Donny looked at Trig for a bit. Trig was leaning against the fender of the van. He lifted a milk carton and poured it over his head, and water gushed out, scraping rivulets in the dust that adhered to his handsome face. Trig shook his wet hair, and the droplets flew away. Then he turned back.
“Donny, for Christ’s sake. Save your own life!”
Peter was no good at waiting. He got out of the car and walked along the shoulder of the road. It was completely dark and silent, unfamiliar sensations to a young man who’d spent so much time OCS — on city streets. Now and then he heard the chirp of a cricket; up above, the stars towered and pinwheeled, but he was not into stars or insects, so he noticed neither of these realities. Instead, he reached the gate, paused a moment, and climbed over. He saw before him a faint rise in the land, almost a small hill, and the dirt road that climbed it. He knew if a car came over the hill and he were standing on that road, he’d be dead-cold caught in the lights. So he walked a distance from the road, then turned to head up the hill, figuring he could then drop to the ground if Donny and Julie returned.
Gently, he walked up the hill, feeling as alone as that guy who had walked on the surface of the moon. He reached the top of the hill and saw the farmhouse below him. No sight of Julie but he saw Trig and Donny slouched on the fender of a van in the yard between the house and the barn, and they were chatting animatedly, relaxed and intimate. There was no sign of danger, no sign of weirdness: just two new friends bullshiting in the night.
But then small things began to seem off. What was Trig doing way out here? What was this place? What was going on? It connected with nothing in Peter’s memory of Trig.
Puzzled, he stepped forward and almost tripped as he bumbled into something.
Two figures rose before him.
Oh, shit, he thought, for they wore suits and one of them carried a camera with a long lens.
Clearly they were feds, spying on Trig.
They had the pug look of FBI agents, with blunt faces and crew cuts; one wore a hat. They did not look happy to be discovered.
“W-who are you?” Peter asked in a quavering voice. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t think I can sell him out,” said Donny.
“Donny, this isn’t a Western. There are no good guys. Do you hear me? This is real life, hardball style. If it’s you or Crowe, do not give yourself up for Crowe.”
“I suppose that’s the smart move,” said Donny.
“So, there,” said Trig. “I made your decision easy for you. All you have to do is cooperate with them. Come on, when the war is over, they’ll reduce his sentence. He may never even serve a day. They’ll work some deal, he’ll get out and go on with the rest of his life. He won’t even be upset.”
Donny remembered that once upon a time, even Crowe had given him the same advice. Roll over on me in a second, Donny, if it ever comes to that. Somehow Crowe had known it would.
“Okay,” he finally said.
“Do your duty, Donny. But think about what it costs you. Okay. Think about how you feel now. Then when you get out, do me one favor, okay? No matter what happens to me, promise me one thing.”
Trig winced as if in pain in the hot light of the headlights, though perhaps something had just gotten in his eye. There was an immense familiarity to that look, the strain on his face, the set of it, the clearness of vision. And … And what?
“Sure,” Donny said.
“Open your mind. Open your mind to the possibility that the power to define duty is the power of life and death. And if people impose duty on you, maybe they’re not doing it for your best interests or the country’s best interests but for their own best interests. Okay, Donny? Force yourself to think about a world in which each man got to set his own duty and no one could tell anyone what to do, what was right, what was wrong; the only rules were the Ten Commandments.”
“I—” stammered Donny.
“Here,” said Trig. “I have something for you. I was going to mail it to you from Baltimore, but this’ll save me the postage and the fuss. It’s no big deal.”
He went over to some kind of knapsack on the ground, fished around, and came out with a folder, which he opened to reveal a piece of heavy paper.
“Sometimes,” he said, “when the spirit moves me, I’m even pretty good. I’m much better at birds, but I did okay on this one. It’s nothing.”
Donny looked: it was a drawing on a creamy page trimmed from that sketchbook Trig was always carrying, incredibly delicate and in a spiderweb of ink, that depicted himself and Julie as they stood and talked in the trees at West Potomac Park.
There was something special about it: he got them both, maybe not exactly as a photograph, but somehow their love too, the way they looked at each other, the faith they had in each other.
“Wow,” said Donny.
“Wow, yourself. I dashed it off that night in my book. It was neat, the two of you. Gives me hope for the world. Now, go on, get the hell out of here, go back to your duty.”
Trig drew him close, and Donny felt the warmth, the musculature, and maybe something else, too: passion, somehow, oddly misplaced but genuine and impressive. Trig was actually crying.
Over the shoulders of the two FBI agents, Peter saw Donny and Trig embrace, and then Donny stepped out of the light and was gone. He’d head to his car, which Peter now saw was but fifty or so yards away. He was screwed. Donny would see him here with the two feds, who showed no sign at all of moving, and he would have made an ass out of himself.
He felt despair rising in his gorge.
“I have to go,” he said to the larger of the two plainclothes officers.
“No,” the man said back, and the other moved to embrace Peter, as if to wrestle him to the ground. Peter squirmed out of the man’s grip, but he was grabbed and thrust to the ground.
The two men loomed over him.
“This is ridiculous,” he said.
They seemed to agree. They looked at each other foolishly, not quite sure what to do, but suddenly one of them pointed.
Then the engine of Donny’s car came to life and its lights flashed on.
The man with the camera pulled away from Peter, leaving the other, the bigger, to lean on him, and ran toward the gate.
“Well, did he help?” said Julie as they walked through the dark.
“Yeah,” said Donny. “Yes, he did. He really did. I’ve got it figured out now.”
“Should I go meet him?”
“No, he’s in a very strange mood. I’m not sure what’s going on. Let’s just get out of here. I’ve got some things to do.”
“What did he give you?”
“It’s a picture. It’s very nice. I’ll show you later.”
They walked through the dark, up the hill. Donny could see the car ahead. He had an odd tremor suddenly, a sense of not being alone. It was a freakish thing, sometimes useful in Indian country: that sensation of being watched. He scanned the darkness for sign of threat but saw nothing, only farmland under moon, no movement or anything.
“Who was that blond guy?” she asked.
“His pal Fitzpatrick. Big Irish guy. They were loading up to spread fertilizer.”
“That’s strange.”
“He said they decided to do the hard part of the job in the cool of the night. Hell, it was only fertilizer. Who knows?”
“What was going on with Trig?”
“I don’t know. He was, uh, strange is all I can call it. He had the same look on his face that the Time photographer got, when he was carrying that bleeding kid in from the cops in Chicago and his own head was bleeding too. He was very set, very determined, but somehow, underneath it all, very emotional. He seemed like he was facing death or something. I don’t know why or what. It spooked me a little.”