“2) Fourteen cartridge cases bearing headstamp COLT .38 SUPER—WW,” the spent casings that Jimmy had ejected in the fight, meaning he’d fired fourteen times, he’d reloaded once and was halfway through the reloaded mag when his father took him out. He was a shooter, that boy. Bob wondered which of the fourteen rounds had been the fatal one, whether his father took it early or late. He shook his head. A fleeting wish came to him that he could reach back through time and deflect that bullet or maybe improve Earl’s aim just a bit on an earlier round; who knew how differently it might have turned out? But no: Jimmy fired the last round; he killed Earl even as Earl was killing him.
“3) Smith & Wesson 1926 Model .44 Special, SN 130465, with six unfired WW .44 Special rounds in the cylinder.” Bub’s gun, Bob guessed. Unfired. Hadn’t got a shot off.
“4) Colt Trooper .357 Magnum, SN 6351, with three loaded cartridges and three empty in the cylinder.” His father’s gun. Bob had seen his father clean that big piece of machinery once a week and after every firing session. Most of his memories of his father, in fact, were connected with firearms and his father teaching him how to shoot, how to hunt, how to clean, care for and respect the firearm. They were the lessons he’d never forgotten.
“5) Six cartridge casings bearing headstamp REMINGTON .357.” His father had reloaded himself, a speed reload under heavy fire from a guy with a semiauto and plenty of ammo. Good work, he thought, the best kind there is.
Only one label remained on the sheet. It bore the depressing title “Bullets Recovered” and he knew it meant recovered from bodies. The coroner’s last connection to the physical mechanism of death.
Did he have the courage to read on? With a sigh, he discovered he did. There were three “exhibits,” that is, bodies, and under each of them was listed the items recovered. Nothing in it surprised him, except that he learned that Bub had a bullet in him from Jimmy’s gun, probably delivered in the excitement of the action, a friendly-fire accident of the kind that was distressingly common in battle.
At last he read of the bullets taken from his father.
There were three.
“Two (2) misshapen (calibration impossible to determine) bullets, copper clad, weighing 130.2 grains and 130.1 grains.”
Then “One (1) misshapen (calibration impossible to determine) bullet, metal clad, weight 109.8 grains.”
Bob looked at it, not quite sure what he was reading, then he read it again and a third time. It did not go away. 109.8 grains.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Julie said.
He turned, startled.
“Yeah, here I am. Going back through it.”
“Bob, you ought to help that boy. It would help you more than anything. You’ve been angry ever since 1955. You should face it.”
“I’m going to do more than face it,” he said.
8
n the gloom of twlight, Earl drove swiftly down Route 88 until he passed beyond Board Camp and came to his own mailbox, turned in and followed the dirt road to his own house. He picked up the microphone and called in.
The news was not good at all. The state detectives had not been able to get to the Shirelle Parker site yet and wouldn’t make it until the morning. Only a one-man shift from the Polk County Sheriff’s Department could be assigned to secure the crime area overnight, though a coroner’s assistant had come out to make a preliminary investigation.
“How long was he there?” Earl asked over the radio.
“Ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes!” Earl exploded to the sheriff’s dispatcher. “How the hell could he learn anything in ten minutes?”
“Come on, Earl, you know we goin’ to go to Niggertown tomorrow when all this about Jimmy is settled, and sooner or later someone goin’ to talk to us. That’s how it works down there. Them people can’t keep no secrets.”
Earl thought: Suppose it was a white person who killed Shirelle?
“Okay. Tell them I’ll be out there first thing in the morning, and to keep the site as clean as possible. I hate to think of that little girl lying out there all alone another night.”
“It don’t matter to her none, Earl.”
Earl signed off.
All sorts of things weighed on his mind; he tried to will them away.
You got to stay sharp, he told himself. You got lots to do.
But he wanted more than anything to sleep, to end the day and hope that tomorrow would be a better one.
He reached the house, which had once been his father’s, low but surprisingly gracious, a white place with a porch and green shingles in a grove of elms. Out back there was a rope swing and a creek. The barn held four good riding horses and the fields were Earl’s for two hundred acres all around. His son came running off the front porch.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
“Well, howdy there, Davy Crockett, how’s Daddy’s best boy?” he said, his heart swelling at the sight of the kid running toward him, the ever-present coonskin cap clutching his head, its tail bobbing on his back. Damnedest thing Earl ever did see, but all the kids wore them.
Bob Lee was nine and had never given anybody a lick of trouble. He was all the son a dad could wish for; all boy, but a hard worker too, and he had something of his father’s natural ways with a firearm. For a nine-year-old, he could fire a .30-30 lever gun with amazing accuracy and last year had bagged a deer, though he’d shot it too far back and Earl had to track it all the way into the mountains of Scott County to finish it. Earl picked his son up and gave him a swirl up to the sky as if he were a bag of feed, swinging him till his little feet swept upward.
“Whoooooooooo!” screamed the boy.
“Best hope I hang on to you, Bob Lee, I let you go, you’ll end up on the moon!”
The boy laughed as Earl set him down.
“Mama’s up the road a piece,” he announced. “Mrs. Fenson felt poorly and Mama said she’d take over some dinner.”
“Umh,” said Earl, recognizing his wife’s behavior in the gesture. “I’m just gonna git me a sandwich and an iced tea and be on my way.”
The disappointment was ripe on the boy’s face.
“You going out, Daddy? You go out every night.”
“Tomorrow, I swear to you, I’ll stay in. Got me one little thing to do. When that’s over, I’m going to take a rest. Come on, boy, let’s see what she’s got in the kitchen.”
In they went, and in no time, Earl had slapped some ham on his wife’s good bread and opened two root beers. He took it all out on the porch, and Bob went with him. They ate in silence. Earl looked at his watch. It was now 8:30 and he had close to an hour’s drive up to near Waldron and the cornfield. He finished the sandwich, took a last gulp on the root beer, draining it.
“Walk me to the cruiser, Bob Lee.”
“Yes sir,” said the boy, adoring the private time with his father.
They got to the car. Earl opened the door, ready to climb in and pull away. The sun was setting. It was the gray hour of perfect stillness and clarity in the world; here in eastern Polk County, the Ouachitas changed subtly in character and became lower, rounded hills, crested with pine and teeming with game, like islands rising out of a flat sea. Earl didn’t do much farming, but it was nice to have some land to hunt and to shoot on. He’d made a good life for his family, he thought.
An immense melancholy and regret suddenly flooded him; there was a kind of hole in his mind where he’d exiled his most recent memories and focused instead on the perfection of the here and now. He reached down and grasped his son and gave him a crushing hug.