CHAPTER TEN
Hunter slept for ten hours, woke up famished, and microwaved the heart and kidneys. They were not tender but juicy and tangy. He drank a pint of whiskey and a gallon of water and slept again.
When he awoke, he hacked the remaining leg into two pieces, and put the foot half into a big pan with onions and a handful of wild rosemary. He stabbed it a dozen times and pushed garlic cloves deep into the muscle. He opened a can of camper’s bacon and draped it all over the leg and put it in a slow oven.
He sat on the trailer stairs for exactly one hour, listening intently. Two cars and a motorcycle went by, and as he was rising to go back in, he heard the whir and labored breathing of a bicyclist slowly climbing the slight grade.
It would not be smart to hunt so close to home. But just for practice he slipped quietly through the underbrush and crouched down behind a dense thicket of bramble. He nibbled on some berries and watched.
He would be a beautiful catch, young and plump. He must be local, since he couldn’t have pedaled very far on the old Schwinn, fat patched tires and faded blue paint held together with skeins of rust.
Hunter’s stomach made a noise and the boy heard it. He stopped and looked around wildly, and Hunter tensed to attack. But then he turned the bike around and fled downhill.
Some ancient instinct urged him to bound after the quarry and bring it down, and something like saliva squirted into his mouth in anticipation. His long muscles tensed to spring, but the brain interfered and he relaxed.
There would be another day.
He would be cautious, as usual. He sat unmoving long after the sound of the bike receded into nothing. The clock in his brain ticked off an hour, and then another hour.
No villagers with torches and pitchforks. No steady-eyed deputy adjusting his Stetson and saying, “Maybe the boy did hear somethin’, Sheriff.” No rumble of tanks and scream of jets converging on the invader from another world.
But he was not an invader, he thought; he belonged here as surely as a shark belongs in the sea.
A rabbit advanced slowly, almost invisible against the dun mat of humus, and sniffed Hunter’s bare foot. He snatched it and crushed out its life before it could even squeak, and nibbled at its twitching body as he watched the sun set.
Not a bad planet at all.
3.
When I turned eighteen, my mother took me down to New Orleans to celebrate my birthday with Aunt Helen. Eighteen was the legal drinking age in New Orleans, and I was ready. Aunt Helen lived there, and knew all the watering holes, and the three of us had walked up and down Bourbon Street and Decatur and St. Charles, comparing the quality of mint juleps in various places. I probably lost track after three or four.
Brennan’s is the place where I learned about treating a hangover with booze, their traditional champagne breakfast. It was a strange medicinal compound of champagne and Pernod, with orange juice on the side, and it worked so well we kept drinking champagne for a while, even after the hangovers were buried.
Aunt Helen—“Hell,” she liked to be called—had by then turned this cycle into a way of life. The hangover would start to gather about the time the coffee was perking, so she’d spike it with a gin Bloody Mary and get on with life. I sincerely hope she outlives us all.
That breakfast had started out airy and French, a soufflé made with berries, and then anchored with hot Andouille sausage and fried potatoes, washed down with imported beer. I don’t think I had eaten better in my life at that time, and have only a few times since.
Of course this visit to the Big Easy was going to be less festive. Not easy.
After eighteen hours on the bus, sleeping fitfully after I finished the short Hunter chapter, I was ready for a little walk. The ticketmeister drew me a map on a three-by-five card and said it was a little more than a mile. It was not quite eleven, and I’d told Kit “about noon,” so I set out into the gathering heat.
Quite a bit of foot traffic, but it wasn’t unpleasant, tourists happy to be where they were, not yet sweltering and cross. I resisted the automatic reflex to take out the cell and check for calls, or call Kit to reassure her. They’re probably listening; why make it easy for them?
Of course there was a chance we had lost them now. In my mind’s eye I could visualize them crawling over Kit’s car, looking for clues. There wasn’t one molecule of evidence that we were going to New Orleans. They would find the directions to Baton Rouge, crumpled up and kicked under the seat, but otherwise I hoped our trail stopped there, in the long-term lot outside the St. Louis airport.
They would get the rifle. That gave me a little chill. Would they bench test it without first checking—lock and load and fire the second round into the blocked barrel? If it killed or injured some DHS or FBI agent, they would probably up the ante. If it was the people who’d supplied the rifle in the first place, who knows? They wouldn’t have any reason to test-fire it. Maybe it would show up in our motel room in Key West, still fatally booby trapped.
The line for Brennan’s was half a block long. After a minute or two, long enough for me to fall into a reverie, Kit tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, sailor—new in town?”
We kissed and she steered me across the street to a place with tables in the front garden. She’d already gotten us a table and a carafe of coffee.
The coffee was strong and bitter with chicory. Thick real cream and honey to take the edge off. A waiter came over immediately and I ordered a beer and a pile of sausage and bacon.
“Breakfast of champignons?”
“Living on candy and carbs, on the bus,” I said. “Dreaming of that sausage.”
“And coming up with a master plan, I hope.”
“I have some ideas. You?”
“One you won’t like.”
In other words, one I’d better accept. “What?”
“We should both change our appearance radically. Look like we belong in the Quarter. Chop my hair short and dye it, go butch.”
“I love your hair.”
“It’ll grow back. Likewise you: off with the beard and moustache, and shave your head.”
“Shave my head? I’d look fucking gay.”
She nodded, expressionless. “Look around. Black jeans and tight black T-shirt, little earring. You get hit on, just say no. I do it all the time.”
I couldn’t argue with the logic. If your appearance gives off a specific sexual signal, most people won’t see anything else. “And then we get fake IDs?”
“You said this would be the place.”
“Yeah. True.” Maybe I could go home for just one minute and grab the file of notes I had on the subject, for the novel. “Smoke shop, head shop, is the place if you don’t need anything heavy-duty. Out-of-state driver’s license.” I looked at her critically and stroked my beard. “Think you could pass for twenty-one? Little girl?”
“In your dreams. Wet dreams.” She could pass, actually—even for a teenager if she dressed the part.
A pile of pig protein and lots of muscular chicory-flavored coffee, and I was ready to face a bunch of spies, or at least a barber.
He didn’t speak much English, but he got “Take it all off.” The feeling of a straight razor sliding along your skull was a new kind of discomfort for me, which I hope never to repeat. He also did an expert job on my beard. In the mirror I looked like one of those children with progeria, a baby’s face with age lines and basset eyes.
Kit’s haircut cost three times as much, and looked like the result of an industrial accident. You shouldn’t lean so close to the lathe, babe. But I hardly recognized her, which was the idea: bleached blond riff brushed out stiff with a purple accent.