by Gene Wolfe
“I don’t blame you.”
“I went back home and told my folks some story. They didn’t believe it, and I don’t even know what it was now. I got my camping stuff together and went out into the woods. I had a little tent, an air mattress and a sleeping bag. The first winter was rough, so I built a cabin about as big as this room in a place where nobody would ever find it.” He paused, recalling Hayfa Washington and the helicopter that had let her down on a rope and somehow made their sunroof open. “It’s Federal land, really. National forest. I don’t think about that much, but it is.”
The woman shrugged. “If all the money’s theirs, all the land is too, I guess.”
“I suppose you’re right.” He put his half-eaten piece of pizza back in the box.
“You just live out there? Like that?”
“It was always going to be for a little while.”
“But you never came back in?”
“Oh, sometimes I do. For my father’s funeral, and then for Mom’s. She died about a month after he did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was too. But they left everything to me—I was the only kid. The house and so on. The car and a little money. I sold the house and the car, and I don’t spend much. I hunt deer and snare small game, and that’s what I eat, mostly. Wild plants in the summer.” He smiled. “I use dead leaves for toilet paper.”
“Do you want to know about me?”
“If you want to tell me.”
“Well, I never got to go to college. I was a clerk in a store and a waitress. Then I got married and had the kids, and you know about that. You want to know how I got started selling guns? A friend wanted to know where she could buy one, so I asked this guy I knew, and he sent me to somebody else. And that guy said he’d sell to me only not to her, because the guy that sent me didn’t know her. So I said, okay, sell it to me, and I paid him, and I told him I’d get my money back from her. And he said you ought to charge her about a hundred more, I would. So I charged her fifty over. And after a couple weeks, I guess it was, she sent somebody else to me, another woman in her building that was scared worse than she was. Now here I am.”
Softly he said, “I steal from campers, sometimes. From hunters, too. That’s how I got this coat. A hunter got hot, and hung it on a tree.”
She nodded as though she had expected no less. “You want to get me another beer?”
The telephone buzzed as he rose; a thin-lipped man who wore a business suit as though it were a uniform said, “You still haven’t called Captain Washington.”
“No,” Jay admitted. “No, I haven’t.”
“We don’t like to arrest people over tax matters. You may have heard that.”
Jay shook his head.
“We don’t. Yet more than half the prison population is made up of tax offenders.” The thin-lipped man vanished.
“They know where we are,” Jay told the woman.
“Yeah. Get me that beer, will you?”
“Shouldn’t we leave?”
She did not speak, and after half a minute or so he brought her another beer from the kitchen.
“Here’s how I see it,” she said when he (with face averted) held out the beer. “Let me go through it, and you tell me if you think I’m wrong.
“To start with, how do they know we’re here? Answer—that FR&SS woman put a bug on our car, I just didn’t find it. That means that if we take the car we might as well stay here. And if we don’t take the car, we’ll have to go on foot. They’ll have people all around this building by now waiting to tail us, and with the streets pretty well empty it would be a cinch.”
“Where would we go?” he asked.
“Damned if I know. We might end up walking all night. Next question. Are they about to break down the door and bust us? Answer—no, because they wouldn’t have called first if they were. The FR&SS woman made the news, she was good-looking, it was dramatic and blah blah. It was meant to. Now they’ll be watching to see if that phone call makes it. I think what they’ll do is get a little rougher every time, because every time they come around the chance that it’ll make Globnet’s news show gets slimmer. The woman was really pretty nice, on purpose. The guy on the phone wasn’t so nice, and next time’s going to be worse. Or that’s how it looks to me.”
“You’re probably right. But you’re leaving something out. They knew that we were in this apartment, and not in some other apartment in this building.”
“Piece of cake. The guys staking it out talked to the pizza man. ‘Who paid you?’ ‘Well, she was a middle-aged woman with red hair.’ ‘Anybody else in there?’ ‘Yeah, I could hear somebody moving around in back.’ ‘Okay, that’s them.’ They got a look at me when we talked on the phone, and the Fed that got into our car probably described us”
Jay said, “You’re not middle-aged.”
She laughed. “When you’ve got two kids in school, you’re middle-aged. How old are you?”
“Forty-one.”
“See, you’re middle-aged, too. You’re older than I am.” To his amazement, her hand had found his.
They kissed, he with his eyes shut; an hour later, turning off the lights in the musty little bedroom hid the stains on the wallpaper and let him look at her face.
Next morning she said, “I want to have breakfast with you. Isn’t that funny?”
Not knowing what else to do, he nodded.
“I never used to have breakfast with Chuck. I’d have to get up early to see about the kids, and he’d sleep till ten or eleven. After he left me I’d have a boyfriend sometimes. Only we’d do it and he’d get up and go. Back to his wife, or where he lived. They weren’t ever around for breakfast.”
“All right,” Jay said, “let’s eat breakfast.”
“We don’t have to take the car. You don’t mind walking three or four blocks?”
He smiled. “No.”
“Okay. We’ve got a couple things to settle, and maybe the safest way is while we’re walking. I don’t know how serious they are, but if they’re serious at all they’ll have bugged this place while we slept. The café’ d be better, but out on the street’s probably as good as it gets. Keep your voice down, don’t move your lips a lot when you talk, and if it’s serious hold your hand in front of your face.”
He nodded and, seeing blowing snow through a dirty windowpane, pulled the reversible coat he had bought the day before out of his wheeled duffel and put it on over the hunting coat that still (almost to his dismay) held his money.
Out in the cold and windy street she murmured, “They’ll figure we’re going back, so first thing is we won’t. If they have a man watch it and maybe another guy watch the car, they could get a little shorthanded. We can hope, anyway.”
He nodded, although it seemed to him that if there were a homing device in the vanette it would not be necessary to have anyone watch it.
“When we go out of the café we’ll split up, see? I’ll give you the address—where to go and how to get there. Don’t look to see if they’re following you. If they’re good you won’t see them. Just lose them if you can.”
“I hope I can,” he said.
The little restaurant was small and crowded and noisy. They ate waffles in a tiny booth, he striving to keep his eyes on his plate.
“The way you lose a tail is you do something unexpected where the tail can’t follow you,” she said. “Say there’s a cab, but just the one. You grab it and have him take you someplace fast, all right? Only not to the address I’m going to give you. Someplace else.”
He nodded.
“I thought maybe you were going to say there’s got to be a thousand cabbies, and they can’t talk to them all. Only every cab’s got a terminal in it, and it records when fares get picked up, and where they’re going. Like if they know you caught the cab at eleven oh two, all they’ve got to do is check cabs that picked up somebody right about then. It’s maybe a dozen cabs, then they can find out where you went.”
“I understand,” he
said.
“Or maybe you go to the john. He’s not going to come in the john with you because you’d get too good a look at him. He’ll wait outside. Well, if it’s got two doors you duck in one and out the other. Or climb out the window, if there’s a window. It gets you ten or fifteen minutes to get away.”
“Okay,” he said.
She had taken a pen and a small notebook from her purse; she scribbled in it, tore out the page, and handed it to him. “Where we’re going to meet,” she said. “Don’t look at it till you’re almost there.”
He was too stunned to say anything.
“You’re finished.”
He managed to say, “Yes, but you’re not.”
“I’m awfully nervous, and when I’m nervous I don’t eat a lot. I look at you and see the two dots, and I know they’re seeing what you do, your sausages or whatever. Let’s go.”
Out on the street again, in the cutting wind, she squeezed his hand. “See that subway entrance up ahead? Maybe you can see the escalator through the glass.”
“Yes,” he said.
“We’re going to walk right toward it. When we get there, I’ll go in and down. You keep walking.”
He did, badly tempted to watch as the moving steps carried her away but staring resolutely ahead.
Soon traffic thinned, and the sidewalks grew dirtier. The vehicles filling every parking space were older and shabbier. He went into a corner store then and asked the middle-aged black man behind the counter for a package of gum. “This a bad neighborhood?”
The counterman did not smile. “It’s not good.”
“I heard it was really bad,” Jay said. “This doesn’t look so bad.”
The counterman shrugged. “One and a quarter for that.”
Jay gave him a hundred. “Where would it be worse?”
“Don’t know.” The counterman held Jay’s hundred up to the light and fingered the paper. “You pushin’ queer? I knows what you looks like now.”
“Keep the change,” Jay said.
The counterman stared.
“Where does it get really bad? Dangerous.”
For a second or two, the counterman hesitated. Then he said, “Just keep on north, maybe six blocks?”
Jay nodded.
“Then you turns east. Three blocks. Or fo’. That’s’bout as bad as anythin’ gits.”
“Thanks.” Jay opened the gum and offered a stick to the counterman.
The counterman shook his head. “Gits on my dentures. You goin’ up there where I told you?”
He did, and once there he stopped and studied the shabby buildings as though searching for a street number. Two white men—the only other whites in sight—were following him, one behind him with a brown attaché case, the other on the opposite side of the street. Their hats and topcoats looked crisp and new, and they stood out in that neighborhood like two candy bars in a brushpile. He turned down an alley, ran, then halted abruptly where a rusted-out water heater leaned against a dozen rolls of discarded carpet.
Often he had waited immobile for an hour or more until a wary deer ventured within range of his bow. He waited so now, motionless in the wind and the blowing snow, half concealed by the hot-water tank and a roll of carpet, a sleeve breaking the outline of his face; and the men he had seen in the street passed him without a glance, walking purposefully up the alley. Where it met the next street they stopped and talked for a moment or two; then the attaché case was opened, and they appeared to consult an instrument of some kind. They reentered the alley.
He rose and ran—down that alley, across the street and into the next, down another street, a narrow and dirty street on which half or more of the parked cars had been stripped. When he stopped at last, sweating despite the cold, he got out Hayfa Washington’s card and tore it in two.
Threadlike wires and their parent microchips bound the halves together still.
He dropped both halves down a sewer grating, pulled off his reversible coat, turned it green-side-out and put it back on, then unbuttoned his hunting coat as well and transferred the hunting knife his father had given him one Christmas to a pocket of the now-green raincoat, sheath and all.
An hour later—long after he had lost count of alleys and wretched streets—he heard running feet behind him, whirled, and met his attacker with the best flying tackle he could muster. He had not fought another human being since boyhood; he fought now as the bobcat had fought him, with the furious strength of desperation, gouging and biting and twice pounding the other’s head against the dirty concrete. He heard the bottle that had been the other’s weapon break, and felt the heat of the blood streaming from his ear and scalp, and by an immense effort of will stopped the point of the old hunting knife short of the other’s right eye.
The other’s struggled ended. “Don’ do that, man! You don’ want to make me blind.”
“Give up?”
“Yeah, man. I give up.” The jagged weapon the bottle had become clinked on the pavement.
“How much did you think I’d have on me?”
“Man, that don’t matter!”
“Yes, it does. How much?”
“Forty. Fifty. Maybe credit cards, man, you know.”
“All right.” The point of the knife moved a centimeter closer. “I want you to do something for me. I want you to work. If you’ll do it, I’ll pay you a hundred and send you away. If you won’t, you’ll never get up. Which is it?”
“I’ll do it, man.” The other at least sounded sincere. “I’ll do whatever you says.”
“Good.” Jay rose and dropped the knife back into his pocket. “Maybe you can pull me down. I don’t know, but maybe you can. Whenever you want to try …” He shrugged.
“You bleedin’, man.”
“I know. It will stop, or I think it will.” Jay got out a hundred. “You see this? It’ll be all yours.” He tore it in two and gave half to the other. “You get the other half when you’ve done what I’m hiring you to do.”
“Okay if I gets up, man?”
Jay nodded, and the other got slowly to his feet. His Jeens and plastic jacket were old and cracked, his Capribuk athletic shoes nearly new.
“Listen carefully. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, our deal is off. I’m going to give you a piece of paper with an address on it.”
The other gave no indication that he had heard.
“I want you to read that address, but I don’t want you to tell me what it is. Don’t say it, and don’t let me see the paper.”
“What is this shit, man?”
“Do you watch the news?”
“I got no time for that shit, man. I listens to music.”
For two or three seconds Jay stared at the blank screen on the other’s forehead, recalling that his own was—or had been—equally blank. “There’s no point in explaining. Do you understand what you’re got to do?”
“Look at the address. Not tell you. Not let you look, even. You want me to tear it up?”
Jay shook his head. “I want you to keep it, and I want you to take me there. If we have to spend money to get there, I’ll pay.”
Reluctantly, the other nodded.
“When we get there, you give me the paper so I can see you took me to the right place. When you do, I’ll give you the other half of that hundred and you can go.”
He had expected the subway, but they took a bus; the ride lasted over an hour. “’Bout two blocks now,” the other said when they left it at last. “You wants to walk?”
Jay nodded.
“You going to turn me in, man?”
“No,” Jay said. They were walking side by side. “I’m going to give you the other half of that hundred, and shake hands if you’re willing to shake hands, and say good-bye.”
“You a pretty fair scrapper, you know? Only you catches me by surprise. I wasn’t expectin‘you to turn’round like what you done.”
“Wasn’t that what you were trying to do to me? Take me by surprise?”
“S
ho’!” The other laughed.
“So that’s all right. Except that right and wrong really don’t count in things like this. I hunt a lot. I hunt animals to eat.”
“Do tell?”
“And for hide and bone to make things out of. Generally I try to give the animals a fighting chance.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But when I’m hungry, really up against it, I don’t. I kill any way I can.”
“We here.” The other waved at one of several squat concrete buildings. “Got a number on it ‘n’ everythin’. You don’ want to look at that?”
“I don’t think it matters now,” Jay said, and looked.
“Number eighteen.” The other fished in his pockets and pulled out the page of notebook paper, now much folded, that the woman who sold guns had given Jay in the café. “All right. It says here Greentree Gardens. An’ it says buildin’ eighteen. Then it says number eight. Have a look.”
Jay did.
“Now this here’s Greentree Gardens, all right? You look right over there ‘n’ there’s a sign on top of that buildin’. What do it say?”
“Greentree Gardens.”
“Right on, man. Right over there’s buildin’ number eighteen, like you sees. Number eight will be ground flo’, mos’ like, or maybe next up. Places like this ain’t bad as some other places, you know? Only they ain’t real safe neither. You wants me to go in there with you? Be glad to if you wants it.”
Jay shook his head, took out the remaining half of the torn hundred, and handed it to the other. Then he offered his hand, which the other accepted after putting the torn half bill into one of his pockets.
Abruptly his grip tightened. Jay tried to jerk away, but the other’s fist caught him under the cheekbone.
He went down, rolling and trying to cover his head with his arms. A kick dizzied him, its shock worse than its pain. Another missed, and another must have struck his forearm, because his arm felt as though it had been clubbed.