Hunters (7 page)

"But if they run a picture," Michael said,
"hell, he's been on television,
someone
will recognize him
sooner or later. And when they do, they can connect him to us."

"They can
always
connect him to us,"
Chuck said with a sneer. "They go back to L.A., they can connect
all of us together. But what's done is done—unless you want us to
go to the cops now and say that yeah, that's our buddy, and gee, he
musta gone crazy, 'cause we all just came out here to hunt, oh
yeah, they'll really believe that once they start checkin' with the
LAPD."

"We could say we came out here to protest,"
Michael said, "and Andrew just went off the deep end."

"We're gonna protest," said Chuck, "what we
got guns and C-4 for? I can't believe you, Brewster, you're a
goddam termite, a goddam chickenshit pussy, didn't you know what
you were gettin' yourself in for or what?"

"You're with us, Michael," Jean said. "The
only way anybody leaves this group now is in the trunk." That one
caught Chuck by surprise, and he gave an appreciative bark of
laughter. "Tomorrow," Jean went on, "we split up and make our kills
and meet back here. The next day we do the camp. But tomorrow we do
it..." She paused. "...on our own."

Chuck Marriner eyed her sleepily. "Who you
doin', Jeannie?" he said, although he thought he knew.

She looked as tough and as determined as he had ever
seen her. "Ned Craig," she said. "I'm going to kill that fucking
Ned Craig."

N
ed was dreaming of
the fall again. He had the same dream every few months, always when
something had upset him. Although he knew it was a dream while he
was in it, he could do nothing about it, could not change it, could
not make himself wake up. The dream was not a creation of his
brain, but a memory, and while he never relived it in his waking
life, it replayed itself in his dreams, so clear and filled with
color that it seemed like life, and he always found himself
admiring the quality of it, the technical proficiency of his brain
that could retain the occurrence so precisely after all those
years.

Everything around him was a bright,
brilliant, blazing green, so intense that his eyes stung, and in
another second he knew that it wasn't the color that blinded him
but the bits of dirt and vegetation thrown up into the air by the
blades of the helicopter hovering overhead.

Then he remembered what he already knew, and
had remembered over and over again, that he and Dave were there
because they had been found planting mines along the VC supply
route, and had, after a brief firefight, run like hell to the river
and radioed for help, the way it had been planned. And now here
came the chopper like the chuffing breath of God, while bullets
whisked through the high grass around them and covering fire raked
the area of the VC fire.

And then the fingers of God came down to
them, harnesses on which they could be plucked to salvation, and
they wrapped the straps around themselves and gestured to the pilot
with the thumbs-up signal that said fly me away to the heaven of
safety, and in another second they were jerked off their feet. Now
the gunshots came more urgently, and as he swayed in the air he
heard the bullets buzz past him like angry hornets of the jungle,
and as the ground dropped away from him and he looked down at the
river dotted with dozens of rocky islands, he was suddenly afraid,
and knew why, remembering what would come.

He could not stop it, could not call back
the bullet that ripped through the cable that held them both in the
air, could not wake from the dream of falling, falling next to
Dave, only a few feet separating them, a few feet that would mean
the difference between life and death when the earth met them.

Dave was slightly lower than he, and he
watched him plunging toward the river, watched the river coming
closer, watched as Dave struck the rock and opened like a pumpkin,
and watched the dirty brown water close around him.

When he struck the water his eyes opened,
and he came up out of his dream gasping for air. It entered his
lungs faster than he expected, and he coughed chokingly. In an
instant Megan was next to him, her eyes sleepy but alarmed, and he
knew he had shocked her out of her slumber.

"It's all right," she said, "it's
okay..."

He breathed deeply for several seconds
before he realized that he was not in his bed, but sitting on the
lounger in front of the fire. He had been listening to music, a Del
McCoury CD, and he had let the high, keening tenor woven into the
latticework of the bluegrass instruments carry him into sleep. But
it had been the day that had carried him into nightmare.

"Just a dream," he said. "Sorry."

"No no..." She patted his leg gently. "About
today?"

"No. The usual."

"Oh God." She curled up on his lap and
rested her head on his shoulder. They watched the fire for a few
minutes. "You still planning to go out tomorrow."

"Mmm-hmm." He needed to hear some music
again, something light and fun to take his mind off bullets and
blood and death. "How about playing something for me?"

"All right," she said, and stood up and
crossed to a corner of the wood-paneled room. There she took her
fiddle and bow from its case and quickly tuned it. "What do you
want to hear?"

"Your pick. Something peppy. 'Fire on the
Mountain,' 'Hell Among the Yearlings,' even 'Cripple Creek.'"

When she began to play, he started to grin.
It was ever thus, he thought. He could not help it. The music was
so infectious, so alive and full of joy, that it drove all thoughts
of death in rivers in Vietnam or the woods of Pennsylvania from his
head.

Megan had been playing the fiddle when he
had first seen her, at the old-time fiddle contest at the Ridgway
Independence Festival five summers before. She had played "Ashokan
Farewell" before it had become a cliché, and the tenderness with
which she delivered the haunting and, at that time, new ballad to
the crowd endeared the lovely stranger to him forever. She placed
second in the judging, losing to a man who had come up from
Pittsburgh just to compete, and whose rapid technique was
astonishing, though Ned thought he showed a total lack of feeling
compared to the woman's intensity.

Afterwards, Ned introduced himself and told
her how much he had enjoyed her playing. They chatted, and Ned
discovered, with a mixture of guilt and gratification, that she was
newly widowed. When he learned that she had just moved from Ridgway
to St. Mary's, he thought that God was good indeed. Before too long
he was running into her around town, and one thing led to another
until they were living together, an arrangement that hadn't changed
for the past four years. She saw no reason to remarry, nor did he.
At first some of the townspeople were dismayed, if not shocked, by
it, but gradually Ned and Megan were treated like any other couple
in St. Mary's, married or not.

The thought of his first wife crossed Ned's
mind as Megan played, and he wondered wistfully where she was, who
she was with, what she had done with her life. At least they hadn't
had any kids before they realized their mistake, hell, before
he
had realized the mistake his whole life had been,
teaching high school science, stuck inside a classroom ever since
he got out of the army, first as a student, and then as a teacher.
It wasn't until he took a job one summer with the Pennsylvania Game
Commission that he realized where his heart was.

The knowledge had cost him his job and his
marriage and another year of training and living in a one-room
apartment, but it had all been worth it, now more than ever, with
Megan as part of his life.

And that life had almost ended today. If he
had been a moment slower, he might be lying out there now, cut open
by the madman he had killed. That thought and the memory of Pete
Diffenderfer's ravaged corpse made him shift in his chair. Megan
stopped playing.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, fine. You've gotta be tired, though.
Let's call it a night."

"Okay." She put the fiddle in its case. "You
want in the bathroom first?"

"No, I'll read until you're finished." When
she went upstairs, he took one of the
Foxfire
books from
over the mantel, sat on the gray stone hearth, and opened the
dog-eared volume at random. He had read all ten of the books
innumerable times, finding in their pages what he found in the
old-time fiddle music that Megan played, and the bluegrass CD's and
tapes he listened to, the sounds and emotions of what he imagined
as being a simpler era, when men and women were closer to the land,
the trees, and the sky. He did not kid himself that times were
better back then, but he thought that they were simpler, and
simplicity was what he sought tonight.

He read part of a chapter about building a wagon
until Megan called him. When he came to bed he found her still
awake. They both took a long time to get to sleep.

S
heldon Lake didn't
see one familiar face in the sports bar in Bradford. He had found
it easily enough, but neither of the bartenders were the one he'd
seen in there six years before. He didn't see Terry either. In
fact, there didn't look to be a single fag in the place.

The bar seemed pretty crowded. There were a
lot of guys who Sheldon guessed were hunters, probably staying at
motels, hitting the bars at night, getting a few hours sleep, and
then tearing off to the woods at daybreak to blast away again. City
boys, probably didn't know a buck rub from a totem pole. But none
of them looked like fags beyond what city boys usually looked like
anyway.

When the older bartender brought Sheldon
another draft, he gathered up his courage and asked, "Terry been in
lately?"

The bartender was too busy to pretend he was
interested. "Who?"

"Guy named Terry? Kinda short and skinny,
blond hair?"

"Don't know him."

"He used to hang out here, I think. Maybe
five, six years ago."

Sheldon thought the bartender's expression
changed. The man seemed to think for a moment, then said, "What you
want him for?"

"Owes me some money."

The bartender shook his head. "Hope it's not
a lot."

"Why?"

"You're gonna have a tough time collecting
it. He's dead." Sheldon must have gone pale, because the bartender
added, "He a friend of yours?"

Sheldon shook his head angrily. "No...no,
bastard just...borrowed money from me once, that's all."

"Sorry about that," the bartender said, and
went to the other end of the bar, where he started talking to a
young couple he apparently knew.

Nothing was going to make Sheldon ask what
Terry had died of. He knew. What the hell else did young faggots
die of anyway? He wished he knew where the man's grave was. He
would have gone and pissed on it.

Sheldon finished his beer slowly. He could
feel the beads of sweat on his forehead, and wiped them away with
his fist. He thought about Terry and damned him, and hoped he was
in hell, and that thought made him wonder if
he
would go
there when he died, because he was going to die, sure enough, and
he figured that maybe he was going to go to hell, and almost wished
he would if that was where Terry was going to be. He was sure the
devil wouldn't mind a little faggot-bashing in his domain. After
all, the people there sure as hell weren't going to be
nice
to each other.

Too, if he was already going to hell, then
he had nothing to lose. And he wanted, more than anything, to make
somebody pay for what had happened to him. All those months of
guarding his ass, and then something as stupid as beating up a
queer, and before you know it you're a dead man. Shit, it just
wasn't fair. If he just hadn't gone into that bar in Bradford in
the first place...

If he just hadn't been so pissed at those
meat jockeys in prison...

If he hadn't had to go to prison in the
first place...

If he hadn't been pissed enough to try and
take out that goddam warden...

And then he stopped thinking back. He had
just found the prime mover, the person who had sent him not only to
prison, but to his death.

Ned Craig.

"
Fucker
," Sheldon said through
gritted teeth, loud enough to make several people near him look at
him. The bartender looked too, and then said something to the
people he was with, probably figuring that the stranger was pissed
because he'd loaned fifty bucks to a dead guy.

Ned Craig, that high and mighty son of a
bitch who had arrested him for shooting a doe in buck season, and
when Sheldon had told him he swore to Christ he thought he had seen
spikes, and it must have been some branches sticking up in the air,
and goddammit, it wasn't his
fault
, and he shouldn't have to
be fined two hundred bucks over what was just a
mistake
,
even after Sheldon
told
him all that, the pompous prick
still
told him he had to be cited, and if he couldn't pay
right then and there, for crissake, Craig would take his goddam
gun
.

More than anything else in the world,
Sheldon hated people who wouldn't listen to reason, who just went
by the rules whether they made any sense or not. His teachers had
been that way in school, and his daddy had been at home, and now
that he was finally on his own, Sheldon had just about had enough
of it.

So he took a swing at Ned Craig's stupid,
stubborn head with the butt end of his rifle. He only connected
well enough to knock that dumb hat off, but it felt great to see
that slimy smirk wiped off the asshole's face. Sheldon dropped his
gun then and went after Ned Craig with his fists and feet.

Craig had surprised him, though. Sheldon had
thought he looked big but soft, and quickly found out that he was
big and
hard
. He'd read him wrong, that was for sure, and
Craig wasted no time in punching Sheldon right out. When he came to
enough to know where he was and what happened, Craig had him tied
up with the nylon cord he had been using to drag his deer, and
pretty soon the police that Craig had called showed up and took him
out of the woods and into a cell.