Work Done for Hire Page 5

  The only building at the Molasses Junction crossroads was a general store. He locked his bike up, feeling foolishly urban, and carried his bag inside the dark dusty place. Mostly bare shelves. With the dust storm rattling the windows, it all felt like a set from a Woody Guthrie movie. With himself a fugitive from a Humphrey Bogart noir flick, armed to the teeth with no target in sight.

  A tired old woman came out of a back room, wiping her hands on a bloody rag. Actually tomato guts. Behind her he could see a canning setup boiling, and a case of empty catsup bottles.

  “What you want, somethin’?” She wasn’t really that old. Her face was creased with fatigue, the lines stark in deep sunburn, maybe kitchen heat. Her body was not old, curves and muscle straining tight jeans and tank top. She turned halfway to adjust a Slim Jims display and not incidentally reveal that she was wearing a snub-nosed pistol in a butt holster. Probably smart in an isolated place like this. But the opposite of sexy.

  He considered buying a box of .38 Special rounds to establish fellow-feeling, but decided against it. “Just a Coke, um, and a Slim Jim.”

  “In the machine there.”

  It was the kind of cooler he hadn’t seen since he was a little boy, a big red icebox with a sliding top; inside, bottles of drinks racked in ice-cold water. He pulled out a twelve-ounce Coke in a heavy returnable bottle, also a time trip. There was a bottle opener at the cash register, which clanged and made satisfying greased-metal sounds. He got a quarter change for his dollar, and a finger-touch of warm flesh. “You need somethin’, just holler.” He watched the .38 swivel back to the stockroom.

  A good place to begin an adventure. Sex and guns and Mother Nature outside playing the noir witch. Forget Arlene and the evaporating check and weepy Mom and dear old Dad.

  Just you and me, monster. I’m coming to get you.

  2.

  I was able to finish most of a chapter while she slept. She envied me for being able to get along on five or six hours’ sleep; I envied her for being able to stay down for ten. She was always more rested than me, but then I theoretically had more time to work. An extra forty-hour week every ten days. If only I could get paid for reading trash fiction and watching TV, I’d be a wealthy man.

  But this particular morning, I did write, and was pretty happy with it.

  So was Kit. She read through it while we had motel-room instant in paper cups.

  “Would they really have to shoot him in the eye, or the ear? I mean in the real world.”

  “They say people who kill people for a living don’t like .38s. The army stopped using them in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine part. The enraged Moro natives would absorb several shots and just keep coming.”

  “Pretty tough customers.”

  “Well, they tied leather thongs around their balls before they went into combat. The leather got wet and constricted, and the pain drove them mad.”

  “That’s got to be bullshit,” she said. “Racist bullshit. They couldn’t walk.”

  “Hey. I read it in a book. That’s why the army changed from the .38 to the .45. The .45 bullet was big enough to knock them down.”

  “But they don’t use the .45 anymore. You said you had a 9-mm in the desert. That’s got to be smaller.” She rubbed her chin. “Forty-five hundredths of an inch is like twelve millimeters. Way smaller.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But it knocks them down better.”

  “Goodness. Smaller is better. Where will it all end?”

  “A tiny little bullet, obviously, that moves at the speed of light. A photon.”

  “Have to be a heavy photon.”

  “I’m sure they’re working on it.” I should’ve paid attention in physics. How could a photon weigh anything, if it always moved at the speed of light? If it didn’t move at the speed of light, it wouldn’t be a photon.

  “So is the monster really from another planet?”

  “He thinks he is.”

  “Yeah, but you know. Don’t you?”

  “Right now he’s Schrödinger’s Cat. And I haven’t opened the box.”

  “Ah.” She took a sip of coffee. “So you don’t know yet.”

  I wagged a pedantic finger at her. “That’s not what I said.”

  She squinted at me while wheels turned—she was the one who first told me about the paradox: Mr. S’s cat is in a box, presumably soundproof, with a gun pointed at its helpless little head. The gun will go off if the trigger is struck by an alpha particle from an alpha-particle generator that the cat’s sadistic owner purchased at the local quantum hardware store. Schrödinger’s point was that because of the quantum nature of elementary particles, there was only a probability, not a certainty, that the alpha particle had done its job. You couldn’t tell whether the cat was alive or dead without opening the box—which takes the problem out of the quantum universe and into the real world.

  Of course in the real world, there would or would not be a smoking hole in the box and cat brains all over the place. But that’s not what scientists mean by “real.”

  “That’s cute, Jack. You mean it literally?”

  I shrugged.

  “So right now—in your mind—the monster is both a human and an alien.”

  I almost didn’t say anything. I trickled a little bit of rum into my coffee. “Until I open the box,” I said.

  __________

  I had a WeatherCard but hadn’t charged it, and of course didn’t bring the adaptor, but the morning sky was seamless blue and the weekend forecast had been good when we left home. So we filled our water bottles and pedaled off into deepest darkest Iowa, which is to say sunny rolling hills with wildflowers anthropomorphically nodding approval as we cruised by on our modest quest. Then the smallest grey cloud peeked over the western horizon, and then it loomed, and then all hell broke loose, lightning and thunder and a screaming gale pelting us with fast fat drops.

  Lightning blasted a copse of trees not a hundred yards in front of us, while I was looking at it and trying to decide whether to stop there for shelter. Then Kit’s bike slipped on gravel and she went down hard. Gloves protected her hands, but her left knee was torn and the shoulder hurt.

  The bike was all right but she couldn’t ride it, left leg stiffening. She couldn’t even push it, really.

  Neither of our cell phones got a signal. “Let’s just lock it and leave it here,” I shouted over the wind. “If somebody steals it, they steal it.”

  She nodded, her face screwed tight. “You go on for help. Or back to the motel?”

  “No! I’m not leaving you.”

  We compromised by hiding the bike behind a sign and piling all her stuff on the back of mine, which I then trundled back toward the Tidy Inn while she limped alongside.

  I wasn’t much of a companion, pushing the double load through pelting rain and grit. I sort of wasn’t there, going into a kind of zen state familiar from the desert: you can get through anything, one minute at a time. When the minute’s up, do another minute. Go blank, stay blank.

  So she startled me when she cried out “There! There it is!” A dim red VACANCY sign flickering in the gathering gloom. Only two hours and twenty minutes of trudge.

  The cruddy place did look a thousand percent more comfortable than it had the evening before. The old crone got all maternal and taped up Kit’s leg. She let us have the same room for ten dollars off, since it hadn’t been made up yet. I could’ve collapsed into a pile of dirty laundry and slept for a week.

  Kit filled the tub while I worked over the bike a little with paper towels and WD-40. Slipping into the water was pure heaven. Almost literally, like dying quietly and drifting off to a somnolent reward. We both fell asleep and woke up in cooling soup. While the tub drained we scrubbed each other with the hand shower attachment, more giggles than hygiene.

  We carried lightweight emergency meals, dehydrated ramen or rice with mys
tery meat—just add hot water and pray—but decided to have regular food whenever it was available. So when we checked in we’d made a call to one of the Amana Colony restaurants, the Wheel, that did home dinner deliveries. I got dressed enough to open the door at eight, and a teenaged boy brought in armloads of Styrofoam boxes—the minimum order, a family dinner for four. Famished, we tore into the mountain of roast pork and sausage, mashed potatoes, green beans, beets, yams, and all. We didn’t open the container of pickled ham, the place’s specialty, saving it for tomorrow, wrapped up along with a loaf of fresh bread and some butter.

  The motel TV only had network, so we lay in bed and watched mind-rot for a while. I fell asleep in the middle of the first sitcom, and when I woke up the room was dark except for the luminous clock, 4:44, a lucky-looking number. Kit snored quietly while I set up the laptop on the desk, angled so the light wouldn’t bother her. I made some instant with hot water from the tap and sweetened it with rum, and let the screen take me into Hunter’s world.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hunter kept his police-band radio going all night while he sat on the steps of the dark trailer and peered out into the night with infrared goggles. He saw a fight between an owl and a weasel, but no human activity. If anybody was missing Lane Jared, PhD, they hadn’t told the police.

  You should know as much as possible about the things you eat. From his flat sharkskin wallet, Hunter could tell that Dr. Jared was thirty-two, single, and perhaps did not drive; he had a “non-driver’s license,” a state ID, issued in Atlanta, and his leg muscles were so tough and stringy that if he owned a car he had probably only pushed it around for exercise.

  He had a membership card for a vegetarian co-op, which no doubt was why he tasted so bland. Not enough poisons. He was either gay or complex; a hidden pocket in the wallet held a much handled photo of a plain-looking young man wearing only a smile and an erection. It also hid three tightly folded hundred-dollar bills; otherwise, Jared had only a single, a fiver, and a ten. No credit cards. An eight-year-old university ID showed him with a Rasputin-style black beard; the head freezing in Hunter’s cooler was clean-shaven and going grey.

  Most of the wallets Hunter collected from his meals were full of documents like membership cards and business cards and receipts. Dr. Jared was parsimonious in that regard. He wished now that he’d talked with the man awhile. He’d said he was a minister; was that a lie? Probably not. Maybe he was a Christian who believed in transubstantiation, and eating him would be a kind of perverse sacrament. It would have been fun to discuss that with him.

  He would probably just scream, though, or get all weepy, like the last female. How could this happen to me? She asked that over and over. Perhaps you were a bad girl. Though you didn’t taste bad. Lots of good fat.

  When the sun came up, Hunter lumbered around the perimeter of his camp checking the alarm devices. Monofilament stretched at toe height. When he first set it up, touching the lines would ring little chimes. Now the system was more sophisticated; lights on a computer map inside would show where the intruder was.

  If it was just one, he could shoot him from the dark. If it was a group, he would arm the trailer’s timer and drive off in the van. The trailer would blow up after five minutes. The van would unroll two mats of nails on the gravel road to slow down pursuers, and where it intersected the state road, he’d buried a hundred-pound crate of dynamite topped with buckets of rusty nails.

  Still, he might be caught. He hadn’t decided whether to be taken alive. An autopsy would immediately reveal that he wasn’t human, which would displease his masters. If he were captured, he would have a good chance of escaping before they found out the truth. But in the process of escaping, he might reveal his superhuman strength.

  Exercise time. Hunter squatted over a truck axle, red with rust except for the two places where he gripped it, and smoothly he lifted it over his head. He pressed and curled it silently fifty times and let it drop.

  Breathing a little hard, he crossed the clearing to where an ancient live oak had grown a stout limb about eight feet off the ground. He grabbed it and did twelve pull-ups, the tree groaning in protest, and then reversed the position of his grip and did twelve more. Then he did three with his right arm alone, grunting.

  He could not run like a human, not in this gravity and atmosphere, but he staggered around his property three times in a well-worn figure eight path.

  It made him hungry. He had a few cuts that had gone straight into the refrigerator’s meat compartment. He took out two arm steaks and smeared them with chopped garlic in olive oil, then sliced an onion and fried it up in butter. Seared the steaks on both sides and lowered the heat to braise them in red wine with some rosemary. He took the jug of Gallo burgundy and sat on the steps, drinking from it while attacking a large can of Sam’s Club potato chips.

  Once each minute, he would stop chewing and listen. He could hear birds and animals going about their business and the quiet simmer of the steaks under the heavy cast-iron skillet top. The smell of rosemary and garlic and sweet flesh was intoxicating.

  A large car or small pickup whispered by on the state road, more than a mile away. A human would not have heard it, he was sure; nor could a human smell the cooking so far away. Hikers were his only worry.

  It smelled so good, we had to come and check.

  You must join me, then.

  3.

  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 unsurprisin
g 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.