Joe Haldeman - Work Done for Hire

“Oh, okay. That’s all right.” She laughed. “Keep it in the family.”

I had to laugh, too. “Hey, if you can’t appreciate good literature, you don’t have to expose yourself to it.”

“It’s not me who’s exposing myself. Are you going to let your mother read this? Your shrink ?”

“I wouldn’t show it to the shrink. Mother would say, ‘Can’t you sex it up a little? Have him jerk off into the grave?’”

“No wonder you’re such a delicate soul.”

“Everything I am today, I owe to dear old Mom.”

I loaded up on carbs with a double stack of pancakes—or used the bike as an excuse to stuff myself, take your pick—and then Kit drove me back to where the weather and road had stopped us the night before. The plan was for her to keep the van while I completed the loop to Des Moines and back; if I ran into trouble she would come rescue me.

I wasn’t going to rough it; I had a map with all the motels on the route and their phone numbers, so when I decided to quit for the day I could call ahead. (That seemed prudent because there weren’t all that many places to stay.)

When she dropped me off and drove away, I felt a guilty glow of freedom. Four or five days of being a carefree bachelor, the wind at my back and nothing in front of me but the road.

The carefree feeling ended with a bang after an hour and ten minutes. I had somehow managed to run over a nail more than two inches long. It wasn’t even the same color as the road, cruddy with rust. But sharp enough to blow me out.

I was carrying two spare tubes, but repaired the flat one out of prudence and pessimism, remembering one day I managed to have three flats in three hours. All of them less dramatic than this one, relatively slow leaks, which can take longer to fix—not obvious where the hole is. Or it turns out to be the valve, unfixable.

I let the glue on the repaired tube rest and pumped up a new one and was on my way—twenty minutes to fix the tube, change the tire, and be back on the road. Short of my best by five or six minutes, but I wasn’t in a hurry.

I should have been. Of course the weather couldn’t last. I slogged through a driving rain until I fetched up on the shores of the Angel Bless Motel. A flashing neon cross would normally repel me like a vampire, but the rain had weakened my resistance.

I was suddenly on the set of a Hitchcock movie that never got made. I staggered dripping into a small Victorian room, a half-dozen cut-glass lamps giving a warm glow to the complicated floral wallpaper. Smiling older hostess wearing a full skirt and an apron. She didn’t say the only room left was #13, which might have sent me back out into the rain. But she did insist on showing me around the six glass cases along the walls, her late husband’s life work. Lots of miniature trains and airplanes and hundreds of butterflies pinned to velvet. She had been a widow for nine years, four months, and seven days.

The room she led me to had only one butterfly, a big purple one pinned under glass, hanging over the bed like an invertebrate crucifix. There’s a sad irony to a moth-eaten butterfly.

I set the coffeemaker to just heat some water, and took as hot a shower as the motel’s plumbing and budget would allow. A quick ramen dinner, and then I made weak tea with just a pinch of sugar. I didn’t want to stay awake.

The TV’s depth axis was shot, so rather than watch crap in two and a half dimensions, I flipped through the various books on my notebook and settled on Down the River , a collection of short stories by recent Iowa graduates. I had a paper copy at home, a contributor’s freebie, but the only story I’d read in it was my own, checking for typos. Mildly curious about the competition, I got halfway through the second story before I turned off the notebook and the light.

It was still raining when I woke up. Not cold or windy, so I guess if I were a serious cyclist I’d just man up and pedal out into it.

Instead, I made a double-strong, double-sugar cup of coffee with ReelCreme™ and took the motel’s chair out under the eaves and sat looking at and listening to the rain, not thinking about the novel or anything in particular. Then I went back inside, made another cup, and unrolled the notebook and its keyboard.

What would Hunter do in the rain? Not a scene from the movie, but what the hell.

Hunter liked the sound of rain drumming on his metal roof. The fact of the rain, though, was a little annoying. He had eaten one frozen meal and wanted a fresh one, but there wouldn’t be many joggers out.

Not many potential witnesses, either.

No diversions left. He was tired of reading, and television was earnest documentaries and Saturday morning cartoons, which offered sufficient violence but no appetizing consequences.

With no particular destination in mind, he got in the van and headed north, playing a Jacksonville radio station on the radio but not hearing the music, listening for weather updates. He got gas in Georgia, filling up at a place that was too ramshackle and open to have surveillance cameras. He did have to go inside to pay, and considered the risk/benefit ratio of killing the dimwitted clerk and emptying the register.

The boy was skinny and sallow and smelled bad, which may have saved his life. And there could have been a hidden camera amidst the chaotic jumble of merchandise behind him. Hunter bought eight Super Red Hot sausages and, unseen back in the van, ate them like a sword-swallower, one after the another, while he studied the map.

The rain had let up when he stopped, but now it continued with redoubled force. He took a left turn and then angled down a county road that pointed into Alabama.

He came upon his prize only fifteen minutes down the road. A large woman on the gravel margin hunched against the force of the rain, working on an upside-down bicycle. He slowed down and waved at her, blinking his lights. She waved back and he pulled off the road in front of her, and backed up.

He rolled down the window as she came up, wiping the water from her long hair. She was big, not quite half his size, and he salivated at the thought of all that delicious fat.

“Golly, thanks, mister—” He flung the door open with such force that she sprawled almost to the middle of the road. But she was standing, staggering, by the time he heaved himself out of the van. He took two ponderous steps and dropped her with a punch to the solar plexus.

Faster, now. He grabbed her wrist and roughly dragged her to the back of the van. Locked. Stupid of him.

The driver’s-side door was still open. He lumbered back to it and stretched to reach the keys in the ignition.

Sudden sharp pain in his back. He turned and she was standing there with a narrow-blade knife, a switchblade stiletto, staring at the color of his blood.

The wound was not serious. He backhanded her so hard her neck snapped.

She was limp but still alive as he tied her up and manacled her in the back. She managed some incoherent growls and moans, too soft to annoy him or attract attention, so he didn’t bother with the duct tape.

“Be happy,” he called back. “You’re out of the rain.”

Decisions. Maybe leave Georgia for this one, so as not to have the same group of state police studying his spoor. Drive on into Alabama, or maybe all the way through to Mississippi.

No. The need was growing in him. Alabama would do.

He was across the border in thirty minutes, and stopped at a McDonald’s for a bag of small burgers and ten orders of fries. He gulped it all down, driving one-handed but with intense care, before he left the interstate. He had memorized the map and the Googlemaps screen that showed the nameless dead-end dirt road that was his tentative destination.