Wicked Prey

asked.
    “Anarchist,” she said. “Or anti-Christ. One of the two. I can’t keep them straight.”
    Letty laughed and said, “I gotta get a camera in here . . . Hey, there they are.” She waved across the hillside at two gangling teenage boys, brothers, both with braces on their teeth. One of them, the older one, was a wicked street basketball player, and had nearly taken it to Lucas at the hoop mounted on Lucas’s own garage. Lucas generally approved of them, but they were looking. He knew it, and they knew he knew it, and so were careful. “Take it easy,” he said.
    “Yeah . . . could I get ten dollars?” Letty asked.
    “I suppose . . .”
    She said quickly, “Twenty would be better.”
    He gave her a twenty and she was gone.
    “Nice girl,” said the woman with the baby.
    “That sun is nasty,” Lucas said. “Is the kid okay?”
    “The kid’s fine, but he’s sucking the life out of me,” she said. “I desperately need a cheeseburger and Mark’s got the money.”
    “I could float you a cheeseburger loan,” Lucas offered.
    She stood up and dusted off the seat of her shorts: “I accept. I’m really starving. Who do you shoot for . . . ?”
    “BCA,” he said, and she nodded, and Lucas asked, “Too quiet. I’d like to see a little life in the crowd.”
    “Too hot,” she said. Speaking as an old riot professional: “Basic rule of riots: you don’t have riots when it’s too hot. People get all pukey. Gotta wait until the evening, when things cool off. The best riots are when you have a long summer day, with a long evening where it cools off a little.”
    “I don’t know all that technical stuff,” Lucas said with a smile.
    They stepped around legs and bikes and clumps of people with signs and got to a street grill—the woman and the kid were convenient cover—and he bought her a cheeseburger and fries and a Coke, and got a Diet Coke for himself, and twiddled his fingers at the baby, and then took the baby while the woman, whose name was Lucy, ate the cheeseburger and they walked back to the tent. The baby had quiet blue eyes, observant and contained, and seemed interested in Lucas’s nose.
    A passing stoner, with a sun-bleached ponytail, hazy blue eyes, and a lute in his hand, looked at Lucy, and then Lucas and the baby, and said, “Got that May and December shit going, huh? Good one.”
    Lucy said, “Well, the sex is terrific.”
    Lucas said, “More like May and August.”
    The stoner tapped Lucas on the chest and said, “Good one, man. I mean, you know? Keep it going, you know? Long as you can.”
    “It’s hard, man, you know, sometimes, with a woman like this,” Lucas said. “They want too much, sometimes.”
    The stoner bobbed his head: “I know that for sure, man. Life is hard, and then you fuckin’, you know . . . die.” Sobered by the thought, he wandered away.
    * * *
    “WE’RE GONNA build a new egalitarian culture, man, ” Lucy said to Lucas, as she sat down on her blanket, chewing on the cheeseburger. “To each, according to his needs, from each, according to his ability. Which means that the insurance agents can keep on selling insurance for sixty hours a week and that stoner can keep getting wrecked every day.”
    “Just a guy,” Lucas said. “A lost soul.”
    “I’m getting tired of it,” Lucy said. She squinted up through the tree leaves, and the sun sliding down to the west. Equinox coming in three weeks, and then winter. “Think I’m going home to Massachusetts. Get my dad to send me to grad school.”
    “Think he’ll do it?”
    “My dad will do anything I want him to,” she said. “Like you and your daughter.”
    Lucas nodded. “Yeah . . . What about your husband?”
    “Why wasn’t he here to buy me a cheeseburger when I needed it?” she asked. She took a few fries. “Fuck the revolution.”
    A group of ten protesters in black began a chant: “No War but the Class War! No War but the Class War!” and people in the park began drifting that way, and a couple of cops idled along with them.
    Lucas and Lucy chatted for a while—Lucy had been living in Iowa, where she and her husband were summer visitors at a drama commune, which gave revolutionary plays to local farm communities, and her husband was working on a screenplay—and then Lucas got up to leave. “Say hi when you see me around,” he said.
    “Thanks for the food,” she said. “I was starting to hurt.”
    * * *
    BACK IN the HomTel, Lindy screeched, in a high-climbing