The Whetting
By Jamie Ogden
The girl was surprisingly easy to carry.
Her long, wet hair had soaked my canvas jacket and my skin felt clammy inside of it. My hands, though, were on fire, as I clenched her body to mine, suturing the wound in her side with my rough fingers. She’d lost a lot of blood back at the hot spring.
The trail out to the road zig-zagged through the sage brush in short, steep switchbacks, slick with mud and pooled with the last of the winter’s ice soaking into the earth. I stepped wide and swiftly, trying to keep my feet on the dried bunch grasses or anything with roots.
Flat ground and gravel brought relief. I stopped to make sure she was breathing, my own breath whetting the quiet night in even strokes. Her small breasts, wrapped in her mud-streaked swim top, rose gently. I held her away from me–like an offering just to be sure it wasn’t my chest making her move. In the space between us, she rasped; still with me.
I had been stabbed once–in prison, in about the same spot, too close to liver and lung. Some bitch had come at me with a shank, for no apparent reason other than I was the first thing in her way as she tried to lash her way to freedom.
The girl, the one in my arms, was scrawny, like a child. Maybe she was a child; couldn’t be much more than twenty. She didn’t stand a chance against that asshole. All she could do was flail underneath him, clinging to the mountainside’s thin crust of dirt. He pinned her down, grabbing at clothes, as she roiled and rolled on the newly sprung wheat grass.
I heard him hit her hard across the face, heard her kicking stop. Then he grabbed the hunting knife and punched it into her side. I gave up hiding quite suddenly, springing out of the night shadows onto his back like a lynx. I put out his breath with my arm cinched around his neck.
I made my break from Idaho Women’s Corrections about a month ago; jumped from a work crew assignment into the untamed pines. The crew boss gave me a pretty good head start before she let the guard know I was gone. The hot spring was about ten steep miles due west, on the other side of the ridge.
March was too warm, making the snow come down fast. I was a wet mess by the time I reached the saddle–damn near hypothermic is what I was. But the snow patches kicked back enough light, and fear kicked in enough adrenaline to help me pick my way down the other side.
They don’t expect women to know the wilds anymore, but that was always our job; to be honed to the rocks, roots, clouds, water, living things and dead things, abundance and danger.
About five hundred feet above the hot spring was my cave. The jack-ass college students, local hipsters and resident rednecks who hiked into the spring rarely climbed any higher than the hot pots. But they left behind enough to keep me supplied in clothes, towels, water bottles and snacks. It was too cold for them to camp out this time of year. So, I’d wait–sometimes shivering until after midnight–for them to get their shit together and hike back out to their pick-up trucks to go home to Boise or wherever, for their voices to fade away from me, so the hot water could flow over me.
At first, I was careful, covering my tracks and hiding from planes flying over. But I had come to accept I wasn’t worth looking for.
The man and girl came up late last night. The canyon seemed empty as I started down to the spring, but then I heard their voices bouncing off the rocks, his thick boozy drawl leading her high-pitched chirps and giggles up the trail, bumping against boulders and pines.
The early days with Nathan were like that–me, sixteen and too free, towed behind a man who seemed to be taking me somewhere. I was new to the courage of liquor and dope, when he took me from the bar to the river, laid me down in the soft, cold sand. His touch was soothing then, like the edge water lapping at stones.
I clung to the current of Nathan long past the time his touch turned brutal. He knocked me out. He knocked me up. The baby clung to my insides. She rewired me fierce as she made my blood and breath her own. When Nathan beat me, I fought for her. He kicked; we kicked harder. When I killed him, it wasn’t an accident. But I still lost her.
When I got the girl to the road, I could see the tavern lit up across the old highway. There weren’t more than a few houses in Elk Bend, but there was still a bar. I slipped across the pavement and into the gravel lot. There were four pick-up trucks to choose from, but I’d go back and take the asshole’s truck from the trailhead.
I deposited her at the front door of the bar, the red light from the neon signs making her skin glow as if it was warm, though she was nearly frozen with shock and cold. I arranged her on her side there on the crusty welcome mat, stab wound on top so they would see it when they stumbled out.
I knelt beside her, cradled her head in the crook of my arm and lowered my cheek to hers. I felt our breaths, joining and splitting like a braided stream … I pounded on the old metal door as hard as I could, rage in my fists. Then, with a river of rage in my legs, I ran.
About the Author
Jamie Ogden enjoys writing and humans. She studied journalism and anthropology at the University of Iowa and Syracuse University. She lives in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, where she has worked a variety of storytelling jobs, such as newspaper reporter, teacher and community organizer. Her work has appeared in Camas Magazine (University of Montana).
