Stephen Hunter: Night of Thunder

Damn, she was good! As she control-skidded around the turn in a whine of rubber fighting for purchase of asphalt, Brother Richard saw his opening and, instead of veering outside of her, he bravely cut inside to begin his surge. His professional-quality cornering, as opposed to her gifted amateur approach, won him the inside where she didn’t expect him to be. As she tried to float back into the proper lane, he revved beyond redline, closed that off from her, and delivered his blow to the front fender of her right-hand side, not so much a thud as a nudge to push her out of equilibrium. But now, damnit, she figured this one out too, and jammed hard on her brakes, pumping the wheel as she skidded left.

The world spun before Nikki, racing across her windshield, pure abstraction in the cone of the one headlamp that still burned, and she nursed the brake pedal with a delicate foot while merely making suggestions to the wheel, which kept her in a semblance of control as she stopped, alas, to find herself one-eightied in the other direction. She was now facing the dangerous rising linkage of switchbacks up Iron Mountain that she’d just survived. So she punched it hard, jammed on the brakes as he came by her a third time (how had he gotten around so fast!), somehow got through a reverse right-hand, backing turn at a speed at which such a maneuver should never be conceived of, much less attempted, and again punched hard.

But he beat her, somehow, to possession of the road, and this time he hit her, rode her hard right. He turned, and she saw his face in the glare of the dash, its plainness, its evenness of feature, its dull symmetry, its almost generic quality, like the father of Dick in a Dick and Jane; it burned into her mind. And then she was off the road, out of control among the trees, and the world was jerking left and right, hard as the car slammed against or glanced off the trees. She felt her neck screaming, her head flopping this way and that, and then she hit, and everything stopped.

It happened so fast, two weeks. His hair went straight to winter from summer, with no autumnal pause. It didn’t thin, it didn’t fall out, it just veered off to dull gray. He looked ancient, or so he thought.

It was a memory that did it. He had recently had an actual sword fight to the death-in the twenty-first century, in one of the most modern cities on earth-with a Japanese gentleman of infinitely superior skill and talent. Yet he had won. He had killed the other man, left him cut through the middle in a mushy field of sherbet snow, turned magenta by the man’s own blood.

Bob thought often: Why did I win? I had no right to win. I was…so lucky. I was so goddamned lucky. It was like a worm, gnawing at his heart. You lucky bastard. Why did I luck out and that guy end up guts out in the snow?

Not that Swagger had escaped intact. The guy had laid him open to steel bone at the hip, and he’d gone too long before stitches saved his life. It never healed right, and he didn’t help by denying so fiercely that there was a problem. Somehow his leg stiffened, as if the tide of blood that the stitching dammed was still there, coagulating and about to break out in a red ocean spray and bleed him to death. Killer’s revenge. But the killer had also, as another part of his revenge, turned him comical, with one of those weird bounces in his gait. Could still ride, could still walk, couldn’t really run much. No talent at all for climbing. A motorcycle saved his life by giving him the illusion of freedom that had once been his strongest attribute.

“I look a hundred and fifty,” he’d said, just that morning.

“You don’t look a day aver one hundred forty-five,” his wife said. “Honey, look at Daddy, he’s turned white.”

“Daddy’s a snowman,” shouted the little girl, Miko, now seven, delighted to find a flaw in a hero so awesome as her strange, white father. “Snowman, snowman, snowman!”

“It’s gray, it’s gray,” Bob protested. Then he added, “I know someone’s going to find her ride cut short she don’t stop calling Daddy a snowman.” But the tone revealed the fraudulence of the threat, for it was his pleasure to spoil his daughters and then take pride in how well they turned out anyway.

He was a rich man. Rich in land-he now owned six lay-up barns in three western states, two in Arizona, two here in Idaho, and one each in Colorado and Montana, and was looking at property in Kansas and Oregon-and rich in pension from the United States Marine Corps. He was rich in homes, as he owned this beautiful, recently finished place sixty miles out of Boise, on land he’d cleared himself that looked across green prairie emptiness to blue scars of mountains under piles of cumulus cotton against a blue diamond sky. He was rich in wife, for Julie was handsome, a character out of a Howard Hawks movie, one of those tawny, feline women who never got excited, had a low voice, and was still sexy as hell. And he was richest of all in daughters.

He had two. Nikki was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and now working her first newspaper job in Bristol, Virginia, a place her father liked a lot more than the New York City where she’d spent the last year. He felt she’d be a lot safer in the small city right smack on the Virginia-Tennessee border. Meanwhile, his adopted daughter, Miko, had taken to western life without a hitch, and quickly became comfortable around horses, the messes that they made, the smells that they generated. She loved them, took to them automatically, and it thrilled her father to see such a tiny thing so relaxed atop such a giant thing, and controlling it so confidently, making it love and obey her. The kid was already earning blue ribbons in Eventing and might even overtake her big sister, who’d been a national champion in that sport two years running when she was a teenager.

Now it was morning, and since it was August there was no school for Miko, so they were doing what they loved: the girl on her horse, Sam, and her father watching her canter gently about the ring. But he was not dominating. For while that had been his way as a marine NCO, it was not his way with his daughter. He leaned on the fence, and you’d have thought, There’s a cool cowboy type of fellow. His jeans were tight, framing his lanky legs; he wore a horseman’s slouch and sucked on a weed. He was all cowboyed up-the Tony Lamas boots muddy but solid, a blue, denim shirt, a red handkerchief around his neck, for it gets hot in Idaho in August, and a straw Stetson to keep the sun off his face.

It really couldn’t have been more perfect, always a signal that disturbance lurks not far away.

“Easy, sweetie,” he called, “you don’t want to force him. You have to feel him, and when he’s ready, he’ll let you know.”

“I know , Daddy,” she called back. She rode eastern, on the snooty, Brit postage stamp of a saddle, with erect posture, a crop in her hand, tall, low-heeled boots, and of course a helmet. She was equally adept with the big western rigs that were like boats upon a horse’s plunging back, but both Bob and Julie agreed that she would eventually go to school in the East, that she should have riding skills set for that part of the country, and, on top of that, they wanted to keep her out of rodeos, where too many young gals flocked because they liked the string-bean boys who rode like hell and bounced up with a smile when they went for a sail in the air and a thump in the dirt. Though with Miko, maybe it would be something else. Maybe it would be to actually do some crazy rodeo thing, like leave a perfectly good cow pony for a ride on a bull’s horns.

“She’ll probably end up the women’s bull-dog champion of Idaho, but still you’ve got to try,” he told his wife.

“If she does, she’ll have to put up with a screaming nag of an old lady every damn day,” Julie said.