2
His back ached and his arms were getting weak; he took a break and set the ax beside the stacked logs. In the night the cool breeze brushed his cheeks. Lamplight from the windows of the house made little pools on the lawn above him. He filled his lungs and dragged another limb to the sawhorses: Meuth had pruned the maples during the week and dragged the limbs around behind the barn with his tractor and they’d been waiting for the ax. Mathieson had volunteered for it because he needed to be alone and because he needed to work hard with his hands and body, exhaust himself to the extreme so that there wouldn’t be any strength left for feeling and thinking.
In the end his muscles rebelled and he had to quit. He put the ax away and left the barn, walking stiffly in slow weariness, guiding on the porch lights.
He stopped under the porte cochere, reluctant to go inside. The scene still reverberated in his skull. They had fought many times but never quite like this. God, the things I said. At its climax she had burst into screaming tears. They were real tears—it was real emotion—but her histrionics had been so theatrical he’d found himself unmoved; and that had frightened him more than the rest. He’d rushed outside.
On the porch steps he sat down with his elbows on his knees, face in his hands.
An insubstantial cloud drifted across the moon; he forced himself to his feet and stumbled inside and up the stairs.
He looked in on Ronny. The boy lay asleep on the bed, covers thrown back, positioned as if he’d tripped while running in sand. Mathieson pulled the door silently shut and went on along the hall.
She was at the dressing table prospecting for pins in her hair. She had a headache again: He could see the pain across her eyes. She looked up, locking glances with him in the mirror, and he saw her breathe in through her nose, slowly and expressively, pinching her lips together. Her hair, still fresh from washing, shimmered in the lamplight; the portable dryer was in the open suitcase; now she was taking her hair down. She twisted half around to look at him directly and his glance traveled the long column of her back—even in anger she still had the capacity to arouse him deeply.
She swung her legs around and crossed them and leaned forward as though she had a severe pain in her stomach: She held that attitude, watching him, anxiety behind the surface anger in her eyes. Her arms hugged her upraised knee.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Are you?”
“I’ll make it up to you.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’m going to pieces, Fred.”
“You can’t. Not yet.”
“Easy to say. Easy for you to say.”
“When I put Ronny to bed he said something to me. He said, ‘I want to be a rodeo rider if I grow up.’”
She only looked at him blankly.
“‘If I grow up.’”
Comprehension changed her face.
“That’s why you’ve got to hang on.”
She turned away from him and her hands plucked blindly at things on the dressing table. She picked up the hair brush and put it down, prodded a lipstick without lifting it, found a pin left in her hair but didn’t take it out—merely touching things as if there were communication in the act.
He said, “You’ve got to try.”
“I feel like Humpty Dumpty—a lot of little pieces nobody will ever put back together.”
“I know.”
“I’m learning to hate you.”
“I’m learning to hate myself.”
She took the pin out and put it down very gently in the little box. Then with growing ferocity she began to brush out her hair.
He stripped off his sweat-sodden clothes and went into the shower. When he came out of the bathroom the lights were turned off in the bedroom; before he switched off the bathroom light he saw her in the bed, lying on her side, facing away from him, crowded as far over as she could get without falling off.
He turned it off and felt his way to the bed and got in. He was careful not to touch her.
Too charged to sleep, he just lay there. Something Homer had taught him kept coming back: A man comes at you hand-to-hand, there’s one way to put him out and it works every time if he doesn’t know to look for it. Doesn’t take much of a blow. Hit him with the heel of your palm—bring it up, short and hard, right up into his nose. Drive the nasal cartilage right up into the head. You hit a man hard enough that way, just once, it’ll drive the splinters right up into his brain and kill him instantly.
The thought had sickened him at the time and he’d changed the subject immediately. But now in fevered visions he saw himself slamming his palm up with vicious rage into face after face—Gillespie, George Ramiro, Deffeldorf, Tyrone, Ezio Martin, Frank Pastor …
And then all at once he had it, the structure of the plan. It brought him bolt upright in bed.
He got up and left the room, striding down the hall barefoot, belting his robe. At Vasquez’s door he banged impatiently and when he heard a grunt he pushed inside.
Vasquez lay across the bed, reaching for the lamp. When it came on he flinched from the light and sat up squinting. He was wearing satin pajamas—bright green. “What the devil?”
“I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Evidently.” Vasquez reached for the clock and turned it toward him. “At half past two it had better be utterly fascinating.”
“I’ve figured it out.”
“Have you?” Vasquez threw the sheet back and slid his feet into a pair of moccasins. “I can’t really see you. You’ll have to wait a moment.” He padded to the bathroom.
Mathieson was too keyed up to sit; he walked to the door and back. Vasquez hadn’t shut the bathroom door and when Mathieson passed the foot of the bed he saw Vasquez bending over the sink, running water, prying his eyelids open one at a time.
Contact lenses, he thought. I’ll be damned.
From a hook Vasquez took down a green-lapeled dressing gown; he folded it around his trim shape and crossed to the straight chair at the writing desk. He sat down before he spoke. “Proceed.”
“We’ve been making a mistake in our whole approach to this thing. I just figured it out.”
“Indeed.”
“We’ve been trying to contrive some cockeyed scheme to nail them all together—simultaneously.”
“It’s hardly cockeyed. We can’t attack one or two at a time and leave the rest free to retaliate.”
“Sure we can. That’s been our mistake. You ever go bowling?”
“Not for a good many years.”
“Neither have I. But that was the image. We’ve been trying to bowl a strike—figure out how to hit all ten pins with one ball. But if you bowl a strike into the pocket—you know the term?”
“Yes.”
“Then think about what really happens. The ball doesn’t actually hit all ten pins. At most it hits three of them. Those three pins take care of the rest. They knock the other pins down.”
“That’s attractive,” Vasquez said, “but I’ve never put much trust in analogies. We’re not dealing with bowling pins. Suppose you bowl a spare instead of a strike? You’ve got one pin left standing. But this one would be a bowling pin that can shoot you to death.”
“All right, it’s a sloppy metaphor. But it got me to thinking. There’s no reason why we have to go after them all at the same time. If we can peel them off one at a time—”
“We’ve gone over all that. While we’re peeling them off one at a time, what do you suppose the others are doing?”
“They’d have to know who to come after and where to find us. If we start taking them out individually, and if we do it in such a way that nobody else knows what’s really happening …”
“Starting where? At the bottom? We’ve discussed that before. We can’t hope to disrupt their operations by stinging individual enterprises. You might annoy them a bit by hitting a few front operations but that sort of campaign would be like trying to kill an elephant with sandpaper. In any case it would be stupid to disperse our attacks—we haven’t the manpower. Save up your punch and when you use it, use all of it in intense concentration. Mr. Merle, none of this is new. Sometimes an idea coined at two in the morning seems brilliant but loses its luster in the light of day. We’ve already demonstrated that you can’t injure Frank Pastor by hitting his subsidiaries. There are too many of them and in any case those operations are protected by the police …”