And there were very few normal sounds outside. No traffic, no voices, no train whistles. A few times he heard a jet airplane high in the sky and the sound of it passing seemed to wash down through the air, crescendo, and vanish again.
The cabin they were being held prisoner in was old, dark, and small with a close ceiling. It was built of logs that had been there so long they’d turned as hard as stone and gray in color. It was essentially two rooms. The main room had a woodstove and propane stove for cooking, a table, cupboards, nails and pegs inserted into the logs to hold coats and clothes, and a double bed pushed up against one wall and a single bed pushed up against the other. There was only one door and two windows. Adjacent to the main room was a smaller bedroom Ron occupied. There was no door between the main room and his bedroom but it had been established early on that no one was to enter his room for any reason or they’d be severely punished.
When Ron was gone, like he was now, the only sound inside the small structure was when the wind rattled something above the rafters or on the roof. It sounded like a playing card clipped to a bike frame so the spokes would make it go rat-rat-rat-rat-rat. And the pop of flames in the potbellied stove.
That, and the two women talking.
*
“HE’S BEEN GONE a really long time,” the older woman named Amanda said to Tiffany. Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“Maybe he’s not coming back. What do we do if he doesn’t come back this time? What if he gets in an accident or something?”
Her voice and accent were familiar to Kyle, kind of like a cross between Grandma Lottie and his mother. Amanda had a round face and tight curls and she had large hands. She was a heavy woman with big thighs encased in jeans. She wore an oversized sweatshirt with a jolly Santa face sewed on the front of it. There was a smear of black soot on Santa’s beard from her feeding lengths of wood into the old stove.
“Oh, he’s coming back,” Tiffany said. “He always fuckin’ comes back.”
“But what if they arrest him, you know? Do you think he’d tell the cops about us?”
“What do you think?”
She was younger, Tiffany was. Really thin, too, almost bony. She had narrow shoulders, improbably large breasts, long stringy blond hair, big brown deep-set eyes, and a hard-edged husky voice. She was always complaining that she was cold no matter how much wood Amanda stuffed into the stove. She’d staked out her spot on the iron-framed bed in the corner nearest to the heat. Linty blankets covered her bare legs. Tiffany had lost one of her long dangly earrings somewhere along the way but the right one was still attached to the lobe. She was still wearing her short black skirt.
“What if he doesn’t come back, though?” Amanda asked her.
“Then we can get the hell out of here, I guess,” Tiffany said.
“What about the bolt and the lock in the door?”
“What about it?”
“How do we break it?”
“Shit if I know.”
Amanda chinned toward the window on the wall above them. “If we got that open could you squeeze out?”
“I know you couldn’t.”
Amanda ignored her and said, “Maybe if you could get outside you could use an ax or something to break the door down and let us out.”
“So it’s up to me, huh?” Tiffany said. She shot a look at Kyle to take his measure. He knew his shoulders were too wide for consideration. She sighed when she realized it, too.
She turned to Amanda. “So it’s my job to get out of that window, find an ax, and chop you out of this cabin? All the while Ron is someplace out there. What if he comes back when I’m halfway out the window? What if he comes back when I’m trying to chop the door down?”
Then Tiffany’s mouth twisted up into a cruel grin. She had two rows of small, dark-yellow teeth. “Maybe you can go lose some weight and climb out through that window yourself. If he doesn’t blow your head clean off I’ll follow you. How’s that?”
“Don’t be so mean,” Amanda said, hurt. “Why are you always so mean?”
Tiffany crossed her arms over her chest and looked away, obviously annoyed.
“Really,” Amanda said. “We’re in this together. We should work together, shouldn’t we?”
Tiffany refused to answer.
“Well?” Amanda asked.
“You’re trying to get me killed,” Tiffany said finally. “This is bad enough without you trying to get me killed, Grandma.”
Amanda shook her head and looked down at her lap. Kyle could barely hear her say, “I’m not trying to get anybody killed.”
They talked as if Kyle wasn’t even in the room. He sat on his very small bed in the far corner of the room. Amanda had addressed him a couple of times since they’d all been together but he’d refused to look at her or answer her questions. He’d done the same once when Tiffany scowled at him and asked, “What the fuck is wrong with you, anyway? Do you even know what’s going on?”
Kyle had nodded that he did.
*
IT HAD BEEN THAT WAY since that night near the river when the man he now knew as Ron showed the pistol and ordered both Kyle and Raheem to pull their boat out of the water into the thick brush. Then the raft.
In the dark, Ron had marched them toward the old house trailer and made them sit on lawn chairs propped up around a cold campfire.
On the way there, Raheem asked Ron questions.
“Why are you doing this?
“Why do we have to go with you? Just let us get back on the river.
“Is there a reward for us or something? Who would spend that kind of money, anyway?
“Are we trespassing or something? What’s wrong?”
But Ron—Kyle didn’t know his name at the time—never answered.
Instead, Ron kept his gun on Kyle as he wrapped Raheem’s wrists together with silver duct tape, then his ankles. Then his mouth with a particular flourish. Ron put the gun in his coat pocket as he did the same to Kyle. Kyle didn’t resist.
Ron wasn’t violent with them, or particularly rough. He said as few words as possible to get the task done.
Kyle didn’t know what Ron meant when the man said to himself, “Looks like I need a couple more dog collars,” and sent them one by one into the trailer house where Amanda and Tiffany were.
The two women had simply stared at them for a long time. They weren’t taped up but Kyle noticed in the gloom of the trailer that each had a small green blinking light emanating from a black collar on their necks.
“Oh this is fucking great,” the skinny one said to the other. “He’s collecting even more people.”
“Maybe they can help us?” the older woman said.
“The big one, maybe. That little one—I doubt it.”
Kyle had ignored them. He managed to stand up with his legs and wrists bound and he watched through the louvred windows that night as Ron fed their clothing and gear from the boat into the fire pit and burned it.
Ron broke up their boat with an ax he’d found in the shed and threw the staves on the fire. Raheem soon joined him at the window.
“What in the hell is he going to do with us, man?” Raheem asked Kyle.