The Throat

to the gate.

The same deep, anxious voice came through the box. 'You're a little late. Hold on, I'll let you in.'

The box buzzed, and I pushed open the gate. 'Close the gate behind you,' the voice ordered. I drove in, got out of the car, and pushed the gate shut behind me. An electronic lock slammed home a bolt the size of my fist. I got back in the car and drove up toward the garage.

Before I stopped the car, a bent old man in a white short-sleeved shirt and a polka-dot bow tie appeared on the porch. He hobbled along the porch, waving at me to stop. I cut the engine and waited. The old man glowered at me and got to the white steps that came down to the lawn. He used the handrail and made it down the steps. I opened the door and stood up.

'Okay,' he said. 'I checked you out. Colonel Pflug was the CO at Camp Crandall right up until seventy-two. But I have to tell you, you have pretty flashy taste in vehicles.'

He wasn't kidding—Hubbel didn't look like a man who had ever wasted much time on humor. He got up to within a yard of me and squinted at the car. Distaste narrowed his black little eyes. He had a wide flabby face and a short hooked nose like an owl's beak. Liver spots covered his scalp.

'It's a rental,' I said, and held out my hand.

He turned his distaste to me. 'I want to see something in that hand.'

'Money?'

'ID.'

I showed him my driver's license. He bent so far over that his nose nearly touched the plastic covering. 'I thought you were in Millhaven. That's in Illinois.'

'I'm staying there for a while,' I said.

'Funny place to stay.' He straightened up as far as he could and glared at me. 'How'd you learn my name?'

I said that I had looked through copies of the Tangent newspaper from the sixties.

'Yeah, we were in the paper. Irresponsibility, plain and simple. Makes you wonder about the patriotism of those fellows, doesn't it?'

'They probably didn't know what they were doing,' I said.

He glared at me again. 'Don't kid yourself. Those commie dupes put a bomb right in our front door.'

'That must have been terrible for you,' I said.

He ignored my sympathy. 'You should have seen the hate mail I got—people used to scream at me on the street. Thought they were doing good.'

'People have different points of view,' I said.

He spat onto the ground. 'The pure, they are always with us.'

I smiled at him.

'Well, come on in. I got complete records, like I said on the phone. It's all in good order, you don't have to worry about that.'

We moved slowly toward the house. Hubbel said that he had moved out of town and put up his security fence in 1960. 'They made me live in the middle of a field,' he said. 'I tell you one thing, nobody gets into this office unless they stood up for the red, white, and blue.'

He stumped up the stairs, getting both feet on one step before tackling the next. 'Used to be, I kept a rifle right by the front door there,' he said. 'Would have used it, too. In defense of my country.' We made it onto the porch and crawled toward the door. 'You say you got some scars over there?'

I nodded.

'How?'

'Shell fragments,' I said.

'Show me.'

I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and pulled it down over my shoulders to show him my chest. Then I turned around so that he could see my back. He shuffled forward, and I felt his breath on my back. 'Pretty good,' he said. 'You still must have some of that stuff inside you.'

My anger disappeared when I turned around and saw that his eyes were wet. 'Every now and then, I set off metal detectors,' I said.

'You come on in, now.' Hubbel opened the door. 'Just tell me what I can do for you.'

3

The crowded front parlor of the old farmhouse was dominated by a long wooden desk with high-backed armchairs behind and before it. An American flag stood between the desk and the wall. A framed letter on White House stationery hung on the wall behind the desk. A couch, a shaky-looking rocker, and a coffee table filled most of the rest of the room. The rocker faced a television set placed on the bottom shelf of a unit filled with books and large journals that looked like the records of his hardware business.

'What's this book you want to write?' Hubbel got himself behind his desk and let out a little puff of exertion. 'You interested in some of the boys you served with?'

'Not exactly,' I said, and gave him some stuff about how representative soldiers had been affected by their wartime experience.

He gave me a suspicious look. 'This wouldn't be one of those damn pack of lies that show our veterans as a bunch of criminals, I s'pose.'

'Of course not.'

'Because they aren't. People go on and on gassing about Post-Traumatic Whatzit, but the whole damn thing was made up by a bunch of journalists. I can tell you about boys right here in Tangent who came back from the war just as clean-cut as they were when they got drafted.'

'I'm interested in a very special group of people,' I said, not adding that it was a group of one.

'Of course you are. Let me tell you about one boy, Mitch Carver, son of a fireman here, turned out to be a good little soldier in Airborne.' He went on to tell me the story, the point of which seemed to be that Mitch had come back from Vietnam, married a substitute schoolteacher, become a fireman just like his dad, and had two fine sons.

After the children had been produced like a merit badge, I said, 'I understand that you also have records of the volunteers from your area.'

'Why shouldn't I? I made a point of meeting each and every one of our boys who enlisted. A fine, fine bunch. And I kept up with them, too—just like the boys I helped get into the service. I was proud of all of them. You want to see the names?'

He gestured toward the row of record books. 'See, I wrote down the name of every one of those boys. I call it my Roll Call of Honor. Fetch me a couple of those books, I'll show you.'

I stood up and went to the bookshelves. 'Could we look at the list from 1961?'

'You want to see something, get me the book for 1968— that's a whole volume all by itself, there's a million good stories in that one.'

'I'm working on 1961,' I said.

His venomous face distorted itself into a smile. A hooked old finger jabbed the air in my direction. 'I bet that's the year you went in.'

I had been drafted in 1967. 'Got me,' I said.

'Just remember you can't pull anything over on me. 'Sixty-'sixty-one is the second book in line.'

I pulled the heavy book off the shelf and brought it to his desk. Hubbel opened the cover with a ceremonious flourish, roll call of honor had been written in broad black strokes on the first page. He flipped through pages covered with names until he came to 1961 and began moving his finger down the line. The names were listed in the order in which they had been drafted and had been written very carefully in the same broad strokes of Hubbel's fountain pen.

'Benjamin Grady,' Hubbel said. 'There's one for your book. Big, handsome kid. Took him right after high school. I wrote to him two or three times, but the letters never got through. I wrote a lot of my boys.'