by Peter Straub
“That must have been terrible for you,” I said.
He ignored my sympathy. “You should have seen the hate mail I got—people used to scream at me on the street. Thought they were doing good.”
“People have different points of view,” I said.
He spat onto the ground. “The pure, they are always with us.”
I smiled at him.
“Well, come on in. I got complete records, like I said on the phone. It’s all in good order, you don’t have to worry about that.”
We moved slowly toward the house. Hubbel said that he had moved out of town and put up his security fence in 1960. “They made me live in the middle of a field,” he said. “I tell you one thing, nobody gets into this office unless they stood up for the red, white, and blue.”
He stumped up the stairs, getting both feet on one step before tackling the next. “Used to be, I kept a rifle right by the front door there,” he said. “Would have used it, too. In defense of my country.” We made it onto the porch and crawled toward the door. “You say you got some scars over there?”
I nodded.
“How?”
“Shell fragments,” I said.
“Show me.”
I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and pulled it down over my shoulders to show him my chest. Then I turned around so that he could see my back. He shuffled forward, and I felt his breath on my back. “Pretty good,” he said. “You still must have some of that stuff inside you.”
My anger disappeared when I turned around and saw that his eyes were wet. “Every now and then, I set off metal detectors,” I said.
“You come on in, now.” Hubbel opened the door. “Just tell me what I can do for you.”
3
THE CROWDED FRONT PARLOR of the old farmhouse was dominated by a long wooden desk with high-backed armchairs behind and before it. An American flag stood between the desk and the wall. A framed letter on White House stationery hung on the wall behind the desk. A couch, a shaky-looking rocker, and a coffee table filled most of the rest of the room. The rocker faced a television set placed on the bottom shelf of a unit filled with books and large journals that looked like the records of his hardware business.
“What’s this book you want to write?” Hubbel got himself behind his desk and let out a little puff of exertion. “You interested in some of the boys you served with?”
“Not exactly,” I said, and gave him some stuff about how representative soldiers had been affected by their wartime experience.
He gave me a suspicious look. “This wouldn’t be one of those damn pack of lies that show our veterans as a bunch of criminals, I s’pose.”
“Of course not.”
“Because they aren’t. People go on and on gassing about Post-Traumatic Whatzit, but the whole damn thing was made up by a bunch of journalists. I can tell you about boys right here in Tangent who came back from the war just as clean-cut as they were when they got drafted.”
“I’m interested in a very special group of people,” I said, not adding that it was a group of one.
“Of course you are. Let me tell you about one boy, Mitch Carver, son of a fireman here, turned out to be a good little soldier in Airborne.” He went on to tell me the story, the point of which seemed to be that Mitch had come back from Vietnam, married a substitute schoolteacher, become a fireman just like his dad, and had two fine sons.
After the children had been produced like a merit badge, I said, “I understand that you also have records of the volunteers from your area.”
“Why shouldn’t I? I made a point of meeting each and every one of our boys who enlisted. A fine, fine bunch. And I kept up with them, too—just like the boys I helped get into the service. I was proud of all of them. You want to see the names?”
He gestured toward the row of record books. “See, I wrote down the name of every one of those boys. I call it my Roll Call of Honor. Fetch me a couple of those books, I’ll show you.”
I stood up and went to the bookshelves. “Could we look at the list from 1961?”
“You want to see something, get me the book for 1968—that’s a whole volume all by itself, there’s a million good stories in that one.”
“I’m working on 1961,” I said.
His venomous face distorted itself into a smile. A hooked old finger jabbed the air in my direction. “I bet that’s the year you went in.”
I had been drafted in 1967. “Got me,” I said.
“Just remember you can’t pull anything over on me. ’Sixty-’sixty-one is the second book in line.”
I pulled the heavy book off the shelf and brought it to his desk. Hubbel opened the cover with a ceremonious flourish, ROLL CALL OF HONOR had been written in broad black strokes on the first page. He flipped through pages covered with names until he came to 1961 and began moving his finger down the line. The names were listed in the order in which they had been drafted and had been written very carefully in the same broad strokes of Hubbel’s fountain pen.
“Benjamin Grady,” Hubbel said. “There’s one for your book. Big, handsome kid. Took him right after high school. I wrote to him two or three times, but the letters never got through. I wrote a lot of my boys.”
“You knew where he had been assigned?”
He peered up at me. “Took a special interest. Grady came back in ’sixty-two, but he didn’t stay long. Went to college in New Jersey and married some Jewish girl, his dad told me. See?” He moved his finger across the line, where he had written NJ.
The finger traveled down the column again. “Here’s a boy for you. Todd Lemon. Used to work at Bud’s Service Station here in town, cutest little guy you ever saw in your life. Spunky. I can still remember him at the physical—when the doc asked him about drugs, he said, ‘My body is my temple, sir,’ and all the other fellows standing in line gave a big laugh of appreciation.”
“You went to the physicals?”
“That was how I met the boys who enlisted,” he said, as if that should have been obvious. “Every day of the physicals, I turned over the business to my clerks and went down there. Can’t tell you what a thrill it was, seeing all those wonderful boys lined up—God, I was proud of all of them.”
“Is there a separate list for the volunteers?”
My question made him indignant. “What kind of record-keeper would I be if there weren’t? That’s a separate category, after all.”
I asked to see that list.
“Well, you’re missing out on some fine, upstanding boys, but …” He turned over another page. Under the heading ENLISTED was a column of about twenty-five names. “If you’d let me show you 1967 or 1968, you’d have a lot more to choose from.”
I scanned down the list, and my heart stopped about two-thirds of the way down, when I came to Franklin Bachelor. “I think I’ve heard of one of these people,” I said.
“Bobby Arthur? You’d know him, of course. Great golfer—turned pro for a couple of years after the war.”
“I was thinking of this one.” I pointed at Bachelor’s name.
He bent over to peer at the name, and then he brightened. “That boy, oh, yes. Very, very special. He got into Special Forces, had a wonderful career. One of our heroes.” He nearly beamed at me. “What a boy. There was some kind of story there, I always thought.”
He would have told me even if I hadn’t asked.
“I didn’t know him—I didn’t know most of my boys, of course, but I never even heard of a family named Bachelor living in Tangent. By God, I believe I even checked the telephone book when I got to my place that evening, and damned if there were no Bachelors listed. I had a feeling this was one of those lads who signs up under another name. I didn’t say anything, though—I let the boy go through. I knew what he was doing.”
“What was he doing?”
Hubbel lowered his voice. “That boy was escaping.” He looked up at me and nodded. He looked more like an owl than ever.
“Escaping?” I wondered if Hubbe
l had managed to guess that Fee had been avoiding arrest. He wouldn’t have even begun to imagine the sorts of crimes Fee had committed: all of his “boys” had been as sinless as his own ideas of himself.
“That boy had been mistreated. I saw it right away—little round scars on his chest. Sort of thing that makes you sick inside. Idea that his own mother or father would do a thing like that to a handsome little lad.”
“They scarred him?” I asked.
He almost whispered. “Burned him. With cigarettes. Until they left scars.” Hubbel shook his spotted head, staring down at the page. His hands were spread out over the names, as if to conceal them. Maybe he just liked touching them. “Doc asked him about the scars, and the boy said he ran into bob wire. I knew—I could see. Bob wire doesn’t leave scars like that. Small, like dimes. Shiny. I knew what happened to that boy.”
“You have a wonderful memory,” I said.
“I go over these journals pretty often, being here by myself.” His face hardened. “Now I got so feeble, I can’t get the books down so easy anymore, need a little help sometimes.”
He moved his hands and stared down at the pages. “You probably want to copy down some of my boys’ names.”
I let him read out half a dozen names from the enlisted men and the draftees while I copied them into my notebook. They were all still living in Tangent, he said, and I’d have no trouble finding them in the telephone book.
“Do you think you’d still be able to identify Franklin Bachelor from a photograph?” I asked.
“Maybe. You got one?”
I opened my briefcase and took out the manila envelope. Tom had cut off the caption. I put it on top of the list of names, and Hubbel bent over so that his nose was only an inch away from it. He moved his head back and forth over the picture as if he were smelling it. “Policeman,” he said. “He went into law enforcement?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m going to write that in my book.”
I watched the top of the spotted head drift back and forth over the photograph. Sparse gray hairs grew up out of his mottled scalp.
“Well, I believe you’re right,” he said. “It sure could be that boy I saw at the induction center.” He blinked up at me. “Turned out fine, didn’t he?”
“Which one is he?”
“You’re not going to trick me,” he said, and planted the tip of his right index finger on top of Paul Fontaine’s face. “There he is, right there, that’s the boy. Yep. Franklin Bachelor. Or whatever his real name was.”
I packed the photograph away in my briefcase and told him how helpful he had been.
“Would you do me a favor before you leave?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Fetch my journals for 1967 and 1968, will you? I’d like to remember some more of my boys.”
I pulled the books from the shelf and piled them on his desk. He spread his hands out on top of them. “Tell you what, you honk the horn of that flashy car when you want me to open the gate. I’ll push the button for you.”
When I let myself out onto the porch, he was pushing his beaky nose down a long column of names.
4
ISTILL HAD TWO HOURS before the flight back to Millhaven, and Tangent was only two miles down the highway past the airport. I drove until I came to streets lined with handsome houses set far back on wide lawns. After a while, the quiet streets led into a part of town with four-story office buildings and old-fashioned department stores.
I parked on a square with a fountain and walked around the square until I found a diner. The waitress at the counter gave me a cup of coffee and the telephone book. I took the book to the pay telephone near the kitchen and called Judy Leatherwood.
The same quavery voice I had heard at Tom’s house said hello.
I couldn’t remember the name of the insurance company Tom had invented. “Mrs. Leatherwood, do you remember getting a call from the Millhaven branch of our insurance company a few nights ago?”
“Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “Mr. Bell? I remember speaking to him. This is about my brother-in-law’s insurance?”
“I’d like to come out to speak to you about the matter,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know. Have you located my nephew?”
“He may have changed his name,” I said.
For about ten seconds, she said nothing. “I just don’t feel right about all this. I’ve been worried ever since I talked to Mr. Bell.” Another long pause. “Did you give me your name?”
“Mister Underhill,” I said.
“I think I shouldn’t have said those things to Mr. Bell. I don’t really know what that boy did—I don’t feel right about it. Not at all.”
“I understand that,” I said. “It might help both of us if we could have a talk this afternoon.”
“My son said he never heard of any insurance company doing things that way.”
“We’re a small family firm,” I said. “Some of our provisions are unique to us.”
“What was the name of your company again, Mr. Underhill?”
Then, blessedly, it came to me. “Mid-States Insurance.”
“I just don’t know.”
“It’ll only take a minute or two—I have to get on a flight back to Millhaven.”
“You came all this way just to see me? I guess it would be okay.”
I said I’d be there soon, hung up, and showed her address to the waitress. The directions she gave took me back the way I had come.
When I drove up to the nursing home, I realized that I had mistaken it for a grade school when I had driven past it on the way into town. It was a long low building of cream-colored brick with big windows on either side of a curved entrance. I parked in front of a sign that read FAIRHOME CENTER FOR THE AGED and walked toward a concrete apron beneath a wide red marquee. An electronic door whooshed open and let out a wave of cool air.
A woman who looked like Betty Crocker smiled when I came up to a white waist-high counter and asked if she could help me. I said that I wanted to see Mrs. Leatherwood.
“It’ll be nice for Judy to have a visitor,” she said. “Are you family?”
“No, I’m a friend,” I said. “I was just speaking to her on the phone.”
“Judy is in the Blue Wing, down the hall and through the big doors. Room six, on your right. I can get an aide to show you the way.”
I said that I could find it by myself, and went down the hall and pushed open a bright blue door. Two uniformed nurses stood at a recessed station, and one of them came toward me. “Are you looking for one of the residents?”
“Judy Leatherwood,” I said. She smiled, said, “Oh, yes,” and took me past the nurses’ station to an open door and a room with a hospital bed and a bulletin board crowded with pictures of a young couple and two blond little boys. An old woman in a print dress sat on a wooden chair in front of a desk below the bright window at the end of the room. The light behind her head darkened her face. An aluminum walker stood beside her legs. “Judy, you have a visitor,” the nurse said.
Her white hair gleamed in the light from the window. “Mister Underhill?”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, and came toward her. She lifted her face, showing me the thick, milky glaze over both of her eyes.
“I don’t like this business,” she said. “I don’t want to be rewarded for my nephew’s misfortune. If the boy is in trouble, won’t he need that money himself?”
“That may not be an issue,” I said. “May I sit down for a minute?”
She kept her face pointed toward the door. Her hands twisted in her lap. “I suppose.”
Before I sat down, she asked, “Do you know where my nephew is? I’d like to know that.”
“I want to ask you a question,” I said.
She turned briefly to me and then back to the door. “I don’t know what I should say.”
“When your nephew lived with you, did you notice any scars on his body? Small, circular scars?”
; Her hand flew to her mouth. “Is this important?”
“It is,” I said. “I understand that this must be difficult for you.”
She lowered her hand and shook her head. “Fee had scars on his chest. He never said how he got them.”
“But you thought you knew.”
“Mister Underhill, if you’re telling me the truth about any of this rigamarole, please tell me where he is.”
“Your nephew was a major in the Green Berets, and he was a hero,” I said. “He was killed leading a team on a special mission into the DMZ in 1972.”
“Oh, heavens.” She said it twice more. Then she started to cry, softly, without moving in any way. I took a tissue from the box on her dresser and put it into her hands, and she dabbed her eyes.
“So there won’t be any trouble about the money,” I said.
I make an extravagant amount of money from writing, not as much as Sidney Sheldon or Tom Clancy but a lot anyhow, a matter I talk about only with my agent and my accountant. I have no family, and there’s no one to spend it on except myself. I did what I had decided to do on the airplane if I learned conclusively that Fee Bandolier had grown up to be Franklin Bachelor, took my checkbook out of my briefcase, and wrote her a check for five thousand dollars.
“I’ll give you a personal check right now,” I said. “It’s a little irregular, but there’s no need to make you wait for our accounting office to process the papers, and I can get reimbursement from Mr. Bell.”
“Oh, this is wonderful,” she said. “I never dreamed—you know, what makes me so happy is that Fee—”
“I’m happy for you.” I put the check in her hands. She clenched it into the tissue and dabbed her eyes again.
“Judy?” A man in a tight, shiny suit bustled into the room. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here right away, but I was on the phone. Are you all right?”
Before she could answer, he whirled toward me. “Bill Baxter. I run the business office here. Who are you, and what are you doing?”
I stood up and told him my name. “If Mrs. Leatherwood spoke to you about our earlier conversation—”
“You bet she did, and I want you out of here right now. We’re going to my office, and I’m calling the police.”