Authors: James P. Blaylock
Bobby spotted Peter’s Suburban, waved at him, and shouted something that Peter couldn’t understand Peter shrugged and shook
his head. Bobby made eating gestures, then rubbed his stomach like a fat man contemplating a meal. Peter gave him the okay
sign, and Bobby ran off, chasing the soccer ball.
Feeling almost cheerful, Peter picked up the spud guns from the backseat, took one of them out of the bag, and put the other
one into the glove compartment. Then, thinking about it, he climbed out of the car and tossed the first gun back inside onto
the passenger seat before shutting the door. It wouldn’t be fair to give it to Bobby in front of the other kids. He didn’t
have a potato for it anyway. They could pick one up down at the general store later.
He stepped into the relative darkness of the day-care center. The low tables were covered with cut-up construction paper and
scissors and glue. An aquarium bubbled against the wall, a half dozen rubbery-looking newts bumping their noses against the glass
as if they were anxious to see who had come in. Beth stood in the kitchen doorway with her back to Peter, talking, probably, to Julie,
the director and teacher. Their talk sounded serious, and so Peter waited in the empty room, not wanting to interrupt.
Beth’s long hair was pulled back casually and caught with a clip of Navajo silver. She was wearing dark green jeans and hiking
boots and a khaki, long-sleeved shirt like a ranger would wear. Peter sat down on one of the tables and stared at the linoleum
floor.
Three weeks ago Beth had taken him on a hike, over the south ridge and down into Bell Canyon. She showed him a big granite
rock full of
metates
—smooth holes where
Indians had ground acorns hundreds of years back. Once she had found a few pottery shards back in there and a fragment of
some sort of stone tool, treasures that were no doubt well worth the hours of scrambling around through scrub oak and sage
and prickly pear.
On their hike they had discovered fresh mountain lion tracks along the streambed and Beth reacted as if she’d seen a Hollywood
celebrity in a café. She insisted they follow the tracks up a little perpendicular canyon, just to see if they could catch
up with the lion, and Peter went along without complaining because he didn’t want to look like a city boy.
Tirelessly, she told him all about how California grizzlies with three-inch-long claws used to roam the Santa Ana Mountains,
coming down into the ranchos and crippling full-grown cattle with a single blow to the back, then dragging the hundreds of
pounds of meat miles up into the scrub to devour it. She seemed to think it was a terrible tragedy that the grizzlies had
been hunted to extinction, and Peter agreed that it was a dirty shame, that he’d been looking forward to being devoured back
in the scrub.
Bell Canyon was wild and empty. The north-facing hillsides were shaded by immense old oak trees, and the deep green heads
of new ferns pushed up through the dark oak mulch. The trail finally more or less disappeared beneath a carpet of autumn leaves,
and Peter lost all sense of direction and time as he followed Beth uphill, content merely to watch her move against the backdrop
of rocks and trees and sky.
“Here we are,” Beth had said to him finally.
They had come out of the woods onto a sunny patch of meadow grass that grew right down into the waters of a clear spring.
A succession of mountains and ridges rose one behind the other in the east until they disappeared on the horizon.
Clearly she had led him on the hike with this lonesome destination in mind. She opened her daypack and pulled
out a checkered tablecloth, unfolding it on the grass. The two of them lay down on their backs, listening to the silence.
A distant pair of vapor trails materialized in the blue sky, the jets moving so high and fast that no sound at all fell to
earth.
On the hike, Beth had been talking about bears and lions and edible shrubs, about how you could make soap out of yucca plants
and leach the tannic acid out of acorns with lye and water. But as they lay in the grass there was nothing at all worth talking
about, and they watched the vapor trails slowly turn into cloud-drift and move off down the lazy afternoon sky.
To Peter she looked a little like a character out of a book, lying there in sunshine—maybe a princess who as a baby had been
switched with a woodsman’s daughter. She was five ten or so, and had a model’s slender build. Her shirt, unflattering as it
was, couldn’t hide her figure, and when she rolled onto her side as if to say something to him, the top three buttons of the
shirt were loosened, although they hadn’t been only a short time ago.
He lay still, waiting, almost afraid to touch her. When he felt the pressure of her hand on his thigh, suddenly it was unavoidable.
Unhurriedly he traced the curve of her breasts above the lacy fabric of her lingerie. He unbuttoned the fourth button of her
shirt, and then the fifth, and she sat up, shrugging out of it entirely, and then tugged his shirt out of his jeans as he
knelt beside her. She pushed him away and untied her hiking boots herself, pulling them off and pitching them ten feet down
the hill. He threw his after them, and both of them stood up, scattering their clothes around the meadow. He pressed against
her, lost utterly in the warmth of her body, in the feel of her flesh against his, warming him while the breeze blew down
off the wild hillsides at his back.
Leaves drifted down onto the meadow from the solitary trees, the ferns and high grass waved in the wind, the afternoon wore
on slowly. Once a red-tailed hawk swooped
down over the spring and snatched something up from the edge of the water, and for a moment the air was full of the sound of beating
wings. …
Hearing her voice, he looked up now. She was saying something to him, looking at him a little oddly from the kitchen doorway,
wearing the same shirt that he had helped unbutton that day on the meadow. Recollecting it had dragged him partway up out
of the depressing rut his mind had been in all afternoon. At the same time it complicated things utterly, and he understood
that despite his resolutions, there were some things he didn’t want to lose. On that afternoon in Bell Canyon everything had
been easy, but he knew that nothing that good ever stayed easy.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Sure.” He managed a smile.
She walked out into the room. “Julie’s been telling me that they’ve had some trouble here today.”
“What sort of trouble?” Peter asked, forcing a look of interest onto his face.
“A strange boy hanging around,” Julie said to him, following Beth out of the kitchen. She gestured toward the window. “Out
there in the brush.”
Through the glass Peter could see the trail that led up the hill and onto the ridge. It ran for nearly four miles before meeting
up with the Holy Jim Trail. A couple of miles up the ridge, it skirted a hillside right above Peter’s house. He and Bobby
had hiked home that way from he day-care center once, racing with Beth, who drove down the canyon along the dirt road. Beth
had beat them home, but not by much.
“He threw part of the carcass of a fawn over the fence,” Julie said. “Hit Betty Tilton with it. She wasn’t hurt, but it was
pretty traumatic for her. We had to call her mother to come pick her up. He’d been hanging around this morning, I guess, making
noises, mostly. Throwing rocks at the kids. One of the kids lost a glider over the fence, and the
boy apparently picked it up and ran off with it. Then about an hour later he just rushed at the fence and pitcher this dead
fawn over.”
“Do you think he
killed
it?” Peter asked. “What do you mean,
part of it?”
“Doesn’t look like he killed it,” Beth said. “It’s in the trash can out there. I’d guess a cougar killed it. Left the head
and shoulders. Bones all splintered up. It’s been dead for days, dried out from the wind. The boy probably found it up on the
ridge and hauled it down.”
“I tried to talk to him,” Julie said, “but he just ran off. Later on I heard him crying off in the brush.”
The term “crying off in the brush” was startling. For a moment Peter could almost hear the crying, and he thought briefly
about Falls Canyon, picturing the face of the boy now, lying beside his mother.…
He clipped the thought short. Probably there was nothing in this. Just a kid messing around.
“Couldn’t have been foxes?” Peter asked, looking at Beth. She rolled her eyes at him.
“I
guess
it was him crying,” Julie said. “Why he was out there on a day like this I don’t know. The wind must have been blowing fifty
miles an hour.”
“What can you do about it?” Peter asked. The story had made him uneasy. There was something strange about it, something dark
and suggestive. More coincidence.
“Nothing,” Julie said. “It’s just a prank. Still, it was such a nasty one that it wrecked the whole day. Kids couldn’t even
play outside most of the morning.”
“Well,” Peter said. “Probably it’s nothing. I remember we used to throw earthworms at girls when I was that age.”
“The world’s changed,” Beth said. “Now it’s dried-out deer carcasses.”
Julie walked to the door and shouted for Bobby. In a couple of moments he appeared, out of breath and smiling.
“What’s up?” Peter asked him.
“The moon,” Bobby said. “Did Julie tell you about the dead deer head?”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “She told us.”
“It’s really gross. Can we keep it, Mom?”
“I don’t think so,” Beth said.
‘I wasn’t here,” Bobby told Peter. “I would have kicked his butt if I was.”
“He’s lucky you didn’t get at him,” Peter said, “but you shouldn’t be talking about kicking people’s butts anyway. The world’s
already too full of butt kicking. Probably he just wants a friend.”
“A friend?” Bobby said, clearly unconvinced.
Nodding good-bye to Julie, Beth held the front door open, and the three of them went out.
“So what are you doing tonight?” Peter asked Beth as they walked to the cars. He winked at Bobby, who pretended to cut up
food on a plate.
Before she could answer, Bobby said, “Want to eat at the steak house?”
“Sure,” Peter said, answering for them both.
“I’ve got a load of stuff to do,” Beth said doubtfully. “I should have gotten more done today, but nothing went right.
Peter shrugged. “You’ve got to eat.”
“That’s right,” Bobby said. “We’ve got to eat. I’ m as hungry as two dogs.”
Beth looked hard at Peter. “You look beat,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Same thing,” Peter said. “Nothing went right today.” His throat constricted, and he suddenly found himself on the edge of
tears.
“Then let’s eat at the steak house,” Beth said. “I’ve got nothing in the house anyway but frozen macaroni and cheese. And
it’s Saturday, we better get over there now, before the rush.”
“Hey,” Peter said, forcing himself to be cheerful, “I bought
something in town today.”
“For me?” Bobby asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Uh-uh,” Peter said. “It’s for your mother. A cooking tool.” He pulled open the door of the Suburban and picked up the spud
gun, showing it to Bobby and Beth.
“What is it?” Bobby asked.
“Potato laser,” Peter said. “It’s from a planet in Milky Way called Idaho. They shoot potatoes there instead of bullets.”
“Idaho’s not a planet,” Bobby said. “It’s a state.” He took the gun from Peter and pulled the plastic away from the cardboard, waving
the gun around like a gangster and pretending to shoot his mother’s car. “What does this shoot?”
“Potatoes,” Peter said.
“You’re kidding, of course.” Beth took the cardbord backing from Bobby. She turned it over and scanned the instructions, then
fixed Peter with a withering look. “It
does
shoot potatoes,” she said flatly. “Pieces of them.”
“Zucchini, too,” Peter said.
“I think we can buy a potato at Emory’s,” Bobby said, opening up the passenger-side door of the Suburban and climbing in. “I’ll
drive down there with Peter, Mom. We’ll meet you.” He pulled the heavy door shut, and Peter shrugged helplessly at Beth, as if
the world and its crazy affairs were beyond his control.
On the way down to the steak house Bobby talked rapid-fire about the deer head in the trash can and about holy he wanted to
take it and hang it on the wall like hunters did. But he said nothing about his flight back home from visiting his father or about
the week he had spent then about having to come back early because his father was a busy man.
Perhaps he had already bottled it up and put it away in the cardboard carton that people used to store that kind of thing,
shoving it out of sight on some back shelf of their
minds. Peter had been dumping stuff into his own carton for too damned long, closing the lid over it, carrying it around until
the bottom had fallen out. If he could help it, he wasn’t going to let Bobby do the same thing.
T
HE CLATTER OF PLATES AND BOTTLES WAS GIVING
K
LEIN
a headache. If he had been in any other company there wouldn’t have been a problem, but he was eating at the steak house
with Pomeroy, who had been explaining things in detail—gesturing, offering Klein unnecessary and unwanted advice.
There were ten good reasons not to be there listening to Pomeroy, and only one good reason
to
be there. Pomeroy was becoming a liability. It was necessary right now to humor him, and then to damned well think of some
way to get him out of the picture entirely. Short of murder, Klein didn’t have any ideas.
Pomeroy had even come up to the house today. Thank God Lorna hadn’t been home. Pomeroy couldn’t be persuaded that he and Klein
shouldn’t seem to be closely associated with each other, and he dropped by like an old friend, full of howdies, smirking around
as if he had a secret that he couldn’t share. Either he was the most happily self-deluded man Klein had ever met, or else
he had a bigger agenda, and was running some kind of lowball bluff. He yammered on now, looking grave, talking about the world
of car sales.