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8.
Tedda, chained inside the van with three other women prisoners, felt a chilly draft and smelled fresh air from somewhere in the darkness—probably where the seals on the doors were worn out. It was all part of the numb realization that she kept waking to in her thoughts: nothing was going to change. She'd gotten life plus fifty for a murder she could not remember having committed.
Then again, she had visions of sitting astride another woman while holding the woman's head by the hair, and raising a huge kitchen knife for a series of fatal stabs. All because of a seductive man with a small mustache.
She writhed slightly, knowing it was hopeless and she'd never get out. She felt some deep need, some urgency, some overpowering sense that she must do something important, save someone, serve the nation whatever that was, but she had no idea what it meant. The feeling came at the oddest moments, and always passed.
Thunder boxed and growled around in the night sky, and lightning flashed dimly visible in the thick swollen gray rain clouds. The roads in the wilderness were black and slick, shining before a dirty white prison van that slowly made its way through the dense forest. Rain drops cascaded down, left and right as the wind kept changing direction.
The inside of the van smelled of dust and oil and something rotten, like a carton of milk or a half-eaten hamburger left under the torn leatherette seats days earlier. The women sat with their hands fastened together in mid-air, as if praying with fingers folded, and chained to the ceiling. They looked at each other silently, afraid. Two were hardened, with the dead look in their eyes and a slight sneer. Tedda was slender, with raggedly clipped thin brown hair lying on the pale skin of a long boyish neck. Her features were plain, androgynous, with freckles and sullenly darting blue eyes. The fourth woman, Estana, was shorter, more solid, with thick curling black hair and lush South Pacific features, eyes black and blazing as wet coal.
The van started making rocking motions and bouncing so that the women's chains, by which they were fastened to steel braces above, swung back and forth in steady arcs rattling. Tedda could smell the steel, and the oil of the canvas in which it was packed when not in use. "Hey," one of the hardened women said in protest, ever ready to blame someone for everything that happened to her—so Tedda thought, averting her gaze lest the other woman make eye contact and make Tedda her instant enemy for life. One couldn't afford that at life plus fifty. Might become life minus fifty.
The van stopped. Leaning forward together, the women peered through a small window in the wall behind the cab. They could see a lantern swinging steadily back and forth as the wipers labored full force to push sheets of water aside. A figure in a yellow slicker drew near. The driver opened his window, and Tedda heard: "Road's about to wash out. If you go across, you may not be able to get back out any time soon."
The driver, a young black man, replied: "I've got my orders. I deliver these honeys over to Edgemoor and then I do my best to get back across."
"Don't do it," said the man standing by the window. The glow of the lantern filled the cockpit, illumining the drivers with a somber orange light.
"Look man, I've got no choice. The longer you hold me up with this chitchat, the more likely I'll be spending the night at the prison."
"All right," the man said. The lantern withdrew. "Good luck. It's a long way across this canyon when it's full of ripping flood water."
The driver muttered something, put the van in gear, and shot forward. For a few seconds, the van seemed to slide this way or that on an asphalt road surface greased with melted clay. Then the van gained traction and rumbled across a steel bridge whose surface was lined with loose planks. Soaked wood made slamming and ringing sounds as the heavy vehicle rolled over it.
"Something is wrong," Tedda heard one of the hard women say. Estana looked terrified, her dark eyes glittering as she looked frantically about. The other hard woman regarded Estana with contempt, her sneer rising a fraction as she looked at Tedda in a silent challenge to do better than Estana.
At that moment the driver yelled something. The van twisted around in a quick, sickening motion. The other driver's arm was visible waving about as if he were trying to steady himself. The driver got the door open and tried to jump, but it was too late. The bridge gave out in a loud crack of snapping timber and tossed railroad ties. All four women screamed as the van rolled backward. Tedda felt acid terror stun her body with its electric charge. It was terrifying to be enclosed in a box like this, illumined only by the dull, dirty-yellow dome light; and chained, while the van slid backwards into a raging river. Women screamed. The back doors crumpled as logs ground against each other. Instantly water rose up, icy water, and Tedda felt it taking her, rising past her sensitive thighs and crotch, up her waist, to her breasts—the warmth in her prison jump suit gone, replaced by numbing cold. Still the water rose. Tedda had a glimpse of Estana staring at her with those big dark eyes full of terror. The other two, the hard ones, were already gone, only their dead hands sticking up from the foaming water with their chains, and their hair floating like seaweed. Estana was next: Tedda caught a last glimpse of Estana's dulling gaze underwater as she sank down in a trail of bubbles. Already Tedda's scream was turned into froth as the water rose above her mouth. Tedda pulled herself up toward the ceiling as best she could. Her whitened knuckles gripped the icy steel chain links, which were slippery with wetness. Oh God, it bought her maybe a foot, maybe a minute of life, before the water took that away too.
The van landed in the river with a splash of white, and twirled in circles like a cocktail stirrer in the mad flood of debris and foaming chocolate water, seen dimly under repeated lightning strikes. As it twirled, the van suddenly turned over, striking a huge boulder in the wash. The van rolled over, slowing for a few seconds, and the roof tore open with a loud, hideous grinding noise. The van turned fully over, bobbed away, and joined tons of other floating debris on its way to some larger lake of deadly flooding.
Tedda thought: this is it.
Then she noticed that a weld seam in the steel plate holding her chain to the rack had split. Her chain was stuck! If only she could get it free.
She took a deep breath as the van ground over the rock. Then the van spun off the rock and turned again, filling totally with water. Sounds turned to angry mumbles like in a tossing dryer as she fought underwater to get free. She pulled herself toward the ceiling and planted her booted feet against it. Nearly blind in the darkness—the yellowish dome light was flickering and going out—she pulled her chains this way and that.
The van lurched with increasing speed and the motion made her stomach sick. Her air was going sour and her ears felt like exploding. Her lungs were on fire. Her stomach muscles fluttered with the desire to breathe, and she fought the instincts of her body.
There: the chain came free. She had a glimpse of the three women hanging together like dead rabbits a hunter was taking home. She kicked free, and the current rushing through the broken van sucked her out the back door. She caught a last glimpse of the dead drivers: the one's brown head with short hair, the other's foot sticking up. Gone. And she was next. She took a terrified gasp of air, coming up, saw the van fly away from her, saw the foaming waters rushing up to strangle her, saw the powerful currents twirling like braids on a giant green glass rope, and—
Felt a shock as her chain caught on something.
She hung numbly while refrigerator water poured around her. She was caught on a huge log, on its roots, sticking out where it had fallen. She was a thing like a speed boat, rising to the surface, bobbing as the laminar flow sliced around her tearing her clothes. She felt one boot go, then the other. It was as if someone sentient pulled her heavy wet socks off. First one then the other. They flew away on the current. Any second now, a heavy log would fly by and impale her. She gave a yell, and pulled herself up. The motion flipped her around on her belly and pulled her in the lee of the huge tree. She saw that it was shaking like a palsied hand, for all its size and tonnage. Eventually it would give, and would crush her as it took her down under and out to the lake or sea or whatever lay downstream.
She summoned her last ounce of energy, pulled herself up on the trunk, and lay gasping for a few minutes. The hard wood under her sang and trembled, and she thought she felt it move an inch, she felt it give a little. That made her pull herself up, as if sitting on a horse, in a saddle. It made her shimmy down toward the shore a foot at a time. Her wrists were still manacled together, and about four feet of slender steel chain links dangled from the manacles, ending in a broken link. She rolled over, tossed herself free, just as the huge log made a protracted groaning noise and slid several feet with the current, preparatory to being unwedged from the bank.
Tedda rolled free, crawled up a bank of packed wet sand in a drenching downpour. She was numb with cold, but alive. That alone gave her energy to keep on. She half crawled, half staggered up the bank until she found herself at the edge of what looked like a huge parking lot. Wind whipped across the flat black surface, and tree branches bounced around like twigs in the storm. She heard a cracking noise behind her, and looked. There went the five or six ton log she'd ridden minutes ago—torn from its anchorage, rocking majestically like a heavy boat as it floated away in the fast tide.
Tedda held her hands to her eyes to shield them from cold stinging needles of rain in the wind. She staggered toward a mass of distant lights atop a fortress-like structure. As the wind howled around her, pushed against her, she abruptly lost her energy and crumpled in a heap, welcoming the numbness, the darkness, like someone falling asleep. It felt almost cozy, the kiss of death.
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