Stacking in Rivertown by Barbara Bell Page A

and collar are removed.
    “Jesus, she pissed in here.”
    “What do you expect? He left her in there too long.”
    They leave me and go about their business. I don’t move. I don’t even open my eyes.
    The fawn kneels beside and kisses me on the cheek. “Beth,” she says. “Wake up.”
    I ignore her. If I have to move or speak, I think I’ll go mad.
    She pulls me onto my back. “Beth.” She runs her fingers through my hair. I open my eyes a slit. “I have food,” she says. “And something to drink.”
    She helps me to lean back against a couch, then wraps my fingers around a bottle of water. I raise it to my mouth, missing at first. The fawn guides it to my lips.
    After I eat a bowl of mashed potatoes, she hands me another bottle. “What day?” I say.
    “Sunday,” she says. “Early.”
    “God.”
    “You need a bath,” she says. “Finish your water.”
    I suck down the second bottle like it’s nothing.
    “You’ve got a play coming later.”
    “God, no.” My vocabulary appears to have gone to shit in the last who knows how many hours.
    “Come on.” She coaxes me like Jeremy. I crawl on my hands and knees, following her into the bathroom. When the tub is full, she helps me to settle in, then goes away.
    My head is splitting from the punch to my nose, which is fattened and still leaking a drop at a time through the clots in each nostril. My face is tender from my lip to my forehead. I think again about buying futures. Seems a mistake to me.
    Ben arrives. He’s dressed in a black silk shirt, gray Armani suit pants, and Italian shoes.
    “You might as well kill me,” I say. “I can’t take this.”
    He stoops beside the sunken tub. “It’s almost over, Beth. Not much longer. One more play.”
    He leaves. I soak for a long time, sinking down and holding my breath, letting the minutes go by, pushing the limit on how long I can stay under.
    When I’m done, I drag myself out and lie on the tile in the sun. I fall asleep.

    I wake when the boys come in with a wide belt and manacles. They help me to stand, very friendly with me as they chain me up. They chatter away about some baseball game they’ve been watching on TV. The boys appear to have gotten over cleaning up my puddle of piss.
    One fits the belt around my waist, covering my now famously erroneous scar. The other pulls a chain through the ring in the front of the belt so that it moves freely. They manacle my wrists and ankles, attaching them with locks to each end of the chain. Another in a long series of hoods is fit over my head and a collar is buckled in place. I hobble along as they lead me out.
    In the room they take me to, they have me climb onto a cold metal table on hands and knees. Nice doggie, one says. Good girl, the other adds.
    Oh, God. Not that.
    They leave.
    Before long the door opens and someone comes in. The door shuts.
    What do you think? says Ben.
    I feel hands stroking my back as though petting, then rubbing my ass. The hands check the tightness of the collar.
    I don’t like a hood, the man says. You know I like to admire their markings.
    I stop breathing. I know that voice.
    Not this one, says Ben. She’s still in training. We have to keep the hood on. See? She was bad. We had to beat her.
    I would have figured out who it was right off, if I had ever had a clue about it. But I wasn’t thinking along those lines. I didn’t know how good Ben was working me.
    The man touches the marks where Ben beat me.
    She’s got good in her though, he says. I can see it.
    That’s all I need. Good old “the world is a happy place” Jeremy. Jesus. And I thought he was using Sunday afternoons to screw Helen.
    My view of the world, the planet in general, the universe, and my very hazy idea of a weak and bumbling God, all of it crashes in with a lot of noise and dust. If you can’t figure Jeremy, you can’t figure anything.
    I had already decided that I wasn’t going to see the light of day again, that Ben was going to keep me this