5. “To make sure you get where you’re goin’ this morning,” she said. But she knew me, I felt. They had their plans, she said, and their plans would not change her way of… Right, I said, you’re — There was a swimming pool in the basement, that was all she knew. You’re who you are, I said; now the man who…last night… She didn’t know his name, that’s all she knew. “Black,” I said. A bicyclist in an old flak vest raced us, looked in my window, my driver swerved and hit him almost — no, did — she was a helluva driver, it spoke for itself, she said there weren’t any bicyclists any more. “Your right fender.” “Armored vehicle, one of ours, friendly heap.” She could fix anything, transmission, rings, long as they didn’t blow her up. A dog was barking. One dog can make all the difference, she said, she’d seen a dog chewing on a foot. “Now, the black guy…” Found down by the river near the stock exchange, that was all she knew. But this deserter…(?) We’ll get you there, she muttered. You’re important, she said, for a Reservist. She looked over at me. It…she began…
4. They could think I came in handy if they wanted, it didn’t change my way of doing things, I said, which sounded grand and I was stretching it probably. She knew what I meant, she got mad sometimes, she said…. All these people wanted me here I sometimes thought, I said, and in spite of it, I’d chosen to be, y’know? I could tell that she did. “Wanted you here?” She stopped herself. “They want you to see what they want you to see,” she said then. All she knew? She took it seriously. In my travels had I ever been to Wisconsin? she asked. Never, unfortunately, I said. Never, never. She sort of laughed, said she’d only been to Florida with her family and it was the wrong part and the wrong time of year — swerving over to make a right, and at the far end was the stadium where something had happened. “You’re a photographer.” “That all you know?” I said. We made a pretty hilarious left, they were letting civilian traffic onto the July 14th Bridge, she said, about the traffic. I saw no bridge. What was it I’d said before I shot that picture? she said.
3. Well, what was it she had found in the Kut photo? I said, she’d said she—. Well…it was the Reservist. What about him? Well, his eye was like a wild horse, and he’s not walleyed.
I said, That wasn’t all. Well, he’d just been distracted, said my driver, pushing me. Well, there was a — There was someone under the table, wasn’t there? said my driver, pushing me. A local woman out of the frame, under the table tied up, I said. Was that it? my driver asked. Not entirely tied up, I said — well, something had just been said, I said. By…? The Reservist whose rifle had been ridiculed. But by you? Yes, I asked if they had seen an Asian kid with a film crew? We’ll get you there; I have a problem with time, you know. I always get there early. Well, that could be hazardous. Tomorrow even more, she said; lot of activity Fridays — no, I thought somebody was doing something to the guy with the eyes under the table, said my driver — If we could just rerun it, I said, wanting some time with her.
2. “Who you hang out with, eh?” I said. “That’s all I know,” she said. “A deserter who comes back on a civilian job — that’s a skid, that’s one for the movies,” she said. “He came back to his unit?” “His unit!” “Who was hanging out with him?” “Working with him, that’s all I know.” “The soldier killed last night?” “He wasn’t working with him.” “A deserter who came back for some job of his own and someone was working with him?” We were going the back way, my driver said, and she had called me a Reservist. Was this why the captain had assigned her to me? I said and I felt she got my meaning better than I did. “I think a friend of mine was doing sound. They ran up a $900 tab in a taxi coming across from I don’t know where, three of them and a driver I guess.” “Two of them and a driver, until they got to…” A rattle of fire from behind us, she looked over her shoulder, she reached to explore my bicep with the back of her hand. “Hang out with a target…,” she said, and left her point unfinished.
1. It was the little Specialist from Wisconsin my driver at eight in the morning at the wheel of an olive-drab-repainted though beat-up though sort of camouflaged and evolved Chevy Suburban like what local Guard troops used that should have been recalled new a dozen years ago, appropriated now from some local civilian arm you figured, no Humvee for me, no mine-resistant vehicle and she said we would hurry up so I could wait at the other end and get set up. Let’s not get beyond ourselves, I said, recalling my sister’s way of — That was some photo, my driver said. I got in and we were gone before I could haul the door shut that was down to the bare metal. I took a look at her and she had the kind of nice looks that she would turn and check you out while she was driving or knew you. “Last night,” I said, and stared at the windshield. “Last night was someone else’s turn,” she said. I looked at her leaning forward at the wheel, small but compact. I asked what about the soldier. “We lost a man. That’s all I know. You hang out with a target, you’re one.”
“What he told me I already figured out,” I said, knowing what she meant—not you but someone else because of you—yet I understood more than I figured she could know — that Umo was here somewhere and with the wrong people; “but that soldier,” I went on, needing to know, unlike this fine woman who kept saying that was all she knew with each new thing she yielded up, “the film crew guy that he recognized as a deserter wouldn’t be after him; a buddy?” I could feel my driver’s contempt coming at me and, in my ignorant neck and eyelids, almost a longtime affection in this woman. She leaned back and raised her chin. “That was some picture.” Down in Kut? Yes, that was…pretty wild. (She was thinking about her day ahead and me, I believe.) The arm-wrestlers? What was it she had found in it? I asked; the captain said you—
“The captain, the captain,” she dropped one hand into her lap as if we had stopped — for she was a rebel in there somewhere—“it’s the others,” she said. “The finish line keeps moving,” she said. “And then there’s the fobbits, the ones who never get off the base. Well you know, you’re a Reservist the captain said.”
I wish I had those words back, my mother said, having told my brother it didn’t matter what he did with his life, long as he liked it. Back? What her spouse would not say after demolishing the cub reporter from the paper who could have done him some good or a loan officer, been abrupt even with the man he cultivated known as Storm (once, by his Christian name Nosworthy in my hearing in those days, and once since), the speechwriter frequently on the phone trolling for input. Don’t bring him into it, my father said over the phone, my sister said, and told me I was meant. She could tell from his face hanging up that he had gone too far and intimate momentarily with his daughter if he could have embraced her nature — how had he received the Coaches Directory with the data about him plus a little comment? But words Dad wanted back? Maybe just the time they took up. Both he and my mother, as if for her, time was family, in the way of beginnings, yet then she came to understand there was my sister and I.