The Triggerman's Dance

by T. Jefferson Parker

  There is one more home for the two other members of Holt’s inner-inner circle: Laura and Thurmond Messinger. This is the adobe church that has stood on the grounds since 1853, topped by a wooden cross to tell travelers they would be treated with Christian respect here. Holt gutted the old interior when he moved onto Liberty Ridge, in keeping with his desire to provide the Messingers with a convenient place to live, and with his profoundly bitter loss of faith in the church after the shooting of his wife and son. Much remains of the old religious ambience inside. Because, as Holt discovered, a church is always mainly a church no matter what you do to it. This is fine with Laura Messinger, a Catholic, and Thurmond, a lapsed Presbyterian.

  Nearby, in a loose archipelago that borders a rolling central landscape verdant with grass and trees and flowers, stand four spacious cottages where the cadets of Liberty Operations are trained. One building is for classroom sessions. One is for martial-arts work. The third is an indoor pistol range and the fourth a library stocked with books that are handpicked by Holt and required reading for any cadet hoping to graduate into Liberty Operations. These volumes include the Old Testament, The Riverside Shakespeare, The Man-eaters of Kumaon, the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States and Holt’s own self-published rumination, Conscience and Character. Beyond these are the recreation building, two bungalows for the live-in help, two generous guest flats; and several outbuildings for the vehicles, the helicopter, propane, generators, water supply and storage. The helipad and tennis courts are hidden in a hollow on the other side the main house, as are the swimming pool, whirlpool, rock garden and aviary. Down by the grove are four sizeable cabins for the citrus workers. Beside the lake sit the boathouse, another guest cottage, the kennels for Holt’s army of springers, the marina and the drydock. Beside the drydock is a large cinder-block structure, windowless and cheerless as a coffin. Inside is the notorious “Holt Alley,” a walk-through small-arms range featuring a city block with 25 bad guy mannequins that can pop out at you from just about anywhere, and 15 innocents who scuttle about their daily lives. No one has ever shot a perfect score in less than three minutes and fifteen seconds.

  On the south end of the lake is the beach, cabanas, and the rifle and pistol range. Next to the rifle benches is a modified sporting clays course where, since the beginning of August, Vann Holt has spent many hours getting ready for quail season.

  As the sun loosens its orange into the western sky, Holt stands here, on the sporting clays range, at the last station. Behind him is the tower, with its mechanical throwers, stacks of targets, platforms and railings. Holt is in a small wooden cage shaped like a portable toilet stall, with the front and back panels cut away but the two side panels up, to make his shots more difficult. He is a large man, thick-limbed and suntanned. His straight silver hair is neatly trimmed on the sides and back, but in front it juts outward over his forehead like a youngster’s. His face is slender, clean shaven and deeply lined; his mouth is taut but unexpressive; his eyes, though pale gray, are now a kind of translucent blue behind the yellow lenses of his shooting glasses. He is dressed in khakis, chukkas and a blue oxford shirt, and has a shell pouch around his waist. He raises the shotgun to his shoulder and calls “pull.” It is not the sharp pull! of the aggressive shooter, not the interrogative pull? of the hesitant shooter, but an unhurried, relaxed command that somehow sounds like a prefix. Puuull . . . His voice is deep and clear. The clay bird hurls from his blinded left side, streaks in front of him, rising, then disappears in a cracking little cloud of black dust. Holt steps back and reloads, staring down at his gun in the way a tennis player might ponder the strings of his racquet. There is a distinct air about him. Seen from any angle, Vann Holt is a man who emanates assurance, engagement and capability.

  Behind the station, Lane Fargo rests his gun across the crook of one elbow and watches.

  Holt steps forward into the box again and calls for the second bird. It comes from his left again, but flies lower, faster, and more directly away from him. There is a quick pop, a short follow-through of barrel, and the disc jumps ahead, nicked but still flying.

  “The magic pellet,” says Lane Fargo. “Pick up your double now, Boss.”

  Holt appears not to hear. He steps back, breaks open his Browning over-and-under, puts the spent shell into his pouch, then pushes two thin green .28 gauge loads into his gun and snaps it shut. He enters the station house again, positions his feet and raises the stock to his shoulder. Everything he does seems deliberate, experienced. He calls for the bird in his usual way, puuull . . ., the way that seems to presage an automatic bursting of his target. The first bird whizzes away, untouched, through the report of Holt’s gun. Then the second, faster and further out, escapes too, streaking across the clay-blackened range and settling out of sight behind a hillock.

  For a moment Holt stands there, looking out as if he can see them again, each missed bird. He raises the gun again and makes the shots in his imagination. Then he backs out of the station, breaks open his weapon, removes the shells and joins his partner.

  “Well, that’s an eighty-four,” says Fargo. “Put you in A’s almost any club in the world.”

  “Behind them again.”

  “Yep.”

  Lane Fargo goes into the station, knocks down both singles and the double. He’s shooting a .12 gauge with a heavy load, and the report of his gun booms across the range. He returns to Holt with a cautious look, but apparently pleased.

  “Ninety,” he says.

  “That’s good shooting, Lane. You’ll slay them tomorrow.”

  They case their guns and lay them in the bed of a little pickup truck.

  “You’re not picking them up as soon, Boss,” says Fargo.

  “The eyes.”

  “I’m not happy about that.”

  “I’m less.”

  “Give you one of my own if I could.”

  “Hang on to what’s yours, Lane.”

  “Stay out ahead of ’em tomorrow, and you’ll limit by ten, Vann.”

  “Nine-thirty, Lane,” says Holt with a warm, genuine, and somewhat impish smile.

  Holt is quiet as they drive back toward the Big House. He has, in his law enforcement years, confronted his own mortality enough to be familiar with it, but this new enemy, which introduced itself during a yearly physical eight months ago, is more unnerving than any creep with a gun. What demoralizes him most is not the fact that the disease is inoperable, nor the slow sapping of his strength, but rather the inexorable diminishment of his eyesight. Fifty-five years of 20/10 vision and now some of the clay birds are just a blur.

  Much to do, he thinks, while there’s still daylight inside.

  “Lane, we’ll cast off at five tomorrow.”

  “I’m ready. You want to me to take care of the guns and dogs?”

  Holt, of course, has taken care of the guns and dogs for the last thirty-five opening days of his life. He shakes his head and tells Fargo he’ll handle it. Fargo is the only one he has told about the blood, and he regrets it. Nothing on earth is more irritating to Vann Holt than condescension. Lane Fargo means well and that is what makes it so disgusting.

  “Got those covered, Lane.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Later that night, after dinner and a brief discussion with his daughter about which dogs to take in the morning, Holt roams the main house. Still dressed as he was at the range but without the shell pouch, he has a tumbler of scotch and water in his hand rather than the Browning. He has replaced his shooting glasses with heavy bifocals.

  It is late—almost midnight—and he is done with the work of the day. He has talked to the caretaker down at the Lake Riverside Estates place; he has confirmed times and weightloads with his helicopter pilot; he has spent almost an hour on the phone with a close personal friend who is in the middle of a messy divorce. He has talked briefly with Carolyn, his wife.

  Now, unsaddled by obligation, Holt is free to tour the enormous house. He has still not gotten used to its bea
uty and size, its varied atmospheres and internal climates. Lately, he’s been particularly drawn to the library, which faces west, is cool in the mornings, sun-dazzled in the evenings, and oddly hushed and handsome after dark. It is on the third floor of the house and provides an overview of Liberty Ridge and the rest of Orange County to the north.

  He sits on one of the leather library sofas, with a reading lamp over his shoulder and the day’s newspapers set out on a coffee table before him. Holt always reads his papers at night, because his mornings are hurried. He scans the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and of course, the Orange County Journal.

  He sips his scotch. Holt finds it increasingly difficult to read the mainstream American press. He does not believe that what he is reading is actually the pertinent news of the day. He thinks that large news organizations have an agenda to follow, and that they choose which stories to print and which to ignore, accordingly. He thinks that papers were better three decades ago, when the reporters were less righteous and egotistical, less obsessed with biographic, crowd-pleasing dirt. Still, he reads them, and they inform, amuse, and infuriate him. Here, he notes, is the dread Susan Baum again, in the Orange County Journal, bleating on about the “first annual” Gay Pride Festival last weekend in Laguna Beach: “The feeling of empowerment I sensed there was strong. There was a life-affirming scent in the air, as surely as the scent of eucalyptus. I saw the love between a lesbian couple and their two-year old, adopted son. I saw the uncloseted faces of young gay males, stepping into the straight world, without shame, for perhaps the first time. Yes, the American family has changed, and now includes these divergent lifestyles. To deny this is to deny the truth, but to see it, is to glimpse America’s future.”

  Holt himself had toured Laguna during the Gay Pride Festival—Liberty Operations was hired by certain individuals to provide security—and thought that the town had been transformed into one big happy gay bar, a sanctioned street-hustle under the PC banner, a mindless cluster-fuck of the naive by the depraved. God knew how many viruses were passed and caught that weekend. Baum failed to mention that. It makes Holt feel sick and angry. He wonders if the moral sickness of the Journal has somehow gotten into his own blood and turned it against him.

  And here, another article of the sort that infuriates Holt, this time about the NRA: “considered by some to be a greater threat to public health than the Tobacco Institute.”

  One lie always leads to another, he thinks: Must send Wayne another five grand.

  There is a computer station in the library. In fact, there is a computer station in every room of the house except the bathrooms and kitchen. The computers are linked to practically every other room of every other building on Liberty Ridge, connecting the people on the huge estate like nerves connect parts of the body. There is a computer in the boathouse, a computer in each of the Liberty Operations buildings, a computer in each of the citrus workers’ cottages, in each of the guest flats and even a computer in the entryway to Holt Alley. All are linked.

  Holt signs on, finds his own mailbox and makes the note to send Wayne LaPierre, the NRA President, $5,000 to blow as he sees fit. Holt knows that Wayne takes extreme positions at times, but believes they are the only things that will work in times of extremity. In times, for instance, when the Attorney General has publicly admitted she wished the citizenry of her country was completely disarmed.

  He signs off, sighs, refills his glass from a crystal decanter on the table before him, then walks out to the observation deck off of the library’s west windows. From here he can see the Pacific, his perfect orange groves, Liberty Lake, a slice of I-5, then to the north the lighted sprawl of the suburbs—Mission Viejo into Lake Forest into Irvine into Tustin into Santa Ana and stretching beyond, like a huge and sparkling welcome mat, all the way to the door of Los Angeles itself. The breeze-cleansed October night is clear. Holt stands at the railing and trains the telescope west at the ocean. He can see a bait boat squidding under halogen lamps miles off the coast. He trains the telescope north, toward central Orange County, home—he thinks—to whores and junkies, home to thieves and liars, child molesters, rapists, killers. Home to La Raza and Aztlán and other aberrations of the mind. Home to the kind of gun-toting racists who shot down Patrick and Carolyn simply because of the color of their skin. Home to the Orange County Journal, which claims that the American future is two dykes and their adopted boy.

  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 to his score of eighty-four on the sporting clays course, to the fact 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 railings in the minor light, its thick power cable running from motor to wall socket. The night nurse—Joni—looks up at Holt and as always, 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 down 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.”