After that, every man in the department, he's pinching his ball skin through his pants. Lifting one elbow the way a monkey would, to scratch the hair under that arm. In their heads, they ain't had sex with anybody. No way could this be crab lice.

Maybe about this time, a detective's wife comes downtown. Finding the little leak spots of blood you get with crab lice. A splatter of red pepper you find in your tightie whities or the inside of your white T-shirt, anywhere clothes come up against body hair. Little specks of blood, blood, blood. Maybe the wife finds it in her hubby's shorts. Maybe she finds it in her own. These are college-gone, suburban, and shopping-mall people with no real crab-lice experience. Now all their itching makes sense to her.

And now this wife, she's pissed off, bad.

And no way could any wife know this is the rubber-doll version of getting crabs from a toilet seat. No doubt the story her husband would tell. But that's all Cora could rustle up from County Health. You can't keep spirochetes alive on silicone. You can't pass hepatitis unless you got broken skin. Blood. Saliva. No, the dolls are real, but not that real.

Any wife lets this go, and next week he'll bring home herpes to her and the kids. Gonorrhea. Chlamydia. AIDS. So she's all over Cora, asking: “Who's my husband banging on his lunch hour?”

One good look at Cora, her hair-spray hairstyle and pearls and knee-high nylons and pants suit, and no wife would cast blame in that direction. Cora with old tissues tucked up the sleeve of her cardigan sweater. Cora with a dish of hard ribbon candy on her desk. The Family Circus cartoons pinned to her cork bulletin board.

Still, nobody's saying Cora Reynolds is unattractive.

Then the wife sees Director Sedlak with her red-red fingernails.

Nobody was not amazed when Cora got called in for a little sit-down.

Nobody could tell Cora Reynolds her days were numbered.

The director, she sits Cora across from her big wooden desk. The director's office with its high-up window. The director sitting, outlined in the sunshine and the view of cars in the county parking lot. With the fingers of one hand, she waves Cora to lean closer.

“It was a tough call,” the director says, “deciding if my entire team is crazy, or if you are . . . overreacting.”

Nobody felt how Cora's heart dropped off a cliff at that moment. She sat, frozen. It's what we do: turn ourselves into objects. Turn objects into ourselves.

Those millions of people, all over the world, still trying to save Breather Betty. Maybe they should just mind their own business. Maybe it is too late.

It's the kids, the director says, who tear up the dolls. It always has been. Abused kids abuse what they can. Each victim will find a victim. It's a cycle. She says, “I think you should take some time off.”

If it helps, just think of Cora Reynolds as a 120-pound condom . . .

Nobody says that last part. But nobody has to.

Nobody tells her to go home and get set for the worst.

As part of keeping her job, Cora will have to return the Breather Betty doll she's reported to have taken. She's to relinquish the stuffed toys she purchased with county funds. She's to surrender her keys to the health room. Immediately. And make the room and the anatomically correct dolls available to all staff members. First come, first served. Immediately.

How Cora felt, it was like coming to your first stoplight after driving a million billion miles, too fast, wearing no seat belt. Resignation mixed with tired relief. Cora, just a skin tube with a hole at either end. It was a terrible feeling, but it gave her a plan.

The next day, coming into work, nobody sees her duck into the evidence room. In there were knives that smelled of blood and Superglue, there for anyone to take.

Already, a line is forming beside her desk. All of them waiting for the last detective to bring back a kid. Either kid. They both look the same, silicone-face down.

Cora Reynolds, she's nobody's fool. Nobody pushes her around.

A detective arrives with the boy hanging under one arm, the girl hanging under his other arm. The man heaves them both on the desk, and the crowd surges forward, clutching the pink silicone legs.

Nobody knows who are the real crazy people.

And Cora, she's holding a gun, the evidence tag still hanging off it on a string. The case number written there. She waves the gun at the two dolls.

“Pick them up,” she says. “And come with me.”

The little boy wears just his white underpants, dark with grease in the seat. The girl, a white satin slip, stiff with stains. The detective scoops them both, the weight of two kids, with just one arm and hugs them to his chest. Their nipple rings and tattoos and crab lice. Their stink of dope smoke and what drips from Breather Betty.

Waving with the gun, Cora walks him toward the office door.

The men stalking her, circling her, Cora works the detective backward down the hall, dragging the girl and boy past the director's office, past the health room. To the lobby. Then the parking lot. There, the detectives wait while she unlocks her car.

With the boy and girl sitting in her back seat, Cora hits the gas, spraying the men with gravel. Before she's even through the gate in the chain-link fence, you can hear sirens on their way.

Nobody knew Cora Reynolds would be so ready. Breather Betty was already in the car, riding shotgun, with a scarf tied over her red hair, dark sunglasses on her rubber face. A cigarette hanging between her red-red lips. This French girl returned from the dead. Rescued and seat-belted to keep her torso upright.

This person made into an object, now made back into a person.

The crippled stuffed animals, the ratty tigers and orphaned bears and penguins, they're all lined up in the car's rear window. The cat among them, asleep in the sun. All of them waving good-bye.

Cora hits the freeway, her back tires fishtailing, already doing twice the posted speed limit. Her four-door brown sedan already pulls a kite's tail of police cruisers, their lights flashing blue and red. Helicopters. Angry detectives in unmarked county cars. Television camera crews, each in a white van with a big number painted on the side.

Already there's no way Cora can't win.

She has the girl. She has the boy. She has the gun.

Even if they run out of gas, nobody will fuck her kids.

Even if the troopers shoot out her tires. Even then, she'll shoot up their silicone bodies. Cora will blow off their faces. Their nipples and noses. She'll leave them nothing any man would stick his dick into. She'll do the same to Breather Betty.

And she'll shoot herself. To save them.

Please understand. Nobody says what Cora Reynolds did was right.

Nobody is even saying Cora Reynolds was sane. But she still won.

This is just what human beings do—turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat.

This is what the police will find if they get too close. The children mutilated. All of them dead. The animals soaked with her blood. Them all dead, together.

But until that moment, Cora has a full tank of gas. She has a bag full of evidence-room cocaine to keep her awake. A bag of sandwiches. A few bottles of water and the cat, purring asleep.

She has nothing but a few hours of freeway between her and Canada.

But, more than all that, Cora Reynolds has her family.

10

Mother Nature slips into some kind of black coat. It's a military uniform or an ice-skating costume, black wool with a double row of brass buttons up the front. A black velvet majorette with her split nose scabbed together with dark red. She gets her arms through each long sleeve, then says, “Button me up?” to Saint Gut-Free.

She wiggles what's left of her hands, and says, “I don't have the fingers I need.”