oh but jesus was a crossmaker

They haven’t even noticed she’s gone. Or they think she’s off in some fenced suburban backyard smoking pot with Nadine and her brother — except mom and dad only ever call it marijuana like a couple of parole officers, sternly chiding: You know, this is serious. Marijuana is very, very serious. That’s how they see her — their truant daughter.

Don’t you ever just want to leave it all behind? Take to the road, throw off your obligations. Just once. One time. Max is giving her that chance, and she’s going to take it.

At the rest stop there’s a plastic rack full of magazines for sale, but none of them interest her. She doesn’t know what she’s scanning for, but all that’s there is: smiling faces and stiff poses, cheerful gestures that don’t seem to mean anything any more, like alien hieroglyphs. Max keeps his eye on her from the parking lot blacktop. She can feel his eyes on her — like an animal watching her from the underbrush. She thinks about telling him there’s a place they could go, out there on the river with nothing else in the world — a beautiful place, a quiet place.

Nobody looks twice at them, a grown man and a teenage girl. I must look old for my age, Danielle thinks, bending over the metal basin of a bathroom sink to pin the hair back from her face. Only when she doesn’t smile. She doesn’t feel like a runaway, and she doesn’t look like one either.

Max is waiting in the car for her when she returns.

“If you want something to read,” he says, and pats the headrest.

In the indentation of the passenger’s seat sits a Vintage International paperback with a little yellow butterfly on the cover, and a blurry photograph of a dancer. More assigned reading. She’d taken every word of what he’d given her to heart, she’d turned over every grown-up word in her mind until an opinion could form like a pearl in an oyster, and now he’s rewarded her with more work. He’s teaching her.

*

Back roads, the scenic route. Sometimes when they cross over state lines there’s not even a sign — Max has to tell her, he reaches over and shows the juncture on the road atlas balanced between her knees.

Is he keeping her here? Is he taking her someplace? No, he’s not keeping her anywhere. He’s taking her — wherever the two of them want to go. California. Or maybe they’ll stop in Texas and find some other place with a river running through it. The sound of Max’s voice is always in her ears, settling into the little hollow at the base of her throat like a secret swallow of red wine, raw and bitter. He’s cheap white trash, and he’s taking her away from summer school and purpose statements and extracurricular activities — from laundry baskets and soccer uniforms and picture day. From her father, and everything he’s done.

She doesn’t feel like a hostage. What would a hostage feel like? Frightened. If she were frightened of him, she couldn’t sit awake and watch him sleep from a hotel bed. The air conditioning is turned up too high, but she doesn’t dare get down off the narrow twin bed to adjust the plastic dial — the mattress sags when she swings a leg over the side, and she can’t risk making a sound.

On the nightstand between them is a big black hunting knife. At the foot of the nightstand is a school bag. Danny is bare-legged in a print nightgown; through the cotton her nipples make sharp points. She could pick up the telephone and dial, she could step out the door and put one foot in front of the other — past the swimming pool, past the ice machine, down to the front desk. She could pick up the phone right now and call her father. Maybe he’d even answer.

Max Cady is asleep. Danny watches his chest rise and fall beneath his unbuttoned shirt — all the muscles of his chest, the ledge of bone that must be his ribcage standing out under his white tee shirt. The ink under the skin, all the messages that span his arms and chest and legs — all the marks she can’t see, all the words where their endings snake underneath a cotton cuff or sink into shadow and can’t be made out. His face is turned away, sunk in darkness. All she can make out in the thin light from the bathroom door is the corded lines of his neck.

The unbroken sleep of the innocent, huh? Danielle runs the water in the hotel bathtub as hot as it will run, and masturbates until her legs feel as weak and boneless as rubber bands. The water runs down the drain, and Danny shuts her eyes.

*

Camouflage, isn’t it — changing his stripes, shedding his skin. He can be wry, gentle, controlled, cautious — when someone is watching. Danny watches for glimpses of what he must be like when nobody else is around.

She’s never known a man like this — more of a man than any man she’s ever known, impossibly unselfconsciously masculine, like something in a movie. Boys are polymorphous and shifting, boys are moving targets — and this isn’t like that. And if Danielle isn’t just being her sweetest, most obliging self — the smiling makes her cheeks hurt, ducking her head, vague distant smiles glimpsed in the rear-view mirror. She’s only the passenger, riding along — manning the map, unspooling her brain from the passenger’s seat when the nights stretch out past nightfall and even Max’s bright sharp eyes begin to dim and droop. Staying sweet-smelling and clean, picky, particular — and it isn’t a chore, when it’s like this, keeping a lid on her anger and boredom and disappointment. She calls him dad in restaurants, before the waitress can raise her eyebrows — he could be somebody’s father, but he’s not hers.

They pull over for dinner at a lousy little bar that must have a kitchen in the back, and a vinyl tiled dance floor tucked away in the corner — it must be the most popular joint in town, and there’s so many moving bodies once they step inside that she can feel Max stiffen with awareness, like a dog with its ears pricked up. Men and women mingling at tables or up along the bar, but no kids. Danielle picks a table with a little jukebox on it, and feeds it quarters.

Max orders her a Coca-Cola — better make that two. He’s old enough to drink, and Danielle is old enough to want something stronger, but she’s never even seen him order a black coffee. Something is different about tonight, in this grease-smelling roadside shack. He takes her arm when they’re done with their sandwiches and Cokes, but not to pull her out the door — he pays the tab in twenty-dollar bills and pulls her out onto the scratched tiles, but not to dance. She wouldn’t know where to put her feet. Max sways with her, his arm around her back and his tattoos burning through his sleeve, burning into her skin. Danielle leans against his hard chest — she can smell the sweat of him, the smell of cigar smoke.

“Bet you’ve never done a thing wrong in your life,” he says.

“You know that’s not true.”

Nobody in this dinky little bar is looking at them. His big hand slips into hers, and the tattoos on the backs of his knuckles are as smooth as scars.

*

There’s a cop car behind every embankment, lurking in every speed trap, but none of them make the stop — none of them even pull Max over. When they stop for gas Max pays at the pump in cash, not so much flirting with danger as making a pass at it. There’s a girl behind the counter; pretty, young, black. Danny can hear Max flirting with her when she pushes past him on the way to the bathroom.

Danielle huddles up in the stinking men’s room. Her hair is tucked raggedly under a cap and her tee shirt is untucked from her jeans under an unbuttoned shirt, one of her dad’s. Danny washes her face under the tap, tries to wash her armpits and her sweat-sticky shoulders, tries to ignore the smell of urine and wet paper towels. All they need is gasoline and a cheap lunch and they can keep driving. This won’t be a long stop, and nobody’s even looking for them. This ruse is so it stays that way.

Something is happening out there, and before she can take the turn around the corner she hears it. Cady’s voice, electric and commanding — the voice, but not the words, and then an ear-splitting sound that rattles the wire racks. A shotgun going off.

Danny thinks, the cops are here, and in the same breath he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead, except he’s not dead, he’s not even down. Max is seeping red blood through tattered holes in his black tee shirt and the man who shot him is on the tile floor — some miserable country kid, ragged and mean-looking. Max kicks away the gun and it slides down a long aisle of potato chips and sunflower seeds.

It’s not the cops. The cops aren’t even there. The kid on the floor isn’t moving.

Max is still standing. Danielle can’t even remember the act she’s supposed to be keeping up. She wants to run to him, to cry out, to do something, but her legs won’t cooperate and her throat won’t let a sound escape it —

Max makes a gesture with his bleeding arm, easy as anything.

“Get out of here, Danny, would you?” Run along now.

The girl behind the counter is terrified, frozen in place. She must be Danny’s age, or maybe a little older; not much older at all. Cady walks away, as easily as he came, and Danny’s sneakers leave long smears of blood behind them.

*

In the passenger’s seat, picking little tiny pellets of lead out of the muscle of his shoulder — he doesn’t shudder and flinch, he doesn’t say anything. How can she tell how bad it is, when he won’t even tell her? The tattoo that once marked his shoulder has been obliterated. The ink under the surface seems as if it should leak out, but it’s as black as the blood is red. The only light comes from the car’s dash lamps, the spill of headlights on the dirt road, and Danielle can scarcely keep her hands steady.

“Bet your father couldn’t have done that without losing his lunch.”

Max’s arm looks like something from a horror movie — the muscles stand out rigid, and the raw flesh beneath her hand is pocked with white edges, red scrapes. It could have been worse. It could have been his face. He doesn’t flinch when she wipes the blood clean.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” She tries to rub his shoulder, high up enough not to hurt — like mom would, ineptly comforting. Max grins at her.

“Not one bit. I come from strong stock, Danny. You’d have to do more than that to take me out of commission.”

The strength of his arm, the raw muscles in his back moving under her hand. Everything dangerous, everything out-of-bounds is there, under the skin.

“It ruined your tattoo, you know.”

What had it been, anyway? What had she seen, that night in the hotel? A dragon or something, or a big cat. A panther? A tiger?

Sitting in the passenger’s seat, with her shins sticking to the leather upholstery — he kisses her there, with her bloody hand on the gear stick and her bloody chambray shirt wrapped around his upper arm. Danny’s mouth opens under his, without even meaning to, and it isn’t like any kiss she’s ever had in a carpeted basement or a school gymnasium — it’s not even like the kiss they shared in the school basement, his thumb teasing her lower lip, his mouth on hers. Her body comes away thrumming.

*

They dodge police cars and inquisitive gas station attendants, and stop off at a state park or a national forest or something, the kind of place Leigh would have turned into a three-day camping trip back when she and Sam and Danny got along better — Danny and Max sleep in the car and eat their supper under the stars, not speaking to one another. The animals are out in the dark, all around them and unseen. The terrible quiet wraps around them like a coat.

Two men turn up later in the night, both young, pacing the perimeter with thin beards and baseball caps and beer cans in their hands. They look dirty. Their only luggage is a black plastic garbage bag. When Danny gets out of the car, one of them whistles at her, and the other one laughs, covering his face. Danny darts back, doubling around the other side of the vehicle with the shame burning in her cheeks, and when she dares to look up to see if they’ve come any closer she sees Max’s face reflected in the side mirror. Max is watching her.

This place would be pretty under different circumstances — dark woods, narrow paths, the smell of running water. She needs some place to wash her hands, her face, her feet. Leaves and branches whip against her bare legs — Danny hurries down the path, listening for something over her shoulder, anything at all.

When Danny comes back the hole is already dug, and the bodies already lined up side by side. He doesn’t tell her why, and Danny doesn’t ask.

*

Early morning in a gas station lot, listening to the radio — a plastic bag full of gauze and granola bars and bottled water down in the footwell with Danny’s discarded shoes. Danny eats her breakfast. Max is reading a paperback book; the cover says Blood Meridian.

Danny reaches out for one of his hands. There are blisters there, on the webbing between his fingers and his thumb. Danielle tries not to look at them, tries not to touch them, tries not to remember where those hands have been and what they have done. Just to touch, to hold, to stay put.

Maybe they tried to rob the car. Maybe they were after her and she never knew it. Maybe—

The pot is making her thoughts hazy. Her throat aches. She wants Max to touch her. She wants to get out of the car and be sick. Danny takes a pull of smoke, and lets it escape her lips before she says anything.

“You know, I felt bad for them. Is that weird? I feel bad for them.”

Them. They both know. It’s only been a few hours — a few miles down the road.

Max takes the joint from between her fingers, like it’s something contaminated. “Don’t. Don’t bother. Some people, well, they just lead unexamined lives. That’s all. They’ll never be any better than poor white trash.”

Danny cocks her head. “You don’t really think that’s true—”

“Oh, I know it’s true. It’s nothing to do with money. Take your father, for instance.”

Danielle exhales, annoyed. “You don’t know shit about my father. You only met him one time.”

“He’ll never be more than an upwardly mobile Southern prick. He can’t keep it in his pants, so he steps out on your mother, but he can’t live honestly, either. So he lies to you about it and thinks that makes him a principled man.”

“How did you know about that?”

“Men like your father don’t think too much. They’re like sleepwalkers. We’ll just have to give him something to think long and hard about when he wakes up.”

“I know that. " She’s unable to suppress her irritation any longer; it comes surging up in her chest like throw-up. “How did you know my dad’s a cheater? How the fuck did you know that?”

“Just a lucky guess,” Max says with savage good humor. It makes the corners of his eyes crease into deep valleys.

“That’s none of your fucking business. You think you hate my dad, ha—”

“Stop right there, Danny. Before you say something you’ll regret.” Max’s fingers spread on the leather of the car seat.

Max didn’t come here for her. He had no intention of taking her away like this, until the opportunity presented itself and he took it — she had to force him into it, to give him something that was too good to resist. If she wasn’t what she was — if she wasn’t pretty, if she wasn’t in summer school, if she wasn’t so easy, if she was a little older or a little younger — he would have left her behind. Killed her. He could have killed her any time now, in five different states and two dozen different counties.

Max has two tattoos that say Loretta, one on his arm and one over his heart. Loretta’s tattoos aren’t like the others; they barely look deliberate — heavy green-black, in a unsteady hand. Maybe those were the first ones he ever got.

Danny swallows, and finds herself smiling, the corners of her mouth crooking back nastily without even trying to. Good old dad, ruining everything even from a thousand miles away. “What do you know about my father, Max?”

“Your father put me away.”

“For what?”

“Down in Atlanta, a couple of beer-swilling crackers picking on a waitress. I stepped up and clocked one of ’em. Turns out he had a bad heart.” Max makes a face like: well, what can you do? “Couldn’t make cash bail. Your old man was my public defender and I never even saw his face. Never even showed up. Guess he had something better to do with his time.”

“No, that’s not why. Max, that isn’t why.” He’s lying to her, and it makes her sick. Danielle plucks the joint from his hand and takes a drag. “What did you go to jail for?”

What did they do to him there? Was he always like this? Who the fuck is Loretta? There are a hundred more stupid questions rattling around in her head, and she can’t even get one of them out without being shunted back into the child’s position again, like she’s some stupid girl and he can run rings around her.

Something behind Max’s face opens like a door. “Do you really want to know why your daddy put me away? Or do you want me to show you?”

Danielle shakes her head, hair swinging. Max puts out his hand for a moment to thumb at the peach-fuzz corner of her cheek.

“I’m the only one who’ll tell you the truth, Danny. Remember that. When the police come, you tell them I made you do everything.”

Classical music on the car radio, unbroken darkness on every side and Max’s long arm braced against the driver’s side window — like that movie with Jodie Foster and the cannibal. She wasn’t supposed to see it — her mother wanted to see it, but she wasn’t supposed to, creeping into the theater with Tabby and Nadine and gripping each other tight in the dark. Mom had heard them talking about it on the phone, and at dinner (no dad, red wine for mom and root beer for Danny) she’d asked her what her favorite part was. She wasn’t even angry, just — surprised. Pleased, maybe. Like it was their secret.

Leigh Bowden doesn’t know where her daughter is tonight. Danny feels sick. She stubs out the joint in the car ashtray and hugs her knees.

Max killed that boy in the gas station — he killed those people back at the campground. Would she swear to that in a courtroom? She never saw it, she didn’t even hear it. What does she know for sure about this man? She doesn’t even know his real name. She doesn’t even know what he’s done, except to whisper it in her ear, back there on the stage with his fingers grazing the soft place of her throat: you aren’t happy, are you, don’t you ever want to leave it all—

“You killed my dog, didn’t you?”

Just an animal — a dumb animal. What did he ever do wrong?

“It was just a little pesticide. They sell it at the hardware store. You know what happens in federal prisons?”

Max says it like it comes easy to him, like it’s normal late-night conversation, slumber party talk. Danny swallows, too stiff to even nod her head.

“I know.”

“Your daddy did that to me. I was twenty-five years old, fresh as a fucking daisy.”

“I’m sorry.” Nausea makes a tight knot high in her chest, right under her sternum.

She knows. She knows. But not to Max — not ever to Max.

He’s been in their house. Nobody let the dog out, and the dog is dead. If he wanted them all dead, then they’d be dead too. Danielle is suddenly aware of her bare legs, how dirty they are, how blank they look. Max’s eyes are creeping over her like a hand.

That man — the boy, on the tile floor of the gas station in front of the cigarette lighters and stay-awake pills, he’s dead and Max has killed him without even thinking. Those men, who only whistled, who only looked —

What had he done? What will he do?

“I made a covenant with mine eyes,” Max says idly. It could just as easily be Shakespeare. Danny knows it isn’t.

Danny is itching in her skin, acutely aware of the borderlines of her body — the secret crease where her thigh and calf press together, the dull throbbing ache between her legs, the track of sweat between her breasts. She can’t take her eyes off Cady’s bandaged arm, the veins of his forearm, the ink there: vengeance is mine. Chapter, verse, New Testament.

Max rubs the back of a finger down the outside of her leg. “You know what the Mann Act is? You’re a smart girl, Danny. When it matters.”

Too smart to be happy. Not too smart to go off with strange men.

“It’s the law that prohibits white slavery.” A weird phrase, the kind of thing that elicits nervous laughs in history class. The memory of the classroom makes her shift uneasily in her seat.

“Transporting any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose. Last amended on November 7, 1986. But the spirit’s the same.”

You’re not transporting me, she means to say. You’re not debauching me.

“I wanted to go,” Danny says. “I’m not breaking any laws.”

“You’re liberated from all that. The sooner you recognize that, the better.”

“Max?”

Danny shifts her weight into his lap, and presses his hand to the inner seam of her shorts.

This is what he wants. This is a mistake. This is a mistake in so many ways. Her zipper slides down, and his thumb plucks at the white elastic waistband of her underwear — god, why couldn’t she have packed something nicer, why couldn’t she have owned something nicer, the kind of sheer high-cut thing beautiful women wear in music videos. Everything she wears seems snagging and too-tight and too-loose and awkward.

This is what she wants, shimmying loose to reveal unmarked flesh, soft mammalian baby-hairs prickling — his fingers find the humid split of her, opening her like a book. Danny shivers and turns her body against his, pressing her knees apart and letting his fingers work in her. Her arm crooks behind his head.

Danny kisses him, long sharp movie-star kisses — the movement of his rough fingers makes her ache and flutter. He has an erection, right there where she can see it, where she can feel it. Danny puts her hand on it, right through his pants, and Max cradles the back of her head in his one big hand — she kisses the corner of his mouth, the scratchy rise of his chin. She can feel the heat of his breath against her face.

Max presses her against the dashboard, hard. It’s starting to hurt now, the bruising crush of his body against hers — down in the pit of her crotch something is aching, tightening. Danny breaks away, sucking down deep breaths, trying to focus herself — her heart is pounding in her chest, the humid air is licking down her belly down to the stir of awful wetness between her legs. Her arms are crossed over her chest, her cheeks are burning and Max is considering her.

Danny squeezes her knees together, and tries to still her shudders.

“Max, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t apologize.”

There are bugs on the windshield, flies buzzing around in the dark outside. Nobody is coming here to save her. Nobody even knows she’s here at all. Max has invited her: Come through hell with me. Come out the other side a new woman — sadder but wiser, harder and stronger.

 

What I did on my summer vacation. Her heart is turning pearl-hard, hard as enamel

*

She sleeps curled up in his lap. Her hair hasn’t been washed in days, gone springy in the heat. It gets cold at night, and the big black hunting knife is there beside him, pressed along his leg. This is the end of her, so many miles away from anywhere she has ever known.

Lying beside him, Danny opens her eyes. Max is smiling at her indulgently.

“I had a little daughter,” he says, “just your age. She likes to think I’m dead.” And he reaches out a big hand.

Where is she now? Somewhere down south in Florida or Georgia, dirt-poor and growing fast.

Whatever he did, Max lost everything. Maybe he deserved to lose it. Let him punish her father — by taking his little daughter away, showing mom how impotent her husband is in the face of danger, how little authority her husband has over his own home.

Maybe this was never the plan. Maybe he never expected her to like it this much.

“Could you ever kill a man?” He presses the knife handle into her palm — his rough hand covering hers, his fingers pressing between hers. “Of course you could.”

“I’d kill him for you,” she says. She doesn’t know if she means it.

Danny’s fingers trace the veins in the back of his hands. This is Max Cady’s masterstroke. Not just to ruin her and to take her away but to make her want it.

*

Max dials the phone. Danielle holds the handset to her cheek, and waits. She doesn’t have to wait long.

Come and find me, dad. The bait, the lure. He’ll come alone, he won’t even bring mom.

Over the phone line Danny’s voice sounds cracked and girlish. Dad just sounds like dad on the other end — he doesn’t say some special thing that she’s been wanting to hear all these years, he all but chokes on the sound of her name. Danny says everything just right, and this man, her father, isn’t even trying.

She holds the handset to her ear for a long time after Max ends the call, listening to the dial tone over the motel telephone line — the manager is a woman, and she thinks Max is just sweet as pie. She won’t be thinking that if dad calls back.

Max presses her against the bed and knocks the plastic handset from her hand, he presses her wrists back against the mattress. The monstrous strength of his body sets her stomach fluttering.

“Don’t go anywhere,” he says.

She could dial 911. She could call Nadine, or her mother, or call her dad again and confess everything — confess everything that’s been done to her, what she’s done. What she’s wanted to do.

Danny lies back with the handset resting across her stomach, and cries. Then she waits.

She’s sleeping when Max comes back for her, sleeping like the dead. He can lift her easily — like a child, and she wakes up to the warmth of his arms, and the smell of sweat. He carries her in his arms; Danny’s head rolls helplessly against him, nodding with every step. Light slants through the blinds at sickly angles.

They’re going someplace, now — to finish it.