He turned and sprinted, his feet flying, ducking along the covered sidewalk, around the odd party of tourists, past some lolling teenagers, feeling like a complete jerk. No: feeling somehow flushed and excited. Once in his career on the Oklahoman he’d had to sub for the vacationing movie critic and go on what was called a junket, where he’d flown down to New Orleans and sat at a table in a hotel banquet room when Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood were paraded around the room, a half an hour per table. It was of course a completely ridiculous situation, but when he first saw the two men entering the big hotel room, he felt as he felt now: giddy, goofy, unprepared, callow as a pup, completely unworthy. And they were only movie stars and turned out to be, at least as far as he could tell in the time he shared with them at the big tables, fairly decent guys but pretend heroes.
Now, this guy was a real hero: in war and in peace, he’d done extraordinary things. As Russ ran and as his excitement mounted, his concentration scattered; his mind seemed full of glistening soap bubbles.
A plan, he thought, you need a plan.
But before he could hatch a plan, his shoes took him around a corner and into the parking lot that lay in front of the Southern States store. It was a gravel lot and dust hung in the air; Russ stopped, and drank in what looked like a scene from some documentary on America’s working habits. This would be the rural division, as imagined by someone with the mordant glee of Hieronymus Bosch and the eye for detail of Norman Rockwelclass="underline" Everywhere it seemed that farmers or ranchers or cowboys milled in the yard, swapping yarns near their pickups or backslapping and grab-assing in little clots. In the background were cattle pens and there was some lowing from the imprisoned animals. It looked like Saturday night at the railhead; where was John Wayne? Well, dammit, John Wayne was everywhere.
These men all had craggy brown faces and seemed woven together out of rawhide and pemmican. All were encased in dusty denim and leather from head to toe in a dozen different shades, all wore boots beat to hell and gone, but the headgear was various: straw hats, Stetsons both domed and flat, brims curly or straight, baseball caps, engineer caps, even a fishing cap or two.
Out of such chaos Russ could make no sense at all, and felt as out of it as an African American at the local Klan meeting. But they seemed to be so enjoying themselves that they paid him no mind at all, and he wandered among them, looking for a set of features he could match with the features he’d memorized off the magazine cover and the more recent photos. He’d guess a man like Bob would leave a wake of wannabes, would be at the center of a circle of acolytes, so he looked for a king among all these princes. He could make out none, and now, one or two at a time, the boys would peel out and begin to leave.
“What’s going on?” he asked one old-timer.
“Friday noontime, they haul in to reload on supplies. Lots of spread-out places here. More’n you’d imagine. The boys all git together for a bit of joshing time on Friday noons.”
“I see,” he said.
He wandered on through the thinning crowd, utterly failing to connect any of these tawny, ageless men who seemed from a different race altogether with his image of Bob Lee Swagger.
He reached at last the supply house, where some laborer was throwing sacks of feed into the back of a weathered green pickup.
Russ froze and then unfroze and just stared.
The man was tall and sweaty and had wrapped a red bandanna around his throat to soak up the sweat. He wore the faded jeans and faded denim shirt of a cowboy, but was also wearing a battered, faded red baseball cap that said .
The man felt him staring and looked him hard in the eyes and yes, yes it was him: older than Russ expected, and browner, almost the color of Navajo pottery, without an extra ounce of flesh anywhere on his face. His skin was a nest of fissures and crags, taut yet ruination itself. The pewter eyes were so intense they burned like lasers. He looked not at all romantic or heroic: he looked like a hot tired sweaty man with a lot of work still to do. He looked grumpy as hell, and maybe mean too. He looked like he could whip Russ’s ass.
“What are you staring at, sonny?” he demanded.
Russ was overcome with shame. But also excitement, and he ran to him and blurted, “Mr. Swagger? Mr. Bob Lee Swagger. I came a long way to see you.”
“Well, you wasted your goddamned time,” said Swagger. “You go write your goddamned book on your own. I ain’t explaining myself to a pup like you or the best writer on earth. I hate writers. I really hate writers. Now go on, get out of my way.”
With that, he climbed behind the wheel of his truck and headed off.
Bob worked the horse. The horse had an eye condition, an ulcerated pupil which had infected, possibly from fly contamination. The infection had spread mysteriously and monstrously until the eye looked like an eight ball sheathed in mildew, and terrible acne had formed on the face all the way up to the ear and halfway down to the nostrils. He was a beautiful gray gelding named Billy, and the girl who owned him had done a good job building him up and bringing him along until the eye thing.
“It’s the worst disease anyone in our family has ever gotten,” said the girl’s mother. “He could die from it.”
“Now, now,” Bob had told her, but mainly told the grave little girl who hadn’t said a word, “the vet’s done all he can. You got to trust the medicine and we won’t miss a night, and you got to trust us. We’ll take the best care of Billy that can be taken.”
Bob Lee Swagger, having survived nearly fifty years of a life that included various adventures in the Marine Corps (three tours in the Southeast Asian War Games, Second Place Finish) and a private life that was amazingly complex, had ended up the one way he’d never thought he’d end up: happy.
Now, who in hell would have thought such a thing?
For one thing, the dry Arizona weather had a miraculously curative power over his reconstructed left hip, where a 148-grain 7.62×54 full-metal-jacketed bullet launched at over 2,600 feet per second had torn out a hideous amount of bone and cartilage. It had taken the government a long year in a vet hospital to get the thing rewired and even then, after all that time, it had been a jury-rigged job and for a good twenty years he’d awakened each morning with the reminder that if you hunt men for a living, they by God hunt you back. The pain possibly had led to the drinking, but possibly not: he’d stayed drunk and mean for nearly a decade to bury pains that maybe had nothing to do with his hip and could not otherwise be rewired, memories of young men thrown away for so much nothing, except possibly a name on a black wall. That took time to work out and make peace with and now the blessed lack of hurt down there where he was rebuilt was extra gravy every goddamned day. But that was only part of it.
The other part of it was the wife. A woman. Julie Fenn, R.N. She’d once been a picture carried between the helmet and the helmet liner by his spotter, one of the great young men who came home from the land of bad things in a rubber bag in a wooden box. Some short circuit in the universe had decreed that Bob meet Julie many years later; when he’d seen her, he’d known: This is the one. There is no other. And by the same token, she’d known that of him, and now they were married, had a little girl named Nicki who wrote her name YKN4 backwards and scrambled, the age tossed in too, on all her drawings of horses. It was so good, so many of the things he’d thought he’d never have, because he had been exiled from the rest of the human community, because he’d done his country’s bidding with a rifle and gone out and officially killed 87 enemy soldiers, one at a time, over a long distance. He knew, of course, that he’d killed 341. Now all that was somehow forgotten.