"Anger at who?"
As if proving the point, he sneered. "Oh, right. This where I say, 'My mother'?"
But Sammie didn't miss a beat. "How would I know?"
She watched him compress his lips, struggling to keep track. To his credit, he returned to what he'd been saying.
"I've always had it," he admitted. "From as far back as I can remember. Maybe I was just born pissed off."
She sensed some of this had been running around his head when they'd parted ways earlier, so she asked, "Is that where you were going last night? To find out? You said you were off to make amends."
He sounded wistful. "Yeah. That was the idea. I figured I'd go visit my mother. I wasn't holding out much hope after all this time. From what Bob told me, she's pretty much a basket case anyhow. It's just…I don't know… that maybe if somebody has an idea of what went wrong, it might be her. I mean, I'm not stupid. I know there aren't any violin sections out there, waiting to help me see the light. But I keep hoping I can find some way to get on the right track."
Sammie was a little confused. "What happened? She wasn't home?"
It was an obvious question, given the conversation. But he knew with a slight jolt that he wasn't about to answer it. It would have been like opening the shutters from around a candle and allowing the wind to blow it out. And having abruptly realized how committed he was to seeing this investigation through alone, like the pursuit of the Holy Grail, he also saw that his entire supposed confession was probably corrupt. If he was truly interested in opening up and addressing his problems, being straight with this person above all others would have been the reasonable place to start. But apparently he wasn't ready. The complex, ephemeral issue of settling emotional past dues held sway. "Something came up."
They stopped before a large building with a central circular room just beyond the open double doors. The light filtering through the windowed cupola high overhead fell upon row after row of disheveled, disemboweled, and rusting metal filing cabinets, their massive paperwork contents spilling all over the floor in disastrous quantities. God only knows what files these were, whose lives they documented, and what void they'd created by being discarded here to rot.
Watching the cabinets lined up like disorderly, drunken, speechless soldiers, Sammie had to wonder about the similar repositories that everybody carried around in their heads, either ignored and neglected or simply inaccessible. In Willy's terse answer, it was as if she'd overhead him struggling in vain with this very dilemma and realized the best she could expect right now was that this conversation might be just the first of more to come.
Nevertheless, a little disappointed, she tried another angle. "Joe says that despite all the shit you hand out, you've got a lot to offer."
"Good for Joe. He's fed me that line."
"Maybe good for you. This is the first time I've ever heard you talk about why you are the way you are. That can't be all bad."
He turned away and resumed walking up the street. "I'm not so sure."
"You've tried ignoring it," she pressed him, her own frustration and irritation welling up. "You tried drowning it with booze. For all I know, you're down here trying to get yourself killed avenging a dead woman you think you wronged. How can talking about it be worse than any of that?"
She heard the words tumbling out of her the way a bystander might watch a car hit a bicyclist-unbelieving and a little fearful. Nevertheless, she did have some control, and that part of her now suddenly felt relieved. The inner strength she'd experienced the night before had been suddenly reinforced with the realization that she had nothing to lose by challenging him.
And in his own way, he rose to that challenge now. Instead of bursting out as he usually did, deflecting an assault with a response of greater magnitude, he stopped dead in his tracks.
Sammie almost bumped into him from behind."What?" she asked.
There was a drawn-out moment of silence before he said, staring at the ground before him, "You're right. And so's Joe. He told me a while ago I should just be straight with you-to honor you by taking the risk, was what he really said. Such a crap artist. You want to know the great thing about anger?" he asked, looking up at her. "It's that you don't have to worry about anything else-not the other guy, not what's going to happen to you. There're no consequences. You just fire both barrels and walk away if you're lucky."
"What about after the smoke clears?"
"It doesn't matter. You don't think about it. And if it gets to be a problem again, and you're still alive, you reload and fire off another round."
She thought about that before saying, "You're not firing now. If you're not angry, what are you feeling?"
He pursed his lips and smiled ruefully. "Confused. That's why I don't like talking. It just screws me up."
"I think that's bullshit," she told him flatly. "I think you're sick of being mad all the time, but you don't know what to replace it with."
He laughed bitterly, recalling what had happened to him since getting that phone call in Brattleboro a few short days ago. "Yeah… maybe I'll try love, peace, and harmony. That would really fit."
"You can't tell till you try it," she suggested.
But they both knew that was pushing things. He rolled his eyes and resumed walking. "Can we talk about something else?"
She smiled. "Yeah, for the moment. We're going to circle this hydrant again, though. Count on it."
He shook his head, curious as to why that didn't sound as bad as it should have. "Good image." By the time they returned to the burial site, the boxes they'd arrived with had been covered with dirt, leaving the rest of the trench open, and the backhoe was scratching at the ground next to the previous hole. All but four of the prisoners were back in the bus with the driver and one of the COs. The remainder waited patiently, leaning on shovels, while the backhoe's blade picked at the earth's raw surface with surprising dexterity and tenderness.
Slowly, a hole slightly longer than a coffin began to grow as the operator dug straight down into the fresh, previously untouched ground.
"What're they doing?" Sammie asked. "He's not in the trench."
"He doesn't want to hit the boxes," Willy guessed as they approached Joe Gunther and Ward Ogden.
"They exhume from the side," the latter explained, "like an archaeology dig."
Sure enough, after going down some ten feet, the backhoe backed off and the four prisoners jumped in and began cutting into the side wall, quickly revealing the stacked boxes, their pine sides still pale and unstained by the dirt.
"Good thing we got after this so fast," Ogden said.
"They don't embalm these folks. Doesn't take long for them to get pretty messy."
The team in the hole removed the uppermost box and lifted it to the edge. The CO above them then gestured to a waiting medical examiner's hearse to come pick it up.
Ogden began walking toward his own car. "Okay. It's a wrap. We go to Bellevue now so they can take a closer look at your friend. And I hate to do this to you," he said to Willy, "but it looks like you're going to have to play next-of-kin again in identifying the body, if that's all right."
"Fine," Willy said, feeling like the sole conduit to society's late discards. "And thanks for letting me come out here." When the time came, of course, and Willy was looking down onto Nathan Lee's dead face, he no longer felt like a pinch hitter for corpses. He truly mourned the loss of this person whose life he'd changed for the better so long ago. Maybe it was because he saw Nate as his only success along those lines, or maybe because, despite that, the end result turned out to be the same, but whatever the truth, he missed the man he'd rediscovered so recently, who seemed to bear only good memories of Willy, and who'd traveled the last mile to help him out.