September 1, 2011 Vol 1 No 11

Somewhere the Desert Hides a Well

by Maria Deira

I

While everyone else in the school van chatted or sang along to the radio, Mac stared out the window, thinking about a girl who’d said hello to him during the academic bowl. In the darkness, he studied his faint reflection in the glass. How did he look to girls? he wondered. He pressed his forehead against the glass pane, his mind thick with fatigue and loneliness, when the van took a sudden sharp curve and bounced violently up and down. Mac’s teeth clenched together as he was thrown against the window.

And then the van was suspended in air. Time stood still. Everyone fell silent and when Mac tried to turn his head, away from the window, he couldn’t. Frozen in place, he saw the van’s headlights flood a field, revealing a lush valley with winding roads and little houses that unfolded from within the desert as would a picture from a pop-up book. Soft lights twinkled inside the diminutive homes and he could make out small animals, thick and sturdy, miniature bulls charging through a meadow, charging and storming on until they abruptly vanished into the shadows, as though they’d fallen into some deep pit.

“Look,” Mac tried to say, but the word stuck in his throat. For a moment, he felt weightless, and then everything sped up again. The van hit the ground, a hard and loud landing that caused everyone to scream. Mac struck his head a second time and blacked out.

II

Ricky wasn’t listening to music as he drove home that night. It was nearly midnight and the flatness of the high desert surrounded him in an unwavering darkness. The truck’s windows were rolled down; the cool wind dried his sweaty face. The highway took him past onion and alfalfa fields. During the day, these fields were harvested by migrant workers, men and women dressed in white linen shirts and slacks and large floppy hats, shimmering ghosts in the unforgiving heat. Tonight, Ricky hadn’t seen anyone or any other vehicle for miles and the fields were full of nothing but an empty blackness.

The truck shook and sputtered as he rounded a corner. As dilapidated as his old man, he thought. Well, he wasn’t going to end up like that. Once he saved enough money, he was getting the hell out of Malheur. He wanted to live where it rained, where the grass was green and the dry dust didn’t make your eyes water. He’d get a small place in some coastal town. Like Newport or maybe Astoria. He’d only seen the ocean once, but the waves, the thick sound of water rushing toward the beach, the enormity of the ocean itself had moved Ricky, had given him, in a way, a dream.

Yolanda, or Blondie as he called her, didn’t know anything about his dreams, but she promised to join him as soon as he found a job and a decent place to live. Ricky smiled to himself. Her sharp scent still clung to his beard. He pursed his upper lip, breathing in so hard that the stiff hairs of his mustache pricked his nostrils. Just as he started to think about the fun they’d had earlier that night, a bright and unexpected stream of headlights distracted him.

“Some drunken idiot’s run off the road again.”

Ricky pulled over to help. Cell phone in hand, he decided to get a closer look at the white van parked in the field before calling a tow truck. He jumped over a narrow irrigation ditch that separated road and field, his boots cutting into the hard dirt.

“Anybody hurt?” he called out, knocking a fist against the hood of the vehicle. Across the side of the minivan, stenciled in blue, were the words MALHEUR SCHOOL DISTRICT. Ricky peered through the windows and counted six silhouettes, but when he rapped his knuckles against the glass no one responded. He was able to slide open the side door, which had been left unlocked, and the cabin light came on. A choppy mix of rock music and static drifted from the radio.

The driver, a man, was passed out over the steering wheel. Two women, their heads bowed down, slept in the middle seat, while three boys were asleep in the back.

“Hey,” Ricky said, afraid to touch any of them. Were they all dead? Or just wasted? “Hey,” he said again.

The woman’s head turned slightly, the light catching her soft features. Ricky recognized her brown, heart-shaped face immediately. “Lydia?” he said. “Lydia, are you okay?”

She winced in response.

III

Lydia had been a student-teacher at MHS for only a month when Mr. Christensen, the high school librarian, invited her to accompany him to an academic bowl, or “geek-meet” as the kids called it. Only four students from the small high school were asked to compete, three boys and one girl. The girl, Graciela, happened to be Ricky’s cousin. Lydia got along well with the boys, but Graciela hated her and called her “Mangos” every chance she got.

That had been Ricky’s nickname for Lydia during the short time they dated. Because Lydia was as sweet as a mango, he’d explained. Later, she learned from one of his friends that he was actually referring to her breasts as “Mangos.” When she confronted him about it, asked him to stop referring to her as some exotic oblong fruit, he wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close.

“But they’re so juicy and perfect and good for me,” he laughed, nuzzling her ear. “Don’t be mad.”

What could she do? At the time, she thought she was in love. So, with her head against his chest, the scent of his cologne a gentle tranquilizer, she forgave him.

“Just don’t call me that around my students,” she told him.

Tonight, Ricky wasn’t so smooth. He was yelling into his cell phone like it was the end of the world. “Something’s wrong with them,” he said, his voice pinched and panicked. “They’re all drugged or something and their arms are burned.”

Lydia’s eyelids felt sticky and her throat was dry. She looked around the van, saw that the others were asleep. Mr. Christensen’s head rested against the steering wheel. When she tried to move, a terrible pain shot through her lower abdomen. The baby, she thought to herself. Damn it, the baby. She hadn’t told anyone. Not yet. It seemed too early to her. Too complicated. She sank back against the seat, placing a hand protectively against her stomach.

She suddenly had the urge to tell Ricky about the baby. It wasn’t his, of course. She just wanted to see his face when she told him that the child was Mr. Christensen’s.

Mr. Christensen.

Why couldn’t she ever call him by his first name? Even when they were alone together, she found herself calling him Mr. Christensen. She wasn’t afraid of him and he didn’t demand her submissiveness. In fact, he was very kind, extremely respectful, but he made her nervous. He was so different from everyone else: so odd and seemingly without a past, so serious –- as though he’d never been called by his first name in his entire life. As though he’d been born Mr. Christensen.

Another pain shot through her belly.

Was Ricky right? Had something bad happened to them? Her wrists had red marks around them, like rope burn. Her nails were dirty and ragged. Had they been drugged? And then what? Had they climbed out of something, pulled themselves up by their fingertips? Maybe they had tried to push the van out of the field. Her shoulders and arms ached and her clothes were damp and soiled.

They’d left McDonald’s in high spirits, talking and laughing as they pulled out of the parking lot, singing along to the radio, all of them in a hurry to get home. And then what? She just couldn’t remember.

“Mr. Christensen?” she said, but he didn’t reply. “Ricky?” she said, suddenly frightened.

As the sound of sirens neared, the others began to awaken. The kids looked at each other silently, rubbed their eyes and wiped the drool from their faces. Mr. Christensen shifted in his seat, and she watched as he came to, his long fingers pushing his hair away from his face. She wanted to grab his hand, to comfort him and be comforted in return, but she was too tired and in too much pain to do anything at all.

He turned toward her, as though he had felt her watching him. His face was pale, the skin around his mouth slightly green. She tried to smile but he stared at her strangely, without any sign of recognition.

“It’s okay,” Lydia said.

His mouth tightened, his eyes widened in fear as she spoke.

“Mr. Christensen,” she said. “It’s me, Lydia.” Didn’t he recognize her now? And if he did, why was he looking at her as though her mere presence caused him excruciating pain?

IV

To: Mina xxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx

From: Graciela xxxxxxxx@xxxxx.xxx

Subject: Missing you

I’m supposed to be in study hall right now, but screw that. If you get this email, text me back. Haven’t heard from you in a while. Remember how we used to always call each other in the morning and tell each other our dreams? Don’t you miss that? Well, since I can’t get a hold of you lately, I figured I’d just write you about it. Here it is –

It starts out with me walking my bike down Main Street. Yeah, you’re probably thinking, “Pinche, Graciela! That’s what you do every day when you walk home from school.” Well, just listen. Because in my dream I never make it home.

When I turn into the alley behind the grocery store I’m transported to a village in the middle of some green fields. The houses are shit, kind of like that shack the cat lady lives in. You know, with all the cardboard and aluminum foil covering the windows and cat fur sticking to the sidewalk? So I’m standing there in this village and everything feels real. REAL, like it’s not a dream and I can’t wake myself up or anything because it’s my REALITY.

Then some short, old gabacho – un cachetón — comes up to me. His big cheeks remind me of a football, pointy at the ends and bumpy. But his skin’s white, like really white, almost translucent, and his eyes are bloodshot and gray and watery. “Why are you standing there, girl? You’re here to work,” he says, pointing at me. “I got you special order.”

I’m like, “Don’t fucking call me GIRL. Don’t you fucking touch me, pendejo.” I jump on my bike and try to ride away, but every road I take leads me back to that asshole and every time I come back he says, “I got you special order, girl.”

“Get in the well,” he says at one point. “You belong to us now.” He pulls me off the bike, even though I’m fighting and biting and kicking, he’s stronger than me and he drags me to this stone well that’s just off the main road. As we get closer to it, I can hear people talking inside. And crying. They sound so sad. There was a voice that sounded like Ricky’s ex. She’s crying, asking over and over, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?”

My heart is beating like crazy. The closer I get to the well, the more I think I’m going to die. And when the old guy pushes me toward it, I’m shaking a lot.

My hand touches the edge of the well and it burns, hot and cold at the same time, like someone is peeling off my skin. I scream — I’m trying to wake myself up, trying to change the dream, but I can’t. Then, out of NOWHERE, a white-haired woman wearing an old dress that looks like a quilt shows up next to me.

That’s when the Viejo backs away from us. He’s scared of her. Maybe it’s because there’s a bull standing next to her. The animal is huge, and I’m scared too. But I’m more scared of the well. “You must leave this place,” the woman tells me, her voice is soft but cracked, like her vocal cords have dried out. “You have to leave now.”

“I can’t,” I say. “I’ve tried.”

“You only have half an hour. Then you’re stuck here forever.”

“Please,” I’m begging her. “I need to get home, but I don’t know how.”

She scrunches up her nose, like something smells bad. “Very well,” she says. “I’ll help you. Now stand still. Don’t move an inch. I’m going to pull your ear.”

And she pinches my earlobe, tugging it hard. There’s a loud hissing sound, like rushing water surrounding my head, and both of us fly straight up into the air. WHOOSH!

The next thing I know, I wake up in a school van, parked in the middle of a fucking onion field. I’m soaking wet with sweat, my left ear is bleeding because my earring got caught in the seat belt, and there’s an EMT asking me what my name is. Everyone else in the van is half-asleep or stoned or something. And all of us have marks on our wrists like we were tied up. What. The. Fuck.

I have no idea what’s going on or what happened to us and I hate not knowing. I hate it. I HATE IT. God, I just hate it here so much and I need to get out. My parents are asking me a million questions, but I don’t know what to tell them. I had to interpret for them in the hospital and I kept telling them that the doctor said I was fine, that I could go home, but they didn’t believe me. I got mad and said, “Well, learn English! You’ve been here since before I was born, Fucking learn the language.” My mom started crying and my dad’s face turned bright red. I feel terrible about it but what else could I do?

FUCK! This town sucks even more now that you’re gone. I miss you so much. I miss you calling me “Smarty Pants.” I miss having you cheer me on at math tournaments and geek meets. I miss everything, like seeing you in the hallways and us skipping class together so we could get ice cream cones and make out behind the AW.

MINA! I just want things to be normal again. Please believe me when I say that what happened that night at the party, I didn’t mean it to happen. TE AMO! Just write to me. Tell me when I can see you again.

XOXO,

Graciela

V

Mr. Christensen didn’t care if he was fired. He just wanted to stay home and watch TV and never sleep again.

Those dreams, those images: he’s on top of her, thrusting and pushing. He can’t stop. She’s asleep, but sometimes she comes to, sometimes screaming, sometimes as turned on as he is. His hands are bound, as are hers. They aren’t allowed to touch each other, but he can feel her breasts under his chest, her legs around his body. And someone is watching them.

“Mr. Christensen,” Principal Wright said, interrupting his thoughts.

“What?” Mr. Christensen tried to focus on the aging administrator’s face. The principal’s short neck and beaked nose reminded him of a turtle.

Principal Wright rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Were you drinking last night?”

“They don’t serve booze at McDonald’s,” Mr. Christensen said. “You know, I heard that coaches get to eat for free there. It’s not true for academic coaches.”

The principal took off his glasses. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’re on paid leave while the school board’s investigation continues.”

“Paid leave?”

“Superintendent’s decision.” Principal Wright shrugged. “I wouldn’t give your sorry ass a second chance.”

Paid leave meant Mr. Christensen would get to stay home for a couple of weeks. Maybe. But even a few days would be good. He wouldn’t have to see her then, wouldn’t have to feel like he did something wrong. “So, are we done?” he asked, standing up. The principal snorted and waved him out of the office.

Mr. Christensen hurried to the library. It was early morning, and students wouldn’t be arriving for another hour. He wrote a note for the substitute. “They can check out whatever they want. Even the magazines. Some of the loners like to eat lunch here – that’s OK.” Then he grabbed a few personal items from his desk: an MP3 player, a box of Imodium AD caplets, and his weekly planner.

“Hello.”

He looked up, quickly hiding the items in his backpack. “Lydia,” he said. “Hi.”

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You don’t look too good.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, I know I look like crap too,” she said. “And I feel like it.” Her steady black eyes studied him. She added, “I want you to know that I don’t blame you.”

Mr. Christensen’s stomach gurgled.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she continued. “No one knows how we got in that field, but I know you weren’t drunk. Maybe it was exhaust fumes from the van that knocked us out or maybe someone put something in our sodas.”

“Maybe,” he said. He pinched the top of his nose to stop his eyes from watering. Life had been fine, acceptable, until she showed up. He was happy working at the school, happy until he first saw her, smelled her, touched her, needed her. So this is love, he’d think to himself when he invited her to his house for dinner, when he’d bake her some fresh bread or when they’d go to the farmer’s market together, walking the dusty paths from booth to booth, hand in hand. He knew it was love, even when she asked him all the difficult questions about his life. Questions he would never be able to answer. Where was he born? Who were his parents? What was he like in high school? Had he been in love before?

He explained to her, opened up to her in a way he had never done with anyone else. He told her about his amnesia, about the day he showed up in Boise eight years ago, naked and without any idea who he was or where he came from. He shared with her how every night he dreamed he was doing terrible things, that he was a monster feeding on the humans he most cared about, dreams that made him feel as though he wasn’t a part of this world.

Disconnected. That’s how he’d felt until she came along. And he had been content in his detachment.

She was always so talkative when they were alone together. But here, in school, she only called him Mr. Christensen, hardly acknowledging him in class or the hallways, only cracking silly jokes or making small talk in the teachers’ lounge.

Was she ashamed of him? How could he even ask her that without embarrassing himself?

The whole situation made him feel very awkward and juvenile and a little bit ill.

So this was love.

“Well, I guess it’s my turn to meet with Principal Wrong,” Lydia said, smiling. When he didn’t laugh at her little joke, she walked toward the door. She stopped for a moment, rubbing her left wrist. “I think I had an allergic reaction to something.” She held out her hands to him. Red, crusty welts encircled her slim wrists.

“It’ll go away,” he said, his own hands trembling. Hadn’t she noticed the others had the same marks as well? Couldn’t she see that what caused those marks was nothing as innocent as a simple allergy?

“I hope so.” She made a face. “I’ll see you later?”

He nodded and she left. Not even a kiss.

Mr. Christensen sank into his chair. He placed his head on his desk. “God help me,” he said, even though he could never remember whether he believed in God or not.

VI

Mr. Wright had asked Mac only two questions:

“Do you think Mr. Christensen was driving drunk?” Mac had answered with a shake of the head.

“How did you do at the academic bowl?”

The boy shrugged.

“Okay then,” the principal said, “you can go back to class.”

And that was it.

Mac rarely spoke because of his stutter. He had attended eight years of private sessions with the school district’s speech pathologist, but it hadn’t helped. When it came to talking, he couldn’t get past the first word, sometimes not even past the first letter. He had failed where other students had overcome their impediments. And so Mac chose to remain silent and, eventually, his teachers and classmates no longer expected him to speak. The only downside to this was that he was rarely spoken to.

On the way home from the academic bowl, while everyone else in the van chatted away, Mac daydreamed about a particular girl with long brown hair he’d seen at the bowl. She’d smiled at him during their first break, and at the second break, she’d cheerfully said, “Hullo!” as they stood in line at the concessions stand. Idiot, he thought to himself. Just talk to her! Say something! But all he managed to say was something between a “hi” and a “hey.” “Hi-ay.” Hi-ay! What was that? He grimaced, which probably looked like he was making a face at her, and then ran to the bathroom as though he were about to piss his pants.

Face flushed and palms sweaty, he stared angrily at himself in the mirror. Another guy leaving a stall said, “Dude, you dropped something on the floor.” Mac looked. And there it was, on the boys’ bathroom floor, next to a broken urinal: the note. A delicately, precisely folded piece of pink notebook paper. Normally, he’d never, ever pick up anything off a bathroom floor, but the note was so tiny, so pink, so neatly folded that Mac couldn’t help himself. He snatched it up and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

Later, when he awoke in the van, stiff and sick to his stomach, the first thing that entered his mind was not the girl but a number. Nine, three, seven, point, zero, five. With what little strength he had, his wrists scratched and sore, he grabbed a pen from his backpack, wrote the number on a corner of the pink notebook paper, and promptly forgot about it.

It was only after he got home and his parents had told him goodnight, after he had taken a shower and washed away the day’s sweat, washed away the stench of exhaust and French fries from his hair, that he remembered the note.

Locked in his bedroom, safe and sound and alone, he sniffed it, thinking that maybe the note smelled a little bit like roses, pretending that it had been written to him, not just something that had fallen out of another boy’s pocket. When he finally opened it, he had to unfold the half-sheet of paper five times to read what it said. Written in bubbly print were the words: Do you like me? Check yes or check no. Beneath that were drawn two tiny squares, one for yes, the other for no. With a chewed up pencil, Mac checked the tiny box for “yes.” He checked it three times.

VII

Graciela thought talking to the principal was rough — the men who pulled her out of her trig class were even more repulsive. The first question they asked: “Can you speak English?”

At first she didn’t respond. The question was stupid and she didn’t want to answer it. But the men stared at her and she felt herself blush. She shifted in her seat. “Yes,” she said, quietly.

“Well, she was part of the academic bowl,” one of the men shared with the others. “She’s no dummy.” They laughed.

The men, there were three of them, introduced themselves as “special” members of the school board. The principal had described them to Graciela as detectives, savvy and perceptive, explaining that they were there to investigate Mr. Christensen, not just because of the recent incident but because of parental complaints and other similarly strange events that had occurred whenever he chaperoned students.

“Then why don’t you call the police?” she’d asked Principal Wright.

“You could say these school board members are sort of like the police.” He had smiled. “It’s complicated.”

Whoever they were, Graciela didn’t like them. They dressed too casually, in jeans and flannel shirts, like they were trying to be down to earth, unintimidating. One of the men wore Wranglers, gray cowboy boots, and a button-down shirt. His belly hung over the waist of his jeans. Graciela called him “the fat cowboy” to herself.

They were mostly civil, but annoying, and worst of all, Graciela couldn’t help but think the most awful things about them. She wanted to hit herself every time she thought about what it would be like to have sex with one of them. This was a bad habit, a horrible habit, she’d picked up from her friend Mina, who had once mentioned in passing that she imagined having sex with every person she saw on the street. The comment was so random, so like Mina, that Graciela couldn’t get it out of her mind. It was a game they shared: who could come up with the most disgusting scenario?

And now here she was. Playing the game without Mina. “Nasty,” Graciela couldn’t help saying out loud. The men glanced at each other, then asked her if Mr. Christensen ever seemed to behave oddly or as though he were intoxicated.

“No,” she said. But now Graciela’s mind was on sex and she couldn’t think of anything else. Not that she liked sex or was promiscuous. She wasn’t a slut, she told herself. It was Mina who would disagree.

“You didn’t even know him,” Mina had told her, accusing her of letting some guy named Jesse “pop her cherry.” Graciela didn’t want to remember that night, that party, but the memory crept into her thoughts when she least expected it or whenever Mina brought it up.

Sometimes at home or in the middle of class, Graciela thought she could smell Jesse’s liquored up breath and cheap cologne, and then she’d remember the feel of his sticky, rough skin on her own. Her heart would race. She’d hold her breath, a crushing pain pressing against her sternum, and she’d have to stab her leg with a pen or safety-pin just to get that awful sensation to pass.

Mina hated her for that night, even though Graciela hadn’t meant for it to happen, even though she’d been alone and scared.

“So if Mr. Christensen wasn’t drunk,” the fat cowboy was asking her now, leaning in close to her face. “Then how did the van end up in the field? What happened on your drive home?” His breath smelled of French fries and coffee and Graciela felt the nausea building up in her throat, burning at the back of her mouth.

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t we just hypnotize them or something?” one of the other men muttered.

“Already tried that with the boys,” the fat cowboy said. “None of them remembers anything. Waste of time.” He frowned. “Well, Graciela, something happened last night. You should remember some little detail. Something about that man must have seemed strange to you. It’s not right what happened, not right that you didn’t get home safely. Who was watching out for you?” He dropped his voice, placed a hand on her shoulder. “We’re just here to help. So, tell us Graciela, tell us what you’ve told your friends and family about that night.”

“Not much,” she said, starting to cry. “Nothing. Because nothing happened. Nothing at all.”

VIII

Lydia’s meeting with Mr. Wright didn’t go well, and she couldn’t believe he was suggesting that Mr. Christensen had been driving drunk and had drugged everyone in the van. It was ridiculous. Mr. Christensen had never hurt anyone, would never hurt anyone.

“I’ve had a feeling about him since he started working here. We all have. There’s something wrong with him,” the principal said. “I get calls from people once in a while –- even at home, asking about him, worried.”

“That sounds nuts.”

“I know. I mean, everything checks out. His story about the amnesia and all that. But it’s like he’s pretending to be someone he’s not. Like he’s hiding from someone. You’ve had to have noticed the slurred speech, the odd eating habits. Does he even eat? And he’s just a little too friendly with the kids.”

“So?”

“Be careful with him Lydia.” Principal Wright took off his glasses. “I know you two are involved – “

“That’s none of your business.”

“Just be careful.”

Lydia stormed out of his office and the school building and headed straight for her car.

She drove around for a while, passing Malheur’s only grocery store three times, before heading out of town.

She went to Mr. Christensen’s house knowing he’d be there, not bothering to call him first. The front door was open and she let herself inside. In the living room, she found him sitting cross-legged, a set of oversized, old-fashioned headphones covering his ears. She crouched down beside him and put her head next to his. He removed the headphones without saying a word and held one of the earpieces up to her ear. The music, instrumental and foreign, was difficult to listen to; its rhythm and tone reminded Lydia of the women from her childhood church who fell to the floor speaking in tongues.

“Do you understand what they’re saying?” he asked.

“No.”

“I used to understand,” he said. “I think I did.” He touched a finger to her cheek, and then brought his hand in front of his face.

She wanted him to touch her again, but he didn’t.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“That’s the plan,” he said, the words coming out slowly. “Pregnant.” He placed the headphones on the floor, pulled his legs up to his chest and rested his chin on his knees. “I don’t remember what that means anymore.”

Lydia felt warm. Too warm. I should go outside and get some fresh air, she thought to herself. I should leave. But the heat shot down her spine to her pelvis and radiated throughout her legs. She needed to move. She pushed Mr. Christensen onto his back and climbed on top of him.

“I love you.”

She kissed him, and he said, “Lydia,” in a way that let her know he didn’t want her to stop.

IX

Ricky was sitting in his truck outside the AW, eating a burger, when Lydia drove by. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her all night. When he found her passed out in that school van, asleep and helpless, he realized that he still had feelings for her. Now, he followed her, keeping his distance as they drove out of town.

She parked in front of a small blue house, but he continued on and parked about a quarter of a mile down the road. She hadn’t even noticed him. He watched her knock on the door, and then enter. He waited a full thirty minutes before leaving his truck.

The door was open, as were all the windows. He walked to the rear of the house, where he could hear the sound of running water coming from the bathroom. He dragged a cinder block under the window and used it as a stepping stool. What he saw surprised him: Lydia, naked, sitting in the bathtub, her head hung forward as though she were asleep. A man, also naked except for a pair of black slippers, knelt next to the tub and was gently washing her body. He rubbed the yellow sponge over her dark skin in quick, circular motions.

Ricky couldn’t look away. A mix of anger, shock, and, to his disgust, arousal kept him immobile.

The man stopped what he was doing and turned toward Ricky. His eyes were a bright blue. “She won’t stop bleeding,” he said.

Ricky jumped from the cinder block and ran into the house. “Lydia!” he called out, moving quickly through the hallway. When he entered the bathroom, the smell of burnt meat filled his nostrils. He gagged, pulling the man away from Lydia.

“Don’t touch her,” he said. The stench in the room was so strong he could barely breathe. “Get back!” Ricky yelled as the man stepped toward him. He checked Lydia’s body, but she wasn’t bleeding at all. A seam of red skin, like a thickened welt, stretched down her back: a scar she hadn’t had before.

“What the hell did you do to her?”

“She followed me,” the man said. “But I didn’t know — ”

Ricky swung a closed fist at him just as a thunderous crash shook the house. The light bulbs above the sink exploded. The mirror cracked. Ricky fell against the toilet. Broken tiles crashed to the ground around him. The man flew up, pulled halfway through the bathroom ceiling so that only his body from the waist down was visible. His slippers clung to his feet, and blood, black and thick, dripped from between his buttocks.

“Ricky,” Lydia said, her voice surprising him. Her hands fluttered before her chest as though she couldn’t control them. “You need to get out,” she said. “You’ll be stuck here forever.” She crumpled into herself.

Ricky cried out, not knowing what to do, not understanding what was happening. A drop of hot blood splattered onto his forearm and his fear turned to panic. He ran from the bathroom, pushed his way through the house. Jumping into the cab of his truck, shaking and retching, he said, “I need to get Lydia out. I need to help her.” But he couldn’t make himself go back inside. He punched himself in the leg. “This isn’t real,” he said before vomiting onto the seat next to him.

An orange grasshopper hit the truck’s windshield. A bee buzzed next to the side view mirror. No, this was real, Ricky thought. More real than anything he’d ever experienced. The blood had hardened on his arm, creating a cyst-like shell. He flicked it off, started his truck and peeled out of the driveway, gravel and dust shooting out behind the vehicle as he sped down the road.

For the second time in twenty-four hours, he called the paramedics, but this time he wasn’t sticking around.

When he got to Blondie’s place, he asked her, “How much money you got?”

Ricky left town that night.

X

Six months had passed since Mac had awakened to find himself in a van in the middle of a field. Mr. Christensen had disappeared the day after the academic bowl. Everyone, of course, assumed he’d been fired, accepting as fact the rumors that he was an alcoholic. But Mac believed that Mr. Christensen was innocent and the real crime was that no one could figure out what was the truth.

Two days after the teacher disappeared, Graciela vanished. Worried, Mac had called her at home. Her mother answered. “Yes?” she said.

But he didn’t know what to say.

A few seconds into the silence, just before he finally hung up, her mother whispered, “Graciela? M’ija? Por favor, dime donde estás.”

Maybe Graciela ran away, Mac reasoned. She had mentioned once a friend in Seattle whom she wanted to move in with so she could get away from her parents. But all that Mac had heard since her disappearance was that she’d been deported. Which didn’t even make sense. He’d never heard of kids being deported. And what about her parents? Wouldn’t they have been deported too?

Lydia, the student-teacher, had disappeared around the same time as Graciela, but returned — quite pregnant — in January. She walked differently, and not just because of her full belly. She hobbled as though her legs had been broken. Some of the girls said they’d seen a thick scar that ran from the nape of her neck down her back. When questioned about it, Lydia claimed she’d been struck by lightning. When asked who the father of the baby was, she replied, “You don’t know him.” When asked why she was found naked, her feet covered in mud and blood, stumbling down the alley behind the grocery store, she calmly said, “That never happened.”

In February, Lydia disappeared again, this time for good, and everyone just stopped talking about her. No one even mentioned the disappearances of Graciela or Mr. Christensen anymore. From the way people in school acted, it was as though they’d never existed. Mac checked the yearbook, making sure their pictures were still there. And sure enough, there they were, captured in listless two-dimensional snapshots, their gray faces staring back at him.

Something else no one ever mentioned again was the night the school van had mysteriously ended up in an onion field. No strange men or school board members came around asking to interview student. Not even Jeff and Bill, the two other boys in the van, talked about it. Not that they ever had. They remembered nothing, felt nothing. “We fell asleep,” was their easy explanation. But for Mac, he always felt as though that night had just happened, as though he were forever waking up.

One day, while eating lunch alone in the school library, he flipped through his day planner and a wrinkled slip of pink paper fell out. The number jumped out at him from the page: 937.05. And then it happened the way a few measures from a popular song or television jingle might get stuck in your head: he kept hearing and thinking, “Nine, three, seven, point, zero, five,” over and over. He wrote the number down on a fresh sheet of paper, copying it over at least a dozen times.

Perhaps he’d never have guessed it if he hadn’t been eating in the library. He pushed his chair away from the table, the chair legs scraping loudly against the floor. The substitute librarian looked at him and smiled. “Yes?” she asked.

“N-n-nothing,” Mac said. “Just look-looking for a b-b-book.” He was trying to talk more often, even if it embarrassed him. He was more afraid of being forgotten now.

Mac walked over to the non-fiction section of the library, dragging his finger across the stacks of 900s. When he finally found the section he was searching for, his shoulders hunched over in disappointment. “Julius Caesar?” he asked himself. What did Julius Caesar have to do with anything?

He grabbed one of the books, a heavy one about the Tenth Legion, and flipped through the pages, skim-reading a section describing how the veterans were given farmland once the legion had disbanded. But non-fiction subjects like armies and wars had never interested Mac. He didn’t like to think about violence, preferring instead to be carried away by poetry and prose and romance. He slid the book back onto the shelf.

Mac wandered through the stacks of books. Maybe he was wrong, maybe the number meant something else or maybe nothing at all. But he had first thought about it that night, and it was one of the few details he clearly remembered.

There was one other thing that Mac recalled very well about that long drive home. It had happened just after they left McDonald’s, when Lydia moved to the front passenger seat. Something Mr. Christensen had said made her laugh. It was a good laugh, Mac thought at the time. Strong and unaffected. She moved closer to the librarian, leaning toward him, tucking a lock of his hair behind his ear, as though she wanted to whisper a secret to him.

Mac found it impressive, that tiny act of intimacy. What would it be like to have a girl touch his hair? Or his cheek? Or his hand?

This was all that he could remember, and yet he felt guilty. After everything that had happened, that one image, that mysterious bond between two people was what he focused on late at night when he couldn’t sleep, as he lay safely in bed, curled up under layers of blankets so thick that they formed a stuffy cave around him. When he should have been praying for those who were missing, he was instead reflecting on love and sex and the mystery of what he believed he could never have. He didn’t want to think about anything else. Everything else frightened him.

And so, with his eyes shut tight, his face hot and his hands clammy, he’d let himself forget for a moment about those who had disappeared. Beneath the weighty shelter of the bed covers, hidden by the dark, he wished instead that he could fall asleep quickly and dream of the girl he had yet to meet.

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Copyright 2011 Maria Deira

Maria Deira has been published in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Pseudopod, and A cappella Zoo. She grew up in the high desert of Eastern Oregon, but now resides in the cozy gloom of the Willamette Valley. Currently, Maria is working on a novel, which she hopes will scare the pants off readers. You can read more of her fiction by visiting her website: http://www.mariadeira.com/

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Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by Ann Leckie.

http://giganotosaurus.org

editor@giganotosaurus.org 