Deviances

Bound and whimpering, the girl sat on a dirt floor pressed into the corner of the garage. Bruises fudged her hide while scraped knees and elbows jutted from her ripped blue and white T-shirt and boy-cut panties the wrong shade of brown.

On the opposite side of the garage, Nostalgia stood with chin length hair the shade of a wasp and hazel eyes bearing down on a man who lay in a ragged cot, shirtless and snoring. His chest was marred with purple jags and clumps of singed pubic hair.

Enraged from knowing what he’d done, Nostalgia spread her fingers and gripped his lard-locks. Jerked him from the soiled bedding and released him to the ground amongst the corroded bolts and greased cars parts., The man shook his head, looked up at Nostalgia. Mouthed, “Who the fuck-”

Nostalgia branded his mouth with her steel toe boot. He gritted and spit blood. Pushed himself from the soil and rust, tried to tackle her. She took his momentum, slid her right hand beneath his left arm, pivoted on her right foot, shifted her hips as her left hand guided him through the metal garage doors and outside into the haze of morning, where two dogs barked.

Glancing at her mentor, Fu, Nostalgia watched him remove the bindings from the female. Gnats crisscrossed through the fumes of spilt fuel, engine oil, rubber, and the sex that had been forced upon the abducted female. Scents that branded memory.

Nostalgia remembered stopping months ago in the desolate hills of Daniel Boone Parkway to use the restroom.

She was on her way back home to Indiana after visiting her parents in Kentucky. Nostalgia’s father worked the mines outside of Whitesburg. Growing up she couldn’t wait to escape the bible-belt and its seething judgment. She got a job in Louisville at the Ford Truck plant. Hated the grime of worn mattresses, beer bottles and fast food sacks abandoned down side streets with the yik yak of base from low rider cars, horns honking and fuel fumes fogging from a vehicle’s exhaust. Found cheap rent in a nearby small town across the Ohio River in Greenville, Indiana.

But after those first few months, she began missing the clean and quiet of the mountains along with her kin. Made that four hour commute to visit her family on her three days off every week.

She’d stepped from her car out into the end of the day heat. The sun was a descending sac.

A station wagon sat idling off to the side, the only deciphered letters on the side of the car were, Salvage. A frame brushed past her as she stepped into the restroom. She’d turned to hook the door shut when the slap of metal walled her nose flat. Rung her brain with pause. Fluid parted down her chin, dotted the concrete floor. Hands pushed her into the mortared wall. Before she could scream, a cloth suffocated her with a toxic scent that forked through her nasal passage and disconnected her motor functions.

Nostalgia woke to the waft of armpits and assholes. Broken vinyl marred her swollen face and aching temples. Willie Nelson’s You Were Always on my Mind blared from the speakers. She was in the backseat of a car. The floorboard was littered with empty motor oil bottles, ragged tennis shoes, tubes of grease, and a small rubber mallet.

She lay like this for a moment, tasting chemical, wanting to shake this nausea from her mind, unable to recollect what had happened. Panic and fear chalked her marrow. Caused her biceps, forearms, thighs and calves to quiver. Her eyes began to leak and her breathing sped up. She watched trees and hillside obscure the late evening sky through the car windows. Glanced at the front seat. A shaved head freckled with sun spots outlined the driver’s side. Flipping through the pages of reason in her mind, she thought about the television re-enactments on Dateline and Court TV documenting the abduction of women. Women taken for the sickness of others.

Showing up weeks or months later, disfigured, assaulted, and dead.

She worked in a factory doing the labor of men, Nostalgia told herself. She was stronger than this moment of fear, not knowing where she was or why. She’d have to use the panic to survive or become another reenactment. Glancing at the mallet on the floor, she reached for it and sat up like a Mustang GT enraged by a shot of nitrous.

Screamed and swung at the shape navigating the car.

The man’s head thumped into the driver’s side window and he hollered, “The fuck?”

The car jerked from one side of the road to the other. Gravel clanked against the car’s frame.

“Get this bitch off me!” The man reached with one hand to protect himself from the hard rubber that smashed his fingers, pelted his ears, dented, and plumbed his liver spots.

From the passenger’s side, a shape pawed at Nostalgia’s attacks. Grabbed at her wrists. She made eye contact with the defender, took in the leaf-green eyes rimmed by mauve sacks draining into cheeks pocked with tiny jasmine bumps. Hair short and thorned north, east and west. Teeth dusted with decay. It was a young boy.

The man stomped the brakes. Nostalgia slammed forward over the seat, dropped the mallet. Then came the punches to her face head, and shoulders. Dizziness danced in her brain. The man thrusted the gearshift into park, pulled her from the car. Drug her through weeds littered with plastic soda bottles and beer cans. Yelled, “Hurry up for someone see’s us!”

The man didn’t stop till till he’d dragged Nostalgia to the trees.

He released her. She balanced on her knees, laced her fingers into a prayer and through wavy vision, she pleaded, “Why you doin’ this, why?” Digits tightened in her hair from behind, yanked and angled her features for the knuckles that fed her more pain.

She blacked in and out. Felt the jag and scrape of branches carving into her limbs. Rocks pitted her skull into a dull state of being. And words rivered through her mind, “She ain’t like none of the others. Got too much gamecock in her.”

Nostalgia felt warm sludge splash upon her legs, chest and face, smelled the stink of coal and mud. Then the warm dunk of molasses-like goo engulfed her body as a hand held her under the pond’s muck. She tasted the left over mineral and stone from mining and the damages it left in the pool of water. The slop replaced her air. She’d no fight left in her and her world expired.

Nostalgia woke stiff and clammy, smelling herbs. A lean cylinder of man stood over her. Behind thick glasses, his eyes beaded. He had carbon colored hair and lemon skin. He pulled long stringy pieces of steel from a white saucer filled with rubbing alcohol, rubbed them between index finger and thumb, worked them into the places of hurt on her body till they hit bone. Made
the pain disappear.

When Nostalgia tried to roll words from her lumped tongue and welted jaws, the man placed his index finger to his mouth.

“No talk now,” he said.

Days passed into weeks. Nostalgia learned the man’s name was Fu, that he was a Fukien disciple from China, brought to the states by a man named Shong, collecting gambling debts for him in connecting states. Fu had lived in Kentucky and Indiana, but now he was a permanent fixture in the Kentucky hills after the procuring of a debt in Indiana had taken a toll on him a few
years ago.

She told Fu her name was Nostalgia Purvis.

They sat in a calculated silence. Then Fu asked, “You remember what happen?”

She told Fu everything came in snapshots. Visiting her parents. Stopping to use the restroom.

The bold letters Salvage on a station wagon. A metal door slamming her face. The scent of toxins.

Waking to the waft of oil and grease. Being beaten and her lungs gasping for air. Tears laced each blink from her swollen eyes. She felt the warm calm of Fu’s touch on her
leg. Even after the recollection, she did not fear this man. Wiped the liquid from her face and asked him, “How’d you find me?”

“I on way home. See shapes from distance move fast from woods to vehicle. Feel negative energy of their wrongs within self. Watch their taillights disappear into night. I walk back to
where they come from with flashlight, find you floating in black pool.”

More weeks passed. Nostalgia missed her mother’s cooking, her father’s stories about his day at the mines when she visited. What she didn’t miss was the spin of impact drills to bolts attaching doors to frames at her job.

She woke one morning to a culling from within herself, knowing she wanted to learn what Fu practiced every morning. She ran her tips over the uneven crust and yellowing fist prints of her appearance, heard the sound of muscle, tendon and bone deflecting and punching a solid surface. Followed the sounds from her bed, through a hallway, across a hardwood floor and out to the back part of the house. Watched Fu with his back turned, knees bent, heels pointed out, toes in. Plumes of smoke rose over Fu’s head. His hips shifted with each attack to what looked like a lacquered fence post with two rods at shoulders’ width and one centered with his sternum.

“I want to find them,” Nostalgia said.

“I’ve felt this. But why?” he asked without turning around. Striking and blocking in a pugilistic rhythm.

“So it doesn’t happen to others,” she said.

“They are predators.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

Fu stopped his actions. His heels met. Then his toes. He stood up. Bowed to the post. Turned and stubbed his cigarette out in a red hexagon ashtray that lay on a green table, said, “Follow
me.”

Nostalgia followed him down steps into a basement. He flipped a switch. Bare bulbs strung from the two-by-six ceiling rafters. Heavy bags shadowing the floor. Diagrams of calligraphy lined the cinder walls with charts of segmented body parts: arms, legs, back, face and neck. Black dots marked pressure points on each. On the far wall hung framed paintings of an old man with white hair and beard riding an ox and next to those were sketches of a man who looked like a monkey balanced on a stick. Between them curved pieces of steel, long and short were anchored into the concrete, butterfly swords he called them. Similar wooden posts were arranged like the one upstairs, only the rods stuck out from different angles.

In a corner sat a chrome table with drainage holes in the top. Stacks of paper, clippings and maps pinned to the wall above it. Fu offered his hand, the palm up, to a chair, and said “Sit.”

“What is this?” Nostalgia asked.

“Too many question,” Fu laughed. “One must crawl before they can walk.”

Fu pointed to the newspaper clippings on the wall. Told her over the course of years as he’d collected debts for his employer within the small towns of surrounding states, he’d read newspapers to better understand the English language. He started connecting small occurrences in the papers from Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee.

Told her, “Women like you disappearing from rural bars or gas stations. Sometimes their vehicles found. Sometimes they not.”

Fu said, “You say something ’bout smell of oil. Word salvage on car.” He pointed to a large map on the wall with destinations circled. Said, “Sometimes bar or gas station not far from such place.”

“Place?” Nostalgia questioned.

“Salvage yard,” Fu said. “My belief, they connected.”

“Connected?”

“Yes, these women being abducted by men who work salvage business.”

“But why?”

“Deviances.”

“Sex?”

“Deviances are many,” Fu said, “My belief, women are taken, kept as slave. Why never found. Could be ring. Catching one could lead to others.”

“How do we catch them?”

He paused, said, “First need training.”

“Training?” she asked.

Fu held a fist in between them. “Martial training.”

“Like you do upstairs on the fence post.”

“On wooden dummy, yes.”

It was a lot to take in that morning. Men abducting women for sex. Keeping them as slaves. But it made sense. Cause those women never turned up.

After that, days were twelve hour sweat sessions of chin-ups every morning in the closet, push-ups and crunches from the planed floor. Stretching, holding postures for minutes, then
hours. Knuckles being pounded flat. Her palms and shins were bruised from striking slabs of wood and punching bags full of sand. Sweat burned her eyes like the lactic acid her muscles
pissed. Nostalgia clocked hours with Fu in that cold basement, firing jabs, crosses, hooks, knees and elbows.

Her rebirth. That’s what Fu, called it.

At night, Nostalgia and Fu dug through the newspapers. Mapped out more details. Discovered there’d been less disappearances from gas stations and more from bars.

Six months later, they traveled the back roads of Kentucky. Started canvassing taverns in close proximity to salvage yards. Parked and watched the denim and T-shirt dressed workers and
farmers saunter from their vehicles across the graveled and paved lots of rural area taverns.

Till one evening they sat in Fu’s car, watched a man pull up in a nicked and scratched wrecker. Parked in the back away from all the other vehicles, entered the bar, hair stringing from beneath
a truckers cap, bloated out belly covered by a sleeveless sweatshirt.

Forty-five minutes later, the man stepped out and walked to his truck. Reached inside for something. Waited beside his truck before pulling on a cancer stick. A female exited alone. He dropped the smoke. Wrapped whatever he’d pulled from his truck around his hand. Soft steps came quick across the gravel. From behind, he placed his hand over the girl’s face. She jerked then melted into his arms. He broke the female over his shoulder. Loaded her into his truck and drove off.

Fu and Nostalgia followed from a distance. Headlights carved through the hill country. They
watched the wrecker turn down a dirt road lined with a graveyard of demolished vehicles. A sign
beside it read Tobe’s Towing and Salvage.

Nostalgia slowed. Fu told her to go on. “Why?” she questioned.

“She need lose hope. An emotion you never experienced.”

“No!” she yelled.

“Girl need see and feel degradation so she don’t let it happen again,” Fu ordered. “This your
first test.”

Fu was sadistic. Malevolent, Nostalgia thought. But he had saved her. She trusted him. He was the teacher and he said, “They be many, many more.”

And now, after stepping from the tin sided garage, that girl sat watching. Her brunette hair knotted, skin on her lips broken, wrist and ankles cankered by rope burns, while the shoat hog of a man stood up panting.

Nostalgia’s right plastered the man’s nose, jarred his neck, bones popping down his spine. Ligaments vibrated down her forearm. The man’s knees locked. Double straight line punches tattooed down his center, hooked left, then right. His pisser dribbled and he whimpered like a child smacked with a thick section of leather for disobediance.

Around them, cars lay dented and smashed in corroded hues of black, navy, and maroon. Dogs drooled with filed teeth, spiked collars attached to log chains that kept their mud-dried coats anchored to the earth.

Nostalgia clutched the hairy man’s loose hanging balls. Wondering about others like him. Dug a thumb into his orb, four fingers behind his ear and met his snout of black heads with her teeth, bit down, and kicked his legs from beneath him.

His outline jarred the dusty lot. Nostalgia spit and straddled the man, colored his sight with her clenched hands, rolled him face down, twisted one arm behind his shaggy back, then the other, and quick-tied his wrists together.

Standing, she tasted his filth and listened to him bleed and scream.

“Who the shit are you?” the man asked.

“Nostalgia.”

“What you want?” he slobbered.

Nostalgia glanced over at Fu who kneeled beside the female. The girl was trembling and hugging her knees. Fu nodded to Nostalgia with a knife-edge smile. She wondered how many more men like this there were. How many girls had been taken.

Nostalgia looked back at the man. Dirt covered him like he’d been dipped in brown sugar. She wanted the same thing she would scourge out of them all. “Answers, ” she said.