If Death Ever Slept

“That’s it. One day in March a squirrel was skipping around on it, up near the top. I was nine years old. My father had given my brother a rifle for his birthday. I went and got the rifle and loaded it, and came out and stood here, right at this spot, and waited until the squirrel stopped to rest, and shot it. It tumbled off. On the way down it bumped against limbs twice. I yelled for Wy, my brother, and he came and I showed it to him, there on the ground not moving, and he-but the rest doesn’t matter. With anyone I might possibly fall in love with I like to start off by telling him the worst thing I ever did, and anyway you brought it up by saying you were looking at a squirrel. Now you know the worst, unless you think it’s worse that several years later I wrote a poem called ‘Requiem for a Rodent.’ It was published in my school paper.”

“Certainly it’s worse. Running it down by calling it a rodent, even though it was one.”

She nodded. “I’ve suspected it myself. Some day I’ll get analyzed and find out.” She waved it away, into the future. “Where did you ever get the idea of being a secretary?”

“In a dream. Years ago. In the dream I was the secretary of a wealthy pirate. His beautiful daughter was standing on the edge of a cliff shooting at a gopher, which is a rodent, down on the prairie, and when she hit it she felt so sorry for it that she jumped off the cliff. I was down below and caught her, saving her life, and it ended romantically. So I became a secretary.”

Her brows were lifted, opening her eyes as wide as they would go. “I can’t imagine how a pirate’s daughter happened to be standing on a cliff on top of a prairie. You must have been dreaming.”

No man could stop a conversation as dead in its tracks as that. It takes a woman. But at least she had the decency to start up another one. With her eyes back to normal, she cocked her head a little to the side and said, “You know, I’m bothered. I’m sure I’ve seen you before somewhere, and I can’t remember where, and I always remember people. Where was it? Have you forgotten too?”

I had known that might come from one or more of them. My picture hadn’t been in the papers as often as the president of Egypt’s, or even Nero Wolfe’s, and the latest had been nearly a year ago, but I had known it might happen. I grinned at her. I hadn’t been grinning in any published picture. One thing, it gave me a chance to recover the ball she had taken away from me.