“Go on,” Bob said.
“I missed it at first,” said the doctor. “Some tissue remains were present and the condition of the bones was not pristine. Of course I’m not in my lab working under the best conditions.”
“But you found something?”
“Yes, finally, I did. In the sternum, a frontal plate of bone that shields the heart and anchors the ribs. There’s a very neat round hole, or almost round. Ovoid actually, suggestive of a downward angle, that is, a high to low shooting trajectory. There’s impact beveling suggestive of an entry wound. If you extrapolate from the placement of the penetration of the sternum on that angle, you get a real solid heart shot. The bullet path leads straight into the right ventricle where the pulmonary artery pulls the deoxygenated blood in. That artery and the ventricle would have been instantaneously destroyed. Brain death would have followed in, say, ten to twelve seconds.”
“So he couldn’t have been shot in the heart and walked three hundred feet back to where he was found?”
“He couldn’t have moved a step. I doubt he was conscious much more than three seconds after impact.”
Bob nodded and turned to Russ.
“So how’s goddamn Jimmy Pye hit him a hundred yards out in the corn and he walks all the way back to the car?”
Russ just looked at him.
“You measured the hole, I take it,” Bob asked the doctor.
“Yes, I did.”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t .357 or .429, right? It was, what, .311, .312 inches?”
“Good. Actually, .3115.”
“As I understand it, the impact beveling always widens the diameter by a couple of thousandths of an inch?” “Typically,” said the doctor.
“So the bullet that killed my father, it was, say, .308 in diameter? That would make it a .30-caliber rifle bullet?”
“That’s what every indicator says,” the doctor replied.
“I don’t get it,” said Russ. “What’s all this with the numbers?”
“It tells me who killed my father,” Bob said, turning to look at him. “It sure as hell wasn’t no Jimmy Pye.”
“Who killed your father?” asked Russ.
“A sniper,” said Bob.
19
he snake rattled again in the corn. The arm hurt. The side had gone to sleep. The legs ached.
Earl, sitting sideways in the front seat of his cruiser, straightened his legs out before him. He was all right. He would make it. A little smile came to him.
If that goddamn snake don’t bite me, I made it again.
His radio crackled.
“Car One Four, this is Blue Eye Sheriff’s Department, Earl, you hang on, goddammit, we are inbound and closing fast and I have an ambulance a minute or so behind. You hang on, son, we are almost home.”
There was always that moment in the islands when it finally occurred to you that you had somehow made it again. It was like a little window opening, and a gust of sweet air floating through the room, and you experienced the simple physical pleasure in having escaped extinction. Other things would come later: the guilt you always felt when you thought of the good men lost forever, the endless dream replays where the bullets that missed you hit you or your own weapon jammed or ran dry. But for now it was okay: it was something God gave to infantrymen, just a moment’s worth of bliss between the total stress of battle and the dark anguish of survivor’s guilt. You just got one moment: Hey. I made it.
Earl thought of the things he had to do. He made a list.
1. Take Bob Lee to that football game. The boy had never been. He himself hadn’t been since 1951, on a visit to Chicago, when he’d seen the Bears play the Rams. It was a lopsided game. He wanted Bob Lee to see a good game.
2. Buy a Remington rifle, Model 740A, the new autoloader, in .30-06. He’d read about it in Field & Stream. Said they were building them even more accurate than the Winchester Model 70s, and you had that second and third shot automatically, without a recock.
3. Kiss his wife. Tell her how much he liked her strawberry pie. Buy her a present. The woman needed a present. Hell, buy her two presents.
4. Face it out with Edie. It had to be dealt with. Do it, put your house in order, clean up your mess.
5. See Sam Vincent. A policeman had to have a will. Sam could recommend a lawyer. Get a will, figure it all out.
6.
But at 6 an odd thing occurred. It seemed like time stopped for a second and Earl’s soul flew out of his body. He imagined himself floating through space. He watched from above as the black Arkansas woods and hills flew by. In the distance, beyond Board Camp, he saw a well-lit little house off by itself. He descended and flew through the window. His wife, June, was there. She was doing something in the kitchen. She was dutiful, erect, a little irritable, in an apron, looking tired as usual, and not saying much. He floated up to her and touched her cheek but his finger had no substance and sank through her. He stroked at her harder, but could make no contact.
Puzzled, he flew up the steps. Bob Lee sat in his room, trying to put together a Revell model airplane. It was a Bell P-39 Airacobra, very dangerous-looking, but Earl knew the pilots hated it and that it never flew after 1943. Bob Lee, still wearing that damned coonskin cap and that Crockett T-shirt, was bent earnestly into the effort, trying with clumsy boyish fingers to cement the clear plastic cockpit bubble to the cockpit frame, a tricky operation because too much cement could smear the transparency of the ersatz glass, ruining the entire illusion of reality. Usually, Earl did this job himself, though the boy glued the bigger pieces together and was getting better and better at it. Earl reached to help the boy, but again his fingers were weightless; they touched nothing.
Bob Lee, he called. Bob Lee, Bob Lee, Bob Lee, but Bob Lee didn’t hear him and struggled with the cockpit and somehow got it mounted. Earl watched as his boy’s face knitted in disappointment and fury, and he beat a single tear away. But Earl knew too the model was ruined. He ached now to take the boy into his arms, and say, now, that’s all right, maybe you didn’t do so good this time, but there’ll be other times. But when he reached he touched nothing.
7. Stop vomiting blood.
The blood was everywhere. What was happening? It spread across his chest and poured from his absolute center. When had this happened? It must have occurred in that split second when Earl went out of his body. It occurred to him that he had been shot and he looked out into the goddamned darkness and heard only the hooting of the owls and the stirring of other animals. It was so dark.
He had the consciousness of it all slipping away. He thought of a drain, of being whirled down a drain. His mind grew logy and stupid. He yearned to see his son again and his wife and his father; he yearned but it did no good.
20
ed was at an executive meeting for Redline Trucking when the call came, and he was almost happy, because Thewell Blackwell II, of Blackwell, Collins, Bisbee, over from Little Rock, was halfway through his briefing on potential complications if Interstate Commerce Regulatory Bill H.355 got out of the House Interstate Commerce Committee without serious reconfiguration, namely that the requirement for weight inspections at interstate borders be open on weekends as well as during the week, which had a long-term downsizing application in terms of routes serviced for out-of-state clients. It was all very interesting but Thewell was hardly the world’s most commanding speaker arid somewhere in paragraph 13, subsection II, subpoint C, Red began trying to decide whether he should go to a No. 8 shot for the long floater at Cherokee Ridge, where next year’s nationals were slated.