Singleton stared out at the water. Riding atop the horizon, like a block of stone, another tanker headed on course to Duluth, or away, it was impossible to tell. Down the beach, Wendy and Meg were sidearming stones into the water, making them skip.
“I’ve come to the conclusion, thanks to the Trip, that killing goes against nature in the deepest way, that to kill another no matter what the reason, no matter how justified in war, leaves you coated with some kind of residue. You pay a price, no matter what. Animals don’t pay a price because the price has to do with the fact that you know what you did. Trees don’t even have the price.”
“So you had to find a way to get him into a situation that would result in his death, and to make it his idea, to make him the initiator.”
“It makes me sad thinking about it, but knowing a little bit of Rake’s story, I wanted him to have the satisfaction in his last moments of thinking that he had somehow resolved things that could not be resolved — because really, Singleton, you and I both know that there is nothing more tragic than a man like Rake, someone who doubled up a trauma so huge that he wants to eat the earth itself.”
“You wanted him to initiate it so it would be part of his own story, somehow connected with his own trauma.”
“Initiate’s exactly right,” Hank said. “Haze was dumb as a peg, but he had unusual smarts when it came to his place in the pecking order and knew he had to worry about me as much as he worried about Rake. He put on a front that he didn’t give a shit. Meg and I waited as long as we could, and then one night when we were all at the dinner table and things were relatively calm I decided to play the trump card. At least I hoped it was a trump card. Truth is, it was just a shot in the dark because I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right connection. I figured that Rake had gone down there and grabbed Meg for a reason. I figured she had some connection with his past, but, again, the rest of the story was lost to me. Bad timing, what have you. A bad twist. Meg didn’t tell me that much about her vision, but again she did mention the man’s name, the man in the vision, and like I said, it gave me a feeling that he had something to do with Rake, his initial combat trauma situation. I figured our only shot would be to put that name in Haze’s mouth.”
“What was the man’s name?” Singleton said. He had a feeling it would help with his report, snap everything into place. Far down the beach the women held stones, waiting for a breaker to ebb, finishing its journey across hundreds of miles of lake and leave behind a momentarily smooth surface, perfect for stone skipping. Hank was saying he didn’t have the slightest idea what the T stood for. Hank said the name that had sparked the duel and he said it again, saying, “Billy-T, Billy-T’s the name,” and then he kept talking as Singleton tried to process the name, one part of his mind listening while another felt a current dashing around the name itself; one part of his mind clear and engaged with reality (another stone tossed, the two women looking distant and conspiratorial) as the other began to process the name that had been spoken, while the other part was unfurled into an acute, brutal, lonely, isolated desolation in which his mind’s eye (no other way to put it, he’d tell Wendy, later) saw his father, dressed in his olive overalls with goggles, at work, car after car, and then sitting during his lunch break with his black bucket between his legs on the windowsill eating a sandwich his mother had made, and worrying over his son in Vietnam, his son becoming a man in the infernal heat of combat.
The next thing he knew, water was closing around him, the cold pounding his temples and his jaws and shoving the air out of his lungs. Even as he sank below the surface, feeling the vise of the cold, he was aware that he was a man who had been flung into direct contact with something huge from his past — and later he’d swear that he was thinking about the report, the name Billy-T expanding in his mind until he could hear it speaking, a slight lisp, and then arms came around him and lifted him up, ordering him not to resist, to stay calm and then for a few seconds he was deep again. He could feel the mighty body, not just the water but the entire lake. There have been rumors about men who, confirming a specific element of their Causal Events Package, went wild with a desire to be permanently unfolded. And then he felt arms around him, lifting him up, and he was above the surface and Hank was slapping him softly, speaking into his ear as he pulled him to shore, saying, “You’re gonna want to do that again. You’ll want to get back into that water but as long as I’m here it won’t happen.” He pulled him along the sand and wrapped him in the picnic blanket and made him sit down.
Through chattering teeth he said the name Billy-T over and over again, his voice incantatory, as if he were trying to memorize the sound of it, and when Meg came up, breathing hard, she stood and listened and then got down next to him and asked, “What happened?”
“He made the connection I thought he might make. The deal has been sealed.”
“What deal is that?” Wendy said. She had her hands on her hips and was staring down at them. “I mean, what deal exactly are you talking about?”
“The deal that started as soon as I saw you walk in the door,” Hank said, and Singleton closed his eyes and felt the beach shift beneath him, a sense of complete dissociation and then, a second later, the feeling of being rooted in the sand. Klein had once said that it didn’t take much to put two and two together when you’re in the field, when you’re on the ground making minute-by-minute conclusions, trying to go with the information you’re seeing, smelling, instead of orders the staff sends down from Command. Draw your own conclusions. Shoot first and ask the dead questions. Was it really possible that the Corps had set the whole thing up as some kind of rehabilitative structure? It was a sad, simple, clear question.
“So you, Billy-T, and Rake were in a squad together in Nam,” Hank explained. “You were buddies with Billy-T. You lost him. You lost your dear buddy, your best friend. The three of you signed up together — at least that’s what it looks like. But I didn’t enlist with you guys. Like I said before, I have memories that go back to the day I was packing my stuff up before leaving for boot camp, and everything before that — growing up downstate, summer afternoons playing ball, friends and buddies and girlfriends but nobody named Meg, and no Rake, that’s for sure, so for me it’s clear that what I enfolded started in Vietnam and was finished in Nam. I was drafted clean and simple. I got my notice. But you and Meg share a common past with Rake.”
“Is that the way you see it?” Singleton said, turning to Meg. Her face was pale and pinched with pain.
“I knew it as soon as you told us your name,” she said. “He talked about you in the vision I had. You two were there together. You were good friends.”
“What else?”
“He was in the jungle, in a firefight, and there was someone named Frank who liked to pray over bodies. Then he was in Hue. Then he was dead. I was in love with him. He was my boyfriend and then he got drafted.”
This is the moment he’d heard about, that was rumored to exist, when you came into contact with somebody who had a direct connection to the trauma and shared the grief. Hank had taken Wendy down the beach to give them a little time alone. Space but not too much space was the way he put it, a chance to talk alone.
“He was angry,” she said. “And he was dead. He talked to me about going to his own funeral. Were you at the funeral?”