He popped the shells out, reached into his shell bag and took out a No. 7½ Winchester Heavy Trap load, and slipped it into his lower barrel, where the tighter of his two chokes was screwed, the Improved Cylinder.
He set himself again. Oh, he hated these far teal. It was so easy for the bird to find a hole in the shot pattern and so distant it was also possible for the bird to take a bunch of hits and yet not break or chip. It happened all the time.
“Pull,” he shouted.
The bird rose, the gun rose and as these two things happened, yet another did: the vibrator on his pager went off, momentarily disconcerting him.
He lost a tenth of a second and when he got up to where the bird was supposed to be paused as gravity overcame its upward velocity, he was late; it was already falling.
But Red didn’t panic.
He punched the gun downward hard, caught up with the falling orange disk and fired as he passed it.
Goddamn, he missed.
“No, you hit it, Red,” said the judge. “I saw a chip. Not much of one, but by God a chip. Great shooting, damn you.”
“Do you mind if I make an emergency call?”
“Sure, go ahead. It’s your concentration.”
Red leaned the Krieghoff against the cage, stepped outside and pulled his folder off his belt. He punched the key that accessed Duane Peck’s hot line for the recorded report.
“Ah, sir, here’s the latest. Yesterday, I followed ’em out Route 71 toward Waldron and then lost ’em. I went back and forth for a coupla hours and finally I picked ’em up at some field out near, uh, Waldron. They never saw me. They were there until dark. That was the kid, you know, and that Bob Lee guy, and they got old Sam Vincent with ’em. Uh.”
The man paused, seemed to lose track, then got himself settled down.
“So anyway, today, today, early, Sam trots over to the temporary courthouse and files some papers. He files what’s called a Motion of Exhumation, to get county permission so that they can dig up Earl Swagger and perform some kind of autopsy on the body. Uh, what’s your thought? They don’t got no idea I’m interested, except for that fucking kid looked at me smart when I first bumped into ’em. I could deal with it now, before it gets too much.”
It was like the sun breaking out on a cloudy day. It was like finding a million dollars. It was free sex with a beautiful woman and no consequences.
He pushed the button to reach the recorder.
“Don’t do a thing. I think we got ’em flummoxed. We may git out of this one without a real problem. Things are looking very, very good.”
They were. This one was covered.
“You look as though you’ve had extremely good news,” said the judge, as Red returned to the cage.
“You know sometimes how a deal looks like it’s going to fall apart on you with all kinds of difficulties? But then something you did years ago, because you were smart and thought about it, clicks in, and it turns out just the way you figured.”
“Well, I can’t say I’ve had that exact pleasure.”
“Well, it feels great,” Red said.
He picked up the gun, popped the breech and dropped two more 7½s in.
“Pull,” he said, feeling wonderful. The birds shot upward and he killed them both.
16
e remembered it as somehow more beautiful. In his memory he saw a rolling green meadow mostly in shade from the stately black oak that stood nearby. The tombstones had a grandeur to them; it was like a parade of the honored dead, a mini-Arlington where an honor guard would keep eternal watch.
But if that Polk County veterans’ cemetery ever existed or if it was only an imaginary place, like an Oz for the dead, it was certainly not the bitter reality: blasted by sun, parched and treeless and very shabby and as flat and banal as a pancake, the cemetery stretched to the empty horizon. It wasn’t even really a veterans’ cemetery, it just had a veterans’ section in it, but beyond the crooked fence the civilians lay just as dead as the vets.
“You never came here?” Russ asked.
“Oh, a few times. When I was small. That was before my mother got what we called ‘sick,’ meaning drunk. She was better off not coming. I just remember her crying like a baby. Her sister had to drive us home. Then I came the night before I left for the Marine Corps. Drove myself. I came once more on liberty but by that time my mother was dead and there wasn’t much else to come back to. I never came when I got back from the war. I just stayed on that goddamned mountain.”
“Is it the same?”
“I remember more trees. Hell, though, I was just a kid. A bush looked like a tree.”
“Is this it, Mr. Swagger?” cried one of the gravediggers hired for the occasion.
“Well, let’s see.”
Bob walked over to the simple stone. It looked no different from the hundreds in here, the war dead of West Arkansas dating back to the Civil War. He bent and squinted in the sun and read off the corrupted limestone:
And then:
“Yes sir, Mr. Coggins, that’s him. Now, if that damned doctor would just get here.” “We may as well get started,” said the old man.
“Why don’t you just.”
The crew—three black men, two young and the older Mr. Coggins—set to it with solid work. Bob watched them cut into the earth with their spades, slice the turf out and then really put their backs into it. Swiftly, the dirt mounded up on the tarpaulin they had set out for that purpose.
“Lot of dirt in a hole,” Bob said.
Russ, watching the black men dig, felt a bit uncomfortable. The whole thing was so matter-of-fact. Nobody at the cemetery office had seen anything remarkable about the paperwork served, but it seemed there were no records left, as the cemetery had changed administrations many times since 1955, and somewhere along the line, the record keeping had grown sloppy and the actual physical materials had somehow disappeared. But it was no big deaclass="underline" Bob found it easy enough.
“I feel guilty with them doing all the work,” Russ said.
“They’re professionals. They’re doing a good job. Let them earn their pay. My father loved a job done well and by God them boys are doing it well.”
Through the morning the men dug, without much in the way of rest. Two in, one out, the shovels a steady machinelike attack against the ground, and the hole widened and deepened.
Bob just watched. He could be so still. Russ, bored, ambled around, trying to think of something to do that would be helpful but which wouldn’t require his actual presence. But then he thought: This is my party. I have to be here.
“You remember that cop?” Bob said.
“Yes.”
“You said to me there was something fishy about him, right?”
“Yes.”