nature: the tall, grave man with gray eyes and abundant hair, and his wife, every bit as handsome, her hair a mesh of honey and brown, her cheekbones strong, her lips thin, her eyes powerful. She had been a cheerleader years ago, but she was if anything more beautiful now than ever. And the daughter, a total ball of fire, a complete kamikaze who always had to be called in, who pushed the snorkeling to its maximum, who begged her father to let her scuba or go water- or para-skiing.
'You got plenty of time to break your neck when you're older,' he told her.
'Your old mommy and I can't keep up with such a thing. You have to give us a break.
This is our vacation, too.'
'Oh, Daddy,' she scolded, 'you're such a chicken.'
And when she said that, he did an imitation of a chicken that was clearly based on a little real time in the barnyard, and they all laughed, first at how funny it was but second at the idea that a man of such reserve could at last find some way to let himself go, to be silly. An astonishment.
At night, they went into town and ate at the restaurants there. Bob never had a drink, didn't seem to want one. It was idyllic, really too good. It reminded Julie just a bit of an R&R she'd had with Donny in Hawaii, just before .. .
well, just before.
And Bob seemed to relax totally too. She'd never seen him so calm, so at ease. The wariness that usually marked his passage in society--a feeling for terrain and threat, a tendency to mark escape routes, to look too carefully at strangers--disappeared. And he never had nightmares.
Not once did he awake screaming, drenched in cold sweat, or with the shakes, or with that hurt, hunted look that sometimes came into his eyes. His scars almost seemed to disappear as he grew tanner and tanner, but they were always there, the puckers of piebald flesh that could only be bullet wounds: so many of them. One of the Virgin Islanders stared at them once, then turned to say something to one of his colleagues, in that musical, impenetrable English of theirs, so fast and full of strange rhythms, but Julie heard the word 'bombom mon,' which she took to mean 'boom-boom man,' which she in turn took to be 'gunman.'
But Bob appeared not to notice. He was almost friendly, his natural reserve blurred into something far more open and pleasant to the world. She'd never quite seen him like this.
There was only one night when she awoke and realized he wasn't in bed with her. She rose, walked through the dark living room, until she found him on the deck, under a tropic night, sitting quietly. Before them was a slope of trees, a hill and then the sea, a serene sheet of glass throwing off tints of moonlight. He sat with utter stillness, staring at a book, as if it had some secret meaning to it.
'What is that?' she asked.
'This? Oh, it's called Birds of North America by Roger Prentiss Fuller.'
She came over and saw that he was gazing at a section on eagles.
'What are you thinking about?' she asked.
'Oh, nothing. This book has some pretty pictures. Kid who painted them really knew his birds.'
'Bob, it's so unlike you.'
'I was just curious, that's all.'
'Eagles?'
'Eagles,' he said.
They returned to Arizona and with the money, Bob was able to upgrade the barn, hire two Mexican assistants, buy a new pickup and reintroduce himself to the Pima County horsey set. In just a little bit of time, they had patients-seven, eight, then ten horses in various states of healing, all ministered to with tender care. His lay-up barn became a thriving concern after a while, mostly on the basis of his own sweat, but also because people trusted him.
Nikki went back to school but she rode every day, English style, and would start showing on the circuit's junior level the next spring, her coach insisted. Julie resumed working three days a week at the Navajo reservation clinic, helping the strong young braves mend after fights or drinking bouts, helping the rickety children, doing a surprising amount of good in a small compass.
No reporters ever showed, no German TV crews set up in the barnyard, no young men came by to request interviews for their books, no gun show entrepreneurs offered him money to stand at a booth and sell autographs, no writers from the survivalist press wanted to write admiring profiles. He and the war he represented seemed once again to have disappeared. No part of it remained, its wounds healed or at least scarred over.
One night, Bob sat down and wrote a letter to Trig Carter's mother. He told her he was planning a trip east some time in weeks to come and, as he said, he'd like to stop by and share with her what he had learned about the death of her son.
She wrote back immediately, pleased to hear from him. She suggested a time, and he called her and said that was fine, that's when she should look for him.
He loaded his new pickup with gear and began the long trip back. He drove up to Tucson, to the veterans cemetery there, and walked the ranks of stones, white in the desert sun, until at last he came to: Donny M. Fenn Lance Corporal
USMC.
Nothing set it apart. There were dozens of other stones from that and other wars, the last years always signifying some violent eddy in American history: 1968, 1952, 1944, 1918. A wind whistled out of the mountains.
The day was so bright it hurt his eyes. He had no flowers, nothing to offer the square of dry earth and the stone tablet.
He'd been in so many other cemeteries, this one felt no different at all. He had nothing to say, for so much had been said. He just soaked up the loss of Donny: Donny jumping over the berm, the vibration as the bullet went
