The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed by Charles Runyon Read Free Book Online Page B

add up the tickets on the morning deliveries, but I couldn’t make sense out of the numbers. I knew what was wrong; my past kept jumping up and hitting me in the face. I picked up the phone and called Ethel: “Can you come in and take over? I’ve got to rush out of town.”
    The streaked old frame house sat on a barren hill in the bowels of the Nation. A single pine tree stood beside the house, its trunk naked except for a tuft of green at the top. The Friedland boys had always kept ‘coon hounds chained to the tree; they’d also had stretching frames for curing muskrat and mink pelts, and a small graveyard of junked cars and wrecked motorcycles. For ten years the sightless windows had overlooked gullied slopes which resembled the ribs of a starving dog.
    Now the house had the bustling disorder of a mining camp. A telephone company truck was parked on the road, and men were stringing wire toward the house. Heine Wentz’ drilling rig squatted half-way up the slope beside a pyramid of fresh yellow clay. I didn’t see Lou’s pickup nor Curt’s old car; apparently Gaby hadn’t yet returned. I recognized Gil Sisk’s hulking figure on the roof and waved; he spat out a handful of nails and called down:
    “Lou went to Connersville for plumbing fixtures.”
    I nodded. Connersville was the nearest large city, forty miles away. “Where’s Curt?”
    Gil’s face spread in a teasing grin. “What you want him for?”
    My face felt hot. “It’s serious, Gil. Where is he?”
    Gil silently pointed his hammer across a flat stretch of ground behind the house. I saw Curt’s back outlined against the sky; broad and tan and bare to the waist, with a quiver of arrows across it. Far ahead of him stood an archery target.
    I made my way over the rocky ground. A light breeze caressed my face, warm until the sun went behind a fleck of cloud, then sharp with the bite of winter.
    “You’re rushing the season,” I said as I walked up behind him. “It isn’t that warm.”
    He turned, and I was surprised to see that he’d shaved off the beard. His face was composed of straight lines coming together in perfect angles, so smooth that I looked hard for a flaw. There was something unnaturally clean and hard about his face; you couldn’t say about him: Here’s a thoughtful man, or a sad and morose man. He seemed … blank, like someone in a waiting room. I felt an urge to see some emotion in the face, and to know that I’d caused it myself. Anything would have served, even hatred or disgust.
    But he looked at me without change of expression and turned back. With a single smooth movement, he took an arrow from the quiver and fitted it to the bowstring.
    “I’ve still got the West Indian sun in my system. The cold hasn’t touched me yet.”
    I felt like a bug which had been seized, stuck under a microscope, and set aside. I forced down my annoyance, remembering that I’d been to blame for our awkward reunion yesterday. It was up to me to erase that beginning.
    “I … like you better without the beard.”
    “It was part of my beachcomber costume.” A vague smile tugged at his lips, as though he were laughing at himself. “Now I’m on another masquerade.”
    We were still stalking on the surface. I felt impatient to make contact, to get beneath his shield. I watched his muscles knot as he slowly drew back the bowstring. A dew of sweat shone on his forehead, but his features were composed. Suddenly all his muscles went slack. Zzzzp! The arrow disappeared; I saw it reappear a second later in the second ring out from the bull’s-eye.
    “I never saw anyone shoot like that.”
    “It’s the Zen method,” he said, drawing another arrow from the quiver. “You’re supposed to let the release of the arrow come as a total surprise. You aren’t supposed to think.”
    ZzzzP! A second arrow quivered in the edge of the bull’s-eye.
    “Pretty good,” I said. “Zen is a kind of Buddhism, isn’t it, like yoga?”
    He nodded.
    “You sit