tour?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“Well, I came in third!”
“My God!”
“Yes sir. You had it that day, Sergeant. Nothing threw you. Not the wind or the sun or the mirage. You shot through everything.”
“That’s our good Marine Corps training, sir!”
“Sergeant, you don’t ‘sir’ me, all right? I’m retired now. All that’s behind us. What’s on your mind?”
“Well, sir, I’ve signed up to do a damned book. ‘I was there,’ that sort of thing.”
“That’ll be a hell of a book. I can’t wait to read that one. The things I heard about the An Loc Valley.”
“Hell of a fight,” said Bob. “Anyhow: I’m working with a young writer and he’s got me convinced we ought to do what he calls context. You know, background, the big picture, how it all fits together. So I thought I’d have to describe the marine sniper program in those days. And he wanted to look at the whole damned thing. Army sniping too; give it the grand overview, he says. Well, sir, I thought you’d be the man to talk to.”
“Gunny, you know a lot of that is still classified. And the army never went public with its snipers in the way the Corps did. Too damn liberal in Washington, I suppose.”
“Yes sir.”
“Off the record?”
“Hell yes, maybe you could just point us in the right direction.”
“You in town?”
“I’m actually home in Arkansas. Eight hours away maybe. Could drive up tonight.”
“Get here tomorrow morning. Let me see. Hell, I have a meeting with Sales. Oh, fuck, I’ll shift it. Jean, call Sales, tell them we’ll have the meeting tomorrow afternoon!”
“That’s it,” said Bob. The general gave him an address.
“See you tomorrow.”
Bob hung up.
“Let’s go.”
“I ain’t getting any younger.”
Some nights it was good and other nights it was beyond good, into some kind of great. Tonight was great. When he was done and when she had given him the ritual compliments, he rolled over and went downstairs. The huge house on Cliff Drive was more or less quiet except for the shiftings of his sleeping children. The light snapped off and she went to sleep. He poured himself a glass of Jim Beam, walked out on the patio and saw, far below, the winking runway lights of the airfield. He took a sip of the whiskey and enjoyed for just a second the illusion that everything was fine in his empire.
Then the beeper in his bathrobe pocket began to vibrate. Red checked the number and saw that it wasn’t goddamned Duane Peck at all but instead the number of Jorge de la Rivera’s phone. Quickly he dialed.
“So?”
“Sir, ain’t got nothing. Goddamn been up, down and around this place. Left a man at his trailer, just picked him up, ain’t seen nothing all day. Maybe they gone.”
Red thought a bit.
“You want us to book time in a hotel, sir?”
“No, no, that would look odd, ten men in three cars and a truck pulling into a Holiday Inn all at once. No, head back up here, get back to the farmhouse. What, by the parkway that’s only an hour.”
“Yes sir. We hunt again tomorrow?”
“Ah, let’s wait on that. Get ’em some good sleep. No fucking around. When we need ’em, we’ll need ’em fresh and fast.”
“Yes sir.”
Red waited a second, then called Duane Peck’s number.
“Hello? Who is …”
“Who do you think this is?”
“Yes sir.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m outside the old man’s house, just like you said. He did the craziest things today. I swear, this old man’s lost it. He—”
“Make a report after I’m off the phone. Listen, Duane, tomorrow, first thing, you go in uniform to every motel, every restaurant, every gas station, every camp store there around Blue Eye and you see if anyone’s seen Swagger and the boy. They’ve disappeared. We have to find them, fast.”
“Yes sir. Instead of the old man?”
“For now, yes. Then you call me. You get something, you call me immediately, you understand?”
“Yes sir.”
Red hung up, finished the bourbon and went to bed in a foul mood.
22
His anger, unmoored, floated about blackly in his mind, looking for a target.
“Mabel!” he screamed. “Where’s my goddamned coffee?”
Then he remembered that Mabel had been his secretary in 1967, for seven months, before she quit and went off to have a nice, quiet nervous breakdown. He thought she’d died sometime in the eighties, but he wasn’t sure.
Mabel’s untimely death did, however, mean one thing: no coffee. So he got up, struggled to find his glasses —nope, they hadn’t taken them yet—and straggled through the house until he found the kitchen. Somehow he got some coffee going; some things a man never forgets. The coffee perking, he bumbled back to his room, got himself showered and dressed, though he had to wear a white sock and a blue sock, and headed back for the coffee.
Fortunately, the mail had come. Unfortunately, it was from 1957. He struggled to put two and two together for a while, unable to comprehend why this letter was lying out here on the dining room table, blue, in neat, precise womanly penmanship. He looked at the signature. Lucille Parker. Who the hell was Lucille Parker?
Then, of course, he had it: it blasted into his mind.
“Goddamn woman!” he bellowed.
He grabbed his car keys, there on the vestibule right next to his meerschaum pipe and his sunglasses and—
Where the hell did that come from?
Anyhow, he grabbed it and raced out to his Cadillac in the garage. He fired her up and backed out. Evidently, his neighbors had mischievously placed their garbage cans in his driveway, for there came a clatter and he looked up in his rearview mirror to see them rolling in the street, spewing their contents everywhere. Why would they do such a stupid thing?
He drove toward Niggertown.
West Blue Eye, it was now called. You couldn’t say nigger anymore. You couldn’t even say Nigra. It wasn’t allowed.
The streets seemed to fill. People were staring at him and he wasn’t sure why. He felt like the Queen of the May on some float in a parade. Horns were honking, children screaming. What the hell was going on?
Suddenly a patrol car, its siren blaring, its flasher pulsing, shot by him, in pursuit of some miscreant. But oddly, the car forced him to the side of the road.
