Lee patted the horse’s neck; the horse stood still. “Enjoy your visit?” Lee said.
“Yeah,” Roy said. “Thanks.”
“What did you think?”
“It was nice.”
The horse snorted. Lee gazed down at Roy. “I mean truthfully,” he said. “I’d like to know.”
“What I really think?”
“No risk,” Lee said. “I’m a big boy.”
“It kind of reminded me of golf.”
“Golf?”
“Harmless fun in funny clothes.”
“That’s a good line,” Lee said. But he didn’t laugh, didn’t smile, showed no emotion of any kind. “Probably true given what you’ve seen. Being as it’s only the soft-core version.” Lee had the heaviest down-home accent Roy had heard in a long time.
“There’s another kind?” Roy said.
Now Lee smiled, a quick smile, a flashing display of white teeth, small and even, quickly gone. And then he was gone too, wheeling the horse around in one easy motion without a word of command, and galloping back into the woods. The mist closed around him.
Roy drove out of the lot and got back on the freeway.
SEVEN
”Funny, the golf joke,” Gordo said, coming into Roy’s cubicle. “Everybody got a kick out of it.”
”Even Earl?” Roy said.
“Especially. Don’t sell old Earl short. The dealership? Built from nothing, and that’s not the only iron he’s got in the fire.”
“No?”
“Fact is”-Gordo took a step closer, which brought him up against the desk, and lowered his voice-“if things weren’t all of a sudden so promising for me around here, I might be looking to hook up with Earl in one enterprise or another.”
“Enterprise,” said Roy. “That sounds good.”
“Want me to put in a word?”
“No.”
Gordo seemed a little surprised that Roy didn’t even think it over. “How come?”
“What do you mean?”
Gordo opened his mouth, closed it.
“What’s the big secret?” Roy said.
“I’m probably out of line.”
“Go on.”
“The thing is, Roy, realistically speaking…”
“What?”
“I really shouldn’t.”
“Talk.”
“It’s just that sometimes you come to a dead end in life.”
Their eyes met. Gordo had deep, dark circles under his; Roy wondered if his own were the same way.
“Know what I mean?” Gordo said.
“Not exactly.”
There must have been something in Roy’s tone, some edge that made Gordo hold up his hand and say, “Correction, not life. I’m talking about the job, that’s all. Don’t you ever ask yourself-Where is this job taking me? Not me, Roy, you. I’m in the process of lucking out, which just goes to show, because in terms of job performance, the truth is there’s not all that much to choose between us.”
Roy’s turn to say something, but what? No, Gordo, you do a much better job. Couldn’t say that, not with what was coming down. Roy settled for: “I’ll be okay.” Right away, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. How would that little sentence strike Gordo in retrospect, the day they announced the job was Roy’s?
“Course you’ll be okay,” Gordo said. “Didn’t mean to horn in.”
“You’re not horning in.”
Gordo leaned over, squeezed Roy’s shoulder. “No offense?”
“None.”
Gordo’s face was close to Roy’s. “You’re a good buddy,” he said, then thought of something and smothered a little laugh. “Poor Brenda.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She’s embarrassed.”
“Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
Gordo smiled, a confidential sort of smile. Roy smelled tooth decay. “You know what they don’t tell you about life back then?” Gordo said.
“What?”
Gordo’s eyes shifted. Curtis was walking by. Gordo straightened, said, “Thanks for the help,” a little too loudly, slipped a manila envelope onto Roy’s desk in what he must have considered a deft maneuver, and left the cubicle, knocking against the padded wall on his way out. Roy recalled how he’d moved in uniform, only the day before.
He opened the envelope. Inside were two black-and-white photographs and a two-page computer printout entitled “Roy Singleton Hill-A Biographical Sketch.” The attached Post-it read: “Dug this up last night. Enjoy-J. Moses.”
The first photograph: Roy and Earl posing by the cannon. Was this like a real Civil War photograph by Matthew whatever his name was? Not to Roy. He and Earl looked silly, that was all. But the second photograph, the one with Lee, was different. Roy and Lee stood side by side with their arms around each other, the way the photographer said the soldiers often posed. For some reason, this one wasn’t silly, not the photograph as a whole, not Lee, and not Roy, even though he was wearing exactly what he’d worn in the first shot, snapped only a minute or two before.
Roy dug out a magnifying glass he had in the drawer, left over from when they dealt in printed labels. His own expression was the same in both pictures, that face he always wore in photographs, angled toward the camera like a cooperative subject, but uneasy. Roy was surprised to see that Earl looked fierce, his eyes hooded under the shadow of the huge brim of his hat, as though sending the signal-to Sherman? Grant? — that he was not to be messed with. Only Lee seemed unaware of the camera; his eyes gazed into the farthest distance, and as Roy examined them, he thought he detected something like battle weariness, as though Lee were a veteran of bloody campaigns that had changed him forever.
“What have you got there?” Curtis, in the cubicle. For a moment Roy thought Curtis might have been talking into his headset; but Curtis’s eyes were on the pictures. Roy noticed for the first time the Confederate flag flying over a tent on the far side of the cannon.
“That you, Roy?” He tapped a pencil on one of the photographs.
“Not really.”
Curtis looked down at him, his eyes narrowing. Curtis had this sense of dignity, didn’t like anyone jerking him around, even when sometimes they weren’t. But Roy wasn’t thinking about that: he was noticing the way Curtis’s narrowed-eye expression resembled Earl’s hooded eyes in the picture.
“Not the real you?” Curtis said.
“I was just visiting,” Roy said.
“Like in Monopoly?”
“It was one of those reenactment camps. I guess you could say a kind of a game.”
