Her voice kept changing as she turned toward the opposite bank, then circled back this way. He saw her touch bottom at the near bank and stand erect, running her hands through her hair. When she spoke again he could tell by the pure tone of her voice that she was looking up at him.
"Hey, bo, come on down, get a little wet."
Selvy was looking across the river to the top of the rock wall. Two figures had appeared on the cliff line. First one, then the other ARVN ranger. He felt the briefest of regrets, thinking of his handguns. There was no mistaking the one he'd roughed up. Mustache. Wouldn't take his eyes off Selvy. The other one, the knife squatter, the one who'd waited motionless in the microbus, didn't mind tossing a look at Nadine.
She looked up that way, following Selvy's gaze. Then she turned toward the car again. Her voice was very small.
"I don't know more'n a monkey who they are."
Selvy remained on the car roof, watching them.
"They're not local people exactly," he said. "Why don't you stay right where you are for the time being? Put on your shirt if you want."
The two men remained for a long moment on the cliff line. Stetsons, sunglasses, tight denim pants. Nothing behind them but clear sky. Finally they moved back. Because of their higher elevation, from Selvy's vantage point, it took just two steps. They were out of sight.
The girl put on her jeans and climbed up to the lookout.
"This is turning into a Western," she said.
"What was it before?"
"I don't know what it was before. But it resembles a Western right now."
"Nothing like a swim," he told her. "You ought to be feeling better."
Selvy got in the car and started it up. Nadine kept looking over to the Mexican side. When the car started moving, she walked after it, opened the door and got in. He drove up to the post office. Less than a hundred yards away, tourists were emerging from a bus.
Selvy got out of the car and went over to talk to the bus driver. Above the curved windshield, in the slot where destinations are lettered, appeared the words: WILD WEST AND MEXICO. Nadine watched the imprint of her wet underwear gradually appear on her jeans.
He came back to the car and leaned against the door on her side. A few of the tourists drifted down this way, going into the general store, taking pictures of each other.
"I'm leaving the car with you."
"You want me to keep it for you."
"I want you to keep it."
"Keep it, period," she said.
"That's right."
The tourists slowly spread through town, mostly older people and eight or nine Japanese. Selvy walked over to the house. Through the front window she saw him speaking to her father. He came back out, carrying a can of beer and a soft drink, also in a can. He held them in one hand back against his hip.
Nadine remained in the car, sipping the beer. Selvy leaned against the door. A man asked if he'd move the car. He wanted to take a picture of his wife standing near the post office door. The car was in the way. Selvy said no.
In pairs and small groups, the tourists eventually reassembled outside the bus. The driver appeared, unwrapping a stick of gum. No one stepped aboard until he was behind the wheel.
Selvy tossed the empty soda can onto the back seat. The girl's jeans were wet, an explicit outline. Her shirt was wet in patches. She'd taken a map out of the glove compartment and was unfolding it elaborately, spreading it across the dash and up along the windshield. He walked over to the bus and stepped on. The door closed behind him with a splash of compressed air. In the brief moment before he slipped into his seat, Selvy noted something odd about the people, or the seating pattern, or something-he wasn't sure what.
It wasn't until they were well under way, heading west on U.S. 90, that he turned in his seat for a longer look. It was the Japanese. They were spread throughout the bus, singly or in pairs, nine of them, and they were all asleep. The other tourists talked, compared postcards, looked out the windows. It was as though the Japanese, secretly, by inborn means, had been able to communicate to each other the placid imperative: sleep.
He faced front again. They'd gone to sleep immediately and they continued sleeping despite the noise and motion. This apartness he'd always found interesting in Asians. This somehow challenging sense of calm. It only remained for him to discover whether they'd wake up simultaneously, raising their heads in unison.
3
All the windows were closed. The blinds were down. Lightborne double-locked the gallery door. Then he turned toward Odell and gestured, arms outstretched, palms up: what do we have?
Odell looked up from a book of etchings. He was older than Richie, but not much, and fuller in the face, although with the same prominent teeth. The book was titled _Extraterrestrial Sex Positions_.
Sixteen millimeter, he said. Considered an amateur film gauge at the time this footage was shot. No standard, or optical, sound track. Magnetic sound, if any, would have to be added. Problems there with certain projectors. Possible problems adapting 16mm to motion picture theaters. Schools and churches, yes. TV, yes.
"Wonderful," Lightborne said. "Schools and churches, that's wonderful."
He'd had to strain to hear what Odell was saying. Odell spoke rapid!y and sometimes indistinctly, with much more of an accent than his cousin had-a run-on Georgia voice, a clipclop, rather than Richie's slight but piercing twang.
Lightborne circ!ed the small table that held the projector Odell had brought with him. They wouldn't be able to view the film until the following day. The projector had a defective part, Odell had discovered, and it was ten p.m.-too late to find a replacement.
Curiously, Lightborne wasn't disappointed. He found he was in no hurry to look at the footage. At some rudimentary level it was an experience he feared. He'd feared it all along, he realized. His involvement brimmed with fear.
Moll Robbins would be joining him for the screening. He wanted a disinterested intelligence on the scene. More than that. He wanted company. Human warmth. An interpreter of the meaning of his fear.
It was all so real. It had such weight. Objects were what they seemed to be. History was true.
Odell said he'd talked to Richie on the phone. Richie was barricaded in the warehouse. He was feeding the dogs infrequently, to give them a meaner edge. He'd had this feeling for months, Odell said. Someone was out to get him. Some dark force. There was a sniper somewhere, waiting for the right moment. He was sitting on a bed in some rooming house, cleaning his rifle scope. He had a bullet with Richie's name on it. Dallas, Richie would say. What am I doing in Dallas?
"All he talks about is John F. Kidney, Bobby Kidney, Martin Luther Kang, Jaws Wallace."
"What?" Lightborne said.
"I keep telling him what Rose Kidney told Tiddy Kidney."
Long pause.
"What did she tell him?"
"That was Harry Truman."
"If you can't stand the heat," Lightborne said.
"That was Harry S Truman, wasn't it, said that."
Odell went on.
Richie was obsessed not only by his impending assassination but by the conflicting reports that would ensue. He'd been shot by one white male, or two white males, or one white male with a mulatto child. The rifle used had no prints, had several sets of prints, now being checked, or had several sets of prints but they'd been accidentally wiped off by the police.
Richie was especially obsessed by fingerprints being wiped off by the police, Odell said.
Lightborne went behind the partition into the living area. He turned on both taps in the wash basin, hoping this would lead Odell to think he was shaving. Then he sat at the foot of his cot and stared into the black window shade three feet away.
_History is true_.
Selvy got a ride from a man in a pickup, south from Marathon. The man was about seventy-five years old. There was a deer rifle on a rack at the back of the cab. Four hours till nightfall. The desert.