The Nicholas Linnear Novels by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

catalog. Agh, he thought, maybe it came in the mail today. It was about due.
    He was picturing Helene’s long-legged frame in the clothes—he laughed: if you could call them that—as he came around the last bend to the beach-front property and saw the black-clad figure step right into the beam of his left-side headlight.
    “What the fuck!” He stepped on the brakes and swerved over to the right shoulder. Leaning out the window, he called, “You stupid bastard! I coulda killed you. What’s the matter with—”
    The door on his side crashed open and it felt as if a tornado hurled him out of the cab. “Hey!” He rolled across the cool tarmac. “Hey, buddy!”
    He got to his feet in a boxer’s semi-crouch, his fists up in front of his chest.
    “Not to fool around, you sonovabitch.”
    His eyes opened wide as he saw the flash of the long blade in the wash of the headlights. Christ, he thought, a sword. A sword? Jesus, I must be drunk.
    A moth battled in the headlight, dazzled, and the cicadas sizzled. Close at hand, the surf hissed and shushed like a nanny calming a crying baby.
    He threw a punch. It never connected.
    The air in front of him seemed to split apart and vibrate like a beaded curtain.
    He felt two sensations almost simultaneously. They were the sharpest, most exquisitely painful feelings he had ever experienced.
    Once, just outside the base, he had had a scuffle with an M.P. and the bastard had managed to slash him with a knife, wounding him in the side, before he had had a chance to bury his fist in the M.P.’s face. It was the guardhouse for him for that, but he had never felt so satisfied in his life.
    But that pain, that burning was nothing to what Billy Shawtuck felt now. The blur of the blade pierced the night and then pierced Billy. From the top of his right shoulder down across his abdomen to the left side of his pelvis. His guts began to spill out and his nostrils were suffused with a nauseating stench.
    “Jesus Chri—”
    Then the round wooden pole crashed, whistling like a boy at play, onto his shoulder. He heard the sharp crack as the bones broke but, astoundingly, there was absolutely no pain. Only the feeling that he had been driven straight through the tarmac of the road.
    Tears came to Billy’s eyes for the first time in years. Momma, he thought, Momma, I’m comin’ home.
    “I think I know what it is,” she said.
    Night had come and a strong wind, springing up from the landward side of the house, rattled the trees outside. Far off a boat hooted once and was still. They lay close together on the bed, enjoying the nearness of their flesh, nothing sexual in it; just two beings, together.
    “You won’t laugh,” she said, turning her face toward his. “Promise me you won’t laugh.”
    “I promise.”
    “If I’m hurt—physically—it prepares me, sort of.”
    “For what?”
    “For the other kind of hurt. The breaking up; the leaving.”
    “That seems to me an awfully pessimistic view of life.”
    “Yes, it does.”
    He put his arm around her and she put one foot between his, rubbing his shins.
    After a time, he said, “What is it you want?”
    “To be happy,” she said. “That’s all.” There is nothing else in the world, she thought, but our linked bodies, our twined souls, and she felt that she had never been as close to anyone as she felt at that moment to Nicholas. Trust had to begin somewhere. Perhaps this was the place for her to start.
    She jumped at the sound of an enormous crash that seemed to come from near the front of the house, the kitchen. She cried out as if a cold hand had clutched at her vitals, saw Nicholas sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed.
    He stood up, and as he began to move toward the bedroom door he seemed totally transformed to her. Standing there stark naked, he nevertheless seemed fully clothed, as if his rippling muscles and gleaming sweat-streaked skin were some mysterious raiment cloaking him.
    He moved silently toward the