Hour 25 of 45

SITTING NEXT TO JODIE ON THE MATTRESS, Stephen was listening through the tap box to the Hudson Air phone line.

He was listening to Ron’s phone. Talbot was his last name, Stephen had learned. He wasn’t exactly sure what Ron’s job was but he seemed to be an executive with the charter company and Stephen believed he’d get the most information about the Wife and Friend by listening to this line.

He heard the man arguing with someone from the distributor who handled parts for Garrett turbines. Because it was Sunday they were having trouble getting the final items for the repairs – a fire extinguisher cartridge and something called the annular.

“You promised it by three,” Ron grumbled. “I want it by three.”

After some bargaining – and bitching – the company agreed to fly the parts into their Connecticut office from Boston. They’d be trucked to the Hudson Air office and arrive by three or four. They hung up.

Stephen listened for a few minutes longer but there were no other calls.

He clicked the phone off, frustrated.

He didn’t have a clue as to where the Wife and Friend were. Still in the safe house? Had they been moved?

What was wormy Lincoln thinking now? How clever was he?

And who was he? Stephen tried to picture him, tried to picture him as a target through the Redfield telescope. He couldn’t. All he saw was a mass of worms and a face looking at him calmly through a greasy window.

He realized that Jodie’d said something to him.

“What?”

“What’d he do? Your stepfather?”

“Just odd jobs mostly. Hunted and fished a lot. He was a hero in Vietnam. He went behind enemy lines and killed fifty-four people. Politicians and people like that, not just soldiers.”

“He taught you all this, about… what you do?” The drugs had worn off and Jodie’s green eyes were brighter now.

“I got most of my practice in Africa and South America but he started me. I called him ‘WGS.’ The World’s Greatest Soldier. He laughed at that.”

At ages eight and nine and ten Stephen would walk behind Lou as they trooped through the hills of West Virginia, hot drops of sweat falling down their noses and into the crooks of their index fingers, which curled around the ribbed triggers of their Winchesters or Rugers. They’d lie in the grass for hours and be quiet, be still. The sweat glistened on Lou’s scalp just below the bristly crew cut, both eyes open as they sighted on their targets.

Don’t you squint that left eye, Soldier.

Sir, never, sir.

Squirrels, wild turkeys, deer in season or out, bear when they could find them, dogs on slow days.

Make ’em dead, Soldier. Watch me.

Ka-rack.The thud against the shoulder, the bewildered eyes of an animal dying.

Or on steaming August Sundays they’d slip theCO₂ cartridges into their paint-ball guns and strip down to their shorts, stalking each other and raising molehills of welts on their chests and thighs with the marble-sized balls that hissed through the air at three hundred feet per second, young Stephen struggling to keep from crying at the awful sting. The paint balls came in every color but Lou insisted on loading with red. Like blood.

And at night, sitting in front of a fire in the backyard as the smoke curled toward the sky and into the open window where his mother stood cleaning the supper dishes with a toothbrush, the taut little man – Stephen at fifteen was as tall as Lou – would sip from the newly opened bottle of Jack Daniel’s and talk and talk and talk, whether Stephen was listening or not, as they watched the sparks flying into the sky like orange lightning bugs.

“Tomorrow I want you to bring down a deer with just a knife.”

“Well…”

“Can you do that, Soldier?”

“Yessir, I can.”

“Now look here.” He’d take another sip. “Where d’you think the neck vein is?”

“I -”

“Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. A good soldier admits his ignorance. But then he does something to correct it.”

“I don’t know where the vein is, sir.”

“I’ll show it on you. It’s right here. Feel that? Right there. Feel it?”

“Yessir. I feel it.”

“Now, what you do is you find a family – doe and fawns. You come up close. That’s the hard part, getting up close. To kill the doe, you endanger the fawn. You move for her baby. You threaten the fawn and then the mother won’t run off. She’ll come after you. Then, swick! Cut through her neck. Not sideways, but at an angle. Okay? A V-shape. You feel that? Good, good. Hey, boy, aren’t we having a high old time!”

Then Lou would go inside to inspect the plates and bowls and make sure they were lined up on the checkered tablecloth, four squares from the edge, and sometimes when they were only three and a half squares from the edge or there was still a dot of grease on the rim of a melamine plate Stephen would listen to the slaps and the whimpers from inside the house as he lay on his back beside the fire and watched the sparks fly toward the dead moon.

“You gotta be good at something,” the man would say later, his wife in bed and he outside again with his bottle. “Otherwise there’s no point in being alive.”

Craftsmanship. He was talking about craftsmanship.

Jodie now asked, “How come you couldn’t be in the marines? You never told me.”

“Well, it was stupid,” Stephen said, then paused and added, “I got into some trouble when I was a kid. D’you ever do that?”

“Get into trouble? Not much. I was scared to. I didn’t want to upset my mother, stealing and shit. What’d you do?”

“Something that wasn’t real bright. There was this man lived up the road in our town. He was, you know, a bully. I saw him twisting this woman’s arm. She was sick, and what was he doing hurting her? So I went up to him and said if he didn’t stop I’d kill him.”

“You said that?”

“Oh, and another thing my stepfather taught me. You don’t threaten. You either kill someone or let them be but you don’t threaten. Well, he kept on hassling this woman and I had to teach him a lesson. I started hitting him. It got out of hand. I grabbed a rock and hit him. I wasn’t thinking. I did a couple years for manslaughter. I was just a kid. Fifteen. But it was a criminal record. And that was enough to keep me out of the marines.”

“I thought I read somewhere that even if you’ve got a record you can go into the service. If you go to some special boot camp.”

“I guess maybe ’cause it was manslaughter.”

Jodie’s hand pressed Stephen’s shoulder. “That’s not fair. Not one bit fair.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“I’m real sorry,” Jodie said.

Stephen, who never had any trouble looking any man in the eye, glanced at Jodie once then down immediately. And from somewhere, totally weird, this image came to mind. Jodie and Stephen living together in the cabin, going hunting and fishing. Cooking dinner over a campfire.

“What happened to him? Your stepfather?”

“Died in an accident. He was hunting and fell off a cliff.”

Jodie said, “Sounds like it was probably the way he’d’ve wanted to go.”

After a moment Stephen said, “Maybe it was.”

He felt Jodie’s leg brush his. Another electric jolt. Stephen stood quickly and looked out the window again. A police car cruised past but the cops inside were drinking soda and talking.

The street was deserted except for a clutch of homeless men, four or five whites and one Negro.

Stephen squinted. The Negro, lugging a big garbage bag full of soda and beer cans, was arguing, looking around, gesturing, offering the bag to one of the white guys, who kept shaking his head. He had a crazy look in his eyes and the whites were scared. Stephen watched them argue for a few minutes, then he returned to the mattress, sat down next to Jodie.