Dark of the Moon

hunting.
    “You guys stay here. Watch the light: he’ll have to move if he didn’t go over the edge.” He slapped a magazine into the rifle, worked the bolt one time. “If you see him, yell. I can’t use the radio. It’d give me away.”
    “Where’re you going?” Big Curly asked.
    “I’m gonna crawl around up the hill. If he’s not dead at the bottom, he must’ve headed uphill. He’d be crawling.”
    Jensen: “Man, maybe we ought to wait.”
    Virgil shook his head: “Can’t. Once he’s off the hill, he’s got a hundred miles of cornfields in every direction. We’ll get him sooner or later, but not before he kills a couple of farmers for their cars. What we need, Larry, is every cop you can find, throwing a perimeter around this hill…It’ll take him a while to get off.”
    “Get some dogs in,” Big Curly said.
    Virgil snapped his fingers: “Do that. Do that right now. If you can get a couple of dogs, tell the handlers to get them to bark. Get them down below. We want him to think that the dogs are coming.”
    “They will be,” Big Curly said.
    “No, no. If he sees people coming, and feels like he’s trapped, he’ll go down shooting,” Virgil said. “If you have a dog walk right up on him, the handler gets shot. We don’t want that. Want the dogs barking, but we don’t want them trailing in the dark. I’m going. Keep watching the headlights. If you see him…”
    “Take it easy,” Jensen said. “Take it easy.”
    “If he’s down there at the bottom of the hill, just start honking your horns,” Virgil said. “I’ll be back.”
     
    I N THE GOOD OLD DAYS, in fifth, sixth, seventh, and maybe eighth grades, before the whole issue of women came up, Virgil and his male friends would occasionally play war, always on a soft summer evening, when the light was fading to dark. There were apple trees in the neighborhood, to provide the ammo; a golf-ball-sized green apple, thrown at close range, could give you a bruise like a good left hook. Tree lines, fences, hedges, and overgrown bridal-wreath bushes provided the cover.
    One thing everybody learned quickly was that in the dark, even with a bright moon—a full moon hung overhead as Virgil slipped into the grass, heading up the hill—was that you were never sure what was human and what was shadow; you learned not to look directly at someone, because he could feel you in the dark. You learned to move slowly, like the moon shadows spreading across the open. If you didn’t learn, you’d take a shot behind the ear, just as sure as God made little green apples.
     
    T HE WAR GAMES were still in Virgil’s blood, refined by years of hunting. He slipped into the thigh-high bluestem, running in a crouch, then duckwalking and crawling, quickly at first, getting away from the lights of the trucks, then more slowly, feeling his way past hard corners of exposed rock, the occasional bit of brush, the prickly wild rose.
    Williamson had essentially rolled the car down the hill the same way his mother’s had gone down, and over the bluff. If he’d bailed before it went over, he’d have three choices: head sideways and down the hill to the west, head up and across it to the north, or head sideways and uphill to the east. He couldn’t go south, because that was sheer bluff.
    Virgil didn’t think he would go down and west, because that would take him right into the face of the arriving cops, and also force him to cross the approach road. He could have gone north, but that would have cut across the lights from Jensen’s and Big Curly’s headlights as they came up the hill.
    Most likely, Virgil thought, Williamson went east, parallel to the bluff, or slightly northeast, edging away from the bluff. That way, he’d avoid the road altogether, which ended at the ruins of the Judd place. He’d cross below the Judd place, turn more north, across the shoulder of the hill, and after walking down the far side, would step into the ocean of cornfields that spread out below.
    The corn was high enough that he’d be able to jog, guided by the rows, without being seen. Someplace along the run, he’d cut into a farmer’s place looking for a ride.
     
    I F V IRGIL WAS RIGHT, he should cross paths with Williamson above the Judd place.
    If he was wrong, if Williamson had gone straight north, and he’d made it across the road…then Williamson would be behind him, and above him.
    That wouldn’t be good.
    He stopped for ten seconds, listening. Could hear men