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12

If Truman Goff had been drafted into the army and if the army had sent him to Vietnam and if he had spent a little time there killing Viet Cong and North and even South Vietnamese, he most likely would never have ended up in the assassination business.

But by the time Truman Goff was nineteen he already had a wife and a child so the draft didn’t touch him. And by the time he was twenty-four he had left Southwest Virginia where he and his wife had been born and was working for Safeway in Baltimore. He was working as a checker then and living downtown in a row house and sometimes hanging out at a neighborhood bar called The Screaming Eagle.

Another regular customer at The Screaming Eagle was Bruce Cloke who had been forty-three when Goff had first met him nearly five years ago now. They had bought each other a few beers and talked about the Orioles and the Colts and about Cloke’s success with women. Cloke was a salesman and wasn’t too particular about what he sold as long as he could sell it to housewives. Sometimes he sold vacuum cleaners and sometimes aluminum siding and sometimes encyclopedias and even, upon occasion, magazine subscriptions. He was a big, ignorant, good-looking man with an immense amount of surface charm and if he had wished, he could have had his own sales crew working for him. But Cloke was also a passionate fisherman and hunter and whenever the notion hit him, he liked to drop everything and spend two weeks or ten days going after bass or ducks or deer.

It had been November when Truman Goff had dropped into The Screaming Eagle for a beer. It was also the middle of the afternoon and the only other customer in the place had been Bruce Cloke.

“How come you’re not working?” Cloke asked, after buying Goff a beer.

“I got a week off. It’s my vacation.”

“How come you didn’t take it last summer?”

Goff shrugged. “I don’t much like vacations. I took a week in July but I didn’t have enough money then to go anywhere so I’m taking the other week now. If I don’t take it before the first of the year, I’ll lose it.”

“Well, I’m taking myself a little vacation this week, too. Right down to Virginia.” Cloke aimed an imaginary rifle at some imaginary target and went pow-pow a couple of times.

Truman Goff got interested. “Deer, huh?”

“That’s right, buddy.”

“Where you going? I’m from Virginia, you know.”

“Down around Lynchburg.”

“Yeah? I’m from down around there.”

Three beers later Truman Goff had agreed to go deer hunting with Bruce Cloke. They left the next morning and by nine that night they were settled into the Idledale Motel on the outskirts of Lynchburg. They were also about halfway through the first of two fifths of Old Cabin Still that Cloke had brought along.

“You know something, buddy?” Cloke said.

“What?”

“I been a fisherman all my born days, but guess where I first got interested in hunting?”

“Where at?”

“Italy, that’s where.”

“What the fuck were you doing in Italy?”

“I was hunting the real thing, that’s what I was doing in Italy. I was hunting krauts.”

“Oh, yeah, in the army.”

“That’s right, in the army. In the goddamned infantry is what. In the Forty-fifth Division.”

“Yeah, well, I guess that’s something all right.”

“You guess it’s something?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Well, let me ask you something. You ever been in the army?”

“No, you know I ain’t ever been in the army.”

“Then you ain’t never hunted the real thing; you ain’t never hunted men.”

“Maybe I ain’t never hunted men but I’ve hunted more deer and more possum and more quail and more bobcat than you ever hoped to hunt.”

“But you never hunted no man, did you?”

“Well, I reckon I could, if I put my mind to it. Wouldn’t be no more trouble than hunting bobcat.”

“You think you could kill a man? I mean you think you could get a fellow human bean right in your sights and then squeeeeeze that trigger ever so easy without getting the shakes? You think you could do that, Truman?”

“Shit yes, I could do it,” Goff said and poured himself another drink.

Cloke looked at him for several moments, grinning. “I’ll be willing to bet you fifty bucks that you can’t.”

“What kind of a fuckin bet is that?” Goff said.

“Just what I said.”

“Shit, I ain’t going to no electric chair for fifty bucks.”

“You don’t have to worry about no electric chair.”

“You just said that you was willing to bet me fifty bucks that I couldn’t get somebody in my sights and then pull the trigger and I said I bet I could, but I wasn’t going to no electric chair just to prove it.” The whisky was making Goff confused. “Well, shit, it’s a dumb bet anyhow.”

“Tell you what, Truman.”

“What?”

“What if we fixed it up so that there wasn’t no chance, I mean no chance at all, of you going to no electric chair. I mean it.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“Never you mind how I’m gonna do it. Is it a bet?”

“Well, shit, I ain’t about to—”

“What’s a matter, you chicken?”

“Now don’t try to get me riled by calling me chicken, Bruce. You could call me chicken all night and it wouldn’t bother me none. I been called worsen that. So you can just keep on calling me chicken, but I ain’t gonna make no bet until I know what I’m betting on.”

So Bruce Cloke explained how Truman Goff could get a man in his rifle sights, pull the trigger, collect fifty dollars, and not go to the electric chair. When Cloke had finished, Goff said, “Well, shit, you didn’t tell me that it was gonna be a nigger.”

“Well, it’s still a man.”

“Yeah, but shooting a nigger. Hell, that’d be easy.”

“I’m willing to bet you fifty bucks you can’t do it.”

“All right, smart ass, I’ll just bet you fifty I can. Let’s go.”

Cloke and Goff drove the seventy-four miles to Richmond in a little less than three hours, arriving on the outskirts of the city just after midnight. They had finished the first fifth of Cabin Still and had opened the second. In the back seat of Cloke’s 1965 Pontiac was Goff’s old .30-.30 Marlin. It was loaded.

“Where the hell you going now?” Goff asked as Cloke drove in an apparently aimless fashion through the Richmond streets.

“What the hell do you care? You ain’t gonna do nothing anyhow.”

“You just have your fifty bucks ready, smart ass.”

“I got my fifty bucks ready. Don’t you worry about that. You just worry about what you gotta do. You only get one chance. Just like deer hunting. Ain’t nobody gonna stand around and wait for you to make up your mind.”

“Just tell me when,” Goff said. “That’s all you gotta do. Just tell me when.”

“Now!” Cloke said and braked the car to a stop. It was a residential street lined with gray, wooden houses. A few lights burned. Cars, most of them several years old, were parked closely together on both sides of the street. It was dark, but three street lamps provided yellow patches of light along a broken cement sidewalk. The houses had small yards and most of them offered nothing but hard-packed dirt although a few had spots of Bermuda grass that were turning an autumn brown.

“Where?” Goff said.

“On your right. Just coming out of that house — about fifty yards down.”

Goff looked and then saw what Cloke meant. A man was coming down the steps of a two-story frame house that had its porch light on. He was wearing a dark overcoat. He walked from the porch to the sidewalk and turned left, toward Goff and Cloke who sat double-parked in the Pontiac, its lights off.