Joe Gores - Menaced Assassin

“Live birth means mammary glands-the young are nursed and receive maternal care.

“Warm blood means hair and fur, a four-chambered heart, two sets of specialized teeth (milk teeth to grow with, permanent teeth to live with) essential for true warm-bloodedness, with variously shaped hard enamel crowns adapted to the animal’s diet.

“Flexible skeletons mean a free lumbar spine, and a unique bone growth pattern called epiphyses whereby the bone grows in the middle, not at the ends. It is this that gives the mammals their tight, flexible, very usable joints.

“Early rodent-let’s call him proto-rat-had very big teeth to chew the roots and plants of the day: tree ferns, horsetails, cycads, conifers, sequoias, araucarias (monkey puzzle trees), and the spanking new flowering plants called angiosperms.

“And proto-rat used those sharp teeth on proto-shrew, forcing the little scuttler to become tree shrew by taking to the trees where proto-rat wouldn’t-couldn’t? — follow. Also, since nocturnal proto-rat controlled the night and the ground, tree shrew became diurnal and claimed the day and the trees.

“When the dinosaurs finally galloped and leaped and plodded off in the Great Dying, our little squirrel-like ancestors were waiting in the trees just as proto-rat’s descendants were waiting on the ground. During 30 million years in their arboreal world, the tree shrews had evolved, had begun developing and coordinating our three major features-hand, eye, and brain. They had started to become monkeys.

“In the process, our eyes moved to the front of our heads, giving us the tremendous advantages of binocular and Technicolor vision. Our muzzles shrank as eye became more important than nose, the claws on the digits of our hands and feet became nails, and we developed opposable thumbs and friction skin (fingerprints) on hands and feet to help us grab useful things like tree branches or a piece of fruit.

“All of this new activity was making our brain bigger and bigger in relation to our size and weight. Which, for some, kept getting bigger also.

“Some of the monkeys got so large and slow, in fact, that they had to confine themselves to lower branches that could support them. As we move to about 28 million years ago, remember that heaviness: it is forcing some of them to develop into… loud movie music here… apes…”

A lean, fast-walking man was passing across the windows on the walk outside. Dante quit listening. The man looked in, saw Will behind the podium, and faltered for a moment before going on. Dante waited, tense, until he had gone up the stairs to the Theological Union. It was a while before he settled back against the wall, and then he kept his hand close to his gun, in case that other fast-moving man should appear out of nowhere.

The P.W. appeared out of nowhere on the icy, windblown day after Thanksgiving, materializing out of a swirling snowstorm like a figure on a Polaroid photo gradually taking on definition once it has been pulled from the camera. He was walking as he would always walk, with his arms raised and bent at the elbows, his hands clasped behind his head in the traditional “surrendering prisoner” manner. Thus, P.W.-prisoner of war.

On that first late afternoon, with the light already fading and early snow on the ground, there was nobody to see him but Old Mose. Mose was seventy-eight, with a seamed chocolate face and frizzy hair turned white as the snow he was struggling with. When the Roadhouse had been one, Mose had played some mean blues piano in the lounge; but an irate customer, a made man-Eddie Ucelli (cool on the kill, a creep in his cups)-had taken care of that by repeatedly slamming the keyboard cover on Mose’s hands because Eddie wanted “O Sole Mio ” instead of “Hellhound on My Trail.”

Mae had kept Mose on as handyman-a misnomer if there ever was one, seeing the state of his hands-so on this snowy afternoon he was outside painfully clearing the front walk, holding the shovel awkwardly in his more or less useless claws.

That was when the P.W. appeared between the eastern white pines, crunching through the snow from the road that had once been a highway. He took the shovel from Mose’s twisted fingers with his strong gloved hands, and started shoveling vigorously.

“Hey, mister, ain’t no call for you to…”

The P.W. paused to lay a gloved finger to his lips, then returned to his shoveling. Mose didn’t have to shovel again as long as the P.W. was there. He didn’t have to tend the furnace, either, or the water heater, or carry in cases of booze or crates of frozen steaks from Ucelli’s meat wholesale company, or perform any of his other heavier tasks. The P.W., in the same plodding manner he did everything, took care of all of them.

It was hard to tell how tall or how heavy the P.W. was, or even how old. His scraggly hair was mostly hidden by a Navy watch cap he seemed to wear both day and night. He had a matted beard he never cut, wore God knew how many layers of clothes underneath an Army camouflage jacket and baggy camouflage combat pants. The soles of his battered Army boots were sadly run over on the outside edge. He never removed his gloves.

Old Mose told the girls in a self-important voice that the P.W. had confided he’d been tortured repeatedly by the V.C., and his hands were not something anyone would ever see again. How much of this was real and how much Mose had dreamed up because it seemed that’s the way it must have been, nobody ever knew, since the P.W. talked to Mose damned little and to anyone else not at all. But anyway, it made a nice story. And it made old Mose feel he had a coeval in the hands department.

The P.W. carried his head thrust forward on his neck like a lily on a stalk, walking with a stooped shuffle that neither slowed nor speeded nor turned aside. It seemed that if he had needed to walk through the building, he simply would have done so like a tank, trailing broken lengths of lath and uprooted wiring and odds and ends of plasterboard with him.

Nobody ever tested the impression, because Mose made sure on that first night that he got some of the half-eaten meals that otherwise would have gone into the garbage, and found a place in the basement by the furnace for him to lay out his grimy sleeping bag. The P.W. rigged a length of hose to fit over the overflow valve on the water heater, and thus could give himself a rudimentary shower-not that anyone ever saw him take one.

Mae didn’t even become aware of him until the third morning after his arrival, when she saw him carrying in cases of booze from the Acme Liquors truck-an Organization firm, of course.

“Mose, just who the hell is that?” she demanded.

“He jes’ show up t’other night, Miss Mae.”

“But who the hell is he?”

“He jes’ show up, Miss Mae,” repeated Mose vaguely.

Delia Ann, a short sturdy black girl much in demand because she had a big butt but was very supple and inventive, said, “The girls have started calling him the P.W.-for prisoner of war.”

“Why do you…” Then Mae saw him walking around to the back of the building to get another load, his arms in their invariable “I surrender” position, and she understood the name. So she changed what she had started to say, to, “I don’t care what the hell you call him, just so long as you call him gone.”

Old Mose said dolefully, “He be a pow’ful he’p to me roun’ de place, Miss Mae.”

“Be a sport, Mae,” said tall, stately, redheaded Clarisse. She was also very popular with the clientele because she could get up on a tabletop, squat naked over a long-necked beer bottle, and pick it up without a laying on of hands. “Let him stay. He’s harmless and a real gentleman.”

“How can you tell?” asked Mae.