Fire Spirit Read Free Page B

man sat down in one of the armchairs and lit another cigarette. The expressionless man sat down, too, but the scowling man went to the window and parted the dark brown linen curtains so that he could look outside.
    â€˜Still raining,’ he said.
    â€˜Close the goddamned drapes, will you?’ the laughing man ordered him. ‘You want half the goddamned neighborhood to see that there’s somebody in here?’
    â€˜There’s nobody out there, man.’
    â€˜You never know. Just close the goddamned drapes.’
    Ten minutes went by, while the laughing man smoked and the expressionless man jiggled one leg as if he needed to go to the bathroom, and the scowling man paced around the living-room asking irrelevant questions, which neither of the other two men bothered to answer.
    â€˜Got to get that alternator fixed, you know that.’
    â€˜Did you ever try the roadhouse steak sandwich at Quizno’s? Now that’s what I call tasty. Or you can have the chicken with chipotle mayo. I never know which to choose.’
    â€˜Think it’s going to rain all night?’
    She stayed on her knees in the middle of the mattress. She was beginning to feel woozy, and she found it hard to keep her balance. She closed her eyes and prayed that when she opened them she would be back at home, and that none of this would have happened, but even with her eyes closed she could smell the laughing man’s cigarette smoke, and hear the scowling man prowling around the room, talking to himself.
    Please please dear Virgin Mary let this all be over. Please.
    Suddenly, however, without a word, the laughing man flicked his cigarette butt into the fireplace and stood up. The expressionless man stood up, too. All three men approached the mattress and stood over her.
    â€˜You look pretty goddamned drunk to me,’ said the laughing man.
    â€˜I feel sick,’ she said, and her voice didn’t even sound like hers.
    â€˜You don’t want to be barfing, sweetheart, believe me. Barfing can put a fellow off, if you know what I mean.’
    â€˜No,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
    â€˜Well, in that case, let’s show you, shall we?’
    With that, he pushed her in the face with the flat of his hand, hard, so that she fell over backward. She cried out, ‘No! What are you doing? No !’ and tried to roll on to her side, but he pushed her again, with both hands this time, and clambered on to the mattress on top of her.
    He was big and he was heavy and he was very strong. He gripped her neck with his right hand, half-throttling her, while he used his left hand to reach down and tug open his pants.
    â€˜No!’ she screamed at him, right into his leering white mask. ‘No, you bastard, get off me! Get off me !’
    He pulled up the hem of the cheap red dress and then forced her thighs apart with his knees. She kept on screaming, high and hoarse, but she knew that nobody could hear her and nobody was going to come and rescue her.
    The laughing man turned around to his two companions. ‘Come on, guys, what are you waiting for? She’s drooling for it. No holes barred.’
    She saw them unbuckling their belts, but that was all she saw because she closed her eyes tight and kept them closed. When the laughing man grunted and pushed his way into her, and the other two climbed on to the mattress beside her, she tried to think of that sunny fall day in Lafayette when she and Daniel had taken a walk in the woods and he had proposed to her, and she had never realized that it was humanly possible to be so happy.
    She opened her eyes. She was lying on her right side, and she was shuddering with cold. The living-room was in darkness, except for a narrow line of street light that fell diagonally across the mattress from the gap between the drapes. She coughed, and sat up, and looked around.
    The three masked men were no longer around, although she could still smell their