Authors: Stephen Hunter
Finally, he awoke.
It was morning, judging from the light. He was freshly bandaged, his arm in a tight sling against his chest. He was clean, too. Somebody had sponged him down. He was undressed. With his good hand, he pulled the blanket close about him, feeling even more vulnerable. He blinked, swallowed, realized suddenly how thirsty he was. His legs ached; his head ached; there was also a bandage on his arm, and some pain. Yes, he’d been hit there; almost forgot about it.
The details swam at him; the punctured holes of the acoustic ceiling, all neat and in rows; some curtains, and how the bright sun streamed through them from some sort of porthole. The room he was in was small and dark, except for the sunlight’s beam. Next to him on a table was a pitcher filled with ice water.
He raised himself and poured a drink and swallowed it in one long gulp.
“How do you feel?”
She had slid into the doorway.
“Oh. Well, I feel like I might live a little bit. How long have I—”
“It’s been three days.”
“Jesus.”
“You slept, you screamed, you cried, you begged. Who’s Payne? You kept yelling about Payne.”
“Payne. Oh, let’s see. A fellow that pulled a trick on me.”
“Why do I think there aren’t too many men that have pulled tricks on you?”
“Maybe not. But he’s one of them.”
“The papers say you’re a psychopathic killer, a crazy man with a rifle. They think if you’re not in New Orleans, you’re in Arkansas. Or dead. Some people think you’re dead.”
He didn’t say anything. His head ached.
“I didn’t kill the president.”
“The president!”
“I wouldn’t kill the pres—”
“It wasn’t the president. Didn’t you listen to the radio?”
“Ma’am, I’ve been in a swamp for a week, shooting one animal every two days to live. In the cars—hell, I just drove.”
“Well, it wasn’t the president. They say you aimed at the president but you hit some archbishop.”
“I never missed what I aimed at in my life. Besides with that rifle—”
And then he stopped.
“That’s what Donny said. And that’s what I believe. But they have evidence. Fingerprints, the tests on the gun, that sort of thing.”
“Well, maybe they aren’t as smart as they think they are. Maybe I’m not so far up the tree as they say. A bishop?”
“My God, you really
don’t
know. Either that or you’re the best liar I’ve ever seen.”
“I wouldn’t shoot a priest. I wouldn’t shoot anything. I haven’t shot to kill in more than a decade.”
Bob shook his head glumly.
Shooting a priest, he thought. And then he thought:
That’s what it was all about. That’s what it was always all about.
And then he thought: And they had me bird-dog it for them. Figure out the best way. Work it out for them. And then they used it against me. For some priest.
Then a thought came to him.
He took a deep breath.
“Say, was there anything in the papers about my dog?”
“Oh,” she said. “You don’t know?”
“They killed him?”
“They say you killed your dog.”
“What they say and what happened are two different things,” he said. But it hurt him that people could say such a thing of him.
He watched her watching him.
“The bastards. Kill a great old dog like that. Oh, the sons of bitches.”
“It’s amazing. You are the most hunted man in America. And your first question isn’t about yourself but about a dog. And when he’s dead—I can tell, you’re really upset.”
“That damned old dog loved me and I wish I’d been a better friend to him. He never cut out but stayed to do his job. He deserved more than he got.”
“So does everybody. Look, you should get some rest. What you’ve been through, the physical stress, the blood loss. It would have killed most men. I know some Indians it wouldn’t have killed, but I don’t know too many white men who could have gotten through it.”
He slept again, though this time without dreams. When he awoke, she was there too. He ate a little, then dozed off. And the third time he awoke, she was still there, just staring at him.
“What time is it?”
“Time? It’s
Tuesday
, that’s what time it is. You slept eighteen hours.”
“I don’t feel as if I’ll ever walk again.”
“Oh, I think you’ll make it. You were very lucky. The bullet went right through you with very little damage. You were smart enough to plug that entrance wound with a clump of plastic wadding. That probably saved your life. I’ve been pumping you full of penicillin to preclude infection.”
“What are they saying about me now?”
“Oh, they’ve gotten around to the psychiatrists and the psychologists, because they have no real news. There’s a lot of theorizing going on about motive. Your anger at your father for dying, how that became your anger at the president. Your anger at not becoming a big hero like—do I have the name right?—Carl Hathco—”
“Hitchcock. Carl Hitchcock.”
“Yes. Things like that.”
“It’s just a lot of talk. They don’t know the first goddamn thing. My daddy was a great hero. And I never cared for medals. He didn’t and I didn’t. Talk’s cheap.”
“You’re certainly right about that, Sergeant.”
He stared off, bitterly. The mention of his father unsettled him. People had no right to bring his father into all this.
“You can’t let it get to you,” she said. “They’ve turned it into a circus. But they always do these days.”
He looked back at her.
“I have to thank you. What you’re doing, it’s—”
“No, I don’t need thanks. I knew in a split second you couldn’t have shot at the president or that archbishop. If that was in you, Donny would have seen it all the years back; he would have sniffed it out.”
Bob couldn’t look at her. Hearing such judgments put baldly into language had the weird effect of shrinking
him. He felt small and wan and self-conscious. He had to tell her the truth.
“If he told you I was some kind of hero, let me set you straight. I spent ten years drunk, and I used to beat on the only woman who ever loved me. But also I let myself slide into bitterness. That was maybe the worst. I let them get to me, and make me less a man.”
A puzzled look came across her face.
“Who? Oh, you know who. They’re always around: smart boys, have all the answers, always telling you what’s wrong and why what you done, you should be ashamed of it.
“But worst of all, I was stupid. I let some smart boys come into my life and turn me around. Real smart boys. They knew all my weaknesses, got real deep inside where I thought nobody could. I don’t know how they knew to get inside me like that. Turned me around, made me a fool. Christ, made me the most hated man in the country. Well, now, I seem to have survived all that. And so now it’s my turn. I need to stay until I’m better and stronger and have figured out another move. I’m sorry to have brought all this trouble to your door. No other door was open to me. So I’m asking you, please: let me stay and mend. A few weeks, maybe a month. And let me study on my problems, figure what the next step is. I can’t give you much but thanks. Will you consider it?”
She looked at him hard. Then her face lit up in a smile that just cracked him in two.
“Jesus,” she said, “it’s so nice to have a man around the house.”
Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Leon Timmons was drunk and he was high. He was sailing, he was floating. He felt so good.
“Hey, Payne, hey, damn, boy, we, we got it made, huh?”
Payne snorted. They were in Big Sam’s, on Bourbon. Up on the stage a buxom woman shimmied. To Payne she looked like an animated piece of beef on a hook in a Jersey warehouse.
“Damn,” Timmons said, “damn, boy, she all girl, eh, Payno?”
“She’s all girl,” said Payne. “She’s a girl and a fuckin’ half.”
“Wooooo!” said Timmons, his eyes lighting up like headlamps.
Payne took a long swallow of Dixie beer. It was the only thing he liked about New Orleans and he was glad to be just about out of New Orleans.
Somebody put another beer in front of Timmons.
“Huh?” said Timmons.
“Leon, honey,” said the waitress, “gintlemin over thar said thanks to the man what almost shot the man what almost shot the president.”
Timmons raised the bottle in salute to his benefactors, who appeared to be a crowd of dentists from Dayton. They applauded in the red wash of light from the overheads, then went back to hooting at Bonnie Anne Clyde and her smoking .45’s up there on the stage.
“You’re quite a hero,” said Payne.
“Damn betcha. You know, Payne, ain’t yet heard whether old President what’s-his-name gonna have me up at the White House. Hell, that old boy ought give me a ticket to the town with my name written all over it.”
“That he should,” said Payne. “You saved his life, man. You stopped Bob Lee Swagger from blowing him up and you almost nailed Bob the Nailer, the great sniper himself.”
“That’s right,” said Timmons, who by now pretty much believed he’d actually fired the shot. He told Payne the story again in excruciating detail, with a few embellishments thrown in. Payne listened dully. Finally Timmons said, “You know, I might even be the NRA Police Officer of the Year.”
“You ought to think about selling your story to the movies, bub.”
“Ahead of you there, Payno. Got me a agent already, out in Hollywood. A very big guy. We gonna make a potful of money.”
“You don’t need no agent. You already got a potful of money.”
“Cain’t have too much money,” said Payne. “Ain’t no such thing as too much money.”
“Ummm,” said Payne.
Timmons’s eyes went back to Bonnie Anne Clyde. He licked his lips; his face had the hard set of a man who’d seen what he liked and liked what he’d seen.
“I believe you could get yourself that girl,” said Payne. “Seems to me she ought to be pleased to spend some time with the hero cop of New Orleans, who almost shot the man who almost shot the man who—well, you know.”
“I believe you are right,” said Timmons.
With a self-important twitch of his head, he beckoned the manager over. Quickly he told him what he wanted.
“Be right back,” the guy said.
“Whooo, think I’m gone be in the hot spot tonight,” said Timmons eagerly.
“Pussy-o-rama, Leon. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling,” said Payne.
The manager came back after Bonnie left the stage, to be replaced by Miss Suzie Cue and her eight-balls.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “She says, yeah, sure, anything for Detective Sergeant Timmons. Only thing is, see, she has the boyfriend, mean nigger motherfucker. So, what she wants is, um, discretion. Quietude. Nothing to rile Ben, ’cause Ben whack her upside the haid he catch her with another man.”
“Okay,” said Timmons. “So how we work it?”
“Out back at midnight. He’s a fireman, goes on duty at eleven-thirty. So you meet her out there, she takes you to her crib, you git your windshield wiper fluid changed but, like, good, my friend, Ben ain’t the wiser, she done bagged a celebrity, and the old world just goes humpty-humping along.”
“Oh, I lak thet,” said Timmons greedily.
“You goan have a time,” said the manager, a weaselly little rat-man with a pencil-thin mustache.
So Payne and Timmons sat through a couple of more sets, trying to put the Dixie Brewery out of business or at least get it to working nights, as if they were a pair of Navy bosun’s mates on shore leave for the first time since the sixties. Timmons’s elaborate hair, which bent in strange ways as it flowed off his ample, heroic brow, gleamed with mousse; he was set for a big night. Meanwhile Payne just sat there, sinking into himself further.
By the time it was nearly midnight, Timmons was extremely drunk. Payne got up, pointed to his watch, and Timmons lurched obediently to his feet, bulling his fat and sloppy way over.
“All set,” he said hornily.
“Then let’s go, big guy,” said Payne, pulling him down the narrow aisle and out to Bourbon.
The street had filled. It looked like party time in Hell. College kids from Ole Miss, northern tourists, large groups of sailors, a few aristocratic types in blue blazers and khakis with their sallow, nearly fleshless women in tow, all seethed and bucked along the narrow concoursc. There was smoke everywhere; up and down the street lines had formed, some to get into the strip joints or the transsexual shows, some to buy T-shirts in the dinky souvenir shops, some to get into the fancy restaurants like Antoine’s or Arnaud’s. A few disconsolate wallflowers peered down from the balconies overhanging the scene.
“Now which way we go?” asked Payne, surveying the turmoil. “I can’t believe I’m skulking around to avoid riling some big nigger.”
“Shoot,” said Timmons, “no sense gittin’ the boy upset when his old lady be handing out the sweets for free. Maybe you wanta little old taste after I finish?”
“How long you be? Maybe twenty seconds?”
“Haw! I can ride a mare like thet half the damn night!”
“Well, thanks, I’ll pass. Number Two in the saddle ain’t for me.”
They ambled through the raucous crowd, were jostled by sailors. Payne hated sailors from the Army, where you were supposed to hate sailors. And he sort of felt like a fight. He wanted to drive one of his fat fists into the dumb, girlish face of some aviation candidate over from Pensacola, and watch the boy collapse, spitting blood and teeth. But he just pushed on. The night was blue. The moon was full, over the low pastel buildings of the quarter. It reminded him of a jungle city. Felt like Saigon. No gooks, though. Lots of niggers, lots of fatboys and pretty girls, lots of action; no gooks. He remembered the sense of war and doom and what-the-hell-we-die-tomorrow joy that he had so loved when he was a lean and dangerous young Forces sergeant in the ’Nam, floating on amphetamines, just back from a long crazed month or so in the fuckin’ boonies, taking frontale.
Payne sighed, swept by melancholy. The whole world seemed to be here on Bourbon, coursing down the narrow street, all hot to trot, seething to get fucked, except for him. He stood apart. Jack Payne was different. He did the hard things.
Next to him, Timmons was aquiver with sexual tension. It was said that he could visit any brothel in New Orleans and have himself serviced mightily, so friendly and helpful was he to certain people, but there were always new experiences and sensations. So he was all hotted up.