Harlan's Race

Lots of foreplay before he tries to fuck you... his way. Snipers are top men. If we don’t zap him, you may be in for months of this... years. You’ll have to commit to a different way of living.”
    The base of my spine went cold.
    “Do we call the police?” Steve asked.
    “Not yet,” said Harry. “They don’t care enough about faggots. We might luck into some detective who’s a brother. But we might not. Same for the attorney general, the FBI. There’d be leaks. Maybe to the wrong people. Only a few of us need to know. You two, and Chino, and me. And John Sive, if we ever have to.”
    Vince wasn’t mentioned as needing to know details. Sad, but true. We couldn’t trust him either.
    “If we get our hands on LEV.,” I said, “what do we do with him?”
    “Depends,” said Harry.
    “On what?” I asked.
    Both vets were scanning the island with their keen eyes. Chino had an eager look. He was the perfect hunter-killer that America had spent millions to train, then flung away with a sneer, like the priceless pearl that Shakespeare wrote about. Now he had glimpsed the perfect war.
    “On whether he has a mysterious accident before the cops get to the scene,” smiled Chino.
    “I’d rather see him stand trial,” I said.
    Harry shook his head in disgust.
    “Yeah, sure,” he murmured. ‘You and John Sive, and your propaganda victories. I remember you guys talking about how Billy was going to have one of those in Montreal.”
    Next day, Harry took the boat over to the mainland and sent the rock to Julius by registered mail.
    When Billy, Vince and Jacques had come into my world, I thought of them as three storm-driven birds. Now two new birds had landed — feathers battered by the winds of war. Saidak was the screaming eagle. Cabrera was the cormorant, at home in the sea.
    That night, we cooked up a butch supper of thick steaks and clams fresh from the bay. Chino’s dry humor was back in form, and he had us laughing and guffawing. It was not going to be your average screwing-in-the-dunes kind of Fire Island summer.
    After dinner, we started making the area more secure.
    “Your desert island may be poetic as hell. But it’s wide open,” said Harry.
    H-C Security went on to elaborate. Hotel Goodnight was exposed — no fence, accessible by land or water, easily fire-bombed. Our dock made it simple for kidnappers to grab somebody and make a quick retreat by boat. Davis Park was an incorporated township, so building codes banned fences — they’d spoil the view. No fence meant no guard dog.
    “Forget dogs anyway,” said Chino. “A .22 pistol with a silencer does a dog.” He stroked Angel’s new cat, Striper. She arched her back and smiled at him. “We’ll watch the cat here. She’ll tell us stuff.”
    “We need to keep bugs off the phone,” Harry said. “We need a few Motorola walkie-talkies — always handy to have around.”
    “We get to know your neighbors’ boats, in case we have to steal one,” Chino added.
    “And we need an alarm system,” said Harry. “Is all that okay with you, Steve?”
    “Hey — do whatever you need to do,” Steve replied.
    Operating an alarm without electricity would be a challenge. In that part of Davis Park, a few residents had phones, including us. But most had chosen to be primitives, with gas-lights instead of electric lights. We were among the primitives. Harry proposed a fancy battery-operated alarm system that cost around $6000. But Chino argued in favor of a low-tech system.
    So, working at night, all of us rigged a trip-wire system around the house. First we dug a foot-deep, yard-wide trench. Miles of dry seaweed lay in rolls on the beach — Angel’s job was to gather armfuls of the stuff. With all that weed, we packed the trench almost full. On top of the seaweed, we laid trip-wires that were connected to tin cans hanging hidden in clumps of brush, or by the house. A layer of sand covered the trip wire.
    It wasn’t the kind of booby trap that would injure some wandering child. But at night, any footstep on the trench (including a deer’s) would sink far enough to rattle the tin cans gently together and alert us. Another wire was set only at night — across the 20-foot-wide entrance to the cove, just below the surface of the water, where any sizable intruder would trip it.
    In the boardwalk, the vets pried several boards loose near the house. More boards were jimmied on our dock. These now creaked when anyone stepped on them.
    Then we