“You’re going?”
“Not far.”
“Stay.”
“We have to put Darrel out of business.”
“Please stay.”
“I’ll be back.”
I walked down a path to the edge of the clearing, my head roaring with sound, hating to leave Jo Anne, wondering if I was making a terrible mistake.
“Hey, ice cream guy. It’s me,” I heard a voice say. Stoney stepped into the light. He wore a mackinaw and a battered football helmet and navy blue sweatpants and pink tennis shoes. “Is that Jimmy Doyle? Geez, what a mess. His face looks like a pepperoni pizza that got run over by a garbage truck.”
“I thought that was you in the bonfire,” I said.
“Oh, no, he was a hitchhiker. They were really mean to him, ice cream guy. Just because he got into their stash.”
I was trying to look at everyone in the clearing, including Maisie and Spud and Cotton, and listen to Stoney at the same time. Also I was drunk on adrenaline from having just killed a man. “What stash?” I said.
“Bags and bags of it. Behind the panels on the sides of the bus. The kid was sucking it up his nose like an anteater.”
“Do you know where Darrel Vickers’s father went?”
“The guy with the face like a bowl full of walnuts?”
If Stoney ever got off chemicals, I was determined to get him into a creative writing class. “Yeah, that guy.”
“Stay away from him. That guy is definitely a criminal.”
“He’s a criminal?”
“Fucking A, I know his type. I wouldn’t trust him.”
I took out my long-blade Swiss Army knife. “Cut my friends loose, will you? I need to get Jo Anne.”
“What for?” he said.
“To get out of here?”
“She’s not going anywhere, ice cream guy. This is the Shitsville where bad people go. Nobody told you?”
* * *
I RAN UP A trail, the M1 gripped with both hands at forty-five degrees, my lungs aching in the thin air, and tried to think my way through all the events of the last two hours. Nothing made sense. I was surrounded by sandstone boulders, some with petroglyphs carved on them. A Comanche moon, huge and yellow, the kind you associate with summer rather than fall, had risen above the canyon. I had just killed one man and had tried to kill another and felt no regret. I had watched the execution of Mr. Lowry, a man I believed to be a genteel farmer and egalitarian patriot, and now, if I had the chance, I was going to cap both Darrel and Rueben Vickers and any others of their ilk I could lay my peep sight on.
But inside this giant grotesque web hung with bat-faced winged creatures, probably from the Abyss, I had returned to the worst day of my life, the one I denied on a daily basis, the day my best friend died at Pork Chop Hill or, worse, was captured and sent across the Yalu to be used as a lab rat.
I have always been a believer. I don’t care what the naysayers and cynics say. In fact, I say fuck them. The big blue marble, the constellations, the Milky Way, the wine-dark waves of the ancient Greeks are filled with magic and with us forever.
I knew now that Saber would always be with me. Just like the days we drifted in his hot rod down South Main in Houston, down by Rice University, under the live oaks and Spanish moss and in the drive-in hangouts, the throaty roar of his twin Hollywood mufflers rumbling on the asphalt, convertibles full of pretty girls waving as they flew past us, Jackie Brenston and Gatemouth Brown blaring from the radio.
So I would not fear whatever happened that night in a box canyon that somehow had become a twisted mirror of the America I loved and fought for. As Stephen Crane wrote at the close of The Red Badge of Courage, the great death was only the great death, not to be sought, not to be feared, but treated as an inconsequential player in the human comedy.
I was breathing heavily when I reached the plateau that led to the place I had left Jo Anne. I had five rounds in the clip and many more in the bandolier. My heart was beating triumphantly, the way it had when Saber and I survived our first day of combat. I knew that Saber and I would prevail again, that the ev
il forces of the world were essentially craven and not worth grieving on. Up the trail I thought I saw Rueben Vickers. I could have shot him, but I felt pity rather than hatred toward him, an angry man who knew his seed should have been cast upon the ground.