He was being civil because it was the standard of decency, not from any ulterior motive, not because he wanted them to like him as if he might someday be a member of this family, and not because he wanted to understand Rae better. It was just basic decency and manners. Wulf was Swiss by nurture, German by birth, and carried a British passport. He was civilized to his very core.
He watched the glances and micro-expressions between Rae and her mother as they held a silent, complex conversation composed of notice, mock despair, and resignation about Rae’s father’s bluster and her brothers’ table manners. Rae’s mother would later chastise the boys but not her husband, Wulf was quite sure.
Rae’s father, Zachariah, was a man who liked pry and to phrase his own prejudices as questions.
Some questions, such as Zachariah’s inquiry about Wulf’s age, he answered straight-forwardly. “Thirty-two,” he said and watched Rae’s startled reaction out of the corner of his eye.
Yes, he was a full decade plus eight months older than she, his little ingénue with a big heart. Her height and self-assurance had fooled him that first night when he met her at the party and he had thought her to be twenty-six or so, but Lizbeth and Georgie had corrected him the next day to his utter dismay.
When they asked where he was from, he was once again mortified that people detected a Teutonic accent.
One of the supposed benefits of Institut Le Rosey, his childhood boarding school in Rolle and Gstaad in Helvetica, was the international student population and the opportunity to learn languages proficiently through osmosis, though very few Americans matriculated there due to the ten percent population cap per language group. Most of his Anglophone friends had been British and he had lived in London, so he knew his English was rather posh British English, but Wulf had thought he was more versatile than he obviously was. He had cultivated a Helvetian inflection and vernacular in his German when he had naturalized his citizenship to Swiss, but good Lord, might his French be accented, too? He would have to ask Yoshi about his Japanese. Wulf wasn’t as proud of his Italian, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, or Arabic. He had no illusions that he could pass for native in those.
But his English? He had thought he had an ear for English.
Wulf answered, “I am from the Confoederatio Helvetica, Switzerland.”
“And how long have you lived in the United States?” Zachariah asked.
“Six years.”
“You going to become a citizen?” her father asked. Again, Zachariah’s sharp glance betrayed that this was not a casual question. There was a correct answer.
Wulf said, “I’m a permanent resident, so I have many of the rights and privileges of citizenship, with the exceptions of the vote and jury duty.”
“You want to be an American?”
“There is much to admire about Americans and American culture,” Wulf said.
“Bet you think we’re funny, here, we Americans.”
“Of course not. Europeans think America is like England, only bigger, with bigger cars, and everyone carries a concealed handgun.”
“Dang straight.”
Rae’s brothers laughed. Their boisterous laugh was charming.
Wulf said, “Yes, and no. That rather shallow stereotype doesn’t convey the kindness, the gentleness, and the innate decency of Americans.”
“Yeah?” Zachariah leaned back in his chair and cradled his iced tea in his hands.
Rae’s mother hadn’t said a word the whole lunch, Wulf noticed. She didn’t seem downtrodden, just the type who listened rather than spoke. Her brown eyes were as lively as her daughter’s, and Wulf guessed that Rae’s intelligence and altruism were from the matrilineal line.
Wulf said, “I lived in Chicago for a year when I first moved to the States. On one cold night, driving to a conference in Iowa City, I was sitting in my car at a truly enormous truck stop on Interstate Eighty while some friends went inside to fetch us some coffee.
“It was cold that night, Midwestern cold, cold enough to frostbite skin in a half a minute. Ice crystal snow scraped the windshield. I was starting to shiver, even though the car was idling. I had parked directly in front of the truck stop’s sliding doors so that my friends could dash in and dash out, even though yellow lines marked it as a no-parking zone. Behind me, I saw a police car pull up, his lights flashing red and blue. The state trooper came up to the window, and I was prepared to tell him that I was sorry for parking there and I would move along. He told me that it was too cold to sit in my car, that I should go inside and warm up, and that he would watch my car while I was inside.”
Zachariah nodded. “That was right nice of him.”
“I have a dozen stories like that, of Americans being astonishingly decent.”
Rae’s family nodded at each other.
Wulf continued, “That, and you can generally count on the fact that when you meet an American, they are probably not drunk. In Europe, after ten o’clock in the morning, everyone is in their cups.”
The boys all guffawed and drank their iced tea or crunched chips, while Wulf watched Rae and her mother smile quietly and continue eating their grilled cheese sandwiches.
“So, all’s y’all Europeans think that Americans carry concealed all the time, do you?” Zachariah asked him with a bit more good humor.
“That’s the prevailing stereotype.” Wulf ate the dill pickle, which was garlicky and crisp, and he thought it must be homemade.
Rae’s father asked, “You wanna go plinking after lunch?”
“Surely you have more important things to do,” Wulf demurred.
“Not at all.” Zachariah wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, crumpled it, and dropped it in the middle of his plate. “We’ll round up some rifles and send some soda cans to meet their Maker.”
Zachariah sat back in his chair and grinned, probably content that he would easily outshoot the effete European.
Wulf calculated whether he should let Zachariah best him.
After lunch, Rae’s father opened the gun safe and distributed rifles. He handed Wulf one of the better ones, a Ruger Varminter .204, while Zachariah took a Remington .30-06 for himself. Wulf wasn’t offended by the smaller gun. The Varminter was supposed to have excellent accuracy for a hunting rifle.
They fished some soda cans out of a blue bin to take with them and started walking out the door.
Wulf called back, “Rae? Aren’t you coming with us?”
“Naw,” her father said. “She’s needed here.”
Rae looked between them with her lovely brown eyes, obviously unwilling to disobey because, as she had said, she would do anything for them, even stay behind.
They treated her like a servant instead of the ambitious, intelligent young woman that she was.
No, not like a servant. Wulf had servants. Dieter was not more than two years away from incorporating his private security firm. Wulf’s upstairs maid Lilli went to the local university a few hours a day and practiced her languages with him because she wanted to be a translator for the UN.
No, Rae’s father treated her like a hunting dog, trained and useful in its duties, but it had better be in the yard when you needed it to fetch a dead bird for you.
Wulf watched Rae, torn between his invitation and her father’s wishes.
Rae turned to her mother, who rolled her eyes and flicked her head toward the door, giving Rae tacit permission to go with the men.
“I just need to change,” she said to Wulf. “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
The males started out into the desert. A pack of rowdy retrievers bounced around them, snuffling and barking at them. Wulf let them nose his hands, and they bounded away, satisfied.
They all traipsed out into the beige and sage cacti and brush, and Wulf was glad that he had worn these old fatigues and planned to change clothes for the funeral. It would not do to go plinking in a suit and tie. The desert smelled like wood that was smoking, just about to catch fire in the heat.
As they walked into the wild de
sert, Wulf caught rustlings around the tops of the dry and dusty ridges, though Rae’s brothers and father didn’t seem to notice that Wulf’s security detail was stalking them. He hoped they had brought the snakebite kits.
Wulf’s mobile phone rang. He saw Dieter’s phone number and answered it. “Ja?”
Dieter asked in German, What are you doing going out “wo sich Hase und Fuchs gute Nacht sagen,” which meant where the hare and the fox say good night? The connotation was of the wilderness, though the German made Wulf think of dark, cool forests, not glaring sand and brittle bushes.
We’re going shooting for sport, Wulf told him, also speaking German.
So they are all armed?
“Ja.” Wulf told Dieter that he estimated the danger level at zero for intent and five for unintended consequences.
“Wunderbar,” Dieter sighed.
Rae caught up with Wulf and her brothers. She was wearing jeans instead of those odd, archaic clothes she had donned before lunch. While Wulf generally had little opinion of people’s clothes beyond utility, he was glad to see her in a modern outfit. The long skirt and tied-back hair had changed her appearance to shudderingly young and dismayingly innocent. When they got back to town, he would dress her in a sophisticated evening gown to assuage his conscience.
He would take her out on a proper date.
Perhaps several proper dates.
He would show her several of the things she had not checked on that Devilhouse application: concerts, travel, and perhaps a few things from the other list.
All in two weeks.
They had two weeks before Wulf moved his household, and then he would leave her alone. He had wrestled with himself for days, pacing at night and wanting to stay, imagining sweeping her up into his life and flying her to Paris now that she knew about Constantin and she had not run from him, and she had trusted him to truss her up in kinbaku-bi and still she had wanted him, but he couldn’t risk her life. He could not stay with her.
Surely two weeks wasn’t too much to ask. Surely nothing would happen to him or to her in only two weeks.
Rae glanced at the barren blue sky and then to the right, a double-flick of her warm brown eyes and lovely dark lashes that she did when she was nervous.
She asked, “Are you sure you’re all right with going shooting?”
“Your family seems fine with it.”
“I mean the guns. Are you all right with the guns?”
Ah, she thought he might have some lingering trauma associated with firearms. His scar stiffened like it gripped his back. “I’m fine.”
“It’s okay if you’re not,” she said. “I’ll get them back inside. We don’t have much time before the Celebration of Life, anyway.”
“I’m acquainted with firearms.” He allowed himself a bit of a smile, but he didn’t want to seem smug. He shouldn’t show off too much.
Yet he did not want to appear incompetent and thus earn their scorn.
Part of him wanted to best Zachariah after he had treated Reagan with such high-handedness.
A delicate balance.
Rae shrugged and hiked beside him.
Zachariah led the way between the cacti and thorny bushes, and they hiked up to a ridgeline in the hot desert sunlight. Her father sent one of the boys around to line up two dozen soda cans on another desert ridge fifty yards away, and when the brother had returned, they all took aim at the cans.
Wulf pressed the rifle on Rae. “Can you shoot?”
“Heck, I taught all these whippersnappers how to shoot.” She ruffled her youngest brother’s dark hair. The boy, whom Wulf estimated to be thirteen plus or minus one year, had the lean physique of a Greyhound puppy that was growing too fast.
He handed the rifle to her. “Show me.”
Her eyes flashed with surprise, but she took it from him. “All right, then.”
Rae held the rifle tight against her right shoulder, took her time, and sighted in on the cans on the opposite ridge. Wulf watched the red cans glaring in the harsh, desert sun. She eased off a couple shots with a nice, smooth pull on the trigger, hitting a can both times. One shot, one kill. Properly done.
She held the rifle correctly when she handed the gun back to him, pointing the muzzle toward no one. “Here you go.”
Wulf smiled at her and wanted to touch her face, but he held back. “Very nice.”
Rae’s father called over, “Nice shooting, for a girl.”
The skin on Wulf’s back chilled despite the hot sun. Her dry father’s tone held no irony, and Rae didn’t remark on the backhanded compliment. It pissed Wulf off just a bit more, just enough.
Zachariah shouted to him, “You know how to shoot that?”
Wulf called back, “I’ll do my best.”
The rifle felt too light and too short in Wulf’s hands, though it was well-balanced. He pressed the stock against his shoulder, but it had been many years since he had shot a standard-sized rifle. He couldn’t seem to get comfortable with it while standing.
Finally, he eased himself down to the desert dust and pebbles and curled his body into a knot around the gun. The rifle was still too short and wasn’t equipped with a bipod, so he braced his left hand under it to hold up the barrel.
Wulf slowed his breathing, and a memory flashed behind his eyes, an image of rows of bunk beds in the barracks from his year of obligatory conscription. He had stayed a further year after that. Those years, when he and his friends around him had been armed, had set the standard for relief for him. He had been tempted to make the military his career, but his sister Flicka had quite correctly dispelled that notion.
Among Rae’s family—four men who bristled with weapons—Wulf felt a modicum of that relief, that they could defend themselves and Reagan if shooting started. Rae stood behind the men who aimed at the cans on the ridge, watching.
The Varminter rifle had an amateur’s scope on it, and Wulf settled the crosshairs near the top of the can, since they were so close. The red metal shone in the desert sunlight, glaring through his scope. A sustained breeze ruffled his hair, so he adjusted one-half of a mil dot upwind.
Wulf pulled his body rigid on the dirt, contracting his muscles into opposition, and slowed his breathing. Sharp rocks ground his belly and knees. He squeezed the trigger just to the break point.
His body pulsed with life and whooshed with air, jostling the rifle. The scarlet can bobbed under the crosshairs.
Wulf held his breath and waited for the pause between his slow heartbeats, then squeezed the trigger past the break point and released the round. The rifle’s recoil shoved his shoulder.
The soda can plinked off the other ridge, spinning in the air.
He tagged it again while it flew.
The blued steel of the rifle warmed Wulf’s cheek, and he breathed.
~~~~~
A Worldly Man
After lunch, while the men were retrieving the rifles from the gun safe, Rae’s mother had cornered her in the hot kitchen, expecting answers. The black smell of the cheese that had leaked onto the skillet and burned lingered in the air.
“Dominic seems like a nice young man,” Momma had said.
“Yeah. He’s nice,” Rae said. The house around her echoed with good memories: all seven sets of handprints pressed into the sidewalk outside, the stack of saddles in the barn, and the guns in the safe for home defense, fun, and hunting.
“But you can’t marry him,” her mother said.
“I didn’t say anything about marrying him.”
“A bird and a fish can fall in love, but where would they build their nest?”
“Momma, I’m not a bird, and he’s not a fish.”
“A man like that, a worldly man, would never be happy here in Pirtleville.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. He’s moving back to Europe in two weeks.”
“Well, all’s well, then. I’ve always said that it’s just as easy to fall in love with a virtuous man as with a worldly man.”
Rae didn’t t
hink of Wulf as being worldly, with its connotations of jadedness, selfishness, and greed, especially when he had been nothing but nice to them all through lunch no matter how her father had provoked him. Still, Wulf did look like a tall, pale oak tree planted among the Pirtleville scrub brush.
That was a stupid image, though. An oak tree would die in the desert.
While she and Wulf were walking out into the sharp scrub brush with her father and brothers and Wulf said that he was all right with the gun, she exhaled, relieved.
If Wulf missed the targets while shooting, that was fine. If he had been wussy about the gun, even considering he had nearly been killed by one, her family would have taken it out of Rae’s hide later. She didn’t want Wulf to be the brunt of those jokes. A worm of discomfort wiggled in her brain that her family would impose such a rule, but they did, and she couldn’t change it or them.
Now, Rae watched Wulf take aim from the prone position, his body wrapped around the rifle, lying on the hard desert clay.
His can popped up from the dusty ridge, sparked in the sun, and then pinged to the side, struck dead on twice.
The next three cans flipped off the dusty ridge and then all were hit again before they sailed into the thorny scrub brush: plink-plink, plink-plink, plink-plink.
Wulf’s shots hit far too many cans in a row to be dumb luck.
Good Lord, he was a really good shot.
Seriously, was there nothing this guy couldn’t do?
Wulf held the rifle easily, and even now, he carried it with familiarity in his hands as he climbed to his feet.
Okay, she was going to try horseshoes, calf roping, tap dancing, French braiding, the harmonica, and origami, and if he excelled at all those things, she was done with him because he must have sold his soul to the Devil or something.
After some boisterous congratulations by her brothers, Wulf walked beside Rae on their way back to the house. The sun was beginning to fall, though it was still hot and yellow in the brilliant sky.
It was getting late, and they had to change clothes before the Celebration of Life at the church.
With his expert shooting and easy conversation at lunch, Wulf had ingratiated himself with her family. He slid right in, very well, too well. His shiny mirrored shell might be at work again.
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