On Friday, that was two days before, that was the 20th. Wise was leaving for the day, around five. He’d just gone past Marshall’s desk, without even an acknowledgment of departure. As though he didn’t even see him there at all. Then suddenly, with hand already to knob, with door already open, with face already out the door, he halted, he drew his face back into view, turned it, said as if by haphazard afterthought:
“Say, do you like rowing, Marshall?”
Why did he wait until he was nearly through the door to ask me that? Why didn’t he ask me sooner, when he passed my desk just a second ago? That was too premeditatedly unpremeditated. Too elaborately deferred, to be innocent. Why did he single me out to ask, why didn’t he ask any of the others?
“Hunh?”
“I said, do you like rowing?”
“Rowing?”
If I say yes? If I say no? More time.
Wise was pleasantly impatient by this time. “I’m only trying to find out if you’d like to get out in a boat and take turns at the oars.”
“Why do you ask?” Marshall parried.
“I’m looking for someone to go along with me Sunday.”
No. Wants to get me alone. Say no.
“I don’t know about Sunday.” He shook his head pensively. “I don’t think so.” He shook his head again, finally attained the definitive refusal he’d set for himself. “No.” And then he stared at Wise searchingly and said: “What about some of the others?”
“Already asked them. Can’t get anyone.”
Too thin. If he did, I didn’t hear him.
Wise shrugged. “Okay, forget it. I’ll go alone, then.”
The back of Wise’s head and the back of Wise’s heel disappeared from the door slit.
Will he, though? Will he really go alone?
Someone else passed, on his way out.
“ ’Night, Marsh.”
“Say, Horton, did Wise ask you to go rowing with him Sunday?”
“Not that I recall.”
Still someone else passed.
“See you Monday, Marsh.”
“Rogers, did Wise ask you to go rowing with him Sunday?”
“If he did, I didn’t hear him.”
Two out of two. I’ll try one more.
“Blaine, did Wise say anything to you about going rowing Sunday?”
“Yes.”
Marshall sighed deeply.
“What’d you tell him, no?”
The answer he got was catastrophic. “Oh, he wasn’t asking me. He knows I couldn’t anyway, May’s laid up with a bad ankle. What he said was, that he wondered if he could get you to go along with him.”
Me. That shows. Even speaking to someone else, it was me, and no one but me, he had on his mind for it.
Will he go alone, though? Will he really go alone?
He may. And yet not be as alone as he seems...
14
And yet not be as alone as he seems.
“Help you, sir?” the sporting-goods shopkeeper inquired.
“Just looking. If I see anything, I’ll let you know.” And then he added, “Just forget I’m in here. I don’t like to be hurried.”
He looked at woolen lumberman’s shirts, heavy, plaided, scarlet and blue. He looked at portable camp stoves. He looked at tin eating kits. He looked at—
He spoke again. He’d taken the long way around, down one aisle, and around, and then back along the other, instead of going straight across to it. “How much is this?”
“That’s a hatchet for chopping kindling. Best there is.”
“I know what it is. I asked you how much it was.”
Then when the storekeeper had told him, “As much as that? I didn’t know they came that high.”
He put it down and strolled on, seeming to have lost interest in it. The storekeeper, however, having detected at least a spark of interest, if nothing more, assiduously fanned it for all he was worth to keep it from going out. It was the only one there had been so far.
“Wait a minute, let me show it to you. Just look at the cutting edge on it. Made of the best steel.” He picked it up and followed him with it, to present it to close view once more. “They come in mighty handy, if you’re ever on a camping trip—”
“I know they do. But that isn’t really what I came in here—”
“Look, you shouldn’t be without one of these. Do you do much camping...?”
When he came out of there finally, he’d bought — or rather, been sold — a hatchet. For chopping kindling.
15
Two hours later he’d reappeared there again. The hatchet still made the curious, flat, wedge-shaped parcel the storekeeper had bundled it into, with the aid of thick brown wrapping paper. The string hadn’t even been taken off it.
Step two. Now to get what I really had in mind the first time.
The storekeeper lost a modicum of his affability.
“No, I can’t return you the money on it... I see that, I see that. It’s not a question of whether it’s even been unwrapped yet or not. It’s sold, and once it’s sold, it’s sold.”
They argued about it at desultory length, and without too great heat, as two men who are perfectly well aware that in the end they are going to compromise, but don’t wish to weaken their bargaining positions by being in too great a hurry.
“No, I’m not asking you to lose money on it... I can give you a credit against the purchase of something else, that’s the best I can do for you. You see anything you like, you let me know.”
Then he tried to help him along, by suggesting things that were priced a good deal higher than the original hatchet, so that their selection would amount in reality to a second sale over and above the first, rather than just an exchange.
“How about some fishing tackle?”
“I never fish.”
“Do you do any hunting?”
“Now and then. Not too often.”
“Could you use one of these?” The shopkeeper was offering it to him cradled lengthwise in his arms. “This is a beauty.”
Marshall looked at it in surprise, as though it were the last thing he’d had in mind just then. “Well, but—”
“Go ahead, hold it a minute,” the storekeeper said with treacherous persuasion. All men are attracted to such objects, drawn to them, can’t resist fondling them if given the opportunity. “Just get the feel of it. Run your hands over it.”
When he came out of there for the second and last time, the package he bore was much longer and thinner. But he wasn’t a man who had bought a gun. He was a man who had had a gun forced on him, very much against his will, by a glib and crafty storekeeper.
Technique.
16
Slowly it got light. Never so slowly before. Never since the prehistoric gloom. Never since the first man waited, in the dim dawn of time, beside the first pool, to kill his first quarry — the first quarry who was of his own kind.
The lake surface, seen flat from this tree-shrouded height, went up the chromatic scale, passing from indigo through deep blue, through azure, through ultramarine, to the silvery sheen of broad daylight at last. No color at all, just the brightness of a mirror that borrows its reflections.
He never moved. Perfect repose. Utter inanimation. The waiter. The wait. In the cool, the shady place, up there, high above the lake. Only breathing, nothing else. Breathing, that necessity for survival. Waiting, that necessity for survival. Lying hidden, that necessity for survival. Everything he did — that necessity for survival. Survival, that alternate of death. Death, that alternate of survival.
He waited prone, belly to ground, lying on a mattress of broken-off fir and evergreen branches, a screen of them even before his face, with just two eyes to peer out through them. Two eyes, and later, death, when the time came. Death, lying beside him now, and later, death, when the time came. Death, lying beside him now, its burnished brightness marred by lampblack, so that no errant gleam of sun could strike it when at last it moved and reared and peered forth.