I didn’t like the actual sniper-ing much, but was surprised to find that I loved the shooting itself, burning up ammo on the rifle range, trying for smaller and smaller groups. In sniper school I often got the day’s best MOA—number of hits within a minute of arc—which was good for a half-day pass on the weekend. Take a cab to a scummy bar off base and try to pick up some girl who didn’t have a financial motive.
I never did pay for it, neither stateside nor in the desert. Maybe I pretended it was virtue. But I was a virgin when I got drafted, and had a grim anti-fantasy about doing something stupid, and the whore laughing at me.
Which of my regrets about the army was strongest—killing people? Following orders from idiots? Wasting three of my most productive years?
Maybe it was not getting laid. Being too shy or scared, when really I was in a horny guy’s heaven. Some of those hookers in Columbus were stunning, but the ones who peopled my fantasies were ordinary cute girls who looked like the coeds I’d spent so much undergraduate time and energy not fucking.
After combat, it was easy. Just ask the damned girl! What’s she going to do, chuck a grenade at you? And combat veterans my age and education were pretty rare still, that early in the war. I learned to play that mystique pretty well, the year between army “separation” and the night Kit ignored my bashed-in mouth and rescued me from my wicked ways.
It was not yet noon when I pulled into the English & Philosophy Building parking lot. I called Kit and discussed possibilities, then drove out to the Coralville Strip and got a two-foot-long loaded submarine to split.
Funny how driving a route you’ve just biked seems to take about the same length of time. The bike ride had been almost three hours and the trip back was not even thirty minutes. But I enjoy biking along in a meditative state; driving, I had to put it on cruise control to keep from speeding out of boredom. Plus a little submarine hunger, even though I’d shortened my half by a couple of bites.
She or a maid had made up the bed, and she was sitting in the lone chair, reading. She had showered and changed her bandage, a less dramatic single wrap of gauze. We went outdoors to a picnic table to attack the sub.
She rode the length of the motel parking lot and decided that discretion was the better part of valor, though I think being a mathematician, she might express that differently. “D >> V”?
We drove back to my place because I had tools and a workstand, and we drank wine while I cleaned and adjusted her bike. I even tuned the spokes on her rear wheel, ping-ping-ping, a process she’d never seen, which delighted her.
She picked up a family portrait that was sitting on top of my nailed-together bookcase. “Hear from your dad recently?”
“Still boning what’s-her-name in Chicago, I guess. I did get an e-mail day before yesterday that went to a couple hundred of his closest friends. He’s opening in Chicago next week. Probably go up.” Dad was a sometime actor, though most of his money came from teaching drama in adult ed, a sure road to big bucks.
“That would be a good gesture,” she said carefully. “It wouldn’t bother you if what’s-her-name was there?”
“No, no. She’s all right. I guess collecting fossils is a legitimate hobby.”
She studied the picture. “I don’t know. I’d say he looks pretty good. He looks like you.”
“Not anymore. He has a bushy white beard now, and horn-rim glasses. Not as much hair. Closer to Lear than Hamlet.”
“Hamlet’s overrated. Who wants a worrywart?
“Careful, there. I played Hamlet in high school.”
“No, really? I’ve known you all this time and I didn’t know that?”
“Wasn’t a big deal. I’d already decided not to follow in Dad’s footsteps.”
“Trotting in front of the footlights. Was he disappointed?”
“Funny, no; not at all. He was all for me getting a doctorate and teaching. It was Mom who wanted me to act.”
She laughed. “While your dad was cheating on her with actresses?”
“Funny business.” I shrugged. “She might’ve known back then; maybe not. It didn’t all come out until the divorce.” Five years ago.
“Did your dad ever say . . . did you know?”
“Oh, hell, yes. Not in so many words, just a wink or a raised eyebrow now and then. And when he was happy he really showed it. By the time I was sixteen I could tell that his being happy didn’t have much to do with what was going on at home. Then Mother caught them together, I think by accident.”
“‘There are no accidents.’ Who said that?”
“Schiller? Maybe the captain of the Titanic.”
“Was it what’s-her-name?”
“No, not even an actress. She was a tech person, a lighting engineer. Not even pretty—that annoyed the hell out of Mother.”
She traced her finger over the glass of the picture. “Your mother’s more than pretty. Glamorous.”
“Yeah, I guess. Little life lesson there.”
“I’m glad you’re not attracted to beautiful women.”
Nothing safe to say to that. I touched her nose, then kissed her gently.
She giggled while we were kissing. “Sorry! I can be so awful!”
“Naw. You just need an editor sometimes.”
She stood up and pulled her T-shirt off in one cross-arm jerk, and then stepped out of her shorts. “So come edit me. If you’re done with the bicycle.”
I wasn’t, quite. But it could wait.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Relaxing after a big meal, Hunter sometimes let his mind wander back to other times and places.
His home planet, Vantor, was beautiful but not pleasant, a hard place to grow up—if you lived long enough to grow. Of his twelve littermates, all male, only one other lived to become adult.
There had been four, but on the eve of their tenth birthday they went into the pit together, and only two were allowed to come out. He could still taste his brothers’ blood, and feel it splashing on his face.
He would not dishonor that memory by eating humans raw. Their taste was insipid anyhow, and needed cooking with spices and herbs. Especially the taste of their sexual parts, pallid and tame. They fought fiercely over that part, the last birthday, thinking it gave strength and courage.
After the tenth, they didn’t count birthdays. You lived until you died, and that would be a long time.
He was not sure how he had gotten to Earth, or what his purpose was here. He was content to wait, and hunt, and eat.
He sat there unmoving through the night, neither asleep nor awake. At first light, he took a shovel with a sharp square blade and cut out a rectangle of turf. He carefully squared out the hole, depositing the dirt on a canvas drop cloth. When the hole was handle-deep, he went into the trailer and brought out the inedible remnants of the luckless jogger. Before covering it with dirt he undressed, straddled the hole, and evacuated generously into it. Then he filled the grave, stamping the soil down tightly, and carefully replaced the turf. He saturated the area with his alien urine, which he knew contained butyric acid. No bloodhound would come near it.
He went back into his trailer and turned the heat up to a comfortable hundred degrees. Then he carefully eased himself onto the oversized recliner and opened up his paperback book: The Pawns of Null-A, by A. E. Van Vogt.
He had read it before, but that was all right. He didn’t read for information.
4.
Kit stared at the last page and set it down carefully. “So he eats this guy’s balls and then shits on his bones and pisses on his grave. Couldn’t you be a little less tasteful?”
“Well, actually, it’s his brother’s balls.”
“Oh, okay. That’s all right.” She laughed. “Keep it in the family.”
I had to laugh, too. “Hey, if you can’t appreciate good literature, you don’t have to expose yourself to it.?
??
“It’s not me who’s exposing myself. Are you going to let your mother read this? Your shrink?”
“I wouldn’t show it to the shrink. Mother would say, ‘Can’t you sex it up a little? Have him jerk off into the grave?’”
“No wonder you’re such a delicate soul.”
“Everything I am today, I owe to dear old Mom.”
I loaded up on carbs with a double stack of pancakes—or used the bike as an excuse to stuff myself, take your pick—and then Kit drove me back to where the weather and road had stopped us the night before. The plan was for her to keep the van while I completed the loop to Des Moines and back; if I ran into trouble she would come rescue me.
I wasn’t going to rough it; I had a map with all the motels on the route and their phone numbers, so when I decided to quit for the day I could call ahead. (That seemed prudent because there weren’t all that many places to stay.)
When she dropped me off and drove away, I felt a guilty glow of freedom. Four or five days of being a carefree bachelor, the wind at my back and nothing in front of me but the road.
The carefree feeling ended with a bang after an hour and ten minutes. I had somehow managed to run over a nail more than two inches long. It wasn’t even the same color as the road, cruddy with rust. But sharp enough to blow me out.
I was carrying two spare tubes, but repaired the flat one out of prudence and pessimism, remembering one day I managed to have three flats in three hours. All of them less dramatic than this one, relatively slow leaks, which can take longer to fix—not obvious where the hole is. Or it turns out to be the valve, unfixable.
I let the glue on the repaired tube rest and pumped up a new one and was on my way—twenty minutes to fix the tube, change the tire, and be back on the road. Short of my best by five or six minutes, but I wasn’t in a hurry.
I should have been. Of course the weather couldn’t last. I slogged through a driving rain until I fetched up on the shores of the Angel Bless Motel. A flashing neon cross would normally repel me like a vampire, but the rain had weakened my resistance.
I was suddenly on the set of a Hitchcock movie that never got made. I staggered dripping into a small Victorian room, a half-dozen cut-glass lamps giving a warm glow to the complicated floral wallpaper. Smiling older hostess wearing a full skirt and an apron. She didn’t say the only room left was #13, which might have sent me back out into the rain. But she did insist on showing me around the six glass cases along the walls, her late husband’s life work. Lots of miniature trains and airplanes and hundreds of butterflies pinned to velvet. She had been a widow for nine years, four months, and seven days.
The room she led me to had only one butterfly, a big purple one pinned under glass, hanging over the bed like an invertebrate crucifix. There’s a sad irony to a moth-eaten butterfly.
I set the coffeemaker to just heat some water, and took as hot a shower as the motel’s plumbing and budget would allow. A quick ramen dinner, and then I made weak tea with just a pinch of sugar. I didn’t want to stay awake.
The TV’s depth axis was shot, so rather than watch crap in two and a half dimensions, I flipped through the various books on my notebook and settled on Down the River, a collection of short stories by recent Iowa graduates. I had a paper copy at home, a contributor’s freebie, but the only story I’d read in it was my own, checking for typos. Mildly curious about the competition, I got halfway through the second story before I turned off the notebook and the light.
__________
It was still raining when I woke up. Not cold or windy, so I guess if I were a serious cyclist I’d just man up and pedal out into it.
Instead, I made a double-strong, double-sugar cup of coffee with ReelCreme™ and took the motel’s chair out under the eaves and sat looking at and listening to the rain, not thinking about the novel or anything in particular. Then I went back inside, made another cup, and unrolled the notebook and its keyboard.
What would Hunter do in the rain? Not a scene from the movie, but what the hell.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hunter liked the sound of rain drumming on his metal roof. The fact of the rain, though, was a little annoying. He had eaten one frozen meal and wanted a fresh one, but there wouldn’t be many joggers out.
Not many potential witnesses, either.
No diversions left. He was tired of reading, and television was earnest documentaries and Saturday morning cartoons, which offered sufficient violence but no appetizing consequences.
With no particular destination in mind, he got in the van and headed north, playing a Jacksonville radio station on the radio but not hearing the music, listening for weather updates. He got gas in Georgia, filling up at a place that was too ramshackle and open to have surveillance cameras. He did have to go inside to pay, and considered the risk/benefit ratio of killing the dimwitted clerk and emptying the register.
The boy was skinny and sallow and smelled bad, which may have saved his life. And there could have been a hidden camera amidst the chaotic jumble of merchandise behind him. Hunter bought eight Super Red Hot sausages and, unseen back in the van, ate them like a sword-swallower, one after the another, while he studied the map.
The rain had let up when he stopped, but now it continued with redoubled force. He took a left turn and then angled down a county road that pointed into Alabama.
He came upon his prize only fifteen minutes down the road. A large woman on the gravel margin hunched against the force of the rain, working on an upside-down bicycle. He slowed down and waved at her, blinking his lights. She waved back and he pulled off the road in front of her, and backed up.
He rolled down the window as she came up, wiping the water from her long hair. She was big, not quite half his size, and he salivated at the thought of all that delicious fat.
“Golly, thanks, mister—” He flung the door open with such force that she sprawled almost to the middle of the road. But she was standing, staggering, by the time he heaved himself out of the van. He took two ponderous steps and dropped her with a punch to the solar plexus.
Faster, now. He grabbed her wrist and roughly dragged her to the back of the van. Locked. Stupid of him.
The driver’s-side door was still open. He lumbered back to it and stretched to reach the keys in the ignition.
Sudden sharp pain in his back. He turned and she was standing there with a narrow-blade knife, a switchblade stiletto, staring at the color of his blood.
The wound was not serious. He backhanded her so hard her neck snapped.
She was limp but still alive as he tied her up and manacled her in the back. She managed some incoherent growls and moans, too soft to annoy him or attract attention, so he didn’t bother with the duct tape.
“Be happy,” he called back. “You’re out of the rain.”
Decisions. Maybe leave Georgia for this one, so as not to have the same group of state police studying his spoor. Drive on into Alabama, or maybe all the way through to Mississippi.
No. The need was growing in him. Alabama would do.
He was across the border in thirty minutes, and stopped at a McDonald’s for a bag of small burgers and ten orders of fries. He gulped it all down, driving one-handed but with intense care, before he left the interstate. He had memorized the map and the Googlemaps screen that showed the nameless dead-end dirt road that was his tentative destination.
At the first small road he pulled over to the shoulder to check on his quarry. He was too big to crawl through the van, so he chanced opening the rear doors. Her eyes were closed, but when he forced her mouth open and poured in some water, she coughed and gagged.
“That’s good. It won’t be long now.”
“Please,” she croaked. “Do . . . do whatever you want. . . .”
“Don’t worry. I will.” He eased the doors shut and went back toward the front of the van, but she started to scr
eam. Annoying.
He went back to the rear doors, swung them open, and hit her head twice on the metal floor, just hard enough to stun her.
“Please. You only cause trouble for yourself.” He tore off a piece of duct tape and smoothed it over her mouth. Then he tore off a small piece and closed one nostril. “Wouldn’t that be an awful way to die?”
Before getting back into the van, he stepped into the forest, studying the loam. The van would leave tracks when he went off the road. If it rained harder, they would be obliterated, but the forecast called for the rain to taper off and stop in a couple of hours.
He studied his memory of the Googlemaps images. The topographical map showed a ridge to the east, and a gravel road in a few miles that ran up it. He would drive up there and check the soil and underbrush.
In the small cooler between the seats he’d stashed alternating quarts of beer and Coke. Took a Coke to be on the safe side. Wouldn’t do to be stopped in the middle of nowhere and forced to kill a state trooper. Two, probably.
He almost missed the unmarked gravel road and reversed back up to it. He drove up the rise and pulled over, out of sight from the paved road, and stopped to listen for a couple of minutes. No traffic; no sound but the ticking of his engine and the patter of raindrops.
He drove on slowly for about a mile and a half. The road ended at the grey ruin of a clapboard shack with a collapsed roof. Saplings grew out of the interior. The front door was missing and there was no glass in the windows.
Still, some indigent might have sought shelter there. He quietly shucked a shell into the 12-gauge and eased heavily out of the van, alert.
His eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the cabin. Sound of a rat or squirrel scurrying away. No other signs of life except spiders and millipedes. Woodsy smell with a touch of mildew.