inward by the density of their forearms. There was even one drawing of a large, uncircumsized penis.
Bob felt humiliated, intrusive, awkward. He couldn't concentrate on the drawings and rushed forward, skipping several pages. At last the season of sex was over, the images changed to something more noble. Trig seemed stricken with admiration for a certain heroic figure, a lone man sculling on the river. He drew him obsessively for a period of weeks: an older man, Herculean in his passions, his muscles agleam but in a nonsexual way, just an older athlete, a charisma merchant.
Was this Fitzpatrick, or some other lost love? Who would know, who could tell? There wasn't even a portrait of the face by which the man could be recognized. But the pictures had somehow lost their originality, become standard.
The hero had arrived, from a Western, or out of the Knights of the Round Table, or something. Bob could feel the force of Trig's belief in this man.
The drawings went on, as the weeks passed, and as Trig's excitement mounted. He was actually happy now, happier than he'd been. The explosion became a new motif in his doodling, it took him but a few tries, and suddenly he got quite good at capturing the violence, the sheer liberation of anarchistic energy a blast unleashed, and its beauty, the way the clouds unfurled from the detonation's center like the opening of a flower. But that was all: there was no horror in his work, no fear that any man who's been around an explosion feels. It was all theory and beauty to Trig.
The final drawing was of a shiny new TR-6.
Bob closed the book and held it up to the light and saw a kind of gap running along the spine of the book suggesting that something was missing. He reopened it and looked carefully and saw that, very carefully, the last few pages had been sliced out.
He left the studio and walked back to the big house, where the old lady nursed a scotch in the study.
'Would you care for a drink, Mr. Swagger?'
'A soda. Nothing else.'
'Oh, I see.'
She poured him the soda.
'Well, Sergeant Swagger. What do you think?'
'He was a wonderful artist,' Bob said.
'Can't ask for more, can you?'
'No, you can't. I made a mistake just then, didn't I?'
'Yes, ma'am.'
'I called you sergeant. You never told me your rank.'
'No, ma'am.'
'I still know a fool or two in State. After you called me, I called a man. Just before you arrived, he called back. You were a hero. You were a great warrior. You were everything that my son could never understand.'
'I did my job, somehow.'
'No, you did more than your job. I heard about it. You stopped a battalion. One man. They say it may never have been done in history, what you did. Amazing.'
'There was another Marine there. Everybody forgets that. I couldn't have done it without him. It was his fight as much as mine.'
'Still, it was your aggressiveness, your bravery, your willingness to kill, to take on the mantel of the killer for your country. Is it difficult to live with?'
'I killed a boy that day with a knife. Now and then I think of that with sorrow.'
'I'm so sorry. Your heroism aside, nothing good came of that war, did it?'
'My heroism included, nothing good came of that war.'
'So tell me, why did my son die? You of all men might know.'
'I'm no expert in these matters. It ain't my department.
But it looks to me like he was picked up by a pro.
Someone who knew his weaknesses, had studied him, who knew of his troubles with his father and played on them.
He's in the drawings as a heroic rower. I can feel Trig's love for him. He may be this Fitzpatrick. Trig was different, you said. When he came back?'
'Yes. Excited, committed, energetic. Troubled.'
'He had to finish that painting?'
'Yes. Is there a message in the painting?'
'I don't know. I don't understand it either.'
'But you think he was innocent of murder? That would be so important to me.'
'Innocent of first-degree murder, yes, I do. The death of that man may have been unintended. If so, it would have been second-degree murder, or some form of manslaughter.
I won't lie to you. He may be guilty of that.'
