Work Done for Hire (6 page)

I
finished the short chapter and quietly got dressed. Peeked through the blinds and it was full daylight outside.

“Time to?” Kit muttered, half asleep.

“Sleep,” I said. “I'm gonna go back and get the van.”

“I could come with,” she said, half sitting up.

“No way. Get some rest.” She grunted and fell back with a thump, and mumbled thanks into the pillow.

I pedaled off into the bright cool morning. This was going to be the pattern of my life, I realized, a lark married to a dove, and I liked it. Almost all my writing, I did while she slept through the morning. True, I wasn't much of a party animal at night, but neither was she. Our nights often ended with me snugged next to her while she read a book or watched TV or a movie on her pad, but I think she liked that. Part of her independence from the conventional world. Her parents' world.

The morning sun had dried everything off and it was perfect bicycling weather. A slight breeze at my back, a hard smooth bike lane. I pushed it up to twenty and kept it there, enough to break a nice sweat.

I stopped once to carry a turtle across the road, feeling kind of stupid. He'd probably just turn himself around and get squashed on the way back. Turtles bothered me more than most roadkills, though. The pathos factor. They thought they had everything covered, and then these mammals evolved to where they had eighteen wheels and hurtled along at ninety miles per hour. Your shell might just as well be tissue paper. Be patient; we'll evolve up over the road and leave you alone again.

The turtle was once my “totem animal.” In high school, a friend had read about the idea, or come up with it on his own—that we should all adopt some species of animal that stood for what we wanted to be. Among all the ferocious and fast and clever menagerie my friends allied themselves with, I was the lone turtle. Slow, careful, observing everything. Safe within my shell.

I wasn't much different now. Faster, at least to the outside observer. A slow brain, that tried not to miss anything.

That had been my big beef with the army, at least in training. Everything fast, by the numbers, hup-toop-threep. Until I found my niche.

A sniper doesn't do anything fast. Watch and wait, wait and watch, don't move. Total zen, except for the bit at the end. You squeeze the trigger and someone a half a mile or more away falls over dead.

I read a library book by a woman who had interviewed all kinds of combat veterans. Before my war, but she had guys from the Gulf and Vietnam and even WWII, and she came up with an unsurprising generalization: the farther away you were from the person you killed, the less fucked up you were by the killing. Seems pretty obvious. You choke some poor bastard to death with your bare hands, it's going to bother you more than squeezing a trigger a half mile away from him.

I don't remember whether she talked to the guys who pushed the button on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Pretty remote, but times a hundred thousand? Maybe they had bad dreams. Worse than mine.

I didn't usually see the results of my “sniper craft,” as they called it. They'd drag them away, or there'd be a pile, your victim one among many. Twice I was sure, though. One guy looked like TV, lying back with his eyes closed, a dark wet spot on his chest. The other had the top of his head popped off, like if he'd worn a helmet he might have been okay. My big moment of fame in the platoon—confirmed-kill head shot, a raghead sniper.

I never told anybody I hadn't aimed for the head. It was a long shot, about five hundred meters, and the bastard was prone, aiming at some of our guys off to the left. I had a solid braced position, and aimed about four feet over his chest. Maybe a breath of wind caught the bullet. “Head shot,” my spotter said. “You da man.” I made E-5 the next week, for one week. Then got busted back for boozing.

Then got the stripe back and lost it again, I'm still not sure how. I supposedly got into a fight and knocked out some E-8 asshole. But I didn't get into fights, not then, and I don't know how I was supposed to've knocked out a bruiser a head taller than me without even hurting my knuckles. But it was his drunken word against mine. So we both got busted, but I had to clean out latrines for a week. Officer latrines, so of course it didn't smell bad at all.

My supposed head shot, though. The bullet hit his head about two inches above the ear, and it was like a sledgehammer. Blood and brains everywhere, bone chips. But if the wind had gone the other way I would have hit him in the butt, or not at all.

What did all this have to do with Hunter, I wondered as I pedaled along. I was a hunter then, in the broadest sense of the word. Civilians who do it for fun sneak around with a high-powered rifle like mine, looking for woodsy “targets of opportunity,” though theirs don't shoot back. Less sporting, if you ask me.

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.

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.

K
it 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.