The noontime newscast informed him that Arabs and Israelis had exchanged a fresh round of massacres. War seemed thoroughly possible. Well, he thought, let’s get in there, fast, beat those bedouins to their flea-bitten knees, and assure our oil supplies. The Russians will scream, but they won’t act if we catch them by surprise and keep SAC on red alert. Or if they are crazy enough to act, we’ll survive, most of us. They won’t.
The afternoon was pissed away on a sales engineer from a firm interested in redoing his heating system. No matter argument, the fellow wouldn’t reduce his estimate to a figure that would please the home office and thus help get Tronen out of Senlac. Greedy bastardon behalf of his employers, true, but his was the smug fat face which must be confronted more or less courteously, while inside, Tronen imagined kicking out those teeth and grinding a boot across that nose.
He left early. His stomach had become a cauldron of acid and he wasn’t accomplishing anything. Thus daylight lingered when he got home, the sun a blood clot barely above the snowfields it tinged, long shadows of houses like bludgeons and of trees like knives. The cold and the silence had teeth. Judas, but the place felt empty! Why not eat out? No, why pay good money for greasy food and slovenly service?
Better relax, really relax, take the evening off.
THE KITTEN
145
A Maalox tablet eased his bellyache, but an egg-nog would soothe body and soul, sipped before a hearthfire. He hoped. This rage in him, allowed to strike at nothing, could too readily turn its destructiveness inward. He didn’t want a heart attack; he wantedwanted
Darkness from the east was rapidly engulfing an ice-green southwest while he brought in as much wood as he reckoned he’d need. Noisily crumpling newspaper, he dropped a glance across the grate and saw fragments of Una’s thesis. His difficulties at work, and that damn kitten, had made him quite forget it. Not everything was ash. Whole sheets survived, browned or partly charred. On impulse he reached over the screen and fished out the topmost. Maybe, if he cited chapter and verse, Una would see what a waste of time her project was his time, for didn’t he, as a breadwinner, have a right to hers?
He brought the piece near a lamp, the better to find his way through the strikeovers and scribbled corrections of a first draft. .. . “will argue that, while Egyptian religion had origins as primitive as any, it developed a subtlety comparable to Maimonides or Thomas Aquinas. Monotheism was no invention of Akhnaton’s; we have grounds for supposing it existed already in the Fifth Dynasty, though for reasons to be discussed its expression was always heno-theistic. The multiple ‘bodies’ and ‘souls’ attributed to man in the Book of the Dead were as intricate in their relationships as the Persons of the Trinity. Even the ka, which superficially resembles an idea found in shamanism and simi-146
The Unicorn Trade
larly naive mythomagical systems, suggested by dream experience: even the ka turns out on examination to be a concept of such psychological profundity that a sophisticated modern can well think that here a certain truth is symbolized, and a Jungian go to the length of wondering if there is something more than symbolism. The author will not speculate further, but does admit to being a Jungian who will in this paper often resort to that form of analysis”
“Holy shit!” Tronen stopped himself from tearing the sheet in half. Let him read it aloud to her, let her hear not only what crap it was but how she wrote like the stuffiest kind of professor. Yes, and point out the influence, in those directions, of her dear ex-boyfriend Harry Quarters … He folded the brittle paper, tucked it in a hip pocket, and went back to building his fire. The rest of her work could certainly burn.
The flames jumped eagerly to life. Their reflections soon shimmered from windowpanes, red upon black. Tronen stood a few minutes watching the fire grow, warming his palms, listening to the crackle, sniffing wisps of smoke that escaped the chimney. His daylong indignation quieted, hardened toward resoluteness. He’d bust that bronco the world yet. Spurs, quirt, and bit-The phone rang.