He is not to be a shooting soldier. He will do order-of-battle work, rather like research, rather like the things he learned to love in his recent four years at Tulane. Wherever they put him, he will be bunkered in at the core of a headquarters compound. It would take an unlikely military cataclysm — or a fluke, a twist of very bad luck, a defiance of an actuarial reality of warfare that is obscured by Cronkite’s nightly report — for him to die.
He is young enough to feel confident in that reasoning.
It is September of 1967. Four months before the military cataclysm of the coming Vietnamese New Year, Tet 1968.
And if he does survive, he believes he will earn a thing he has long yearned to earn, foreshadowed only a few days ago in a bar on Magazine Street. His father shed tears over his tenth farewell Dixie, Robert’s fourth. Silent tears. William Quinlan has always been a quiet drunk. A quiet man, about feelings he could not command, feelings better felt by women. Robert still thinks, as he flies away to music his father could never understand, that he knows what the tears were about.
In the car, however, this ostinato is solemn and insistent. More than solemn. It aches. He feels nothing like contentment as he races through the corridor of oaks. It is forty-seven years later.
He glances at Darla.
Her face is pressed against the window.
Down a pea gravel drive they emerge from a grove of pine and cedar. They stop before the house they built in 1983 from early-twentieth-century Craftsman plans, with a shed-dormered gable roof, a first floor of brick, and two upper floors of veneered stucco and half-timber. For a decade Darla’s parents withheld every penny of their considerable resources from the struggling young academic couple, disapproving of the politics that brought the two of them together, and then, upon their deaths, they surprised their daughter with a will that split the parental wealth in half between her and a brother as conservative as they. She got the sprawling Queen Anne estate on Cayuga Lake and enough money to keep it up, along with the expressed hope — just short of a mandate — that their “daughter Darla and her family come home.”
The parents’ death itself surprised her. It was by late-night car crash on the Taconic Parkway, both of them apparently drunk. Darla immediately sold the Queen Anne and she and Robert built this new house, to their shared taste, having lately taken their places at Florida State University. At the time, their son Kevin was eleven. Their daughter Kimberly was five.
Tonight, with Robert’s Clinton-era S-Class Mercedes sitting next to Darla’s new Prius, they enter the house and put away their coats and go to the kitchen and putter about, she heating water for her herbal tea and he grinding his Ethiopian beans to brew his coffee, and for a long while they say nothing, not uncommon for this early-evening ritual, which occasionally feels, for both of them, comfortable.
Then, when their cups are full and they are about to go off to their separate places in the house to do some end-of-evening work, Darla touches Robert’s arm, very briefly, though only as if to get his attention, and she says, “What did you two talk about?”
“Who?” he says, though he knows who she means.
“The homeless man,” she says.
“The weather,” he says.
She nods. “Did he say how he copes?”
“We didn’t get into that.”
“I hate to shrug him off,” she says, though in an intonation that mutes the “hate” and stresses the “off.” She therefore does not need to add “but we must.”
They say no more.
They are both on sabbatical this spring, and they go to what have been their separate studies ever since the house was finished.
Robert’s is on the third floor, where the Craftsman plans called for a gentleman’s billiard room. His desk faces the fireplace in the north gable, with its hammered copper hood. Dormers and window seats are to his right hand and his left. His books line the room in recessed shelves.
Early-twentieth-century American history is his specialty and he is writing a biography of a journalist, publisher, and agitator for pacifist and socialist causes, John Kenneth Turner. Tonight, he is working on a paper for a history conference. “The Prototype of the Twentieth-Century Antiwar Movement in the U.S.: John Kenneth Turner, Woodrow Wilson, and the Mexican Invasion.” A mouthful of a title that he sits for a time now trying to simplify.
Darla’s study is off the first-floor hallway between the living room and the dining room. Her desk looks west through the casement windows, across the veranda, and out to the massive live oak behind their house. She teaches art theory. By certain scholarly adversaries at other schools, her research is considered to be interdisciplinary to a fault. She is known for her book Public Monuments as Found Art: A Semiotic Revisioning. Tonight she is trying to finish the rough draft of a paper, which, indeed, she will present at a semiotics conference. “Dead Soldiers and Sexual Longing: The Subtexts and Sculptural Tropes of the Daughters of the Confederacy Monuments.” The title seems just right to her.
They are focused thinkers, Robert and Darla. They would, if pressed to consider the matter, attribute some of their focus to the mutual respect they have for each other’s work. They need give each other not a single thought once they are sitting in these long-familiar rooms.
But the last sip of Robert’s coffee is cold. And he thinks of Bob.
He wonders what the man is doing right now. There is some shelter or other in Tallahassee, surely. Bob is there. Perhaps he is thinking, still, of Charleston, thinking of whatever it is he feels responsible for. Or perhaps Robert was right about that sudden stillness in Bob. Perhaps the man is merely hunkered down for the night in this life he’s drifted to, trying to figure out how he got here.
After the man and his wife passed and vanished and Bob got reacquainted with the food and the coffee before him and after he ate and drank and sat for a while at the table, he has once again forgotten what he knows about what can set him to thinking, forgotten this to his severe detriment since he does not want to deal with the inside of his mind, with the thinking machine revved up, not ever, but especially not at the very same time as having to deal with finding a place to sleep, now that he’s missed the deadlines for the shelters and the missions and the lighthouses and the mercy houses and the promised lands and the heavenly refuges. But tonight he has forgotten what he knows about the situation.
So as soon as he remembers, he stands and goes out of the New Leaf Market and it’s too late, the situation is upon him: It was light and now it’s dark. It happened while he wasn’t watching. It happened quick.
It launches him along Apalachee Parkway. And for a long while he just focuses on pushing his body hard to get away. Push and push. That’s all there is. Too much. The ache in his legs and his back starts it all aching in his head again. He doesn’t know how far he’s come, how long he’s been walking. A couple of miles. Maybe more. Then a landmark tells him he’s making progress, even as it stirs up issues. Tillotson Funeral Home passes, its phony columns floodlit like the capitol building, its marquee making some dead body famous for being dead. Some stiff named Henry tonight. Henry something or other, the second name not even worth Bob noticing. This guy doesn’t matter. Some Henry who was breathing and then he wasn’t.
The dark continues to nag at Bob. Its suddenness happened early, this being the first week of January. It left a bad chill behind, which is why he’s been walking east as fast as he can. In January he cannot simply vanish into the urban woodlands of Tallahassee, follow a bike trail and then veer off into the woods and find his things in a place only he knows about, through a culvert and along a drain bed and up a bank to a mark on a tree here and a mark on a tree there and a few more marks and a fallen oak and a hollow beneath, a place that was good for him all autumn long and he could go there anytime no matter how his flailing mind was trying to fuck with him, and he could get his stuff and he could find a place to sleep in the woods.