Some Kinds of Love: Stories

Hunter, Seeker

J81 Hunter, Seeker Ifirst encountered Barabbas Nimmo, the man who may or may not be our suspect in the Ether Eddie case, when we were both eleven. Back then we had beautiful bodies, never bathed, and we were deadly serious about our games. March in the Missouri Ozarks it could as well snow two feet as roil a humid eighty degrees with tornadoes as exclamation points. Jonquils wag their yellow heads. In the hills redbuds foam purple. Despite columns of sunlight, something of winter lurks in the west. And it was just this precarious month thirty years ago when we spirited our Huffy and Red Rocket dirtbikes deep into the cedars hugging Scottie Brodbeck’s house, where we met for the game of Hunter, Seeker. Hunter, Seeker was an evolved Hide-and-Seek that may have been unique to Southern Hollow, though I doubt it. Brodbeck named it after something he read in a science fiction novel, and the name stuck all over the subdivision. The initial gathering, choosing who was “it,” then running and hiding were the same. In the finding came all our twists. As of March 1, “Ether Eddie” has entered five households in Southern Hollow, a suburban neighborhood which, before Eddie began, felt no need to lock its doors at night. On breaking 82J hunter seeker in anywhere from midnight till three in the morning, he slithers through the home to the bedroom of his female victim. She is white as all are in Southern Hollow, petite, attractive, age sixteen to eighteen. My daughter Cassie has just turned sixteen. With a cloth doused in ether he covers the victim’s mouth and nose. There is physical evidence and testimony that our Eddie pulls the sheets down to bare the victim, rolls the victim on her back so her face is up, her stupefied lips parted. He may cross her hands upon her chest as if he were the undertaker composing a corpse. Then our Eddie seats himself on the edge of the bed and watches his victim sleep. When she stirs, he freezes until he is sure her struggling mind has perceived him. Then he rises and vanishes. I have been summoned to bedrooms so close behind his wake that I have felt on my palm his imprint in the mattress. Even through sterile gloves I have caught the warmth where blood surged through his buttocks and thighs. I have been alone in bedrooms where the ether of his passing still lingers. The Hunter couldn’t just find you beneath the oak leaves, under the deck, or in the lightning-struck hollow of the buckeye tree. When he thought he spotted you, rules said the Hunter must declare his intention with a chant, then freeze and count ten full seconds. In those ten seconds the Seeker could bolt from hiding and court the chase, or call the Hunter’s bluff by staying still. If, after the ten count, the Hunter lunged at a spot where no one was hiding, rules forced the Hunter to move along to another part of the Brodbecks’ acre of yard to hunt for someone else. Even when he lunged at the right spot, the game was not done. The Seeker must be tackled and wrestled to the ground, shoulders pinned for a three count. So in every game there was the assurance of running, wrestling, cavorting in dirt and Bermuda grass, and doing bodily violence to one another. There was much excitement in that day’s game since the Nimmo twins—Barabbas and Hosea—would be there. They went to the private Christian Boys Academy downtown and were aloof from us hunter seeker K83 at Pershing Elementary. And the Nimmos were rich—they lived on Morkan Hill above the Galloway part of Southern Hollow. The father owned a chain of pharmacies and the mother was heiress to a trucking company. In my investigation I have found the name goes back to the first families of Springfield. Barabbas was special, Brodbeck’s mother warned us before the Nimmos brought the twins by. Not blind but unable to see well in daylight—his pupils grew no muscle to the iris, so they stayed wide. “Atonal Iris,” Mrs. Brodbeck called it—she volunteered at hospitals and talked a great deal about anatomy and sickness. One of the Liveri girls who babysat at our house and...