The Triggerman Dance (17 page)

"Did he call today?"

"No call. Busy with studies, I guess."

"I hope the Catholics don't get to him."

"?" He just looks at her, mouth open.

"Nothing worse than a lapsed Catholic."

"Oh, well, that's true, honey."

The fact that Holt and Carolyn were married in the Mormon Temple in Los Angeles does not even strike him as odd.

Carolyn's insistence on a living, college-age son—be it Patrick, Randy, Nicky, Steve—has worn Holt down over the years The fact that she hasn't seen this son since the day they were both shot and he died on the floor of a fast food place in Santa Ana; does not affect the march of Carolyn Holt's one a.m.'s. During "The Children's Hour," Patrick is alive and doing well at a good Eastern college—now apparently Catholic—though during the day, Carolyn might weep over his death. Or she might not.

She'll want another postcard soon, Holt thinks, and I'll have to mock one up.

"Terri's lips all healed?"

"Quite nicely."

"Those braces hurt her. I wonder if Dr. Dale could loosen them a little."

"I'll talk to him about it."

"Would you?"

"Of course. We're going bird hunting in the morning."

"You and Terri?"

"Yes. You know, down in Anza. We'll be back the day after sometime around noon. She wants to bring Lewis and Clark from this year's litter."

"Terri picks out cute names."

"I agree. And they're fine dogs. She's been working them for nine months."

"What about Sally?"

"Oh, I'll hunt with Sally, don't worry about that." "I miss those days."

Times like this hurt Vann Holt most, times when Carolyn is lucid and real, when he can communicate with the genuine Carolyn for a few sentences and taste something of what has been, realizing that she is still sometimes very present and very alive. The doctors explained her burned and broken brain matter as something akin to bare electrical wires clotted by wax— sometimes the signals will get through, and sometimes they won't. With a gunshot to the head, they had prophesied, anything can happen.

They talk until almost two, when Carolyn smiles and stretches the upper half of her body, then lowers the head of her bed back into sleeping position. Joni and Holt help turn her so the bedsores on her back—those perennial, agonizing plagues—can heal up and start again.

He kisses her goodnight—once on the lips and once on the forehead—then goes to his room, undresses and gets into the huge empty bed. He feels his heart beating hard in his side, and hears it clanging against his eardrums. It is the rhythm of rage.

He is soon lost to dreams, the same dreams he has had on October the fourteenth since he was twelve and hunted his first season with his father, dreams of birds rising in a blur of feathers and of pulling the trigger of a gun and watching as the birds— every one of them—fly untouched into the sky and disappear over a ridge ablaze with morning sun.

By six a.m. on October the fifteenth Vann Holt felt like a new man, clipping along ten thousand feet above the California desert.

The Hughes 500 was set up for five passengers and cruise at a quiet 130 mph. Holt had included five in his hunting party which he believes is two too many for safe and good shooting His fourth was Juma Titisi, a Development Ministry Official from Uganda who is interested in hiring security consultants— team of them, in fact. The fifth was an old friend of Holt's from his college days, Rich Randell, now in charge of Liberty Op overseas paramilitary accounts.

Lane Fargo sat beside the pilot, lost in a conversation about grazing rights on BLM land, acres of which slipped past them ten thousand feet below.

Next to Holt was Valerie, at the window, her hair partial! stuffed up under the red Irish cycling cap she wears to hunt bird She listened politely to the Harvard-educated Titisi, holding fort on the destructiveness of tribal rivalries in his nation.

Holt listened also, or appeared to, but his attention was on his daughter, of whom he is often in quiet awe. He nodded along, looking at her from just over a foot away, pleased at the confidence he has cultivated in her, amazed at the breadth of her knowledge after taking a degree in English Literature at the University of California, Irvine. How could she possibly be familiar with the policies of Buganda province's fickle
kabaka,
or the hydroelectric plant near Jinja?

"I've always wanted to visit the college at Kampala," she said. "All the different African religions fascinate me."

Smiling, the tall and noble-faced Titisi invited her to stay with his family and visit the school. "You might be disappointed in its size and architecture, but the programs are rich in heritage and many of the classes are conducted in English."

"See, Dad?" asked Valerie, turning to her father. "
That's
why I studied English."

"It's all clear to me now."

"Dad lobbied heavily for engineering or maybe a pre-med program, but how could I let all those good books go unread?"

"And now that you've read your Shakespeare and Joyce," said Titisi, "you can think about doing something to help your country, your world."

"I've got vet school applications out."

"Overcrowded and competitive," said Randell. "Much less than a 3.85 and you're out of the running. I know because my son tried."

"I got a four-o, about two million assisting hours, and two field champion springers bred, trained and handled."

Vann Holt loved the way a young person could say the most self-aggrandizing things without sounding that way at all.

"I don't think I can help my country," Valerie continued, "but I could help some sick animals. Though here I am, going out to kill little innocent birdies and eat them for dinner. Maybe I should go into poultry ranching, more in keeping with my carnivorous lifestyle."

"Maybe you should help me run Liberty Operations," said Holt. This was an old refrain, but he had seen her interest rise in the last year. In fact, he was already luring her into the world of private security and privatized law enforcement with an odd job here and there.

Titisi and Randell laughed, and Valerie grinned at her father. Fargo looked back with his usual dour face, one thick black eyebrow raised like a gust of wind was about to blow it off.

"Have you shot quail in California?" she asked the Ugandan.

"Never."

"There's nothing like it," she said. "Although I'm sure the lions you took in the plains were pretty exciting."

Titisi looked at her a little uncertainly, not sure if this young

California brat was chiding him for shooting large cats for "sport"—though he had only done it once—or approving the primal ritual of a young Ugandan killing a lion.

"Oh, I did take one, once. Do you disapprove?"

"Yes," said Valerie. "I don't think I could kill unless I was going to eat. But I'm American and you're African, so a difference of opinion is pretty likely. I wouldn't tell a Honduran to leave his rainforest in place either, though personally I'd rather have the forest than a mahogany coffee table. Plus, we don't have lions here, so I can't be tempted. They are pure magnificence though—at least in parks."

"Miss Holt, they are more magnificent than you can imagine, running free on the Ugandan plains. And consider that then is a certain significance—for some peoples, at least—in killing an animal that could easily kill
you."

Valerie went quiet. Her father watched her deep chocolate colored eyes, exactly the color of her mother's. Her hair too those pale golden curls so undisciplined and joyful—pure Carolyn, he thought. Carolyn.

"Well, the quail aren't bad either, and they barbecue up real nice!" said Valerie.

She and Titisi smiled at each other.

Holt, for the thousandth time, was proud of his daughter' uncommon common sense. "It would please her father immensely if she would take over the reigns of Liberty Operation when he goes to the happy hunting grounds."

"Oh, Dad," she said. "You're going to live to be ninety and we both know it."

She climbed over him and squeezed her way to the rear of the copter, where the dogs stood bracing their front paws on the kennel screen, tails blurred at Valerie's arrival.

Two hours later they were near the Anza Valley meadow that Holt had hunted for the last thirty years. The morning was cool, no breeze. The short golden grasses of the meadow stretched across five hundred rolling acres punctuated by clump of red manzanita, dark oak and sprawling green ghettos of prickly pear cactus. Around the perimeter of the meadow stood the old-growth manzanita and madrone, twenty feet high and to dense for anything but a determined dog to get through. Here, at nearly 4,000 feet and far from any city, the air was clean and

Holt's white Land Rover bounced along a winding dirt trail and came to a stop amidst the high cover of the meadow's edge. Holt told everyone not to slam the doors, then got out. Another rig, red and driven by Lane Fargo, followed just a few yards behind. Holt had already briefed his party on how they would hunt this morning: park the trucks on the west perimeter of the field, drop down into the low grass where the quail should be feeding this time of day, push them outward into the meadow, try to keep them from getting to the far side, where the deep cover would make them impossible to hunt.

The party spread out and formed a loose front—thirty yards between each of them—to work the field. Holt and Sally, his ten-year old bitch, took the far right end. Next came Randell, then Titisi, around whom Holt was feeling slightly unsafe because he had never hunted with the Ugandan before. To Titisi's left, thirty yards down, came Valerie, with Lewis and Clark, just ten months old. They were already working out in front of her, cutting left and right, scrambling back within shotgun range with every sharp chirp of Valerie's whistle. Lane Fargo had the far left end, putting at least forty confident yards between himself and Valerie.

Holt had organized his party like this not only to spread out the dogs and share them, but because he liked to watch his daughter without her knowing. He fell back just a little so he could see her. There she was, just eighty or ninety yards away, taking long deliberate steps through the grass, a tall, healthy woman, with her khakis tucked into her boots, a 20 gauge side-by-side cradled in her arms, a whistle between her lips and the red cycler's cap stuffed down over her pale bouncing curls. She stopped, canted an ear toward a big patch of cactus in front of her and called the dogs over and to the right. Holt never knew when it might hit him, but sometimes, all it took was a look at Valerie to send his heart into a sweet, swelling tumble of sadness and joy. The joy came from beholding her life, her spirit, her being. The sadness came from beholding the fact that she was practically all he had left, all that would outlive him, at any rate, so long as nothing happened to her. And always on the edge of Holt's consciousness was the blip, the reminder, that in the world today, anything can happen. Anything. At moments like that,