The Triggerman Dance Read online

  Holt finally backs away from the telescope, letting it hang by its swivel. Even on a night like this, so clear and clean, what he sees quickly begins to shift, blur and fade. He thinks back his score of eighty-four on the sporting clays course, to the facts that last year he shot an eighty-seven the day before the quail opener, and the year before that an eighty-nine. The blood, he thinks. "Visual deterioration in majority of cases." And there's nothing anyone can do about it.

  Rage on.

  This is the haunted hour in Carolyn's room. Just before one a.m. Holt quietly enters. It is a large room, but dark now, illuminated only by the nurse's small reading lamp. The nurse sits at a desk far from the hospital bed, but Holt can see its chromed railing in the minor light, its thick power cable running from motor wall socket. The night nurse—Joni—looks up at Holt and as ways, smiles. She sits at the computer station, as always, scanning through CD ROMs of rock bands. Then she whispers a summary: Good, Mr. Holt.

  Good, Mr. Holt. Bad, Mr. Holt. Far away, Mr. Holt. Quiet tonight, Mr. Holt.

  As always, Holt nods, then goes to the bedside and sits do on a recliner that Joni has moved into position for him. Carolyn stirs when he sits down, shifts position, yawns deeply. Then Holt hands her the bed control unit and the head of the mattress moves up, motor grinding, so that Carolyn can look at her husband. She takes stock before speaking. Her hair is cut short around her face, which is plump, pink and round. Her brown eyes sparkle in the weak light. She wears a nightshirt buttoned clear up because she is, she has told her husband, embarrassed by the girth of her neck and arms.

  "I love that coat," she says.

  Holt looks down at his oxford shirt, his bare forearms "Picked it out just for you."

  "I'm sleeping well tonight."

  "I'd sure let you sleep straight through, if—"

  "—I'd much rather talk to you."

  "I like this time, too."

  In fact, Vann Holt hates this time more than any during his day. He has privately nicknamed it "The Children's Hour," because it is the time that Carolyn slides into one of her many ruts of bullet-induced damage and wants to talk about the children. Not that she doesn't talk about them during his several visits during the day and night, but at one a.m. it is almost always the children. Whose children would not be altogether clear to the outsider, because Carolyn's encyclopedia of names is a shifting, dynamic book. But Holt has realized over the years that no matter what name his wife attaches to what person, she is referring to her own. He is long past correction, past the many months of trying to reeducate Carolyn to the fact that she has only one living child and her name is Valerie, no son. Holt hates this hour because he realizes how much of Carolyn is gone, how Patrick is fully departed, and how deep is his own collusion in his wife's dementia. He hates this hour because he has to look at what the world did to her, witness the half-paralyzed, steroid-bloated, psychotic mess of a woman they turned her into. At times he wishes she was dead, so his memory could select good moments and stanch the flow of the bad, cutting them down to a manageable trickle. It is difficult to remember the good because she remains in the here and now, actual and undeniable as a mountain, a living testimony to her own ruin. In Holt, a fury is always building.

  "Where did you get the new jacket?"

  "Nordstrom, hon."

  "It seems a little small."

  "I'm probably gaining weight."

  "Did Susan help you pick it out?"

  "Yes."

  "What color did Nicky get?"

  "Same as mine," says Holt dispiritedly. "Blue."

  Holt has concluded that "The Children's Hour" is a kind of derivative from the years when Carolyn was a healthy, beautiful woman, and she was always waiting for him in their bed when he came to it, always at one a.m. That was when Holt's workday was finished. He was tired but rarely too tired to make love to her, and she was always eager. They had at least one unbreakable date each day, and that was at one a.m.—work done, children asleep, a nightcap glass of wine for Vann, Carolyn half dreamy and toasty warm, the smell of sleep on her breath, her thighs so unbelievably smooth and soft, her center deep and slick. Whatever was holy about that time, Holt has decided, got translated into this: talk of the children.

  "Did he call today?"

  "No call. Busy with studies, I guess."

  "I hope the Catholics don't get to him."

  "?" He just looks at her, mouth open.

  "Nothing worse than a lapsed Catholic."

  "Oh, well, that's true, honey."

  The fact that Holt and Carolyn were married in the Mormon Temple in Los Angeles does not even strike him as odd.

  Carolyn's insistence on a living, college-age son—be it Patrick, Randy, Nicky, Steve—has worn Holt down over the years The fact that she hasn't seen this son since the day they were both shot and he died on the floor of a fast food place in Santa Ana; does not affect the march of Carolyn Holt's one a.m.'s. During "The Children's Hour," Patrick is alive and doing well at a good Eastern college—now apparently Catholic—though during the day, Carolyn might weep over his death. Or she might not.

  She'll want another postcard soon, Holt thinks, and I'll have to mock one up.

  "Terri's lips all healed?"

  "Quite nicely."

  "Those braces hurt her. I wonder if Dr. Dale could loosen them a little."

  "I'll talk to him about it."

  "Would you?"

  "Of course. We're going bird hunting in the morning."

  "You and Terri?"

  "Yes. You know, down in Anza. We'll be back the day after sometime around noon. She wants to bring Lewis and Clark from this year's litter."

  "Terri picks out cute names."

  "I agree. And they're fine dogs. She's been working them for nine months."

  "What about Sally?"

  "Oh, I'll hunt with Sally, don't worry about that." "I miss those days."

  Times like this hurt Vann Holt most, times when Carolyn is lucid and real, when he can communicate with the genuine Carolyn for a few sentences and taste something of what has been, realizing that she is still sometimes very present and very alive. The doctors explained her burned and broken brain matter as something akin to bare electrical wires clotted by wax— sometimes the signals will get through, and sometimes they won't. With a gunshot to the head, they had prophesied, anything can happen.

  They talk until almost two, when Carolyn smiles and stretches the upper half of her body, then lowers the head of her bed back into sleeping position. Joni and Holt help turn her so the bedsores on her back—those perennial, agonizing plagues—can heal up and start again.

  He kisses her goodnight—once on the lips and once on the forehead—then goes to his room, undresses and gets into the huge empty bed. He feels his heart beating hard in his side, and hears it clanging against his eardrums. It is the rhythm of rage.

  He is soon lost to dreams, the same dreams he has had on October the fourteenth since he was twelve and hunted his first season with his father, dreams of birds rising in a blur of feathers and of pulling the trigger of a gun and watching as the birds— every one of them—fly untouched into the sky and disappear over a ridge ablaze with morning sun.

  CHAPTER 13

  By six a.m. on October the fifteenth Vann Holt felt like a new man, clipping along ten thousand feet above the California desert.

  The Hughes 500 was set up for five passengers and cruise at a quiet 130 mph. Holt had included five in his hunting party which he believes is two too many for safe and good shooting His fourth was Juma Titisi, a Development Ministry Official from Uganda who is interested in hiring security consultants— team of them, in fact. The fifth was an old friend of Holt's from his college days, Rich Randell, now in charge of Liberty Op overseas paramilitary accounts.

  Lane Fargo sat beside the pilot, lost in a conversation about grazing rights on BLM land, acres of which slipped past them ten thousand feet below.

  Next to Holt was Valerie, at the window, her hair partial! stu
ffed up under the red Irish cycling cap she wears to hunt bird She listened politely to the Harvard-educated Titisi, holding fort on the destructiveness of tribal rivalries in his nation.

  Holt listened also, or appeared to, but his attention was on his daughter, of whom he is often in quiet awe. He nodded along, looking at her from just over a foot away, pleased at the confidence he has cultivated in her, amazed at the breadth of her knowledge after taking a degree in English Literature at the University of California, Irvine. How could she possibly be familiar with the policies of Buganda province's fickle kabaka, or the hydroelectric plant near Jinja?

  "I've always wanted to visit the college at Kampala," she said. "All the different African religions fascinate me."

  Smiling, the tall and noble-faced Titisi invited her to stay with his family and visit the school. "You might be disappointed in its size and architecture, but the programs are rich in heritage and many of the classes are conducted in English."

  "See, Dad?" asked Valerie, turning to her father. "That's why I studied English."

  "It's all clear to me now."

  "Dad lobbied heavily for engineering or maybe a pre-med program, but how could I let all those good books go unread?"

  "And now that you've read your Shakespeare and Joyce," said Titisi, "you can think about doing something to help your country, your world."

  "I've got vet school applications out."

  "Overcrowded and competitive," said Randell. "Much less than a 3.85 and you're out of the running. I know because my son tried."

  "I got a four-o, about two million assisting hours, and two field champion springers bred, trained and handled."

  Vann Holt loved the way a young person could say the most self-aggrandizing things without sounding that way at all.

  "I don't think I can help my country," Valerie continued, "but I could help some sick animals. Though here I am, going out to kill little innocent birdies and eat them for dinner. Maybe I should go into poultry ranching, more in keeping with my carnivorous lifestyle."

  "Maybe you should help me run Liberty Operations," said Holt. This was an old refrain, but he had seen her interest rise in the last year. In fact, he was already luring her into the world of private security and privatized law enforcement with an odd job here and there.

  Titisi and Randell laughed, and Valerie grinned at her father. Fargo looked back with his usual dour face, one thick black eyebrow raised like a gust of wind was about to blow it off.

  "Have you shot quail in California?" she asked the Ugandan.

  "Never."

  "There's nothing like it," she said. "Although I'm sure the lions you took in the plains were pretty exciting."

  Titisi looked at her a little uncertainly, not sure if this young

  California brat was chiding him for shooting large cats for "sport"—though he had only done it once—or approving the primal ritual of a young Ugandan killing a lion.

  "Oh, I did take one, once. Do you disapprove?"

  "Yes," said Valerie. "I don't think I could kill unless I was going to eat. But I'm American and you're African, so a difference of opinion is pretty likely. I wouldn't tell a Honduran to leave his rainforest in place either, though personally I'd rather have the forest than a mahogany coffee table. Plus, we don't have lions here, so I can't be tempted. They are pure magnificence though—at least in parks."

  "Miss Holt, they are more magnificent than you can imagine, running free on the Ugandan plains. And consider that then is a certain significance—for some peoples, at least—in killing an animal that could easily kill you."

  Valerie went quiet. Her father watched her deep chocolate colored eyes, exactly the color of her mother's. Her hair too those pale golden curls so undisciplined and joyful—pure Carolyn, he thought. Carolyn.

  "Well, the quail aren't bad either, and they barbecue up real nice!" said Valerie.

  She and Titisi smiled at each other.

  Holt, for the thousandth time, was proud of his daughter' uncommon common sense. "It would please her father immensely if she would take over the reigns of Liberty Operation when he goes to the happy hunting grounds."

  "Oh, Dad," she said. "You're going to live to be ninety and we both know it."

  She climbed over him and squeezed her way to the rear of the copter, where the dogs stood bracing their front paws on the kennel screen, tails blurred at Valerie's arrival.

  Two hours later they were near the Anza Valley meadow that Holt had hunted for the last thirty years. The morning was cool, no breeze. The short golden grasses of the meadow stretched across five hundred rolling acres punctuated by clump of red manzanita, dark oak and sprawling green ghettos of prickly pear cactus. Around the perimeter of the meadow stood the old-growth manzanita and madrone, twenty feet high and to dense for anything but a determined dog to get through. Here, at nearly 4,000 feet and far from any city, the air was clean and

  the colors and shapes of the flora were unambiguous and rich as paint. Holt's white Land Rover bounced along a winding dirt trail and came to a stop amidst the high cover of the meadow's edge. Holt told everyone not to slam the doors, then got out. Another rig, red and driven by Lane Fargo, followed just a few yards behind. Holt had already briefed his party on how they would hunt this morning: park the trucks on the west perimeter of the field, drop down into the low grass where the quail should be feeding this time of day, push them outward into the meadow, try to keep them from getting to the far side, where the deep cover would make them impossible to hunt.

  The party spread out and formed a loose front—thirty yards between each of them—to work the field. Holt and Sally, his ten-year old bitch, took the far right end. Next came Randell, then Titisi, around whom Holt was feeling slightly unsafe because he had never hunted with the Ugandan before. To Titisi's left, thirty yards down, came Valerie, with Lewis and Clark, just ten months old. They were already working out in front of her, cutting left and right, scrambling back within shotgun range with every sharp chirp of Valerie's whistle. Lane Fargo had the far left end, putting at least forty confident yards between himself and Valerie.

  Holt had organized his party like this not only to spread out the dogs and share them, but because he liked to watch his daughter without her knowing. He fell back just a little so he could see her. There she was, just eighty or ninety yards away, taking long deliberate steps through the grass, a tall, healthy woman, with her khakis tucked into her boots, a 20 gauge side-by-side cradled in her arms, a whistle between her lips and the red cycler's cap stuffed down over her pale bouncing curls. She stopped, canted an ear toward a big patch of cactus in front of her and called the dogs over and to the right. Holt never knew when it might hit him, but sometimes, all it took was a look at Valerie to send his heart into a sweet, swelling tumble of sadness and joy. The joy came from beholding her life, her spirit, her being. The sadness came from beholding the fact that she was practically all he had left, all that would outlive him, at any rate, so long as nothing happened to her. And always on the edge of Holt's consciousness was the blip, the reminder, that in the world today, anything can happen. Anything. At moments like that,

  when his heart was pounding hard with the alternating current of joy and dread, he wanted to hold her tight to his chest; he wanted to surround her with an invisible shield impermeable by any form of harm; he wanted to lock her away and preserve her forever. None of those thoughts came to Vann Holt as he stepped quietly through the low grass and watched Sally work a ground patch. Instead, next to the pride he felt watching Valerie, what he felt most strongly now was his focused anticipation of the birds that would soon be rising. He could hear them, chirping alarmedly out there in front of Sally. He could feel the perfect balance of the Remington in his hands. He noticed the heightened perception of his eyes, though he knew that they were failing him. Even his sense of smell was acute now, the astringent perfume of sagebrush and desert scrub, the dankly human odor of the gourds, passing straight up through his nostrils and into his brain.
Like nothing else in the world, hunting made Vann Holt feel alive.

  Then, the ground before him seemed to bunch and gather and the air above it exploded with dark shapes as the covey rose with the wooden knock of wings. Holt's heart jumped into his throat, the same way it had for the three decades he'd hunted here, no diminishment of the rush at all, a charge of purest adrenaline streaking through his body. There were ninety of them, he guessed, bringing up the gun and flicking off the safety. He picked out a large male and shot it, then another, then another. Sally jumped to the first bird while Holt stood and watched the cove bend away in front of him and toward the others, fingering three more shells into his magazine without having to look at then getting them pointed in the right direction by feeling for the brass base. Shotguns popped to his left now, as the birds accelerate across the meadow. He saw Titisi blasting away into the cove hitting nothing. Then Randell picked up a single as the birds sped toward Valerie. Holt watched her drop two, then saw her loyal little springers—Lewis and Clark—nosing their way toward the first bird. God, she's great! On the far side, Lane Fargo shot double at about sixty yards. When Holt stepped toward his dog, two stragglers came up, wings whirring, necks straining, together. He shot the male first, then rode out the hen and knocked her down just as she started her turn. He stood, marking the falls and sliding two new shells into his gun. Sally dropped the first bird at his feet, pivoted and bolted back toward the second.