“But he won’t go home. It’s beginning to feel a little sick. Poor YKN4. I don’t want her to think this is how you have to grow up.”
“Oh, she can handle it. It helps her to know her father is an extraordinary man. It gives her a little something, I think.”
Swagger looked at his wife. She was a tanned and handsome woman whose blond hair had begun to show streaks of gray. She hadn’t worn anything except jeans and boots and T-shirts since they’d returned to Ajo. She worked like a dog too. Bob thought she worked harder than he did and that was saying a lot.
“How old would you say he is?” she asked.
“About twenty-two or so. If he wants adventures he should join the Corps. He could use a few weeks on Parris Island. He shouldn’t hang out here, scaring the child and making me even crankier than I am.”
“I don’t know why he seems different.”
“He reminds you a little of Donny, that’s why,” Bob said, naming her first husband.
“Yes, I suppose he does. He has Donny’s shyness and unsureness.”
“Donny was a good boy,” Bob said, “the best.” Donny had died in his arms, gurgling blood in little spouts from a lung shot, eyes locked on nothingness, squirming in the terror of it, his left hand gripping terribly into Bob’s biceps.
Hang on, Donny, oh Jesus, medic, Medic! Goddammit! Medic! Just hang on, it’ll be fine, I swear it’ll be fine.
But it wasn’t fine and there were no medics. Bob was hung up outside the berm, his own hip pulped by the same motherfucker, and Donny had come for him and caught the next round square in the boiler. He remembered the desperate pressure in Donny’s fingers as the boy clung to him, as if Bob were life itself. Then the fingers went limp and the gurgling stopped.
Bob hated when that sort of thing came back on him. Sometimes you could control it, sometimes you couldn’t. Blackness settled on him. In older days, it would have been drinking time.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“It’s all right. Hell, I guess I can go tell him face-to-face to get out of here and quit wasting his life.”
He got up, gave her a tight little smile and walked down the road into the place. The boy was across the road in an old Ford F-150, just sitting. He saw Bob coming and Bob saw him smile. He got out of the truck.
“Now, what in hell do you want?” Bob said. “Say your piece.”
The boy stood before him. Yes, early twenties, lanky, with a thick mop of hair and the soft look of college all over him. He wore jeans and a fancy little short-sleeved shirt with some kind of emblem on the chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This was stupid. But I didn’t know how else to talk to you. So I thought if I just showed you I was serious about all this, just let you know I was here, didn’t force it or act like a jerk, they say you’re a very decent guy, anyway, I thought you’d eventually let me talk to you.”
“This ain’t no interview. I don’t give interviews. What’s done is done and it’s mine, not for nobody else.”
“I swear to you, I have no interest in 1992.”
“And I ain’t doing no I’m-such-a-hero books. No Nam stuff. That’s over and done and best forgotten too. Let the dead lie in peace.”
“It’s not about Vietnam. I didn’t come about Vietnam. But I did come about the dead.”
They faced each other for a long moment. Twilight. The sun eased behind the mountains, leaving an empty world of gray light and silence. The dead. Let them alone, please. What good does it do, what good can it do? Why would this boy come before him, claiming to represent the dead. He knew so many of the dead too.
“So, goddammit, spit it out. A book? You do want to write a book.”
“I do want to write a book, yes. And yes, it’s about a great American hero and yes, he’s from Blue Eye, Arkansas, and yes, he’s the kind of man they don’t make anymore.”
“No books,” said Bob.
“Well, let me go on just a bit,” the boy said. “The great American hero is named—was named—Earl Swagger. He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, 22 February 1945, D plus two. He went home to America, where he became a state trooper in Arkansas. On July 23, 1955, he shot it out with two armed robbers named Jimmy and Bub Pye. He killed them both.”
Bob looked hard at the boy.
“And they killed him too. Your father. I want to do a book about your father.”
4
arl assigned Lem to stay with the body until the state detectives and the county coroner arrived. He got back to the cruiser and noticed Jed and Lum Posey leaning on Pop Dwyer’s hood, the three of them hooting like old drunks. But when they felt his hard glare, they dried up fast. Jed’s face had swollen badly; it looked as if he’d swallowed a grapefruit, yellow and rotten. But Jed was hard mountain trash; you could bang on him for hours without really breaking anything.
“You boys stay here till the detectives come. Pop, them dogs cool?”
“Cool as they can get in this weather, Mr. Earl,” said Pop.
“Good. You stay on station now, you hear.”
“I do,” said Pop.
Earl got into his cruiser, turned over the engine and flicked on the radio. The air was full of traffic as the state mobilized for the manhunt, led by the state police, all 111 officers of them, who would inherit responsibility for this job. He listened for a bit in disbelief, as if in disbelieving he could make it go away. But it would not go away.
“Ah, Dispatch, this is Car Two Niner, ah, we are now in blockade at 226 and I got two units arching down between 226 and 271, you got that, Dispatch?”
“Roger, Two Nine, we got the state Piper Cub working your area, trying to cover them back roads. He’s on another frequency, but if we get anything, we’ll git to you.”
“Got it, Dispatch, I’m holding here. Got three units, more coming in.”
“Wally, the colonel says you might want to send one of your units over toward Lavca. We got good military help out of Chaffee and I think they’re goin’ pitch in some airborne stuff.”
“Dispatch, I got a unit headed to Lavca.”
“Good work, and over, Two Niner.”
Earl recognized Two Niner as Bill Cole, a lieutenant in the Logan County barrack. Dispatch was talking for Major Don Benteen, second-in-command; Colonel Evers must have been calling the shots from somewhere in Little Rock, and was presumably on his way over to take area command.
Jimmy, you goddamned little fool, he thought with sudden passionate bitterness.
Where did we go wrong on you? What got into you, boy? How’d you turn out this way?
There were no answers, as there never had been for Jimmy Pye. Earl shook his head. He’d been as guilty as anybody of telling Jimmy Pye that it was okay. He’d always been there for the kid, easing the fall even as he recognized the remoteness in Jimmy and denied it, even as he began to see how different Jimmy was from poor old Lannie Pye.
He thought of Bub Pye, Jimmy’s cousin, a poor dim boy who no one ever thought would amount to much, so dreary in comparison to Jimmy. Earl couldn’t even bring Bub’s face up out of memory, even though he’d seen him just yesterday. There was something forgettable about Bub. What would happen to him? Bub had been a carpenter’s apprentice, but he just couldn’t get the hang of things, and they’d let him go. He’d never found another job. He was a decent boy but without much in the way of prospects: but he was no criminal. That goddamned Jimmy had made him a criminal.
Darkness crept into Earl’s mind. This poor dead colored child, Jimmy Pye, all in one goddamn day!