okay. We got him through it.”
“I’ll miss Billy.”
“I’ll miss him too. But he has to go back to his life. That girl Suzy, she’s missed him too the last four weeks. Now it’s her turn to be happy.”
YKN4 wore jeans and Keds and a little polo shirt. She was, as are all children who pass the better part of their times in barns among horses, dirty and happy. She bobbed along beside her father as he took Billy in slow, cooling circles around the corral until finally the animal’s breathing had returned to normal.
“You gonna wash him down, Daddy?”
“Help me, honey?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You are such a big girl, YKN4,” said Bob, and his daughter’s face knitted up and laughed.
YKN4 took the horse by the halter line and drew it into the barn, where she strained to link it to a rope. The big animal yielded entirely to her bossy directions. She didn’t give it a chance and she didn’t back down. “Come on, you big old dopey thing,” she shouted, shoving against its shoulder to move it backwards. She brought another line over and clipped it to the halter, effectively tying the horse in the middle of a stall.
“Can I give him a carrot, Daddy?”
“Let me finish, honey.”
Bob turned on the hose and fixed a pail of soapy water, then moved to the horse and began to rhythmically sponge it, neck to shoulders, shoulders to withers, down each muscular leg.
“Daddy,” said the girl.
“Yes, honey?”
“Daddy, there was a man.”
Bob said nothing at first. A little steam gathered behind his eyes, a little fire. “A skinny man. Thick hair, dark. Looked intense?”
“What’s
“Ah. Like he’s galloping only he’s just standing still. Not a smile nowhere on him. Face all tight like a fist.”
“Yes, Daddy. Yes, that’s it.”
“Where was he?”
“He was parked just down the road from where the bus let me off this morning. Rosalita looked at him and he looked away.”
“In a pickup truck? White?”
“Yes, Daddy. Do you know him? Is he nice? He smiled at me. I think he’s nice.”
“He’s just a fool boy with the idea I can make him rich and famous. He’ll get tired. He’ll go away. I thought he got the message but I guess he’s more stubborn than I give him credit for.”
Would they ever leave him alone? You get your goddamned picture on a magazine cover and the whole world thinks you got enough secrets in you to write a best-seller. Over the years, no end of assholes had come at him. How did they find him? Well, it was like his address was out on some nutcase Internet, and all the losers and loonies came sniffing along. Some weren’t even American. The goddamned Germans were the worst. They offered him money, anything, for ah interview. But he was all done with that. He’d had the worst kind of fame, and it was enough for him. He was done with that.
“Did he bother you, honey?”
“No, Daddy. He just smiled.”
“If you see him again, you tell me, now, and I’ll speak to him, and then he’ll go away. Otherwise, we’ll just wait until he tires himself out.”
Many of them just disappeared after a while. Their ideas were so absurd and ill formed. Some of them didn’t even want to write about him and make money; they just wanted to see him and draw something from his presence, from the thing that his life had been. So stupid. His life wasn’t a monument or a symbol or a pattern: it was his life.
It seemed for a time the boy vanished. Then he was back again one night, sitting patiently in the truck across the road. Julie was back; they’d eaten and were sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea and watching as the sun set behind the low mountains in perfect serenity.
“He
“Damn fool boy.”
“At least he keeps his distance. He has some manners.” In their time, people had pulled into the yard, jumped out and begun offering contracts, setting up camera lights, glad-handing, carrying on, sure they were onto something big, they’d found El Dorado at last. Bob had several times called the Sheriff’s Office, the last time for the Germans, who were extremely obnoxious.
“But he won’t go home. It’s beginning to feel a little sick. Poor YKN4. I don’t want her to think this is how you have to grow up.”
“Oh, she can handle it. It helps her to know her father is an extraordinary man. It gives her a little something, I think.”
Swagger looked at his wife. She was a tanned and handsome woman whose blond hair had begun to show streaks of gray. She hadn’t worn anything except jeans and boots and T-shirts since they’d returned to Ajo. She worked like a dog too. Bob thought she worked harder than he did and that was saying a lot.
“How old would you say he is?” she asked.
“About twenty-two or so. If he wants adventures he should join the Corps. He could use a few weeks on Parris Island. He shouldn’t hang out here, scaring the child and making me even crankier than I am.”
“I don’t know why he seems different.”
“He reminds you a little of Donny, that’s why,” Bob said, naming her first husband.
“Yes, I suppose he does. He has Donny’s shyness and unsureness.”
“Donny was a good boy,” Bob said, “the best.” Donny had died in his arms, gurgling blood in little spouts from a lung shot, eyes locked on nothingness, squirming in the terror of it, his left hand gripping terribly into Bob’s biceps.
Hang on, Donny, oh Jesus, medic,
But it wasn’t fine and there were no medics. Bob was hung up outside the berm, his own hip pulped by the same motherfucker, and Donny had come for him and caught the next round square in the boiler. He remembered the desperate pressure in Donny’s fingers as the boy clung to him, as if Bob were life itself. Then the fingers went limp and the gurgling stopped.
Bob hated when that sort of thing came back on him. Sometimes you could control it, sometimes you couldn’t. Blackness settled on him. In older days, it would have been drinking time.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“It’s all right. Hell, I guess I can go tell him face-to-face to get out of here and quit wasting his life.”
He got up, gave her a tight little smile and walked down the road into the place. The boy was across the road in an old Ford F-150, just sitting. He saw Bob coming and Bob saw him smile. He got out of the truck.
“Now, what in hell do you want?” Bob said. “Say your piece.”
The boy stood before him. Yes, early twenties, lanky, with a thick mop of hair and the soft look of college all over him. He wore jeans and a fancy little short-sleeved shirt with some kind of emblem on the chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This was stupid. But I didn’t know how else to talk to you. So I thought if I just showed you I was serious about all this, just let you know I was here, didn’t force it or act like a jerk, they say you’re a very decent guy, anyway, I thought you’d eventually let me talk to you.”
“This ain’t no interview. I don’t give interviews. What’s done is done and it’s mine, not for nobody else.”
“I swear to you, I have no interest in 1992.”
“And I ain’t doing no I’m-such-a-hero books. No Nam stuff. That’s over and done and best forgotten too. Let the dead lie in peace.”
“It’s not about Vietnam. I didn’t come about Vietnam. But I did come about the dead.”
They faced each other for a long moment. Twilight. The sun eased behind the mountains, leaving an empty
