Now and then, when he was making love to his wife, wartime images would intrude. They came not as flashbacks of the sort common to victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, but as simple memories that slipped unbidden into his consciousness. He recalled sex acts with the native prostitutes, and this made him guilty at first, as if he were cheating on his wife by having another woman’s image in mind during their lovemaking.
He dismissed the guilt. After all, you couldn’t hang a man for his thoughts, could you? And, if a memory of another woman enriched the sexual act for himself and his wife, where was the harm? He didn’t seek to summon up such memories, but if they came he allowed himself to enjoy them.
There were other memories, though. Memories of drawing a bead on a sniper in a tree, holding his breath, squeezing off the shot. Seeing the man fall in delicious slow motion, seeing him fall never to rise again.
He didn’t like that, and it bothered him a little. He found he could will such thoughts away, and did so as quickly as they came. Then he could surrender to the delight of the moment, untroubled by recollections of the past. That, after all, was over and done with. He didn’t hang out at the Legion post, didn’t pal around with other vets, didn’t talk about what he’d seen and done. He barely thought about it, so why should he think of it now, at such an intimate moment?
Never mind. You couldn’t help the thoughts that came to you, but you didn’t have to entertain them. He blinked and they were gone.
After his second child was born, Luke’s sex life slowed down considerably. The pregnancy had been a difficult one, and when he and his wife attempted to resume relations after the birth, they were not terribly successful. She was willing enough but not very receptive, and he had difficulty becoming aroused and further difficulty in bringing his arousal to fulfillment.
He’d never had this problem before.
It was normal, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. It would work itself out.
He tried mental tricks-thinking of other women, using memory or fantasy as an erotic aid. This worked some of the time, but not always, and never as well as he would have liked.
Then one day he used a fantasy about a woman at work to help him become erect, and, during the act, he tried to extend the fantasy to reach a climax. But instead it winked out like a spent lightbulb, and what replaced it was an involuntary memory of a firefight. This time he didn’t blink it away, but let himself relive the fight, the aiming, the firing, the bodies falling in obedience to his will.
His orgasm was powerful.
If it troubled him at all to have used memories of killing, any disquiet he felt was offset by the height of his excitement and the depth of his satisfaction. Henceforth he employed memories and fantasies of killing as he had previously used memories and fantasies of other women, and to far greater advantage. His ardor had waned somewhat even before the second pregnancy, as is hardly uncommon after a few years of marriage; it now returned with a vengeance, and his wife caught a little of his own renewed enthusiasm. It was, she told him, like a second honeymoon.
That set his mind entirely to rest. It was good for both of them, he realized, and if what he did in the privacy of his own mind was a little kinky, even a little unpleasant, well, who was harmed?
Memories would take him only so far. You used them up when you replayed them over and over. Fantasies, though, were pretty good. He would think of someone he’d noticed at work or on television, and he would imagine the whole thing, stalking the person, making the kill. He would spend time with the fantasy, living it over and over in his mind each time he and his wife made love, refining it until it was just the way he wanted it.
And then, perhaps inevitably, there came a time when he found himself thinking about bringing one of his fantasies to life. Or, if you prefer, to death.
“Hunting,” the policeman said. “Soldier, why the hell didn’t the poor sonofabitch try hunting? No safer outlet for a man who wants to kill something. You get up early in the morning and go out in the woods and take it out on a deer or a squirrel.”
“ I wonder,” said the priest. “Do you suppose that’s why men hunt? I thought it was for the joy of walking in the woods, and the satisfaction of putting meat on one’s table.”
“ Meat’s cheaper in a store,” the policeman said, “and you don’t need to pick up a gun to take a walk in the woods. Oh, I’m sure there are other motives for hunting. It makes you feel resourceful and self-reliant and manly, fit to hang out with Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo. But when all’s said and done you’re out there killing things, and if you don’t like killing you’ll find some other way to pass the time.”
“ He’d hunted as a boy,” the soldier said. “You’d be hard put to avoid it if you grew up where he did. His brother took him out hunting rabbits, and he shot and killed one, and it made him sick.”
“ What did he get, tularemia?” the doctor wondered. “You can get it from handling infected rabbits.”
“ Sick to his stomach,” the soldier said. “Sick inside. Killing an animal left him feeling awful.”
“ He was a boy then,” the policeman said. “Now he was a man, and one who’d killed other men and was thinking about doing it again. You’d think he’d go out in the woods, if only for curiosity.”
“ And he did,” said the soldier.
He thought along the very lines you suggested (continued the soldier), and he went out and bought a rifle and shells, and one crisp autumn morning he shouldered his rifle and drove a half hour north, where there was supposed to be good hunting. The deer season wouldn’t open for another month, but all that meant was that the woods wouldn’t be swarming with hunters. And you didn’t have to wait for deer season to shoot varmints and small game.
He walked around for an hour or so, stopped to eat his lunch and drink a cup of coffee from the Thermos jug, got up and hefted his gun and walked around some more. Early on he spotted a bird on a branch, greeting the dawn in song. He squinted through the scope and took aim at the creature, not intending to shoot. What kind of person would gun down a songbird? But he wondered what it would feel like to have the bird in his sights, and was not surprised to note that there was no sense of excitement whatsoever, just a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach.
Later he took aim at a squirrel and had the same reaction, or non-reaction. Hunting, he could see, was not an answer for him. He was if anything somewhat relieved that he hadn’t had to shoot an animal to establish this.
He unloaded his rifle and walked some more, enjoying the crunch of fallen leaves under his feet, the sweetness of the air in his lungs. And then he came to a clearing, and in an old orchard across the way he saw a woman on a ladder, picking apples.
His pulse quickened. Without thinking he slipped into the shadows where he’d be invisible. He stood there, watching her, and he was excited.
She was pretty, or at least he thought she was. It was hard to tell at this distance. He should have brought binoculars, he thought, so he could get a better look.
And he remembered that the gun’s telescopic sight would work as well.
He spun around, walked back the way he’d come. He was not going to look at the woman through a rifle sight. That was not what he was going to do.
He walked around for another hour and wound up right back where he’d seen the woman. Probably gone by now, he told himself. But no, there she was, still in the orchard, still up on the ladder. She was working a different tree now, and he could get a better look at her now. Earlier her back had been toward him, but now he was presented with a frontal view, and he could see her face.
Not very well, though. Not from this far away.
He took the rifle from his shoulder, looked at her through the scope. Very pretty, he saw. Auburn hair-without the scope it had just looked dark-and a long oval face, and breasts that swelled the front of her plaid shirt.