TEN

“Honey baby lamb chop, you know I love you, so why not do this little thing for me?”

“You know I can’t stand that creep.”

“Yeah, but—”

“He’ll put his hands on me. There’s no way to avoid that, Junior. He’ll grope me all over.”

“Diamond, baby, I know that Delmar is a jerk. If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t be askin’. It’s because he is a jerk that we have to fix his wagon.”

“ ‘We’? As usual, you want help on a little project to improve the world.”

“Delmar Clay’s time has run out.”

“Arch Stehlik thought this up, didn’t he?”

Junior Grimes nodded.

“He’s been getting you into trouble all your life, Junior. He never gets caught and you always do.”

Junior didn’t want to talk about Arch this morning. “I need your help, Di.”

“Why me?”

“You’re the only gal with the moxie to pull this off. And the guy has the hots for you. You’ve told me that yourself.”

“He isn’t the only one. There’s a dirty old man who lives in Dismal Hollow who slobbers all over himself every time he sees me. Do you want me to encourage him?”

“Sweet thing, you know I don’t. But Delmar wants to get in your pants. That’s the hook. What do you want me to do? Advertise in the newspaper for women that Delmar Clay has the hots for?”

“Just what’s in this for me, Junior Grimes? Are you going to seriously discuss marriage if I do this for you?”

“It’s not for me. It’s for Billy Joe Elkins and Melanie Naroditsky and Arleigh Tate and everyone else who’s ever had a run-in with Delmar. Think of it as a civic duty.”

“You’re avoiding my question.”

“You know I want to marry you, Diamond, but I don’t have the money.”

“A marriage license only costs three dollars, Junior Grimes.”

“It’s all the other costs I’m thinkin’ about.”

“So we can never get married? Is that what you’re saying? We can never have a life together? Maybe you should get another girlfriend, one who wants to stay single her whole life. Or maybe you should get a real job that pays real wages.”

Junior had had enough discord for one day. It was almost as if he were already married. “I’ve got a real job,” he replied testily. “Now are you going to do this for me or not?”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“I’m not asking you to have sex with the guy. Just get naked for a few minutes. No one will ever see your face in the photos. Then you can slap him silly. Bobbittize him and mount it on a walnut plaque—I don’t care.”

“Maybe I’ll give him what he wants.”

Junior got up from the table in the back of the restaurant and stormed off through the kitchen toward the garage.

Diamond Ice sat drinking her coffee. Her real objection to this scheme, which she had stated and Junior had ignored, was that Arch Stehlik thought it up. It was sly and a little wicked, both Stehlik trademarks. Junior had not a trace of either characteristic in his makeup, which was his charm. He was a good, decent, honest man who always said exactly what he thought. Yet all Arch had to do was suggest something sneaky and Junior was ready to climb aboard to drive the train.

Oh, well. Perhaps it was better for everyone that Arch had taken cards in this game. This way Delmar Clay wouldn’t wind up in the hospital and Junior wouldn’t spend very many days in jail.

Diamond Ice finished her coffee and left two quarters on the table.

 

A wave of anxiety swept over Richard Hudson when he heard the car pull into his driveway. As the sound of slamming doors reached him in his study, he looked longingly at the pleasant sanctuary where he had done his writing for the last three years. Somehow he had this feeling that this place would never again be the same.

No! He would not permit his privacy to be invaded. Would…not…permit…

A loud knocking on the door. He moved slowly, reluctantly, in that direction.

Through the glass he saw Goofy and Crystal, and they were staring in. Crystal smiled broadly and waved.

With a nagging suspicion that he was sealing his own doom, Richard Hudson unlocked the door and pulled it open.

Crystal charged in. Goofy followed. Each of them was carrying a shopping bag. “I brought eighteen books,” Crystal announced, “which is all I had. I know you’ve written more of them. I want to get the other titles.”

“Most of them are out of print,” Hudson said listlessly, but Crystal wasn’t paying attention. She was looking around as if this were the lobby of the Waldorf or Elvis’ bedroom.

As Goofy dumped the books on his dining room table, Crystal Ice zeroed in on Richard Hudson. The dazzling smile, the perfect white teeth, the green eyes that took in every pore and pimple…he felt as if every spotlight on earth had hit him all at once and he had no place to hide. The lights were sizzling hot and he was perspiring.

She whipped a pen from somewhere and offered it to him. He took it reluctantly and faced the pile of books.

“Ooh, this is sooo exciting!” she declared.

He picked up the first book and turned to the title page. “To Crystal Ice, Best Wishes, Richard Hudson.”

She watched over his shoulder as he wrote, watched from a distance of two or three inches. He could smell her scent, feel her body heat on his shoulder, feel the fire.

When he finished the first volume, he picked up another.

Instinctively he moved away from her. She followed. “This is going to take a while,” he said. “Would you like some coffee? There’s some in the kitchen.”

“No, thanks.”

“Pour me a cup, will you, please?”

That did it. She dashed away. He dropped into a chair and scribbled frantically.

He should never have published a word under his own name. It never occurred to him way back when that someday a problem might arise. He supposed that he must have had an inkling when he created Prince Ziad, some nagging sense that something might be lurking out there in the darkness, so—thank God!—he had had the sense to publish Ziad under a pen name.

He was marveling at his prescience when Crystal returned with his coffee and set it carefully near his hand, as if she were serving at a White House dinner.

She settled in on the other side of the table and stared at him.

He did another three or four books, then said, “You’re making me nervous.”

She tittered. “I guess I’m making a fool of myself. I’m so excited! If you only knew how you have delighted me through the years with your books. And now, to see you in the flesh…it’s marvelous! I feel as if I know you better than any other man in the whole world.”

“You really don’t know me at all.”

“Oh, but I do! I know how your mind works, what you think. I know what you consider interesting, what you think droll, amusing, witty, sad, tragic, tender…I know you.”

He stopped writing and forced himself to meet her gaze. “You know what I’ve written. But you don’t know me. Open your eyes, Crystal. I’m a short, fat, ugly man who’s well into middle age and losing his hair.” He closed his eyes for a moment, searching for the words. When he opened them she was right there, her eyes boring into his. He felt like a butterfly pinned to a board.

“When I was a boy I wanted to grow up to look like Gary Cooper, but it didn’t happen. I’ve always been short, fat and ugly. I’ll always be short, fat and ugly.”

Her gaze never wavered. “That doesn’t matter.”

“But it does,” he protested. “It matters to me. I have to live with it. And I have learned how. I write stories. This is my life.”

“I could live with it, too,” she said.

He gaped. Where had this conversation come from? Where was it going?

He attacked the remaining books in a flurry of scribbling, dropping the Best Wishes from the formula in order to finish faster.

He pushed the last book onto the pile and rose. “Come on, Goofy, let’s hit the dirt.”

He left her sitting there at the table with her books. He galloped out the door and loped across fifty furrows before he stopped, turned and looked back the way he had come.

“She likes you,” Goofy said when he caught up.

Richard Hudson could resist the pull of gravity no longer. He plopped heavily into the damp earth and sat staring at the house.

Crystal helped herself to the coffee that Richard hadn’t touched and wandered slowly through the little house, taking everything in. She looked at this, fingered that, examined each item with interest. In his study she looked at the computer, the black screen, touched the keyboard where his fingers created the magic that moved her.

Finally she stood in front of the bookshelves, which occupied two walls of the study. There were all the Richard Hudson books. She counted—thirty-two. One by one she took down those she had never seen before and examined each carefully, then replaced it on the shelf.

Intuitively Crystal Ice understood one of the basic truths of the creative process: Richard Hudson was all the characters he had created, the good, the bad, the heroes and villains, the monsters and the victims, all of them. They lived inside of him and he put them on the pages to populate the stories that he wanted to tell.

If they weren’t in him, if he couldn’t give them life, the stories would fail. But they were…and he could…he had…so his characters, these little creatures from the living mind of Richard Hudson, walked and talked and lived and loved. They lived real lives and died real deaths between the covers of his books.

His best books were The Voyagers and The Survivors, an epic saga in two volumes about mankind’s first attempt to colonize a planet of another star. Each ran to over three hundred thousand words.

She took the two thick volumes from the shelf and sat in the stuffed chair where he must sit, turned on the lamp and read snatches, refreshing her memory.

The Survivors was his masterpiece. The premise was that technology and civilization are inseparable. Mankind must have a critical mass of technological skills to sustain any particular level of civilization, and the ability to pass these skills to subsequent generations. If the skills could not be passed on, or if the number of people fell below the critical level, civilization would crumble. Human society would inevitably descend to a technological level that could be sustained, with an appropriate value system. In The Survivors the voyagers who had crossed the stupendous reaches of interstellar space had, in five generations, descended back into the age of unpolished stone. A scout ship that arrived from the mother planet two hundred years later found only a few scattered families of hunter-gatherers wearing skins, and no trace of the colonists.

The final twist—Crystal turned to the last chapter to read it again—was the most unexpected. The planet the survivors had colonized turned out to be Earth.

It was a dazzling twist, she thought. Very bold. If he fumbled the ending the whole novel would fail. But he didn’t fumble. He pulled it off.

Indisputably the man who created this work was brilliant. Perhaps a genius.

Reluctantly she returned the books to the shelf. She stood at the window and gazed at the two figures hunched in the dirt on the ridge. Goofy and Richard.

She had spent her life surrounded by the ordinary. Met ordinary people, faced ordinary problems, ate ordinary food, worried about and solved ordinary problems.

Richard Hudson was not ordinary. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

She wandered back through the house. There was another bookcase in the living room; she stopped to examine the books that it contained. She adjusted a light so that she could see better.

Funny, there were some Prince Ziad books here. Her sister Diamond loved the Prince Ziad tales. Crystal had looked at them one day when she had nothing else to do, but they bored her. Strange that Richard should have these third-rate hunk fantasies on his shelf. Rip Hays couldn’t hold a candle to Richard Hudson.

And here were some books in—what was that? Japanese. The covers were lurid versions of Prince Ziad. She opened one to the title page. Yes, this one was a Japanese translation of a Prince Ziad adventure. In fact, all the Japanese books on this shelf—there were a half dozen—were translations of Ziad.

And French translations, and Spanish, Italian, German…Chinese?

Why did Richard Hudson have all these foreign editions of Rip Hays’ books?

An idea flickered, then ignited. Could it be?

She strode back to the study. Richard and Goofy were still up there in the mud. She jerked open his desk drawers and began going through his files. Bank files, investments, letters from his publishers…Morton Sciata, literary agent…

She scanned one of the Sciata letters. The one she randomly selected was a letter about publishing Prince Ziad in Poland. She read no further.

She put the files away, closed the drawers, and went to the window.

Richard Hudson was Rip Hays! Well, it made sense. He had told her several times that Richard Hudson books didn’t sell. That certainly wasn’t news. Obtaining them was always difficult. Many bookstores didn’t even stock them and required you to place a special order.

Richard wrote Prince Ziad to make a living.

Crystal Ice smiled gently. Her genius had faced the wrath of the marketplace all these years alone, suffered for his art. Thinking how he must have writhed when the results of extraordinary effort were ignored by ordinary book buyers, she saw him in a whole new light.

Well, she had found him.

“It’s going to be all right, Richard,” she said aloud. “At last you’ve met a woman who appreciates you.”

 

The Eden country looked good in any weather, but on a clear, crisp day with the autumn leaves at their peak, it looked superb. If you were also in love, the scenery was sublime. The air had a tangible sweet aroma, a taste like a kiss, and the breeze was a gentle caress. If you were in love.

Sam Neely was. He drank in the sensual sensations as he let the cruiser drift along the road through that Eden country.

It came as a surprise when he passed Richard Hudson’s house and saw the love of his life coming down the porch steps into the yard.

Crystal!

He turned the cruiser into the driveway and killed the engine.

She was calling to the men on the ridge as Sam Neely floated toward her, his feet barely touching the ground.

“Lunch is ready!” she called.

She had a great voice, Neely thought, perfect timbre, perfect pitch, and it carried so well she didn’t need to shout at the top of her lungs. He smiled broadly, unable to contain his joy.

She looked like Venus standing there with the breeze playing with her hair, looking at the men several hundred yards away. One of them raised his arm and waved.

Neely took several deep breaths, then said, “Hello, Crystal.”

She glanced at him, said, “Hi,” then climbed the steps to the porch.

He followed. “Just a hi? That’s it?”

Now she faced him. “What did you expect? A big, fat ‘Whatcha doin’?’ ”

Neely took a step back. His confusion showed on his face. “Well, I thought at the very least I’d get a pleasant smile, or something along those lines. After all…”

“I have soup on the stove,” Crystal told him curtly. “Richard will be here shortly. He’s coming now.” She gestured toward the ridge and reached for the screen door.

“I didn’t come to talk to Richard. I came to talk to you.”

That stopped her. She frowned. “What about?”

“Well, about Sunday afternoon. I—”

“I was in Capitol City Sunday. There must be some mistake. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must stir the soup or it will burn.” She let the screen door slam behind her.

Sam Neely didn’t know what to think. Sunday afternoon certainly wasn’t a figment of his imagination. He was standing there at a loss for what to do next when Richard Hudson walked from the plowed ground onto the lawn. “Better wash your hands, Goofy,” he advised his companion. Then he said hello to Neely.

Sam Neely was more interested in the house than in Hudson. Both men stood staring at the screen door.

“She made soup,” Neely said.

“I didn’t invite her to stay,” the writer replied. “She’s been in there all morning.”

“Fine woman,” the state trooper said warmly.

“Oh, sure,” Richard Hudson acknowledged, never taking his eyes off his screen door, on his house. “Fine woman.”

“One hell of a fine woman!”

“One of a kind.”

“They don’t come any better.”

“I suppose not. But even so, I don’t want her.”

Trooper Sam Neely stared openmouthed at Hudson, who tried to explain. “I like the way I live. I need peace and quiet. You understand?”

Neely didn’t. That was obvious.

“A woman would be an unnecessary complication.”

Neely’s mouth worked, but no words came out. He swallowed hard, then tried again. “They’re complicated, all right. But I guess I don’t—”

“When I was younger I wanted a woman. Wanted one rather badly, as a matter of fact, but she didn’t want me. Wasn’t the least bit interested. For me, then, the rejection was devastating. Now, looking back, I believe it was better for both of us that the situation worked out the way it did. She’s married to a dentist now, I understand.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe I’m rationalizing. One can never be sure.” He shrugged. “Not that it matters.”

“What’s that got to do…?”

“I don’t want this one.” Richard Hudson pointed toward the house. “Can you get her out of there?”

“Ahh—”

“Without hurting her feelings?”

“No.”

Hudson took the negative with good grace. He jammed his hands into his pockets. “I suppose not,” he said, and slowly climbed the porch stairs. He opened the screen door, then disappeared inside. The screen slammed behind him.

Sam Neely took off his hat and scratched his head.

Goofy carried his cinder blocks to the kitchen window. He arranged them one atop the other, climbed up and peered in.

Crystal’s voice split the still air. “Goofy, get in here and eat your lunch!”

 

Why did you hunt that deer?

Ed Harris found the note on his desk that evening after work. Anne’s handwriting. The note was undated, so he couldn’t be sure how long it had been lying there. He tried to remember the last time he was in the den. Well, Sunday, when Ruth was here.

So Anne had been here since. Poor Anne, poor lovely Anne who could never understand people.

Why did you hunt that deer?

He looked at the trophy on the wall, a magnificent buck, a once-in-a-lifetime deer. And his father died just twelve hours after the deer did.

Actually, he wished he had never killed it. He regretted pulling the trigger when he saw the animal dead and regretted it every time he looked at the trophy since. He had to kill it, though. Had to kill it so he could tell his father that he had.

But Anne hadn’t asked that. “Hunt” was the word she used. Why did you hunt it?

He settled into the easy chair and went drifting back.

An early winter storm had blown in that week. Cold, sleet, snow, wind—those were the things he remembered most. A cold rain was falling when he and Anne had driven up to the house in the Faraway Hills, the afternoon the ambulance brought his father home from the hospital to die.

Up in his room the old man had whispered, “Eddie, I saw a huge deer this fall above Panther Lick—you know where it is. Take the national forest road on the back of the farm, about three miles up in there, up high. He’s got a huge rack, beams as thick as your wrist. Big deer, big as a steer. Never saw one like it, not in my whole life.”

He had coughed then, needing oxygen. When he could continue he said, “Ed, I’ve seen that buck three times this year. I was hoping that the docs could keep me going long enough so I could go after him.”

A bit later he added, “Won’t be easy. I figure he’s five or six years old. Wily old cuss, he’s made sure no one else has seen him. I listened to the hunting chat this summer and fall. If anybody had seen him up on Panther they would have talked…maybe the best deer ever grown in this Eden country…thing like that would be talked about.

“Get him for me, Eddie.”

Ed Harris, banker, didn’t want to go hunting. It seemed to him that he and his father should spend these last few days together. The old man had lived a long, full life, had fought in a war, had been a civic leader and built a bank, had fathered and raised children, had buried his own father…shouldn’t they talk about all those things, about a life well lived, perhaps even about the future? Religion, God, the afterlife?

“Dad, I think—”

“Do this for me, Eddie.”

“I’m not much of a hunter.” That was a true statement. He hunted birds occasionally with a bank client who had dogs, yet he hadn’t hunted deer since he was a senior in high school.

“Doesn’t matter. Hunt him for me.”

That night when they were getting ready for bed in the guest room, he had told Anne, “I’m going hunting in the morning. Dad wants me to.”

She had stared at him as if he had lost his mind. Finally she said, “He won’t live more than a few days, Ed. The doctors took out his IVs. He’s lost seventy pounds these last five months. He’s dying.”

“That’s why I’m going to do this.”

“You don’t have a hunting license. You didn’t buy one this fall.”

“I’ll buy one tomorrow night at Doolin’s.”

“You’ll buy a ticket when the show is over. That makes sense. What if Delmar Clay catches you hunting without a license?”

“He won’t catch me. Listen to that wind! In the morning it’ll be cold as blazes and spitting snow. Delmar Clay would be the last man alive I’d expect to run into in the Faraway Hills on a day like that.”

“What if you get a deer?”

“Anne! I’m not going to get a deer. I’m going hunting! Because Dad wants me to go. So he can lie there thinking about how it was when he did it. There’s not a chance in a hundred that I could get a shot at a buck in these hills in this weather. I’ll be spending most of my time trying to stay warm and dry and not get lost.”

“Ridiculous” was Anne’s verdict.

The alarm rang at 5:00 A.M. He used a flashlight to dig his father’s hunting clothes from a trunk in the attic. Long underwear, waterproof pants, two old sweaters, a waterproof coat and a wool hat with earmuffs. A wool scarf, two pairs of wool socks, a pair of heavy gloves.

His rifle was there, too. Still in the attic where he had left it all those years ago. It was a Model 94 Winchester, a lever action in .25–35 caliber, with an octagon barrel. In the glow of the flashlight he could see patches of rust. He worked the action three or four times. Well, he probably wouldn’t be shooting it.

The rifle was older than he was. He had bought it from a man moving to Florida the summer he was fourteen. Paid forty dollars for it, money he had earned heaving bales of hay. When Dad inspected the rifle, he said it was made before World War II.

Two boxes of ammo lay on the shelf. That was good, since he doubted if anyone still manufactured ammunition of this caliber. He took ten shells and put them in his pocket. What was it Uncle Frank had once said when he saw him putting a whole box of shells in his pocket? “We’re going hunting, Eddie, not to a war. Take enough for two magazine loads. If you can’t get a deer with that many, you don’t deserve to get one.”

Ol’ Uncle Frank…dead ten years now. He had loved to hunt. At least he called it hunting—sitting under a tree chewing a cigar with a rifle across his knees, watching the light and shadow as the sun moved slowly across the sky. He did two weeks of that every year and usually killed a nice buck. He always said that if a man could sit still long enough, eventually a deer would happen by.

An old pair of hunting boots lay in one corner. Ed Harris wiped off a cobweb and rammed his hand inside each of them checking for spiders as the wind sang around the eaves and sleet pellets rattled on the glass of the little attic window.

In the kitchen he made several sandwiches and wrapped them in plastic bags as the agency nurse watched. He also poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it greedily.

“He’s finally getting some sleep,” the nurse said.

“How’d he do last night?”

“About what you’d expect.”

“You tell him I left before dawn.”

“I’ll tell him. He talked about that buck three or four times during the night.”

Anne came down to the kitchen wearing an old robe with a sweater over it. She looked at the rifle and frowned. “It’s very cold out there, Ed.”

“Yes,” he said, and kissed her cheek.

“You shouldn’t go.”

“I love you.”

The wind hit him like a hammer. The invisible sleet pellets stung as they struck his cheek. He adjusted the ear flaps of the hat, got the coat collar up and the scarf wrapped halfway around his face, then trudged away into the darkness. The sleet on top of the wet earth made the ground slick. The temperature was about thirty degrees, he guessed, not cold enough to snow yet cold enough to kill you.

He got as far as the barn. He slipped inside out of the wind. The cattle sensed his presence and lowed several times.

This was crazy. Why in the world had he started before dawn?

Hell, he thought, because this is the way we do it! He could almost hear Dad and Uncle Frank telling him that. Dressing before dawn while Mom made a hearty breakfast, stuffing food into pockets for lunch, a kiss from Mom on the way out the door, Dad and Frank whispering in the yard as they loaded their rifles…yes, this is the way we do it.

But all that was past. Gone. He should have left at a decent hour. He certainly wasn’t going any farther until he could see his footing. If he fell in the woods and broke his leg…he shook off the thought.

Standing in the dark barn, inhaling the aroma of cattle, listening to the birds in the rafters protesting his intrusion, he fought to keep warm. He was wearing only enough clothes to keep warm as long as he stayed moving. He thought about going back to the house for more clothes, then rejected it. The nurse might mention it to Dad.

He had played for endless hours in this barn when he was growing up. This morning in the darkness he was acutely aware of the other creatures in here with him, the cattle and the swallows and undoubtedly two or three cats. Spiders here and there, and probably, up high in the rafters where the cats couldn’t go, an owl or two. Maybe a groundhog under the feedway, snuggled in his hole for the winter.

He had left this farm so long ago, off to college, then to banks in various cities where he accrued knowledge and experience. Seven years ago Dad had invited him to return to take over the bank here. He and Anne and Ruth had moved back to the town where he grew up.

The day came slowly, just a gradual graying of the world outside. When the visibility was thirty or forty yards, he went through the back door of the barn and started climbing the hill toward the forest.

He hit the old logging road at the top of the ridge and went along it for almost a mile before he came to the national forest fire road. This was the boundary of the farm. Soon to be his mother’s farm. He thought about her, about how she would take her husband’s death, as he walked along with the rifle cradled in the crook of one arm and his head twisted to avoid the sleet. She was already suffering from Alzheimer’s and seemed to be in a constant slight daze, with almost no short-term memory. She could still remember what happened twenty years ago with perfect clarity but couldn’t remember what you told her three minutes ago, or whether the stove was on or off. Someone was going to have to stay with her.

His mind went to the financial arrangements that would have to be made, then slipped on to the two big loans awaiting approval at the bank. Lawyers, mortgages, UCC filings, cash flow—he knew all those things so well, and yet there were times when the spreadsheets were less important than his sense of how a business was doing and whether the person borrowing the money was really good for it.

He was thinking of these things as he walked along the dirt road through the stark, black trees, higher and higher into the hills, when he realized that the wind was noticeably colder, with a velocity and biting cut that it hadn’t had before.

Motion—he saw something moving quickly out of the corner of his eye. He fumbled to get the rifle up while he tried to see if the running deer had antlers. He couldn’t tell. It gave a great leap and disappeared amid the black trees, swallowed by the gloom.

He heart was pounding, he was breathing hard.

He looked at the rifle.

He hadn’t even loaded it!

Now he took off his gloves and dug into his pocket for the shells. He fed four of the cold, hard, shiny brass tubes into the loading gate on the side of the receiver, worked the action to chamber a round, then carefully lowered the hammer to half-cock. As he recalled, the half-cock notch on this old gun wasn’t perfectly safe, so he squeezed the trigger while he held the hammer and made sure.

He had dropped his gloves into the wet leaves. He picked them up and put them back on.

Ready and alert, he continued along the dirt track through the forest.

Within minutes the sleet turned to snow and came furiously, almost horizontally.