Savage Season
By Joe R. Lansdale
Chapter 1
I was out back of the house in the big field with my good friend Leonard Pine the afternoon it started. Me with the twelve gauge and him pulling the birds.
'Pull,' I said, and Leonard did, and another clay bird took to the sky and I jerked the gun up and cut it down.
'Man,' Leonard said, 'don't you ever miss?'
'Just on purpose.'
I'd switched to clay birds in favor of the real ones a long time back. I didn't like to kill anything now, but I still enjoyed the shooting. Getting the bead on something and pulling the trigger and feeling the kick on my shoulder and watching the target blow apart had its own special satisfaction.
'Got to open another box,' Leonard said. 'The pigeons are all dead.'
'I'll load, you shoot for a while.'
'I shot twice as long as you did and I missed half those little boogers.'
'I don't care. My eye's getting off anyway.'
'Bullshit.'
Leonard got up, brushed his big black hands on his khaki pants, and came over and took the twelve gauge. He was about to load it and I was about to load the launcher, when Trudy came around the side of the house.
We both saw her about the same time. I turned to open another box of clay birds, and Leonard turned to pick up a box of shells, and she was swinging our way in the sunlight.
'Shit,' Leonard said. 'Here comes trouble.'
Trudy was about four years younger than me, thirty-six, but she still looked twenty-six. Had that long blond hair and legs that began at the throat—good legs that were full at the thighs and dark of skin. And she knew how to use them, had that kind of walk that worked the hips and gave her breasts that nice little bounce that'll make a man run his car off the road for a look. She had on a tight beige sweater that showed she still didn't need a bra, and a short black skirt that was the current fashion, and it made me think of the late sixties and her mini-skirt days—back when I met her and she was going to be a great artist and I was going to find some way to save the world.
Far as I knew, closest she'd gotten to art was a drafting table and dressing mannequins in store windows, and the closest I'd gotten to saving the world was my name on some petitions, for everything from recycling aluminum cans to saving the whales. I put my cans in the trash now, and I didn't know how the whales were doing.
'Watch her,' Leonard said, before she was in earshot.
'I'm watching.'
'You know what I mean. Don't come crying over to my place if she does it to you again. Mind what I'm saying, now.'
'I know what you're saying.'
'Uh-huh, and a hard dick knows no conscience.'
'It isn't that way and you know it.'
'Well, it's some kind of way.'
Now that Trudy was closer, the midday sun full on her face, I could see she didn't quite look twenty-six. The pores in her nose were a little larger and there were crow's feet around her eyes and laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. She always had liked to laugh, and she'd laugh at anything. I remembered best how she laughed when she was happy in bed. She had a laugh then that was pretty as the song of a bird. It was the kind of thing I didn't want to remember, but the memory was there just the same, like a thorn in the back of my brain.
She smiled at us then, and I felt the January day become a little warmer. She could do that to a man, and she knew it. Liberated or not, she didn't fight that ability.
'Hello, Hap,' she said.
'Hello,' I said.
'Leonard,' she said.
'Trudy,' Leonard said.
'What're you boys up to?'
'Shooting some skeet,' I said. 'Want to shoot some?'
'Sure.'
Leonard handed me the shotgun. 'I got to go, Hap. I'll check you later. Remember what I told you, huh?'
I looked at that hard face of his, black as a prune, said, 'Sure, I'll remember.'
'Un-huh. See you, Trudy,' and he went away then, making deep strides across the pasture toward the house where his car was parked.
