by Farris, John
Draping the blanket around him, he went to the door of the cabin and looked out. It was another rare and spacious country day.
"Good mornin', Colonel Bowers!" Arn said cheerily from the top step of his front porch. "A little too early for you?"
"Hello, Arn." He was hoarse as a rooster. He cleared his throat. "No, I need to be up and around."
"How do you find the accommodations?"
"Very comfortable. Ten minutes, Arn?"
"Be lookin' for you. Don't stand on ceremony, hie yourself straight to the kitchen."
Whit used the bathroom in the cedar-paneled cabin, scrubbing the stubborn blood from his unshaven face, then jostled Terry awake.
"Arn's home. Let's go have breakfast."
Faren was frying eggs and pork chops in two big iron skillets on her gas-fired Magic Chef range when Whit and Terry came in, Terry wearing the same clothes he'd had on for the past three days and with sleep still in his eyes. Faren gave him a kiss on the cheek, introduced him to Arn. "How about a dish of oatmeal to start you off, sleepyhead?" Arn rose with a hint of indulgence from his chair at the head of the oilcloth-covered table and shook hands with Whit.
"Keep yourself lookin' fit these days, Colonel. Terry, why don't you have a seat right there."
"Listen, Arn, I'm long out of uniform. Just plain Whit ought to do."
"What happened to your nose? You and the boy have a friendly little sparrin' match?"
Whit touched his nose gently as Terry stared at him. "Bumped a doorjamb in the dark last night."
"You better put some ice on that," Faren advised him.
"Doesn't bother me all that much."
"Two eggs or three, Whit? These are guinea hen eggs, you might find them a little strong to your taste."
"But they're good eatin'," Arn said. "First clutch I've come across this spring. Guineas hide their nests, it's a job to find 'em. But how they do lay."
"Three eggs will be fine," Whit said to Faren.
Arn smiled as he poured coffee into Whit's mug and refilled his own. His cheeks were freshly shaved and he wore an old blue plaid wool shirt tucked into faded jeans. He looked Terry over with friendly curiosity. Terry met his gaze for a second, then self-consciously studied Faren's parakeets in a hanging wicker cage.
"Favors you, don't he?" Arn said to Whit. "Just got the one boy?"
Whit nodded. "Millie and I were divorced right after the war. I'm single now."
"Kind of expected you'd be in command of the entire 82nd by now."
"I never was in Slim Jim Gavin's league, and I knew it. Besides, I had a potful after the Bulge."
"Same here. Maybe the Screamin' Eagles had it rough in Bastogne; but it wasn't no cinch where we were up there on the Salm. Goddamn snow and fog, never knew if we had Panzers in front of us or behind us. Remember how we crossed each other's lines once, both sides retreatin' at the same time? Plans, strategy, none of it meant a thing. That war came down to sluggin' it out, daylight and dark, till somebody knuckled under. I just couldn't believe God loved krauts so much he made so many of 'em."
"Did you kill a lot of Germans in the war?" Terry asked him.
"Never counted," Arn said, with a genuine and chilly lack of interest.
Faren began to serve them, and no more was said about the battles they had fought, as if Arn and Whit had reached a tacit agreement that neither of them cared for reminiscing. While they ate Arn talked sparingly, for the most part asking questions of Terry, whom he appeared to have taken a shine to. Did Terry enjoy hunting and fishing? Did he like guns? Terry owned up to never having fired a rifle. Arn shook his head in disbelief.
"Well, if you're stayin' long enough, maybe I'll get the chance to expose you to some of the finer things of life."
"Dad says you were the best shot in the 505."
"Don't know how true that is, but I never come near to bein' the marksman my daddy was. He could shoot the grease out of a biscuit and never break the crust." Arn smiled at Whit, but his folksy congeniality seemed cooled by watchfulness. "Faren tells me you're workin' now for the outfit that owns Wildwood."
"That's right."
"Got some big plans in mind. Golf courses. Maybe run a four-lane highway smack through it, put up a few of them roadside stands that sell peanut brittle and little statues of Bambi."
"I don't think so, Arn. All we're planning now is a feasibility study. Any development, which would be on a strictly limited basis, is still years away."
"And maybe we'll both be old men before that happens."
"I wouldn't be surprised."
Arn turned his head to glance at his wife, who was standing by a window with tied-back curtains of dotted Swiss. She sipped coffee, looking across the table at Whit, in the filtered brightness her face as flat and brown and expressionless as a walnut plaque on the wall.
"What's on your mind for today?" Arn asked her.
"I need to go down to Qualla and shop some orders."
"Sutter handlin' your output this year?"
"No. I've had my fill of his cheating ways. He still owes me two hundred and fifty dollars from last season."
Arn's eyes glinted. "Tell him your old man's comin' down there to collect if he don't pay up."
"You won't, either. I'll take care of business on the reservation."
"Those white Cherokees are worse than Jews. And that reminds me."
''Arn," she said softly, ''no."
"Like you said, you see to business on the Boundary. I'll take care of my business. I could stand another dose of pork chops to finish off these biscuits with."
Faren placed her coffee mug on the windowsill, took up the fry pan and placed it on the table. She said to Terry, "Maybe you'd like to come along with me this morning. I'll show you the reservation. Not just the part where the tourists go."
"It'll turn your stomach," Arn promised.
"Arn," Faren said with an edge of exasperation, "things aren't as bad as they used to be."
"I'd like to go," Terry said.
"Good. That'll give Arn and your dad plenty of time to talk about whatever it is they need to talk about. Whit, don't let him eat all those pork chops by himself."
"No, thanks, Faren, I've had enough." He passed his hand across his jaw; time for a shave. Arn had settled back in his chair chewing the last of a biscuit and some crisp pork fat with an air of contentment that might have been misleading; the fingers of one hand were drumming silently on the oilcloth. Whit recalled the first time he had seen Arn, when the regiment was formed at Benning in June of '42. He was a three-year veteran who had volunteered for the paratroops, hoping for some action. He looked as solid as a raw oak plank; you could read his grain like a road map. Now the grain was blurred, hidden. "Why don't you help Faren with the dishes?" Whit said to Terry. "I'll police the cabin and run a razor through this beard. What're your plans, Arn?"
"Nothin' much. Need to deliver one of my dogs to the vet's, he's rubbed a raw patch on his hind end and there's infection that's got to be cut out. So it you'll kindly leave me with the Pontiac, Faren, and take the coupe.
"All right, Arn."
"Whit, we'll meet down at the store in thirty minutes. That'll give me time to do inventory, go over the receipts, and make out a couple checks."
Whit was buttoning his shirt in the cabin, when he heard a horn outside, an impatient summons. He went out and got into the Pontiac station wagon. There was a big dewlapped cinnamon-colored hound in the back. Arn, behind the wheel, took off in a burnout and hail of gravel even before Whit shut the door. Arn had a look he'd seen before. Clamp-jawed anger,white spots glowing on his normally weather-reddened cheekbones, eyes like zinc washers.
"Something wrong?"
"There's this jackass I need to catch up to on the road. He went by me not two minutes ago, settin' on his motorbike just bigger'n shit."
"What's it about, Arn?" Whit asked, feeling his pulse quicken as they hit the blacktop road with a jolt at forty miles an hour, the back end of the wagon comin
g half around in a skid, the hound falling about in a tangle of long ears and bony baize legs.
"Crouch down back there, idjit!" Arn snarled at his yelping dog. He gunned the Pontiac through a bewildering latticework of sun and shadow on the hilly road, heedless of what might be in his way come the next bend. To Whit he said brusquely, "Got this score to settle, and it won't wait."
"Maybe you better take it a little easy," Whit suggested.
"Hell," Arn said with a weary contempt, hunched over the steering wheel. They had leaped to sixty miles an hour, tires screeching on every turn. "You don't let no man get away with butcherin' your dog."
"What man?" Whit asked, and then he saw, as the road straightened and the flowery woods thinned alongside the road, someone familiar on a black motorcycle half a mile ahead of them, riding into Tyree town. Arn made a low noise of satisfaction in his throat and stepped it up to seventy. They closed swiftly on the bike whose rider was Jacob, the French-speaking man from Fulcrum's Cafe.
Jacob couldn't have heard the Pontiac coming above the noise of his own machine. But he had a rearview mirror, and when the oncoming wagon filled it he looked back sharply, almost losing control of the bike. Then he turned and crouched lower and tried to kick his moderate speed higher; but a dirty cloud of smoke burst from the exhaust pipe and the bike wobbled again from either Jacob's anxiety or the strain he was putting on the engine.
"Yahhhhhh!" Arn shouted, and Whit braced himself, thinking that Arn intended to bash into the unprotected cyclist.
"Arn, slow down!"
But Arn had done some fast dangerous driving in his time; he could handle even the potentially unstable wagon as if it were modified for dirt track laps or hauling illegal alcohol. On the very edge of town he gave the wheel a twist to the left, passed the frightened Jacob, whose face was turned to them and so close to Whit he could see every pore in the man's nose, the sweat that had popped out on his brow, the electricity of fear in his wide blue eyes. Then Arn cut back in, skidding a little on some loose gravel spilled over from the driveway of the A&W root beer stand. To avoid colliding with the wagon, Jacob left the road. His motorcycle hurtled over a ditch into the sawmill yard, came down on both wheels, but so hard Jacob was bounced from the seat as if from a trampoline and went sailing, doing an ungainly hands-down turn in the air while his bike jumped and spun and crashed broadside into a stack of four by fours in front of the metal sawmill shed.
Arn hit the brakes gleefully, fishtailing to a dead stop five feet from the grill of a pickup truck coming the other way, slapped the stick into reverse, and went smoking straight back to the sawmill yard, raising dust. The hound he'd brought along was yapping its head off. Arn was out of the wagon before Whit could react. One of the millhands standing in the wide shed doorway pointed to a mound of sawdust and wood shavings eight feet high, as big around at the base as a silo. Arn circled the mound and soon reappeared with Jacob in his clutches, pushing the stumbling stunned man along in front of him. Jacob was smothered head to foot in curly wood shavings and orange sawdust, only the whites of his eyes showing like partially eclipsed moons. If Arn had taken a match to him, he would have burned for three days.
"Let him go, Arn," Whit said, and when Arn showed no sign that he had heard, continuing to manhandle the wobbly Jacob, Whit repeated himself in a tone of voice he had learned from Blackie a long time ago, "Sergeant, I said take your hands off that man!"
Instinctively Arn released Jacob, who collapsed and then began, sobbing, to crawl aimlessly across the ground. Arn raised his head and looked at Whit, fists cocked, the look firing up to a belligerent glare.
"You don't know what he did!"
"For Christ's sake, Arn, you could have killed him."
Arn stood his ground as Whit approached him, no longer looking at Jacob, perhaps now considering Whit as his prime adversary. Whit gave him a wry, skeptical, half-annoyed look, and Arn's shoulders dropped a little; he dropped his hands too. Jacob continued on his disorganized way around the sawmill yard, moaning. Arn walked past the bike, lying bent out of shape beneath the pile of four by fours, some of which had been scattered around.
He said to the two millhands gawking in the doorway of the shed, " 'Mornin', Skeeter. Elb."
"Well, howdy do, Arn," the one named Elb replied.
He had a thin hatchet face, and his Adam's apple stuck out so far it looked as if he had swallowed the end of a broomstick. He was wearing a carpenter's apron and had a flat wide pencil behind one ear.
"Where's your waterhose, Skeeter?" Arn asked the other man.
"Right there by the corner spigot, Arn."
"Borrow it a minute?"
"You go right ahead, Arn."
Arn turned on the spigot and uncoiled the hose. Whit had kneeled beside Jacob, bracing him with both hands on his shoulders. He felt the man trembling, still buffeted by shock. There was a little blood from Jacob's nose mixed with the sawdust in his black beard.
"Just be still," Whit advised. "You might have cracked some ribs or done some damage internally."
"No. No. I'm—all right. But he—he's crazy! Why did he do that? My bike, my bike is wrecked!"
Arn came up behind them trailing hose.
"Stand aside and let's clean him up," he said dispassionately.
Whit moved just as Arn opened the nozzle of the hose and began spraying Jacob. The big man shuddered and cringed in the stream of cold water, began to cry hysterically.
Whit reached out and took the hose away from Arn, getting them all a little wetter.
"I've had just about enough of this, Arn!"
"Watch yourself," Arn said, in a voice more ominous for its lack of inflection. "I ain't lookin' at no courts martial now if I pound
Whit turned off the hose but held it in his right hand six inches from the brass nozzle.
"Your mouth's writing checks your ass can't cash, Arn. Now what the hell is this all about?"
Arn stared at Whit for a full ten seconds, coming to no conclusions about which of them might be the quickest in this situation. Then he disavowed any interest in scrapping with Whit and turned his attention to the soggy Jacob, who was sitting up sobbing helplessly while he tried to wipe wet sawdust from his face.
"I told you," Arn said. "He killed my best dog yesterday in the woods. Slit Jim Dandy from his asshole to his breastbone, left him on the ground with his guts dragged out and the flies a-crawlin'."
With a thrust of his big shaggy head toward the skies like a tenor dying in an opera, Jacob roared, "That's a lie! I could never do such a thing!"
"Let's just have us a look at those boots." Am bent quickly to grab one of Jacob's feet, nearly upending him. Arn studied the rundown waffle pattern of the mud-caked boot heel and sole and a tic of unpleasant surprise grazed his lips.
"How many pairs of boots you own?" he demanded of Jacob.
"I have no more boots!"
Arn let go of Jacob's foot and stood back, scratching a cheekbone with one finger.
"Well, that ain't a-gonna get it," he said softly. "I figure you for a liar."
"You're the liar," Jacob retorted, his tone hurt, not accusatory.
He tried getting to his feet. He was nearly twice the size of Arn. He had fierce blue eyes but his awkwardness, his unshapely and babyish bulk, denied an inbred pugnacity or fighting skills. When Jacob spotted his twisted bike he coughed and sobbed, tears running freely down his cheeks, clearing away a little more of the sawdust. He limped toward the bike, moaning with each step.
The saddle bags had been thrown aside in the motorcycle's collision with the lumber pile. Whit retrieved them, began inserting some of the things that had fallen out. A learned tome on Assyriology, another thick book with ruins pictured on the jacket, this one printed in French. He found Jacob's dilapidated wallet, a U.S. passport, numerous letters dampened by water from the hose. The envelopes bore return addresses and imprimaturs of universities, museums, institutes of purposes unknown to Whit, in this country and in Europe. There were phot
ographs. Whit picked them up patiently. All the photos were of relics; composite animals in crude clay, other figures that were half human, half animal. Bulls and dragons, lions and eagles.
"Give me those!" Jacob yelled, hobbling toward him. "You have no right to take my things!"
"Settle down," Whit advised. "I was just picking them up for you."
He handed over the water-spotted photos and correspondence. Then he glanced at Arn, who was standing with his thumbs hooked in his belt, looking skeptical but with the white spots of violence gone from his cheekbones. Looking as if he sensed he might have made a mistake, but was in no mood to apologize; a certain rancor persisted.
Whit walked over to Arn and said in a low voice, "When was your dog killed?"
"Yesterday."
"Wildwood."
"When?"
"Early afternoon." Each word came with reluctance, with a slight heave of his chest and shoulders, his lips coming together after each reply as if soldered.
"Terry and I were having breakfast in Fulcrum's Cafe about eight o'clock, eight-fifteen yesterday morning. He was there, too, on the stool next to Terry. They had a brief conversation, in French. Told Terry he studied at the Sorbonne."
"I know he's smart. Too goddamn smart for my liking.
"Pay attention, Arn. We saw him a little later at the gas station across the road there, making some adjustments on his bike. The point is, could he have got up there in the woods on his bike and killed your dog at the time you know he was killed?"
"You can't get back in there on a bike," Arn conceded. "Not that far, anyway."
