“Oh, just seeing the place gets me to thinking. I got a question or two.”
“What questions?”
“How’d they get here? Through the biggest manhunt in Arkansas?”
“That was my question! Remember, I asked that question. When we were driving in the day before—”
“But when you asked it, it was a stupid question. It was stupid because we had no idea of the layout of the roads that led to the site and the kind of terrain it was. It could have been there were fifty obscure country roads, far too many for the cops to cover, all leading here. But there weren’t. There’s only Route 71, a major highway, well covered, and this little logging track that don’t go nowhere. So now it’s a smart question.”
Russ didn’t get the distinction, but he didn’t say anything.
“Then,” Bob said, “how come here? You tell me?”
“Ah—” Russ had no answer. “This is where he ran into them. He chased them, they turned off the road, he got by them and blocked them, uh—”
“You think that little road is wide enough for him to get by them? It’s night, remember, and if he slides off the road into the soft soil of the cornfield, he’s fucked. No, he was waiting for them. He was already here. And it’s off the road, out of public view, so they wouldn’t get surprised by someone coming along. How’d he get jumped by them? Hell, he was a salty old boy. He’d made two thousand arrests, he’d fought in three major island invasions, he was nobody’s fool. Yet they open up and hit him bad, first few shots? How?”
“Ah—” Russ trailed off.
“Maybe he was the mastermind of the job. Maybe he had come to get his payoff and split the take.”
Russ looked at him in horror. “Your father was a hero,” he said.
“That’s what it said in the papers, isn’t it? He was just a goddamn man, don’t think of him as a hero, because then you don’t think straight about it. No, he wasn’t in on it. He didn’t trust ’em. But he knew they was coming. Reason he swung around to park in the direction he did was so he could use his searchlight, which was mounted outside the driver’s-side window. He had to cover ’em. Hell, they were surrendering to him, that’s what it was. How’d he know where to go, where they’d reach him? Why would he believe them? What was it really about?”
Russ had no answers.
“Come on,” said Bob. “There’s only one man who can tell us.”
“Sam?”
“No,” said Bob, leading the way, “Daddy himself. He wants to talk. It’s just time we listened.”
They walked back and found Sam sitting on the open tailgate of the truck, his pipe lit up and blazing away. It smelled like a forest fire.
“You boys didn’t get lost? That’s a surprise.”
“Sam,” said Bob, “let me ask you something. Suppose I wanted to exhume my father’s body? What sort of paperwork is involved?”
Sam’s shrewd old features narrowed under his slouch hat and grew pointed.
“Now, what the hell you want to do that for, boy?”
“I just want to know what happened. The diagrams may lie and the newspapers may lie and all the official documents may be gone, but the body is going to tell the truth.”
“Bob, it was forty years ago.”
“I know there’s not much left. That’s why we need a good man. Now, what’s it going to take?”
“Well, I file a Motion of Exhumation with the county clerk and the Coroner’s Office and you have to find a good forensic pathologist. Get a doctor, not an undertaker like they got in too many counties down here.”
“Someone from Little Rock?”
“There’s someone in the medical school up at Fayetteville who’s well thought of. I could call him. Then I suppose you have to make an arrangement with a mortuary to clear out a place for him to work. Bob, you want to go to all that trouble? It was open-and-shut.”
“It’s the only way my daddy can talk to me. I think I ought to listen to what he has to say. I have to find out what happened that night.”
Sam slept on the way back and when they pulled up to the old house where he’d lived and raised his kids and married his daughters and his sons and buried his wife, they waited for the stillness in the car to wake him. But it didn’t.
“Sam?” Bob finally said softly. It was twilight, with the sun lost behind Rich Mountain, which towered over Blue Eye from the west.
Sam made some wet, gurgling sound in his sinuses, stirred a bit but then seemed to settle back.
“Sam,” said Bob a little louder, and Sam’s eyes shot open.
He looked at each of them.
“Wha—where—what is—”
“Sam, Sam,” said Bob, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. “Sam, you been sleeping.”
But Sam’s eyes lit in panic and his body froze in tension.
“Who are you?” he begged fearfully. “What do you want? Don’t hurt me!”
“Sam, Sam,” said Bob calmly, “it’s Bob, Bob Lee Swagger, Earl’s boy. You just done forgot where you was.”
The old man was shaking desperately.
“You’re okay, Mr. Vincent,” said Russ. “Really, it’s fine, you’ve forgotten.”
But Sam’s eyes flashed between them, wide with horror.
“It’s okay,” said Bob. “It’s okay.”
14
arl eased into the cornfield road. The dirt felt soft, and he progressed slowly. Around him, illuminated in the shafts of his headlights, the stalks of corn towered, eight feet tall and quivering ever so gently in the breeze.
Off the shoulder of the road, in the field, the earth looked loose and he was afraid if he got off into it, he could get stuck. Wouldn’t that be a goddamn mess!
The road curved a little to the left, until eventually it paralleled what, from the darker texture of the night, had to be the rise of Ferguson’s ridge. He’d taken a deer on the ridge, though several miles away. That same day, some sharecropper woman had given Sam a tongue-lashing for shooting so close to her children. Served him right, though to hear him tell it, Sam’d never made a mistake in his life.
When he was about a hundred yards in, that is, so far in he couldn’t see the U.S. 71 for the thickness of the corn, he halted the car and tried to think. He wanted to be able to put the light on Jimmy and Bub. That meant he had to turn the car. He got out, looked around, kicked at the shoulder and the dirt off the shoulder to tell if it would support the weight of the Ford. It appeared that it would. He climbed back in and painstakingly ground the wheel toward the left, cranking the car in a tight turn until the front wheels were just about off; then he spun the wheel in the opposite direction, backing slowly. This put him on the left side of the road, pointed outward. He turned off the engine, then leaned out the window and tried his spotlight. It threw a harsh circle of white light down the road that collected in a vivid oval a hundred feet out. With one hand he pivoted it, tracked it up and down like an antiaircraft searchlight, then turned it off.
He looked at the radium dial of his Bulova. Nine-fifty. Ten minutes to go.
Why am I so nervous? he wondered.
He’d been nervous in the war, or at least on the night before an amphibious operation.
Reason to get nervous. Amphibious operations were tricky and dangerous. At Tarawa, the Traks had run aground on coral a thousand yards out. It was a long walk in through the surf laden with equipment, with the Japs shooting the whole way. You get through that, you could get through anything.
But just some little goddamn nervous thing was flicking at him. He felt cursed. He’d made a big mistake today. He hadn’t meant to but he’d sure as hell wanted to and so he did it and now what? So he’d clean it up tomorrow. He’d clean up the mess he’d made, he’d be a man. These things could be handled and to hell with everything else. He knew he’d do it. He just didn’t know what it was to do.