Summer Cool

29

Again, Paine waited. The heat lessened, and sometime during what must have been the night, he slept, and dreamed. And, for all that he had seen and been through, it was a peaceful dream.

Paine was on his hill, with his telescope, and he saw Bob Petty whole again. Though it might have been possible for him to do so, Petty had not gone mad. He had lost only his respect for himself, and had acted only out of love and honor.

And on his hilltop, with his telescope, Paine searched once more for Rebecca, who refused to appear to him. "Maybe you'll think of me as holding you from now on," she had said. Paine wanted her to hold him now. But she was not there in the empty vacuum of space, and he cried out futilely to the scattered atoms of her dead body.

And then suddenly he was looking not into the eyepiece of the telescope but into its open end, and he saw his face huge in the mirror below. For now the instrument was pointed not at the stars but at himself, and he saw his own essential self, saw into his heart, and saw that Rebecca was there with him, had been with him all along. For the vast cosmos cannot compare to the human heart, which in the atoms of its memory breaks death and transcends time.

And he felt the memory of her arms around him, cradling his heart and protecting him from the cold night, and death was something he neither feared nor craved.

Maybe you'll think of me as holding you.

And she held him till morning came, and he awoke into the air of another hot day.

Poppa and the others had taken the limbs and torso and head of Philly Ramos away. Paine was thankful for that. There were still bloodstains on the blue padding of the walls. Paine's water bowl had been refilled, and Paine drank half the water, and sat on the edge of his mattress, away from his dried vomitus, and tried to think.

His body was weak, and his mind. The oven-like heat of the cellar told him to lie down and sleep, but he would not do that.

He looked, instead, at the half-full water bowl, and at the single light bulb in the center of the ceiling.

He picked up his water bowl, carried it to the corner of the room under the trapdoor in the ceiling, and put it down. Then he went back to his mattress, pulling it over beneath the light, folded it over, and stood on it. He was not high enough. He got off the mattress and folded it in thirds, making it three thicknesses high, and stood on it again.

It was just high enough for him to work at the fixture.

He pulled the insulation from around the metal box, finding the wires that led into the fixture box and tracing them away from it. He followed the line of the wire, which was stapled to the overhead beam, removing insulation along the way.

When he had a sufficient length, he found a spot where the thick electrical cable was bowed out slightly from the support beam and slipped his hand between beam and wire. He grasped the wire and yanked on it, working the staples from side to side until one of the tines pulled out of the wood and he was able to free the cable from it.

He worked his way back to the fixture box this way, yanking the cable and freeing it as he went.

When the cable had been freed from the last staple near the fixture box, Paine straightened out his mattress and moved it back to its original spot. He picked up his water bowl and placed it on the floor two paces from the wall under the trapdoor. Then he walked back to the cable, took a strong two-handed grip on it, and yanked it sharply out of the fixture box.

The basement went dark.

He felt up gently along the cable until he reached a spot near the end, where the cable insulation had been cut away to allow the individual wires to be separated, stripped, and attached to the light fixture.

Holding the cable at this point, keeping it well away from his body, Paine moved to the corner of the basement where the trapdoor in the ceiling was, trailing the cable behind him. He measured out two paces from the wall, found his water bowl, sat down on the floor near it, and waited.

Again, time was heat. Paine measured the day by the amount of heat in the cellar. In the dark, the game was even easier, and, for a while, it occupied Paine's mind. It was a better thing to think about than the way Tiny Man had hacked up Philly Ramos_; better than thinking about what Tiny Man would do to him alter there was no more need to have him around. Though he did not crave death, or fear it, he knew that it might arrive very soon. There was as little doubt in Paine's mind as in Kwan's that Bob Petty would come. The question, which was a question that covered most of the secrets of life, Paine thought, was when and how?

In the dark, as the day went along, when the heat had peaked, which put it somewhere around 3:00 P.M., Paine began a new game. Continuing to hold the cable carefully, switching it from one hand to the other when he got tired, he began to strain his ears for sounds from the rooms above.

At first he heard nothing. But he persisted. He thought of the way an astronomer uses averted vision, will look slightly to the side of an observed object because that part of the eye, away from the center of the pupil, is more sensitive to light and will see more detail. He began to use averted hearing, cocking his head slightly away from a barely perceived sound to sharpen his sense of it.

It was a bogus analogy, a mind game, but it worked. His hearing sharpened, and he began to hear sounds. A series of footfalls, a muffled exchange of conversation, a snatch of television from the far side of the house. He heard a door open and close; the volume of the television rose. Reruns of Bonanza. He heard a commercial come on, someone laugh.

It took him hours, but he began to figure out their setup. There were two of them in the house. Two of them had left. He imagined that Poppa, with one of his cohorts, had driven in the jeep to the house on the Indian reservation. That was where they would meet Bob Petty. They knew Petty wouldn't agree to come where all four of them waited for him. They would hammer out a deal, and Petty would follow them back here. That was when they would try to take him. Tiny Man had enough confidence in his own abilities to be able to handle Petty alone; the others were mere insurance. Tiny Man also knew Bob Petty's mind as well as Paine did, and knew that he would do almost anything to get Paine freed.

Paine wondered if Poppa and his two friends were aware of the fact that they were nothing but bait. Again he heard a grunt of laughter from the TV room above. Apparently not.

The heat in the cellar diminished. Paine could almost hear night falling outside, rushing to meet his own imposed night.

The time when they had fed him the night before was already past; his body had tensed, and now weariness assaulted him with the realization that they were not going to bother to feed him. The television droned on-reruns of "The Patty Duke Show," "Laugh-In," "Dennis the Menace." He heard an occasional short blurt of laughter. The opening and closing of the refrigerator, a chair scraped across the floor. The front door opening and closing.

Finally, the television was turned off; the sound of night came to the house.

Then there was only the sound of one figure walking, from one end of the house to the other.

The walking continued for hours. Paine's back was painfully stiff. His legs ached, his eyes wanted to close. He was weak. He thought of the mattress, five yards away; it would feel like a bed of feathers to him. The walking above him was a susurrus, soothing him to sleep. He directed his averted hearing away from it, listening for other sounds, a creak of the house, night noises.

The night passed. Paine thought desperately of lively things, baseball games, boxing matches, raucous parties. His head drooped_; he fought himself out of sleep, found he had dropped the cable. It had snaked away from him on the floor. He spent an anxious ten minutes crawling in careful arcs, until his fingers brushed across it, mere inches from the live wire ends.

He went back to his spot, measured two paces out from the wall, found the water bowl, sat, waited.

The walking above stopped.

With indirect hearing, Paine registered the clutching down of the returning jeep outside the house.

It was the coolest time in the cellar. Paine estimated that it must be an hour before dawn, the coldest time of desert night, a clean chill in the air. The sky above would be wide and pure, Saturn high overhead, bringing a preview of autumn stars up behind it in the east-Cassiopeia, the Andromeda galaxy, the Pleiades, peeking above the mountain horizon. An hour-long respite from the heat, the temporary banishment of summer.

Paine tensed, waited.

He heard no sound from above.

Then, he did. A door, not the front door, at the back of the house, thrown open, a tattoo of gunfire, a fumbled pause, more gunfire. Running. Something knocked over, a curse in the dark. Muffled shouts. More gunfire. A curse, followed by a single shot.

Silence.

Not silence. With his strained ears, Paine heard something, the stalking of a hunter, which grew to a resulting whisper. At the back of the house, four quick steps, followed by quiet.

So suddenly that it startled Paine, the trapdoor directly above him was yanked up.

Paine forced his voice to sound calm and faint. "What the hell's going on up there? The light bulb went out."

A quickly muttered curse, the metal ladder lowered into the hole.

A figure as small as a monkey scampered down the ladder.

Paine lifted the water bowl, pooled it around the bottom of the ladder, jammed the live wires against the nearest rung.

Tiny Man stepped into the water and screamed, a spark of light bursting around his small body. He was flung from the ladder, and Paine heard him hit the floor as darkness returned.

Paine threw himself at the spot where Tiny Man had hit. He missed by a foot, heard Kwan panting beside him, on his back Paine covered him with his body, began to pummel him in the face and body, raining blows as fast as he could. Kwan's body was trembling slightly, as if electricity was still running through him, but Paine felt him stiffen, regain his strength.

As Paine reached for Kwan's neck, Tiny Man clamped his hands around Paine's wrists. His grip was steel. One hand left Paine's wrist and Paine felt it move down to a hardness at Kwan's midsection. The hardness moved. Paine took a hand from Tiny Man's throat, moving desperately around to Tiny Man's wrist. His fingers brushed the flat of hard steel. Tiny Man slashed upward, moving against Paine easily, and suddenly Paine lost his grip on the arm with the blade and he felt Tiny Man's arm move free of him, drawing back for a blow.

"Good-bye, Mr. Paine. I will cut you so that you will die slowly and no one can save you-"

Paine and Kwan were outlined in the circle of a flashlight beam as a shot split the air. Tiny Man grunted and bucked once under Paine, his eyes opening wide and then closing. Another shot and Tiny Man bucked and grunted again, less audibly. His knife clattered to the floor. It sounded as if he had taken a couple of punches, but Paine saw two red and growing stains in the side of his shirt.

Tiny Man's eyes unfocused and he went limp under Paine as Paine turned.

Bob Petty was standing at the bottom of the ladder, his police revolver still held in one straight, aiming arm. As Paine watched, Petty pumped a third shot into Kwan's dead body beneath him.

Petty's eyes met Paine's and locked there.

A long moment passed as the world reestablished itself. Then Bobby smiled, a sad thing, and said, "Sorry I had to beat the shit out of you, Jack."