During the second year, Leonard’s weight leveled off at 170 pounds. The stubble-short hair on his head now matched his beard, steel gray with patchy reminders of darker days. At fifty-six years old he’d never felt nearly so powerful. He was also certain that few individuals had ever attained comparable accuracy with so varied a group of long guns. He’d put thousands of hours into his shotguns and rifles. He’d perfected his skills in the heat of the desert’s summer sun, in the driving rain, the cold and snow, and all this at morning light, high noon, and twilight. He had total confidence he could hit any target in any circumstance. He’d even achieved a high degree of mastery while practicing by standing on a small trampoline. The target and the shooter move, and then the moment arrives, the trigger is pulled, the bullet flies, and the target is hit.
Two years alone can do strange things to a man, even a man so resolved in his purpose as Leonard Martin. He had stretches of time as long as a month or more when he didn’t speak a single word to another human being, not to anyone. He began speaking to himself, not out loud, but still they were conversations with himself. He had long talks about the weather-how to spot the movement of a storm, what the changing shapes of the clouds meant for the next day-and about the creatures he shared the New Mexico wilderness with. “The rabbits,” he’d say to himself, “they run four or five jumps and then change direction. Why do they do that?” He studied them closely, sometimes sitting on a chair in front of his cabin for many hours without moving. There was a method to their movement, he realized. At least three-quarters of the time when a rabbit jumped in another direction it was to his right. “If I were a coyote,” he said, “I’d chase to the right and I’d have rabbit for dinner.” Leonard watched all the living things around him: the birds, the deer, and the prairie dogs; even the insects, the beetles, the spiders and butterflies. They all had a purpose, and they all had a pattern to their lives. He’d never given a thought to any of them before. Now he felt he knew them, knew them in a way other men did not. Some of the larger animals he came to recognize by sight. One rabbit in particular became his favorite. He was scruffy like all the others, but he had a dark spot on his hindquarters and a piece missing from one ear that made him easy to identify. Leonard named him Henry, after Frogman Henry. There were no frogs around, so the rabbit would do. He often sang, out loud, “Ain’t Got No Home” in his best Frogman Henry voice. One day Henry didn’t show up. Leonard never saw him again. “It’s a cruel world,” he said to himself. Leonard could not hurt any of the animals that lived around him. In fact, he couldn’t even stomp on a pesky insect. They all had complicated lives, he told himself, and he had no business disturbing them. They respected him. He respected them. Many times he could have shot any one of a multitude of living creatures racing, jumping, or crawling about his personal firing range. In truth, it would have been very helpful to do so, but he never fired a bullet in anger at any living thing in New Mexico.
After two years in the mountains of the southwest, Leonard Martin packed everything he needed into the evangelical SUV and began his journey to Boston.
New York
In the grand scheme of the newspaper business, the common run of those who write obituaries comprises youngsters on an anxious path to better things, and played-out pros with more past than future. There are, of course, exceptions. For many years, the New York Times’s obituary page framed the work of Robert McG. Thomas, considered by many to be the newspaper’s finest writer. After he died, others searched vainly for his magic, Isobel Gitlin among them.
She stood out in the paper’s notorious garden of strivers-aggressive, obsessive, persistent young weeds growing with graceless gusto to the light. She’d been hired out of graduate school, where she studied Western Classics, not journalism, pretty much at her leisure, and wrote a column in the campus paper, popularly referred to as 3S but officially called “Sex and the Serious Scholar.” When she first heard of Christopher Hopman, Isobel had put four uneventful years into the Times and acquired a faint reputation for cheerful detachment.
Isobel seemed genuinely pleased with every assignment. She never badgered her editors for work on better stories. The ones she did get, while varied, were always local and rarely involved significant news. Whatever she worked on-Brooklyn sewer problems, Manhattan zoning battles, crack run amok in the Jersey suburbs-didn’t really have to be published. If it struck someone as interesting and fit the space plan for the day, it might pop up in the back somewhere, to Isobel’s delight. Most of the time she gladly researched stories for fellow reporters. Her self-regard was not tethered to the byline, and this was what set her dramatically, eerily, apart. She often wondered, if only for a moment, if it was her evident self-confidence or easygoing style that made certain editors feel uncomfortable. She was “sent to Siberia” after the firing of an aged, embittered elephant, Phil Ross, a reporter who had enjoyed decades of high status before his banishment to the bowels of the obit page. Sent there by editors not even born when he filed his first byline story in the Times, Ross, in his anger, apparently bet a colleague fifty bucks he could populate the obituary page, time after time, with feature items on the deaths of mediocre, second-rate athletes: a shortstop who, in an otherwise undistinguished career, drove in the tie run in the eighth inning of a World Series game in the 1940s; an Irish lightweight, little more than a club fighter, who fought thirty-eight times, winning thirty-two without ever boxing for the championship. A month after praising the Irishman, he snuck in a small obit for a woman he claimed was “the finest athlete” ever to attend the all-female Vassar College. Shortly after that, he got caught when, in a fit of reckless exuberance, he tried to lead one edition with an obituary for someone he dubbed “Mr. Shuffleboard.”
When permanently assigned to obits, Isobel understood that someone had succeeded in getting her out of sight, or out of hearing. That did not diminish her sense that this lateral demotion was a fine thing: a chance to do serious, worthwhile work, the work of Robert McG. Thomas.
The New York Times is the world’s newspaper of record and also a key asset in a very large media conglomerate of nearly twenty newspapers, more than a half-dozen television stations, and a couple of radio stations; it is a publicly-owned company sensitive to all the demands and requirements attendant upon high profile corporate identity. Of those at the paper who knew Isobel, some claimed that she was hired and retained only because she was Fijian-a white girl, but nevertheless a real honest-to-goodness Fijian. Her mother was a porcelain-skinned French nurse who struck that island’s fabled shores on a long-awaited vacation and never went back to Mother France. She soon met Isobel’s father, an Oxford-accented British Jew with South Pacific business interests that had moved him, some time before, to become a local citizen. Thus was Isobel born on Fiji’s soil, beneath its hopeful, sky-blue flag, soon to speak its three great tongues, plus English and Parisian French besides.
Her father named her Isabel. Her mother pronounced it Eee-so-bel, and so they spelled it Isobel. She was five foot four in stocking feet, and although unable to ignore a half-dozen unwelcome pounds, on a good day Isobel could admit that she probably looked as good as a thirty-year-old woman should. She did not confuse herself with the flat-bellied, hard-assed, high-titted beauties infesting the Times. But after a drink and a glimpse in a flattering mirror she could be confident any man worth coming across might think her attractive. Isobel’s jet-black hair was cut to the shoulders. It complemented her creamy skin and small, hazel eyes. Her nose was thin but good, her cheekbones high like her mother’s, and her chin very much English. Isobel dressed less carefully than most. She liked loose woolen suits in bright, clear colors. She wore rimless drugstore glasses for reading, which meant that she looked through them most of the time. She once heard a sympathetic colleague describe her appearance as “studious.” Isobel did not know if that was to the good.