Bob drove through waves of hallucination, skidding left-and right-hand turns, watching alleys fly by, terrified most of all of the bird. He knew if a bird had him, he was dead and gone, because a bird could stay with him.
But no bird came. In a second, over the car’s police radio, he learned why.
“Base Six, that medevac all set with Flashlight and other wounded aboard, let’s clear the air so we can ASAP to Shock Trauma.”
“Roger, Shock Trauma, I want all birds to go to ground level while we get the man to the hospital. Any word, Alpha?”
“Lots of blood, that’s all I can tell you, Base Six, and we got paramedics working hard. You let us worry, he’s in our hands now.”
Then other messages broke in and the whole thing degenerated into a cascade of possibilities, of rumors, of men yelling for attention and assistance. He heard a couple of references to “five-one-four Saint Ann” and the fleeing suspect, but that baffled him; he’d been in 415; 514 was a block away, on the other side of the street. Where did they get that number? What was going on? Then he had it. Sure, that’s how well planned it was. Timmons gives the wrong address, as if he’s flustered. The whole outfit goes to the wrong house a block away. That gives Payne and the colonel the time to slip away.
He drove onward, down deserted streets, and now a new problem began to eat at him. His head kept trying to float back to Vietnam. He fought with it, feeling very much two men, a weak one who wanted to return and a strong one who would not let him. He’d been hit in Vietnam too, and once you’ve been hit, it always feels the same. He slid for a second, unrooted in time, the dead past floating up big as a movie in front of him. There was an enormous amount of pain that day, and the pain he now felt brought that back. But this wasn’t anything like it. The pain of the hip had been absolute.
This pain was stunning and pointed but he knew he could beat it. He’d had worse pain than this, plenty of times. This was nothing. He snorted, trying to get out of the ’Nam, and made himself concentrate on old Jack Payne and the happy glint in his pig eyes as he pulled the trigger.
He felt himself slipping into numbness and stupidity. He hated himself for that moment of utter strangeness when he’d been shot.
Gun-simple fool. He’d been easy for them because he wanted Solaratov so bad, that was it. That was the best trick, how they played on what he wanted. These Agency fucks had somehow found out about him and Donny and how they got nailed by a Nailer coming over the crest, and they used it on him like a club, used his most private thing. Agency hoods, working on something big and dark and complicated, meant to turn on his stupidity and his vulnerability and his need.
Now, I got to stop the blood or I die. He looked about him. On the seat was a bag that said Dunkin’ Donuts. He reached in, pulled out a wad of waxy paper. He tightened it into a ball and stuffed it into the entrance wound, the one that was bleeding so badly.
There. Wasn’t much, but it was what he had.
He knew exactly where he was going, if he could only stay smart enough to get there.
He’d studied it, after all. There was only one escape route. Now, he had only one problem and that was the fact that he was dying.
Or was he? Shouldn’t he be dead by now? The first bullet had gone right through him, for some crazy reason, and he suspected that it was a ball round, overpenetrative, it had missed major body structures, taken out no arteries, whatever. As for the shoulder hit, that part of his body had gone to numbness, but there wasn’t much blood and he had a sense, maybe illusory, it didn’t matter, that no bone had been broken. So on he drove, by this time calmed down and no longer roaring. But he had to dump the car, that was the thing. The car was death.
He drove toward water.
In water there was safety.
“Attention all, units, we have a definite confirm, we have Government Interagency motorpool car, a beige eighty-eight Ford Taurus, plate number Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima, that’s Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima. Suspect is armed and dangerous, a white male, about forty, wounded but considered dangerous, and an early ID for the name Robert Lee Swagger, I say again, all units, he’s armed and dangerous, approach with caution.”
Oh, shit, he thought.
But Bob had seen the water.
He rolled off the road, raising a cloud of dust behind him, slewing through weeds and mulch. Suddenly it was before him, the vast band of blue-black Mississippi, a sinewy, bending thing. He had no real idea of what he was doing because of blood loss. And of course the rage which was making him insane. He had no sense of making a decision. The car just surged ahead and he felt a sense of liberation, of release, similar in fact to the one he’d felt as he blew through the window, and then suddenly there were bubbles and blackness all around him, pulling at him. In the pocket of the cab, the water line rose as the car sank. He rose with it, until his head struck the ceiling. He felt the torrent blasting through the car’s open windows as he sank, and he knew he’d die now, trapped beneath the surface.
But again his rage helped and it released a last pump of energy and adrenaline, and with half a body and the thrust of his legs, he managed to get the door open. He was almost born again. The water was warm and green now and he rose toward sunlight, and then suddenly tasted the air. The plunge off a dock had carried the car maybe fifteen feet out; overhead a helicopter made a sweep of the river, the way the Hueys had buzzed the Perfume during Tet. But it was far off and couldn’t see him.
He flipped to his back, and propelled himself toward shore. Drifting, he eventually found himself among green reeds weaving in the current. Barges plied the water a half-mile or so away, but the river was so wide here it looked to be a placid lake. Bob waded woozily, his hair plastered against his scalp, his wet shirt heavy against his skin, his body drugged with fatigue. He couldn’t believe he was still alive and able to move. It seemed a miracle.
He found a rotting log floating in the weeds. If he stayed there he’d die or get caught and he knew if he got caught, he couldn’t kill them all, kill Payne and the colonel – and kill Solaratov, who made it all possible. If it was Solaratov. And if it wasn’t, he’d kill whoever it was. That’s what he wanted.
Bob got his belt off, stopping momentarily to discover with surprise the gun he’d taken jammed into his waist. Thank God it was stainless steel and probably wouldn’t rust. As for the bullets, would they corrode? He didn’t know. What choice did he have? He slid it to his jean pocket, a tight fit that would hold good. Then he buckled the belt around the log and wrapped his arm through it, and pushed off. With surprising swiftness, the log carried him into the center of the river, and the current picked him up. But he felt amazingly good. Now and then a chopper buzzed by but he wasn’t visible against the log and when darkness came, he swore at the flashing lights here and there along the shore. But Bob just let the current carry him along through the afternoon and the night, and when the dawn broke, he was right where he wanted to be. He was in the jungle.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The lead editorials mourned the passing of the great man, of course, but the off-leads quickly got to the matter of blame.
And so he returns, ran the piece in the Washington Post the next day, the seedy little man with the grudge and the rifle.
The grudge does not make him special; only the.38 caliber rifle does. Like a figure from our darkest, most atavistic nightmares, he returns, and writes himself into history. If, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has alleged, the perpetrator of yesterday’s shooting tragedy in New Orleans turns out to be Bob Lee Swagger, the Vietnam War hero fallen on hard times and embittered because his country would not award him the Congressional Medal of Honor he felt he deserved, or if he turns out to be another man with vainglorious notions of what he deserves but could not get, it really doesn’t matter. What matters – what has mattered since 1963 – is that in this country alone history can be written with firearms precisely because firearms are available; small men can become, momentarily and delusionarily, big men, because firearms are available. In the case of Lee Harvey Oswald it was a cheap Italian war surplus rifle. In the case of yesterday’s tragedy, it was a high-powered American sporting firearm, manufactured by Remington. Again, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that guns have no other purpose but to kill, and that they kill so frequently has begun to erode the illusion of the “American sportsman.” Isn’t it time for everybody, in the terrifying wake of another bloody American tragedy, a typical American tragedy, involving guns and dreams that would not come true, to begin to work toward the day when only policemen and soldiers and a few forest rangers have guns?