Dead Aim

CHAPTER 18

Parish stood at the side of the main lodge’s meeting room, his back to the night-darkened windows, holding his wine glass in his left hand. He kept his right hand empty so he could offer it to the men to shake, or put his arm around the women. The glass held an inch of red wine, and always stayed at the same level because he never drank any of it. He never approached anyone at these final-evening farewell parties, merely oversaw them as he oversaw everything else at his school. The students came to him-first in greeting, simply acknowledging him as they arrived, and then again singly, as they saw their chances-to smile and talk.

“I’ve loved my time here,” said Helen Corrigan. She had a habit of lifting her shoulders and compressing her face in an ingratiating smile during her pronouncements, then simultaneously releasing both sets of muscles in a gesture that signaled both her satisfaction and her intention to stop talking.

Parish bent his head lower to nod slightly. “I’m very glad. Tomorrow, as everyone in your class goes home, you’ll be given a questionnaire about your experience. Sometime in the next few weeks, maybe you’ll share any ideas you have for improving things: the courses, the accommodations, the food, or anything else. Now that this little group has spent a month with us, you’re all a very valuable resource.”

“We are?” She was flattered.

“You’re experts,” he said. “You’ve learned what we were intending to teach, and now it’s your turn to teach us by telling us what we could do better.”

As her face grew sincere, it went slack and allowed a few of the wrinkles that had been surgically erased to reveal their shadows. “I’ll try,” she said. “But this has been a life-changing experience I wouldn’t tamper with too much. I’ve always been a little afraid, without really being aware of it. That’s not entirely over, but the stupid part is, the part that’s almost like a superstition: you’re scared, but you don’t know what you’re scared of, and it doesn’t matter, because whatever comes along, you’re not capable of thinking of anything to do about it. Now I know there are some things I can do that will help.”

Parish lowered his voice and leaned down again. “I sensed that we were succeeding with you, Helen. I’ve kept an eye on you, and I’ve been very pleased with your progress.”

“So have I.” She giggled. “I’ve even lost fifteen pounds.” She raised her hands to her shoulders and half-jokingly twirled around.

Parish chose to take her seriously. “We’ve all noticed that, too. It’s not uncommon. Our guests eat a nutritious, balanced diet and get a great deal of exercise without giving either much thought.”

“After the first few days, I began to think of friends I’d like to talk into coming here. One look at the weight I lost would be enough for some of them.”

“I’d love to see a few of your friends here,” he said. “If the physical program is what attracts them, fine. Come back with them, and you can help them learn. As you know, we have to keep classes very small and personal, but with enough notice, we might be able to arrange something just for you and your friends.”

“I’ll think about that. I will.” She repeated her gesture of lifting her shoulders and tightening her facial muscles, then settling again, and moved on to let others pay their respects.

Parish let his eyes wander around the room without letting them focus on anyone. This class had consisted of six men and women in their fifties or sixties. Because the basic course at the camp took a month and started at forty thousand dollars, it was inconvenient to the lower classes: all of these people could afford to come back when they wished. He had seen on the first day that there was only one who had any potential whatever as a hunter, but the rest were useful in their way: there had to be some harmless self-defense students or it would be hard to account for Parish’s income, or the existence of this place.

He watched Christiana and Edward, two of the customers, engaged in a whispered conversation across the room. After a moment he saw that their hands were touching. Suddenly Christiana seemed to sense that she was being observed, and turned toward him, so he smiled and drew his eyes away. Excellent. Those two people would leave with this camp experience mixed up in their minds with sex, remembering it with the same irrational glow. Maybe they would return, and they would both be very sincere in their praise of the place to their friends.

“I wanted to thank you, Michael.”

Parish turned his head to the left. David Altberg was beside him. “You’re welcome, David. It’s been a pleasure to have you in our program.” He had been watching Altberg for weeks, and he knew that Altberg was not here just to take the obligatory leave of his host. Women who wanted to talk to him about something in confidence or speak seriously always planted themselves in front of him and looked into his eyes. Men stood beside him and looked at whatever he was looking at. Parish was ready for what Altberg would say: he had been waiting.

“I… have a couple of friends who have been through the program with you in the past, and we’ve talked about it some,” said Altberg. He glanced at Parish’s face for signs that he should not proceed, but Parish looked politely interested. “I got the impression that you also sometimes offer… advanced instruction, for people who have been through the general course and want to do more?”

Parish nodded. “That’s true. We can offer training at any level. Who are your friends? It’s likely I’ll remember them.”

“Well, Ray Darville? Carl Fortin?”

Parish leaned closer and dropped his voice a bit. “I think I know the sort of thing you had in mind. We can talk tomorrow about arranging something, if you’d like. You could stay on after the others leave.”

“Great,” said Altberg. “I’ll do that.”

“Why don’t you meet me here in the lodge tomorrow at, say, two o’clock, after I’ve seen the others off?”

“I’ll be here,” Altberg said. “And thanks.” He stepped forward, turned to face Parish, shook his hand, and moved off.

In a moment, Debbie was at Parish’s side; she stood on tiptoes to put her face close to his ear. “Don’t tell me you’re arranging another expedition already.” He glanced at her and saw that she was wearing a long yellow summer dress with thin straps. The effect was disconcerting, because the dress revealed her soft, curved feminine silhouette, but the upper part left bare the lean, sinewy muscles in her upper back and shoulders.

Parish shrugged. “We’ll see.” He turned to watch her face. “Interested?”

She pursed her lips and squinted. “Not right away.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And not with creaky old geezers like David Altberg. Would I have to?”

He shook his head, and whispered too. “No. It’s nothing that’s likely to demand your skills. There’s a loose end that I could take care of, and give David his thrill at the same time.”

Parish watched her move off into the party. He was often intrigued that there were people who thronged around Debbie. Some were women who seemed to ignore her acerbic manner and see her as a heroine, a big sister. She demonstrated throws in her class by using the most formidable male students as opponents, and some of the women had never imagined such a thing before. Other admirers were men, who seemed to see only the curves she had accentuated in her body through fifteen years of brutal workouts, and not understand that what she had been doing was fortifying herself against that kind of attention. People understood parts of Debbie. Parish suspected that he was the only one who knew that her indifference to men applied equally to women: she had no interest in sharing her bed with anyone, and not much interest in talking to them.

In the corner of his eye he caught Mary O’Connor’s red hair. Her head turned, she walked past Christiana and Edward, then stopped in front of him. “Michael, will you help me with something out here?”

Parish nodded, then followed her out onto the porch. When she was sure they were alone, she said, “Debbie says you’re going out again right away.”

Parish smiled. “I was going to talk to you about it later. It’s just come up in the past few minutes. A client came to me.”

“You’re using them to get rid of your own problems, aren’t you?”

“It wasn’t about me at all,” he protested. “The detective came here asking about Catherine Broward’s suicide. Catherine seems to have had a kind of inner weakness that we didn’t detect while she was here with us.”

“She was sorry she did it,” said Mary O’Connor. “She told me the next day, and I guess she never got over it. Is that so hard to understand?”

Parish looked at her with detached interest, then scanned the area around them to be sure none of the guests were close enough to the porch to overhear. “To be so eager for the hunt one day, and then be consumed by regret the next is certainly not a sign of stability. But she obviously couldn’t help it. I think we owed her at least enough to protect her memory from some kind of accusation, don’t you?”

She laughed, her eyes glittering, and pushed back her long red hair. “Oh, Michael. You’re so good at this. You don’t care about her, but you think I do.”

“You’re wrong. I feel terribly sorry about her,” he said. “We made a commitment to her to protect her privacy. That isn’t over, is it?”

“I suppose not,” said Mary. She looked at him over the edge of her glass. “Debbie told me you got her a ten-thousand-dollar tip.”

“Did she tell you why?”

She ignored his question and pursued her own train of thought. “And Emily too.”

Parish nodded. “That hunt was a mess. The careful plan we laid out for them was just an inspiration for an evening of improvisation. They opened up while Debbie was within a foot of the target, Emily wasn’t in position yet, and I was still outside. Ten thousand wasn’t enough.”

Mary looked at him for a moment, turned and took a step, then stopped and said, “Keep me in mind.”

“As soon as it came up, I was thinking of you.”

“Who else?”

“I’m not sure at the moment. Emily to handle the client. And I think Spangler.”

She cocked her head, thought for a moment, then nodded. “Spangler would be fine with me. We could be a couple. We’d look good together.” She turned and walked back in to the party. After ten seconds, Parish followed and took his place along the wall.

Mary joined Helen Corrigan and two other students across the room at the hors d’oeuvres table, tolerated a few minutes of their chatter, then stepped over to Edward and Christiana to distract them from each other long enough to get them to include David Altberg. Then she made her way through one more circuit of Parish’s admirers stiffly, her face held in a fixed smile that made her facial muscles tired after a few minutes. She was taller than most of the guests at this party, and her bright red hair was easy to spot above the other heads, so she felt conspicuous.

She acknowledged the women’s compulsive but vague politeness: “I enjoyed the experience very much,” rather than “Thank you so much for” this or that. All of the students had met her, because she filled in and helped out in the classes, sometimes working the firing line on the range, teaching students to clear jams or rearranging their limbs in proper shooting stances. She often worked with Debbie, assuming the various fighting kamae, or showing students how to roll and recover. Debbie needed to perform the roll, but she never let a student throw her. Mary supposed few of the guests knew what she was doing there. They probably thought she was some sort of advanced student who stayed on and on.

In a way, that was exactly what Mary was. She had been Michael Parish’s first friend in this country. She had met him before he was Michael Parish, when he was still only Eric Watkins, and she had been the one who had known things. She had been sixteen, having for the first time gotten too far from North Carolina to be found and dragged back home. She spent time with a changing group of acquaintances, all of them young and from someplace else. Most of them slept in abandoned buildings south of Hollywood, and spent their days trying to get enough money for food and drink. When they did, they sometimes shared, and when they didn’t, they sometimes traded.

Mary O’Connor fit into that world easily. She had already learned that accepting the affection of boys came easily to her. It had always seemed to be the generous thing to do. And now when she did it, they shared their food, drinks, and even their money with her. It wasn’t ever a transaction; it was just that human beings were herd animals, and they accommodated each other’s needs to get along. Often, after she and one of the boys had formed a temporary alliance, she found that the affection she had been feigning had actually come to be.

For the year before she had met Eric Watkins, she had been living most of the time by shoplifting with two other girls, Darlene and Wendy. They would find a fresh shopping bag from a good store or two, then go into another store. Mary would step into the dressing room with one item to try on. On her way in, she would search the nearest stalls to find clothes that somebody had tried on unsuccessfully and left there. She would use a pair of wire cutters to remove the electronic tags from some of them and slip them into her bag. When she came out, she would very visibly return to the rack the single item she had tried on, and then leave. Darlene would be doing the same, while Wendy kept the clerk busy with requests and complaints.

Mary and her two friends would then station themselves beside an expensive, sporty car they found parked at a different shopping mall, usually near a music store. Mary would accost girls who passed and tell them wonderful stories. Sometimes she had driven a hundred miles from home against her parents’ orders, spent all her money on clothes, and discovered she was out of gas. Another time, she said she had been at a movie with a boyfriend, and he had gotten angry and left her there. She had no money, so she had charged some clothes at the mall, and now she was trying to convert them to cash to get home.

Some of the young girls she chose to hear her pitch were eager to help her because she seemed to be like them, and others were simply eager to take advantage of her misfortune. Even when they suspected she was lying they bought the clothes: the goods were the most desired and sought-after styles and brands, certified by the fact that they were the ones that girls before Mary had selected from all others in the store and wanted badly enough to try on. And they really were bargains. They had real price tags from fine stores to prove it.

One night she was with several acquaintances who had been sleeping in the back of an abandoned camper one of the boys had found parked on a side street a few days before. When she saw them on the street, they were on their way to buy dinner, so she went along. Then Eric Watkins turned up. She did not see him arrive. He just materialized in her peripheral vision on the street among the others, and they began to talk. He seemed to be no more than two or three years older than the oldest boy, maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven, but he had a kind of self-assurance that made him a hundred years older than anyone.

After that evening, Eric Watkins showed up on the street twice more. Nobody in the group expressed much curiosity about what he was doing there, but when one of the boys asked where he was from, he said he had come from Australia, and had “gone walkabout.” Mary had pondered the phrase for a few days, partly because she liked the sound of it and partly because it meant that he was probably going to move on soon, and she was not sure how she felt about it. But the next time someone asked, he answered that he was from Canada and had registered at UCLA. The third time Eric Watkins simply came and took her.

He had always come on foot before, but this time he pulled up in a car, as she had known he would sometime. She was walking on Sunset with her friends Wendy and Darlene, and when he pulled up and stopped the car, all three of them stopped walking and looked for a moment. Then the other two had turned and walked on, while she had stepped to the curb and gotten into the car.

She had sat in the front seat beside him. Although she’d had no idea where he was going, or what he intended to do with her when he got there, she had sensed that all uncertainty was over. She had known from that moment not that she would be okay, because nobody could know that, but that she would be possessed, told what to do. The car door had slammed shut, and she had been home.

She and Eric Watkins had traveled for a time. Sometimes he would stop to work just long enough to buy them some new clothes and the next few tanks of gas, and then they would move on. Sometimes they would both get jobs and stay for several months. She would clean hotel rooms in the morning while he sold cars. He was very good at selling things, she supposed because he had a slight accent that sometimes sounded British, and the snobs would buy anything they were told to buy in an accent like that. In the evening she would wait tables at a restaurant while he worked as a bouncer in a bar. It seemed to be a job he had no difficulty getting, because he was an expert at unarmed combat. She had known when she had met him in Los Angeles that he had been a soldier for some extended period, because when everyone else was slouching on the street, maybe leaning on things as they talked, he would often slip into a stance with his hands clasped behind him and his feet exactly as far apart as his shoulders. You couldn’t grow up in the part of North Carolina where she had, surrounded by military bases, and not recognize parade rest.

She had been the one to pick up Emily. Mary had been in a laundromat in Phoenix, washing her clothes and Michael’s-he had just become Michael-so she could pack them clean before they went on the road again. She had noticed Emily, because Emily was not happy. They were about the same age, and Mary could see that Emily was washing some clothes that were hers, and some that belonged to a man. The place was hot as only a laundromat in Arizona-with eight commercial dryers going on high heat and surrounded by a mile of blacktop on every side-could be.

The sweat was making Emily’s curly, dark hair hang in ringlets. Mary said, “Hot in here.”

Emily turned her head quickly, startled. “What?”

Mary guessed that Emily had been so completely locked in her reverie of dissatisfaction that she was not actually sure that Mary had spoken. She looked relieved when Mary answered, “I said it was hot in here,” then giggled. “Did you ever notice that when you have to repeat something like that, you feel really dumb? Both of you listen to it very carefully while you’re saying it again, and when it’s over, it wasn’t actually telling anybody anything they didn’t know.”

Emily’s expression turned into something better than relief, a kind of fellow feeling, as Mary had hoped it would. Mary instinctively knew it was time to wait, so she picked up a magazine that somebody had left on the blue molded-plastic seat next to her. It was an issue of People. The cover had been torn off, but she could still tell. It was so old that the story the pages naturally opened to was about a hot new TV star-a pretty blond girl like all of them were-who had by now been around forever. Mary had never picked up the habit of reading for pleasure, but she did not mind looking at photographs, so she began to leaf through the magazine from back to front, letting her eyes trace the contours of the beautiful faces. After a few minutes she could sense that Emily was becoming increasingly agitated. As Mary serenely stared at the pictures, Emily’s movements became more quick and fluttery. Finally, Emily blurted out, “I’m Emily. What’s your name?”

“Mary. Do you live around here?”

Emily nodded. “If you want to call it living.” She pushed the wheeled basket that she had been loading from the washing machines over to a dryer and began pulling out big male shirts and pushing them in. “My boyfriend was coming out here to the university. I decided I’d come along, get a job, maybe pick up some credits in night classes.” She shut the door and moved to another dryer and began loading it. “How about you?”

“No. We’re just here for a day or two. Is it nice?”

Emily sat down on one of the plastic chairs near her. “I don’t know. It might be okay in the winter, because it couldn’t be this hot all year round.” She was watching Mary’s face, as though waiting for confirmation of the theory.

“I suppose not,” said Mary. “Where were you from before?”

“West Virginia,” said Emily. “As if you can’t tell from my accent.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard one from there before,” Mary said truthfully. “I think it’s nice.” Her mother had not permitted her to know people from the other side of the small North Carolina town they had lived in, let alone anybody from West Virginia, and she could not remember meeting any West Virginians since then. She supposed there just weren’t many.

“You said you were only here for a day or two. Are you and your husband on vacation?”

Mary smiled. “He’s not my husband. And we’re just here because we-he, really-is closing a deal. Then we’re going to California. We’re gypsies, I guess.”

“God, I envy you,” said Emily. Then her eyes looked surprised, and Mary knew that it had just slipped out. She had not intended to say it aloud.

“Why?” asked Mary. “Aren’t things working out here for you?”

Emily’s eyes were suddenly brimming, but the tears weren’t from sadness. They were tears of frustration and anger, the tears of a stubbed toe. “We’ve been here for three months-since June twenty-seventh-and it’s been exactly this hot. From the minute my parents found out we had left together, they’ve hung up on me. The only time I’ve heard my mother’s voice, she called me a whore, and my father won’t even do that. Danny, my boyfriend, is this big, dumb kid. He thinks that since the coach said he’s going to start on the freshman squad at tackle, he’s set for life, so he won’t even crack a book. He sits in front of the TV, because he’d rather see it than me. I can’t do night school this semester because the only job I could get was at night. If I’m not at work I’m here, or at the grocery store, or in that hot little apartment cooking.” She looked at the floor as though she were talking to herself. “I’ve got to do something, find something.”

Mary said, “I’m sorry Phoenix didn’t work out for you, but there are lots and lots of places.” She tried a bold experiment. “If you could get a ride to California, would you go?”

Emily stared at her for a moment, her mouth half open. “With you?”

Mary nodded. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning, and it takes about seven hours of driving to reach L.A.”

“What about your boyfriend? Will it be okay with him?”

Mary nodded. “You’ll like him a lot.” She looked at Emily judiciously. “I can’t promise anything, but he’s about to start a business, and he’s looking for people to work there.”

“I ought to go,” said Emily. “I really feel like it.”

Mary wrote down the name of the hotel, the street, and the room number on the margin of an advertisement in the People magazine, then tore it off and handed it to her. “Come tomorrow morning.”

“What time?” Emily asked anxiously.

“I wouldn’t come much after seven. Michael likes to get on the road early. And he’s not my boyfriend. Please don’t say that he is in front of him. He wouldn’t like that.”

“I really feel like it,” said Emily. “I’d love to walk out of here and never see Danny again. He thinks I don’t have any choice but to stay with him, because my parents have dumped me and I’m not in school or anything, so he treats me worse and worse. I’m beginning to hate him.”

“If you don’t want to go back there, you can come right now,” said Mary. “You can spend the night with us.”

Emily studied her, a bit uneasy. “Is this something weird?”

Mary shook her head. “It’s pretty straightforward. He’s been buying up land, and he’s going to build something like a dude ranch, a self-defense school for rich people. He knows about that.”

“I don’t mean the business,” Emily said. “I mean you and him. And now me.”

Mary said, “Not to me. I’m not interested in you that way. He might be, but since he hasn’t seen you, I can’t really predict. I just thought you looked like you could use a friend, but that you didn’t look as though it was all your fault. Sometimes you meet people who are all alone, but they also look like they’re mean, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise to anybody. You don’t. But if you’re worried about it, there’s no pressure. Ours isn’t the last car out of here.”

Emily opened a dryer and began to fold her clothes. She did it with the hasty efficiency of a person who was not devoting any thought to it. Mary returned to her magazine, holding her hand over the captions and trying to guess what they would be. Then Mary’s dryer stopped. She pushed one of the rolling baskets over to the machine and emptied it. When she returned, she saw that Emily was finished. She had packed up her laundry, and left Danny’s neatly folded on a counter. She helped Mary fold hers, and then followed her to the car.

On the way to the hotel, Mary tried to prepare Emily for Michael Parish. She did not tell her that he had still been Eric Watkins when she’d met him, but she did tell her that he had been born in South Africa and had started out as a soldier there. She told her that he had been in lots of armies of African countries after that. She went no further, because the details were all vague and probably jumbled in her mind. He had mentioned Uganda and Zimbabwe. He talked most often about the Congo, but it seemed to be both a place and a river, both of sizes that kept changing, and part of the river was not even in the country. There was no way of sorting out in which places he had been part of the government and in which an invader, or part of a group chasing invaders into another country.

She knew that the rank got higher each time, and it had not surprised her, because he was ambitious. Sometimes he had been a captain, sometimes a colonel. Unless colonel wasn’t a real rank, but was an honor the way it was in the South, where Colonel was just a name the chamber of commerce or even a club could give a man. He had once said he’d left South Africa because of the blacks. She had at first assumed it was because the change in the government had left the blacks in charge. But they were also in charge in Uganda, Zimbabwe, the Congo, and everywhere else he’d chosen to go, weren’t they? She had not pursued the issue very far.

She had helped him invent the name Michael Parish. He had not said why he didn’t want to be Eric Watkins anymore, but she knew it was for reasons that had to do with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and with the banks and licensing authorities in California. She was not sure whether the fault that had been found with Eric Watkins was something that had happened since he had come to the United States, or something he feared might have stuck to him from his early days in Africa.

Tonight, as Mary suffered through the farewell party, she still had not settled those details, although a good ten years had passed. They did not seem any more important now than they had then. She looked across the main lodge at Emily, who was surrounded by Helen Corrigan and her two classmates. Mary had been a good judge of character. She had also known from the beginning that Michael would find her attractive: Emily was so perfectly the opposite of Mary that he could hardly fail to think of her that way as soon as he saw them together. She had never doubted for a moment that Emily would acquiesce as soon as Michael signified a desire. Emily had as much as asked in the laundromat whether that would be part of it, and Mary had as much as confirmed it. She certainly had not denied it. She and Emily had at least shared some intelligence that included an understanding of what men were like.

That was before Emily had even met Parish, had him look at her in that way he had, in which he devoted every bit of his attention to her, studying her and giving her the impression that he was seeing things about her that she had always wished men would notice but was convinced that none of them ever had. And even more to the point, she had not yet heard him. His talk was what was impossible to withstand. He used his foreignness, the fact that he had seen the world and knew things, to make people want to know them too. But he also used it to ask questions. It was as though he were a man not from across an ocean, but from across the galaxy, that he was a sublimely benevolent being who was deeply fascinated by every detail about a person but did not know anything about petty provincial rules against asking very personal questions. Talking to him for an extended period was like being slowly, gently, but relentlessly stripped.

Michael had found Mary at sixteen, and she had found Emily at nineteen, and Michael had raised them. They were his apprentices, his partners, his first and best students, so perfectly schooled in his ways that they were inheritors of his experiences as well as his knowledge.

She had never stopped being the same girl she had been when she’d left North Carolina, the girl she thought of as the basic human being. But when she wanted to, she could also be like him, someone who had hunted on veldts and fought in jungles. In becoming his second self, his reflection, she had acquired the power to kill. That was something she could never repay him for.

Mary looked around her at the small group of students. As soon as this lot had drunk too much and gone back to their cabins, she would take off this uncomfortable dress and begin to look over her gear to prepare for the next hunting party.