"It's fine, sweetie. Oh, it's just-"

He felt something like a sting at his hip, jumped a tiny bit, then recognized it as his beeper's vibrator. But it wasn't the office beeper, it was the new one. It was the Blue Eye 800 number.

"Red?"

"Just got a message, no big deal," he said, taking the little cellular out of his pocket. "I'll call in a sec. Amy, honey, haven't you had that Rolex three whole weeks? It's gotten boring, hasn't it? Why don't you let Daddy buy you a new one?"

"Daddy, you suck."

Red laughed. Good-naturedly tormenting his children was one of his deepest delights. Amy knitted her fierce, bright little face up into something like a fist, and if it had been possible, she would have smacked him with it. A wave of deep and uncompromising love poured over and through him. The way a man feels about his favorite daughter who goes her own way, takes nothing and makes good on everything. The watch was presented to her not by Red at all but by Maryvale Prep, for graduating with the highest accum in its history.

The lights began to dim.

"Okay, got to get back to family number two," Red said cheerily to Susie.

"You'll bring Nick home tonight?"

"He can stay with us if you want."

"No, that's fine. He's got practice early. I know you you won't get him there." won't get him there."

"We'll take him for ice cream after, and bring him by."

"Great, honey."

"See you," he said, as the overture came up, hot and pounding.

But Red didn't return directly. He walked back to the rear of the house, paying no attention as the curtain opened to tumultuous applause, revealing what looked like a back alley populated by sleek, sinuous feline shapes that one after another began to shimmer to life.

Red dialed his number and listened.

"It's Duane Peck here," the voice came, telling him what he already knew and impressing him with nothing. "Anyhows, uh, this kid is in town, and I got him nailed and I'll stay with him. First stop, old Sam Vincent. Is that a problem? Should I take care of that? Let me know. Also, uh-"

Someone was singing.

And we all say: OH OH!

Well I never!

Was there ever A Cat so clever As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!

"-ah, he ain't alone. Tall guy, lanky, looks you up and down real fine. I thought it might be. Yeah, it was. The son. The guy in Vietnam, called him Bob the Nailer. He's along with the kid. Don't know why, but he's here too. Bob Lee Swagger, Earl's boy."

No emotion showed on Red's face. He just cleared the call and, standing there in the back of the house, dialed another one.

"Billy, Red here."

"Hey, Red, what's on your-"

"Listen here, got me a situation. You put me together a team. Very tough guys, experienced, qualified on full automatic, professionals. I don't want to use my boys. Got that?"

"Red, what-"

"Shut up, Billy, and listen. I want no less than ten. I want good weapons, good team discipline. I want 'em all to have felony records, preferably as drug enforcers. Get 'em from Dallas, get 'em from New Orleans, get 'em from Miami. Out-of-town boys. I want them to have records, in case we lose a few and bodies start showing up in Polk County, the newspapers will start calling it a drug war."

"How much you want to go, Red?"

"I want the best. The best costs. You get 'em here, get 'em here fast. Good boys. Shooters. I want the best shooters. I want an A-team."

"We'll get working on it right now."

"Good work, Billy," Red said, then returned to his seat for the rest of Cats Cats.

13.

It took three hours, not at all helped by the fact that Sam's old eyes weren't as good as they once were and that he had to stop twice to go to the bathroom. Then he got irritable and hungry and they bought him some pancakes at the Waldron exit Denny's. But there were no more episodes of strangeness, where Sam forgot who they were or who he was.

Then, once, Sam said, "Here, here, I think it's here!"

"It can't can't be here," Russ, the navigator, exclaimed. "We just passed 23 and the papers say it was be here," Russ, the navigator, exclaimed. "We just passed 23 and the papers say it was south south of 23. We're heading north toward Fort Smith. We must have gone too far!" of 23. We're heading north toward Fort Smith. We must have gone too far!"

"Goddammit, boy, don't you tell me where the hell we are. I traveled all this on horseback in the thirties, I hunted it for fifty years and I've been over it a thousand times. Tell him, Bob."

"It's the new road," said Bob. "I think it's throwing us off."

For old 71, with its curves and switchbacks, slalomed between the massive cement buttresses that supported the straight bright line that was the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway. Sometimes the huge new road would be to the left of them, sometimes to the right of them and sometimes above their heads. There would be times too when it disappeared altogether, behind a hill or a screen of uncut forest. But it was always there, somehow mocking them, a symbol of how futile their quest seemed: to recover a past that had been destroyed by the coming of the future.

But at last the two points of their peculiar compass jibed to form some sort of imaginary azimuth to where they wanted to go: Sam's memory and Bob's to the corrected version of the Arkansas Gazette Arkansas Gazette of July 24, 1955. of July 24, 1955.

They had just passed an odd little place set by the side of the road called Betty's Formal Wear, in a ramshackle trailer a few miles out of a town called Boles. It was Sam who shouted, "Here, goddammit, here!"

Bob pulled off the side of the road. A little ways ahead, an Exxon station raised its corporate symbol a hundred feet in the air so it could be seen from the parkway, the inescapable parkway, off to the right. The roadway was thirty feet up, a mighty marvel of engineering, and even where they were, they could hear the throb as the occasional car or truck whizzed along it.

"Aren't we looking for corn?" corn?" Russ asked. "I thought it was a cornfield." Russ asked. "I thought it was a cornfield."

"Ain't been no corn or cotton in these parts for two decades," said Sam. "All the land's in pasturage for cattle or hay fields. No cultivation no more."

They were parked next to a GTE relay station, a concrete box behind a Cyclone fence.

"Back there?" said Bob.

"Yeah."

Someone had planted a screen of pines in the sixties and they now towered about thirty feet tall, as if to block the ground from public scrutiny. Bob could see the flat, grassy field through the pines, however, shot with rogue sprigs of green as small bushes fought against the matted grass for survival.

"Yeah," said Sam. "Corn, it was all corn then. Couldn't hardly see nothing. I was the fifth or sixth car out here, but it was getting busier by the moment."

Bob closed his eyes for just a second, and he imagined the site after dark, lit by the revolving police bubbles, punctuated by the crackle of radios, the urgent but futile shouts of the medics. It reminded him somehow of Vietnam, first tour, 1965-66, he was a young buck sergeant, 3rd Marine Division, the aftermath of some forgotten nighttime firefight, all the people running and screaming, the flares wobbling and flickering in the night the way the flashing lights would have ten years earlier, in 1955.

"You okay, Bob?"

"He's fine," snapped Sam. "His father died here. What do you think he's going to do, jump for joy?"

Russ seemed stricken.

"I only meant-"

"Forget it, Junior. It don't mean a thing."

Sam opened a flask, took a tot.

"Believe a man named O'Brian owned it, but he tenanted it out to some white-trash families. Over there, where that goddamned highway is, that was the crest of the ridge, woods-covered then. Took a deer there in 1949, and one of the white hags without teeth came out and gave me hell, shooting so close to her cabin where her damn kids were playing."

"She was right," said Bob.

"Yes, goddammit, I believe she was. Buck fever. I had to shoot. Silliest damned thing I ever did-that is, until today."

"Where were they?"

"The cars were back through there," Sam said, lifting a blackened claw and pointing. "I believe you can see traces of the little road that ran between the cornfields. About a hundred yards in. Your daddy's cruiser was parked slantwise of the road, Jimmy's twenty yards farther down."

"The bodies were where they were in the diagrams?" said Russ.

"Yes, they were. Believe I answered that one yesterday. No decent lawyer ever asks the same question twice. He remembers remembers the question he asked and the answer." the question he asked and the answer."

"I couldn't remember."

"All right," said Bob. "I want to go back there, look at the land."

"Believe I'll rusticate here," Sam said. "You boys go on ahead. Sing out if you get lost or need me to haul you out of the mud. And watch out for snakes. Mac Jimson killed a big rattler in the road the night your daddy was killed. Scared the hell out of us. Shot it in the head. Had to. Just crossing the road. Never saw no snake act like that before."

"A rattler?" said Bob.

"Big goddamn timber rattler. Strangest goddamned thing. All the cops around, the rattler skedaddles across the road. Mac had to shoot it."

"I hate snakes," said Russ.

"Hell, boy," said Sam, "it's just a lizard without legs."

Bob and Russ left the old man, cut through the trees and headed across the overgrown, weedy ground. It was field now, no corn anywhere, junk land that crouched in the shadow of the highway. Bob made it to the trace of road, not road so much but simply an opening where the vegetation hadn't grown so high because it had gotten a late start. The trace went back toward the big highway, then began to curve around. Bob got about a hundred yards back.

"Here?" asked Russ.

Bob took a deep breath.

"I do believe. Ask the old man."

"Sam! Here?" screamed Russ. screamed Russ.

Bob watched the old man, who studied them, then nodded up and down.

"Here," said Russ.

Bob had never been here before. So odd. He stayed in Blue Eye eight more years and he'd never come out here and stood at the spot. Then he went away to the Marines, and then came back and went up in the mountains, and never once, either before or after, had he been to this spot.

Never laid any flowers or felt the power of the blasphemed earth. Why? Too much pain? Possibly. Too close to going under with a poor drunken mother who just could not hang on and the terrible, terrible sense of it all having been taken from them. The bitterness. It could kill you. You had to let the bitterness go or it would kill you. He knew he'd been by, though. As he remembered, Sam had driven him up U.S. 71 to Fort Smith to join the United States Marine Corps on June 12, 1964, the day after he graduated from high school.

"Here," said Russ, consulting the diagram from the newspaper. "Here's where Jimmy ended up parking. Now"-he walked past Bob, hunched in concentration, nose buried in the clipping before him-"here is where your father's car was. And your dad was found in the driver's side, sitting sideways, fallen slightly to his right and hung up on the steering wheel, his feet on the ground, the radio mike in his hand."

"Bled out?" said Bob.

"What?"

"That was the mechanism, right? That's what killed him. Blood loss. Not shock to his nervous system or a bullet in a major blood-bearing organ?"

"Ah, that's what it says here. I don't-"

"Russ, how does a bullet kill? Do you know?"

Russ didn't. A bullet just, uh, killed killed. It, uh- "A bullet can kill you three ways. It can destroy your central nervous system. That's the brain shot, into the deep cerebellum, two inches back from the eyes and between the ears. Instant rag doll. Clinical death in less than a tenth of a second. Or it can destroy your circulatory and arterial system, depressurize you. The heart shot or something in the aorta. That's fifteen, twenty seconds till clinical death, your good central body shot. Or, finally, it can hit a major blood-bearing organ and you essentially bleed to death internally. A big stretch cavity, lots of tissue destruction, lots of blood, but not instant death. Say, three, four, sometimes ten to twenty minutes without help. Which of those?"

"I don't know," said Russ. "It doesn't really say. It just said he bled to death. The latter, I guess."

"It would be nice to know the mechanism. It would tell us a lot. You write that down in your book under things to find out."

"Where would we go to find that?"

Bob ignored him, just standing there, looking about. He tried to read the land, or what little of it was left. This was a hunter's gift, a sniper's gift: to look at the folds and drops and rises in a piece of earth and derive meanings from them, understand in some instinctual way how they worked.

The first thing: why here?

Standing there exactly where his father had stood, he realized that in high corn, this spot was invisible from the road. Moreover, it took just enough delicate driving to steer back here without losing control and careening back into the corn; there'd been nothing in the papers about a highspeed chase. There couldn't have been a chase! His daddy's car would have been behind theirs, not in front of it, unless Bub and Jimmy were chasing him! him!

He looked about, trying to imagine it in high corn.

"You run back to Sam," he said to Russ. "You ask him about the moon. Was there a moon? We can check, but I don't think so, not from my memory anyhow. Ask him about the temperature, the wind, that sort of thing. Humidity. Was it heavy?"

The boy looked at him vacantly. Then puzzlement stole across the delicate features.

"What is-"

"I will tell you later. Just do it."