A Time of Predators

Joe Gores A Time of Predators

TO MY PARENTS WITH ALL MY LOVE

Before... Friday, April 18th

Before...

Professor Curtis Halstead yawned, looked at his watch, and settled back into his ancient leather easy chair. Paula hadn’t been on the 12:30 A.M. has, or she would have called from the depot; the next, and final, wasn’t due from San Francisco until 2:10. He stretched a heavy arm toward his glass of red wine, planning to read the dozen mimeo’d papers he’d collected that evening from his graduate seminar in anthropology at Los Feliz University.

But sitting there in the pool of light from the floor lamp, with the living room of their big old house creaking homely about him, Curt felt his eyelids getting heavy. He surrendered, draining his glass and setting aside his papers to slide lower in the chair. In a few minutes his breathing was even and steady.

“You ever had a guy try to queer you?” asked Rick Dean idly.

Rick was nineteen, lean and dark and intense, with a Barrymore profile. Sitting in the front seat of Heavy Gander’s 1956 Chevy station wagon, he turned so the remark would include the two in back as well as Heavy. One of them, Champ Mather, worked his big calloused hands and frowned with the effort of expressing himself.

“Christ, Rick, a guy do that to me, I... I’d break his neck.”

“Well, it happened to me,” said Rick, suddenly moody. His dark eyes stared at the cars straggling from the broad V-shaped lot of the drive-in movie. “It was two years ago, I was just a junior in high school and really dumb. I was walking home from this movie, see, and this guy came along and asked if I minded company.”

He stopped, as if realizing that the lights of a car swinging toward the exit might show the tautness of his features, and tipped up his beer can. They had drunk three six-packs during the movie. Since Champ Mather was twenty-one, he could buy it for them legally.

“Then, as soon as we got on a side street, he reached right over and groped me! Right there on the sidewalk!”

The boy beside him stirred. Heavy Gander fit his nickname, for he was obese and sweating under his light windbreaker. Merely because he was behind the wheel, his belly was jammed up tight against it.

“So what’d you do, Rick?”

Before Rick could answer, the other boy in the back seat, Julio Escobar, made an elaborate and well-practiced movement, and a switch blade was lying along his palm. It was unopened but deadly-looking merely by its six-inch folded length. Julio had straight black hair and an olive face whose coarse features included a long down-turned nose and a thick-lipped mouth. The lower lip was loose and petulant.

“I would have stuck him!” Julio exclaimed intensely.

In the concealing darkness, Rick’s fingers tightened around his beer can. “Well, I didn’t stick him, but I beat hell out of him. I damned near killed him.”

The others made approving noises, and Rick tossed his dead soldier out the window into the nearly empty drive-in lot. Actually, he had floundered away from the sidewalk across the sandy loam of a vacant lot, chased into darkness by the queer’s laughter. Funny, he hadn’t ever before let himself think about that night. His mouth tightened. “Say, you guys wanta have a little fun?”

“Sure, Rick,” Champ said immediately. Despite his hulking size, Champ had the alert, devoted, empty eyes of a fine retriever. Rick was the one with ideas. Rick always thought up things to do that were fun to remember afterwards, until he forgot. Champ forgot stuff easy.

“How about you, Julio?”

Julio shrugged his narrow shoulders with great nonchalance. “We should get some more beer, Rick. Or if we knew who has some pot...”

“No hash,” said Rick sharply. He had blown pot only twice, but it had made him feel vague, made him want to drift. Tonight he didn’t want to drift. Tonight he wanted to be sharp and hard and tight. He laid a hand on Heavy’s meaty shoulder. “Let’s go, man. We’ll chive down by the university somewhere, see if we can find us a queer. Then well give him a hard time, just for the hell of it.”

Heavy emitted a sudden terrific belch, and Julio started giggling. Heavy was forever breaking a guy up with all the wild noises he made.

“Geez, Rick, I don’t know...” Heavy began cautiously.

“It’s Friday — no school tomorrow. But if you’re chicken—”

Heavy grunted and twisted the ignition key sharply. He had a roundly cherubic face, but when he brushed back his long blond hair, a skull-and-crossbones ring glinted dully on his right hand. Rick grinned to himself. You could always shame chicken Heavy into doing stuff.

“I’ll pay for the beer,” Rick offered happily.