“The corporal. He was next to me when the shells started coming in.”
“You were by yourself when the litter-bearers dug you out.”
“No, he was sitting a few feet from me. Inside the shell hole.”
The colonel patted him tenderly on the arm. “When your men broke the German salient, the first thing they did was look for you.”
“What’s that odor?”
“That’s the fellow on the next cot. He was loading a phosphorus shell when it blew up.”
“I saw Labiche. Before the explosion and after. He talked to me.”
“You were buried alive. Only your hand was sticking out.”
“He told me he was dead.”
The colonel stood up and gazed into Ishmael’s face. “Are you cold? I can put a blanket over you.”
“He wanted to give me a letter. It was for his family in New York.”
“This happens when you are gravely wounded. You feel there are things you must take care of. Sometimes you feel a terrible obligation to people you haven’t thought about in years.” The colonel picked up a box from under the bed and sorted through it with his mechanical fingers. “Here are the things from your dugout and your pockets. I suspect this is the letter you’re talking about. See, it was here all the time. The address on it is in New York City.” The envelope was creased and smudged with dirt, stenciled with blood.
“There was another letter. One I was supposed to take care of. I can’t think clearly.”
“Rest. You’ll be going back to America soon. There is nothing to worry about. Listen. The guns are quiet. Look at the sunset. It’s a grand finish to a grand day. We broke the spine of the Boche and hammered them into the dirt. They’ll never invade France again.”
Ishmael felt himself slipping loose from the conversation, his vision blurring, the smells of urine and medicinal salve and trench foot and gangrenous flesh growing more and more distant. I will never forgive my father, never answer his letters, never be undone by his guile, he thought. He left his family to founder by the wayside. Would that I could drain his blood from my veins.
Later, Ishmael could not be sure if he spoke these words aloud or to himself, or if they would have made any sense to his friend the colonel. When he awoke in the middle of the night, the sky was totally black except for a flickering of either cannon fire or electricity on the horizon. The man who had been burned by a phosphorus shell was carried away on a litter like a lump of bandaged charcoal, replaced with a man who had neither arms nor legs.
Top of the bloody evening to you, Ishmael thought. Would you call this a grand end to a grand day? How about a game of checkers?
IT WAS A dry September, the kind that brought no relief from summer’s heat and left the rocks in the streambeds white and dusty and printed with the scales of insects that normally lived below the water’s surface. Hackberry was determined to bring in a prize crop of pumpkins from the three acres down by the river where he grew vegetables that were for his personal use. Each morning he hoed out the weeds in the rows, and each evening he hauled water in barrels from the river and walked down the long lines of pumpkins, stringing water from perforated syrup cans that hung from a yoke stretched across his shoulders.
The sun had just dipped behind the bluffs on the far side of the river, splintering like a red diamond inside the cottonwoods, the river riffling slate-green through the shadows, when Hackberry heard a motorcar—actually, a touring vehicle that resembled a tank—coming up the dirt road, its heavy chassis and spoked wheels churning up huge amounts of dust, most of it drifting across his field and into his face.
The driver wore goggles and a duster and a cap. Not so the passenger in back. The latter stepped down on the ground like royalty from a carriage, dressed in a sky-blue silk shirt, a gray flop hat with an oxblood fur band, laced boots, and skintight striped trousers hitched high up on his hips so they accentuated his heart-shaped butt. The man removed his hat and pushed back his silvery blond hair, then unbuttoned his fly and cupped his phallus in his right palm and urinated in the middle of the road.
Two years previous Hackberry had seen the same man through a spyglass, in the early dawn at the base of a sunlit mesa, and in that moment had known he was looking at a man who had no category. Hackberry set down his water buckets and walked toward the touring car as the visitor stuffed his phallus back in his fly and buttoned up.
“I have indoor plumbing if you’d like to use it,” Hackberry said.
“Don’t need it,” the man said. He extended his hand. “I’m Arnold Beckman. You may have heard of me.”
Hackberry kept his eyes on Beckman’s and did not raise his hand. “You have business with me?”
Beckman took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose in it. “I understand you’re looking for your son. I think I’ve found him.”
The accent was European, with a tinge of Cockney, as though Beckman had gone to the wrong source to learn English; the aquiline profile was marred by a chain of pitted scars that went down the cheek and onto the neck and into the shirt collar. His skin looked untouched by the sun, a pallid hue in it that was more green than white.
“How would you know anything about my boy?”
“I heard of your situation through your neighbor.”
“You’re a friend of Cod Bishop?”
“I made an inquiry with a United States senator. Your son is in the Fitzsimmons army hospital near Denver. Is it true you were a Texas Ranger?”