The Grounding of Group 6

by Julian F. Thompson

  He looked around, then went inside and fetched a straight-backed chair. He set that near the sliding door, so that someone coming from an angle, and the uphill side, would never even know that he was there, until he’d seen them, too. His sight-line down the road was excellent—ditto through the cleaned-out woods in front of him. Rotten hunter that he was, he didn’t even think about his car.

  In fact, excited as he was, he didn’t even think about his lunch. And that was most unusual, for such a big-domed little pig as Homer Cone.

  Sara and Sully had kept on playing Chase. They knew that they were close to “home” and lunch, and both of them were good and hungry. They were also both feeling a little bit excited and a little bit nervous about the prospect of having the Robinsons’to themselves. Coke and Marigold did gosh-knows-what, exactly, at the Robinsons’; what would they do? Sara and Sully both wondered that, but neither of them knew that that was what the other one was wondering.

  Sully was “hare” for what they thought might be the last lap of the game. The only reason they weren’t sure was that neither of them knew exactly how far away they were from home in running minutes. They had a pretty good idea of how regular far it was, but time was another matter.

  Sully took off. He decided he’d go hard again, really dig out, and try to make sure this was the last game. As a result, he saw the roof line of the house, at a distance, before even three minutes were up. He was coming from the northwest, angling down through the woods from the uphill side, on the side away from the road. He’d slowed to a nice quick, quiet walk, as he tried to decide on a hiding place.

  One obvious possibility was not more than thirty yards from the house. It was a dark hunk of metamorphic rock that stuck up out of the ground for all the world like a titan’s hassock: four-and-a-half feet high, and half again as much across. Marigold had labeled it “The Blackhead,” although, in fact, it was a lot more wartlike. Sully saw that he could hunker down behind it and, when he heard Sara coming through the woods, just move a little one way or the other so she’d never see him. Unless, of course, she came right to it—in which case he’d leap up and mug her. Sully didn’t want to prolong this last game. He wanted to eat… and see what’d happen. He wished he could remember if Nat and Ludi had said they were going to come by the house on their way from Spring Lake Lodge to relieve Coke and Marigold, or what. But even if they did, there’d still be a good four hours when they’d have the place to themselves.

  Sully’s palms were sweating as he dropped down on all fours behind the rock and peered around it. He checked his watch. Sara would have started.

  She came on schedule, but farther down the slope than he’d expected. She wasn’t going full-speed, of course, seeing she was looking for him, too.

  Sully watched her moving. Even at a distance, she looked great. She had a light tan T-shirt on that said “Ski Trak Skis,” in green, on it; her braid was bouncing, and she didn’t have a bra on either, he knew that. Firsthand, you might say; Sully smiled. Her shorts were from her school, those white gym shorts that she was just about getting ready to outgrow, it seemed to Sully. Put it this way: they would have been uncomfortable on him, but girls were different. Actually, they looked pretty good on her. They sure were tight around the ass, but hers wasn’t flabby like a lot of girls’ were. Sully couldn’t imagine a better-looking girl for him than Sara was. If they ever got married, they’d have some really potent kids, he’d bet. Not tall, maybe, but super-healthy, and strong. And his kids, probably mostly boys, wouldn’t have to put up with the city, or any fags like McCorker. You could bet on that, too.

  She hadn’t seemed to guess he was behind The Blackhead; probably she thought he’d gone right in the house—and in the icebox, too. He watched her check her watch. She was just about straight downhill from the house, a little ways below the porch.

  “Good afternoon,” said Homer Cone to her. He’d heard her coming, from below and to his right. He’d stood up soundlessly and stepped straight forward, his rifle almost at his shoulders, his eyes just locked right onto her.

  “Let’s just don’t move quite yet,” said Homer Cone, as always, speaking through his nose.

  Before, the house had hidden Homer Cone from someone kneeling by The Blackhead. But once he stood up straight and walked away from it, it didn’t anymore. Sully knew exactly who he was, right off the bat; he’d seen him through binoculars, at Coldbrook Country School.

  Arn-the-Barn had stopped to eat his lunch at quarter past the hour. The place he’d chosen was a patch of nice soft grass, a really thin, green, matted kind—a sunny island in between a bunch of bushes that he didn’t know were blueberries, which was too bad. His girlfriend, Ginnie, was nuts about blueberries, and it would have given her a kick to know that Arn had been sitting right where some had actually been, not in a box, a month or so before.

  When things were going exactly right in Arnold’s lunch, he’d open up his second can of Pepsi when he was about three-quarters of the way through his second sandwich. That meant that there’d still be plenty of Pepsi left to have with his Milky Ways. If he didn’t have enough Pepsi left, the second Milky Way would seem to sort of stick in his back teeth, which’d make him feel as guilty as hell. His dentist, Dr. Lombardo, had a poster in his office that specifically told you to lay off candy bars and sodas. But soda didn’t stick, at least.

  This particular day, things were going A-O.K. It was one gorgeous day. The sandwiches had been perfect, really tasty; the Milky Ways were soft and fresh, but the chocolate coating hadn’t gotten runny so’s it stuck to the paper. And there were still a couple of swallows of Pepsi to swish around in his mouth after he’d finished the second Milky Way.

  Arnold didn’t even know that some people named Novotny, from Long Island, had built a house in the woods no more than three hundred yards southwest of where he sat.

  But he did know what a .30-.30 sounded like when it went off, those same three hundred yards away.

  Nat and Ludi went along beside an old stone wall, a wall so old that it had fallen, settled, sprawled. Ludi liked to think about whoever made those walls, and what they must have thought about when they were making them. Whoever made that wall had probably wished he had more kids, rather than less, she guessed.

  The single shot was quite a ways away, in front of them. It didn’t seem to get to her at first. She turned to Nat and said, almost distractedly, “The Robinsons’?”

  He said, “Could be. Or right near there. It was a rifle, bigger than a .22, for sure. Jeezum. I think we’d better hustle.” He started trotting, angling across the hillside. I hate to think and run, he thought, absurdly. Ludi was attentive now, running right behind him.

  When they got close, he stopped.

  “I guess what we ought to do is try to sneak in close and see if we can see what’s going on. What I ought to do,” he said. He looked at his watch. “It’s just about time for Sara and Sully to be getting back. Jeezum.”

  Ludi shut her eyes and tried to feel what was going on. Of course things didn’t work that way. Feeling—seeing—didn’t have a thing to do with trying. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  She whispered, “Could I just go with you?”

  Before, he would have told her “no.” Before, he’d have made her wait below the house and take the car keys and his wallet.

  Now he kissed her quickly on the lips and said, “Come on.” She wasn’t a kid anymore, and Nat had never been an M.C.P.

  8

  Homer Cone was no fool. As such, he knew, for example, that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. He further knew that, in certain situations, when you’ve seen one, you haven’t seen them all.

  He also (finally) knew that he would much rather shoot all five members of Group 6, plus their (ho-ho) faculty advisor, than just one of them. There wasn’t any question of his not shooting this one that he had right here in front of him, of course: this girl in the (ahem) tight shorts. He’d get around to that in just a moment.

  In his
own mind, Homer Cone was something of a humanitarian. When he returned a class’s blue books, after an exam, he didn’t build up the suspense—especially for marginal students—by handing them back in descending order, best to worst. Nor would he wander slowly around the room, seemingly at random, making vague remarks concerning summer school, or nature vs. nurture, the usefulness of wealthy, senile aunts, or the wage scale for illiterates in Portugal. No, he would march right in and say, “You flunked it, Livingston, you cretin. But you had lots of company: Swetman, Burdock, Remmeltree, and Norris. In twenty years of teaching, I’ve never had a dumber class. If you weren’t all so ugly, I’d like to have you bronzed.” The other members of the class would titter, sucking up to Cone. Little did they know that he was serious.

  But, all that to one side, Homer Cone did know that he was going to shoot Sara (whose name, of course, he didn’t know or care about). He wouldn’t stretch things out, or change his mind. There wasn’t any sense in taking prisoners, no matter what the situation. Sooner or later, you’d either have to kill them anyway or let them go, and in the present case they’d already let this group get away once, when they intended to kill them. Not this time, my dear, thought Homer Cone, thinking through his nose. There was absolutely no logical or acceptable reason to keep this girl around, just to share her with Mrs. Ripple. Let Mrs. Ripple find her own girls. This one had a date with Homer Cone.

  But first he had to have some facts from her, some information. It shouldn’t take him long to get what he was looking for. His many years of teaching had transformed Olive Cone’s bland little fat boy, Homer, into a subtle, shrewd inquisitor.

  “So, where are all the others?” he nasaled down at Sara.

  Sara’d had no trouble recognizing Homer Cone; she also knew that he was there to kill her, if he could, and that the means to do exactly that was resting in his hands. Before that moment, she’d never thought about being shot—in fact, she’d never seen any shooting, at targets, animals, or birds, in person. Films of shooting, yes; shootings on TV, sure, constantly. Without even counting some of the big, epic war movies, it’s safe to say that Sara had probably seen over a thousand people shot in the course of her viewing life, some of them not even actors. And maybe another hundred people shot at and missed. Lucky for her, you might say.

  For when she heard Homer Cone ask her where the others were, the part of Sara’s mind that dealt with problems, plans, ideas, and reasoning shut down. She turned into an animal: the product of her culture.

  Pivoting away from Cone and toward the shelter of the nearest tree, she just took off and ran, bent over, doing driving, zigzag steps, but not predictably. She didn’t have to think about the proper way to do it.

  Homer Cone was absolutely certain that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”; that was one of those eternal verities. And, to make things even better, here was a little bird who challenged his authority. He had asked her a civil question, and she’d been rude enough to run, instead of answer him. Who did she think she was?

  He raised his rifle to his shoulder, sighted through the scope.

  Except for shooting rifles, Homer Cone had never been the least bit good at sports. The only positive thing that could be said about his career in Little League baseball, for instance, was that he was the only kid on his team who looked normal (meaning “same-as-usual”) with one of those huge batting helmets on. But, for all of that, his baseball life had ended quickly, at the age of ten, when he was drilled in the ribs by a batting practice fastball thrown by David Rusterman, age twelve. He’d quit the sport that very day.

  And for one small fraction of a second, standing on a porch, deep in the woods, not far from Coldbrook Country School, Homer Cone believed that he’d been HBPed again. His body felt a jolt and staggered to its left; his rifle lobbed a shot into the air that came down many hundred yards away. He started to look down, and to his right, to see if there could be, by any chance, a baseball on the deck beside his foot.

  But what he saw, instead, was this: sticking out below his armpit, jammed between ribs five and six, was one round piece of dull aluminum, a hollow rod with feathers set in it, and a notch right at the end.

  Who killed Cock Robin? Homer Cone thought that, and died. Sully’s arrow’d touched his heart, as nothing in his life had ever done before.

  When Sara heard the shot, but didn’t feel it, even more adrenaline pumped through her system. It was like the gun lap of a swimming race, and she was leading once again. In just a few more strides, she’d be beyond the cleared-out space and into thicker woods. That would slow her down, but trees would also shield her from the next shot and the next. Her mind was coming back to her: use the contour of the slope, she told herself. Once she got that little ridge between herself and him, he’d never get her. Couldn’t. What she would do was keep on going hard, until she knew she’d shaken him, and then describe a circle back to Spring Lake Lodge. Or, wait. Maybe she should head for School: warn Coke and Marigold. Nat and Ludi would be going there, as well, and she could catch the four of them and warn them all.

  She stopped, now hidden from the house. All. All but Sully. Where was Sully? Back there somewhere. Hiding near the house. Maybe in the house? There hadn’t been a second shot. Why not? Could the man have shot at Sully, not at her? And killed him, even?

  Sara stood beside, behind, a big old sugar maple, breathing hard. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she should do, and she felt as if she maybe couldn’t move. Then suddenly, from not too far away, up-slope, she heard a call: not really loud, but terribly intense, you might say. Weird.

  “Sara”—Sully’s voice, she thought—“Sara”—Sully’s voice for sure. “Sara. Please.”

  She ran toward it. He heard the noise and ran toward her. She saw that he was very pale; his freckles, on the other hand, were darker and stood out against his skin like oil spots on a clean white shirt. “Sul,” she said, and ran right up to him.

  He didn’t seem to want to touch her. “I shot him with an arrow,” Sully said. “I might have killed him. He’s lying on the porch.”

  Sara tried to think what they should do. She made her mind behave. It was tempting to stick to the idea of heading on down to the school and meeting with the rest of them. But they had a lot of stuff at the Robinsons’ they really needed, like their sleeping bags, and there was the question—sort of an important one—of was the man alone, or what? And was he dead…or what? “I guess we should go back,” she said.

  Sully looked as if he might pass out. She got him to sit down and put his head between his knees; pretty soon, he said that he felt better. Shook and functioning—but barely—Sara thought.

  They angled up the hill and then around it, wanting to come down behind the house but to one side. So they could see that Homer Cone was lying on the porch, not moving, with an arrow in his side. No other person was in sight. They hurried down and saw the car that Homer Cone had come in, parked right where he had left it. They crept on up the outside steps that took them to the porch. The man was definitely not moving; his rifle lay a yard away from him, and seemed to breathe about the same amount that he did. They tiptoed toward the body.

  The door from the living room slid open.

  “Freeze,” said Arn-the-Barn Emfatico, his pistol in his hand.

  When Arn-the-Barn had heard that rifle shot, not far from where he was, he didn’t either duck or holler. Instead, he tilted back his head and filled his mouth with Pepsi: two swallows’ worth in one. Then he slid the empty can inside his little rucksack and stood up. He wanted to get out of brush and into open woods, where he’d be clearly seen by anyone. All he needed was to catch a “sound shot” from some crazy out-of-season hunter. He started in to whistle, loud as possible: “I’ve been workin’ on the railroad…” That was a nice noncontroversial number, Arnold thought. He moved in the direction of the shot.

  Pretty soon, of course, he saw the house and, coming from the east, he also saw Cone’s car, which looked familiar, vaguely
. He walked around the house; he called, “Hey! Everything O.K.?” and got no answer. He saw the steps that went up to the porch and used them. There was Homer Cone, his rifle by his side, his face averted. The head shape looked familiar, very.

  “Hey,” said Arn-the-Barn again. He walked straight to the body, bent, and saw the face. “Well, waddya know?” said Arn-the-Barn, by no means horrified. He’d never seen a victim of a violent death before, but he, like Sara, had been known to watch a little television. He knew exactly what to do; he felt at home and competent. He knelt and touched the body’s neck, like Quincy might. He turned up one dead eyelid and put his ear down near the mouth, as either Ponch or Jon would do it. And then, of course, he stood and shook his head, like Colonel Sherman Potter. He went into the house to find a phone.

  While he was looking for the phone, he also added two and two as best he could; he didn’t always get an answer. This Mr. Big-Dome Bigot from the school had almost surely shot the rifle—he could check—and someone else had hit him with an arrow. Who? The possibility of Nat did cross his mind. The person hadn’t stuck around, though; that was strange. You’d think they’d try to hide the body, wouldn’t you?

  Arnold found there wasn’t any phone, and when he went upstairs again, to check the rifle on the porch, he saw two kids out there. So how could he resist the chance to tell them “Freeze”?

  They did. The man was much too close to make a run for it, and much too huge to jump on, even if he hadn’t had that pistol in his hand. What they felt was overwhelmed, defeated.

  “I suppose you’re from the school,” said Sara sullenly.

  Arn shot up his eyebrows. “From the school? That place? Sheesh.” He waved his empty hand. “Hell, no, I’m from…around. You know. What the hell happened here?”

  Sara’s hopes revived. She thought he might be a policeman, even dressed in shorts like that. Perhaps he was on some sort of undercover assignment and couldn’t risk identifying himself.