A Time of Predators

He turned the VW left into Entrada Way, which cut through a presubdivision residential area to Linda Vista Road. The streets were deserted and dark except for the glow of televisioned living rooms and an occasional porch light left burning by a watchful parent.

That Shirley Meier, bringing up Hitler’s naked aggression against Poland as a subtle refutation of the argument that hostility presupposed frustration! Belmont hadn’t even caught her point. Curt’s grin faded. He had caught it. 1939. He’d been fourteen then, attending secondary school in England because his father was a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, and the shadow of war, despite Chamberlain’s “peace in our times” return from Munich, had hung heavy.

Ancient history, Chuck Belmont had called it.

To a generation which found nothing distressing in swastikas, iron crosses, or Nazi helmets, it probably was. Certainly Curt’s three years in the British military were something he seldom recalled himself, these days. The desert war in 1942, the clandestine landings in Sicily, these seemed to belong to a different Curtis Halstead.

He turned left onto Linda Vista Road, putting the bug through its sprightly gears. Just five weeks until finals; then, the book. No summer classes this year, nothing whatsoever to interfere.

He passed Longacres Avenue Extension, glancing off to his right across the dark expanse of golf course. Pity he didn’t play, living where he did. Perhaps this Sunday he and Paula, who used tennis to stay in condition, could start taking a bit of a hike again. He hadn’t taken a ramble through the heavily wooden strip beyond Linda Vista, which marked the meanderings of San Luisa Creek, for over two years.

Curt braked, swung into his drive, made the switchback and sent the VW chuffing up the grade in second to the darkness below the porch. He sat in the car for a few moments after killing the engine, listening to the creak of cooling metal and the chorus of frogs from the ditch by the golf course. Shirley Meier had brought the past drifting back to him in shreds and tatters. Not a bad thing, actually. Dealing habitually with students, it was easy to forget the past’s validity: for youth always saw its current problems as unique in man’s history, and thus as susceptible only to newly formulated solutions.

Curt checked his watch — nearly midnight — sighed, fumbled out his keys, and climbed to the porch. In the deserted living room, an unopened bottle of dago red waited on the coffee table for his disapproving head-shake. Paula was becoming a nuisance about his evening glass of wine. He crossed to the hall, stuck his head into the reading room, where the overhead light still glowed. The couch was rumpled, the throw pillows bashed out of shape. He had reached for the rheostat control before he saw the rag rug bunched up in accordion pleats as if a runner had used it as a starting block, and the Swiss milking stool on its side in the center of the room.

Well, now, that was damned odd. What...

Curt whirled and went to the foot of the stairs, moving silently on the balls of his feet, before he stopped. Reflexes honed a quarter-century before apparently were not totally forgotten. But really, now, tire rug and stool would have a perfectly simple explanation; and meanwhile, he was glad Paula hadn’t witnessed his ludicrous thirty seconds as an overweight James Bond creeping about his own home on tiptoe.

He clumped stolidly up the stairs and into their bedroom. Paula was at her dressing table, just in the act of bending over to pick up a fallen bottle of hand cream.

“What the devil happened downstairs? What...”

Blood. Ten pints of blood in a woman Paula’s size, and half of it on the floor. More blood, it seemed, than a human being possibly could hold.

Curt was across the room in three strides to lift her by the shoulders away from the dressing table. Her body was still warm, but her head flopped back inertly against his supporting arm. Her lower jaw gaped idiotically. One front tooth was dripped, and there was a puddle of saliva on the starred glass where her face had rested.

Very slowly and gently Curt laid her down again. The eyes had not been Paula’s eyes; they had been those of a corpse. His one-time long familiarity with death had taught him that “mortal remains” is a very precise concept: with the act of dying, every shred of glory flees from every human corpse.

He put his hands over his face and rubbed them slowly up and down, feeling it now like a gunshot wound when the air gets at it.

How? Why?

Curt turned back, raised Paula’s flaccid forearm and twisted it so the wrist was up. He regarded the rubber-lipped gash for a long moment. That was how. A ragged sob torn from his chest surprised him. But why? Would he ever come to any understanding of why?