Al Sarrantonio - Cold Night

He took a half-bag of crackers and a stale doughnut from his pack and ate, crouched at the roots of an old oak. It was getting cold. The thin windbreaker that had been more than adequate when the sun had filtered warmly through the trees now helped little, and he soon began to shiver.

"Shit," he said, hugging himself, angry at his bad planning and worse luck; "shit!"

Above his whispered exclamation of self-pity, he heard another sound.

Instinctively, a line of fear drew down his back. He had learned certain sounds in the woods. This wasn't the scratch of a squirrel, or the jumpier antics of a chipmunk. It wasn't the darting sweep of a fruit bat. It was something else.

He rose slowly, half-paralyzed by fear, his back pressed tight against the rough bark of the tree.

In front of him, something hissed and moved across his thin line of vision.

It stopped, showing itself off. It knew that it had him, and, like all cats, it almost preferred play to killing. Its eyes were like two gleaming pumpkin cutout slits, glowing. Almost by their light, he could see the prominently whiskered outline of the rest of its small face. It bared its teeth once at him, giving a short testy snarl, and then circled back on itself, into the surrounding blackness and then out of it again.

Cougar.

His uncle had told him about cougars. They hunted only at night; could drag a 900-pound moose over snow by the neck; could jump up fifteen feet with ease and cover twenty miles in one night. A man against a cougar without at least a shotgun and lots of space to fire it was a dead man. His uncle said he had once seen a man brought out of the woods who'd inadvertently cornered a female. The left side of his body was raked as if a machine had gone through it, razoring through clothes, skin, muscle, even bone. Some of the gashes had been nearly an inch deep.

This looked like that kind of cougar.

The thing slid across his line of sight, growling to itself, then turned into the darkness again. Jack heard its faint, leisurely pad, heard it suddenly stop.

The woods waited.

Out there, he felt it tense into the projectile that would fire at him out of the night, knifing into his flesh and making it night forever for him.

It pulled tighter, tighter, ready to discharge-

"Don't move, Jerry." His uncle's voice sounded calmly to his left.

The cougar sprang.

The dark exploded with light and thunder. The cougar's hissing thin face, whiskers spread over its long teeth like twin brushes, disintegrated like a crushed melon at his feet.

"Jerry-" his uncle began.

Jack peeled away from the tree trunk and ran off. His hands were his eyes; he patted them out in front of him, warding away the night and the thicket of trees. He ran into a tangle of underbrush, and his foot was grabbed by a root. He twisted to one side and fell. He pulled free, gasping, and one boot came away. He stood and stumbled on.

The night lit up ghostly in front of him. Looking up, he was dazzled by the risen, gibbous moon sliding out from behind a bank of clouds. He was in a small clearing, with a stretch of woods in front of him.

He hobbled into it.

There was enough moonlight strobing the trees ahead for him to see where he was going.

Behind and to his left, he glimpsed his uncle just descending from the clearing into the wood he inhabited. He hobbled faster.

He cut to the right, off into a thicket away from his uncle. His feet tangled, tumbling him to the ground. He rose, catching sight of his uncle gliding like a spirit after him.

"Jerry," his uncle called out patiently.

Jack's lungs burned with insufficient oxygen. He ignored the fire, stumbling on. The moon brightened; then was lost to a cloud. Jack tripped again, and suddenly before him was the broad trunk of an old maple. He cried out but his hands did not rise fast enough as the moon returned and he saw his uncle's face beside him as the tree punched him-

He awoke in his bed, in daylight. The light was off, making the room nearly dark, but the door was open and the long windows downstairs filled the doorway with sunlight.

His uncle sat at the foot of the bed, in the dimness, staring at him. His face was blackened with cork, a camouflage cap was pulled low over his brow. Only the whites of his eyes stood out madly from his face.

His uncle spoke quietly, in horrible contrast to his appearance. "I want to tell you something, Jerry," he said. "I heard a copter this morning. It won't be long before they find you. Before they do, I have to tell you something."

Tear tracks intersected the cork markings on his face.

"I could have gone longer," he said. "I want you to know I could have gone as long as I had to. I have the will, Jerry. I've had it for a long time. I wanted to prove that to you."

Uncle Martin sat rigid and military as stone, a weeping statue. "That first time was the only time, Jerry. It never happened again. Never. It never happened in the Army, or the Green Berets, not anywhere. I saw what I was, and I beat it, Jerry." He sobbed, a tight gulping sound. "I beat it."

His uncle rose and stood stiffly beside the bed. His hands were straight at his sides, like dead things. He stared down at them. "I don't know why I touched you that time, Jerry. You meant more to me than anyone in the world. You still do. If I had known that touching you would make you actlike that, I would not have done it. But I loved you, Jerry. And I had such feelings. . such strong feelings, that I thought it was right to do what I did."

A great sob sought release, but his uncle held it back.

"I didn't know it was wrong. I learned it, though. That's what I want you to know. I learned, and it never happened again. All the time I was in the Army, and all the men and boys I saw, the feelings that went on inside me, I never let them out."

His uncle turned and looked at him earnestly. "I had to prove it to you. To make it right between us." Tears rolled down his face. "You were my little brother, Jerry! You were all I had in the world! What you did to me, the way you shut me out, it nearly killed me. God, I was only fifteen, Jerry. If only I could take that one time back. ."

His uncle sat stiffly down on the bed, wiping a hand across his face.

"So I thought I could make it like it was again, show you that what I did meant nothing. I wanted to take it back.

"And now I have. Oh, God, please, Jerry, tell me it never happened. . "

His uncle wept into his hands.

When the state troopers came through the door a half hour later, he hadn't moved. As they pulled Uncle Martin from the bed he saw his pleading eyes and he said quietly, "It never happened," and his uncle's last look was one of deliverance and peace. .

"That's my most painful memory," he whispered to Rebecca Meyer. Somewhere he had begun to cry, and he let her hold him, rocking the poison out of him. "Oh, God," he wept, "he never touched me, Uncle Martin never touched me, oh, Dad. . "

The night continued. She rocked him, and, sometime near dawn, she whispered to him, "You're well."

He laughed and said, "You're right."

He moved against her, and for a time they didn't talk. Paine fleetingly thought of the sounds of the tape in Barker's office.

"What about Gerald?" he whispered.

"Gerald can go to hell."

When they had finished, the sun was rising and she said, "What are you going to do today?"

"That depends on whether it means anything to you that I don't work for the Barker Agency anymore, and don't have a contract to find out who killed your father."

"My sister can go to hell, too," she said. She looked deep into his eyes. "Here's a contract of your own," she whispered, kissing him.

He smiled. "Then I'm going to see someone who knows more than he told me."