Stunts, page 14
“No kidding?”
“Says the lecture business has kind of dried up on him.”
A glance and away; the boy was near to smiling.
“Yep. Seems his friend, that Burwin fella—the one that talked him into moving?—seems he doesn’t have as many strings to pull as Evan thought.” He kicked aside a fallen branch with his foot, aiming for the gutter. “I told him he was foolish, going all the way over there. Could’ve found a new job right around here, didn’t have to leave his house to strangers.”
“He wanted to go, Mr. Naze. He likes it over there.”
“I suppose.”
Another half block.
“Did he say when he was coming home?”
“Didn’t say he was. Just said the lecture business had kind of dried up. I suppose he means temporarily. Oh.”
At the next corner, an old black Chevy barreled past them, suddenly swerving too close to the curb. John had to stagger back to keep from being struck, was kept from falling by Brian’s arm, which dropped away as soon as he was steady.
“Bastard,” John muttered at the car’s vanishing bumper.
“Dom Pastori’s the driver,” Brian said tonelessly, not looking. “That’s Patrick Reynolds with him.”
John glowered. “A friend?”
“Hell, no.”
Good, he thought, and decided to head home. That had been a close call. Too close. Deliberate. Not a killing move; a scaring one.
And the sonofabitch had done it well.
3
“Love it!” Dom cried over the voice of the engine.
Patrick said nothing.
North on the wide, two-lane highway. Soon enough into the state forest, the top quarter of Port Richmond still on his right but hidden by several hundred yards of trees and sparse underbrush; in winter the houses there would be visible, barely. Not, he thought, that anyone would care; you come this far north in New Jersey, all you want to do is get the hell out.
Half a mile later he slowed down, checked the rearview mirror for cops, and swung abruptly left across the empty, southbound lane into a narrow dirt road. He switched off the radio.
“Found this last week,” he said, pointing with his left hand. “Don’t know what it is. Fire trail, hiking trail, something like that, I guess.”
Patrick only nodded.
The road climbed as the car lurched side to side in the ruts, fell again as the road darted sharply left.
He smelled the leaves, the pine, and closed his eyes to enjoy it, opened them just in time to break at a seemingly roof-high boulder that marked the end of the line.
“Very nice,” said Patrick dryly. “You play house out here, or what?”
Dom laughed once without parting his lips, made a swift, practiced K-turn so that they faced back the way they had come, then switched off the engine and jumped out of the car.
Patrick opened his door.
It was quiet. Not a breeze, not a bird. Just the sound of his soles on the hardening ground.
He opened the trunk and pulled out a rifle, scope, and metal ammunition box that gleamed as if it had been polished.
“Holy shit,” Patrick said quietly, eyes wide. “What the hell are you—”
Waggling his eyebrows, Dom put a finger to his lips, shook his head, and led him around the boulder. One hundred and ten measured paces along a trail that began on the far side of the rock; he had counted them eight times, once a day, since the idea came to him in a half-dream. He could do it in his sleep. He could do it blindfolded.
He could do it at night, when the only light was the stars.
He stopped at a thatch of fast-browning ferns and pushed through to a flat-topped mossy boulder that reached to his waist.
“Here,” he said.
“Better and better,” Patrick said, and leaned over the rock, looked down the gentle slope. Then he looked at Dom. “I think I have a feeling.”
With practiced efficiency, Dom snapped on the scope, opened the metal box and picked out a single shell, popped it into the rifle, and covered the bolt with his hand. “What you figure is, see,” he explained, setting a hip against the rock, the rifle aimed at the trail behind him, “is that there’s maybe a couple of thousand cars a day go by this place between, say, noon and sunset. During the week, I mean.”
A glance downward. A fifteen-foot-wide swath of new growth that provided a clear view of the highway. A fire had cleared it; there were still patches of black here and there on the ground.
“So the odds of you hitting someone you know are pretty damned slim.”
Patrick’s eyes widened.
Dom hauled the rifle to port arms, worked the bolt, and sent the shell into the chamber.
“Unless, of course, you know exactly when they’ll go by, and what car they’ll be in.”
He braced his elbows on the rock, put the stock to his shoulder.
Patrick stepped away. “Dom, look, you aren’t going to shoot anybody, right?”
“Bang,” whispered Dom as a motor home sped past. If he had actually fired, the driver would have swerved, probably figuring he had a flat, though he probably wouldn’t have figured that there’d be a hole in his wall, back by the john. Would have, if he stopped once he realized it wasn’t a flat at all, most likely shit a brick when he realized he’d been shot at.
And hit.
And it could have been him instead of his vehicle.
Patrick’s finger touched Dom’s back.
“Dom, listen, this isn’t a stunt. This is—”
“A stunt, if you work it right,” he answered quietly, setting his eye against the scope. “Which I will.”
Cross hairs. Automobiles and trucks and one motorcycle, one van, up close and damned personal.
The finger poked him again. “How can you work it right?”
Dom smiled, the wood of the oiled stock pleasantly cool against his cheek. He didn’t raise or turn his head; his cheek hard now against the stock. “Pat?”
“What?”
“How fast can you run?”
“What!”
Dom stretched his neck, sniffed, kicked his toe lightly against the boulder. “I said, how fast can you run?”
Patrick made a noise that sounded like a squeal, and slapped his shoulder, hard. “Goddamnit, Pastori, what the hell are you talking about? C’mon, let’s get—”
The nose of a van.
Dom giggled, and pulled the trigger.
“Jesus!” Patrick yelled, and was already running before Dom turned around, listening to the echo of the retort as he snatched up the spent shell, the metal box, and sprinted after him toward the car.
He laughed as he jumped in.
He laughed as Patrick screamed at him.
And he wondered, joyful tears on his cheeks, a breath wonderfully hard to catch, how long he could make it last before he told the stupid prick that the bullet had been a blank.
Sixteen
1
Shortly before the sun, turning red, hit the trees, the fog began to move.
In strips and puffs it drifted across the streets, across the highway, splitting as cars pierced it, reforming and growing in their wake; twisting slowly in depressions, spilling slowly under shrubs, trailing along gutters and ruts and trenches and ditches; lifting toward windows and doors and faces that grimaced with the invisible touch of autumn damp; falling in slow motion off the cliff toward the fog that had already leeched color from the shoreline, took form from the river.
On Tyler Avenue it blurred the neon; streetlamps grew halos and shadows grew indistinct; footsteps lost their crack, tires lost their hum, and the bells in the steeple of the First Baptist Church sounded less like a hymn than they did buoys on empty water.
And on the fifty-yard line, the stands empty, no one else on the field, the stadium looked immense as the fog turned light to haze. So much so that Greta Rourke sank to the grass and pulled her knees to her chest. Ski sweater for the chill, shorts for the hell of it, tennis shoes and no socks, and a silver ribbon that loosely tied her hair.
Small.
She was so small.
And everything else was so big.
Even the sky had no clouds, and when she looked up she saw nothing but deep blue through gaps in the fog. Always blue. Sometimes so vast that she felt as if she were falling; sometimes so close she knew that if she let go of her legs, she’d be able to reach up and touch it, put her fingers through it, to the universe on the other side.
It made her dizzy.
She closed her eyes.
Her forehead drifted down to her knees, and she felt the heat there, the bone, and she opened one eye to see between her legs the grass. Like the tops of hundred-foot trees in an Amazon jungle. If she were in a plane, she’d be able to fly down, find a clearing, make a daring landing, and discover the only tribe in the world that knew how to live forever without once knowing how big everything was beyond the deadlands where the jungle and the river and the mountains ended.
Slowly her head rose, her focus shifting to the concrete stands beyond the track that circled the gridiron. They weren’t very high. And behind them rose the brick and tinted glass school, which wasn’t very high either. A single story. Roof flat, broken only by goose-necked air-conditioning ducts, toadstool heating vents, a pair of satellite dishes, a twenty-foot radio antenna.
Big.
Actually two squared U’s joined by breezeways through their centers. In the two courtyards, trees and grass and benches; to the left, beyond the attached auditorium, a parking lot; to the right two smaller brick structures that housed groundskeeping equipment, sports equipment, arcane electrical and technical equipment she’d didn’t for the life of her understand.
Big.
Enough rooms for four classes of three hundred students each, give or take, no crowding, the auditorium seated seven hundred. Teachers. Guidance counselors. Administration. Fifteen hundred people at any one time? Did that make sense?
Big.
And in no time, too quickly, her parents would be sending her someplace else. Someplace bigger.
When they knew damned well that small was all she wanted.
I don’t want to be a lawyer, she had told them often enough.
Everyone, they said, expects you to study law, like your father.
Name three, she’d answered.
One of them had almost slapped her for her impertinence; the other had advised calm and control, that perhaps Greta, as a top-ranked senior in her class, might well be old enough to make up her own mind.
Good cop and bad cop.
One day one of them would threaten and the other would see reason; the next day, the roles were reversed.
It had begun last June and hadn’t let up.
It would end in June, if she lived that long, if she didn’t blow her brains out just to keep them quiet, just to keep them from squabbling over her future like hyenas over a meal.
Not that she’d really do it.
For one thing, it was dumb; for another, Mr. Kendal would probably follow her to wherever you go when you’re dead and drag her back, give her a piece of his mind, then give her a spanking.
In his last letter, he had told her that despite her parental problems, she was lucky. He had one student who, unable to choose his vocation and under pressure from his folks to make up his mind, had opted for dropping out and roaming and had been shot in Italy, by the police.
She wasn’t sure exactly what the point was, but she thought he was telling her, the way he always did, to hang in there, get to college, and then do what she wanted anyway. Parents, he had once said, look to their children to atone for their own failures. The kids who are ultimately successful refuse to accept even a taste of that guilt.
She wasn’t sure, but she thought that dropping out sounded pretty good right about now.
Quiet footsteps on the dampening grass. She stiffened until her nostrils flared at the soft scent of lavender. Then she relaxed, let her hands drift down to grip her ankles, let her head turn to the right as a girl in denim from jacket to old jeans sat beside her, mimicked her pose.
“Taking one last look at the old place?” Sarra Marlow asked, blowing black bangs away from her eyes, a finger wiping the fog’s touch from her glistening cheeks.
“Yeah, right. One last look. You wish and I pray. We still have a few months, y’know.”
“Six months, one week, one day,” Sarra corrected primly, the wet finger raised. “That’s only life plus fifty without parole for us subhumans.”
Greta looked back at the school. “Have you ever wanted to just blow the damned place up?”
“Every day of my life,” Sarra answered. “No college in the world could be worse than this.”
“My father says that’s what he always said about his high school.”
“Mine too.”
They watched a dark bird hover over the building.
The fog shifted, settled.
Greta looked back at the grass. “He’s full of shit.”
“Right.”
“I think,” Greta said after a minute had passed, “I want to pull a stunt.”
Sarra giggled. “You can’t do that, Rourke. There’s a committee for it, remember? And I don’t remember either of us being asked to be on it.”
Greta looked at her friend, cheek on her knee. “Fuck the committee,” she said flatly.
A minute later Sarra nodded. Then she frowned, and scratched under one eye with her thumb. “So what about Linholm? He says we’re not—”
“Fuck Linholm too.” She grinned.
Sarra giggled. Sobered. “I was over at Gilder’s yesterday. I think Corky wants to do something too.”
Greta sniffed loudly, wiped her nose with a finger, touched the grass and felt the cold. Felt the fog. “Corky’s a jackass.”
“Yeah.”
“Corky will screw it up.”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck Corky.”
“I already have,” Sarra said. “He screwed it up.”
Greta’s laughter bubbled, burst, rolled her onto her back and made her kick her legs in the air. She ignored the wet grass, the feel of it on the back of her neck, the smell of it in the air. “I saw Shane today,” she said after she’d calmed down.
Sarra’s eyes widened. “No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
“He talk to you?”
Greta shook her head. Shane wasn’t talking to anyone these days, not since his college acceptance had been put on hold. Before, he was a talker, a yakker, burn your ears off with all the stuff he said, half of which didn’t make sense; now he was ghost, walking around the halls, muttering to himself.
It was spooky.
Everybody knew it wasn’t his fault, though. The word was, Linholm had refused to submit a decent recommendation, something that had always been automatically done. The word also was, it had nothing to do with Shane’s grades, which weren’t spectacular, but they weren’t a disaster either. But the Führer was always on his case about something. It didn’t make any difference what, the principal was there, busting the poor guy’s ass for practically just breathing.
And Mrs. Bishop wasn’t helping things, not by a long shot—she had been pushing him since the day his father had walked out, and Greta had the feeling that Shane had finally opened his eyes and realized that his life wasn’t his own anymore. It belonged to his mother.
Greta understood that all too well.
“You know,” Sarra said, one hand waving ribbons over her head, “if anyone could come up with a good stunt, Shane could.”
“The old Shane,” Greta corrected.
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
Yeah, Greta thought; shit.
“Corky thinks he’s queer.”
“I think,” Greta said solemnly, pinching the bridge of her nose, “Corky is queer.”
Sarra shook her head. “Nope. Pat Reynolds is queer. Corky’s just stupid.”
True enough, Greta said with her nod, and watched the sky, saw a cloud, felt the settling cold on her spine and wished she had brought a jacket. She could freeze to death here, which may or may not serve everyone right. She snorted. Now that’s stupid.
Besides, what if everything was big on the other side? Sarra laid down beside her. “Okay,” she said, “so what do we do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Greta answered carefully. “I don’t know. But I will.”
2
On the way home, batting at the fog and pretending they were in London, hiding from the Ripper, they caught up with Rita Galiano carrying a brown paper bag under one arm. The greetings were loud enough to bring one woman onto her porch, a small terrier yapping at her side.
“Gonna get arrested,” Greta said in mock fear. “Disturbing the peace. My college career, forever ruined. My mother would just love a felon in the family.”
The door slammed; they could still hear the dog barking.
“So kill yourself,” Rita told her. “I’ll come to the funeral.”
“Thanks.”
“I won’t,” said Sarra. “I’m busy.”
Greta swung for her arm and missed. “Now how do you know that?”
“Whenever it is, I’m busy.”
They walked on in silence.
Greta looked at Rita and sighed. Big. Now, she’s big where it counts. Why the hell can’t I be big, where it counts, and keep everything else the way it’s supposed to be?
Sarra poked at the bag. “The food that good you bring it home?”
“Rolls,” Rita explained. “My mother likes them. She tells my father she made them.”
Greta couldn’t help a whoop. “And he believes it?”
“My father,” she said, “is Superman in the courtroom. At home, he’s just another man.”
They laughed, pushed at each other, fell back into silence.
Until Greta, with a wink at Sarra, said, “Is Brian a man?”
Rita glared at her quickly.
“Oh, whoa,” Greta said, hands up in surrender. “Ms. Marlow, I think I’ve made a faux pas here.”
“What’s that?” Sarra asked.
“It means,” Rita said without inflection, “she’s just stepped in more shit than she thought.”
“Hey, Rita,” Greta said quickly, abruptly aware that her friend was only partly kidding, “hey, look, I didn’t mean—”
