Her eyes widened again, and she returned her gaze to Henry. “Is that true, Bear?” It irritated me that every woman I knew was on a cuddly first-name basis with the man.
Henry nodded toward me. “White man full of shit.”
We were on a Technicolor roll now. I was Randolph Scott to his.. I don’t know, one of those bigger than life Indians that either got beat up or killed by the end of the third reel. “It’s true, he’s government trained to be involved in these kinds of covert operations.” I pointed to the framed boxes on the wall behind the bar that contained a burnt map of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. On this map were Henry’s Special Forces pin, Purple Heart, Army Distinguished Service Cross, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and assorted campaign medals. There were also black-and-white photographs of Henry with his infantry platoon leaders, and one with his friend and team member Lo Chi, whom he had brought back and relocated in Los Angeles. There was even a picture of Henry and me, wearing the two ugliest Hawaiian shirts in Saigon, on a three-day leave in 1968. “You see all that stuff on the wall? He was trained in the war to be the gravest irritation to all those around him. There is no way a common soldier, such as myself, could possibly compete with a hand-picked, combat-hardened pain in the ass like him.” Few people knew the shadowy history of the Special Operations Group that had operated out of Laos, but the numbers said it all: For every American Special Forces soldier that was lost, the North Vietnamese lost between 100 and 150 troops. The Bear had been a part of one of the most effective killing machines on either side of the war.
Henry’s face pushed up and curved to the side as the weight of his head held steady in the palm of his supporting hand. “Common soldier? The closest he came to any real fighting was when he agreed to meet me for a three-day in Saigon.” Under his breath he continued, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one that heard it, “Except for Tet…”
I left Henry to leverage Roger into doing some free electrical consulting work and turned my attention back to Vonnie. She was staring into the glass eyes of one of the mounted antelope behind the bar. “Pretty animals.” Her eyes remained steady on the pronghorn. “Do you think they feel pain like we do?”
“Nope.”
She turned to look at me, seemingly irritated. “Really?”
“Really.”
She stayed with me for a second, and then, fading into disappointment, glanced at her wine glass. “So, you don’t think they feel pain.”
“No, I said I don’t think they feel pain like us.”
“Oh.” The smile slowly returned. “For a minute there I thought you had become a jerk.”
“No, a blacksmith’s son.”
She continued to smile and then nodded. “You used to come out to our place with your father… Lloyd.”
I watched her. “Nobody remembers his name.”
“I think my mother had a little crush on him.”
“Just another Longmire, plying his wiles. When I was real little, I used to make the shoeing rounds with him. It looked painful to me, so I asked him.”
“What did he say?”
“Pop used to speak in biblical terms, but what he said was that the brutes of the field don’t feel pain like humans. That that’s the price we pay for thinking.”
She took another sip of her wine. “Comforting to know that we’re the species that feels the most pain.”
I half-closed an eye and looked at her for a second. “Is that East Coast sarcasm I’m hearing?”
“No, that’s East Coast self-pity.”
“Oh.” I was getting in way over my head. I can do the bull about as well as it can be done, but that edgy buzz-talk makes me weary in a heartbeat. I try and keep up, but after a while I start to drag.
She placed a hand on mine, and I think it was the hottest hand I had ever felt. “Walter, are you all right?”
It always started like this, a touch and a kind word. I used to feel heat behind my eyes and a shortness of breath, but now I just feel the emptiness. The fuses of desire are blown black windows, and I’m gone with no pennies to save me. “Oh, you mean you really want to talk?”
Her eyes were so sad, so honest. “Yeah, I figured since we didn’t have anything else to do.”
So I leaned in and told her the truth. “I just… I’m just numb most of the time.”
She blinked. “Me too.”
I felt like one of those guys in the movies, there in the foxhole asking how much ammo your buddy’s got. I got two more clips, how ’bout you? “I know the things I’m supposed to do, but I just don’t seem to have the energy. I mean, I’ve been thinking about turning over my pillow for three weeks.”
“I know…” She looked away. “How’s Cady?”
Here I was floating in the white-capped Pacific of self-pity, and Vonnie threw me a lifeline to keep me from embarrassing myself. Three fingers, bartender… “She’s great.” I looked at Vonnie to see if she was really interested. She was. “She’s doing so well in Philadelphia.”
“She always has been special.”
“Yes, she is.” We sat there for a moment, allowing the crackle and roar of my parental self-satisfaction to fade into the soft glow of friendly conversation. Her hand was still on my arm when the phone rang.
“Looks like she’s tracked you down.” The hand went away.
I watched as Henry allowed it to ring the second time, his tele-signature, then snatched it from the cradle. “It is another beautiful evening here at the Red Pony bar and continual soiree, how can I help you?” His face pulled up on one side as if the receiver had just smacked him. “Yes, he is here.” He stretched the cord across the expanse of the bar and handed me the phone. His eyes stayed on mine.
I nudged it between my chin and shoulder with one hand, took a sip of beer with the other, and swallowed. “Hello, Sugar Blossom…”
“Hello, shithead,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s not a dead sheep.”
I stood there, letting the world shift at quarter points and then got a bearing and dropped my voice. “What’ve we got?” Every eye in the bar was on me.
Vic’s voice held an edge that I had never heard before, approaching an excitement under the grave suppression of businesslike boredom. “Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty-one years of age… one entry wound characteristic of, maybe, a. 30–06.”
I started to rub my eyes, noticed that my hand was shaking, and put it in my pocket. “All right… call the Store and tell them to send the Little Lady.”
There was a brief pause, and I listened to the static from a radio on 137 patched through to a landline in Durant. “You don’t want any Cashiers?”
“No, just the Bag Boys. I’ve got a highly dependable staff.”
She laughed. “Wait till you get out here. These fucking sheep have been marching around on everything; I think the little bastards actually ate some of his clothes. And they shit on him.”
“Great… Past the Hudson Bridge; you got your lights on?”
“Yep.” She paused for a moment, and I listened to the static. “Walt?”
I had started to hang up the phone. “Yeah?”
“You better bring some beer to quiet Bob and Billy down.”
This was a first. “You bet.” I started to hang up again.
“Walt?”
“Yep?”
“It’s Cody Pritchard.”
2
There’s nothing like a dead body to make you feel, well, removed. I guess the big city boys, cataloguing forty or fifty homicides a year, get used to it, but I never have. I’ve been around enough wildlife and stock that it’s pretty commonplace, the mechanics of death. There’s a religion worthy of this right of passage, of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one. Yesterday you were just some nobody, today you’re the honored
