‘What kind of sentence reduction could he possibly expect?’ asks one of the anchors. She’s a perky brunette. How can they all be so perky so early? Is it drugs?
‘Life instead of the needle,’ the detective returns, not even having to pause for thought.
Billy is sure this is also correct. The only question is what Allen knew, and why the killing had to be so public. As a warning to others who might share Allen’s knowledge? Ordinarily Billy wouldn’t care. Ordinarily he’s just the mechanic. Only nothing about the situation in which he now finds himself is ordinary.
The anchors turn it over to a reporter who’s interviewing John Colton, one of the Young Lawyers, and Billy doesn’t want to see that. Just a week ago he and Johnny and Jim Albright were matching quarters to see who was going to pay for the tacos. They were on the plaza, laughing and having a good time. Now John looks stunned and woeful. He gets as far as ‘We all thought he was a really decent—’ before Billy kills the television.
He rinses out his cereal bowl, then checks the Dalton Smith phone. There’s a text from Bucky, just three words: No transfer yet. It’s what he expected, but that, added to the expression on Johnny Colton’s face, is no way to start his first day in – might as well call it what it is – captivity.
If there’s been no transfer yet, there probably isn’t going to be any transfer at all. He was paid five hundred thousand up front, and that’s a lot of cheese, but it’s not what he was promised. Up to this morning Billy has been too busy to be really mad about getting stiffed by someone he trusted, but now he’s not busy and he’s pissed like a bear. He did the job, and not just yesterday. He’s been doing this job for over three months, and at far greater personal cost than he ever would have believed. He was promised, and who breaks their promises?
‘Bad people, that’s who,’ Billy says.
He goes to the local newspaper. The headline is big – COURTHOUSE ASSASSINATION! – but it probably looks bigger and better in print than it does on his iPhone screen. The story tells him nothing he doesn’t already know, but the lead photo makes it clear why Sheriff Vickery wasn’t in attendance at Chief Conlee’s press conference. The pic shows that absurd Stetson hat lying on the steps, with no county sheriff to hold it up. Sheriff Vickery beat feet. Sheriff Vickery skedaddled. This picture is worth a thousand words. For him it wouldn’t have been a press conference, it would have been a walk of shame.
Good luck getting re-elected with that photo to explain, Billy thinks.
2
He goes upstairs to tend Daphne and Walter, then stops with the spray bottle in his hand, wondering if he’s crazy. He’s supposed to water them, not drown them. He checks the Jensens’ fridge and sees nothing he wants but there’s a package of English muffins on the counter with one left and he toasts it up, telling himself that if he doesn’t use it, it will just get moldy. There are regular windows up here and he sits in a bar of sun, munching his muffin and thinking about what he’s avoiding. Which is Benjy’s story, of course. It’s the only job he has to do now that he’s finished the one that brought him here. But it means writing about the Marines, and there’s so much, starting with the bus to Parris Island, basic … just so much.
Billy rinses off the plate he’s used, dries it, puts it back in the cupboard, and goes downstairs. He looks out the periscope window and sees the usual not much. The pants he wore yesterday are on the bedroom floor. He picks them up and feels in the pockets, almost hoping he’s lost the flash drive somewhere along the way, but it’s there with his keys, one of them to Dalton Smith’s leased Ford Fusion in the parking garage on the other side of town. Waiting until he feels it’s safe to leave. When the heat goes down, as they say in those movies about the last job that always goes wrong.
The flash drive feels like it’s gained weight. Looking at it, a marvelous storage device that would have seemed like science fiction only thirty years ago, there are two things he can’t believe. One is how many words he’s already put on it. The other is that there can possibly be any more. Twice as many. Four times as many. Ten, twenty.
He opens the laptop he thought he’d lost, a more expensive lucky charm than a battered baby shoe all grimy with dirt but otherwise about the same deal, and powers it up. He types in the password, plugs in the flash drive, and drags the single stored document to the laptop’s screen. He looks at the first line – The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm – and feels a kind of despair. This is good work, he feels sure of it, but what felt light when he started now feels heavy, because he has a responsibility to make the rest just as good, and he’s not sure he can do it.
He goes to the periscope window and looks out at more nothing, wondering if he’s just discovered why so many would-be writers are unable to finish what they have started. He thinks of The Things They Carried, surely one of the best books about war ever written, maybe the best. He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.
All over the world there are half-finished books – memoirs, poetry, novels, surefire plans for getting thin or getting rich – in desk drawers, because the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down.
Some other time, they think. Maybe when the kids are a little older. Or when I retire.
Is that it? Will it be too heavy if he tries writing about the bus ride and the jarhead haircut and the first time Sergeant Uppington asked him Do you want to suck my cock, Summers? Do you? Because you look like a cocksucker to me.
Ask?
Oh no, he didn’t ask, Billy thinks, unless it was what you call a rhetorical question. He shouted in my face, his nose just an inch from mine, his spittle warm on my lips, and I said Sir no sir, I do not want to suck your cock and he said Is my cock not good enough for you, Private Summers, you cocksucking poor excuse for a recruit?
How it all comes back, and can he write it all, even as Benjy Compson?
Billy decides he can’t. He pulls the curtain closed and goes back to the laptop, meaning to turn it off and spend the day watching TV. Ellen DeGeneres, Hot Bench, Kelly and Ryan, and The Price Is Right all before lunch. Then a nap and then some afternoon soap operas. He can finish with John Law, who tick-tocks his gavel like Coolio in the old music videos and takes no shit in his courtroom. But as he reaches for the off button, a thought comes from nowhere. It’s almost as if someone has whispered in his ear.
You’re free. You can do whatever you want.
Not physically free, God no. He’ll be cooped up in this apartment at least until the police decide to lift their roadblocks, and even then it would be wise to stay a few days longer just to be sure. But in terms of his story, he’s free to write whatever the fuck he wants. And how he wants. With no one looking over his shoulder, monitoring what he writes, he no longer has to pretend to be a dumb person writing about a dumb person. He can be a smart person writing about a young man (for that’s what Benjy will be if Billy picks up the narrative again) who is poorly educated and naïve, but far from stupid.
I can let go of the Faulkner shit, Billy thinks. I can write he and I instead of me and him. I can write can’t instead of cant. I can even use quotation marks for dialogue if I want to.
If he’s writing strictly for himself, he can tell what’s important to him and skip what isn’t. He doesn’t have to write about the jarhead haircut, even though he could. He doesn’t have to write about Uppington screaming in his face, although he might. He doesn’t have to write about the boy – Haggerty or Haverty, Billy can’t remember which – who had a heart attack running and was taken away to the base infirmary, and Sergeant Uppington said he was fine and maybe he was and maybe he died.