slotted the end of the tag into the screwhead again, and turned it twice. The rest of the length he was able to loosen by hand. He did it with a big, unbelieving grin on his
face.
Before beginning on the screw at the left end of the split—a split that was now two
inches wider—he wiped the metal tag clean on his shirt (or as clean as he could; the
shirt was as filthy as the rest of him, sticking to his skin) and kissed it gently.
“If this works, I’ll frame you.” He hesitated, then added: “Please work, okay?”
He slipped the end of the ID tag into the screwhead and turned. This one was tighter
than the first…but not that tight. And once it started turning, it came out in a hurry.
“Jesus,” Curtis whispered. He was crying yet again; he’d turned into a regular leaky
faucet. “Am I gonna get out of here, Bets? Am I really?”
He moved back to the right and started on the next screw. He went on that way, right-
left, right-left, right-left, resting when his hand got tired, flexing and shaking it until it felt loose again. He had spent going on twenty-four hours in here; he wasn’t going to
hurry now. He especially didn’t want to drop his keyring again. He supposed he could find it, the area was small, but he still didn’t want to risk it.
Right-left, right-left, right-left.
And slowly, as the morning passed and the holding tank heated up, making the smell
ever thicker and more noisomely rich, the split in the bottom of the tank widened. He
was doing it, closing in on getting out, but he refused to hurry. It was important not to hurry, not to bolt like a frightened horse. Because he might fuck up, yes, but also
because his pride and self-esteem—his essential sense of self—had taken a beating.
Questions of self-esteem aside, slow and steady won the race.
Right-left, right-left, right-left.
Shortly before noon, the seam in the dirt-caked bottom of the Port-O-San bulged open,
then closed, then bulged and closed again. There was a pause. Then it split open along four feet of its length, and the crown of Curtis Johnson’s head appeared. It drew back, and there were clatters and scratches as he went to work again, removing more screws:
three on the left, three on the right.
The next time the seam spread apart, the matted, brown-streaked crown of his head
continued to thrust forward. It pushed slowly through, the cheeks and mouth drawn
down as if by terrible G-force, one ear scraped and bleeding. He cried out, shoving
with his feet, terrified that now he was going to get stuck half in and half out of the holding tank. Still, even in his fear, he registered the sweetness of the air: hot and humid, the best he had ever breathed.
When he was outside to his shoulders, he rested, panting, looking at a crushed beer
can twinkling in the weeds not ten feet from his sweating, bleeding head. It looked
like a miracle. Then he pushed again, head lifted, mouth snarling, cords on his neck
standing out. There was a ripping sound as the gaping split in the tank tore the shirt off his back. He hardly noticed. Just ahead of him was a baby scrub pine no more than
four feet high. He stretched, got one hand on the base of its thin and sappy trunk, then the other. He rested for another moment, aware that both of his shoulder blades were
scraped and bleeding, then pulled on the tree and pushed one final time with his feet.
He thought he might pull the small pine right out by the roots, but he didn’t. There
was a searing pain in his buttocks as the seam through which he was wriggling tore
his pants down, bunching them around his sneakers. In order to get all the way out, he had to keep pulling and twisting until the sneakers finally came off. And when the
tank finally let go of his left foot, he found it almost impossible to believe he was
actually free.
He rolled over on his back, naked save for his underpants (askew, the elastic hanging