CHAPTER ONE
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
-Tennyson, 'Ulysses'
D-127, San Antonio, Texas
Like watching fish in a tank, Wes Stauer thought, looking at the thin traffic making its way along East Evans Road and down Bulverde. No, that's not quite right. It's like watching paint dry. Not even enough cars on the road to provide the hope of a decent accident.
He watched one of two identical two-seat cars pass the other anemically and sneered, Battle Song of the Proletariat Specials. Painted 'Green,' of course.
He shook his head. He could afford a decent, which these days meant an imported, car. Most couldn't anymore, after the tax bite took. Indeed, most who could afford any kind of personal transport these days could only support one of the designed-by-committees-of-special-interests things, like those two seat jobs asthmatically chugging up the road in front of Stauer's house.
Stauer didn't really care that much about the tax rates, personally. His home was held by a corporation masquerading as a religious organization he'd set up in Lebanon once upon a time. He paid the corporation, which is to say, himself, a very modest rent. The rent just matched depreciation and expenses, so there was no tax burden there. Likewise most of his money was overseas where Uncle's sticky fingers couldn't get at it. Oh, yes, the Internal Revenue Service took a whopping bite out of his retired pay, but that, in relation to his overall finances, was 'mere.'
Unpatriotic? Stauer mused. It's never unpatriotic to keep your government from wasting your money on things that shouldn't be done anyway.
Not that he was necessarily all that illiberal in every particular. He wasn't really, at least as far as domestic issues went. Student aid, for example, to send someone to school to learn to be an engineer? Or a doctor. Or, just as good, a machinist or plumber or farmer? Those kinds of things he was fine with, though he was rather finer with them if there was some price involved; teaching poor kids or providing health care in Appalachia, for example. Or military service, of course.
To take a masters on the public ticket in resistingbadevilhonkywickednaughtydeadwhitemaleoppressionandrepressionlittleEichmannismbadbadbadidness? I'm not precisely enthusiastic about that.
And he had the strong sense that the money collected to help the poor and even out the playing field was, in fact, mostly being spent on upper middle class drones with sociology degrees, Who sow not; neither do they reap, and construction contracts for the very well connected.
Case in point, he mused, that program to pay school girls not to get pregnant. They pay a hundred thousand inner city girls a thousand or so dollars a year, each, and ten thousand social workers ninety thousand a year, each, to administer it, and half the girls end up getting knocked up anyway. Case in point, the senatrix from California whose husband somehow just managed to land a three-billion dollar contract to build wind farms in a place with no wind, because, unfortunately, the Senator from Massachusetts has a vacation home overlooking the place where there really is wind. Case in point . . . ah, what the hell's the use?
And it's not entirely fair to blame the President for this, either. It was building up for years, since the nineties, anyway. Maybe the eighties. And maybe President Wangai made it worse; but maybe he didn't, either. Nobody was going to make it a lot better. You drink enough; you get a hangover. You spend enough; you get broke. Maybe we could have spent our way back to prosperity. I doubt it, but maybe. But, if so, we'd have to have spent on the right things. We haven't.
At least it's a little better here in Texas. A little.
Stauer'd thought he knew why he'd retired to San Antonio. To use the PX and commissary, to have Brooke Army Medical Center nearby when the time came for that. That's what I thought I was doing.
It wasn't those things, though. Or, at least, it wasn't entirely those. What the hell did I want? The facilities- he mentally shrugged-yeah, okay, sure. But I wanted the facilities someplace where I wouldn't be reminded of what I was missing. No sharp young troopers, fit as a fiddle and ready to fight. No listening in the morning air for the distant cadence I can't join in any more.
I do miss the Army.
And I didn't want to be in a purely Air Force town. And at least my arthritis isn't too bad here. And home . . . well, it hasn't been 'home' in a very long time.
'It sure sucks to get old,' Stauer muttered, 'and I'm not convinced that the alternative is worse.' He sighed, looking down toward his feet. Briefly, his eyes rested on his stomach. 'Two years ago, you miserable bastard, you were flat.' Traveling further downward, he scowled and said, 'And don't you even think about getting old. At least you still have a purpose.'
From inside the residence he heard the purpose's plaintive call, 'Honey, come to bed.'
Philomena Potter-Phillie, for short-stirred in the big bed, reaching for the man who should have been there but who now stood on the balcony. Her questing hands coming up empty, she awakened and sat up. Immediately she called out, 'Honey, come to bed.'
Phillie, ER nurse, aged twenty-seven, five foot, ten inches, thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-six, was a quarter English-eighth German-eighth Irish-half Mexican self-propelled monument to mixed marriages. She had short blond hair that had not come out of a bottle, large emerald green eyes, and skin that was essentially white but tanned really, really well. Long legs were a given. She was quite pretty without being painfully so, having a regular, straight nose, full lips that were almost pouting, high cheekbones and a rather endearingly delicate chin.
She was also one of those not entirely rare human females predisposed toward older men. Perhaps 'hard- wired' would be more accurate. Indeed, Phillie was so hard-wired for older men that she'd hung on to her virginity- technically, anyway-until well after turning seventeen, precisely so she'd be legal for the class of men that interested her. At the time, the minimum age for that had been thirty-five. She'd added a year and a half, on average, every year since. Her current lover-Wes Stauer, presumably sitting on the balcony watching life crawl by- was a little young by those standards. If young, he was also a soldier, had been, anyway, for about thirty years. That had the effect of making him look older. It was also the other area in which Phillie was hard-wired: Soldiers; yum.
Oh, she'd tried doctors, naturally enough, being an RN and all. Leaving aside the potential problems at work, she'd decided they were, on average, a bunch of arrogant pricks, and especially the specialists. She'd also tried Air Force types. The student pilots from Randolph AFB were interesting, but they were mostly arrogant pricks, too. And she tended to be taller than them, which was awkward and operated against the third area of her genetic predispositions. At six-two Wes is just about right. Why won't the bastard come back to bed?
The Special Forces medics, training at Fort Sam, downtown, had been her most enjoyable group. She'd even thought about marrying one of them. Then he'd been killed in Afghanistan and a colonel had come to tell her how very sorry he was and all, and how much the country appreciated . . . and that colonel had led to another colonel and that colonel . . .
***
'I'll be there in a few,' Stauer called back. No I won't. Not tired, not horny, not even lonely. Just miserable. 'Go back to sleep.'
Nice girl, though, he thought. And, unlike most women that age, I can't say she has neither the charm of innocence nor the skill and grace of broad experience. And she's not even immature. She'd be a good match for an old fart like me. If I wanted a match. Family? I put all that off-'married to the Army'-and never missed it. And now I've no Army and no family. She says she wants kids. I just don't know if I'm up to it. Or if I'd be a decent father. And why the hell am I even thinking about this? I don't want to get married. Christ, I'll 'be stone dead in a moment.'
A car was pulling into the complex's parking lot as Stauer stood up. He ignored it. Walking inside and gently closing the sliding glass door behind him, Stauer padded quietly on stocking feet to the bedroom he'd set aside as
