The air-conditioning blew hard and chill, cutting through the baggy pajamas he lived in. When the last of his seismic coughs had faded, he swung his legs over the side and stood up, ignoring the battered aluminum walker the Veterans Administration hospital had issued him. He didn't need it, and besides, the damn thing was too short for his rangy six-foot-six frame-just like the bed-but that was the Army for you. He'd told all this to Jay Shanker, his court-assigned lawyer nearly six months ago, the last lime he had been allowed an outside visitor.
Talmadge craned his head up to the corner of the room and glared at the closedcircuit video camera attached to the wall above the television. He focused right on the camera's little red LED, and despite the arthritis from the partial shoulder separation he'd got at Chosin Reservoir more than half a century before, Talmadge raised his arm with an extended bird finger. "Fuck you!"
It pleased him to know the camera captured his unvarnished opinion for posterity and scientific scrutiny. One day, somebody honest would find the tapes. The truth would come out then and heads would roll.
The truth was why they had jerked Talmadge out of Leflore County Court on the second day of sentencing hearings. Before that, his lame court-appointed lawyer had kept him shut up and drugged out during the murder trial, not even letting him speak up in his own defense. The trial took less than a week and the jury less than an hour to convict him of murder.
Everybody, especially Talmadge, knew the conviction was a greased rail to the gas chamber, which is why he secretly flushed his medicine down the toilet before the sentencing hearings.
There, his mind freed from the chemical handcuffs that had kept him silent for so long, he stood up in open court and declared it a frame-up to keep him quiet about Project Enduring Valor and began to rattle off names and dates and places he had mostly forgotten until the seizures started.
A contingent of Army officers and MPs conveniently in court that day hustled him out of the courtroom in record time, then bundled him off to the mental ward at the VA hospital, where he had remained ever since. The judge sentenced Talmadge to death in the gas chamber at Parchman, then sealed the court records and threatened anyone present with serious jail time if they talked about what had proceeded.
"Y'all got a tough row to hoe, now don'tcha?" Talmadge addressed the camera. "Y'all want me dead so I can't remem'buh things no mo'." He looked up at the camera and nodded his head for good measure.
Then he gingerly increased the weight on both legs. Despite the arthritis pain in his knees and hips that had ended his career as a hunting guide, Talmadge ignored the walker and shuffled over to the window. He parted the curtains and squinted through his reflection in the window glass. Southwest through the darkness he caught a glimpse of the very top of the Capitol dome above the trees. Talmadge imagined himself free out there with real fresh air to breath and grass and dog shit to avoid stepping in. Anger filtered into his chest, dark, hot, and sharp. Then he turned back toward the camera and the red light that never went out.
"Fuck you all, 'specially you Mr. High-and-Mighty, General dog-fucker Braxton and all them clap-rotten horses you rode in on."
Sweat beaded up on Talmadge's face and his pulse throbbed along the neat surgical scar that ran like railroad tracks from the bridge of his nose up past his right eyebrow and into his thinning hairline. Then his vision faded the way it always did when his medication wore off. A scintillating crescent of multicolored neon obliterated his peripheral vision, then spread.
The damn lights had started it all. That first day, he'd bent over a cup of coffee at the Delta Cafe in Itta Bena, talking with Dud Shackleford and Dooney Clark about how fishing at Mossy Lake had gone right to hell, and they all agreed it was thanks to all the crowds from as far away as Jackson with their fancy bass boats and million-dollar tackle that made too damn much noise for real fishermen to catch anything.
On the first day when the lights in his head had shattered his vision, Darryl Talmadge had dropped his coffee cup and spilled coffee all aver the table. Dooney called 911. Talmadge was sure he was having a stroke, but when he got to the hospital in Greenwood, the emergency room doctors diagnosed it as some sort of migraine aura, perhaps a reaction to the stress of his wife's death and the need to sell his house to pay her medical expenses. The doctor said the aura probably didn't mean anything serious, but if it came again, perhaps he needed to go to Jackson or Memphis to have his head scanned.
Then the flashbacks came cascading from his head right after Dud and Dooney settled him into his room at the Tallahatchie Manor Assisted Care Facility, where he'd lived since his wife, Dora, had died of cancer from all the cigarettes, right after his knees had gotten too arthritic for him to care for their little place on Highway 7, north of the Episcopal chapel outside Itta Bena, He still felt guilty for the relief that had mixed with his sorrow when Dora died. She had begun to slip into the cranky stages of Alzheimer's and was running him ragged when the cancer killed her. His depression had hit right after the Alzheimer's, back when he'd realized the woman he loved no longer lived inside the body he tended. Yet he used every shred of his swiftly eroding energy and money to do the best he could for her. Talmadge figured out a few months later that he had done it all to honor Dora's memory; it had been like living with a fresh gravesite in the house where feeding her and bathing her and keeping her from wandering off and getting hit by a tractor filled the same emotional need as placing flowers on a grave. He felt gratefully ashamed when the cancer finally took Dora.
But the really bad memories that landed him in hot water flooded from his head not long after Dooney and Dud had dropped him off at his room. The scintillating lights came back with a vengeance. As the neon rainbow crescendoed towards climax, he fumbled out the old cassette recorder and filled up all the tapes he could find with an avalanche of memories that had never scrolled through his consciousness before. He'd always thought the mortar shell that had separated his shoulder in Korea and laced his head with shrapnel had forever erased memories from those days. But here, to his astonishment, they flooded back, and along with them, memories of white coats and hypodermics and Project Enduring Valor. He babbled into the microphone until he lost consciousness.
The next day, after the lights had gone, he played the tapes and heard his voice as if for the first time and listened to his words relating strange tales of which he had no memory. Now certain this was the beginning of Alzheimer's like Dora's, he pulled out his old. 12-gauge, the Remington automatic built on the Browning patent that had once made him a legendary wing shot in any season, loaded three cartridges with number four shot- the largest he had since duck hunting was his favorite-then with an old cassette of Dora singing in the background, he danced with the. 12-gauge for the entire morning before calling Dooney.
Two hours later at the VA hospital in Jackson, they sat in the waiting room almost all day until a harried physician came out, listened to his story, pried the shoebox with the cassettes away from Talmadge, and arranged for his admittance.
If only he had left the freaking tapes at home, things would be so different now, as he shifted his focus to the television screen where one of CNN's artlessly untalented but sensuously full-lipped news girls filled the screen, droning on about some flood in Europe washing away priceless art treasures. She wore a sly smile on her face as she read this tragic story. Then she read something that cut through Talmadge's latest light storm.
"Eight Russian soldiers were gunned down and three others wounded yesterday by one of their comrades in the Caucasus Mountains on a remote crossing post on the border with Georgia," she said with that sly cynical smirk just below the surface. "A regional duty officer with Russia's branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry said the shooter was under the influence of some sort of hallucinogenic mushroom popular with conscripts in the remote border region. This is the second such shooting in the same region within the past four months as desertions, violence, and suicides continue to plague Russia's deteriorating military establishment… And now with entertainment news about Paris, J. Lo, and Britney…"