"You gonna wash him down, Daddy?"

"Help me, honey?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"You are such a big girl, YKN4," said Bob, and his daughter's face knitted up and laughed.

YKN4 took the horse by the halter line and drew it into the barn, where she strained to link it to a rope. The big animal yielded entirely to her bossy directions. She didn't give it a chance and she didn't back down. "Come on, you big old dopey thing," she shouted, shoving against its shoulder to move it backwards. She brought another line over and clipped it to the halter, effectively tying the horse in the middle of a stall.

"Can I give him a carrot, Daddy?"

"Let me finish, honey."

Bob turned on the hose and fixed a pail of soapy water, then moved to the horse and began to rhythmically sponge it, neck to shoulders, shoulders to withers, down each muscular leg.

"Daddy," said the girl.

"Yes, honey?"

"Daddy, there was a man."

Bob said nothing at first. A little steam gathered behind his eyes, a little fire. "A skinny man. Thick hair, dark. Looked intense?"

"What's intense intense, Daddy?"

"Ah. Like he's galloping only he's just standing still. Not a smile nowhere on him. Face all tight like a fist."

"Yes, Daddy. Yes, that's it."

"Where was he?"

"He was parked just down the road from where the bus let me off this morning. Rosalita looked at him and he looked away."

"In a pickup truck? White?"

"Yes, Daddy. Do you know him? Is he nice? He smiled at me. I think he's nice."

"He's just a fool boy with the idea I can make him rich and famous. He'll get tired. He'll go away. I thought he got the message but I guess he's more stubborn than I give him credit for."

Would they ever leave him alone? You get your goddamned picture on a magazine cover and the whole world thinks you got enough secrets in you to write a best-seller. Over the years, no end of assholes had come at him. How did they find him? Well, it was like his address was out on some nutcase Internet, and all the losers and loonies came sniffing along. Some weren't even American. The goddamned Germans were the worst. They offered him money, anything, for ah interview. But he was all done with that. He'd had the worst kind of fame, and it was enough for him. He was done with that.

"Did he bother you, honey?"

"No, Daddy. He just smiled."

"If you see him again, you tell me, now, and I'll speak to him, and then he'll go away. Otherwise, we'll just wait until he tires himself out."

Many of them just disappeared after a while. Their ideas were so absurd and ill formed. Some of them didn't even want to write about him and make money; they just wanted to see him and draw something from his presence, from the thing that his life had been. So stupid. His life wasn't a monument or a symbol or a pattern: it was his life.

It seemed for a time the boy vanished. Then he was back again one night, sitting patiently in the truck across the road. Julie was back; they'd eaten and were sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea and watching as the sun set behind the low mountains in perfect serenity.

"He is is stubborn." stubborn."

"Damn fool boy."

"At least he keeps his distance. He has some manners." In their time, people had pulled into the yard, jumped out and begun offering contracts, setting up camera lights, glad-handing, carrying on, sure they were onto something big, they'd found El Dorado at last. Bob had several times called the Sheriff's Office, the last time for the Germans, who were extremely obnoxious.

"But he won't go home. It's beginning to feel a little sick. Poor YKN4. I don't want her to think this is how you have to grow up."

"Oh, she can handle it. It helps her to know her father is an extraordinary man. It gives her a little something, I think."

Swagger looked at his wife. She was a tanned and handsome woman whose blond hair had begun to show streaks of gray. She hadn't worn anything except jeans and boots and T-shirts since they'd returned to Ajo. She worked like a dog too. Bob thought she worked harder than he did and that was saying a lot.

"How old would you say he is?" she asked.

"About twenty-two or so. If he wants adventures he should join the Corps. He could use a few weeks on Parris Island. He shouldn't hang out here, scaring the child and making me even crankier than I am."

"I don't know why he seems different."

"He reminds you a little of Donny, that's why," Bob said, naming her first husband.

"Yes, I suppose he does. He has Donny's shyness and unsureness."

"Donny was a good boy," Bob said, "the best." Donny had died in his arms, gurgling blood in little spouts from a lung shot, eyes locked on nothingness, squirming in the terror of it, his left hand gripping terribly into Bob's biceps.

Hang on, Donny, oh Jesus, medic, Medic! Goddammit! Medic! Medic! Goddammit! Medic! Just hang on, it'll be fine, I swear it'll be fine. Just hang on, it'll be fine, I swear it'll be fine.

But it wasn't fine and there were no medics. Bob was hung up outside the berm, his own hip pulped by the same motherfucker, and Donny had come for him and caught the next round square in the boiler. He remembered the desperate pressure in Donny's fingers as the boy clung to him, as if Bob were life itself. Then the fingers went limp and the gurgling stopped.

Bob hated when that sort of thing came back on him. Sometimes you could control it, sometimes you couldn't. Blackness settled on him. In older days, it would have been drinking time.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have mentioned it."

"It's all right. Hell, I guess I can go tell him face-to-face to get out of here and quit wasting his life."

He got up, gave her a tight little smile and walked down the road into the place. The boy was across the road in an old Ford F-150, just sitting. He saw Bob coming and Bob saw him smile. He got out of the truck.

"Now, what in hell do you want?" Bob said. "Say your piece."

The boy stood before him. Yes, early twenties, lanky, with a thick mop of hair and the soft look of college all over him. He wore jeans and a fancy little short-sleeved shirt with some kind of emblem on the chest.

"I'm sorry," he said. "This was stupid. But I didn't know how else to talk to you. So I thought if I just showed you I was serious about all this, just let you know I was here, didn't force it or act like a jerk, they say you're a very decent guy, anyway, I thought you'd eventually let me talk to you."

"This ain't no interview. I don't give interviews. What's done is done and it's mine, not for nobody else."

"I swear to you, I have no interest in 1992."

"And I ain't doing no I'm-such-a-hero books. No Nam stuff. That's over and done and best forgotten too. Let the dead lie in peace."

"It's not about Vietnam. I didn't come about Vietnam. But I did come about the dead."

They faced each other for a long moment. Twilight. The sun eased behind the mountains, leaving an empty world of gray light and silence. The dead. Let them alone, please. What good does it do, what good can it do? Why would this boy come before him, claiming to represent the dead. He knew so many of the dead too.

"So, goddammit, spit it out. A book? You do want to write a book."

"I do want to write a book, yes. And yes, it's about a great American hero and yes, he's from Blue Eye, Arkansas, and yes, he's the kind of man they don't make anymore."

"No books," said Bob.

"Well, let me go on just a bit," the boy said. "The great American hero is named-was named-Earl Swagger. He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, 22 February 1945, D plus two. He went home to America, where he became a state trooper in Arkansas. On July 23, 1955, he shot it out with two armed robbers named Jimmy and Bub Pye. He killed them both."

Bob looked hard at the boy.

"And they killed him too. Your father. I want to do a book about your father."

4.

Earl assigned Lem to stay with the body until the state detectives and the county coroner arrived. He got back to the cruiser and noticed Jed and Lum Posey leaning on Pop Dwyer's hood, the three of them hooting like old drunks. But when they felt his hard glare, they dried up fast. Jed's face had swollen badly; it looked as if he'd swallowed a grapefruit, yellow and rotten. But Jed was hard mountain trash; you could bang on him for hours without really breaking anything.

"You boys stay here till the detectives come. Pop, them dogs cool?"

"Cool as they can get in this weather, Mr. Earl," said Pop.

"Good. You stay on station now, you hear."

"I do," said Pop.

Earl got into his cruiser, turned over the engine and flicked on the radio. The air was full of traffic as the state mobilized for the manhunt, led by the state police, all 111 officers of them, who would inherit responsibility for this job. He listened for a bit in disbelief, as if in disbelieving he could make it go away. But it would not go away.

"Ah, Dispatch, this is Car Two Niner, ah, we are now in blockade at 226 and I got two units arching down between 226 and 271, you got that, Dispatch?"

"Roger, Two Nine, we got the state Piper Cub working your area, trying to cover them back roads. He's on another frequency, but if we get anything, we'll git to you."

"Got it, Dispatch, I'm holding here. Got three units, more coming in."

"Wally, the colonel says you might want to send one of your units over toward Lavca. We got good military help out of Chaffee and I think they're goin' pitch in some airborne stuff."

"Dispatch, I got a unit headed to Lavca."

"Good work, and over, Two Niner."

Earl recognized Two Niner as Bill Cole, a lieutenant in the Logan County barrack. Dispatch was talking for Major Don Benteen, second-in-command; Colonel Evers must have been calling the shots from somewhere in Little Rock, and was presumably on his way over to take area command.

Jimmy, you goddamned little fool, he thought with sudden passionate bitterness.

Where did we go wrong on you? What got into you, boy? How'd you turn out this way?

There were no answers, as there never had been for Jimmy Pye. Earl shook his head. He'd been as guilty as anybody of telling Jimmy Pye that it was okay. He'd always been there for the kid, easing the fall even as he recognized the remoteness in Jimmy and denied it, even as he began to see how different Jimmy was from poor old Lannie Pye.

He thought of Bub Pye, Jimmy's cousin, a poor dim boy who no one ever thought would amount to much, so dreary in comparison to Jimmy. Earl couldn't even bring Bub's face up out of memory, even though he'd seen him just yesterday. There was something forgettable about Bub. What would happen to him? Bub had been a carpenter's apprentice, but he just couldn't get the hang of things, and they'd let him go. He'd never found another job. He was a decent boy but without much in the way of prospects: but he was no criminal. That goddamned Jimmy had made him a criminal.

Darkness crept into Earl's mind. This poor dead colored child, Jimmy Pye, all in one goddamn day!

It was the worst day he'd had since Iwo Jima.

Reluctantly, he picked up the microphone and pushed the send button.

"Dispatch, this is Car One Four, I am ten-eight."

"Earl, where you been?" It was the major, taking over for Dispatch.

"Been at that crime scene, Major, you copy and send units?"

"Negative, One Four. Earl, you got to let that nigger gal cool till we catch up with Jimmy Pye. I seen the record, he's a Polk County boy, and you were his last A-O."

"I know the family," said Earl.

"Okay, good."

"You want me on roadblock or sweeps, Major?"

"Negative, One Four. You go cover the family. Maybe he'll make some contact with them. Don't he have a wife, that's what the records say."

"Married her a week before he done his jail time," said Earl.

"You check on her, then, Earl. You cover her and any other kin he might have there in Polk. You need help, you wire up with the sheriff's boys."

"Got you, Major. But when am I going to see that forensics team? I want them out here on the crime scene fast as possible."

"Maybe by the late afternoon, Earl. Them boys got lots of work still to do at the Fort Smith IGA. It's a bloodbath. He shot two boys in the office, a nigger outside, and he popped a city officer in a car. He's bad news, Earl."

Earl nodded bitterly, checking his Bulova.

[image]

Earl drove through Blue Eye's Colored Town, on the west side, under the bulk of Rich Mountain. It was small and scabby; why couldn't these lost people pick up their garbage, mow their lawns, tend their gardens? Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of decay and lassitude and disconnection from decent living. The children, barefoot and in rags, lolled on the porches of the shanties, staring at him with big eyes and slack faces. They wore ragamuffin clothes and their eyes were huge, unknowable pools as they stared at him, though when he rounded a corner and caught them unawares, he was able to see them playing games like jump rope and hide-and-seek with their natural exuberance; but when they saw the big black and white car and the white man in the Stetson with the harsh eyes, they immediately cooled way down and met him with those empty faces.

In time, he passed the most impressive building in Colored Town, Fuller's Funeral Parlor, an old mansion from the days when white people lived in this end of town, nestled under elm trees; and a little farther down, the second most impressive building, a church, white clapboard; and then, finally, down a tree-shaded street where the small Negro middle class lived.

The Parker house was the third on the right, also clapboard, with a porch and a trellis hung with bright wisteria, tiny but neat and well tended. Mrs. Parker led the choir in the church; her husband, Ray, was a clerk for the gas company, the only colored man employed there.

Earl was both glad and sick to see no other police vehicles; that meant he could talk alone to the Parkers without the presence of a lot of bulky white men with badges and guns, which would quiet them down and scare them or at the least drive them into the guarded conditions Negroes affected in the presence of a lot of white people; but it also meant he would have to give them the news himself. Maybe he should have called that minister.