He eased gently onto the bed to sit near the foot of it, turning so that he could look at her. Certainly a great quantity of lovely lady. Close to five eleven in her bare feet, he estimated. Possibly a hundred and forty to a hundred and forty-five pounds. All the creamy tidy luxuries of her were as perfectly in scale and proportion as with some of the remembered women, the few miniatures he had known, a foot shorter, fifty pounds lighter, yet not more delicately and tenderly constructed than this resting Amazon.
And once again he remembered the woodchuck, and the obsession he and his grandfather had shared during most of one of those endless Indiana summers when he had been seven years old. There had been some kind of trouble at home that he had been too young then to understand, and they had sent him out to the small farm for the summer. His grandfather had a bald head with spots on it and a bristling white moustache and a deep scar on his forehead. His grandfather was short of breath, and his left arm stopped midway between elbow and wrist, ending there in a leather thing like a round hoof with a threaded hole in the middle of it into which he could screw different attachments to suit different kinds of work. His grandfather had been wounded and gassed in a war long ago in the history books. The government sent him money every month. There was only one milch cow in the big cobwebby barn. She was brown and her name was Hilda, and she was family. There was a chicken yard with Rhode Island Reds. His grandmother took care of those. His grandfather said they were dumb, nasty cannibals.
There was a kitchen garden, almost an acre, that was the only part of the farm his grandfather worked. The rest grew up to grass, and men came and mowed it and stacked it and carted it away.
“Show you something, Aldie,” his grandfather said the day after his father left him at the farm. They walked a long way up the dusty farm road, at least a mile, and then over to a grassy bank, and his grandfather pointed out the great big round hole with the grass-grown mound of dirt beside it, a hole slanting down on the first uprise of the bank into fearful blackness.
“Right down in there lives the biggest son of a bitch of a woodchuck in creation, boy. Now don’t you say son of a bitch in front of your grandma, you hear?”
“I won’t.”
“We’re going to get him, Aldie. We’re going to by God get that smart old son of a bitch.”
His grandfather planned the campaign carefully. He found the only place where they could lie in wait, a shady little ridge where there were alder and witchhopple and the smell of dampness under big beech trees. It had a clear view of the rich green grassy flat where the woodchuck would come out and graze in the early morning or at last light.
“He’s old and he’s big because he’s so damn smart, Aldie.”
They made precise measurement of the distance from the ridge to the grass flat. It was a hundred and forty yards. Back near the farm, his grandfather found a place where there was exactly the same distance to shoot at exactly the same downward angle. They tacked white paper to a pine board and painted a target on it and staked it on the range. His grandfather rested his Springfield .30 on a feed sack half full of sand, lay prone, and squeezed off ten slow shots. The gun oil and Fourth of July smells, and the wicked crack and distant echo, were all very exciting.
He ran out and pulled the paper target off the board and came running back. His grandfather studied it and spat. “Throwing low and left,” he said. “Pretty good group, but low and left.” So he adjusted the sights, and the second group was even with the middle of the target but still a little bit left. The third group was off to the right. The last group was centered.
The next day his grandfather painted a crude picture of the woodchuck life-size on white paper, lifted up on his back end, muzzle high, front legs in the air.
Aldo squatted near the old man, who took a long time before he squeezed off the first shot. Aldo waited for the next one but his grandfather said to go get the target and bring it back, because there was going to be time for just one shot. The hole was centered right in the head of the painted woodchuck.
“Now we’ll get him for sure, boy. He stays so close to that hole of his, I got to get him perfect or he’ll go deep on us. And you haven’t got enough size yet and I haven’t got enough arms or wind to dig him out.”
So they began the vigil. They would get up at the first gray of false dawn and trudge up the road in the morning chill, go around behind the ridge, and sneak up to the prepared place, and his grandfather would rest the rifle on the sandbag, the muzzle sticking out through the leaves.
Twice, as the sun was coming up, there was a clear shot, but the wind was blowing hard from left to right, and his grandfather explained that so much wind could move the slug a couple or three inches off. Once Aldo had seen him first and had whispered, “There he is, Grampa!” And the old chuck had lumbered quickly to the burrow and disappeared.
“Boy, he’s got ears like a bat and eyesight like a buzzard. He heard you just as good as I did.”
Another time his grandfather forgot to work the bolt action beforehand to jack the bullet into the chamber. At the cautious snickety-clicking sound, the chuck disappeared, and his grandfather said bad words for a long time.
Aldo began to be afraid, in late August, that they would take him back to the city to start the second grade, and he would never be there to see his grandfather get the old son of a bitch.
One night it rained and the road was damp, and they were in position when the first pale gold of the sun began to shine through the misty morning sky. Aldo saw the old woodchuck come out and stop eight feet from his hole. He held his breath. The chuck sat upright, sniffing at the morning air. The crack of the rifle made Aldo jump, and he saw the chuck moving toward his hole. His grandfather jumped up faster than Aldo had ever seen him move, and Aldo had to run hard to catch up with him. The woodchuck was half in and half out of his burrow, back legs sprawled. His grandfather, wheezing and gasping, grabbed a rear leg and yanked the old woodchuck back out, let go quickly, and moved back.
“Right... through the head,” his grandfather said. “Even so, the old son of a bitch nearly got underground.”
“Right through the head,” Aldo said.
His grandfather rested the rifle against the slope and looked quietly down at the dead animal. He was getting his breath back. Finally he said, “Sheee-yit!”
“What’s the matter, Grampa?”
“Nothing, Aldie. Nothing.”
“Why are you acting so cross?”
“I’m not cross, boy.”
“Are... you sorry for him?”
“Sorry? No. I’m not sorry.” His grandfather looked down at him, frowning. “What I’m thinking about, the old son of a bitch is no longer up here to come git. No reason anymore to think about how I’m going to get him because... it’s all done and over.”
Mr. Aldo Bellinger looked at the sleeping wife of Mr. Rountree and knew that sometime within the next week, aboard Winkler’s sloop, he would tell Anne Faxton how, as he saw Liz sprawled beside him, fading down into sleep, that same wistful regret had come into his mind with the remembered weary sound of Grampa’s voice saying “Sheee-yit!”
He looked down at himself, torpid between the thick tough thighs with the hard weave of muscle under the curly sun-scalded hair, aware of the beginning now of the first thickening of new tumescence. Twenty-five visits a year to Marburg for the tests and measurements, and the sophisticated changes in the level of the dosages of steroids, cortisones, supplementary testosterone. Five thousand a year to Marburg to keep the sexual clock set back a dozen years. So get full value, Bellinger.