He shoved the shotgun harder into the back of my long-suffering neck. “Keep driving. Don’t you dare honk the horn.”
Shucks, why hadn’t that occurred to me?
Heading on up the road, I had only a glimpse of my own fuchsia home on the passenger side, because I did not dare to turn my head and look. A moment later, Stoat commanded, “Turn here!”
A very rutted and rudimentary lane ran off to the right.
With mental eyebrows raised, wondering what the crazy old pervert was up to now, I took the turn and sent the van into thick woods at a bumpy crawl. I remained terrified, of course, but after a person has been scared fit to pee her pants for long enough, fear becomes a chronic condition to be endured like arthritis or a bad back or the common cold.
The woods gave way to what had maybe once been a pasture but was growing up in scrub—scratchy bushes, shaggy junior pine trees, twisty vines with chalk white leaves. Judging from the crudest of all possible twin-rutted trails winding through the obstacles, I saw that kids had been riding four-wheelers here, cheerfully trespassing while risking their fool necks by crossing the road to jump the ditches on either side.
“Turn right,” Stoat ordered.
Mine not to wonder why; mine but to do or die, or postpone death slightly. Anyway, it was his van that was going to be scratched silly and break an axle. I turned into a space so narrow that thorny branches skittered across the metal on both sides. Necessarily, I slowed the van from a crawl to a creep on terrain more appropriate for tank treads than tires. Plowing through ditches, trundling over logs, all the while I wondered what the heck Stoat was planning. Inwardly I trembled; was I driving him into this hinterland so that he could kill me and nobody would ever find my body?
The four-wheeler trail diminished, faded, then vanished altogether, leaving the van surrounded by privet so thick and tall I felt justified in taking my toes off the gas pedal, relieving my overstretched leg muscles.
Stoat barked, “Whatcha stopping for?”
“We can’t go any farther.”
Stoat actually chuckled. “You ain’t never been no man. Sure you can. Just ram on through.”
“You want me to ruin your van?”
“Go right ahead. You ruined my life already, ain’t you?”
Interesting. I’d never thought of our unfortunate acquaintance in that way.
“Go!” Stoat barked.
Fine. Okay. Whatever. I extended my protesting leg and punched the gas pedal, sending the van crunching through and over the privet, which alternately lifted the vehicle clear off the ground, then set it down again with a wildly slewing vengeance. In the backseat, Stoat lurched and swayed, but I still felt his hand on the business end of the shotgun he had duct-taped to both of us, clever bastard. He could not have foreseen that we would go four-wheeling in a vehicle with two-wheel drive, and that I could have been out of the van and away, but there I still was, stuck to a shotgun stuck to him.
Out of the privet at last, the van struggled through brambles and saplings.
“Just aim between the big trees,” Stoat instructed. “Don’t bother about nothing else.”
Following instructions, I ran the van like a bucking Bubba truck over crepe myrtle, but shied away from a thick catalpa, zigzagged through a grove of water oaks, trundled beneath pink-furred boughs of mimosa—
Mimosa?
“Stop here,” Stoat commanded. But before my foot touched the brake, the van coughed, choked, gasped, exhaled a malodorous steamy cloud from beneath its hood, and died. The engine went shockingly silent.
“Punctured something,” Stoat grumbled. “Don’t matter. This is where we git out.”
Quite illogically, I turned off the ignition, removed the key, and put the gearshift in park, discombobulated to see where “here” was: the woods immediately behind my so-called home. Between the pink fuzz-flowers and plumy kelly green leaves of drooping mimosa boughs, I could glimpse planks painted fuchsia.
“You better goddamn well hope you got some eggs that ain’t gone rotten,” Stoat said.
Trying to remember whether I had eggs in the refrigerator was like trying to revisit a previous life. As if through a glass darkly I recalled that, yes, there were eggs, but it all seemed so long ago, maybe they had gone rotten like Stoat.
“And some halfway decent bread,” Stoat added.
Bread? Did I have any bread, and if so, was it decent or otherwise by Stoat’s unpredictable standards? My brain froze like an overtaxed computer.
“Move your ass,” Stoat growled far too close to my head; I jumped. He edged his way between the bucket seats, his duct-taped shotgun turning my head for me, forcibly. “Gimme them van keys,” he demanded. “We get out the way we got in.”