“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
THIRTEEN
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 cruised 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—a 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’s 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 partially stuffed up under the red Irish cycling cap she wears to hunt birds. She listened politely to the Harvard-educated Titisi, holding forth 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 there 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’s uncommon common sense. “It would please her father immensely if she would take over the reigns of Liberty Operations 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 clumps 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 too 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 ev
eryone 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 gourd 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 covey bend away in front of him and toward the others, fingering three more shells into his magazine without having to look at them, getting them pointed in the right direction by feeling for the brass base. Shotguns popped to his left now, as the birds accelerated across the meadow. He saw Titisi blasting away into the covey, 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 a 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 their falls and sliding two new shells into his gun. Sally dropped the first bird at his feet, pivoted and bolted back toward the second.
The covey disappeared, almost as quickly as it had risen. Holt watched them put down mid-meadow, happy that they were still naive enough to allow a second jump. By noon, he knew, they’d be skittish, and in one week so spooked you’d have to get them the first time because there would be no second. That was when the hunting was a true challenge.
To his left, Tirisi cursed and examined a handful of shells as if they were responsible for the fact that he had missed. Randell found his bird on the outskirts of a cactus patch. Lewis and Clark managed to come up with Valerie’s first quail, but proceeded to fight over it, which brought Valerie bounding forth to land a boot squarely on the butt of each dog. Lane Fargo just stood there and watched, having already collected his kill. Sally, methodical as always, followed Holt’s hand signals and easily found all four of his other quail. Holt picked up each one as she dropped it on his boots, felt their warmth and heft, admired the handsome plumage of the cocks and the more subtle beauty of the hens, then slipped them one at a time into the game pouch on his vest. Five birds in the first jump, he thought: it’s going to be a good day.
After Holt pocketed his last bird he reached down and gave Sally a hearty “attagirl,” rubbing behind her ears with his hand. She sat and looked up at him, her little stump of tail vibrating in the dirt. Before he even straightened, Sally was off again, nose down, zigging and zagging her way thirty yards ahead of him—never more—looking back every few seconds to make sure her master was paying attention.
Holt shot a single that had stayed behind only to burst into the air almost at his feet. Lane Fargo did likewise, out to Holt’s far left. Randell and Tirisi unloaded on a pair of stragglers, hitting nothing but air. Lewis and Clark started to sprint after the flying birds, but responded nicely when Valerie called them back with her whistle. Tough to call a young dog off a bird, Holt thought, that’s why a good shooter makes a good trainer. With pride he watched Valerie praise her dogs as they returned; she slipped a little something to each of them from her pocket. Holt never used food reinforcement for his dogs, but Valerie always did, and her results, he thought, were superb. He looked out to the rising sun, and breathed deeply the fine clean air of the desert. The birds in his vest were warm and heavy against his back. Sally, he thought, is probably the best dog I’ve ever had. Fleetingly, he remembered Patrick—how beautiful he was out here with his own dog, how gentle he was with her, and how he didn’t really care if he shot ten birds or none. But he let Patrick’s image flutter on past, like a quail, going out of sight. Sometimes, he reminded himself, you have to remember to forget.
By 9:30, Holt had his limit of ten quail. Valerie had nine and Lane Fargo had thirteen. They all hunted until almost eleven, giving Titisi and Randell a chance to knock a few down—which they did.
By 11:30 they had cleaned the birds, put them on ice, and loaded into the two Land Rovers for the drive into town. Holt was hungry now, and he could almost smell those burgers on the grill. Best in the desert, he thought.
“My treat at Olie’s,” he said, happy for the moment, glad to be thinking about nothing but birds and burgers and Valerie, who sat in the passenger seat beside him, holding his hand on her lap.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Olie’s is dark and cool and quiet when they walk in from the parking lot. It is a few minutes after noon and the last of the lunch rush—a young couple with a two-year old—comes through the swinging saloon door while Titisi holds it open. The young mother thanks him, but looks at him askance.
Holt takes a look at the long, picnic-style table near the jukebox, the same one he’s used for the last thirty years. He is the
kind of man who likes to do things the same way, time and time again, if that way works. But as he looks at the table—certainly no different than it was a year ago—a little voice begins to stir inside him. Vann Holt is also a man who listens to his voices. The voice says nothing, just a little infantlike whine, a protest or complaint of some minor nature.
“Let’s sit over there,” he says, motioning to a table on the other side of the room. “That looks good.”
“We always sit here, Dad.”
“Now we’re sitting there, Valerie.”
So they sit there.
Holt takes a seat with his back to the wall, which is festooned with an ancient promotional beer sign that features an ersatz running waterfall with bears playing in it. Valerie sits to his left, and Lane Fargo to his right. Across from them are Titisi and Randell, and Holt is pleased to see they are now talking about the security consultants Titisi wants to employ in Kampala.
“Number of ways to go about it,” says Randell, nodding.
“Competent, responsible men,” says the Ugandan, somewhat obligingly, as he looks at Holt, then back to Randell. “The kind of men who can organize, train, lead. Men like you.”
Holt hands out the plastic-covered menus, feigning disinterest in the business. Consultants, he thinks: young armed men willing to take risks for money, willing to kill for it. Mercenaries, or the trainers of mercenaries—what was the difference?
Of course, Randell knows this, and Titisi knows he knows it, but there is a certain latitude regarding definitions that must be offered at this stage. It is a courtesy. There is always the chance—very remote here, but possible just the same—that Titisi has been spun by the Federals, and his real mission is to offer Liberty Operations an opportunity to hang itself. Holt has had those opportunities before, and he is expert at keeping his company on the legitimate side of international law as it applies to security, investigations and military consultation. But gray areas do exist. Holt knows he can smell a rat from about ten miles away, though Titisi has thus far emitted a reassuring air of greed and menace, good indicators of honest intentions and trustworthiness. It always amazes Holt how cruel governments can be to their own people, in the name of helping them. On the other hand, Holt knows that Titisi can be thinking the same thing: that Vann Holt, ex-Federal, may have finally been manipulated into blowing the whistle on certain clients. It is little comfort to Titisi that he and his nation are the smallest of potatoes. At this stage, the Holy Trinity is vagueness, optimism, courtesy.
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