The naked edge

12

The man who called himself Bowie drove west over the rugged Teton Pass, leaving Wyoming. Dark mountains hulked on each side. His destination was a motel in Idaho Falls, two hours away. He'd rented a room there two days previously. He'd made his preparations and left yesterday before dawn, arriving in Jackson Hole with plenty of time to accompany the sniper on his hike to the ranch. At mid-day, the motel's maid would have cleaned his room and made the bed. There was no way for her to be aware that for much of tonight, the bed would not have been slept in. Tomorrow, after he got a few hours sleep, she would again make the bed, nothing unusual about his patterns. By then, he'd have checked out, gone to the Idaho Falls airport, and flown his plane to his next destination.

As he drove through the darkness, his tortured thoughts tugged him back to a long-ago summer when he and Aaron had played in the shadows of the trees in the park at the bottom of their street. Someone had built a new subdivision a few blocks away. To make the location more attractive, the owner had put in a lake, stocking it with goldfish. What the owner didn't count on was the effect of heavy rains. The lake overflowed, fish and water spilling into the stream that wound through the park. Aaron and Bowie had sat by that stream, spellbound by the magic of the six-inch-long fish, their speckled gold shimmering beneath the water.

"We could go home and get buckets," Aaron had suggested. "Trap a couple of fish in each bucket."

"And then what?"

"Try to convince our parents to buy us each a fish tank."

"I don't think my father would go for that. He'd probably knock me on the floor for suggesting it."

"I don't think my stepfather would go for it, either," Aaron said. "But, hey, we could still get the buckets. What we'll do is catch the fish and carry them back to the lake."

"It'll take all day," Bowie said, although his name had been different back then. "Besides it wouldn't make a difference. The next rain, all these fish will flood back into the stream." He removed his knife from his pocket and opened it. "I know what to do."

Aaron stared uneasily at the sunlight glinting off the blade.

Bowie saw a dead branch on the ground and cut off its twigs. He was about to sharpen its tip and suggest that they use the fish for target practice, but the look on Aaron's face told him to make a different suggestion. "Let's get some string and safety pins. We'll fish. We'll pretend our helicopter crashed in the jungle."

"Cool." A doubt clouded Aaron's eyes. "But if we catch any, I don't want to eat them. They're not very big, and I'm not sure goldfish taste good."

"Who said anything about eating them? We'll put them back in the lake after we catch them."

But they never did catch any fish, no matter how hard they tried throughout that muggy summer, most of which they spent in the shade of those dense trees, pretending they were the last two members of a Special Forces team trapped behind enemy lines. They became so skilled at hiding from the enemy that kids bicycling past or men and women strolling hand-in-hand along the path didn't see them crouching among the bushes.

As things turned out, it didn't rain again for a long time. The stream evaporated until there were only four inches of water. Most of the fish suffocated. By then, he and Aaron had gotten tired of fishing and instead lay among the bushes, reading Bowie's knife magazines. Sometimes when Bowie's father got even drunker than usual, bragging about what a hot-shit football player he'd been and how Bowie had damned sure better be as good, Bowie went down to the park on his own. He speared a couple of the surviving fish. His knife was so sharp that it made him feel as if he cut through butter when he sliced their bellies open. After all, what did it matter? The fish would have died anyhow.