“I hate snakes,” said Russ.
“Hell, boy,” said Sam, “it’s just a lizard without legs.”
Bob and Russ left the old man, cut through the trees and headed across the overgrown, weedy ground. It was field now, no corn anywhere, junk land that crouched in the shadow of the highway. Bob made it to the trace of road, not road so much but simply an opening where the vegetation hadn’t grown so high because it had gotten a late start. The trace went back toward the big highway, then began to curve around. Bob got about a hundred yards back.
“Here?” asked Russ.
Bob took a deep breath.
“I do believe. Ask the old man.”
“Sam! Here?” screamed Russ.
Bob watched the old man, who studied them, then nodded up and down.
“Here,” said Russ.
Bob had never been here before. So odd. He stayed in Blue Eye eight more years and he’d never come out here and stood at the spot. Then he went away to the Marines, and then came back and went up in the mountains, and never once, either before or after, had he been to this spot.
Never laid any flowers or felt the power of the blasphemed earth. Why? Too much pain? Possibly. Too close to going under with a poor drunken mother who just could not hang on and the terrible, terrible sense of it all having been taken from them. The bitterness. It could kill you. You had to let the bitterness go or it would kill you. He knew he’d been by, though. As he remembered, Sam had driven him up U.S. 71 to Fort Smith to join the United States Marine Corps on June 12, 1964, the day after he graduated from high school.
“Here,” said Russ, consulting the diagram from the newspaper. “Here’s where Jimmy ended up parking. Now”—he walked past Bob, hunched in concentration, nose buried in the clipping before him—“here is where your father’s car was. And your dad was found in the driver’s side, sitting sideways, fallen slightly to his right and hung up on the steering wheel, his feet on the ground, the radio mike in his hand.”
“Bled out?” said Bob.
“What?”
“That was the mechanism, right? That’s what killed him. Blood loss. Not shock to his nervous system or a bullet in a major blood-bearing organ?”
“Ah, that’s what it says here. I don’t—”
“Russ, how does a bullet kill? Do you know?”
Russ didn’t. A bullet just, uh, killed. It, uh—
“A bullet can kill you three ways. It can destroy your central nervous system. That’s the brain shot, into the deep cerebellum, two inches back from the eyes and between the ears. Instant rag doll. Clinical death in less than a tenth of a second. Or it can destroy your circulatory and arterial system, depressurize you. The heart shot or something in the aorta. That’s fifteen, twenty seconds till clinical death, your good central body shot. Or, finally, it can hit a major blood-bearing organ and you essentially bleed to death internally. A big stretch cavity, lots of tissue destruction, lots of blood, but not instant death. Say, three, four, sometimes ten to twenty minutes without help. Which of those?”
“I don’t know,” said Russ. “It doesn’t really say. It just said he bled to death. The latter, I guess.”
“It would be nice to know the mechanism. It would tell us a lot. You write that down in your book under things to find out.”
“Where would we go to find that?”
Bob ignored him, just standing there, looking about. He tried to read the land, or what little of it was left. This was a hunter’s gift, a sniper’s gift: to look at the folds and drops and rises in a piece of earth and derive meanings from them, understand in some instinctual way how they worked.
The first thing: why here?
Standing there exactly where his father had stood, he realized that in high corn, this spot was invisible from the road. Moreover, it took just enough delicate driving to steer back here without losing control and careening back into the corn; there’d been nothing in the papers about a highspeed chase. There couldn’t have been a chase! His daddy’s car would have been behind theirs, not in front of it, unless Bub and Jimmy were chasing him!
He looked about, trying to imagine it in high corn.
“You run back to Sam,” he said to Russ. “You ask him about the moon. Was there a moon? We can check, but I don’t think so, not from my memory anyhow. Ask him about the temperature, the wind, that sort of thing. Humidity. Was it heavy?”
The boy looked at him vacantly. Then puzzlement stole across the delicate features.
“What is—”
“I will tell you later. Just do it.”
“Okay, okay,” said Russ, turning away on the errand.
A wind rose. The sun was bright. Now and then a car rushed along the parkway, whose buttresses were about a hundred yards farther back. Bob turned in each direction, trying to feel the land. To the south, there was an incline. His father would have come that way. To the north, at least now, the bright roofs of the highway service buildings, the motel and the gas station, and the restaurants. But in those days, nothing but wild forests; the town proper of Waldron still lay eleven miles ahead. To the west, more incline, as the other side of 71, the road fell away toward the prairies of Oklahoma. He turned back to face the east, to face the parkway. But it hadn’t been a parkway then. It had been a ridge, obliterated in the building of the road. How high? How far? The road was a hundred yards off, but possibly the road builders hadn’t placed the road at the center of the ridge; maybe it was at its highest even farther out.
“He says no moon,” said Russ, breathing heavily from the jog. “He says stars, but no moon. No humidity. About seventy-five degrees, maybe eighty. A little breeze, nothing much.”
Bob nodded. “All right, now ask him two more questions. The first is, where were all the tenant farmers’ shacks? Were they right here, did this road run back to them? Or were they farther along? Where did this road go then? And second: ask him which direction my father’s car was parked. He said it was aslant the road and the body was behind the steering wheel. I want to know on which side of the road that was, which direction it faced.”
Russ took a deep breath, then turned and ran back to the old man.
Again alone, Bob turned to face the highway that towered above him. He walked back through the weeds and came at last to stand next to one of the mighty concrete pylons upon which the road rested. It was cool here in the shade, though the road rumbled. Someone had painted POLK COUNTY CLASS OF ’95, and beer cans and broken bottles lay about on the gravel. Beyond the parkway Bob could see the land fall away into forest and farm over a long slope of perhaps two miles until a little white farm road snaked through the trees.
He looked back and saw that the action had played out halfway down just the subtlest slope. He saw Russ standing big as day where he had left him. He walked on back.
“Okay,” Russ said, breathing hard, trying to keep it straight. “The road evidently was an old logging trail and it ran back and up and over the ridge. This area used to be logged back in the twenties. The ‘croppers lived another mile or so down U.S. 71 away from Waldron, toward Boles. That’s where Sam shot his deer and the lady yelled at him.”
“It wasn’t here?”
“No sir.”
“Okay. And my daddy: he was on the left side of the road. Facing east. Facing the ridge, right? Sitting sideways in his seat, with his feet on the ground, not as if he were about to drive away, is that right?”
Another look of befuddlement came across Russ’s face.
“How did you know that? It wasn’t in any of the newspaper accounts. Sam says the car was parked on the left side of the road and the door was open and your daddy—”
Bob nodded.
“What’s going on?”