Sixteen
A woman's voice murmured from somewhere nearby. His
imagination? John Hartman went upstairs and out into the twilight to
check. Roy Rockingham's patio door hung open. John crossed the yard and
tuck his head into the kitchen.
"Joyce?"
He risked a quick look through the house, but paused
in the living room when he spotted the overturned couch.
The house had been trashed. Grimly, he conducted a
search to ensure Joyce was not lying unconscious or worse among the
wreckage of her home, then returned home to leave a message on Sheriff
Gene Packerson's answering machine.
"Gene, this is John Hartman. Roy tore up his place
and I don't see Joyce about. I have a bad feeling about the situation."
He didn't know what else to say. Hopefully, she had
packed some clothes and ran. In any event, he'd leave it up to the
sheriff to follow through with an investigation.
When he put the phone down, he could hear David
talking in low tones in his room, talking to himself. He went upstairs
and outside to fetch the mail that had languished in the box during the
course of the day and returned to his basement den. He opened two
rejected articles and an assignment offered by an obscure journal unable
to pay enough to justify the time and effort.
His field of knowledge was too narrow to broaden his
potential markets. The magazines wanted articles on technology. Cruise
missiles were neat. The wars in and about the Persian Gulf had been a
comic book display of mind-boggling toys. His were personal skills, those
of stealth, infiltration and assassination, wilderness survival,
one-on-one self-defense and emergency medical techniques. Who needed to
know any of that in a world in which the police were only three pecks of a
cellular phone away?
The young flocked to the martial arts, but his
expertise was not at all refined or formalized. He had been trained to
kill on foreign territory and to survive long enough to reach friendly
shores. Survivalists and soldiers of fortune were his only audience,
fanatics waiting for the end of the world and prepared to hasten its end,
given half an opportunity. Or maybe amateur hit men looking to feed on
the insurance checks of murdered husbands. Those were markets he had no
desire to fuel.
Not so long ago, he could remember feeling superior
to Marlene's journalistic ambitions. Men were the doers in the world,
masters of ideas and machines. Women were but talkers, nurturing mothers
and lovers. Amused by his attitude, Marlene had accused him of belonging
to the dark ages.
She had respected the warrior in him. It had aroused
the animal passion in her. But she had been right. He was a true
anachronism in a world in which people judged their self-worth and the
worth of others by their ability to create rather than destroy. The
modern world was outgrowing war. Cruise missiles were a dime a dozen and
too easily capped with megaton thermonuclear warheads to play with. They
had both agreed that civilization would die, if the temptation to settle
an argument by force could not be resisted. She had never known that his
own military career had ended on a similar note, escalating violence that
could still end his life, if those involved ever managed to track him
down.
Could he hope to change, or had he already sabotaged
himself beyond redemption? He held up his ruined hand to view, his guts
knotted with despair. He had to change. He was too old, too damaged to
return to the past. But was it ever to happen without Marlene's
insightful and loving guidance?
He switched off the computer knowing he could not
write his articles in such a bleak mood. Maybe later.
Maybe never.
A knock at the front door upstairs brought him to his
feet. Joyce again?
The face at the door, though, bore more resemblance
to that of a troll. John sighed in annoyance and removed a check taped
alongside the door. He handed it to his bearded visitor through a slit in
the screen rather than bother unlatching the wood frame door. It wasn't
the first time the old eccentric Zeke Fontaine had collected garbage at
midnight.
Zeke tucked the payment for the upcoming month's
refuse collection in his shirt pocket, offered a toothless grin, tipped
his worn cowboy hat, and hurried around the side of the house. The beam
of a flashlight darted through the darkness. He reappeared moments later
dragging the trash barrel from the back yard and emptied it in his idling
three-quarter ton pickup. He returned the empty barrel and reappeared a
second time toting two plastic bags of garbage from the shed.
John absently fetched a beer from the refrigerator,
closed a window to block a chilly ocean breeze bringing in rain clouds
from the west, and thumbed a remote to scan the cable channels in the
living room. He found nothing of interest and switched the television
off.
He listened to David whispering in the utter silence
of the house and wondered what games the boy was playing so late at
night. Still spooked by David's hallucinations and his own imagined voice
in the night, he crept down the hall and put his ear to the boy's door.
"This one here," David said cheerfully. "You bought
this for me on my last birthday. It's all about dinosaurs. Here, let me
show you. You stick it in here..."
The keyboard rattled briefly.
"See? You put the mouse arrow wherever you want and
it pops up a little dialogue box and tells you stuff. This one here is
about Tyrannosaurus Rex, my favorite. He's a real monster, isn't he? Dad
told me we couldn't afford it, but you went and bought it for me anyhow
and told Dad it was on sale. Dad told you that you were spoiling me
rotten. He told me it was the advantage of having an only child, except
that someday soon he expected to do something about that."
David's voice softened. "You were going to have a
baby. I would have had a baby sister by now, if you hadn't gotten burned
up."
On the dark side of the door, John choked back sudden
tears. He fought back a panicky need to cry out his unbearable rage and
misery. The lump in his throat shot pain throughout his body.
Clutching his chest in both hands, he turned and
hobbled away. He had no understanding of David's deepening crisis, and no
way to cope with it. Wrought with anguish, he thoughtlessly grabbed a
fresh bottle of whiskey from the dining room cupboard on the way by and
went downstairs to be alone with his misery.
