by Farris, John
From the brief look he’d had at the farmyard and the hill beyond as he drove in, he’d decided that the Major was either high on the hill, effectively screened by trees, or in the barn loft.
Practice looked over his shoulder. The barn loft was plainly visible to him, which meant that if the Major were sitting up there, he had a clean shot at Practice. But the bullets had struck the other side of the car. He raised his head cautiously and sighted through the rear windows for an instant, but it was too dark to see ...
Another bullet smashed through both windows, so close that specks of glass struck his cheek. Practice crouched again, wondering if the Major’s bullets could reach through the body of the car for him, and he felt his stomach cramping with fear.
“Jim!”
Again he looked over his shoulder, and this time saw John Guthrie, in a white shirt and denims, standing in the doorway of the farmhouse.
“What the hell is going on out there?”
“Get back!” Practice shouted. “Get in the house!” But the screen door had slammed and he saw the Governor advancing toward him, his white shirt clearly visible in the dark.
“Who’s doing the shooting ... ?”
“No!” Practice shouted, but before he could say more he heard the crack of the Major’s rifle, and John Guthrie pitched forward and lay motionless on the grass.
Practice stared at him in horror. The white shirt had given the Major a target he couldn’t possibly have missed. Whether he had chosen to place his bullet a little above the collar or through the heart was unimportant.
“Daddy!”
This time it was Chris in the doorway, holding the screen open, and as Practice glanced up he saw Dore’s blond head behind the boy. Again Chris screamed, “Daddy!” And Practice suddenly broke from cover, running toward the door which seemed half a mile away. There was no cover at all. Perhaps the Major would be momentarily off guard. Or perhaps he was now centering Practice within the scope, tracking him in his headlong, hopeless run, timing his heartbeat, waiting for the moment to send Practice into the dirt with another perfectly placed bullet.
With a groan of fear and anguish, Practice threw himself toward the ground in a diving somersault, distantly hearing the crack of the rifle. Then he scrambled to his knees, ran, dived again, seeing nothing but the doorway and the terrified faces of Chris and Dore. Another bullet whined off the concrete doorstep just ahead of him.
The door was open. He hurtled through, pushing Chris and Dore aside.
“Get down, get down,” he pleaded, and before he was finished, the house began to explode, fragment after fragment, windows, table lamps, even the walls. He crawled on hands and knees to where Chris was standing, staring out at his father on the lawn. He pulled the child down with one hand and yanked at Dore with the other.
“What’s happening, what’s happening?” Dore moaned. “Who’s trying to kill us?”
Practice heard the bullets hitting inside the house, digging into floors, walls, furniture. As he looked up, a light fixture over the dining room table shattered with a little puff of smoke and swayed crookedly on its chain. Stop it, he thought, his teeth gritted. Enough! He wondered how long it would be before one of the Major’s volleys found them, flat on the floor; how long before he heard the unmistakable sound of a bullet striking flesh.
And then, magically, it was quiet. Chris whimpered on the floor, and Practice moved slightly, holding him. One light remained on, a table lamp in front of the chimney, the one place safe from the bullets that had been fired into the house. They were lying on a diagonal line from the chimney and fireplace to the front door, and now Practice thought he knew approximately where the Major was hiding up on the hill.
Was he changing position now, so that the chimney would no longer be an obstacle to him? Would his next bullets search them out and kill them as they lay helplessly pinned to the floor, unable to move or to run away?
“Dore!”
He heard her sobbing nearby and lifted his head slightly to look at her.
“Tell him to stop—tell him to stop ...”
“Dore! Listen to me. As soon as you hear the next shot, I want you to scream, ‘Chris! Chris!’ And then cry as loud as you can. When he shoots again, scream as if you’re hit. Can you remember that?”
“Tell him to stop,” she moaned.
“Dore ...”
He lifted his head again and saw, not far away, a chaise with a padded, canvas-covered cushion. He squirmed to the chaise and lifted off the pad, then worked it back to where Dore was lying. He doubled the pad, and covered her. Only her arms and legs were unprotected. The doubled pad was more than a foot thick. He didn’t know if it could stop a .30-06, but it might.
Chris was beginning to stir, and Practice crawled back to him and lay down so that he was covering Chris with his body.
They waited.
There were six shots this time, each about three seconds apart. He heard them hitting the floor all around them. After the fourth shot Dore suddenly roused herself and began to scream Chris’s name. And then, as suddenly, she stopped. Practice had been listening for the last bullet, but he hadn’t heard it hit. There might have been a slight, almost undetectable thump, as if the cushions which covered Dore had been struck. But he couldn’t be sure. He bit his lip and kept Chris absolutely still beneath him.
Come on, he thought grimly. Come on, you bastard, and take a look. You have to know, don’t you? You have to know!
He heard his watch ticking close to his ear and tried to gauge the passing of time, but soon abandoned the effort. Was it five minutes since the bullets had stopped? How long could he keep Chris still? What had happened to Dore? He was afraid to make the slightest move. The Major was a hunter; he could stalk like a ghost. He might be outside the screen right now, looking in, his rifle on them, alert for any movement.
Back in the woods an owl hooted. Chris’s breathing was labored. Practice held his hand firmly on the back of Chris’s head, wishing he could talk to the boy, reassure him in some way.
The screen door opened an inch, a sound that chilled Practice.
He’s coming in.
Did any of them look dead? Would the Major recognize the sham and raise his rifle again to place a last bullet in each of their heads?
The crack of the rifle nearby jolted him. He didn’t know if his muscles had jumped convulsively at the sound or not. He lay still, wanting to scream to dispel his tension, not daring to ...
“Get up,” the Major said. “Get away from the boy.”
So he knew. Slowly Practice raised his head, feeling the stiffness of his neck and the slow noose of fear around his throat. He wanted to plead, to make this fierce, indefatigable man leave them alone, but he was too exhausted with the knowledge of sure death.
“Stand,” the Major said; and Practice rose, staring into those implacable yellow eyes. The Major stood directly in front of the screen door, half in darkness, half illuminated by the brightness of the moon outside, the rifle cradled in his arm as steadily as ever.
On the floor, Chris sobbed.
“Stand away from the boy,” the Major said.
“No.”
“Don’t be a fool. I don’t want him to die in pain as my daughter died. But I’ll shoot through you to get to him.”
“I’m coming for you, Major,” Practice said. “I know I won’t make it. I won’t get two steps before you stitch me up
and down with that Winchester. But still I’m going to come.”
“If you choose to do it that way,” the Major said unemotionally, and he adjusted the aim of his rifle with his left hand.
Outside, the motor of Practice’s car roared.
The Major flinched, and for a moment his expression was bewildered, but he didn’t take his eyes off Practice. He took a step back, and, not losing sight of Practice, turned his head to look out.
The sound of clashing gears was loud and jarring in the night.
Light filled the doorway, and the Major�
��s malevolent eyes glittered. His lips stretched away from his teeth and he cried out, vaguely, but his cry was barely audible over the noise of acceleration as the car raced toward the house.
The rifle arced away from Practice, who snatched Chris from the floor and backed away with him. The Major stood stiffly and calmly within the blinding headlights as the car came on. He fired round after round into the light.
He was still firing as the car jumped the two concrete steps outside and smashed into the house at a speed of more than fifty miles an hour. The Major literally disappeared in the explosive impact of metal and wood, and the whole house seemed to buckle as if it were the center of an earthquake. Practice braced himself for the collapse of the roof and walls that would kill them as surely as the Major’s bullets, but miraculously the house absorbed the impact of the two-ton automobile, survived its seizure, and remained standing. There was a huge hole in the front wall, and part of the upper floor had fallen in. Pipes were burst and water spurted upward in a cloud of steam that mingled with the heavy dust of plaster and debris. The car was badly wrecked, but as Practice stared, the door on the driver’s side opened with a squawk of bent metal and John Guthrie got shakily out, his eyes fixed intently on Practice.
“All right?” he asked. “Is everybody ... ?”
“I think so.”
Guthrie looked down at the rubble piled up under the wheels of the car. The stock of a rifle was visible and Practice thought he could see one of the Major’s arms, but he didn’t really want to look.
Blood rolled down Guthrie’s left cheek from a long but apparently superficial wound. He dabbed at the blood with his fingertips and leaned against the side of the car he had driven into the house.
“Only way,” he said, horrified. “There was nothing else I could do.”
“You did enough,” Practice told him.
• 23 •
The train was late.
Osage Bluff’s station, a block below the hill on which the Governor’s mansion stood, was an antique, and had never looked prosperous even in the days when trains ran more frequently. Years ago, the parking lot in front and alongside the station would have been packed with cars and taxis, and the waiting room would be full, anticipating the arrival of the eight o’clock from Fort Frontenac; but the airlines gradually had taken their share of the passengers, and now fewer than a dozen people waited outside on the platform under the long roof. They gazed impatiently down the tracks for the headlight of the diesel as the streamliner came around the bluff beneath the penitentiary and slowed to the sound of its great strident bell.
Practice had been able to park only a few feet from the cobblestone walk along the tracks, and he waited fretfully, with one cigarette and then another, looking out at the black river and at the lights of the river bridge. It was summer, and hot. He wiped his forehead with an already smudged handkerchief and wondered if she had really come at last.
He felt and heard the train’s approach simultaneously, looked at his watch, grunted, and got out of the car as the diesel bore down on the station, headlights revolving. The lighted cars slid by quickly. It was one of the few luxury trains left on the line. The conductors and porters Practice glimpsed standing behind half-doors were ancient men in starched white or baggy blue suits. He searched the windows of the coaches anxiously for Lucy, but didn’t see her.
The train ground to a stop and the porters jumped down quickly from two coaches directly in front of the station. The passengers began to get off, and Practice walked along the platform, eagerly watching them appear.
Lucy was one of the first to get off. She wore a blue traveling suit and carried a small overnight case. The porter pulled a larger white suitcase off the train for her and with a smile set it down out of the way. Lucy thanked him, and as she turned, Jim was aware that her hair was different; she was wearing it in a more sophisticated style. He came up to Lucy feeling slightly disheveled in the heat, and out of breath, and as flustered as he had ever been in his life.
“I’ll take that, lady.”
She turned quickly, tried to smile, but couldn’t. They looked at each other for an awkward few moments, then she reached out and touched his sleeve and said softly, “Oh, Jim.”
Lucy was jostled by departing passengers and she stepped out of the way. Practice picked up her suitcase.
“This way,” he said. “How was your trip?”
“Long. I think I ought to get used to flying, but ...” She stopped and stared up the hill, at the lights of the city and of the Governor’s mansion, just visible through the trees.
“There have been some changes,” he said. “But not as many as you might think. Cities don’t change much in a year and a half. Just people.”
They walked side by side to his car, a used Plymouth, and he put her suitcase in the back seat. He had an opportunity to look more closely at Lucy as she got in. Her clothes were expensive. He knew from John Guthrie that Lucy made close to forty thousand dollars a year in Washington. Guthrie had arranged the job for her, and seen to it that she had a full social life almost from the moment she’d arrived. Lucy hadn’t had much to say about herself in the few letters she and Practice had exchanged, but it was obvious to Practice that she had prospered in new surroundings. And he was glumly certain that she had all the male attention she could want. He wondered if there was a particular man by this time, one whom she was thinking about even now. He felt years older than he had just minutes ago, uncertain, and a little drab.
He was aware of how shabby the interior of the dusty Plymouth looked. There were crumbs of tobacco on the dashboard, and the back seat was littered with scraps of paper and legal pads.
Lucy took a deep breath and smiled at him.
“Well, tell me all the news. I never hear anything from the Guthries, except for a few lines John sometimes scrawls at the bottom of his letters to Senator Toneff.”
“He has this ranch in Montana, seven hundred and some acres in a place called Sourwater Valley, which looks better than it sounds. He’s got beef cattle, sugar beets, and wheat, and wants for nothing as far as I know. Dore’s happy, too. He bought her six pairs of blue jeans as soon as they moved away from here, and the nearest civilization is thirty miles away in Billings.”
“And Chris?” she asked eagerly.
“At first Chris didn’t want any part of the ranch. He hated horses and so forth. Stayed in his room and sulked most of the time. But this spring he finally came around to the point where he admitted he might like to climb on a horse. Just a matter of time for Chris.”
Lucy laughed. “Do you think they’ll ever come back to Osage Bluff?”
“John swears not. But he’s a politician, and his politics are rooted here. Maybe in three years, or four, when he has the ranch under control, he’ll divide his time between there and Osage Bluff. Now, tell me, before I bust—you write the most uninformative letters, by the way, welcome as they are—how’s Washington? What are you doing? Is it—a permanent sort of thing?”
She laughed again. “Let me catch my breath. I love Washington. It was far different from anything I’d known, or thought I could get used to. But John’s friends took me in hand and helped me over the rough spots. Senator Toneff is a dream to work for. We have fierce arguments over everything and he’s fired me a dozen times. Always apologizes with a big vase full of roses. I’m rooming with a girl from Atlanta who won a lot of beauty contests and speaks an unbelievable language I haven’t caught on to yet. The pace is furious, most of the time. That has its good and bad points. Aren’t we going to the hotel?”
“Yes. First I had—I wanted to show you—something,” he finished lamely.
On a narrow street, just a block from the downtown area, he pulled into a parking place beside an old five-story building with a pitched roof and three gables. He opened the lobby door with a key and they took the elevator, which was not much larger than a telephone booth, to the top floor. Under the sloping roof he led her to a white door set in a red wall
. Lucy was smiling in a strange way. On the door, in black letters, was a sign, JAMES TYLER PRACTICE, ATTORNEY AT LAW. He hesitated a moment in front of the door, not daring to look at Lucy, then opened it and turned on the light in the small foyer. There was just room inside for a secretary’s cubicle, a couch in yellow, and a small rug on the floor with wide olive and green stripes.
“Jim ...”
“Wait.” He crossed the anteroom and opened the door to his office. There was one big window in the room, framing the lighted Capitol and a portion of the river below it. He didn’t turn on the lights but stood looking toward the Capitol. Lucy came into his office and he glanced back over one shoulder at her.
“I pay too much for it,” he said. “The kind of business I do, I should have a booth in a lunchroom uptown. Things are slow but gradual.”
“It’s—wonderful, Jim.”
“No. But my own. Oh, not even my own, if I want to be technical. John Guthrie gave me a lot of help. Maneuvered some business my way when he left his own law office in the hands of his partner. That got me started. I’ve been hard at it ever since.”
“Talk about uninformative letter writers!” Lucy said.
“I could have bragged, I suppose. I was desperate enough to write a lot of stuff that hadn’t come true yet. I could have kept repeating over and over what a big man I was going to become. I wanted to, but somehow it would have been dishonest. I didn’t want you to come back that way, Lucy. I didn’t want to lure you back. You know something, Lucy? I’m forty-two years old. And I’m starting to lose my hair.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said softly.
He suddenly felt severely short of words. “Well, this is what I’ve done. What I’ve always wanted, Lucy. I can’t wait to get down here in the morning and make twice as much work out of the work I have. I hate to leave and go home at night. Because it gets lonely where I live. I’m forty-two years old and a man who’s missed a lot of chances. I don’t have any right to expect not to be lonely, but that’s the way it is.”
