Earl listened. Nothing. He edged forward farther.
“Jimmy, come on! I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
Nothing. Then he heard the click of a pistol safety snicking off.
“I got you beat, Earl.”
Earl straightened and turned, the gun at his side.
Jimmy was twenty feet behind him, the Colt automatic out and pointed straight at him.
“I win, Earl.”
“Jimmy, for God’s sake. Put it down. It’s all over.”
“It is all over.”
“Jimmy, it ain’t worth it.”
“Earl, put the gun down and I’ll let you live.”
“I cain’t do that, Jimmy. You know that. This is the end of the line. Another second or two and I can’t cut you no more slack.”
“Earl, I don’t hate you. But it ain’t my fault.”
He pulled the trigger.
The gun flashed and bucked and smoke swirled about.
Earl stood straight as a goddamn rail.
“You missed, Jimmy. It’s too far, you ain’t a good enough shot. Son, you’re overmatched. Put it dow—”
Jimmy fired, sure he’d hit, but astonished at how fast the older man was as he dropped to one knee, the gun rising in a blur. He wasn’t just fast, he was some other kind of fast, his arm a whip, a smear, a flash, and the two shots were almost one, so swiftly did they come.
The next thing he saw was Earl over him in a fog.
“Earl?” he said.
“Yes, Jimmy.”
“Earl, I cain’t see nothing. It hurts.” Something with his head. It was like in a vise or among broken boxes or pieces of glass or something. Fog everywhere. Never seen nothing like it.
“It’s all right, Jimmy. It’s all going to be all right.”
Jimmy breathed the last time and went still. There was no death rattle, final gurgle or twitch, as there sometimes was. It was as if his soul simply departed, leaving only a cask behind.
Earl could see that one shot had torn through his left eye and exited the side of his beautiful head, destroying it. The second had hit him just above the heart. He lay as calm as a young king, soaking in his own blood, utterly motionless, one eye beautiful and blue with its perfect curl of blond lash, the other eye shattered pulp, leaking black jagged streaks into the earth.
Earl looked away and found the strength to rise. He stood on groggy legs, dizzy and unsure. With an act of will, he took a step and then another, and walked back to the car, feeling as old as the mountains. God, he felt so awful. No man should have to kill a boy he’d known for twenty years.
Why hadn’t Jimmy told him what was going on?
What was going on? What got into Jimmy?
I will by God find out.
His arm was still bleeding. It only hurt like the goddamned devil himself was beating away on it. His left side was completely numb and he was sopped with his own blood. He realized he would die if help didn’t get there soon enough.
It all came down to the radio with the broken aerial.
He bent over, retrieved the mike and pushed the send button.
“Any cars, any cars, goddammit, trooper down, ten-thirty-three, please respond, please respond.”
Silence.
He looked up into the sky. Stars, piles of them, against the dark. He felt so goddamned alone. He tried again.
“Any cars, any cars, this is Car One Four, is anybody out there, trooper down, ten-thirty-three, ten-thirty-three, Jesus Christ, I am losing blood.”
So. On a road in a cornfield, bleeding out. After so many chances in the islands. Bleeding out in a cornfield.
“Any police cars, any tow trucks, any band jumpers, please help, trooper down, ten-thirty-three, please acknowledge.”
Nothing.
It ends. It’s over. It’s finished. I didn’t make it. He closed his eyes. His son’s face floated before him, and he felt himself reaching out, but it vanished.
“Ah, Trooper One Four, this is a commercial aviation flight, Delta One Niner Zero up here at twenty-seven five and vectored southbound into New Orleans. I’m hopping the frequencies and I happened to pick up your signal, son, where the hell are you?”
“Delta, Delta, I am eleven miles south of Waldron, Arkansas, just off Route 71 in a cornfield, one hundred yards off the highway. I have been hit twice and I am losing blood.”
“You hang on, son, I am going to shift frequencies and put the squawk onto the Little Rock emergency frequency and the boys on the ground will ASAP it to your local authorities and you will get assistance and if they can’t make it, I will set this buggy down on the goddamn highway and pick you up myself, Trooper.”
“Thank you, Delta One Niner Zero, ain’t you a Good Samaritan?”
“And ain’t you a tub o’ guts, Trooper? Good luck, son.” He signed off.
Earl set the radio mike down and sat in the dark. The world seemed suddenly full of possibility.
Then he heard the sound of death; it chilled him. It was the dry, raspy, spastic crackle that signified the presence of a rattlesnake.
Great, he thought; that’s all I need.
15
Judge Myers was going to beat him. This was very frustrating for Red because Judge Myers never beat him. Nobody ever beat him, goddammit.
Red was the best sporting clays shooter in West Arkansas, and maybe the whole state; he’d placed high in several national tournaments, including the Big Pig in Maryland, the NSCAs in San Antonio, the Seminole Cup Challenge in Orlando. He had a gift for the game, a natural grace with the shotgun and a kind of geometry-instinctive mind—his arithmetic gift again, perhaps—that let him solve complex problems of deflection with an almost eerie confidence.
But even the good shooters have the odd off day, when the birds come from the trap not as they should but by freakish chance too close, too far, or caught and toyed with in a burst of random wind, lifted oddly or squashed oddly, faster, slower; when, for whatever reason, the eye isn’t seeing with quite the clarity it normally does, or the brain isn’t reading and solving with quite the same power, the hands are slow, the gun never gets mounted right: so many little things that begin to erode at whatever it is that makes you hit. So it was today with Red.
The judge, who had never broken 45, was standing at 45 now on the last station. Red was standing at 43. If he ran five, the best he could do would be to top out at 48, so the judge could beat him with a five or even a pussy four and the man was so confident and feeling so full of himself, the five looked possible, the four positive. “This isn’t my day,” said Red.
No, it wasn’t. He hated the last station, not the two oblique outgoers that came low off the trap, easy for a shooter at his level, but his worst damned shot, a far teal, straight up and way out, first a single then a goddamned simo. He should have it changed; after all, he owned the course.
The judge stepped into the cage. Before them the beauty of the state’s wildness displayed itself, for the course was a good one, with shots hard enough to keep it interesting. The trap was to the left; the first two outgoers sailed low and dropped as they fell into a valley amid dogwoods, crossed a pond and disappeared in the vegetation. The teal were the bitches. They looked like dots, popped straight up from a remote on the other side of the pond, bare against the sky only momentarily, so dark and far you couldn’t even see their orangeness. You wanted to catch them as they paused in equipoise at the cusp of their rise; if instead you tried to take them going down, you’d run out of shot before you could pull the trigger.
“I’m feeling strong today, Red,” said Judge Myers, of the Fort Smith Myerses, who was also chairman of the Sebastian County Party and a close personal friend and campaign fund-raiser of and for Senator Hollis Etheridge, and if Hollis’s campaign ever got into gear, the judge would be headed for a Big Job in Washington, all of which pleased Red no end.
“Well, Judge, if you want, I’ll just write you the check now. We don’t even have to shoot it out. The better man won today.
”
“Oh, Red, you sly damned dog you, you really are Ray Bama’s son! But that kind of psych job won’t work on me.” The judge laughed; Red’s gamesmanship was a legend in Fort Smith’s raciest poker, golfing, and wing-shooting circles, which, essentially, were the same circles, and only one circle, the Rich Boys Club.
Red and the judge went way back; when, in 1991, a Justice Department attorney working for the Organized Crime Strike Force, had petitioned for a wiretap, someone Red knew had tipped him with the information and it was Judge Myers who’d granted Red a temporary enjoining order. That case would come up to decision sometime soon too, possibly by the second or the third decade of the next century.
So the judge owed Red, who contributed money by the gallon to the party, and Red owed the judge. That’s why Red loved to shoot against the judge: it was even.
The judge slipped two ACTIV 8s into the chambers of his Perazzi, snapped the lovely gun’s sleek barrels into the receiver with the solid thunk of a bank vault closing and took up a nice loose ready position, the gun tucked under the right shoulder, the weight forward on the balls of the feet.
“Trapper ready,” came a call from the bush.
“Pull!” the judge called, and obediently the unseen trapper launched the disks, two orange saucers which in a blur flashed into the valley, sinking, skimming, diminishing all at once. The judge’s gun spoke twice, fast, and two orange puffs marked the hits as he swung through.
He opened the barrels, let the empties pop out and slid two more ACTIVs into the over-and-under chambers.
“Pull,” he shouted, and quickly enough, from beyond the pond, a bird the size of an aspirin screamed into the sky, paused ever so slightly, and the judge stayed with it, followed through and killed it.
Except he didn’t.
“Goddamn,” he said. “Now I’m spooked.”
“You’re not spooked,” said Red. “Not you.”
“Damn!” said the judge.
He reloaded for the really hard simo: two birds launched at once, inscribing arcs away from each other. You couldn’t get them both with one shell; you had to take one early as it rose, then swing to the second one, before it fell too far and you lost it in the vegetation, tricky as hell because you had to trust your instincts as far as finding the line, and if you came down through it and were off center, there was nothing to be done.
He steeled himself, took a swallow, tried a hundred ready positions, then found one to his liking.
“Pull!” he shouted.
And missed both.
“Goddamn!” the man screamed. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, as he stepped away.
“Well, well,” said Red. “Lookie here.”
“Red, you ain’t never run this station and I don’t believe you’re going to now.”
“Jack Myers, you are probably right, but we shall see what we shall see.”
He stepped into the cage.
The test was concentration. Thinking too hard about the teal that lay ahead could cost him the easier outgoers that he had to deal with first. Visualize, he ordered himself, and in his mind he watched a movie of himself, mounting the gun smoothly, coming up on line with the two birds with no excess motion, not even much gun movement, killing them fast and getting out of there.
He slid two shells into the gleaming chambers of his Krieghoff K-80, $12,000 worth of poetry and grace assembled lovingly by the best gun makers in Germany. He locked the gun shut and just felt himself leaning ever so slowly forward, letting the shot assemble in his mind, letting his emotions calm, his heart still and his concentration begin to gather.
“Pull!”
You don’t want to look as the birds come off the trap, because they move too fast; you’ll be late. As Red smoothly pulled the gun up and into his shoulder with an economical, practiced placement until it naturally found itself pointing exactly where, also by long practice, he was already looking, he watched the birds come into the window of his sharpest vision. There was no time for thought or consideration, for things happened faster than words could be arranged to record them: the birds were there, falling, diminishing, but etched in his focus, the barrel was a blur beneath them, the gun seemed automatically to fire twice as he swept along, and the orange smears where the birds’ ceramic was dissolved by the force of eight hundred pellets of bird shot driving through their center marked his hits.
He popped the shells out, reached into his shell bag and took out a No. 7½ Winchester Heavy Trap load, and slipped it into his lower barrel, where the tighter of his two chokes was screwed, the Improved Cylinder.
He set himself again. Oh, he hated these far teal. It was so easy for the bird to find a hole in the shot pattern and so distant it was also possible for the bird to take a bunch of hits and yet not break or chip. It happened all the time.
“Pull,” he shouted.
The bird rose, the gun rose and as these two things happened, yet another did: the vibrator on his pager went off, momentarily disconcerting him.
He lost a tenth of a second and when he got up to where the bird was supposed to be paused as gravity overcame its upward velocity, he was late; it was already falling.
But Red didn’t panic.
He punched the gun downward hard, caught up with the falling orange disk and fired as he passed it.
Goddamn, he missed.
“No, you hit it, Red,” said the judge. “I saw a chip. Not much of one, but by God a chip. Great shooting, damn you.”
“Do you mind if I make an emergency call?”
“Sure, go ahead. It’s your concentration.”
Red leaned the Krieghoff against the cage, stepped outside and pulled his folder off his belt. He punched the key that accessed Duane Peck’s hot line for the recorded report.
“Ah, sir, here’s the latest. Yesterday, I followed ’em out Route 71 toward Waldron and then lost ’em. I went back and forth for a coupla hours and finally I picked ’em up at some field out near, uh, Waldron. They never saw me. They were there until dark. That was the kid, you know, and that Bob Lee guy, and they got old Sam Vincent with ’em. Uh.”
The man paused, seemed to lose track, then got himself settled down.
“So anyway, today, today, early, Sam trots over to the temporary courthouse and files some papers. He files what’s called a Motion of Exhumation, to get county permission so that they can dig up Earl Swagger and perform some kind of autopsy on the body. Uh, what’s your thought? They don’t got no idea I’m interested, except for that fucking kid looked at me smart when I first bumped into ’em. I could deal with it now, before it gets too much.”
It was like the sun breaking out on a cloudy day. It was like finding a million dollars. It was free sex with a beautiful woman and no consequences.
He pushed the button to reach the recorder.
“Don’t do a thing. I think we got ’em flummoxed. We may git out of this one without a real problem. Things are looking very, very good.”
They were. This one was covered.
“You look as though you’ve had extremely good news,” said the judge, as Red returned to the cage.
“You know sometimes how a deal looks like it’s going to fall apart on you with all kinds of difficulties? But then something you did years ago, because you were smart and thought about it, clicks in, and it turns out just the way you figured.”
“Well, I can’t say I’ve had that exact pleasure.”
“Well, it feels great,” Red said.
He picked up the gun, popped the breech and dropped two more 7½s in.
“Pull,” he said, feeling wonderful. The birds shot upward and he killed them both.
16
He remembered it as somehow more beautiful. In his memory he saw a rolling green meadow mostly in shade from the stately black oak that stood nearby. The tombstones had a grandeur to them; it was like a parade of the honored dead, a mini-Arlington where an honor guard would keep eternal watch.
But if that Polk County veterans’ cem
etery ever existed or if it was only an imaginary place, like an Oz for the dead, it was certainly not the bitter reality: blasted by sun, parched and treeless and very shabby and as flat and banal as a pancake, the cemetery stretched to the empty horizon. It wasn’t even really a veterans’ cemetery, it just had a veterans’ section in it, but beyond the crooked fence the civilians lay just as dead as the vets.
“You never came here?” Russ asked.
“Oh, a few times. When I was small. That was before my mother got what we called ‘sick,’ meaning drunk. She was better off not coming. I just remember her crying like a baby. Her sister had to drive us home. Then I came the night before I left for the Marine Corps. Drove myself. I came once more on liberty but by that time my mother was dead and there wasn’t much else to come back to. I never came when I got back from the war. I just stayed on that goddamned mountain.”
“Is it the same?”
“I remember more trees. Hell, though, I was just a kid. A bush looked like a tree.”
“Is this it, Mr. Swagger?” cried one of the gravediggers hired for the occasion.
“Well, let’s see.”
Bob walked over to the simple stone. It looked no different from the hundreds in here, the war dead of West Arkansas dating back to the Civil War. He bent and squinted in the sun and read off the corrupted limestone:
EARL SWAGGER
U.S.M.C.
ARKANSAS STATE POLICE
1910-1955
And then:
Husband, Father, Marine, Police Officer
UNCOMMON VALOR
“Yes sir, Mr. Coggins, that’s him. Now, if that damned doctor would just get here.” “We may as well get started,” said the old man.
“Why don’t you just.”
The crew—three black men, two young and the older Mr. Coggins—set to it with solid work. Bob watched them cut into the earth with their spades, slice the turf out and then really put their backs into it. Swiftly, the dirt mounded up on the tarpaulin they had set out for that purpose.
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