha, for the flash of the tiniest moment, thought the baby-faced one would simply let go of her arm, and she would continue on into town, back to the small park. But it wasn’t true: something glimmered in Sal’s eyes. He said, “Hold on, now. What do we have here,” and then he said, “Lift up that arm, Charlie.” It was her left arm, her stub, and when Charlie twisted it up toward the night sky, they both howled with laughter. “Who was it? Who bit your hand off?” Sal asked.
“I bet it was a tiger,” Charlie said, still laughing, still painfully gripping her arm. “Don’t you all have tigers over there?”
“Shut up, Charlie,” Sal said, his face suddenly serious. “Come on. Get her over to the truck.”
Charlie yanked on Savitha’s arm. She jerked forward; her eyes snapped to the empty road, to the inside of the gas station, the counter. The large man who’d given her the key was turned away. She opened her mouth to shout, but Charlie was quicker: he slapped his hand over her face. Her head came to his chest, and his hand was so big that it covered her mouth and most of her eyes. He pushed her against the truck, and when the long-haired one opened the door, she thought they would force her inside, but instead, he yanked the knapsack from her shoulder. He rummaged until he found the money, then threw the knapsack into the cab of the truck. He then reached for something she couldn’t see, closed the door, and said, “Come on.”
“Where to?”
“You want Mel to call the cops?”
“But the truck.”
“We won’t be long. Let’s go.”
They dragged her to the back of the gas station. By now, Savitha couldn’t breathe. She twisted her head this way and that, until a gap between his fingers let in air. She tried to bite and got the inside of a finger, but he yelled, “Goddammit,” and clobbered the side of her head. Savitha’s ears rang. “Will you shut up,” Sal said, and led them to a clump of cottonwoods, a little distance behind the station. They entered the thickets, and within three or four steps came to a small clearing. Beer cans shone in the moonlight; a fire had once been built—she saw even in the low light that they’d been here many times before. “Let me see it,” Sal said.
“What you going to do, Sal?”
“I said, pass her over.”
It was now Sal who clenched her left arm with his own left arm, bony and cold compared to the baby-faced one’s arm. He didn’t bother with the hand over her mouth. Instead, he reached somewhere under his shirt, and there, in the moonlight, was something black and gleaming. He held the gun to her face. “You make a noise. One fucking noise. You understand that?”
Savitha stared at him, her thoughts stilled, her eyes wide. She was looking into it, but inside her—inside her was the long and dark tunnel.
“I said, do you understand?”
No, no, she didn’t understand, but evil had its own vocabulary, its own language. She nodded.
“And you try to run. You try to take a fucking step.”
She understood.
He let go of her arm; she stumbled back and fell to the ground. She hadn’t even known he was holding her up. “Get up,” he said, and when she did, he said, “Now go ahead. Put it in your mouth.”
She looked at him, no longer understanding, and then she looked at the baby-faced one. And they stood like that, neither truly understanding.
“I said, put it in your mouth.”
When she still stood, unmoving, not knowing what he wanted, he grabbed her arm again and shoved her stub against her mouth. It knocked her teeth into her bottom lip, drawing blood, but he kept shoving. What did he want? “Open it,” he seethed into her face, his acrid breath greater than air. “Open it, and put it in.” He pushed the gun up to her face, between her eyes, and she heard a click. “Put it in.”
Now she understood. The whole night now a violence of understanding. The stars blazing like bullets.
He let go of her arm and took a step back. He waited.
She opened her mouth. She wrapped her lips around the stub.
The baby-faced one whooped with delight, but the long-haired one only watched. He nodded. His bony face white against the black of the gun, still held at the ready, pointed at her face.
After a moment, he lurched with irritation. “Not like that,” he said. “Bitch, not that. You know better.” And he reached over, grabbed her by the hair, and rammed her face into the stub. She choked on her own arm. Tears filled her eyes. He then pulled her head back up, and then back down, and then back up. “Like that,” he said.
And so she did.
By now, the baby-faced one had unzipped his pants and was moaning at the edge of Savitha’s blurred vision. She saw the movement of his hand.
But the gun. The gun didn’t move. It was motionless in the moonlight, black, lustrous, untroubled, its feathers unruffled. It laughed.
You’re alive, Savitha said.
The crow watched her, still laughing, in the silver and starry night. Its beak rose into the air, and there it stayed, its stillness mocking her movement.
They’ve taken you, haven’t they? the crow said. They’ve taken you piece by piece. And this—this is the last piece. Now, in this clearing, with these strangers. I warned you, it said. I warned you all those years ago. In Indravalli. I said, Make sure they take you whole. But you didn’t listen. You didn’t listen. And now look at you. You are nothing. You are a girl. You are a girl in a clearing.
The baby-faced one let out a long groan, and the bony-faced one laughed, and the crow pulled back, opened its wings, and flew up and away, and Savitha followed it with her eyes, but the rest of her dropped to her knees.
*
And so it was: that the fabric of something she’d never understood, had never even tried to understand, was what had enclosed her heart, what had held it with its soft and wrinkled and cottony hands; it was this cloth that was now ripped wide open. The two men left her there, in the clearing, and she heard the turning of the truck’s ignition and then the sound of the engine going up the road, becoming, at last, only the night. Silent and unforgiving.
But how was I to know? she thought, lying on the ground. How was I to know: that it was always this: always the boll to the loom to the cloth, and then, finally, and with such fragility, to the heart.
4
There was lightning to the west. She raised her head, and at first she smiled, thinking it a gathering of fireflies, synchronized in their mirth. But when she stood up, she saw the dark clouds racing toward her. Toward Spearfish. It was not as dark as she remembered. Was it morning? The thunder rumbled. It spoke. And then one drop, and then two. She lifted herself up, saw the discarded beer cans, the old circle of fire, and she wondered, Which way is east?
She straightened her clothes, but when she took a step, she crashed to the ground in a heap. Her legs were numb. And her mind was terribly empty.
Had she fallen asleep?
The storm was coming fast now. The thunderclouds racing across the prairie, over the Black Hills, into the Dakotas. She watched them with such interest, such longing, that they seemed as if they might bend down to her, the clouds, low and rushing, and carry her off in their embrace. But they paid her no attention and gathered ominously, growing darker and heavier with deluge. The lightning now struck from the west and the south, some from the north. Savitha watched it; the lightning her father’s hands, reaching for her. Nanna, she said, was I ever the one with wings? But then the thunder crashed, and she stumbled out of the clearing, around the back of the gas station—the wind whipping around her, swirling with the strength of a sea—holding on to the walls, blinded as she was by wind, by rain, by sudden storm.