CROSS COUNTRY

She isn't looking for trouble, and she doesn't expect trouble to be looking for her. She chants no mantra on this day. She listens to the steady bellows of her lungs and the rushing of blood in her arteries. Her feet rise and fall, heel-toe, heel-toe, and her body moves against the lycra encasement of her running tights. She's locked into her long-distance pace, which isn't blindingly fast, but she's taught herself to never quit and she could, perhaps, run down a deer if she had enough time.

She's running along the centerline of a road, but there aren't any cars. It's a closed section of highway that curves along the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge--a condemned two-lane blacktop made long ago for tourists in Model A Fords, but now is only cracked concrete with lines of green where the grass pushes through. She runs into narrow, dripping tunnels blasted from solid rock by the WPA, and then she runs out the other side into the living explosions of blackberry vines that close the road down to one lane, in places. She crosses short bridges with mossy stonemason walls. Lichen hangs from the trees like moistened beards. The sky is overcast, as usual, and water is everywhere. Waterfalls rush white through the fern-dark underbrush. The woman's face is wet from heavy drops falling from the trees: maple, beech, Douglas Fir, cedar, ash. Rain patters on leaves and courses down slick trunks, but the woman doesn't stop to partake of this sensual feast. She is only semi-aware of her surroundings because she's working to improve herself, improve her time. She believes the beauty of the land will still be there, when she's finished.

The Columbia River is two miles wide below her, but the woman will not drown. The river drains the land from Montana and up into British Columbia and then it rolls back to the south and then west to the sea, all the time nurturing its populations of salmon and steelhead and sturgeon. There are eels on the rocks, bass in the sloughs, ducks and geese in the wetlands. In the hills above the river there are bobcats, coyotes, foxes, and perhaps mountain lions and black bears, but wild animals do not stalk the woman. Nature surrounds her and she is young and she feels unthreatened, as she always has, in the forest.

Though her life has never been in danger, she is aware that horrible things happen. She was raised in a town surrounded by old-growth timber and so she was raised to be self-sufficient. In a small pack strapped to her back, she carries a cache of emergency supplies. The items are miniature and, on ordinary days, sufficient: waterproof matches, a tube of antiseptic lotion, tissue paper, a half-dozen Band-Aids, her wallet and keys. It's a very sensible kit for her to carry, and the small weight of it, if she thinks of it at all, makes her feel she is a pragmatic person.

She keeps her pace. There aren't any other people in sight. No fellow runners or hikers or bicyclists. It wouldn't matter to her if there were other people. Her running is a deep meditation, her mind focused inward upon itself. In this mindset, she is convinced that her lungs do not burn, the muscles of her legs do not ache, her stomach does not protest. On the straights, she closes her eyes and goes as close to a transcendental state as she dares. She catches glimpses of the people she loves: her mother's hands knitting a sweater, her father's Adam's apple bouncing up and down when he laughs, the brown eyes of the gentle boy she dated in high school.

And so it comes as a great surprise when she trips over a length of heavy fishing line pulled taut across her path. One second she's moving and the next, she's kneeling in a puddle and trying to catch her breath. Her shins burn from their impact with the line and her knees leak blood. She hears a rustling in the trees and a gloved hand snakes from the undergrowth. A strange arm lunges for her as if to save her, catches hold of her hair and then pulls her into the bushes. The pain of her fall and the pain of the man's grip flood to the fore, but she doesn't believe the pain is real. The leaves of the underbrush shake and release their burden of water as the arm pulls her along. She doesn't scream or lash out as she's heard she must, under the circumstances. The rain slips down and replaces the water falling from the leaves. A freight train enters a tunnel on the far bank of the river. The woman disappears.


The man holding her is wearing a red and green ski mask, as is the other man who strips off her running tights. Their faces are the colors of Christmas, but their eyes are hungry and mean. The abuse is worse than she might've guessed, had she only read about it in the newspaper. A stunning rain of blows, at first. No reason, no explanation, only the grunting of exertion and the flat, smacking sound of fists on flesh. She curls up and tries to go to that place in her mind that comes when she runs.

They pull off the rest of her clothes. She tries to resist, but her arms emerge from arm holes and her legs retreat from leg holes until she is naked. She feels the cold growth of moss and lichen against her skin and she wants to pull it over her like a blanket. She tries work herself into the ground, but the soil is too thin.

When she struggles beneath the first man, it isn't a savage defense, but only a sort of protesting isometric exercise beneath his weight. The man lifts from her and the second man forces himself upon her much more roughly than the first. The second man hits her until a moan comes from her bleeding lips and then he laughs. When he's finished, she tries to sit up but he pushes her back down with the sole of his boot.

The men have a short conversation, their breath steaming the air. She doesn't hear what they say. They remove their masks. The second man snaps open the blade of a small folding knife. The woman feels as if she is an animal that has been hit by a car. Her vision is blurred and the men and the forest look soft and muted as the backdrop of a dream. The second man walks toward her and it's only a few steps, but it seems to take forever.

The woman has always listened to the signals of her body, and now the signals tell her that she is in no condition to run. Her mind tries to solve the problem of it. She feels the bulge of her small pack caught between her back and the soft forest floor. The men didn't take it, but there isn't anything in it that would help her, now. She doesn't believe in violence, but she longs for a weapon. The longing comes from nowhere and everywhere and it seems slightly ridiculous to her, even under the circumstance, but the image comes anyway: Her pulling a gun from the pack, pointing and firing, and then the image is gone in its own desperate balloon of unreality.

The second man stands over her and she looks up at him and says, "Don't." The man laughs. "Little late for that, isn't it?" He comes at her and stabs her with the knife. She holds up her hands and takes a few defensive cuts to her arms and then the knife finds her once, twice, three times high in the chest, but the small blade doesn't penetrate to her vital organs. She isn't dead, but they wrap her in a blanket and lash it down with their heavy fishing line. They drag her as they might drag a rolled-up carpet. She loses consciousness.


There's no light. No water, no sky, no earth, only pain. Only suffering in the cold air. But then she hears a sound. Something is moving. Tires on pavement, swaying hell, the smell of blood. She fades in and out and then she opens her eyes as wide as she can. She moves to the limits of her bindings as waves of sickness roll from the darkness, but she fights until the dizziness subsides. She struggles again and the line comes free. It isn't necessary to tie strong knots for a dead woman, she thinks. Moving slowly, she tests her arms and legs for damage. No bones are broken but when she moves, her t-shirt sticks to the blood on her chest and the pain nearly causes her to lose consciousness again. She stops moving. She listens to her ragged breath coming in and going out and she feels the fingers of terror fluttering on her skin and then the fingers become more purposeful and start to take hold of her. She stifles an urge to scream.

The thought enters her mind that she should let the men continue to think she is dead. She cries silently. The tears drip from her face like raindrops from a muddy leaf, but no one can see her. After a few minutes she understands that tears have no power in this place. She cries until the flashes of her panic begin to grow dimmer. Gradually, she finishes with crying because it can do no more for her.

With great effort, she pushes against the fear, forces it into a corner of her mind and holds it there. She waits to make certain it won't break loose again. She squeezes her eyes shut and takes a smooth, deep breath and then another and another, and then she takes stock of her situation.

She's lying in the trunk of a car, going God-knows-where, on a straight, fast road that can only be a freeway. She isn't angry, but only confused. She can't comprehend why this should be happening to her. She begins to hope. It was all a mistake; the men will take her home; they will let her go; they will forget about her, entirely.

She listens to the sound of tires hissing over wet concrete, and the hum of the car's exhaust. One of the men laughs and the sound of it is like a red light flashing behind the woman's eyes. The truth is bared, in that laugh. Stark and mean. There's no escape, no way to reason with these men. Her hope vanishes and, casting about, she finds a kernel of resolve she didn't know she had--a resolve that's different than the long-suffering drive of the runner. Something older and much darker. She gropes in the darkness and her fingers close around a steel bar. A tire iron.

The small determination flares in her chest and then grows stronger. She lets the physical world she is in flood into her consciousness. The pain. The rough steel beneath her back. The smells of blood and mildew and gasoline. She senses these things and the bleakness of her situation. She moves her arms and legs slowly to wring the stiffness from them. She doesn't hope, nor does she give up hope. Everything is different, because running is no longer her goal. This isn't a sporting event, and she can't afford to play by rules. Things begin to appear simple, elemental, to her and she knows without question that she is changing into something else, entirely. When the men open the trunk, she will fight and win, or fight and die. Words have become useless. Violence has brought her to this place, and now violence is the only thing that can save her.

The car slows. Her heart beats faster. She's nearly prepared, but before she goes completely over the edge she pauses, resisting the madness. Deprived of the sight of the water and the trees and the wildlife, she longs for her life to be the way it once was. Images of the people she loves come to her with photographic clarity: her mother's crooked teeth, her father's swollen belly, the floppy ears of the gentle boy she dated in high school. And then the ancient imperative rises in her and she's mortally angry at the men who stole her away, and at her old blind ways, and she knows she'll do whatever it takes to run beneath the trees with her hard, new eyes.

§ § §

Terry DeHart was raised in Portland, Oregon and is a former U.S. Marine. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three daughters, and works as a technical writer at NASA/Ames Research Center.

Terry's stories have been published in bananafish, Vestal Review, In Posse Review, The Paumanok Review, Barcelona Review, Zoetrope All-Story Extra and the first edition of Literary Potpourri.

Terry has completed an outline of his first novel, and is now "putting in the words and commas, and shit." He can be reached at: tdehart@earthlink.net.

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