Fun With Problems

From the Lowlands

LEROY TRAVELED EAST into the high country pursued by little sense of sin. He had made a lot of money being no worse than anyone else in the San Francisco Peninsula data business and in his way contributing a lot. He had gone early to Silicon Valley; he had lived with his first wife in a bungalow, a tiny place in the bamboo near the Stanford golf course. She had worked as a keypunch operator for Bank of America, and he was hired by Lockheed as an analyst.

The place he was headed for was high in the Mountain West, a second home so far upstream on a river called Irish Creek that past it the canyon went to ground. The gorge was still two hundred feet from rim to riverbank, but beyond Leroy's it sank from sight and became a descent into the heart of the high desert. Here the mountain sheep had nowhere to go but down to escape danger, and they had learned over generations to leap from the exposed crags when startled, and disappear into the shadows and scattered sunlight of the sunken canyon.

In some ways the house Leroy had built — or caused to be built — reminded him distantly of the bungalow in Menlo Park. It was much larger, to say the least, and it had a swimming pool. But it accorded with an old need that he was not at all ashamed of: being close to the land. It stood at the far end of the only access road, a mile and a half beyond where the paving ended. Approaching his house the track was only surfaced and sealed. Paving, the realtor had sworn to him, would come soon. When he had spent a few weeks in the house he was not sure he required paving, which would mean his road's extension and more development along the canyon.

Decades before, Leroy had happened by a university research center on one of the rare Saturdays when he was free from Lockheed, and had seen some acquaintances from the company playing with computers. They were the old computers of that time, which, people joked, looked like the Dnepropetrovsk hydroelectric dam. His friends were playing a primordial war game, dogfighting with virtual spaceships, blasting each other's entities on the screen. They were whooping and dancing and having enormous fun. Leroy thought it looked like fun too. He was as fun-loving as anyone, though he liked practical jokes most. He loved what had once been called the put-on, in his own definition of it. For example, on his BMW there was a bumper sticker that read: LOST YOUR CAT? CHECK MY TREADS.

His mountain property had two levels, both of them set well back from the river so he could assure himself that he was not like the reckless householders downstream. Some of them had balanced themselves on picturesque but heart-stopping outcrops, where they could crawl to the edge of their decks and look down over the rim into swirling white water. Leroy never failed to see, in his imagination, their terrifying fall into the canyon, houses and Franklin stoves and heritage tomatoes and trophy wives in a fatal descending whirl.

Leroy and one of his friends from the company were among the young men who employed the principles of the early computer game to establish their electronics company. They called it "electronics" at first, but it became ever so much more. He and the friend, whom he called Dongo, prospered. Life on the San Francisco Peninsula was good; he and Dongo could smoke dope and pick up chicks at Kepler's and party. Everyone had a beard and grew their hair long; it was a statement. You could laugh at the nine-to-five dorks from IBM with their white shirts and scabby close shaves. They laughed back, but not for long when their scene looked like it was going under. Then he and Dongo would sing a song about the IBM types that went:

They're drowning in the lowland, low land low,

They're drowning in the lowland sea.

It had been a long time since those days, but every once in a while the song came back to Leroy. As the drive to his house took him over the high prairie, the sweet land smelling of sage and pine, the plain disappeared into a dizzying impossible perspective that ended where the white-clouded, snowy, sawtooth-shaped peaks rose. Approaching the head of the valley, he hummed and sang "drowning in the lowland sea," not really thinking of IBM or Dongo or the First Girl or anything much. Just sort of singing along with the tumbling tumbleweed.

Dongo had really liked to party. Too much party, old Dongo. Dongo had turned Leroy on to acid once — there had been a lot around then — but Leroy, with his enthusiasm for work and his strong business sense, had not gone near it ever again. In fact, watching Dongo had led him to stop using dope altogether. Moreover, he had found a chick, not that he would call her a chick anymore. A woman, a woman who taught him all of love that he would ever know, which on the emotional level was not really too much. Barbara, the most beautiful of all things California.

Then Dongo starting losing it. Really. Dongo got so into acid that he thought he could teleport himself to remote galaxies. Much as Leroy loved the land, Dongo went utterly insane over the idea of it and moved to the toolies of Humboldt County. Leroy had been forced to take what was called in Communist dictatorships of the time "strong measures," as his Romanian girlfriend Ilena liked to say. Ilena's mother had been a commissar. Leroy had been forced to cut poor Dongo loose. He was able, legally it turned out, to take over the business, a fair-means-or-foul sort of thing, a dire necessity. One way or another.

Times were not then tough, but there was no knowing. Dongo was beyond help. Leroy never knew quite why he called Paul Dongo. There was just something Dongo-like about the guy. Poor Dongo hadn't liked it much from the first day, although he had never said "Don't call me Dongo." Probably, Leroy thought, he sensed where the power was. The petty resentment actually helped when the time came to move on, and Leroy, as anyone would, did what he had to do. What happened then was Barbara the beautiful, on some kind of fucking cosmic ray, beamed herself to Dongo up in Dongoville, California, but she came crawling back after a year and Leroy unwisely married her. Dongo died — had to happen. Leroy's marriage was brief.

Halfway across the prairie below Leroy's house was the Salikan River, of which his Irish Creek was a fork, and along the Salikan was an old mining town with the same name. Half the town's houses were post-sixties, alpine style or Old Westy, but there were fifties ranch houses, a steepled Mormon church and a black-and-white-movie motel at the top of the bluff over the river. An old general store stood beside it that had an Oakland Tribune newspaper rack on the wood sidewalk outside, though Oakland was nearly a thousand miles away, and insofar as Leroy could remember there was no such paper. Leroy parked his BMW out front.

The newspaper rack was always empty because Beck, the proprietor, was afraid that people would take newspapers without paying. Leroy himself had made a practice of doing that. Still, he wondered about Beck's savage irascibility. People around Salikan called Beck Caw or Crow or Craw or something of the sort, some sound they made. Craw was an older gentleman, as the wry youth of California said, God knew how old. There was a woman who worked with Craw sometimes, and Leroy had taken to thinking of her as Slob, which was his name for poorly groomed, overweight individuals. Slob, he presumed, was Craw's daughter, but who knew the relationships between these people?

Leroy straightened up as he stepped onto the wood sidewalk. Maybe it was the influence of westerns: something about shed-like buildings with wooden sidewalks made a man feel like walking tall. And Leroy was in good shape. He worked out regularly. He thought it made him stand out from the obese jerkarounds you saw in town and at the downscale mall in the valley. The little bell tinkled when he opened the door of Beck's store. Craw and Slob were both behind the counter.

"Afternoon, folks," Leroy said going in.

Old Craw looked at his watch. Slob gave him a soft hello.

"Hey, Beck," Leroy asked, "you got the Oakland Tribune?" Leroy thought he might have made that joke before. Old Beck never looked at him. The daughter answered.

"Hasn't been an Oakland Tribune for a great many years," she said. "I'm surprised you ever heard of it, your age."

Leroy was pleased. Indeed, he appeared considerably younger than his years.

"I haven't," he told her, and walked away. He heard the old man start to say something but get shushed by his daughter.

Strolling down to the dairy case to get some skim milk, he was reminded of the first heavyset person he referred to as Slob. He was good at nicknames, at least he thought so, and pretty original. Some people, he thought, practically named themselves by not caring how they looked. The other Slob was a young man who had worked for Leroy, a bit of a genius type, too much so. Leroy had started out calling him George. Slob the First became political and made objectionable noises about contracts with the Defense Department. Some systems went into the making of cool modes of weaponry that featured nasty surprises for enemy personnel and their dependents. Of course they did terrible things to people — they were weapons, for Christ's sake. As much as anything else they reminded Leroy of the computer war games at the research institute. But it was the age of the agitator; people needed to piss and moan. If Slob First had not been so obnoxious about it, Leroy would not have conceived the plan to make him disappear, corporately speaking.

While Leroy was fetching his quart of milk and dozen eggs, a bunch of drive-through tourists came in. The man was slight and overpolite to Craw and Slob behind the counter, tentative and ingratiating as your drive-through tourists tended to be. His wife acted the same way, smiley, hi there. The wife was a babe in nice-fitting jeans and a tight University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, T-shirt with a blue hoodie over her hair. They had a child of about five, who unfortunately for the kid resembled his dad. While the couple fiddled around the counter, the lad wandered down the rows toward the dairy section where Leroy was getting his milk and eggs.

The little boy looked about him blankly. Leroy had a sudden impulse. Craw kept the candy under his birdy eye at the counter but his supply boxes were in the back, near where Leroy was standing. One carton of expensive chocolate bars stood beyond the child's reach but available to Leroy's. He reached up and took a bar of imported chocolate out. Catching the child's eye, he made a small clicking sound of conspiracy and handed it to him. After a moment the child took it and put it in his pocket.

At the counter Leroy paid a simmering Craw Beck for his purchases. Seven dollars, no less. The family group was at the counter behind him. Before Leroy reached the door, Craw exploded.

"You plan on paying for the boy's candy?"

He was speaking not to Leroy but to the father of the little boy.

"What candy?" the man asked.

"The candy in his pocket!" Craw said with a vicious smile. Beside him, Slob frowned. The wrapper was in plain view.

"He's not even allowed to eat candy!" the father said. More surprised, Leroy thought, than angry. A mild type. Leroy had paused with one hand on the door, a disinterested onlooker.

Turning to look at Leroy, the woman recalled what she had told herself she could not possibly have seen in the space of a moment. She gasped and pointed at him.

"That man!" she said. "He gave it to Todd. I'm sure he did."

Leroy shrugged. Slob looked at him suspiciously.

"Well, damn well put it back or somebody pay for it," said Craw.

Leroy went out at once and put the scene behind him.

Halfway between Beck's store and the post office he encountered a tall woman whom he had nicknamed Grannykins. It was not that she was particularly grandmotherly, only that the plain metal-rimmed glasses she wore lent her long lean face a certain severity. She came under Leroy's scornful definition of older lady; in fact, she was about his age. She was graying but distinctly handsome and had friendly brown eyes. He had first seen her on a horse. She had said hello to him that day, and he had the distinct impression that she was putting moves on him. It was just sad, he thought. She was so much older than any babe he would ever be seen with. Was she serious?

"And how are you today?" she asked, smiling. "I'm Sal," she reminded him. This woman, Leroy knew well enough, was really named Salikan, after the river. The idiotic name dated her pretty well, he thought, and he wondered how she lived with this embarrassment. Salikan, a dog's name. The thought made him grin, which she took as indicating pleasure in her company. He had the strongest impulse to explain to her what was funny, give her a tip about herself. Leroy had been told that Sal's parents had been rich hippies, descended from a Helena molybdenite tycoon. Leroy had never introduced himself, although she had told him her name many times before.

"Hi!" he said. He had to stop when she did.

"How are things with your house?"

"They're good."

"I ride up by your canyon sometimes," she said.

How pathetic, thought Leroy.

"Yeah, I've seen you."

"I don't go up there so much now. I've got wary."

"Right," Leroy said. "You can't be too careful."

Over her shoulder, he saw the flustered-looking tourist family approaching, snuffling little junior, angry mom, subdued loser dad. Sal saw that she had lost Leroy's interest and went away.

"Well, so long," she said. "You take care."

As the tourists passed, Leroy went into the post office to check his mail. Inside, a clerk stood behind the open parcel counter holding a fly swatter. Leroy went past him to the bank of post boxes, opened his and scooped out the useless paper, real estate ads and supermarket flyers. Just then his eye fell on a row of federal WANTED posters on a glass-cased bulletin board beside the street door and he sauntered over to inspect them. One of the fugitives, Leroy observed, was born Alan Ladd. He sometimes used "Bum" as an alias. Hilarious, thought Leroy. In fact, the man's face was a little daunting. The FBI wanted Bum for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for the crime of murder, committed a few times over on little provocation. At a distance his picture resembled the old cartoon image of a burglar, plug-ugly in the striped shirt and wool cap. But even Leroy could see that there was a man behind the small dead eyes that looked at you over his flute of a nose. The peculiar nose, the lines around his mouth and his round chin made him look like a bad puppet. Pinocchio. The poster said Alan Ladd had worked as a dog trainer; his face was both swinish and prim. Leroy went out, climbed into his BMW and began the drive upriver toward his house.

The huge sky over the valley showed a late-August afternoon light, and even from the car Leroy could savor the deliciousness of the waning day. In the distance a front was gathering, an enormous darkening tower that rose from the mountaintops to an azimuth where innocent blue began. The clouds, bank heaped on bank, spread like an angel army across a quarter of the sky and closed on the near hills. In his own way Leroy was stirred by the drama of it, but he was not in the mood for rain, not on the road up. The fleecy cumuli that had graced the afternoon were giving way before the front; sudden cloud shadows raced over the landscape. The idea of rain, the shadows, caused him a quick confusion of ideas. They were positive: things changed and he thrived. A man who believed in himself was free. The secret was that you could almost make your own weather if you stayed smart and strong. You could sort of make yourself the mysterious force. Leroy thought good things. He shivered.

The road before him climbed in tightening switchbacks, and it was pure pleasure to follow its turns up the slope. Sometimes his heading was the range of shadowed white peaks across the valley, sometimes the field of black volcanic rock that stretched away from the river. To drive such a car and know what you were doing was to own the road.

Climbing, he passed the last few frame ranch gates and then there were no more cattle grids or mailboxes. Driving the last paved half mile, he came to a cleared lot on the canyon side of the road. A house was being built there, a house as big as Leroy's own, as far as he could tell. About a dozen men worked on the construction — carpenters laying and nailing boards on an upper story, roofers, painters applying an undercoat to a completed separate building across the lot. A mobile roller for laying tar and an articulated loader were parked just off the road. Leroy pulled onto the shoulder. The building lot was surrounded by birches bending to a wind he could not feel at first. One moment, walking toward the construction, he was dazzled by sunlight, dazed by the afternoon heat that rose from the bone-dry earth. In the next, he was in the shadow of the imminent storm overhead, grazed by the wind out of the trees. The crewmen were all looking up the valley into the storm that seemed about to break.

Leroy was curious about the house that would be neighboring his. Its rising presence agitated him. On the one hand, he was annoyed that construction upriver was advancing. On the other hand — and he had not thought of it much before — there were times when the loneliness of his location impinged on his satisfaction. He wanted to start a conversation with the men working on the site.

"Hi," he called out. Right then he knew it was going to turn out wrong somehow. "Anything I can do for you guys?"

All of them turned toward him at once. For a long time none of them gave him any answer. He looked at each of them in turn. One of them looked like the man on the poster. It caused him a slight intake of breath. Of course it wasn't the same man, but the brutality of the workman's face shocked him a little. Then it seemed that all of them, the lot, had some weird vocabulary of features in common. It looked as though all they were going to do was stare at him, tight-lipped, hard-eyed. Then the man whose face he had thought most resembled the poster said:

"Yeah. Make us rich."

A deeper silence seemed to fall, so that it was possible to hear the river below.

"I'm trying," Leroy said merrily.

No one laughed, though the hard-faced man to whom he had spoken made his features humorlessly reflect Leroy's attempt at a friendly smile, with a curled lip, a show of teeth and raised eyebrows. Everyone stood in place at his workstation, still and staring. As he turned to walk back to the car, he heard what he had always dreaded in places like Salikan, a rumble of spitty laughter, low growls and arrested fricatives trailing his departure. The successful man is resented by the hewers of wood and carriers of water. The wealthy man of taste and means draws the impotent hatred of the mob. In some countries, Leroy had heard, such people had a clearer sense of their station in life and conducted themselves accordingly. Whereas here, he thought, it was supposed to be all jolly rough-and-tumble, and you couldn't spit in some peon's face when he tried to be smarter than you. Leroy had some enraging and frightening memories. Losers could come right to your house.

The turns were sharper and the incline steeper where the paving gave way to sealed gravel, but Leroy's car rose smoothly through it all. When he had put the car snugly in his garage he let himself inside, into the large kitchen, and poured himself a glass of pinot grigio. It had been a very tiring drive, and Leroy was working on a headache for which the wine was not a remedy. His eyes were sore; he thought he might be due to replace his contacts. He had worked hard at keeping fit, seeming and feeling younger than his age, but still he had put in the time. He had not been out for an easy life, and he had not had one. It occurred to him that no matter how a man postponed it, he ended by progressively settling for less. The thought made him angry.

Leroy's canyon home was the newest and biggest house on the river. Somebody's had to be. He had definitely come to feel that a house ought not to be outsized or conspicuous, and his own place caused him a jot of self-consciousness. The thing was, it had been like a new toy, and hard for him in the first flush of ownership not to improve on it and add features. The pool had been something of an engineering feat, but it was a joy, looking cut into the rock, though it really wasn't, and ingeniously supplied with water at great cost. There was glass on one wall of the den, cantilevered so as not to catch the full force of the wind coming down the canyon but commanding a view of the national forest and wilderness to the north and east. It would have been hard for him to say why, but the dimensions of the place made him feel somehow younger. It proved he belonged to an age group below his calendar years, a Bullshit Walks generation. The right people understood.

Maybe he had figured there would be more people around. In the past they always came to pick his brains, to find out what he could do for them, to listen to his strategies and plans. Girls came for the fun and games, an adventure by the pool, the brightness and glossiness. You always had to be careful with girls, he realized. Girls could go a long way toward making or unmaking your reputation, especially in California. Guys came for access, to prove themselves to him, eager for his blessing on some project. He had taken the Orvis trout-fishing course twice in the hope of excelling on the river. He had become a proficient skier, having learned, one on one, from a top Kraut.

Everybody had to be kept in line. The fact was, Leroy knew, to be too accessible was dangerous. Accessibility aroused the predator. When they call you a nice guy, beware. The nice guy will find his brains on the floor — a proverb from somewhere, some newly competitive nation. Leroy could envision his brains on the floor, gray, bloody, posthumously active, refusing to cease their clamor. He often contemplated with satisfaction the brilliance concentrated within his intellect and will. Sometimes, he knew, it burned with too bright a flame.

He was running a supervisory eye over the road and the garage side of the house when it fell upon an undesirable oddity. Tied to one of the aspens over his driveway — certainly visible from the road — was a twisted length of plastic, the kind of transparent tube in which a newspaper might be delivered on a rainy day. The tube was wet, soiled and blackened like something that had washed up in some filthy city gutter. It was knotted on a high branch of the tree so that part of it floated like a pennant over his turnoff, perhaps a signal pennant. Signaling what? His presence? It was unsettling. It made him imagine piracy, a Jolly Roger.

He moved out of the well-appointed kitchen and sat before his floor-to-ceiling window, watching the stormy night darken the borders of the canyon. The black clouds brought down the night sky, the moon that had been rising; the first stars all disappeared. He took his glass of wine outside to the patio, walked down the stone steps to his pool and switched on the poolside lights and underwater illuminations. The sleekness of the lighting was comforting at first. Then in the blue-tinted light he saw that lapping against the tile of his pool was another soiled piece of plastic like the one in the tree. He felt a wave of disappointment — in things, in the sorry aspect of his rewards, blemishes on good fortune. It seemed like the work of a spoiler, and it frightened him. He looked around him. Somewhere in the sunken canyon behind his house thunder broke and echoed massively; the sound of it felt as though it might shake the house on its stone fortress. A fork of lightning struck rimrock overhead, and whether by reflection or a second strike, it lit the canyon below in stunning detail, displaying precisely the coloring of each cliff, its cuts, layers and scars, its geological history. Leroy stepped back against the rock wall of his house. There was a smell of scorched sage and burning pine. The air was bone-dry, and not so much as a drop of rain fell.

He went back inside, finished his wine and poured another. The drink made him hungry — on the trip up he had not given any thought to food. All that was in the house unfrozen were the eggs and milk he had bought at Craw's, a half stick of butter and an unopened jar of caperberries the beautiful Ilena had brought him months before. The caperberries were imported from Romania, from a place called Cluj, which happened to be in Transylvania, where Ilena herself came from. She had always described herself as Transylvanian, which meant she might have been Romanian or Hungarian or descended from Saxon or Slavic settlers. Leroy had never asked her. He required only that she be as beautiful as she was, and as accommodating. To be seen with her was to command envy and respect and to display the superior quality of his life. Any fool could see her out in Valentino and Cole Haan, and that, Leroy thought, was all they needed to see.

He opened the berries with difficulty and took out the butter, milk and eggs. He broke an egg onto the Teflon surface of the frying pan. Looking at the yolk under the kitchen light, he saw that there was a bright blood spot in the center of it. This was mildly disturbing to such a perfectionist as Leroy and he tried to remember what it might signify. Perhaps, he thought, the egg was not fresh. Or the opposite. He stood reflected in his kitchen window against the black night outside, seeing his own blank face. A flash of lightning lit the rock landscape outside, revealing the aspens, the plastic flag at the top of one tree. He sipped his wine, put the pan aside and dialed Ilena's number in San Anselmo.

"Allo, Leroy," Ilena said in her husky voice when she heard who it was. "How may I serve you, my kink?"

"I miss you," Leroy told her. "Why didn't you come with me?"

"Aha. Your punishment, cheri."

"Punishment for what?" He smiled wanly at his reflection. "I've been good."

"Good? Ho ho. A good one."

"No, really. Come up, get a morning plane to Rock City. Get one tonight. I'll get you picked up."

"Naah," she said in a vulgar comic voice. He hated her speaking that way. "Naah," she said. "No fuckink way."

Leroy suspected Ilena might be drunk. She had a drinking problem.

"But why, sweetheart? Don't you love your king?"

"Naah," she said.

"Come on."

"Come on," she mimicked. "Come on. Leroy, you're a noodle, eh?"

"Please come."

"Naah."

"I'm opening your caperberries. Thinking of you."

She laughed charmingly. "Don't be so stupid. You make me pissed off."

"If you don't come," Leroy said, "I'll make you sorry."

"Ya? I don't think so. How about: Fuck yourself, dollink."

"Listen," Leroy said, trying to change the subject. "I broke an egg into the pan to cook your berries. There's a red spot in the yolk. What about that?"

She gave a soft canine yip. "Break other egg."

Leroy reached for a second egg and broke it. It also had a red spot in the yolk.

"A red spot," he told her. "Honestly."

"Yes? No shit? Whoa."

"What?"

"Break next egg. Egg next to it."

Leroy did. There was a red spot. He told her so.

"Somebody playing a joke on you, boss. Like the jokes you like. Put-on, pain-in-the-ass jokes you like."

"I thought you liked my jokes, Ilena."

"Naah."

"You always laugh at them."

"Tell your name for me," she said.

"Oh," he said, trying a laugh. "It's harmless." His nickname for her was Strangepussy. Harmless. But who could have told her?

"I laugh when you put-on somebody else," Ilena said. "You too, when someone hurts. You're cruel motherfucker."

"When did you decide this?"

"Lewis tells me."

Lewis was a business associate of whom Leroy had had enough.

"Lewis! He told you? That nitwit?"

"You think? Screw you! Hey, kink, what looks like? The red spot?"

"It's just red."

"Look like skull, no? Tiny skull."

"I don't see a skull."

"Yes!" she insisted bad-humoredly. "You will see. Ask your other girlfriends. Ask Ludmilla, the gypsy."

"Ludmilla's not a gypsy," Leroy said.

"Fuck she ain't. You cheating cul. You get what you deserve. Your money is cursed. Your house. Your dick. Skull in the eggs. You will see."

Leroy cleared his throat. "Please, Ilena."

She cursed in her language and hung up.

Holding his silent phone, he looked out of his dark kitchen window again and saw the face of the fugitive Alan Ladd, the ape's face, the tiny eyes. Smiling. And what to call his mouth? Disapproving. A homicidally disapproving mouth. But it was only a vision, imagination. Alan Ladd, his crushed face, his tiny eyes. Alan Ladd was at the wheel of some murder victim's car, perhaps driving on a transcontinental superhighway, otherwise driving a back road in the woods, prowling. Prowling for victims. Beside Alan Ladd a dog was seated, an exquisitely trained pooch, a mechanical dog actually, its teeth honed and gleaming. Maybe Alan and his dog were seeking out a lonely house in the woods marked by a filthy plastic banner.

But there was nothing in the window. The thought was a worm of the brain. Leroy's phantom, the torment of a too busy man dedicated to his work.

"I can and will make life sweet," Leroy said aloud. As frightening as losers are, he thought, I am more. I have the high ground.

He went into the part of his den that served as a library. Lightning flashed beyond the glass wall, thunder boomed in the rock. There was still no rain. On Leroy's reading table was the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary. It stood beside Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, whose citations he used to crush underlings. The dictionary came equipped with a magnifying sheet that could be applied to the page to make the small print more readily legible. Leroy picked up the sheet and took it into the kitchen. He had not turned the stove on, so the eggs sat coldly in their pan, complacently three-eyed in the light, innocent as unborn Cyclopean babes. Leroy set his magnifying sheet on the pan's rim.

Yes, he saw. The spots might be skulls. They were elongated, cephalic, with inward curves that might mark cheekbones. The tops were rounded, maybe cranial. There were two tiny rounded darker marks against the blood red that might represent eyes, little rectangles that could stand for teeth. A hollowed snout.

Blood spots, though, not portents, nothing intentional. Whether random biology or a poisoner's mark, Ilena had made them appear as they did. Out of secret hatred or jealousy, out of the sheer evil of the weak, which he had seen often enough. As so often with the helpless and self-deluding, she had turned the strength of the strong against her betters. The tactic of sly inferiors: to set his mind against itself in a lonely place. All day, he realized, he had been thinking negative thoughts. Was it something fated, a test of confidence to be proved, as though there were some superforce that ruled strength, constantly sorting out the chosen, making them risk their gifts and qualities against the little strategies of the lame? Was there some kind of supernaturalism in the law of survival?

Leroy decided that it did not matter to him. Even if all the forces of the eternal loser were able to combine against his superior mind, people like himself had to prevail. Because morality was functional. To be strong was to be hard, to laugh at punks who never dreamed of taking the first step toward getting what they wanted, who never knew. Never knew except to resent and set petty traps.

Oh, and they hated being called by the names they chose for themselves by virtue of their own absurdity. And their humor was frail; they hated the jokes that required them to act out their foolishness and impotence. They had to live the reality that the elected provided for them. In their sheepy droves they hated Leroy and his like.

Angry, he burst out onto the patio. In his rage he brought his hand down hard on his metal outdoor breakfast table, again and again. While his legato echoed on the wall, he heard a faint but curious sound. Looking up, he saw a dark brown shape. It stayed in place without motion. In a moment, the overhead lights above his pool cast two glowing lights on the lower extension of the thing. What glowed was a pair of bright yellow eyes. It was a cat, coiled, about to spring.

Somehow Leroy managed to leap into the pool. His plunge took him below the surface for a second, and as he fought to clear his vision he made himself hope that he had imagined the thing. But then he saw the panther in the very place he had been standing. It was trembling, regarding him from the far edge of time. Its face was skull-like.

Immediately the big cat moved around to the other side of the pool so that it waited behind him. He turned, treading water, fighting for breath. Floating in the middle of the pool was a large red and green beach ball. He put his arms around it to stay afloat, but it seemed to be drifting toward the side of the pool where the cat waited. Leroy came so close that the cat reached out over the water and, as Leroy watched, a pair of claws the size of kitchen knives shot out from its paw's black pads. The cat growled what sounded to him like a command to despair. Leroy, hanging on to his buoyant toy, saw something dreadful that he recognized in the animal grin and extended fangs. Unrelenting confidence. Dead certainty.

Leroy clung to the merry beach ball. The harder he clung to it, the more it seemed to drift toward the panther's reach. Batted by an almost casual thrust of the cat's claw, the ball began to spin in his slippery embrace. The cat was circling the pool, tense but assured as any mere animal could be, feinting, reversing ground. At play. Leroy began to scream for help. His breath was failing, but on each inhalation he clung harder to the whirling ball.

Overhead the stars had come out, the Milky Way. Leroy thought it might be a trail, a way out. All at once from somewhere in the canyon he heard a voice, one he thought he remembered. He called to it for help with all the breath he could summon until he realized that the voice was singing.

"I'm drowning in the lowland, low land low."

The song was one he knew. It was the voice of Dongo. Dongo singing a song in the canyon.

"Drowning in the lowland sea."

Leroy, spinning with the beach ball, began to sing along.