14

DINNER

Travis parked the Chevy on the street in front of Jenny's house. He turned off the engine and turned to Catch.

"You stay here, you understand. I'll be back in a little while to check on you."

"Thanks, Dad."

"Don't play the radio and don't beep the horn. Just wait."

"I promise. I'll be good." The demon attempted an innocent grin and failed.

"Keep an eye on that." Travis pointed to an aluminum suitcase on the backseat.

"Enjoy your date. The car will be fine."

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," Catch grinned.

"Why are you being so nice?"

"It's good to see you getting out."

"You're lying."

"Travis, I'm crushed."

"That would be nice," Travis said. "Now, don't eat anybody."

"I just ate last night. I don't even feel hungry. I'll just sit here and meditate."

Travis reached into the inside pocket of his sport coat and pulled out a comic book. "I got this for you." He held it out to the demon. "You can look at it while you wait."

The demon fumbled the comic book away from Travis and spread it out on the seat. "Cookie Monster! My favorite! Thanks, Travis."

"See you later."

Travis got out of the car and slammed the door. Catch watched him walk across the yard. "I already looked at this one, asshole," he hissed to himself. "When I get a new master, I will tear your arms off and eat them while you watch."

Travis looked back over his shoulder. Catch waved him on with his best effort at a smile.

The doorbell rang precisely at seven. Jenny's reactions went like this: don't answer it, change clothes, answer it and feign sickness, clean the house, redecorate, schedule plastic surgery, change hair color, take a handful of Valium, appeal to the Goddess for divine intervention, stand here and explore the possibilities of paralyzing panic.

She opened the door and smiled. "Hi."

Travis stood there in jeans and a gray herringbone tweed jacket. He was transfixed.

"Travis?" Jenny said.

"You're beautiful," he said finally.

They stood in the doorway, Jenny blushing, Travis staring. Jenny had decided to stick with the black dress. Evidently it had been the right choice. A full minute passed without a word between them.

"Would you like to come in?"

"No."

"Okay." She shut the door in his face. Well, that hadn't been so bad. Now she could put on some sweatpants, load the refrigerator onto a tray, and settle down for a night in front of the television.

There was a timid knock on the door. Jenny opened it again. "Sorry, I'm a little nervous," she said.

"It's all right," Travis said. "Shall we go?"

"Sure. I'll get my purse." She closed the door in his face.

There was an uncomfortable silence between them while they drove to the restaurant. Typically, this would be the time for trading life stories, but Jenny had resolved not to talk about her marriage, which closed most of her adult life to conversation, and Travis had resolved not to talk about the demon, which eliminated most of the twentieth century.

"So," Jenny said, "do you like Italian food?"

"Yep," Travis said. They drove in silence the rest of the way to the restaurant.

It was a warm night and the Toyota had no air conditioning. Jenny didn't dare roll down the window and risk blowing her hair. She had spent an hour styling and pinning it back so that it fell in long curls to the middle of her back. When she began to perspire, she remembered that she still had two wads of toilet paper tucked under her arms to stop the bleeding from shaving cuts. For the next few minutes all she could think of was getting to a restroom where she could remove the spotted wads. She decided not to mention it.

The restaurant, the Old Italian Pasta Factory, was housed in an old creamery building, a remnant of the time when Pine Cove's economy was based on livestock rather than tourism. The concrete floors remained intact, as did the corrugated steel roof. The owners had taken care to preserve the rusticity of the structure, while adding the warmth of a fireplace, soft lighting, and the traditional red-and-white tablecloths of an Italian restaurant. The tables were small but comfortably spaced, and each was decorated with fresh flowers and a candle. The Pasta Factory, it was agreed, was the most romantic restaurant in the area.

As soon as the hostess seated them, Jenny excused herself to the restroom.

"Order whatever wine you want," she said, "I'm not picky."

"I don't drink, but if you want some..."

"No, that's fine. It'll be a nice change."

As soon as Jenny left, the waitress  -  an efficient-looking woman in her thirties  -  came to the table.

"Good evening, sir. What can I bring you to drink this evening?" She pulled her order pad out of her pocket in a quick, liquid movement, like a gunslinger drawing a six-shooter. A career waitress, Travis thought.

"I thought I'd wait for the lady to return," he said.

"Oh, Jenny. She'll have an herbal tea. And you want, let's see..." She looked him up and down, crossed-referenced him, pigeonholed him, and announced, "You'll have some sort of imported beer, right?"

"I don't drink, so..."

"I should have known." The waitress slapped her forehead as if she'd just caught herself in the middle of a grave error, like serving the salad with plutonium instead of creamy Italian. "Her husband is a drunk; it's only natural that she'd go out with a nondrinker on the rebound. Can I bring you a mineral water?"

"That would be fine," Travis said.

The waitress's pen scratched, but she did not look at the order pad or lose her "we aim to please" smile. "And would you like some garlic bread while you're waiting?"

"Sure," Travis said. He watched the waitress walk away. She took small, quick, mechanical steps, and was gone to the kitchen in an instant. Travis wondered why some people seemed to be able to walk faster than he could run. They're professionals, he thought.

Jenny took five minutes to get all the toilet paper unstuck from her underarms, and there had been an embarrassing moment when another woman came into the restroom and found her before the mirror with her elbow in the air. When she returned to the table, Travis was staring over a basket of garlic bread.

She saw the herbal tea on the table and said, "How did you know?"

"Psychic, I guess," he said. "I ordered garlic bread."

"Yes," she said, seating herself.

They stared at the garlic bread as if it were a bubbling caldron of hemlock.

"You like garlic bread?" she asked.

"Love it. And you?"

"One of my favorites," she said.

He picked up the basket and offered it to her. "Have some?"

"Not right now. You go ahead."

"No thanks, I'm not in the mood." He put the basket down.

The garlic bread lay there between them, steaming with implications. They, of course, must both eat it or neither could. Garlic bread meant garlic breath. There might be a kiss later, maybe more. There was just too damn much intimacy in garlic bread.

They sat in silence, reading the menu; she looking for the cheapest entree, which she had no intention of eating; and he, looking for the item that would be the least embarrassing to eat in front of someone.

"What are you going to have?" she asked.

"Not spaghetti," he snapped.

"Okay." Jenny had forgotten what dating was like. Although she couldn't remember for sure, she thought that she might have gotten married to avoid ever having to go through this kind of discomfort again. It was like driving with the emergency brake set. She decided to release the brake.

"I'm starved. Pass the garlic bread."

Travis smiled. "Sure." He passed it to her, then took a piece for himself. They paused in midbite and eyed each other across the table like two poker players on the bluff. Jenny laughed, spraying crumbs all over the table. The evening was on.

"So, Travis, what do you do?"

"Date married women, evidently."

"How did you know?"

"The waitress told me."

"We're separated."

"Good," he said, and they both laughed.

They ordered, and as dinner progressed they found common ground in the awkwardness of the situation. Jenny told Travis about her marriage and her job. Travis made up a history of working as a traveling insurance salesman with no real ties to home or family.

In a frank exchange of truth for lies, they found they liked each other  -  were, in fact, quite taken with one another.

They left the restaurant arm in arm, laughing.

15

RACHEL

Rachel Henderson lived alone in a small house that lay amid a grove of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the Beer Bar cattle ranch. The house was owned by Jim Beer, a lanky, forty-five-year-old cowboy who lived with his wife and two children in a fourteen-room house his grandfather had built on the far side of the ranch. Rachel had lived on the ranch for five years. She had never paid any rent.

Rachel had met Jim Beer in the Head of the Slug Saloon when she first arrived in Pine Cove. Jim had been drinking all day and was feeling the weight of his rugged cowboy charisma when Rachel sat down on the bar stool next to him and put a newspaper on the bar.

"Well, darlin', I'm damned if you're not a fresh wind on a stale pasture. Can I buy you a drink?" The banjo twang in Jim's accent was pure Oklahoma, picked up from the hands that had worked the Beer Bar when Jim was a boy. Jim was the third generation of Beers to work the ranch and would probably be the last. His teenage son, Zane Grey Beer, had decided early on that he would rather ride a surfboard than a horse. That was part of the reason that Jim was drinking away the afternoon at the Slug. That, and the fact that his wife had just purchased a new Mercedes turbo-diesel wagon that cost the annual net income of the Beer Bar Ranch.

Rachel unfolded the classified section of the Pine Cove Gazette on the bar. "Just an orange juice, thanks. I'm house hunting today." She curled one leg under herself on the bar stool. "You don't know anybody that has a house for rent, do you?"

Jim Beer would look back on that day many times in the years to come, but he could never quite remember what had happened next. What he did remember was driving his pickup down the back road into the ranch with Rachel following behind in an old Volkswagen van. From there his memory was a montage of images: Rachel naked on the small bunk, his turquoise belt buckle hitting the wooden floor with a thud, silk scarves tied around his wrists, Rachel bouncing above him  -  riding him like a bronco  -  climbing back into his pickup after sundown, sore and sweaty, leaning his forehead on the wheel of the truck and thinking about his wife and kids.

In the five years since, Jim Beer had never gone near the little house on the far side of the ranch. Every month he penciled the rent collected into a ledger, then deposited cash from his poker fund in the business checking account to cover it.

A few of his friends had seen him leave the Head of the Slug with Rachel that afternoon. When they saw him again, they ribbed him, made crude jokes, and asked pointed questions. Jim answered the jibes by pushing his summer Stetson back on his head and saying: "Boys, all I got to say is that male menopause is a rough trail to ride." Hank Williams couldn't have sung it any sadder.

After Jim left that evening Rachel picked several gray hairs from the bunk's pillow. Around the hairs she carefully tied a single red thread, which she knotted twice. Two knots were enough for the bond she wanted over Jim Beer. She placed the tiny bundle in a babyfood jar, labeled it with a marking pen, and stored it away in a cupboard over the kitchen sink.

Now the cupboard was full of jars, each one containing a similar bundle, each bundle tied with a red thread. The number of knots in the thread varied. Three of the bundles were tied with four knots. These contained the hair of men Rachel had loved. Those men were long gone.

The rest of Rachel's house was decorated with objects of power: eagle feathers, crystals, pentagrams, and tapestries embroidered with magic symbols. There was no evidence of a past in Rachel's house. Any photos she had of herself had been taken after she arrived in Pine Cove.

People who knew Rachel had no clue as to where she had lived or who she had been before she came to town. They knew her as a beautiful, mysterious woman who taught aerobics for a living. Or they knew her as a witch. Her past was an enigma, which was just the way she wanted it.

No one knew that Rachel had grown up in Bakersfield, the daughter of an illiterate oil-field worker. They didn't know that she had been a fat, ugly little girl who spent most of her life doing degrading things for disgusting men so that she might receive some sort of acceptance. Butterflies do not wax nostalgic about the time they spent as caterpillars.

Rachel had married a crop-duster pilot who was twenty years her senior. She was eighteen at the time.

It happened in the front seat of a pickup truck in the parking lot of a roadhouse outside of Visalia, California. The pilot, whose name was Merle Henderson, was still breathing hard and Rachel was washing the foul taste out of her mouth with a lukewarm Budweiser. "If you do that again, I'll marry you," Merle gasped.

An hour later they were flying over the Mojave desert, heading for Las Vegas in Merle's Cessna 152. Merle came at ten thousand feet. They were married under a neon arch in a ramshackle, concrete-block chapel just off the Vegas strip. They had known each other exactly six hours.

Rachel regarded the next eight years of her life as her term on the wheel of abuse. Merle Henderson deposited her in his house trailer by the landing strip and kept her there. He allowed her to visit town once a week to go to the laundromat and the grocery store. The rest of her time was spent waiting on or waiting for Merle and helping him work on his planes.

Each morning Merle took off in the crop duster, taking with him the keys to the pickup. Rachel spent the days cleaning up the trailer, eating, and watching television. She grew fatter and Merle began to refer to her as his fat little mama. What little self-esteem she had drained away and was absorbed by Merle's overpowering male ego.

Merle had flown helicopter gunships in Vietnam and he still talked about it as the happiest time in his life. When he opened the tanks of insecticide over a field of lettuce, he imagined he was releasing air-to-ground missiles into a Vietnamese village. The Army had sensed a destructive edge in Merle, Vietnam had honed it to razor sharpness, and it had not dulled when he came home. Until he married Rachel, he released his pent-up violence by starting fights in bars and flying with dangerous abandon. With Rachel waiting for him at home, he went to bars less often and released his aggression on her in the form of constant criticism, verbal abuse, and finally, beatings.

Rachel bore the abuse as if it were a penance sent down by God for the sin of being a woman. Her mother had endured the same sort of abuse from her father, with the same resignation. It was just the way things worked.

Then, one day, while Rachel was waiting at the laundromat for Merle's shirts to dry, a woman approached her. It was the day after a particularly vicious beating and Rachel's face was bruised and swollen.

"It's none of my business," the woman said. She was tall and stately and in her mid-forties. She had a way about her that frightened Rachel, a presence, but her voice was soft and strong. "But when you get some time, you might read this." She held out a pamphlet to Rachel and Rachel took it. The title was The Wheel of Abuse.

"There are some numbers in the back that you can call. Everything will be okay," the woman said.

Rachel thought it a strange thing to say. Everything was okay. But the woman had impressed her, so she read the pamphlet.

It talked about human rights and dignity and personal power. It spoke to Rachel about her life in a way that she had never thought possible. The Wheel of Abuse was her life story. How did they know?

Mostly it talked about courage to change. She kept the pamphlet and hid it away in a box of tampons under the bathroom sink. It stayed there for two weeks. Until the morning she ran out of coffee.

She could hear the sound of Merle's plane disappearing in the distance as she stared into the mirror at the bloody hole where her front teeth used to be. She dug out the pamphlet and called one of the numbers on the back.

Within a half hour two women arrived at the trailer. They packed Rachel's belongings and drove her to the shelter. Rachel wanted to leave a note for Merle, but the two women insisted that it was not a good idea.

For the next three weeks Rachel lived at the shelter. The women at the shelter cared for her. They gave her food and understanding and affection, and in return they asked only that she acknowledge her own dignity. When she made the call to Merle to tell him where she was, they all stood by her.

Merle promised that it would all change. He missed her. He needed her.

She returned to the trailer.

For a month Merle did not hit her. He did not touch her at all. He didn't even speak to her.

The women at the shelter had warned her about this type of abuse: the withdrawal of affection. When she brought it up to Merle one evening while he was eating, he threw a plate in her face. Then he proceeded to give her the worst beating of her life. Afterward he locked her outside the trailer for the night.

The trailer was fifteen miles from the nearest neighbor, so Rachel was forced to cower under the front steps to escape the cold. She was not sure she could walk fifteen miles.

In the middle of the night Merle opened the door and shouted, "By the way, I ripped the phone out, so don't waste your time thinking about it." He slammed and locked the door.

When the sun broke in the east, Merle reappeared. Rachel had crawled under the trailer, where he could not reach her. He lifted the plastic skirting and shouted to her, "Listen, bitch, you'd better be here when I get home or you'll get worse."

Rachel waited in the darkness under the trailer until she heard the biplane roar down the strip. She climbed out and watched the plane climb gradually into the distance. Although it hurt her face, and the cuts on her mouth split open, she couldn't help smiling. She had discovered her personal power. It lay hidden under the trailer in a five-gallon asphalt can, now half full of aviation grade motor oil.

A policeman came to the trailer that afternoon. His jaw was set with the stoic resolve of a man who knows he has an unpleasant task to perform and is determined to do it, but when he saw Rachel sitting on the steps of the trailer, the color drained from his face and he ran to her. "Are you all right?"

Rachel could not speak. Garbled sounds bubbled from her broken mouth. The policeman drove her to the hospital in his cruiser. Later, after she had been cleaned up and bandaged, the policeman came to her room and told her about the crash.

It seemed that Merle's biplane lost power after a pass over a field. He was unable to climb fast enough to avoid a high-tension tower and flaming bits of Merle were scattered across a field of budding strawberries. Later, at the funeral, Rachel would comment, "It was how he would have wanted to go."

A few weeks later a man from the Federal Aviation Administration came around the trailer asking questions. Rachel told him that Merle had beat her, then had stormed out to the plane and taken off. The F.A.A. concluded that Merle, in his anger, had forgotten to check out his plane thoroughly before taking off. No one ever suspected Rachel of draining the oil out of the plane.