Train by Pete Dexter

passed; the boat rocked up and back, as if it were breathing.
     
     
“The doctor they got at Vacaville?” he said. “I had to talk to him every Monday morning, ten-thirty, and then group session at four, every damn week, even after he already diagnoses I was a classic psychopath, without the ability to feel remorse. Said I couldn’t put myself in nobody else’s place. Thirty months, I had to do every day, on account I couldn’t feel remorse.”
     
     
She sat still; they sat still. It came to her that she was supposed to say something now, but she didn’t know what might save her. “Tell me the truth about something,” the mulatto said softly.
     
     
She nodded again. She looked quickly at the big one, and then away. He wanted to do what he wanted to do.
     
     
“You ever knowed anybody like that, that felt remorseful over what they done? I don’t mean if they got caught. Just sit around cryin’ over something that’s already past? What is your opinion on that?”
     
     
She felt him watching her, waiting to hear her lie. Whatever she said, he would hear the lie, and that would be it. That was what he was waiting for; then he’d let the other one do what he wanted.
     
     
“I don’t like doctors,” she said.
     
     
And that stopped him cold, and then he started to smile. She didn’t know what else to say, and so she only nodded, and her skin stuck to itself where the blood was drying on her neck, and then pulled loose.
     
     
The mulatto kept smiling, and in some way believed he had won her over. “You see that, Arthur? I told you, man. She gone start the motherfucking ship.”
     
     
They untied her, and when she stood up the towel fell from beneath the shirt, and as they went up the narrow stairway she felt fresh blood on her stomach. She was behind the big one, and smelled the baby powder on his pants. He stopped, halfway through the threshold, checking for other boats, and a moment later he reached down and picked her up by the arm, lifted her the way you lift a child, and it hurt her breast, but then the air was clean again, and cool, and she felt the sun.
     
     
The mulatto appeared a moment later and had a look around. There were other boats, but none of them close by. No one would see what happened; the only record would be what these two remembered themselves. The unfairness of that stirred her, that all that would be left of this was what they remembered.
     
     
She pulled herself to her feet, and stumbled over a rope. She would have fallen, but the big one caught her by the hair from behind and pulled her upright. She touched her face— she had been touching her face all her life; even as a child, she’d known she was beautiful— and did not recognize the shape.
     
     
He let her go, but stayed so close she could hear noises in his stomach. She walked to the back of the boat to the wheel. They both followed her, but unsure of their footing, afraid of the edges. The wind came up a little and there were whitecaps beyond the wall protecting the inlet.
     
     
She sat down at the pilot’s deck and saw that they’d left the ignition key on. Red lights all the way across the control panel. She left the key where it was and pushed the button on the other side of the panel, the one that warmed the fuel.
     
     
“What you doing there?” the mulatto said. He was standing to the side, watching, throwing a shadow over her arms.
     
     
“It’s a diesel,” she said. “You have to prime it.”
     
     
The mulatto looked across the water. There was movement on the decks of two of the sailboats. One of them a ninety-footer out of Seattle that had been moored there since before she and Alec came on the boat. “How long this gone take?” he said.
     
     
“Not too long.”
     
     
The big one towered behind her, his head a few inches from the boom. The boom was metal and she had once knocked herself out, bumping into it as she came up from below in the night.
     
     
She held the button