Necessity

Mostly she follows game trails through the woods, splashing through puddles left by the hard rain. Where the track squeezes through gaps too narrow for the Jeep she backs up and finds a way around.

It reminds her of treks during hunting season with her father when she was nine or ten or eleven years old and he was trying to teach her to be a boy. He was very serious about knowing how to survive in the wilderness. When they were stationed at Elmendorf he’d been forced down twice by freak weather in the Alaskan wilderness; he came out on foot both times, to the amazement of experts who’d presumed him dead.

Backing up for the third time to find yet another way across a steep-sided creek, she is thinking, I wish I’d paid more attention to what he had to say.

Then she thinks: don’t make a habit of recollecting things like that. You’ll never dare repeat them to anyone.

Not even Ellen?

That’s a question she hasn’t answered: whether it will be safe someday to tell Ellen the truth.

There isn’t much breeze. She’s worried that the sound of the Jeep may be carrying as far as the house—it can’t be much more than three-quarters of a mile off to the left.

Something stirs to her left. It draws her quick alarmed attention. She gets a glimpse of movement—tawny fur bolting into the trees. Doubtless a deer. There are quite a few of them in these woods, trapped on the property by Bert’s brutal fence: they’re born here and they grow up here and they die here, mostly from bullet and shotgun slug wounds inflicted by Bert and his hunting cronies.

It all seems to be taking much longer than it ought to. The boundary fence should have turned up before now. She’s had time to cross the entire property twice over. It’s only 320 acres, for Pete’s sake.

Has she lost her bearings? Ru

No. She checks tree shadows along the ground; the sun is there—that’s the proper angle; she’s still heading toward the fence. It ought to be right in front of her. She ought to have smashed into it by now.

So where in hell is it?

There. Just up the slope, concealed by brush.

She turns to the left, fighting the wheel, braced against the seat as the tires lurch across rocks and root systems and unexpected holes. The rough pitching flings her against the shoulder belt and at intervals it cuts into the side of her neck; by the end of this ride she’ll have a welt there and a purpling bruise on the side of her elbow where it bangs into the door. Without the belt to hold her down she’d have smashed her skull against the ceiling by now. She feels shaken to pieces.

It isn’t the sort of establishment into which an i

Be just dandy if he’s making his rounds today …

Now she knows where she is. Anxious about the draining of time she vectors to the left across an open meadow and guns the Jeep to reckless speed.

At the top of the meadow she slaloms amid tree trunks, some of them jagged and blackened. Must be almost there now. Got to be …

Wheels spi

Hitting the clutch, gathering breath, she remembers when they bulldozed the road through from the house to the landing strip: a rough pioneer track, unsurfaced, barely graded but sufficient for the Bronco.

Twigs and branches lie askew in the ruts now, some of them crushed. There are a lot of puddles. She sees dark grease stains on the bent weeds that make a spine along the hump of the middle of the track.

It’s been used fairly recently, then.

Of course that doesn’t prove they’re still using the airstrip. It doesn’t prove they haven’t rolled up the steel mesh and taken it away.

If they have—suppose the strip has become boggy from yesterday’s rain: too overgrown for Charlie’s airplane to land?

The worst thing is there’s no time to find out.

She cranks the wheel sharp right and fits the tires into the deep tracks and drives the short distance to the back gate. It is a simple reinforced steel contraption that lacks the formality of the curlicued iron gate at the front entrance but makes up for it in solidity: the gauge of its mesh is such that no wirecutter short of an acetylene torch could breach it.

Holding it shut are two enormous padlocks, top and bottom, their hasps at least half an inch thick.

They gleam in the sunlight—the glint of new metal.

Her keys don’t fit.

49 She switches off the ignition and stands beside the Jeep staring dismally at the padlocked gate. In the abrupt silence there are sharp pinging sounds—heat contractions in the engine.

Her watch: it’s noon. She feels the terrible pressure of time. Charlie will land at precisely one o’clock but how long will he dare to wait for her if she’s not there to meet him?

Charlie with his simplistic images of Mafiosi and his limp jokes about gun molls: what if he’s not as brave as he pretends to be?

The padlocks are hopeless. You’d need a bazooka to break them open. She examines the other side of the gate. The hinges are thick steel straps belted around the upright steel pole. Bolted together and the nuts welded in place to prevent anyone from unscrewing them.

It would take something a lot heavier than this Jeep to bust through that gate.

But she’s remembering an odd snatch of conversation. It was Jack Sertic, wasn’t it? Up here at the cabin one rainy afternoon; half a dozen of them sitting around the huge living room in boots and hunting shirts waiting with their rifles for the rain to quit so they could go out and prove their courage against a hapless fenced-in herd of deer.

They were talking about crime in the city: street crime and burglaries. They didn’t think of their own activities as crime—not in that same sense. (She remembers confronting Bert with it; one of the last conversations they had; she was accusing him in a tight quavering voice barely under control and he replied arrogantly: Jesus, the way you talk you’d think we were some kind of thugs—I don’t pull out a knife and ambush people on dark streets—I don’t threaten i

Jack Sertic that day was talking about a friend of his who lived in a penthouse on Riverside Drive, one of the postwar buildings with greenhouse balconies and interior fire escapes. The friend’s penthouse had been burgled so many times that finally he’d invested a fortune installing a solid steel front door and doorframe with inch-thick deadbolt locks. The most burglarproof door money could buy.

“So the next time he’s out of town for the weekend”—she even remembers the chuckle in Jack’s high-pitched voice—“the burglars come back and they take one look at that bombproof door of his and they just laugh and pick up a sledgehammer and smash their way right through the wall next to the door. These buildings, Sheetrock wallboard, you can go through the walls like butter.”

She still can hear the bray of his laughter and see Bert’s scowl of disapproval. Muggers and burglars aren’t amusing to Bert. He can be very righteous.