//Written By Hadwin Kingsley

Mrs. Weiss’ Jackal Hunter

By Kingsley || June 5, 2002

“This is not a detective story.  I keep a log of my activities because it pleases my lawyers for me to do so.  I take no pleasure in it; I take no pleasure in the killing I do, either.  It is something made necessary.  I kill jackals.”
–Thomas Wycek, Jackal Hunter, 12/11/–

Thomas Wycek, the jackal hunter, had a gift.  He’d had it all his life, and as is so often the case with these human curia, in his youth this gift had been the cause of much ridicule, and sometimes worse.  In maturity he had learned to use it.  His gift, or affliction, depending on what professional he consulted, was a form of hallucination.

The mansion on the beach hadn’t been built so much as it had turned its good side, like a celebrity, to a golden Pacific sunset, and it had stayed perfectly posed since, a frozen frame.  Wycek had pulled the deeds before he’d offered his bid.  The house had been the residence of many, and several of note; it had been home to none.  He shivered in the predawn ocean wind, taking in the broad second-story deck, the three acre fenced beach below, the black water beyond, breaking hard on the strand.  When he’d first seen the property, ten days ago, he’d seen (pyramid) the mansion from the road.  It’s been looted already, he thought, staring up at the hundred-yard monument.  Then he’d stopped himself, clenched his eyes, and when he opened them, five long seconds later, he’d started his preliminary investigation of the sprawling cedar shingled Cape.  Wycek was not given to sentimentality, but it reminded him of dancers he had known.

The client’s property had last been appraised at eleven million dollars.  Wycek put the house at a hundred seventy thousand, in labor and materials; the seven acre lot was, well – it was a more subjective matter, and beyond his skill or interest.  The purchase of the house seven doors north by a famous film director had helped the property values on this beach.  In common with many people the world over, Wycek and his ex-wife had, without any specific intention, seen every one of the filmmaker’s movies.  That fellow had made his money the glamorous way.  Mrs. Weiss’ husband was in scrap metal.  While less romantic, it was assuredly no more honest, and the results were plainly self-congratulatory.  The filmmaker’s lot was six acres, Mrs. Weiss had pointed out casually eight or nine times.  Though impressed, Wycek also doubted anybody had ever given Mr. Weiss their money by accident.

Wycek shivered again, and reached his left hand back to untangle the hood of the sweatshirt beneath his web harness.  The hood would dampen his hearing somewhat; with this offshore breeze the sense was significantly degraded anyway.  His bolt action Moisin-Nagant carbine in his right hand, he finally persuaded the heavy cotton over his ears.  It was immediately warmer.  Wycek returned to his vigil, his eyes tracking the bushes that ran perpendicular from the house to the sea, the rifle resting on his left forearm.  He internally flexed the muscles of his right leg, then his left, the still march of honor guards and snipers.  The Buckingham gents would have been proud, he thought.  Wycek didn’t visibly move at all, as he forced the still blood in his extremities to circulate.  He grinned at the imagined warmth of hunting in a tall beaver skin cap.   I should look into the marketing potential, he thought.  Lots of Brits moving here these days…

He glanced over his shoulder at the dewy glow infusing the crests of the hills behind him and figured about forty minutes until Mrs. Weiss woke.  Fifty-six minutes to coffee.  For now, he scanned the brush, listened, focused his eyes on concealments, and began again, still, alert, and cold.
There’d been no sign of the jackals this night.  That was not in itself surprising; jackals were, by definition, cunning bastards.  The problem itself was likewise unstartling.  He’d been a jackal hunter for four and a half years, and business was good.  Mrs. Weiss had gotten his name from a wealthy friend he’d serviced.  Like most of his clients, Mrs. Weiss had exercised some aggressive reserve when she first called him.  She’d admitted later she’d been ashamed.  That was in part what people paid Wycek for – he understood their problem.  He never judged.  On the contrary, he understood only too well.  A property like Mrs. Weiss’…  It was just a matter of time before you had a full-fledged jackal problem.  Jackals were his job.  Judge the victim of an infestation?  That was like blaming the survivor of a train wreck for the badly maintained tracks.

Hunting jackals consisted of this, mostly: staring at things, completely still.  Wycek did not feel at the height of his abilities tonight.  His mind kept wandering and he’d fidgeted half the watch.  Not outwardly – that would be suicide, at least professionally.  But his eyes had been unruly, unwilling to settle on the concealment that might have revealed, in time, the prey he was paid to kill.  Still, still, thought Wycek.  In truth, he wanted very much to go home, to his squalid apartment, and fall asleep in front of a particular (peregrine falcon) foreign language news service.  He didn’t speak any foreign languages; that was the point.  Wycek breathed deeply, and releasing the pleasant image of home, placed his eyes on a bush fifty yards from the house, toward the hammering surf.  After a moment, his eyes found the leaf he sought, one among tens of thousands.  It was an average leaf, for an overgrown hibiscus plant, speckled in bright three quarter moonlight.  He bored into it, half a football field distant.  There, discipline is all, he thought…  He concentrated the entirety of his conscious attention into the solitary leaf.  He concentrated and he ceased to exist.  Somewhere beneath that leaf there lurked a jackal.  His stillness spread.  For a yard around Wycek, there grew an absence of being.  Like a black hole, when hunting, Wycek was detectable only by what wasn’t there.  The leaf was everything.  He was hunting well.

Dawn had kicked the breeze up another ten knots.  It would be a good day for sailing, but it was a terrible morning for hunting.  He raised his old and trusted carbine, and grasped the end of the bolt firmly.  With his right hand, he gingerly squeezed the trigger, easing the knob forward to the uncocked position with the stiff fingers of his left hand.  There would be nothing to show for his work.  A light was on inside the beach house.  Time to give his report, drink Mrs. Weiss’ strong coffee, and drive the fifty minutes home.  To sleep.

The door from the deck to the living room was copied from one in a famous Nantucket whaling house.  It swung inward on magnificently oiled hinges.

“Going to be a breezy one, Mrs. Weiss,” Wycek called, closing the patio door behind him.  The living room was large by any standard, its ceiling partitioned by huge beams, fifteen feet above.  Four steps down, and nearly fifty feet away, the living room gave onto the foyer, directly ahead, with its antique door, hardwood floors, and glass domed roof.  To Wycek’s left was the formal dining room, overlooked by a second, much smaller sitting room.  The kitchen stretched beyond, drawing him with its early morning warmth.  He strode toward it.

“Oh?” answered Mrs. Weiss conversationally, as he entered.  “Here — have some bagel.”  In contrast to the designer labels she wore while gardening, while beachcombing, while at market, Mrs. Weiss’ morning costume was definitively shabby.  Comfort clothes.  With unconscious modesty, she pulled the lapel of her worn terry robe closed, with flickering, veined fingers, and handed him his coffee.  Some women did their aging up front, and some got it all at once, Wycek reflected.  Mrs. Weiss was fifty-odd and of the former variety.

“Just the coffee, if you don’t mind,” he said, habitually.

“You.  You’re skin and bones.”  She flitted to the stove, starting breakfast for her husband.  Wycek could just discern the hiss of plumbing, somewhere below.  Mr. Weiss would be upstairs in fifteen minutes, full of aggression, already preoccupied.  Wycek made a point of leaving before Weiss came to breakfast.  It was not the worn, self-assured affect of the old man that made Wycek uncomfortable.  Wycek was a worn, self-assured man himself.  The old man was quick and mean, and there was a wily urgency to the scrap metal millionaire’s small talk.  Socially ferocious people troubled Wycek.  When Senior Weiss habitually informed the room at large of the exact durations of his absences, Wycek was inevitably filled with dread, and the need to fly home to his lonely sheets.

It hadn’t taken long to conclude Mr. Weiss was as repelled by the Missus as Wycek was.  That wasn’t, in itself, proof of anything, of course.

Wycek smiled at Mrs. Weiss over the rim of the coffee mug, sipping.  He felt the liquid heat him to his sternum, where the sensation faded into the background of his ambient body heat.  He’d been colder than he thought.

“No sign of our problem last night.”

“There’s no comfort.”

“I’ll get them, Mrs. Weiss, or you don’t owe me anything.”  He looked at her freckled ear, prepared to hold her eye in a show of sincerity, if she’d cared to look up.

She didn’t.  “We discussed this,” she said.  “I wanted to have it solved before the kids came.”  She made no effort to hide her irritation.  There was a puckered sadness about Mrs. Weiss, always.  When she mentioned her children, it overtook her voice, her face.

“So you are definitely celebrating Thanksgiving here?”

“We always do.  Then Ted and I pack it up, Sunday, and go to Palm Desert for the winter.  It’s been years since we had Ethan with us.  He usually stays away.”  She looked up at him sharply, her brow suddenly knit.  “My daughter’s one of these ‘save the earth’ers.’  That… may be a problem tomorrow.”
Wycek smiled reassuringly.  “I’m sensitive to situations of this kind, Mrs. Weiss.  There will be no problems with your kids.”

She nodded, turned back to the stove. Her face relaxed, without actually smiling. “But you’re running out of time to… do your business.   I don’t mean to complain, I just…” She trailed off, her plaintive voice scaling two octaves before being whipped away by the range exhaust.

Wycek gulped the last of his coffee.  He was tired; behind his brow, gentle pressure pushed forward and down.  He grabbed his rifle from the corner, where he’d leaned it.   “They count on things like that, Mrs. Weiss.  They’re cunning.  But there are plenty of ways around it.  And holidays have a way of bringing them out.”

Mrs. Weiss grinned fiercely into the frying pan, scrambling her husband’s eggs.  She turned her head to him, her eyes half open.  “You’re out of your mind.”

On the stairs, Mr. Weiss called some unintelligible question for his wife. Wycek lingered a moment, then saw himself out.  This was not an easy hunt.

*                    *                    *

“The Weiss case was a standard pest removal.  Mrs. Weiss contacted me on (date given), at my office.  I did a standard evaluation, according to the procedures laid out in my Jackal Hunting Codex, (Prosecution Exhibit “G”) conducted on (date given) at her premises (address given.)  Her complaints included being awakened at night, by noises, by feelings of dread, by persistent animal sounds of an unverified origin.  Her husband, she indicated, was often away overnight; Mrs. Weiss, herself, had no definite occupation.  The premises were of a very high value, but had no organic defense or security system.  In short, it was a classic target for jackal infestation.”
–Thomas Wycek, Jackal Hunter, 12/11/–

The drive home, through the mountains, was followed by the first urge toward drink Wycek had felt in a year.  Standing still in his kitchen, amidst pizza boxes and containers of discarded Korean food, he’d run through a quick mental exercise, the habit of disciplined habit avoidance.  He’d gulped a glass of water, muttered something quick and worn, like an Our Father or broken resolution, and tottered sleepily and sober to his double bed.  He managed to set his cheap clock before sleep crawled through the unlaundered bedclothes and stole him like an early death.

Holiday traffic on the 101 south the next evening was negligible.  He’d woken, as always, four minutes before the alarm, refreshed but nagged by deeper fatigue.  He’d launched into routine, ignoring the idea of Thanksgiving, or giving, or thanks.  Most people, Wycek reflected as he drove, are either just finishing their pie, or asleep in front of the Patriots’ game.  Wycek hadn’t properly celebrated the holiday in three years.  He and Miami, his ex-wife, had made much of the day in their two years together, seeing in it both spiritual and sensual communion, opportunities too often lost in trivialities, frozen dinners, and utilitarian concerns.  Since his divorce, work had relentlessly poached upon such sentimental preserves.  This year and the last, there had been hunts to post; the year before that he’d spent Thanksgiving in a topless bar, methodically destroying himself in alcohol-engined moral decay.  That, happily, was a thing of the past, though Wycek still grinned when he recollected it.  He’d mastered his love affair with spirits as he had the other one-sided love of his life, and he now eschewed vice altogether.  He no longer indulged his weakness for women in expensive and fruitless pursuits.  If he still longed for softness and cheer, at least he no longer frittered himself away like a boatswain too seldom in port.

He signaled right, steered the white utility truck with the large “Thomas Wycek – Jackal Hunter” signs onto the exit ramp.  His mind wandered again.  He valued work, valued it perhaps too much, as a release from the responsibility of being.  But then, that was a judgment aptly rendered on most men of his race; it bore within its verdict many proud husbands, and staunch fathers.  He made a left, just catching a yellow light.  If he spent another holiday working, with no one awaiting him at home, then it was toward the better day, the one he’d spend among loved ones, in warmth and familial cheer.  He rolled his head, and settled back in the bench seat.  It was twenty-two miles exactly to the Weiss house.

And this is a fruitless line of inquiry, he thought.  Once a marriage ends, with both people living, you never really believe in another one.

It had been dark ten minutes when Wycek arrived at the Weiss house.  He drove by, lights off, looking into the driveway.  Two extra cars, garage lights on, and no one outside.  He parked on the side of the road, grabbed his rifle and a knapsack of gear, and walked the hundred feet back to the house.
Wycek crossed the brick paving of the driveway, toward the decorative (old skull) gatehouse that gave onto the courtyard between the garage and mansion.  His heels made a heavy sound, like a shoed horse, as he stared into the (murder holes) windows.  The gatehouse had guest quarters within, a two-story apartment unto itself.   Such hollow luxury, he thought.  There were more than enough bedrooms in the main house for the young Weisses.  This stood unoccupied year round.  Wycek had insisted on touring it when he’d made his initial inspection, though it had nothing to do with his hunting.  The place was spotless, dustless, perfectly kept up, awaiting guests who were never invited.  He sighed as he passed beneath the black panes that reflected the empty sky, into the tunnel that led to the yard.  He understood Mrs. Weiss’ family.  He felt no jealousy of them.

He entered the central court by the raised bricked walk that led to the front door.  He took a small stair on the left, ten feet inside, and descended to the lawn.  There was a ground floor entrance to the house here, and another covered path that led beneath the main walk.  A third path, left of the door, led to the beach, and he took this one, hitching his knapsack further up his shoulder as the brick paving abruptly gave way to sand, shushing his trod.

As he cleared the side of the house, the wash of the waves was suddenly louder, as if a door had opened onto the sea.  Faintly, above the ocean, he could make out the treble of women’s voices and classical music.  He considered posting his hunt on the second floor deck, as he had the night before.  He listened, remembered what Mrs. Weiss had said about her daughter’s political leanings, and decided the ground floor would serve better for the first watch.  He found a patio table and dropped his bag, unzipped it, and scrounged out five large rifle cartridges.  Pulling the bolt of the Moisin-Nagant up and back, he slipped one of the cartridges into the magazine, where with a springy click it seated.  He repeated the process four more times, reflecting.  The moon was still three quarters full and its ghosted fire danced upon the brass cartridges as they slipped into the breach.  Casual words Miami had said during the early part of their engagement echoed silently back to Wycek through the night’s damp stillness.  “That would hurt if you threw it at me.”  She’d been right.  The round was startlingly large, cased in a solid alloy jacket, with a muzzle energy superior to any contemporary rifle except the magnum big-game pieces.  The Chinks must have held the Yanks of good account in ’53, thought Wycek.  They handed their soldiers a bolt-action elephant gun, a cold weather uniform, and a book of prayers that all ended  “And may MacArthur die in his sleep.”

Now, on the other side of the Pacific, Wycek imagined the distant Chinese gun maker, fearing and hating him, and was comforted.  The round would reduce a cinderblock to morsels, but pass through a cantaloupe and leave the shooter an edible breakfast.  The effects of bullets are counterintuitive; the harder and faster they are, the less of a mess they make.  This only holds up to a point of course, and only relatively.  It would hurt if I threw it at you, Wycek thought.  Throwing it at you at half a mile a second…  well, that would hurt plenty too.

He drove the bolt forward, and with a metallic thick, the first round was chambered.  He was ready.  In honor of the Thanksgiving he was missing, he chose a piece of lawn furniture, already interred for the season in its thick canvas cover, and sat heavily down.  He’d do the first shift as close to comfortable as he could manage.  The noise of settling wood and escaping air ceased.  He was still.  He began to scan.  It was cold, and he was alive with electricity.  He could feel the jackals were here.
Later, he couldn’t remember what drew his attention to the holiday dinner upstairs.  He swore it hadn’t been a noise, not a specific, definite one.  Yet he couldn’t explain why this night, after ten nights of hunting, he broke with his long practiced routine, stole up the stairs to the second story deck, and snuck a glimpse of the Weiss family at dinner.  The only explanation he could give, and it was true, if not comprehensive, was he was inspired.

*                    *                    *

The Weiss Family.  As he’d toured the property on his first day, Mrs. Weiss had given him as much account of her brood as she had resource for.

Elena was older than her brother Ethan.  She’d been young, been unruly, been in trouble, been sent away and returned with a degree in Chinese poetry, a minor in childish pottery, and not a shred of repentance.  She lived a life of estranged sentimental contentment, was Wycek’s interpretation.  She rarely visited, but came more often than Ethan.

The younger Weiss was thirty.  He lived in the East, believed fanatically in the West, and sold cattle futures to oil barons and steel captains.  He had been home three times in twice as many years.  Wycek wondered, as Mrs. Weiss described her illustrious son, of whom she was so proud, how much more of a future those cattle might have had without Ethan.  Wycek couldn’t shake the sillies when men of industry were held up for his appraisal.  Even extolled, Ethan didn’t sound pleasing.
Wycek leaned against the whitewashed railing of the second story, staring through the patio doors into the dining room, trying to match faces with Mrs. Weiss’ descriptions.  The Weiss Thanksgiving had been opulent, the result of money and a maternal need to please.  Wycek watched his clients eat like a man who suddenly has a notion to steal a beautiful garment, and having instantly rejected the idea, still feels guilty under the helpful eyes of the salesperson.  The patio doors were divided into twelve panes, two panes across, and despite the expert efforts of the Weiss’ housekeeping staff, a film of sea salt thinly begrimed the glass.  Wycek’s view was limited to three pairs of hands, half a head of short, black hair, several utensils, and a plate of well-attacked food.  The feast had somehow given way to fighting.

Wycek had been hunting since his youth; certain senses, not belonging to any of the normal five, had long accompanied him on his postings.  He remembered now, being stilled, mid-stride, in a dense northeastern wood, in his teens.  A faint tremor had stopped him, and he’d peered intently, trusting, at each leaf, each shadow, searching for a cause.  His left foot had fallen asleep; he guessed it had been ten or twenty minutes before he’d seen the squirrel.  Actually, it had only been an eye, frozen and gray lidded, about twenty yards distant, eighteen feet up a pine tree, and he’d deduced the rest of the animal.  His target was masked entirely; only the rodent’s terrified attention had given it away.  He’d felt it.  At that age, his marksmanship had impressed him more than the remarkable sense that had allowed his shooting its utility.  He was older now.  Something was aware of him, still like prey.  His mind searched for the attention.

The disagreement at the table was well underway.  From below, the women’s high voices and the classical woodwinds had carried well over the bass of the breakers.  Here, the women’s voices didn’t tinkle, and the music seemed loud.  He never heard what the ground of the argument was.  Dinner broke up, before he could spot the stare that had keyed him.  The family was adjourning, to the vast living room, and he could see them each clearly.  The music quieted.  White-aproned help placed coffee.  Wycek glimpsed Mrs. Weiss’ daughter, Elena, smirking as she rolled gracefully across the room.   She turned and settled into an overstuffed chair, her face partially hidden by a houseplant.  The young man at whose dark hair Wycek had stared made a final remark to the seated family, and turned to the patio door.  Behind Ethan, his father bellowed a deafening “NO!”

Most of Wycek’s initial impression of Elena Weiss was lost in his scramble to not be found a peeping Thomas.  He hurriedly put the coveted garment back on its hanger, and raced down the worn wooden steps to resume his professional duty.  As the finely featured young man reached the patio, Wycek was taking the steps by threes.

He heard dress shoes on the deck above him when he hit the sand at the foot of the stairs.  He stopped there, breathing in on every third breath impulse, artificially stilling his pulmonary function.  He waited, back to the deck, with closed eyes, judging the radiance of his existence.  He smiled ironically.  This was decidedly bad hunting.  He could have spotted his gasping, startled self in a mall at Christmas.  The footsteps above him stopped, and he heard the distinct snick of a lighter.  A full minute later, the steps moved five feet.  To the railing, thought Wycek.  His breath had slowed.  He crept around the six by six pylon that supported the stairs and stepped silently onto the deck, looking up through the planks above at the feet of the young man.  Wycek disappeared.

A good deal of the man’s cigar vanished, and twice Wycek felt Ethan’s eyes on him.  Wycek had time to wonder at how much inutile noise people make, when they think they’re alone.  Ethan habitually smacked his lips, with no apparent cause.  Eventually even he was still.  In the silence, a skunk emerged with the tiniest tremor of bushes at the side of the yard.  He looked briefly at the hole that Wycek had created in space, and resumed his predatory waddle through the beach sand.  He passed a scant three feet from Wycek’s boots, and somewhere deep inside the hunter, a presence smiled smugly.  The skunk stopped.  He looked at Wycek doubtfully, as if betrayed, and hurried across the sand, humping and extending comically.

Up yours, skunk, thought Wycek.  Had you cold.

“Stinking bastard,” said a voice above him.

Wycek stilled.  Above him, there was silence, but he could sense anger like the hum of fluorescent lights.  There was a whisper of cloth, and Wycek had time to think –a sleeve – before a terra cotta urn of geraniums arced gracelessly overhead, wobbling in uneasy parabolas.  It landed with a soft thud and a faint tinkle, just shy of the bushes on the windward side of the yard, a full second behind the skunk.  The potted plant landed perfectly upright, a statistical and physical anomaly.

“Whuh!” came an amazed cry from above, and Ethan sprinted down the stairs, around the deck, and ran five paces past Wycek toward the geraniums, still holding a lit cigar.  Wycek winced.  The young man stopped abruptly, stiffly raised himself to full height.  There were ways out of this, Wycek knew, but he hesitated, and gave up.  Ethan turned slowly, and looked doubtfully back at Wycek.  They stared at each other for some time.  Wycek knew this situation well, knew what the other was feeling.  He doubted Mrs. Weiss’ son was making much sense of this, as he stared at the man in hoodie and black tactical gear, holding the Korean War era bolt-action rifle.  Confusing the rich perhaps wasn’t Wycek’s job, but it was, for him, sometimes a benefit.  He was mentally planning a line of coffee mugs based on this theme, when two things happened with surprising violence: the momentarily forgotten skunk reemerged, hindquarters reared, startling the windward bushes, and the man staring at Wycek began to transform.

Wycek hallucinated.  It happened without prompting, without warning, like a remembered smell or a good idea.

The man’s face began to waver.  Wycek understood the importance of this transient metamorphosis; he tried to wait the tenth of a second his excited optical sense required to complete the revision.  Hunter’s instinct won out, and the clue would be lost.  Wycek dove to his right, onto the deck.  He landed beneath the enameled table that bore his kit bag, and with his free left hand pulled a chair over himself.  Time accordioned like a car crash; minutes later Wycek would hear the interrogative Ethan shouted at him, hear the louder but more general invective as the skunk’s implausibly potent juice sprayed the man and everything within forty feet with stinking, foul, musk.

His right shoulder was warm and painful, and he’d barked the outside of his right knee.  The chair was resting uncomfortably on his neck.  He was otherwise fine.  He brought his left hand to his nose, whiffed.  Nothing.  Seconds later, the ladened air wafted slowly over the porch like nausea.  Wycek shrugged the chair off, and climbed stiffly up, careful not to touch anything.  Mrs. Weiss’ son was still, looking back at the receding rustle in the bushes.  He twisted from the torso, facing Wycek in horror and disbelief.

“Oh – oh - ah…” He broke off, and looked back at the bushes, then at his cigar, which he dropped with a look of disgust, then at the bushes.

“Goddamnit!”  And he stormed past Wycek toward the house, a bubble of stink preceding him.  He stopped before he’d reached the door, and turned to Wycek.  “You made him do that!”

“I can say with confidence I did not.”  Wycek sniffed shallowly.  Skunk had had a full bag.  It was going to be two days before the smell was gone, even with the ocean so close.

“This is private property.”  Ethan said sharply.

“I’m aware of that.”  Wycek inwardly sighed, but deliberately matched the man’s outward bristle.  –Corporate types are so tough.  Watch, he’s going to use a technical term.  Fill up his air bladder and puff out his gills!  Look out!

“I can have you apprehended.  This constitutes trespassing and assault.”

Wycek made a concerted effort to arrange his features into the very picture of officiousness.  “I’m certain you are right, sir, but as I’m an employee of your mother, and without spray glands, I’m confident your complaint rests solely with the skunk.”

Mrs. Weiss’ son eyed Wycek with genuine doubt.

“I believe his vulnerability to litigation is dubious, unfortunately.”  Wycek winced, wished he’d resisted.  The son scowled evilly and turned on his heel, crossed a few planks houseward, and ripped the door handle down in full temper.

After a brief pause, Wycek added, “Downstairs is locked.”

The son sagged.  Three breakers exploded hollowly on the strand.

“Drop those clothes and swim for ten minutes,” Wycek said calmly.  “That’ll knock it down a couple pegs and keep you from spreading it around.  As for the remainder, you’ll need Bloody Mary’s, and in quantity.”

“I think you had better wait for me inside,” the young man said quietly.  He had looked almost vulnerable for a moment, as Wycek had spoken.  Now his act had returned.  Perhaps it’s not an act, thought Wycek, waiting for the man’s next move.  Maybe he really is, deep down, a hard-on incapable of real threat.  Like his father.

After regarding Ethan another moment Wycek shrugged, and turned his back to him.  “I wouldn’t venture in there as you are,” he called over his shoulder.  “You know how your mother is.”
As Wycek reached the second floor patio door, a casual ascent later, he heard a splash and an expletive from the ocean.  He reflected as he pushed the brass door handle down.  It hadn’t been the son eyeing him over dinner.   He knew that for certain.

*                    *                    *

“Properties, like any complex system, Your Honor, such as an automobile or a human body, have sophisticated and often misleading means of expressing underlying problems.  These problems cannot be effectively approached symptomatically.  A lateral approach, examining all data, especially ostensibly non-related peripheral data gives a broader and therefore more complete picture of the overall system than a highly detailed, specifically limited approach.  One must first understand how the property is meant to work, in a thorough but broad sense, before one can perceive any possibility of reestablishing harmony within the overall system.”
–Thomas Wycek, Jackal Hunter, 12/13/–

Upstairs, the women were recumbent and startled into quiet by Wycek’s intrusion.  He stood a moment at the door.  He had meant to open with a sympathetic account of what had just happened to Ethan, but to his surprise, he was invited to partake of the cooling coffee service.  Mr. Weiss had already repaired to some inner lair, and this troubled the hunter slightly.  Wycek leaned his rifle against the doorjamb and accepted the women’s invitation as calmly as he could manage.  It was only coffee with a client, after all.  Nothing to be excited about.  The forty feet of bare leg showing beneath Elena’s immodest skirt was client leg, at one remove no less.  Nothing to be overly concerned with, or aware of, or Christ save him, remotely fascinated by in any way.

“Mr. Wycek, this is the daughter I told you about,” said Mrs. Weiss.

Wycek grinned stiffly and nodded hastily toward the young woman.

“Lovely,” said Elena to no one in particular.

“Black, please,” he said, ignoring the unvoiced condemnation of the maid with the silver carafe, the singular glare of a servant serving a servant.  Her creamer hand retreated.  Wycek smiled, looking into Elena Weiss’ plainly wicked brown eyes.  Her eyes stared easily back.  The room seemed very still.  Somewhere, a stereo system whirred as it changed discs.

“Habla ingles?” he whispered several decibels below room tone to the serving woman.  “Habla INS?”
The woman stopped glaring and quickly straightened.  A wave of Mrs. Weiss’ tremulous left hand dismissed her.  Wycek reminded himself to eschew a proffered refill, when it was inevitably and vengefully foisted on him.  Quiet baroque music not composed by Bach chirped math and the room’s energy settled into patience.

“Well?” Mrs. Weiss began.  She looked well, and the dim lighting was fair to her.
“Fair,” said Wycek, voicing the sequence of his thought like an abruptly awakened dreamer.
“My mother says you’re in pest control,” said Elena, “and I think that’s perfectly horrible.”
The pain in his cheeks made Wycek aware that he was grinning like the victim of a strychnine poisoning.  He couldn’t stop.  Like a bashful chump in a grade-school play, Wycek felt intense scrutiny washing over each pore of his face, like a sunlamp at irresponsible propinquity.  He tried to rally.  He suddenly wanted very much to be eating something.

“Oh, don’t bother him, Elena,” Mrs. Weiss scolded.  “She has opinions on everything, Mr. Wycek.  Don’t you get her started.”

It seemed an age since anyone had spoken to him.  He cast back to remember what Elena had said.
Elena held his hot eyes with her cool ones.  “Mother, don’t you have elixirs or aliens to see to?”
Mrs. Weiss made a sound like a sneeze.  “I don’t see…” she began.  Her eyes flitted to the windows, out onto the deck, and hardened after a moment.  “You’ll be telling him about your corns next,” she said, dully.  “My daughter is short of conversation but long on confession.  She hasn’t got my class.”
“I have corns, Mr. Wycek,” said Elena, arcing the toes of her right foot toward him.

“So do I,” he said, with momentary relief.  He halted, sure he’d spoken rashly.  Some Wycek, present but not actually in the room, stood gawking at a vast mocking audience, seeing, deaf, unable to hide.  He wondered what miracle would staunch the flow of stupidity from him, bleeding his dignity dry.
“You see, mother, we now have two things in common.”  Mrs. Weiss refused to return her daughter’s conversational glance.  Elena continued patiently.  “We have corns and confessional tendencies.  I get around, so I have an excuse for the first and none whatsoever for the second.  What are yours, Mr. Wycek?”

“Your son will no doubt be in favor of my trade, whatever his previously held views,” said a different Wycek evenly to Mrs. Weiss, unaware of what was happening to his sad, emotional cousin.  “I’m sorry to report he has just been sprayed by a skunk.  At very close range.”

“There must be some mistake.  That’s fratricide.  Ethan is a skunk,” said Elena, and opening her throat, gave vent to a sonic assault in many ways like a human laugh.

Elena looked very much like the rest of her family.  Her hair was longer by fashion, but the same color as her kin’s.  Her eyes and musculature gave attractive glimpses into what Mr. and Mrs. Weiss must have seen in each other.  Her waist was by far the longest of the family - the sort of human genetic variance Wycek found irresistibly perplexing.  Did a longer waist give her better survivability?  Increase net genetic perpetuance?  There was no time to consider this, as her laugh, while also aberrant, was demandingly inconsistent with a thriving genome.  It was a sound to make seasoned waiters drop plates.

The feral baying had hardly crescendoed into staccato barks when Mrs. Weiss called the fun to a halt.  In a confused flurry of maternal concern and feminine disgust, she inquired what the most effective means of simultaneously treating and banishing her son might be.  Wycek tried to pull his eyes away from Elena’s outwardly pretty throat to answer his client.  Elena caught his eye, unashamed and grinning.

“Tomato juice, mother,” she said, contemptuously.  She stretched her legs, one pale calf over the other, and sank more deeply into her chair.  “I think it’s terribly apropos.”

“She’s absolutely correct,” said Wycek quickly.  “The sea water will help, but he’ll need highly acidic fruit juice, and a lot of it.”

“He’s in the water?” Mrs. Weiss asked, barely loud enough to be heard over the axiom in D minor playing through hidden speakers.  “But…” She tottered toward the windows, hurrying but betrayed by the room’s huge open space.  There was time to watch, to shift uncomfortably, and to watch a while longer before she reached the glass overlooking the deck.  She glared out.  The music caressed the outline of some divine geometric figure, paused for a quarter note, and began a new variant, in an endless tonal proof of God’s essential order.  Mrs. Weiss shook her head, able to see nothing without, the inside too bright and the outside too dark.

Elena finally grew annoyed.  “He’s fine, mother.  For the love of Mel.”

Wycek reflected on the reversal of the normal Way he’d just stumbled on.  Usually it’s the inside that’s dark -

“It’s terrible,” Mrs. Weiss interrupted, staring, seeing nothing but her own reflection.  “No, he’s ruined the night again, it’s just terrible.”  She put her tired right hand, stilled, for once, to the side of her mouth, and walked away from the man and woman in her living room, disappearing down the stairs beyond the foyer.

A long silence fell between Wycek and his client’s daughter.   The Mexican-American maid appeared on cue, grinning like an opiated ass, and begged Wycek to have more coffee, which he firmly declined, aware without forensics that the laxatives dissolved in that one cup of French roast would sump his bowel for a week.

“You don’t like my laugh, do you?” asked Elena.

“It must be stopped,” said the other Wycek, coolly playing with the perfectly manicured nails on its smooth ghost hand.  “And who, or what, is Mel?”

When Wycek was in his teens, he’d seen a one frame editorial comic strip, attending a topic he’d not noticed, which consisted of a line drawing illustrating the simple turning of phrase: “No man is an island, but some are big promontories.”  He’d found this very funny indeed, and for days afterward had been moved to laugh over it at random times, in public places, much to his momentary embarrassment.  So it was odd, even bizarre, that years later, when he and Miami had been married, he’d selected a long finger of land, jutting into the Atlantic, on which to be wed.  He’d stood at the tip of the spit, and she’d walked down it, accompanied by the manager of her dance troupe, as they referred to it in the trade.  He’d told her, and himself too, that it, and consequently she, symbolized his link to land, to life, and that by walking the thirty rocky paces from terra firma to his post next to the breakwater lamp, she was creating a physical metaphor of what had always been the fact of their life together.  It was narcissistic, and the genuine and frankly acknowledged sentimentality was embraced by both, and intrinsic.  They were both undeniably touched when, undaunted by forty-knot winds, she and her bouncer-boss had somehow made it to him.  And if the entire wedding party missed what words were spoken by the brine-soaked alcoholic JOP, the ruined clothes and subsequent head colds lent a funny and unavoidable reality to the proceedings.  She had taken the walk, whatever the hazards or shame.  And later he had somehow been unable to shake the sudden intruding memory of that stupid cartoon.  The small part of his consciousness not touched by reception bourbon had searched the faces in the VFW hall for recognition of the punch line.  He’d chosen his crowd well.  None of them seemed to get it.

Elena dispersed the help, admonishing them to be prompt the next morning, and tidied the huge kitchen in a general way while Wycek watched, passively following her.  A few minutes before, as they’d shared silences in the living room, there had been a shriek from downstairs and a brief conversation between a clarinet and an ardently blown tenor saxophone.  Pipes had gurgled and thumped, and Elena had suggested they see what card games the domestics could play.  He’d agreed too readily to everything, acted delighted until he thought his hebetude complete.  If Elena had noticed, she apparently liked her men stupid.  She’d made no ill-fitting remarks, no indication of baiting or boredom.

The maids had scowled peevishly at him, too overtly made a show of the fresh carafe of coffee.  They’d declined any comprehension of English, still more fervently denied Elena’s solicitation of a low stakes poker game.  Whereupon, they were given their day rate, in cash, with no holiday bonus, and sent packing.

“No game, no tip,” she’d said pointedly to Wycek.  Two of the girls had glanced knowingly back at her.  She was simple in dress, in expression, and it was her frank embrace of simplicities that made her behavior hard to place.  Wycek gathered that was how Elena wanted it.  He leaned and perched to accommodate their incidental conversation, and found he found it easy to answer her.  The warmth of the sunlamp remained; the scrutiny had mercifully gone.  It was quarter to one when Elena suddenly yawned, covering her mouth with surprise.  She returned to her point, but her body said it was soon headed elsewhere.

“I find the idea of shooting little stupid mammals absolutely ghastly, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t take pleasure in it, for what that’s worth,” he responded.

“What I find of worth is the stillness you mentioned.  Do you just have a need to seem special, or is it true that you stand absolutely still when you’re hunting?”  She looked at him closely, watching his body language.  She had stressed the absolutely as far as a word can go, without breaking down.
He was quiet for a moment.  “It is completely, totally, true,” he said without reservation.
“Then I want to see it.  You’ll hunt from the extreme west corner of the first floor deck tonight.  That is where I’m sleeping.”  Her wicked smile was back, a smile of the eyes, and somehow at odds with them.  “Well, just inside, I mean,” she added, giggling.

“If you like,” he said.

“I have a thought such stillness might overcome my natural insomnia.”

She looked over his head for a few seconds, as if considering adding to this.  Finally, she yawned abruptly, and walked to a door at the back of the kitchen.  Wycek could not immediately recall where it led; their talk was over, that much he recognized.  She turned from the door, no doubt aware of the dramatic effect.

“You do enjoy this talk, don’t you?”  Her face was neutral again, at peace.  “I don’t talk to you like most people?”

“If a sailor adrift for a calendar month can truthfully say a glass of cold, fresh water is refreshing, then I find your conversation pleasant.”  He savored the words as he spoke them, proud of his unexpected eloquence.

“You chew everything to death,” she said, “Can’t you just taste?”  She looked at him, her face tensed at the brow.  “Just swallow?”

He looked back a long time before answering, gauging his truth against consequence.  At a certain point in life, determined by the sum of a particular variety of minutes and seconds more than the general accumulation of years, it happens that some people find truth the lesser of evils, whatever gains might be had more immediately for a lie.

“No, Elena.  I’m sorry, and I can’t just.”

“Fair enough.  You have something to learn from me.”

He winced as she flicked her eyebrows at him, and turned through the door.  The hunt was going straight south, and he was absolutely, incontestably, willing it.  What was the point of developing professionalism, he wondered, smiling sickly at the back of her head, if what you learn is less potent than what you wish?

Wycek the Peaked stood facing southwest, on the western most corner of the Weiss’ first floor deck, not far from where the skunk had launched its chemical warfare attack.  The moon was wearing veils, the wind was mild, and the geraniums had swallowed Wycek’s earthly presence totally.  Mel bless him, he was hunting, despite the evening’s many obstacles.

He’d always been in love with strippers.  He’d known, in the way honest men secretly seek to marry their mothers’ better attributes, not reckoning the rest of her character will follow, that he would ultimately marry an exotic dancer.  He’d seen his first at a county fair when he was very young, having gotten separated from his parents.  He spent most of an hour wandering, afraid to cry, seeing his vulnerability mocked in the rough faces of ticket takers and drunken patrons.  Like a broken sparrow knows its odds, he made his reckoning and struggled along the side of the dirt track, until he found a quiet corner in which to prepare himself for the ugly fate he knew was coming.  It was in this nest, a stack of hay bales twice his height at the back of a livestock barn, that he heard the dark music over his sniffles of self-pity.  Out of a morbid sense of futility, he followed the sound, sure his lot could not possibly grow worse.

Stuck behind a small herd of stanchioned award-winning cattle, a slightly overweight traveling showgirl received the full-figured appreciation of a mixed crowd of junior farmhands and midway technicians.  Wycek’s timing was perfect; her set had just begun.  She had slowly revealed her pale, freckled body, throwing her worn costume pieces safely beyond the reach of her patrons, one by one.  When she had eventually discarded her undergarments, startlingly new in comparison to the rest of her clothes, Wycek had had his first hallucination.

He’d understood something very important that night.  Even when his mother pried from his father where the boy had ultimately been found, embarrassment hadn’t come to him.  Wycek’s father had modeled the feeling comprehensively, so it wasn’t a lack of exposure that prevented Wycek’s cheeks reddening.  No, he’d learned something about himself that night, squatting in the steaming offal of prize Holsteins.  He did not mistake the show the woman put on for the woman herself.  Somehow, he’d understood the smile and the ease of her body were simply skills, like reading or remembering important dates.  He’d known, without words or cognition, that the interrupting bursts of frantic physical activity were an analogue for something he very much desired, though he was unclear, at the time, why he felt that.  He knew, watching her writhe, that the peace he suddenly knew, like a carsick traveler wiping his mouth by the side of the road, was the experience of direct knowledge.  Something was expunged, and relief flooded in.  He wanted a woman who was the sum of her skills, not limited by her inheritance and development.  He wanted professional femininity.

His father had explained to him that fair grounds were extremely dangerous for four year olds, and admonished him to never wander again.  Wycek agreed, but the scolding was redundant and was trivial in the light of knowledge his trek had ignited.  His father had been accidentally killed on an agricultural exchange to Korea that same year.  Wycek had bitterly resented his father for not sharing that strange night with him.

*                    *                    *

The striking of a lamp in the room behind him abruptly cast the hunter’s shadow twenty feet across the sand.  His night vision was instantly wrecked.   He cursed mentally, momentarily prey to irritation.  His geranium basked in incandescence; the beach beyond the ellipse of illumination was a solid black, indistinguishable from sea or sky.  Wycek was unsure how long he’d been hunting.  From the moon’s descent he reckoned it was growing well toward dawn.  He stood frozen to the marrow, trying to blink the light away.  It was too bright to be a lamp.  It was much, much too bright.
Elena had said she was ready for sleep around one, he thought.  It must be nearer four, now.  So what is this?  And where the hell did she find a ten thousand watt bulb?

A movement within occulted the glare, momentarily, interrupting his thoughts.  Ambient light still lit the sand before him, his outline still stood distinct, but the light was, for a moment, covered.  Then the obstruction moved, disappearing to Wycek’s right.

At first, the dance had the character of shadow puppetry, and he was inclined to think Elena was playing a wicked nocturnal joke on him, unaware that he had come closer to his prey in the last few hours than he had in ten nights’ hunting.  Then the silhouette of her full, slightly upturned breast appeared, and he was instantly assured that this was not the stuff of kid’s parties and camping trips.  Her shadow slipped with tantalizing slowness from the hard edge of the doorframe, and Wycek stood rigid, as promised, breathlessly awaiting ghost Elena’s courtship.  The rest of her torso appeared in profile, a distinct negative on the sand.  The shade was still a moment, quivering slightly, as if waiting for the correct measure of an unheard tune.  It must have come.  Her arms reached languorously for his shadow and began to caress, and he stared still, straight ahead, and let the dance enfold him.
Wycek watched in moody reverie.  Ultimately, Miami had proven to be a bad woman, and untrue.  By the time he’d arrayed his evidence, largely intuitive and hallucinatory, before her, in the shared squalor of their kitchen, her infidelities had numbered into the teens.  He’d been startled at the abuse she’d suffered betraying him, the indignities to which she’d very willingly subjected herself.  In all, it had amounted to nothing personal, and everything.  He’d tried earnestly to forgive her, and she’d tried no less to forgive herself.  It was finished.  The divorce had gone almost unnoticed, a paper formality, like a death certificate, a redundant insult to the grieving.

It was impossible to recall all the steps; she danced too well for him to say, later, how she had come to be posed, have her hands, and legs, and hips, and breasts just thus.  Certain of the poses survived the immediate experience in snapshot memories, but the dance itself was beyond specific recollection, like jazz, and as indelible.  Her chest swelled, her legs moved just so, now her hands appeared to caress his hips.  Whatever might come of it, Wycek was certain that she must love him.  He was not cynical, but people who know life too intimately can seem so.  Knowledge, true, penetrating knowledge can be love, can be a greater love than the feeling that inspires poetry or poets.  The dance Elena Weiss performed the morning after Thanksgiving was the greatest gift a woman had ever given Wycek.  He would always remember it.  He would never mention it to anyone.  Its significance could only suffer in description.

Months or lifetimes later, the light vanished as abruptly as it had come, and with as little warning or reason.  Wycek stood as before, but trembling slightly, confused and moved.  The dance had reached a rhythmic natural conclusion, a moving dumbshow of the original organic ending.  The dance hadn’t ended there, however, and the gentler moves that had followed Elena’s extremely athletic burlesque had intrigued and touched him more deeply than the provocative precursor.  Her shadow and his had consummated something truer than flesh, he was sure.  The interruption was harsher than closing time.

He’d been absorbed, deep within himself, for some time, when he heard a door open quietly on the first floor porch.  Wycek sensed Ethan before he heard him speak.

“You want to get your fucking ass in here?”

Wycek admitted he did, though he reckoned for altogether different activity than the young Weiss had in mind.

*                    *                    *

“Your Honor, I mean no comedy or contempt when I cite as my main evidence of innocence the very fact that these charges are being made against me.  If I’d been attempting what he claims, he’d not be here to say so.”
–Thomas Wycek, Jackal Hunter, 12/11/–

Wycek had gone back to school soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait.  One night a commentator had mentioned the possibility of reinstating the National Selective Service and the next day Wycek had enlisted for a tour of education.  He dropped out the day the first armored recon unit crossed the 32nd parallel, but during this considerable interval, he redefined the term ‘non-traditional student’ for most of the instructors of his intended major, Ceramics, and spent more than his share of time in campus coffee shops.  He’d listened to the shallow quips of the liberals who opposed the intervention.  They were, inevitably, the same people he later ended up servicing professionally, married at once both to outwardly nonconfrontational politics and their own comfort.  Explaining the contradictions of this to a liberal was begging for a conversational Vietnam, and he’d long accepted that his clients’ need for blamelessness was an unavoidable symptom of the nation’s pandemic jackal problem.  Listening to wealthy middle aged post-baccalaureate spinsters scoffing at terms such as “friendly fire” and quipping that such ordinance wasn’t what it claimed, and how this was further evidence of the Corporate Oil Conspiracy, eventually became more than the hunter’s rock-solid nerves could handle, and a scalding or four later he’d learned, like Nixon, how to recognize a lost cause.

Hunting jackals was an opportunity to confront the client as well as help them.  It was the ultimate civic service, as Wycek saw it.  He helped bring culpability to the people who employed him, who were unavoidably implicated in his act of violence; they were rid of their debilitating problem in the same easy squeeze of the trigger.  The absence created by the hunt also rid the space occupied by the hunter, briefly, of conscience.  On the few occasions Wycek had been arrested for killing a jackal, he’d been acquitted.  Jail was often a welcome relief after a posting.  It kept him off the sauce.  He caught up on his sleep.  He wrote.  He did a lot of thinking in jail.

*                    *                    *

Ethan walked to the far end of the room, around a corner that led to a staircase, as Wycek paused on the threshold to knock sand out of the grout of his boots.  Weiss reappeared a quiet slam later behind the paneled bar, at the back of the basement recreation room, awaiting genteel patrons who drank only mediocre cognac or top-shelf whiskey.  Wycek took in the sofa and matching leather chairs, trying to locate the high ground.  The young Weiss gestured to one of the bar stools across the mahogany from him.  His hair was wet, his skin bright pink, and he still stank.  Wycek obligingly crossed to the bar.  He’d hear the young man out and go home.  He pulled the middle stool of three, and sat.  Ethan had already poured himself a generous splash of excellent single malt scotch, and he drank it in a gulp, eyeing Wycek shrewdly.

“I’d have to figure a Polock for something this stupid,” he began.

Wycek held the younger man’s eyes.  He’d largely forgotten the joys of man baiting.  His clients were usually more thankful than this, or childless.

“I’m about as Polish as you are Jewish,” Wycek answered gently.

Ethan started.  “I was bar mitzvahed, you prick,” he began.  “I still celebrate Hanukah.”

“And I celebrate pirogues, and I don’t think that has much to do with anything,” said Wycek.  There was a pause, and Ethan eyed him indignantly.

“And we can trade meaningless racist quips all night,” continued Wycek, “Or you can arrive at your topic.”  He stretched his shoulders and neck, watching the young Weiss digest the offer.  He realized the rifle was still in his right hand.  He hesitated, and put it between his legs, against the bar.  Ethan was arousing the ire in him.  Wycek enjoyed knowing an accident, a sharp kick, for instance, would discharge the rifle and make a melon-sized hole in the bar below Weiss’ chin.  Whatever happened after that was a ballistic crapshoot, but it probably would not go Ethan’s way.  Ethan didn’t react, Wycek noticed.  He needed to have weapons pointed at him more often.

“What do you figure us for, huh?” Ethan asked, a little impatiently.  “I mean, you must take us for easy marks.”

Wycek furrowed his brow.  “I’m afraid I’m not with you, Ethan.”

“Ethan?  What, you’re a member of the family now?”  Ethan poured another drink, then poured one for Wycek.  “I’m calling a halt to your employment, Mr. Wycek.”

Wycek watched the Weiss boy patiently, unsure what was at stake for him.  “My business is with you mother.  It’s for her to call off or continue, as she sees fit.”

“You make your living taking advantage of the elderly, is that it?  Is that your angle?  I know all about your kind.  You terrify old people, raise hell, then come in and present yourself as the understanding specialist who can solve the problem.  The people are so beleaguered, you’ve emptied their bank accounts before they have a chance to work it out.”  Ethan smirked at him; then he shook his head and raised his glass.  He paused before sipping.  “I’ve dealt with your kind of scum before, you know.”
Wycek watched Ethan drink, a little jealous of the man’s liberty with spirits.  He waited until the drained glass had hit the bar and he had Ethan’s attention before he spoke.  “First of all, your mother is neither old, nor feeble.  Second, she found and contacted me, which would endow me with truly supernatural powers of prediction if the infestation problem she contacted me about was indeed of my devising, as you suggest.  Indeed, such a gift would be worth considerably more employed to other purpose.  But I digress from my third point, to wit; I receive no payment until the problem is resolved to the client’s satisfaction.  Once solved, the client pays me a prearranged fee.  So I’m hard pressed to see how this hunt resembles the work of these scum you know so well.”  Wycek paused.  Ethan seemed genuinely surprised by the information.  He broke the silence by pushing the neat scotch he’d poured for the hunter across the bar until it touched Wycek’s elbow.

“My father put you to this,” said the young Weiss with sudden certainty.  “God, I should have known.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Wycek began.

“Of course not,” Ethan interrupted.  Ethan cast a mean, wily look at Wycek.  When he proceeded, it was in a more conspiratorial tone.

“My father and I have been engaged in something of a… power struggle.  I own a large part of his assets, you understand.  I help him manage the family wealth.  And lately he and I have been… at odds, on some fairly sticky issues.  We fought about it tonight, actually.”

Wycek watched.

“You’re some kind of private muscle, right?” Ethan asked.  They both waited until Wycek was sure Ethan wasn’t taking a silence as a response.

“In some sense,” Wycek answered cautiously.

Ethan grinned.  “He brought you in to scare the family into backing him.  Don’t say anything.  Look, how about you tell me how much this ‘prearranged fee’ is, and I’ll double it – and you can work for me?”

Wycek held the young man’s eyes.

This has turned decidedly bizarre, thought Wycek.

After a long consideration of the young man’s offer, Wycek said, “I appreciate your offer, but it is quite incomprehensible.  I am paid to hunt jackals.  Nothing more.”

Ethan stared at him a moment, then motioned for Wycek to drink up.

“I don’t, thanks,” said Wycek patiently.

Ethan considered him.

“That’s what my mother said.  Let me get this straight,” he began, and then fell quiet.  He regarded Wycek as though the hunter had just sworn on his mother’s exhumed hand that Santa Claus was a living philanthropist with a house in Burbank.  The interval after Weiss’ prelude stretched interminably as Wycek thought of other comical metaphors that might equally aptly describe the young man’s expression.  He caved in and prompted Weiss.

“Please, let’s,” said Wycek warmly.

“You hunt jackals,” said Weiss.

“I do,” answered Wycek.

“And jackals are…”

“They are semi-predatory canines that prey on the slow, the weak, and the sick,” said Wycek, patiently, sure of his topic.  “Beyond their nuisance potential, which is considerable, they can seriously disturb a complex system such as this property.  In extreme cases, they will even kill.”  He finished lightly, hoping to avoid any appearance of threat to the young man.

“Wild dogs, which hunt in packs.  Like in a nature show,” said Ethan slowly.

“Like in nature shows, yes,” Wycek encouraged.

“Huh,” said Ethan Weiss, and sank against the back bar, squinting at Wycek.

A long pause ensued.  Wycek stared at the man, hoping the hallucinations might start again.  They didn’t.

“Are you sure what you’re talking about isn’t called a coyote?” Ethan asked, finally.  Wycek tried to curb a chuckle.

“Mr. Weiss, I can tell you for certain what I mean is not a coyote,” he said, trying to avoid offending the man, “I assure you.”  Imagine, he thought, a coyote…!  Wycek laughed.

“Okay.  Just so we’re clear.  Because, and it pains me to tell you this, while this continent, and this county in particular, is home to coyotes of various shapes and sizes, you will not find a jackal in this hemisphere, outside of a zoo.  Or in-side one that’s reputable.  So you’ll forgive me if I find the need for a full-time jackal hunter a little hard to credit!”  Ethan stopped, and refreshed his glass with two ounces of scotch, which he immediately belted.  He slammed the glass down and jutted his finger in Wycek’s placid face.

“You are either illiterate, which you’ve ruled out with your smart talk, or completely insane, which I have not, or you’re just a goddamn grifter taking advantage of my parents’ loneliness and gullibility.  Either way, you are done here!”  Ethan breathed hard through his nostrils, his finger still pointed accusingly at the tip of Wycek’s nose, millimeters shy of contact.

Wycek wanted very much for the man to stop shouting.  Wycek’s temper, and temperance, had always been a finely tuned restraint.  He had learned the value, and indeed the joy, of stillness, and this compensated for the rash sensuality that had led him to broadly indulge in pleasures of the flesh, as well as those of physical violence.  Like a wine glass topped to spilling, his passions were held tremblingly coherent.  Life was a series of jolts that fell like pebbles in the glass, ripples that tested his emotional meniscus, spending themselves without ever quite spilling.  The young Weiss had strayed from the society of politeness, and perhaps even consideration.  Wycek tried to still the glass, tried to right the psychic gyroscope he’d developed to such a pitch of resilience.

“Take your finger away, kid.”

Ethan did, then hastily tried fill the void of the abandoned gesture.  “Look, there’s good money in it for you if you’ll listen to me.  I’m not asking all that much, and…” Ethan paused, not noticing Wycek’s trembling, and refilled his own glass.  “I’m just asking you approach my father with a certain…request.”

“I have enough on my conscience without adding dishonesty,” Wycek said, outwardly patient.  Ethan had withdrawn his offending hand, but he was still too close.  Wycek wanted to close his investigation.  He could feel them.  He could hear their wet noses at the baseboards.  The jackals.  The jackals.

“Tell me about your father.  I’ve had my doubts.”

Ethan shrugged.  “We’ve all got our problems.  Mine is I’ve got myself into a situation, and I need my father’s signature to get the cash I need to make it go away.”  He paused, and pointedly sipped his scotch.  “Yours is, you’re an out of work alcoholic who doesn’t know how to get with the winning side.  Anyway, I’m sorry I wasted my time.  You’re so…”

Ethan paused, looking for the right word.

“So…fired.”

Wycek took this in, boiling.  He looked across the bar, at the slim, graceful man whose hands had never known toil, whose belly had never known want, and he grabbed the crystal highball Ethan had poured for him.  He downed the glass without a doubt, slamming it down.  It audibly cracked.  Weiss refilled it anyway, staring laughingly at Wycek all the while.  Wycek drank again, a rivulet of peaty liquid dripping in his lap.

It had been a long time, too long, and the feeling the drink left in his throat, in his belly, was like a childhood friend, come to comfort.  Wycek wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said very softly, “I think we may be stalemated, here.”

Before Ethan could make sense of this, Wycek continued.

“I’ve never invented anything, apart from a good excuse or two, and I’m guessing you haven’t either.  So before you or anyone like you launches into a critique of my trade, I’d like to point out we can all safely say the so-called “way of the world” is not our fault, personally.  Fax machines, and freeways, and high-rise buildings are not without cost to human dignity, and health, and spiritual communion, and I candidly admit my profession owes its existence to the pangs of these unhealthy growths in our less and less aptly-called civilization.”

Wycek gestured with his glass, and the young man refilled it mid-air, looking at Wycek with thick reservation. The booze poured uselessly across Wycek’s forearm.

“I should mention right now,” Wycek continued, putting down the broken glass, “that any liberal who interjects trivia about holistic Native American practices is hereby challenged to put their private education to use, and propose a practical method by which to bring the possibility of harmonious living back to planet Earth.  Without putting the entire planet out of a job, I mean, and no, labeling oranges ‘organic’ doesn’t count.  Hey, I’ll start listening to you if you’ll agree to never use email or a cell phone again.  Or penicillin.  Ready for that?  Ethan?  No?  Ah, how quickly we arrive at the modern Luddite quandary.  We can light the tallow and die from bad cases of mumps or we can face facts and humbly decide the world is not going to change for our comfort.   In any event, I submit that anyone who thinks he or she has stumbled stoned into a better gestalt for interfacing with the world than the other six billion consumers hereabouts is perhaps paying more attention to their bong than to statistical reality.  But, here – find me a Red Indian and ask him which way of life is more effective.  He may tell you one thing or the other; but ask him which way is better at making whiskey and rifles, and laugh as he takes a swig.”

Ethan took one himself.  Wycek rose and grabbed the Moisin-Nagant.  He looked the young Weiss in the eye.  “Whiskey and rifles are the ultimate expression of Western civilization.  And I fully embrace that you have no idea what I’m talking about.  And you never will.”

Ethan didn’t, or if he did, he couldn’t immediately find a way of saying so.

“And now excuse me, but I’m going to go into the other room and make love to your sister.”

*                    *                    *

“I falsified no evidence.  I changed no record.  This account is factual and any inference to another’s state-of-mind or perception is duly initialed by the person in question, as you will see, for example, on page 22 of my hunt-journal.”
–Thomas Wycek, Jackal Hunter 12/13/–

She’d been waiting, half asleep, when he shut and locked the bedroom door behind him.  She’d rolled toward him onto her side, and smiled sleepily, without surprise, as he’d walked into the shaft of moonlight that pierced the glass doors to the outside.

“Ethan turned off the lamp,” she’d said apologetically.  “I told him I liked the look of you.”
“Thank you,” the hunter had said, at last.  He had knelt by the bed, laying his rifle down.  He held her face, looked closely into her eyes.  If she sensed a change in him since their talk, she had anticipated it well enough not to remark now.  She held his eyes, slipped her arm from beneath the bedclothes, and flattened her hand across his stomach.  It was taut and shaking.  He’d held her head, but his eyes had closed, in pain or remorse.  He repeated his thanks, again and again, softer and softer, until finally she was unsure if the sound coming from him was muttered gratitude or a sob.  Who could tell anyway – those two so often kept each other’s company.  Finally, without impatience, she had pulled his head to her chest.

“Relax,” she’d said to his hair.  “You may find I’m not worth all this,” and she’d gestured vaguely above him, where she imagined his feelings swirled.

He’d raised his head, at last, and his face had looked older, less animated, but filled with a worn, loving humor she hadn’t seen earlier.

She’d had many, many lovers in her life, with ever diminishing consequences.  She judged after, as light broke, he had as well, and the shallow breath of a fellow wanderer against her ribs gladdened her.  Good men are all testes and viscera, she’d thought.  She’d never felt esteemed, much.  Certainly no one had looked at her with such plainly scored worship.  Somewhere in the eddy of sex someone had knocked, and someone had shrieked thanks and forgiveness, but who had done what - she didn’t know, couldn’t remember.  She’d smiled as she watched the new day light the breakers, beyond her brightening window.  New days are so oppressive and so like one another until abruptly this one isn’t, she thought, and it feels like the world has begun again.
“In these organic systems damaged components can cause debilitating stress on the organ as a whole.  Worse than a critically damaged unit, is the component that left unhindered will not completely fail in its own functioning, but nominally continue, causing greater harm through its failure to fail.  This partially functioning component, or one that functions without integrity, will do massive, widespread harm to the system at large, even to healthy components in no apparent way linked to the degraded part.  These require excision with the utmost prejudice, though it mean the destruction of the damaged element.  They cannot be treated, and the system in its wholeness cannot survive with them in.”
–Thomas Wycek, Jackal Hunter, 12/14/–

There was nothing unusual about his arriving in the kitchen for coffee, just after dawn, insisted Wycek, apart from the lingering smell of old towels about him and the route he had taken to get there.  He heard the plumbing within the mansion groan, heard a toilet on the first floor flush, saw Mrs. Weiss half bent over the stove, making breakfast, as she had every day for many, many.  And he was new, and he was transformed, and nothing had ever happened before, to the hunter who arrived in the kitchen for coffee.

“Well, you get anything?” asked Mrs. Weiss bitterly, without looking up.

Wycek reminded himself that he need feel no worry or guilt, and answered her directly.

“I have come very close, but the system is disordered.  The extra people, the extra movement has made the prey cautious.  Despite that – I am very close to completing our contract.”  He accepted the offered mug of coffee, checking quickly that it had been freshly brewed.  One of the silver carafes stood on its head, like a penitent child, freshly washed.  The other was gone.

“Is this from last night?” Wycek asked cautiously, holding the mug a safe distance away.

“Ethan was stumbling around drunk this morning,” she said, “So I gave him last night’s and told him to sober up.”

Wycek savored this news as he sipped his very hot, non-laxative-laced coffee.

“Have some crumb cake,” Mrs. Weiss said, refusing to look up.

“I have never accepted, on principle, Mrs. Weiss, and I refuse again.  I’m sure it’s as perfect as cake comes.”  He sipped.  She made better coffee than any woman he’d ever met, not that this was much of a distinction.  He wondered if Elena made coffee like her mother.  He bet she did.  Of course she did.
“I’m afraid I misled you,” she began, still staring at the eggs hissing in the fry pan before her.  “We’re leaving today, not Sunday.  I’m afraid our need of you is at an end.”

Wycek was stunned.  He wondered at this announcement a moment, before the truth came to him.  Ethan, he thought.  Of course, he’d want me gone.  Wycek addressed Mrs. Weiss forcefully.

“Mrs. Weiss, I appreciate I may have upset your son, early this morning.  Believe me, he said the most contemptible things about your husband - ”

“Well?” Mrs. Weiss demanded, cutting him off.  She looked up from her frying pan, terry robe open to her drooping right breast.

“I mean no offence to you or your son, Mrs. Weiss,” Wycek began.  “But you hired me for a job, and I have endeavored to complete that contract in good faith, and I don’t see how it’s fair to fire me for defending your husband.”

She appraised him contemptuously, not noticing the brown smoke and acrid smell that began curling up from the eggs.  “What about this ‘contract’ didn’t you understand, Mr. Wycek?” she asked, impatiently.

Wycek couldn’t immediately think of a way of answering the question.

“I am here to kill your jackal, Mrs. Weiss.  There is no question in my mind you have a jackal problem.”

“When you killed Mandy’s ‘jackal’, you were in and out in four days,” she said, breathing heavily.
“Your friend Mandy’s problem was nothing more than a bogus creditor,” he said defensively.  “I made a few phone calls, showed up on his doorstep once, and he left her alone.”

Mrs. Weiss looked hurt, as if he had deliberately misunderstood her.  “You were good to Mandy,” she said finally, “You just don’t like me.”  She turned back to her frying pan, and to the blackened eggs within it.

Her scream of frustration drove him from the kitchen.  As she dumped the charcoaled breakfast into the sink, looking very much like she might cry, he strode away, toward the patio door, trying to piece together what his former client Mandy and the older Mrs. Weiss might have in common, apart from a grocer and garden club.

He knew he was within hours of solving the Weiss’ problem, forever.  He hated the animal that held his clients’ spirits prisoner.  It was unnecessary that he feel anything for his prey, but he took the offence of the jackal personally.  As a matter of principle, he could not abide any stay of execution.  The thought that the Weiss’ jackal would go unpunished was unthinkable, an affront to his dignity, his reputation, and this new, barely recognizable incarnation of himself.  He thought quickly, trying to calculate the number of minutes of sleep he’d managed.  It was enough, he thought.
He was at the patio door when he called curtly over his shoulder, a bit too loudly, “It’ll be dead before noon.”  He never heard her reply, if there was any, over the clang and sizzle of a frying pan.  He cocked the rifle and was on the deck, his heart and breath already quieting for the work before him.
Ethan had put his mother up to it, Wycek was sure.  Ethan was shaking the globe within which his family lived, hoping the snow would obscure him.  Elena was somewhere mere yards from him, he thought, perhaps still supine in her broad, warm bed.

Without warning, a clear thought, like a voice, caught up with him.  You are without want now, he thought.  Honor the gift.

The sun was behind him, the Pacific Ocean before him, in an array of spastic mirrors reflecting the love of the father of the planet.  He closed his eyes briefly, opened them on the geraniums, still perfectly poised in the sand, and was gone, a space within space.

He heard cursing, heard the patio door open and close softly behind him, and he was returned to living space.  A wet scrape of throat behind informed him of Mr. Weiss’ desire to speak.  Wycek returned to what clients laughingly called reality and pivoted.

Mr. Weiss wore a cheap leisure suit.  His right hand shielded his eyes from the ocean glare, as he walked tentatively toward Wycek.  He was grinning limply, his heart not really in it.  He drew alongside Wycek at the deck’s railing, glanced up at him, and turned to the sea.  Wycek watched him.  He seemed to be struggling with his topic, so the hunter tried to limber the man’s tongue with an inoffensive introduction.

“Your wife tells me you’re –,” Wycek began.

“It’s not me!” screamed Mr. Weiss, abruptly, enraged.  “I try, have you listened to her?”

“– leaving today,” Wycek finished.  He stared at Mr. Weiss a moment, before mentally rephrasing.  As twisted as the Weiss job had become, he reminded himself, he was determined to bring it to a successful resolution, and maintain his dignity and that of his client.

“I understand you and your wife are leaving early for Palm Desert,” Wycek said, as evenly as his conversational disorientation would allow.

“God help me, yes,” said the elder Weiss, much relieved.  “There are pools, and tennis courts, and golf pros, and mercy, Mr. Wycek, mercy.”

Wycek nodded briskly, as if he understood clearly, and sympathized.  His head whirled.  The system was falling into chaos.  The hunt could not be maintained like this.

“I thought you were…” the old man began.  Wycek inclined his head expectantly, like a dog playing at human comprehension.  “Well, you know… going to take care of things.”

Wycek felt a flush of indignation, but let it pass.  One could not expect the client to recognize the difficulties of his profession.  “I’m doing the best I can, Mr. Weiss,” he said modestly.

Old Weiss jerked like he’d been struck.  “Best?” Mr. Weiss shouted.  “She’s been alone in that bedroom more than a week, and nothing!”  He looked at Wycek a moment before walking five paces away, his hands pasted weakly on his hips.  “She’s stuck in there with her equipment and…” Weiss looked genuinely distraught now, and Wycek dismissed his own defensiveness.  The old man is really trying to share his suffering with me, Wycek thought.  Inexplicable as that hurt may be.

Mr. Weiss stared at him from the stairs a little longer, until Wycek held his left hand out in an offering of uncomprehending sympathy.  The old man shook his head sadly and turned, taking the steps slowly.  Wycek’s hand fell slowly back to his side, when he suddenly understood the meaning of Mr. and Mrs. Weiss’ words.

Wycek had succumbed to Mandy’s sadness, which had been too much like his own, on the surface, for him to reject it at first.  He had known Mandy.  He’d been hired to kill her jackal.  She had been divorced, left rich, and had a problem with an enterprising cheat.  If during his investigation he had been weak… He consoled his pride knowing Mandy hadn’t found him so.  So that was…

Wycek felt horror, then holy righteousness at the realization.  Was that what he’d been hired for, truly?  Why then had he stood his vigils, trying to untangle the impossible complexities of the property?  Why had his particular expertise been employed if the secondary techniques of a tennis instructor would have sufficed?  Wycek turned back to the sea, cross and hot.  Life was unreasonably full of betrayals, he thought.  No matter how old one got, no matter how experienced, there was always another depth to which one’s fellow man could sink.  He turned to the house, expecting himself to go within and confront the family.  The least he could do in defense of his honor and pride was hold forth, show them all for what they were.  He’d have a nice, well prepared speech for them and their kind and he’d go.  He’d go and he’d get good and drunk.  The statutes of his previous ways came back to him.  Wake up in your own bed with your shoes off and you can count it a win.  Well, he had no intention of winning tonight.

His hand hadn’t touched the brass handle of the door when he remembered Elena, downstairs.  They had soiled that, too.  They were trying to take even that from him.
He turned back to the sea, full of motion and remorse, unsure of himself for the first time in years.
How to reconcile with her? he asked the Pacific.

The Pacific was true to its name, and unhelpful.

After a year, an education, he felt his shoulders slip through their vertical range and settle heavily in their carriage.  He was beaten.  It was that simple.  He couldn’t very well leave his card with Elena.  He couldn’t attempt to pretend he hadn’t been exposed, albeit falsely.  He crossed slowly to the stairs, and full of sentimental memory from the night before, he began to walk wearily down the (plank) steps to the beach below.  He hit the sand, hesitated there.  He cast a last look across the first floor deck, all exposed in the new day.  His kit bag lay where he’d left it, on the patio table, the night before. With the noxious mood of a resolution momentarily delayed, he crossed toward his gear, his heart beating time with a lament long before composed for him.

And there, without warning, he watched as his long sought prey (jackal) emerged from a basement door, and trotted ten paces out onto the beach.

The animal hesitated; sniffing the air, it took a few tentative steps toward the water as Wycek calmly, silently, raised the Moisin-Nagant.  The iron sights bobbed slightly as he seated the metal butt-plate of the stock firmly against his shoulder.  He took a full breath, and withdrew his animal presence fully within him.  His sight picture went still.  Somewhere, in a different world, a finger began to tighten imperceptibly on a trigger.  At some point, in the near but indeterminate future, the carbine would explode with a single point of finely focused hatred, and a jackal would cease to be.
Ultimately, Miami had proven to be a bad woman, and untrue.  Wycek’s memory of her spilled through his empty mind, with the warm embarrassment of a childish mistake.  He tried to shrug it away, blinking down his sights.

Wycek’s gift for identifying truth was once more freed.  Somewhere in a different set of dimensions, a finger eased this jackal toward nothingness.  The thing on the beach had no knowledge of his executioner.  If he had known, what might he have done?  He might have begged for his life, one supposes, and this might have borne the fruit of his immediate survival, though Wycek doubted his own capacity for restraint.  The jackal might have run – but this would have changed nothing, for Wycek was deep within his hate trance, where his aim was always true, long-practiced and unforgiving.  A third possibility was the jackal on the beach might have spotted his executioner, and all acceptance, borne his fate with responsibility and honor.  This would have spared him.  This was not to happen.

The jackal fell forward, to his knees, ruining Wycek’s sight picture.  The jackal undulated, wracked with some internal modern dance.  Wycek let his breath out, waiting for the jackal to settle.  After several seconds, the animal struggled wearily back to its feet.  Then it squatted again, convulsed, and abruptly ejected a charge of liquid waste past and through the French swimming sling it wore.  It moaned piteously, as if being eagerly consumed from within.  Its struggles brought it standing again, back into Wycek’s sights.

The jackal stood sniffling, the freshening ocean breeze blowing perfectly across the target’s nose, parallel to the hunter.  The trigger was somewhere mid-squeeze, but it was a good rifle, and impossible to feel when, precisely, the gun would fire.  Wycek’s hallucination burned clear and bright, the sun was warm, and the world was stilled, waiting for the firing pin to find release and the jackal to cease to be –

Wycek sensed an attention, a fearful, immediate consciousness behind him before he felt the gentle hand that fell without urgency across his right shoulder.  He reacted from instinct, deliberately releasing the trigger, even as rage began its one-way journey from his belly to his limbs.  He turned his head to his right, frustrated and desperate, praying the person who dared to intervene might be made silently to go or killed.

Elena stood behind him, in a dressing gown, looking at him with compassion and incomprehension.  She slowly shook her head, looking at Wycek intently, either unaware of the gravity of her brother’s situation or unmoved by it.  She held his sad, fevered eyes and pressed to him closely enough that he felt her warmth through his sweatshirt, his thermal underwear, the chill of the late November ocean breeze.  She pressed there, against his hip, and watched the immediacy of his hurt fade.

“It’s all new,” she said, knowing it was true, knowing he knew this and had forgotten through the compulsion of work.

“You’re not being,” she added, “You’ve just lost the habit of stillness.”

He stared at her forgiving face, momentarily forgetting his desperate struggle against the jackal.  She was not Elena Weiss, not even human, but (benediction) the embodied heat of human kindness. The next conscious decision he made, in a different man’s life, was to squeeze the trigger, loosing the terrifying energies of his carbine safely into the sky, over the empty ocean, startling the prey, which would not, he grasped, return.  Not, in any event, as a jackal.

Elena watched her Speedoed brother vanish into the neighbor’s yard, his tail between his legs, and laughed her horrible, guttural laugh.  Distant dogs barked, alarmed, or joining the fun.  Then she kissed Wycek on the lips, looked back over the neighboring hedge, and spoke over her shoulder, as if finishing an earlier sentence.  “Mel was a homosexual nanny who was fired for beating the shit out of Ethan.  We secretly thanked him at the time, but you end up blaming them, in the end.”

Charges of assault with a deadly weapon were filed against Wycek.  Within a few weeks he was defending himself in a court of law, for the last time.  His written account of all that happened was not valuable legally, as it happened, despite his contention of objectivity.  Happily for him, however, Elena’s testimony against the prosecution’s only witness damned the state’s case, and Wycek walked, again.  Unlike his previous acquittals, however, Wycek would from that day forward be a truly free man.  Coincidentally, or not, his gift, heretofore as much a part of Wycek as his thumbs, also left him that day.  His sight was never again disturbed, excepting on his second and final wedding day, when he faced the Unitarian preacher he and Elena had picked out of the yellow pages, and saw a vast, heavenly canine with spotted snout, bending to sanctify him.  He was to reflect on that vision into his easy dotage, so far as it didn’t interfere with his being.  When it did, he’d brew some coffee, and while he waited, stare at some lonely object, until he went away, knowing she’d wander by and bring him back.

[ Topic Fiction & Snobbery, Short Fiction | No Comments ]

A brief letter of confession from one who has three tenths suicided, to his loving cousin in Des Moines

By Kingsley || August 5, 2000

My love, people will warn you: Los Angeles is a hard town. It wears you out. I was prepared therefore, for the dangers that beset the person who dares to join the hundred-year-old migration from country to city. In my turn, I walked that well-worn trail, by now a considerable rut, and I moved from my New England home to seek fortune of modest dimensions. In other words, I endeavored to show all those morons who’d given me beatings, who was laughing now. Cramped living conditions I was prepared for. Liberal arts college dorms are preparatory for nothing if not squalid inner city hovels. I had steeled myself for the challenge of my moral and ethical code. Liberal arts college dorms are preparatory for plenty, actually, in addition to the other kind of filth. Crowded public transportation, smog, disease, rudeness, traffic - no one asked me to leave the countryside. I am a man, or I was, or I thought I was, and these were things I had coming to me, because I was born poor and decided early I would die rich.

Los Angeles is not a hard town. New York is. The Apple of the Nation is legitimately filled with hardness, some humor, and little else. The former East Berlin is a hard town, and a decade of capitalism hasn’t fully erased the lines of leftover bullet holes on alley walls, gently ascending murders in still life. New Delhi is a torturously hard town, and there are plenty of nights I drink to that city alone, drink to the Muslim ghettos and what I saw there, and to what I wish I hadn’t.

Los Angeles is not on par with these. It is not on par with Detroit, or Rockford, Illinois, or Gary, Indiana because these latter are museums of human struggle. One can quantify human suffering in the closed pawnshops and the granite edifices of once famous department stores that loom like brontosaurus skeletons, incapable of having ever really lived. These are towns in which time has moved on, and the people and real estate have failed to. These places reek of failure and dreams bang with a hollow sound, like plywood signs reading “Closed.”

Los Angeles fails to rank, in even the featherweight “Hard Town” division. It can’t get in the ring. Los Angeles is not hard because it is, in every natural respect, perfect. It is stunning. The climate is superb. The flora is exotic and copious. The beaches beckon on the one hand, mountains on the other. Los Angeles is supremely easy. Like the captain of the cheerleading squad, she secretly begs to be bedded by all who see her. And, love, we come in droves. I must confront that I, in common with everyone I can call without first dialing ‘one,’ moved to Los Angeles for greed.

I have always enjoyed the study of human conflict. I admit I have always had a conscious preoccupation with it, that by understanding tactics, and history, I would be better equipped in struggles with my contemporaries. While the study of classical strategy treats the concept of deception as a weapon, nothing prepared me for the scope of the deception practiced by the inhabitants of this gross, effete city of the west. I still boggle at the scale of the mendacity. The other night proved one thing, however. While I can yet be surprised by it, I cannot be fooled any longer. Thus does that internal barometer of hope move from one fifth empty to three tenths dead. It is not others’ betrayals that kill us, my love. It is our own, of our own, whatever the immediate satisfaction.

I am currently a freelance writer. It is rarely rewarding, in the sense of genuinely fulfilling one’s need to create, much less to eat, but it does afford one some measure of pride. A long time ago, around the time the Pilgrims landed, I think, I wrote a modestly successful play, which became a widely praised but as yet unfilmed adaptation for the screen. I have lived on that one incomplete success for nearly a year. In consequence, I am unfortunately well acquainted with the dominant form of life in Los Angeles, the Meeting.

The meeting I write to tell you of promised to be of the fairer variety, as these things go. The place was West Hollywood, in an unfashionable but thoroughly comfortable restaurant. The evening was cool, our table outside. A friend of mine had called me there. Though I am prevented, legally, from disclosing his name, I may say that he is a Producer, one of that nebulous caste which may or may not conceal actual competency of some kind, but never prove a cover for Taste. The brief had been simple. A fellow had contacted him, through friends of friends, and this fellow had an interesting story involving the largest pearl in creation - a gem of some historical significance - and how this fellow had come to possess it. This fellow wanted a screenplay made of his life, and his efforts.

–Work for hire? I asked.

My producer said it was. Naturally, I went.

I did balk initially, for simple enough reasons. This producer had not, to my knowledge, ever produced anything I had ever heard of. Perhaps he was really related to the people he said he was. Every so often, as my opinion of him set, in not very flattering terms, he involved me in a meeting that stood to benefit me in some financial or political sense. As if possessed of a sixth sense for ambient contempt, an attunement that someone, somewhere, had secretly begun to hate him, he would scramble for the bedside phone and arrange Meetings between people who had nothing to offer one another. These meetings invariably went very well, and they invariably yielded nothing of any kind for me. Upon such hooks is hope hung, or maybe hanged, however, and he tenaciously refused to allow himself to be written off completely.

The second reason was equally rational. People who want screenplays written about them, large precious stones or no, are de facto narcissists of impossible proportions. Thus the prospect of spending the next eight to ten weeks at the beck of someone who always lacked skill but never opinion was not something I readily warmed to. My private projects, however, for all their private joys and sorrows, were not generating an income. Work is work. Sometimes, it’s a little more so.

I arrived on time, and quickly found my producer friend. I flirted harmlessly with a waitress who could tell, somehow, that I am still happily engaged, and iced tea in hand, I settled down for strained small talk. I began, because he’s horribly inept with people. That’s why he’s a producer. I cannot explain why that follows; believe me, it does.

–How’s your girl?
–Her throat’s much better. How’s yours?
–Appallingly bored, and drunk most of the time.
Silence.
–Relax, D., I say,
–I’m being facetious. Her new diet doesn’t allow alcohol.
–Oh, he chokes out, in relief. Yeah. He points to his beer.
–Red Hook.
–It’s good. I don’t have much of a taste for beer. Guinness, under the right circumstances, is as close as I come.
–You don’t drink? he asks, lurching to conclusions he has every reason to know are incorrect. I’ve been noticeably drunk with him on four occasions. He eyes his beer with discomfort.
–Copiously, but only hard stuff. Scotch. As you know.
–Oh, he nods, much relieved.
–Yeah. Scotch is hard.
–How did you come to hear of this fellow? More to the point, how did he come to hear of you?
–A friend of my family referred him to me, he says, missing the obvious insult as I’d assumed he would.
–He’s got a great story. And he’s a very rich man. He’s connected to a lot of ‘A’ list actors.

I am not new. I have heard this before. This promise, or threat, works remarkably well, because out here it really is possible. If it were true, one wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of the conversation, obviously. The gorgeous and unforgivable fact of Los Angeles is the daily collective sin of its inhabitants: we refuse to believe in the possibility of anyone else’s dream, while each of us privately nurtures his or her own. I’ll be discovered tomorrow, he says, the agent is going to call, I’ll have a comeback, my tits won’t sag, my wife isn’t cheating… But the truth is as unrelenting as the weather forecast for tomorrow: no one gets discovered, not really; your agent lost your file ages ago and it wasn’t a mistake; you can’t have a comeback if you didn’t get there to begin with; we all stopped noticing your tits a decade ago, you anorexic wraith; and last, but hardly least- I was with your wife last night. I really am sorry; unhappily for both of us, she isn’t.

It’s about quarter past when my friend begins to seriously fidget, enough that I can know he isn’t simply having another attack of ADD. Flourish of cell phone, he calls the fellow we’re to meet.

He leaves a message.

–He lives right around the corner, my friend offers, by way of explanation. It’s a great neighborhood, after all. A good one for walking places.
–He probably left already.

At this point, I’ve already taken advantage of my better view of the entrance to examine newcomers for telltale signs of “I own the largest pearl in the world and fought long and hard to keep it” character. This first impression will be of value, should he decide to do business. I quickly identify the fellow. He stands out a mile among the young, hip, coolly spastic thirtysomethings who loiter, creating the drama their private dreams require for continued belief.

–How old is this fellow? I ask, eyeing the mark at the entrance.
–Fifty-seven, he answers, with sureness that troubles me, as if I’ve hit on the one fact he has and his enthusiasm is compensatory, inversely proportionate to his research.
–What does he look like?
–I don’t know, my friend answers, airily.
–I’ve never met him.

Slow, certain horror rises in me. I do not belong here. I am not proud. Arrogance without pride isn’t much of a trick; I mastered it on the farm, Guernsey teat in hand. I have been here long enough, however, have written sufficient copy to know when a writer is needed, and when he is a premature guest, like the urgent old friend who comes to your parties no matter what slights you have dealt him. This horror isn’t simply to do with the fact that I am now not making love to the aforementioned fiancé. She has not known love in a month, as far as I know, a co-victim of our mutual pact of conscious destruction on the wheel of Los Angeles. This night is perfect in its coolness, and our talks have had an intimacy of late that speaks of real respect, real regard, real human truth, long absent. It is not merely this fact, nor the impropriety of it, but that there is no point to the necessary upcoming performance. The smiles, the sycophantic enthusiams and overlooked stupidity — these will be for naught, because there is no deal, here, yet. My time is being wasted. I wake with this private knowledge, each morning; I don’t need it in my professional life. It’s a first meeting. It reminds me of an old playwright’s advice to me: Always order a drink. It’s seldom you’ll not need one.

I am now certain I am looking at the interested party. He’s the only person for nine square miles wearing a blazer, apart from me, and he’s older, resting a heavy gym bag on his foot. If constipation is an adventure, (and I’m told by those who know, it really, really can be,) then this fellow is Indiana Jones. He does look wealthy, though. He’s our man.
He disappears into the restaurant, and my friend and I settle down to wait.
At this point, I could have left. It would have been an insult to my friend, possibly a serious one, but I couldn’t really count that as much of a loss. Nothing kept me. My friend apologized for his anonymous guest’s apparent tardiness for the third time. So, I was technically within my rights. Naturally, I didn’t move. Hope does spring, after all, or I’d have long since taken that old playwright’s other advice and learned the fine art of plumbing. After all, my friend might actually be related to the people he claims as kin. And Hell, for all its hotness, may one day be the ski resort of the vacationing sinner. I only say that it is possible, and possibility is a hungry, dangerous animal.

After socially necessary glances at our watches, I commit an unforgivable sin - I panic, socially. I ask about work.

–I’ve been really busy, he says. Getting the artwork together before the release.

We speak this way. Definite pronouns are powerful in Los Angeles. The film. The star. The release. They add tangibility to the wafting iridescent hopes we chase, like so many soap bubbles lofted on farts.

–I must apologize, D. I say.
–Your release?
–My album is coming out in two weeks. Not domestically. It’s so competitive here. Japan, Germany - he begins to tick off fingers, a culture in a digit - France, Holland, and… He looks helplessly off into space, the importance of this final destination preventing him seeing the look of amused disbelief on my face.
–Belgium, I say.
–I told you this already?
I immediately ask him, quiet please, I immediately ask him why he has never mentioned his pop music career before.
–I’ve been singing since I was fourteen, he says, ostensibly by way of answer.
–My mother wanted to get into music a long time ago, but the major labels were too competitive. She had this pianist friend; she recorded him and started her own label and distribution company. She sold him to all the cruise lines. It’s her label. Here’s the liner.

The sad desperation of this person, this other life, leaves little doubt, for once, over the veracity of his assertion. The idea of this overweight, middle aged, alleged brother of someone reputable being backed by the horn section of the Titanic as they slip into the ice prevents social catastrophe.

–Congratulations! I sing triumphantly. David Hasselhoff, look out!
–My mother says it will probably only sell ten thousand copies, he says, deflating, snatching the album liner from me.
–I’m going to take a walk around, I say.
–See if our guest is waiting beyond.

I stand and stroll away, leaving him to find the special pocket in his faux leather grip in which his musical ambitions are tucked. I light a cigarette, rock my head to each side, hoping for a pop, determine there are no women of distracting merit, and stride with the confidence and ambivalence only Los Angeles dreamers can have onto the raised marble plaza between the restaurant and street.

I immediately spot my previous mark. Curiously, he had not entered the restaurant, or if he had, he had returned and positioned himself in such a way that he could not be seen but from my current approach. The heavy looking bag is protectively crouched behind his legs, against the marble wall, and he seems confused, old, now. My eyes sweep over his, and move on, looking for other candidates. Finding none, finding nothing of interest in the street beyond, I swivel back to him, walking ever forward.

He’s shaking his head, very slowly, looking me full in the face, fear frozen on his features.

Well that’s fucking odd, I think. In embarrassment, I look away. Not before I see him shake again, his head heading north this time. No, he says to me silently. Not me. Not me.

Obligingly, I ignore him. I walk to the limit of the marble plaza, look first west, then east, then west again, searching for a man I’ve already found, performing the universal pantomime of blind dates. -I’m waiting for someone. Someone here is waiting for someone too. If you’re waiting, it’s likely for me. Come on, now, you ugly cow.

I turn decisively back to the well-dressed paranoid mark. He’s shaken, looking straight at me. -It is you, he seems to be saying.

–P.H.!, I say, naming him. He nods, turns back to his leather bag, now eighteen inches away from his right heel. By the time I’m in handshake range, the bag is in hand.
–It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir, I say, in my very deepest English conservatory trained voice. It even works on straight guys. He returns the idle compliment and follows me to the table where my friend sits, looking strained and tired. And thus, the Meeting begins.

Something you must understand, cos, that few out here do, is the absolute primacy of the rule that someone must control the meeting. Otherwise, how does anyone know when it’s acceptable to go home? It’s usually very clear. I want something from you, and you have it, or have claimed to have access to it, or at the very least, knowledge of it. Thus, I ask, you demand, we negotiate. You give or do not, and when one end or the other had been reached, for now, the meeting is over.

It’s not always that easy.

But with some forethought, it can be. This is another great reason never to have writers at first meetings. We immediately go for the conflict, set about looking for the resolution. We want direction, a sense of purpose. And to be fair, sometimes that simply isn’t how humans work.

–Have you been waiting long? P.H. the mark asks.
–No. About five minutes, I say, not really lying, since it’s merely convention.
Before any conversation occurs, my friend, the Producer, miraculously produces something. Three identical five page stapled documents, to whit.
–Please sign this, he says, thrusting the whole impressive stack before a man he’s never met before, without a word of introduction.

I am not interested in evaluating this technique from a standpoint of elegance. I merely draw your attention to the phenomenon, because one sees it so frequently out here. It can be better examined through the following challenge: Try talking that way to a complete stranger in the “Canned Soup” and “Dressings” isle of your favorite grocery store.

The simple fact is, people do not talk to each other this way in life. There’s a simple reason for this. You talk to a hundred people with this kind of debonair arrogance, ninety of them will kill or maim you, right there, irrespective of the Contadina or condiments. I would happily punch you in the nose, my love, if you spoke to me the way people routinely talk to each other out here. But the veneer of business, ever thinner with some, somehow communicates a sense of safety to people. This friend of mine could no more stop a roundhouse than a hard-line resurgence in Russia. Yet somehow, in some way, though virtually all business in Los Angeles is conducted in informal settings, this false sense of protection is allowed to survive. And thus, so are producers.

–This applies to you, as well as to me, I’m assuming? he says, glancing over the pile of pretentious documents before him.
–Yes, right there, it’s reversible, says my friend, as though he’s talking about a not-very-pretty vest.
–It says each party at this table will receive confidential information, and none of us may reveal without express, written…
I won’t bore you, I don’t remember anyway. It seemed standard, and unnecessary, and fair enough. The man, P.H., reread a particular paragraph and recanted.
–Oh, yes, I see. I’m sorry. I’m a little addled.
Addled? I had to respect him for that.
–While I read this over and sign it, why don’t I show you something? This is an appraisal of the Pearl for forty million dollars, and here, okay, the previous, you see, is dated 1983, here’s the appraisal, it’s all in order, you can check this, here you see I have an independent appraisal for fifty-two million dollars, based on the identity confirmed by the previous appraiser…

He went on a bit. It’s only fair to say, though I had no drink, I cannot report the actual dialogue of the next two hundred minutes of my life. I will give you the general measure of it, beloved cousin. I don’t recall precisely, excepting some more noteworthy passages, because all of the information seemed by the way. It was only later I understood that this was not mere incompetence. At the time I couldn’t help but think,

–Little wonder he wants a writer.

Such arrogance, cos. I should know better.

He handed us materials, talking all the while about the Pearl. As he spoke, six broad beads of sweat rolled down his forehead, followed by five more. -Well that’s odd, I thought. It’s so cool tonight, and dry. And he’s been sitting for some time.

And thus, listening with as much interest as I could manage, I noticed three things: he still hadn’t signed the papers, he wasn’t obese enough to warrant that kind of sweat, so he’s fearful, which doesn’t make sense unless-

The expensive blazer perfectly offset the perfect blue of the thick silk shirt he wore. They both failed to hide the bulky knit of the Kevlar vest beneath.

–Our man is wearing body armor, I thought, turning to D. D. was saying -Yeah, and nodding. He hadn’t noticed. Had he ever seen body armor before? Did I want to explain why and where I had? The answer to these questions was no. It was an item of interest, a curiosity, merely. Our man wore body armor. Fine. I unconsciously scanned for snipers until interrupted by P.H. and the scrapbook he thrust into my hand.

The book contained an exhaustive collection of articles to do with a pearl named alternately the Pearl of Allah, or the Pearl of Lao Tzu, according to one’s faith. The Christians weren’t making an appearance on this one, and I choked back a giggle at my wit, as I gingerly took the beaten scrapbook from the old fellow. According to legend, the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu, famous for his ostensible authorship of the immortal Tao Te Ching, commissioned an amulet of jade, on which his face was carved between the faces of Confucius and Buddha. This amulet was then placed in oysters of increasing size, over the centuries becoming a cultured pearl of enormous proportions. The pearl, said to have made the tending families enormously prosperous, was eventually swept away in its oversized mollusk, and was recovered in the Philippines in the fourteenth century by a Palawan diver. Lucky, lucky bastard, he became the only person to so literally defy the proverbial wisdom of not holding one’s breath. It made his Moslem masters wealthy in their turn, until the cure for malaria arrived in the hands of an enterprising cheat, Wilburn Dowell Cobb. The price of quinine was around two dollars in 1934, but a Moslem chieftain gave the Pearl of Lao Tzu to the death-robbing American in return for his eldest son’s recovery from fever. The Pearl remained in a Wells Fargo safety deposit box in San Francisco until Cobb’s death. This much the scrapbook corroborated.

I did my best to read his articles, and follow the new information as it washed over the transom. It soon became clear that this man had begun his story in earnest. I scanned documents, ordered coffee, and did my best to renew my brightest, most interested half-smile. The man launched into a tale of how he got the Pearl from Cobb. It was confusing, but peppered with amusing anecdotal information. My brain grabbed occasional items, details that would make for good writing, should the deal be clinched. Cobb’s name, for example, stuck. I logged it, as the man proceeded from how-he-had-come-to-own-it, to how-he-had-come-to-be-cheated out of it.

The story had to do with a con man, now this man’s worst enemy and best friend, (his words, I’m not being coy,) and a lunatic mobster. I must admit the bells rang loud at the You’re a Goddamn Sucker station house of my mind when it came out this man did not, in fact own the Pearl. He owned, at best, one third of the blessed thing. To explain this, there was a woman named N., a Saudi Prince, a Mafia hitman, and an FBI agent. It all made little sense, was not told well, and conspired to make the evening run on. If meetings go long, one can know for certain that no one important is there. People who have the capacity to actually do things in this world don’t take long to come to the point. They have to be somewhere, and in Meetings, like Los Angeles sex, sooner is better. All the way around. For everyone.

I am not important, and I had to admit to myself I had actually let myself get my hopes up. So I was stuck hoping. Being stuck provided opportunity for observation. This man was Jewish. He was not from our country, as it turned out, not originally. He’d been part of a large family jewel firm, (snicker) which under the circumstances made him Israeli or South African, and he had been banished from the business. He was down and out, at the moment, trying to climb back up from terrible losses. He had perfect teeth, expensive brother-of-the-best-dentist-in town teeth.

He ran beauty contests.

–Girls? he asked.
–Believe me, I know the best. I’ve organized dozens of the most prestigious contests in the country.

To prove it, he handed me another scrapbook, opened to a page of black and white group portraits, beauty contestants of some distant age posed around the central figure his thick pointer finger indicated was him. I glanced up at him. The drive home was not a complicated one. Why hadn’t I ordered a drink?

Now, deep in his story, it came out he’d recently suffered from cancer. Having a devout relationship with tobacco, I offered, somewhat guiltily,

–I’m so sorry. What kind?
–Cancer of the arm, he answered, and rubbed his left hand beneath his ri