his fathers voice, rumbly hoarse and powerful, yet always with a kindness under it.
'Daddy! Daddy!'
'Bobby Lee it isn't your daddy,' his mama would call from her bedroom down the hall, where again she was lying but not sleeping.
'I heard my daddy.'
'No, Bobby Lee. You were dreaming, honey. It wasn him, I'm sorry.'
So he would ask the next morning.
'When is Daddy coming home?'
His mother would stare off into the distance.
'Honey, I do not know. He will come home when he is ready.
'Is he all right, Mama?'
'Sweetie it would take a tank to kill that man.
But the boy knew this was no answer. Yes, it would take a tank or something big and powerful and mean, but he had figured out that there were tanks in the world, as there were big, powerful, mean things and that they killed people. There was a war in some place called Ko-ria and the older people and most of the boys talked about it every day about how we had to stop them yellow commies and drive them back or they'd come over here and take over.
Now he sat on a day like all the others, rotten in its sameness, and he watched as a car turned up the driveway and began to crawl toward him.
It wasn't Mr. Sam's car, that he knew. It had an aching familiarity about it, and in his heart, a thought exploded so fiercely he thought he'd die, but at the same time he fought it, for he knew he couldn't face another disappointment.
He prayed: Dear God, please let it be my daddy.
This one time God listened, or so it seemed. The car pulled up, and Bob Lee now confirmed it was his daddy's, and in that second, lumbering, strangely stiff, his father climbed out.
'Daddy!' he screamed, loud enough to wake the dead, or even his mother from her solemnity, 'Daddy!'
'Well, howdy there, young man, say, ain't you a big '. You know a boy named Bob Lee? Used to live here. Little squirt, whatever happened to that boy?'
'Oh, Daddy!'
The boy threw himself at the father, who swept him up, gave him a hug that was urgent in its intensity, then held him up to the sky at arm's length in his two big hands.
'Lord, you look good to this old man.'
'Daddy, what happened? Was you in a fight?'
His daddy's ear was bandaged as was his left hand. His face was oddly swollen about the eyes, one of which was badly bloodshot. There was a darkness visible in the flesh of his face.
'It's nothing, Bob Lee. It's all over. Don't mean a damned thing. Oh, it's good to see you, son! Say, what good would I be if I didn't bring you something. Here, you see if you like this.'
Earl took the boy to the trunk of the car, opened it, and there was a two-wheeled Schwinn bicycle, gleamy new, the twenty-four-inch model, purchased with the last few dollars in the late Davis Trugood's operating fund.
'Oh, Daddy!'
'Yep. Figured it was time you learned to ride a two-wheeler.' The father pulled the bike from the car and dusted it off. 'I will teach you?'
This may have been the happiest moment in Bob Lee's life. He already knew how to ride a two-wheeler. Jimmy Frederick, a school buddy, had one, and had showed him how, and for some reason Bob Lee just took to it so fast and natural it amazed Jimmy Frederick. Now Bob Lee climbed aboard, set the pedal, pumped hard that long first move, and shoved off, riding with no uncertainty about the farm yard.
'Damn! Where'd you learn that trick?'
Bob Lee's face lit up in a blaze of intense pleasure.
'He's a champion,' his mother said from the porch, her own voice lit with pleasure.
'Howdy, ma'am,' said Daddy. 'I brought you something, too.'
'A new Crosley refrigerator, I hope.'
'Naw, just some old flowers!'
He pulled out a bouquet from the backseat of the car, a batch of roses red and dark as blood, and walked over to hand them to his wife.
Then he kissed her hard, in a way that Bob Lee had never seen him before. His mother perked up something wonderful; it was like a parched plant getting a shot of water, and the leaves changing immediately.
'Now you come here, Bob Lee.'
Bob Lee obeyed.
'I just want you both to hear this from my own lips. I had to go away, but now I am back. I will not be going nowhere again. I will be here with you forever and ever. Do you hear me? My adventures are over.' 'Oh, Earl,' she said, as if she believed it.
That night Bob Lee heard his father and mother talking earnestly. He knew something was different somehow. He could feel it in their voices.
His father had changed in some small way, and that in turn led to a change in his mother. Whatever it was, Bob Lee couldn't say, but he felt it. It scared him a little.
Please God, he prayed, please don't never take my father away.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people came up with so many good ideas on this project I began to question, toward the end, whether I had anything to do with it at all.
The great Weyman Swagger, one of the world's finest natural editors, brought considerable intelligence to bear from start to finish. Behind that grizzled countenance lurks penetrating insight; he really gets it.
Then my friend Lenne Miller, in the throes of a divorce, took time out from his anguish to pitch in a key idea and to remind me that I couldn't write a book where the hero hates dogs.
Usual suspects Mike Hill and Jeff Weber were there as needed.
In my journalism life, I went to my editor, John Pancake, and said, 'John, I have a question that the Arts Editor of The Washington Post certainly ought to be able to answer. How do you drain a swamp?'
Here's the scary part: he knew.
He also was, as always, somewhat forgiving in his definition of acceptable time-in-office, which provided me the freedom to have the two careers going simultaneously and puts off that Big Choice another year or two, if not forever. Gene Robinson, Deb Heard and Peter Kaufman were equally forgiving on the present absent issue.
Cellmates Henry Alien and Paul Richard were enthusiastic, which is a great help, believe me. Bill Smart, another great old Post guy, loaned me certain shooters' biographies helpful in concocting my old men; and when office politics in the Style Section grow wearying, I can always turn to him for an illuminating discussion on much more important subjects such as: 9-mm vs..40 S&W for personal defense, or 7-mm Remington Mag?enough for elk?
Randy Mays, retired from a certain agency he can't talk about, supplied me with a Department of Energy book on Los Alamos science that I kept too long, as I usually do. Sorry, Randy, but thanks so much.
Also in Washington, Mike Jeck of the American Film Institute came up with that wonderful use for old cowboy movies.
I should also mention the late Jim Schefter. Jim, author of The Race, and several other volumes, died before he could read this book, I'm sorry to say. But he caught a huge geographical mistake in 'Hot Springs' that would have made me the recipient of dozens of snippy letters. I'm sure he's up there in Writer's Valhalla, taking his red Corvette through 180 fishtails on gravel roads whenever possible.
In cyberspace, my thanks go to Bob Beers, who voluntarily runs a Stephen Hunter website at Wbanet.
