A deer mouse, not to be confused with a dear mouse, scuttled out from under one of the bunk beds and dived into some firewood stacked beside an honest-to-God potbellied stove. I carried Hypatia over there and set her down on the floor, exhorting her, “Enjoy.” An oak snake, after all, is just a fancy-colored rat snake by another name.
Next, with my heart beating a little faster than before, I pried open the Rubbermaid containers.
Acute disappointment. The containers protected blankets and candles, not food.
There were no kitchen cupboards or counter space. No kitchen sink. What did the people who used this place do for water, let alone food?
Ah. I saw a screen door, much patched, leading to the backyard jungle, and toward the near side of the jungle stood an old-fashioned water pump.
I barely noticed the gallon plastic milk jug squatting on the floor inside the screen door. The flashlight battery seemed to be dying just in time for dark. Quickly I scanned the back steps in case of snakes other than Hypatia, then the floor under the picnic table and under the lower bunk—
I shrieked. Justin burst in at a run. “What? What’s wrong?”
“What’s right!” My flashlight had picked up words in thick black marker—CANNED GOODS. Plunging to my knees, I laid the flashlight on the floor and began pulling out flat cardboard boxes crowded with cans and jars. “Peanut butter! Do you like peanut butter, Justin?”
“At this point, who cares? Give it here!”
“Wash your hands first.” Oh, how childbearing doth make mothers of us all.
“How? Should I spit on them?”
“Try the pump.”
Then I had to show him how to prime the pump with the water in the plastic milk jug, left there for that purpose. As he scooped peanut butter with a relatively clean finger, the flashlight began to fade so rapidly I turned it off. It was getting dark outside, so I couldn’t read the labels on the cans that I was hauling out from under the bunk. Then I remembered the candles I had seen in the Rubbermaid containers, and with them I found, along with a black marker, a dish towel, and some other things, matches.
That simply, like a butterfly fluttering its wings in India, the evening reversed itself and became nearly festive. By the light of candles stuck into the chinks of the picnic table, Justin and I used his handy-dandy multipurpose tool to open cans of Vienna sausage (which I loathed, but he wolfed down like a puppy), stewed tomatoes, baked beans, mixed vegetables, sauerkraut—at this point almost anything edible looked good, and wonder of wonders, I found some Pringles! An acceptable starch on which to load the other things and gulp them down.
While Hypatia traced contented serpentines all over the cabin, Justin and I ate hard and fast. After we had gorged, we belched nearly in unison, laughed, and sat back to look at each other.
“You feel better?” we both asked at the same time, then laughed again.
This was, of course, too good to last. Every movie I had ever seen told me the bad guy should arrive this instant when we were off guard. I said, “We ought to douse the candles.”
I saw a quick shadow of understanding cross Justin’s face almost as if I had taken the black marker and written “STOAT” there. He nodded, yet said, “Before we do that, could you cut these Goldilocks cornrows and braids off of me?”
“You don’t like them?”
“God, no, I hate them!”
“Stoat the Goat’s idea, to draw attention to your hair and not your face, right?”
“Right.” He handed me his pocket tool opened to rudimentary scissors. “He even made me dye my eyebrows.”
“Now, that’s extreme.” As quickly as I could, listening all the time for the sound of any vehicle approaching in the night, I started shearing his bleached hair, proceeding at first around the base of his skull. As plaits of hair dropped away from the back of his neck, I saw two marks that wrenched my stomach.
Trying not to sound as sick as I felt, I asked, “What are these, cigarette burns?”
“Stun gun tracks. From when he first knocked my bike down and hauled me into his van.”
Little kid. Stun gun.
“That consummate bastard,” I said.
“Overkill,” Justin agreed. “But effective. I didn’t even try to run when he got me home.”
“And then what did the son of a bitch do?”
He told me a little bit about it, not too much, and I did not press him with questions. By the time I’d cropped his dreads off, he’d fallen silent. I started on the cornrows, which were more difficult to cut off. After I’d been yanking and tugging for a good time, Justin complained, “Ow.”
“It’ll be worse than ow if we don’t get our butts to the police station.” I kept hacking, piling shorn yellow hair onto the table. Finished at last, I jammed the grubby green baseball cap onto him. “Wow. You look completely different.” Then, quickly, I blew out the candles and at once felt safer.