“Oh, yeah, sorry, wasn’t paying any attention.”
She smiled professionally, and he glimpsed out the windows to see the Sawtooths, the down-homey little Boise skyline, and the airfield, named after a famous ace who’d died young in war.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Bob drove to the hospital straight from the airport. During a brief gap in the power of the ibuprofen, his incision began to knit in truly exquisite pain. He knew bruising would start by tomorrow and the thing would be agonizing for weeks—but he didn’t want to stop.
He drove through the quiet, bright streets of Boise, as unpretentious a town as existed anywhere, and finally reached the hospital where the crutches got him in, the ibuprofen got him beyond the agony again and an elevator got him to his wife’s room, outside of which his daughter and Sally Memphis waited.
“Oh, hi!”
“Daddy!”
“Sweetie, how are you?” he said, gathering up his daughter and giving her a big hug. “Oh, it’s great to see my gal! Are you okay? You doin’ what Sally says?”
“I’m fine, Dad. What’s wrong with you?”
“Sweetie, nothing. Just a little cut on my leg, that’s all,” he said, as Sally shot him a disbelieving look.
He chatted with his daughter for a bit and with Sally, whose response to him was cool. It seemed that Julie was sleeping now, but there hadn’t been any real complications from the surgery. They thought she’d get out sometime soon and Sally had made arrangements to go to the small ranch in Custer County as Bob had planned. She agreed with him that it was a safe security arrangement, at least until the situation clarified.
Finally, Julie awakened and Bob went in to his wife.
Her torso was in a full-body cast that supported the arm on the side where the collarbone had been shattered. His poor girl! She looked so wan and colorless and somehow shrunken in the cast.
“Oh, sweetie,” he said, rushing to her.
She smiled but not with a lot of force or enthusiasm and asked how he was and he didn’t bother to answer her, but instead went on about her, caught up on her medical situation, checked on the security arrangements, finally told her he thought he was on to something.
“I could tell; you’re all lit up.”
“It’s a long story. There’s something I can’t figure out, and I need help.”
“Bob, how can I help you? I don’t know anything. I’ve told you everything I know.”
“No, no, I don’t mean about it. I mean about me.”
“Now you’ve lost me.”
“Honey, I got this thing I have to figure out. It doesn’t make no sense to me. So either it’s wrong, or I am wrong. If it’s wrong, there’s nothing I can do about it. If it’s me that’s wrong, then I can figure it out.”
“Oh, Lord. I get shot and it’s all about you.”
He let the cut simmer, not responding.
Finally he said, “I’m very sorry you got hit. I’m very happy you survived. You should concentrate on how lucky you were to make it through, not how unlucky you were. You handled yourself well, you took control, you were a hero. You got your life, you got your daughter, you got your husband. It ain’t no time to be angry.”
She said nothing.
“It ain’t about me. It’s about us. I have to figure this thing out.”
“Can’t you let the police, the FBI do it? They’re all over the place. That’s their job. Your job is to be here with your family.”
“I have a man hunting me. The more around you I am, the more danger you’re in. Don’t you see that?”
“So you’ll be off again. I knew it. You weren’t there when I got shot, you weren’t there when I lay in that gulch for three hours, you weren’t there when I was operated on, you weren’t there when I came out of the operation, you haven’t been taking care of your daughter, you’re evidently not going with us to the mountains, I hear you’ve been drinking, you’ve obviously been in some kind of fight or something, because of the terrible way you’re limping and the way your face is completely sheet-white, and all you want to do is go off again. And … somehow, you’re happy.”
“I wasn’t in a fight. I had a bullet cut out of my leg, that’s all. It’s nothing. I’m sorry,” he said. “This is the best way, I think.”
“I don’t know how much of this I can take.”
“I just want this to be over.”
“Then stay here. Stay here, with us.”
“I can’t. That puts you in danger. He’ll know soon enough, if not yet, that I wasn’t the man he hit. So he’ll come back. I have to be able to move, to operate, to think, to defend myself. Not only that, if he comes after me again, and you’re there again, do you think I can defend you? Nobody can defend you. Let him come after me. That’s what he was trained to do. Maybe I can get him, maybe not, but I sure as shit ain’t going to let him go after you.”
“Bob,” she said. “Bob, I called a lawyer.”
“What?”
“I said, I called a lawyer.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I think we ought to separate.”
Certain moments, you just feel your chest turning to ice. It just freezes solid on you. You have trouble breathing. You swallow, there’s no air, then there’s no saliva in your mouth. Your ears hammer, your head aches, blood rushes through your veins, pumping crazily. You’re that close to losing it. It had never happened to him when the shit was flying in the air and people were dying all around him, but it happened now.
“Why?” he finally said.
“Bob, we can’t live like this. It’s one thing to say we love each other, we have a family, we take care of each other. It’s another when you go off every so often and I hear rumors that people are dead and you won’t talk about it. It’s another when you’re so angry all the time you won’t talk or touch me or support me and you snap at me all the time. I can just make so many excuses to our daughter. But then the next thing, the worst thing, the war comes into our house and I’m shot with a bullet and my daughter sees a man die before her very eyes. And then you go off again. I love you, Lord, I love you, but I cannot have my daughter going through that again.”
“I’m—I’m very sorry, Julie. I didn’t see how hard this was on you.”
“It’s not just the violence. It’s that you somehow love it so. It’s that it’s always in you. I can see it in your eyes, the way you’re always searching the terrain, the way you’re never quite relaxed, the way there’s always a loaded gun close at hand, the way you drive me out. You’re not a sniper anymore; that was years ago. But you’re still over there. I can’t compete with the war in Vietnam; you love her more than us.”
Bob breathed heavily.
“Please, don’t do this to me. I can’t lose you and Nikki. I don’t have anything else. You’re all I value in this world.”
“Not true. You value yourself and what you became. Secretly, you’re so happy to be Bob the Nailer, different from all men, better than all men, loved and respected or at least feared by all men. It’s like a drug addiction. I feel that in you, and the angrier you get and the older you get, the worse it becomes.”
He could think of nothing to say.
“Please don’t do this to me.”
“We should be apart.”
“Please. I can’t lose you. I can’t lose my daughter. I’ll do what you want. I’ll go with you to the mountains. I can change. I can become the man you want. You watch me! I can do it. Please.”
“Bob, I’ve made up my mind. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You need space, I need space. The shooting business just makes it more important. I have to get away from you and get my own life, and get away from the war.”
“It’s not the war.”
“It is the war. It cost me the boy I loved and now it’s cost me the man I loved. It cannot take my daughter. I’ve thought all this through. I’m filing for separation. After I recover, I’m returning to Pima County and my fa
mily. We can work out financial details. It doesn’t have to be bad or ugly. You can always see Nikki, any time, unless you’re off at war or in the middle of a gunfight. But I just can’t have this. I’m sorry it didn’t work out any better, but there you have it.”
“I’ll go. Just promise me you’ll think it over. Don’t do anything stupid or sudden. I’ll take care of this business—”
“Don’t you see? I can’t have you taking care of this business and getting yourself killed. I can’t lose someone else. It almost killed me the first time. You think you had it hard in your traction and your VA hospital? Well, I never came back. There isn’t a day I don’t wake up and not remember what it felt like when the doorbell rang and it was Donny’s brother, and he looked like hell and I knew what was happening. It took me ten, maybe twenty years to get over that and I only just barely did.”
He felt utterly defeated. He could think of nothing to say.
“I’ll go now,” he said. “You need to rest. I’ll say good-bye to Nikki. I’ll check on you, stay in contact. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You be careful.”
“We’ll be all right.”
“When this is all over, you’ll see. I’ll fix it. I can do that. I can fix myself, change myself. I know it.”
“Bob—”
“I know I can.”
He bent and kissed her.
“Bob—”
“What?”
“You wanted to ask me what was wrong with you. Why you couldn’t figure something out?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll tell you why. It’s because of the great male failing of your age. Vanity. You’re publicly modest but privately insanely proud. You think everything is about you, and that blinds you to what is going on in the world. That’s your weakness. You have to attack your problem without ego and vanity. Approach it objectively. Put yourself out of it.”
“I—”
“It’s the truth. I’ve never told you that, but it’s the truth. Your anger, your violence, your bravery; it’s all part of the same thing. Your pride. Pride goeth before the fall. You cannot survive unless you see through your pride. All right?”
“All right,” he said, and turned to leave.
Here I am, right back where I started from, he thought.
The room was shabby, a motel on the outskirts of Boise, not a chain but one of those older, forties places on a road that had long since been surpassed by other, brighter highways.
I am slipping, he thought. I am losing everything.
The room smelled of dust and mildew. Every surface was slightly warped wood, the bathroom was only nominally clean, the lightbulbs were low-wattage and pale.
I drank a lot of bourbon in rooms like this, he thought.
He was here on more or less sound principles. The first was that by this time, whoever had been trying to kill him surely realized he had missed and was back on the hunt again. Therefore the ranch house, with its clothes, its life, was out. He knew that place and to go there was to get yourself killed, this time for real, with no poor old Dade Fellows to stop the bullet.
So, after doubling back and crossing his own tracks a dozen times, and setting up look-sees for followers and finally satisfying himself nobody was onto him yet, he was here. Paid cash, too. No more credit cards, because whoever this bird was working for, he might have a way of tracking credit cards. No more phone calls except from public phones.
What he needed now was a gun and cash, like any man on the run. The cash he knew he could get. He had $16,000 left from a libel case the late Sam Vincent had won for him years ago, and he’d moved it from a cache in Arkansas to a cache here in Idaho. If he was clear again tomorrow, he would get it.
A gun was another problem. He felt naked without one, and the gun laws here in Idaho weren’t troubling yet, but there was still that goddamn seven-day wait by national law. He could head back to his property, where his .45 Commander was stored away, but did he really want to carry it on a daily basis? Suppose he had to take an airline or wandered into a bank with a metal detector? Sometimes it was more trouble than it was worth. Besides, how could he shoot it out against a sniper with a 7mm Remington Magnum with a .45? If the white sniper found him, it was over, that was all.
Bob sat back, turning the TV on by remote, discovering to his surprise that it worked. The news came on.
Bob paid no attention. It was just white noise.
His head ached. He held a bottle in his hands, between his legs as he lay on the bed, on a thin chintz bedspread. Jim Beam, $9.95 at the Boise Lik-r-mart, recently purchased. There were water spots on the ceiling; the room stank of ancient woe, of raped girlfriends and beaten wives and hustled salesmen. Cobwebs fogged the corners; the toilet had a slightly unwholesome odor to it, like heads he’d pissed in the world over.
I am losing it, he thought.
He tried to press his brain against the riddle again.
He felt if he could get that, he would have something.
Why, all those years ago, did Soloratov use an Ml rifle, a much less accurate semiauto? It appeared to be one of those mysteries that had no solution. Or, even worse, the answer was mundane, stupid, boring: he couldn’t get a bolt gun, so he settled for the most accurate American rifle available, an M1D Sniper. Yes, that made perfect sense but…
…but if he could get an M1D, he could get a Model 70T or a Remington 700!
It don’t make no goddamn sense!
It doesn’t have to make sense, he told himself. Not everything does. Some things just can’t be explained; they happen in a certain way because that’s the way of the world.
Bob looked at the bottle again, his fingers stole to the cap and the plastic seal that kept the amber fluid and its multiple mercies from his lips, and yearned to crack it and drink. But he didn’t.
Won’t never touch my lips again, he remembered telling someone.
Liar. Lying bastard. Talking big, not living up to it.
He tried to lose himself in what was on the tube. The news, some talking head from Russia. Oh, yeah, it sounded familiar. Big elections coming up, everybody all scared because some joker who represented the old ways was in the lead and would carry the day, and the Cold War would start up all over again. The guy was this Evgeny Pashin, handsome big guy, powerful presence. Bob looked at him.
Thought we won that war, he said to himself.
Thought that was one we did okay in, and now here’s this guy and he’s going to take over and restore Russia and all the missiles go back into the silos and it’s the same old crock of shit.
Man, there was no good news anywhere, was there?
He was feeling powerfully maudlin. He yearned for his old life: his wife, his lay-up barn, the sick animals he was so good at caring for, his perfect baby daughter, enough money. Man, had it knocked.
It all was taken away from him.
He turned the TV off and the room was quiet. But only for a moment. A couple of units down, somebody was yelling at somebody. Somewhere outside, a kid was crying. Other TVs vibrated through the walls. Traffic hummed along. Looking out the window he saw the buzz of neon, blurry and mashed together, from fast food joints and bars and liquor stores across the way.
Man, I hate to be alone anymore, he thought.
That’s why Solaratov will get me. He likes being alone. I lived alone for years, I fought alone. But I lost whatever edge I had.
I want my family. I want my daughter.
The lyrics of some old rock and roll song sounded in his ears, moist, rich, poignant.
Black is black, he heard the music, I want my baby back.
Yeah, well, you ain’t going to get her back. You’re just going to sit here until that fucking Russian hunts you down and blows you away.
Ceiling, discolored. Cobwebs, mildew, the sound of other people’s grief over the traffic and me stuck by myself with no goddamn way in hell to figure out what I got to figure out.
You thin
k everything is about you and that blinds you to the world, his wife had told him.
Yeah, as if she would know. She really never did get him, he thought bitterly.
His hand involuntarily cranked on the bottle top and he heard it crack as the seal broke. He opened the bottle, looked down into the open muzzle. He knew a form of doom lay behind that muzzle. It was like looking down the barrel of a loaded rifle, the incredible temptation it had to some weak and deranged people, because to look down it was to look straight into death’s own eye. So it was with the bottle for an ex-drunk. Look into it, take what it has to offer and you are gone. You are history.
He yearned for the strength to throw it out but knew he didn’t have it. He raised the bottle to his lips, wise with the knowledge that he was about to die, and brought the bottle—
You think everything is about you.
Bob stopped. He considered something so fundamental he’d not seen it before, but suddenly it seemed as big as a mountain: his assumption that Solaratov came to Vietnam to kill him and had returned to Idaho to kill him.
But suppose it wasn’t about him?
What could it be about, then?
He tried to think.
The sniper had a semiauto.
He could fire twice, fast.
He had to take them both to make sure of hitting one.
But suppose I wasn’t the one he had to hit.
Well, who else was there?
Only Donny.
Could it be about … Donny?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
He awoke early, without a hangover, because he had not been drunk. He looked at his watch and saw that it was eight here, which meant it was eleven in the East.
He picked up the phone, then called Henderson Hall, United States Marine Corps Headquarters, Arlington, Virginia. He asked to be connected to the Command Sergeant Major of the Corps, got an office and a young buck sergeant, and eventually got through to the great man himself, with whom he’d served a tour in Vietnam in sixty-five and run into a few odd, friendly times over the years.
“Bob Lee, you son of a bitch.”