ELLEN LOOKED LIKE either a mean schoolteacher or a mean prison guard, Henry thought, when he met them at the Conoco an hour later. He thought it was her hair: short, tightly curled, her ears sticking out like semaphore signals. He was having second thoughts about going off with them, but the idea of being in a movie: a movie. He’d be somebody.
Ellen was gassing up a Subaru station wagon when Henry wandered up, and Kristen came out of the Conoco carrying two grocery bags, heavy enough that the muscles stood out in her forearms. She’d changed into jeans in the cool of the evening, but still had the black duct tape across her breasts.
They got in the Subaru, Henry in the back, with his pack and the grocery sacks, the women in the front. Ellen started the car, and then Kristen, in the passenger seat, threw her arm around Ellen’s shoulder, and the two women kissed, a long, sloppy French kiss, with Kristen’s eyes cutting to Henry in the back, who looked away.
After ten seconds or so, Ellen turned away, put the car in gear, and they headed out through town, past the roaming bikers, country people in trucks, out of the built-up area, and into the hills.
“Where’re we going?” Henry asked, ten minutes out. There were no lights along the road they were on. Ellen said, “Got a camp out here. The movie’s set out in the wilderness. The thing is, you can’t have shit like road signs and telephone wires when you’re shooting a cowboy movie. You gotta get way out in the countryside.”
They drove along for another few minutes, then Henry asked Kristen a question that had been bothering him a bit: “Aren’t you a little . . . cold?”
“Mmm, yeah, you know. There’s a shirt right behind you, in the back, toss that to me, will you?”
Henry turned in his seat, looked over the back, saw the shirt, got it, and handed it to her. She ripped the tape between her breasts and peeled it off, then turned to Ellen and said, “What do you think?”
“We get back to camp, and I’ll suck them right off your body.”
“You wanna help?” Kristen asked Henry.
“Uh, I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know? What the fuck does that mean?”
“I think he’s queer,” Ellen said.
Kristen nodded. “Yeah, he looks queer.”
“Not queer,” Henry said, turning to look out at the night. He really wished he’d stayed with Skye.
“He’s queer,” Kristen said. She pulled on the shirt and buttoned it. “Maybe he could blow Raleigh.”
Henry shrank away into a corner of the seat. “Why don’t you guys let me out. I can walk back from here.”
“Oh, fuck that. Pilate wants to talk to you about the movie. We told him you were coming, and if we don’t bring you up here, he’ll kick our asses.”
The road had started out bad and had gotten worse, gone from gravel to rutted dirt. Ellen slowed, slowed some more, and Kristen said, “There’s the rock.”
An orange rock, looking like a pumpkin, sat on the edge of the road. Ellen took a right and started climbing a hill. The headlights no longer showed any road at all, although here and there, Henry could see tire tracks. They topped the hill and off to the left, and higher, he saw a sparkle of lights coming down through a stand of trees, and as they got closer, an oversized campfire.
“Here we be,” Kristen said. Ellen pushed the Subaru past a circle of cars, and the group’s RV, and stopped.
The two women got out, collected the grocery bags, and Henry, toting his pack, followed behind them, through some trees and between a couple of older cars, toward a campfire whose flames were reaching to head height.
He looked up and saw the entire Milky Way, right there, on top of him. He staggered a little, looking straight up as he walked. The stars looked like the lights of L.A., from up on top of the Santa Monica Mountains.
“Got him,” Ellen called, as they walked into the firelight.
Henry could see fifteen or twenty people sitting on camp chairs and stools around the fire, and then Pilate stood up and called, “Everybody say, ‘Yay,’ for Henry the traveler.”
The people around the campfire all shouted, “Yay,” and Pilate came over and wrapped his arm around Henry’s shoulders and said, “Glad you could come. Hey, Raleigh, come over here and say, ‘Hi.’ Bell, come over here . . .”
Three or four men came over, and wrapped up Henry, tighter, really tight, and he tried to laugh or smile and at the same time push them off, and then Pilate said, “Take him down, gentle,” and the whole mass of them collapsed on the ground, and somebody said, “Give me the tape,” and Henry tried to fight them then, but his arms were pinned, and he tried to bite, but there was a hand on his forehead, pushing him back, and then somebody rolled a strip of tape over his eyes and they turned him and rolled him and in the end, he was helpless, his hands taped behind him, his feet taped at the ankles, his legs at the knees, another strip around his mouth so he couldn’t scream.
He could still hear.
He flopped around on the ground, hit the back of his head on a tree root, and everybody laughed and then Pilate said, “Shred him.”
Somebody had a knife or a razor, and they cut his clothes off him, until he was buck naked except for the tape, and then Pilate said, “Kristen . . .”
“I got them,” she said. She clanked something together. Steel.
Henry was dragged for a while, rough, over rocks and tree roots and spiky brush, and then somebody said, “Gonna cut the tape, hold his arms.”
For a few seconds, Henry thought they were going to cut him loose, and he stopped struggling while somebody he couldn’t see cut the tape around his wrists. Two or three people had hold of each arm, and he fought them, but couldn’t get free, and they pushed him up against the rough bark of a pine tree and Pilate said, “Higher, get them really high.”
Henry’s tormentors levered his arms overhead, his back against the bark, and a woman said, “I can’t reach that high,” and a man said, “Give’m to me.”
They nailed him to the tree. Drove big spikes through his wrists, just below the heel of his hands. Henry screamed and screamed and screamed and not much got out, because of the tape over his mouth.
Then he fainted.