by John Lawton
‘No, Mr Raines. Not what you’re thinking. No one murdered Marty.’
‘Natural causes, then?’
‘If you can call cancer induced by Agent Orange, and all the other filth we’re tipping onto the jungle over there, natural—then yes, Marty died of natural causes. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor at Christmas. Our doctors gave him three months. He lived six. I suppose I should be grateful for that. No, Marty wasn’t murdered, but he was killed all the same. Vietnam killed him as surely as if he’d stepped on a land mine.’
And I felt as if I’d just walked into a field of them. The maid let me off the hook. Brought the two of us iced tea. I strung out a few sips for a minute or more and then played my hunch.
‘It may well be Vietnam that brings me here, Mrs Fawcett.’
‘Vietnam? You were in Vietnam?’
‘No I wasn’t . . .’
‘Of course. You’re not that generation, are you? Marty was twenty-one. You’re nearer thirty I suppose. When you were draft age it was all so low-key, wasn’t it? Something odd going on in Laos that I could never quite understand or the President could never quite explain.’
‘I’m thirty-one as it happens. I’m guessing that this has something to do with the war. I don’t know what. And all I’m doing is following clues.’
‘You have a clue?’ she said as though she thought I hadn’t.
‘The only lead I have is a man who calls himself Broken Arrow. I don’t even know his real name. I don’t know the first thing about him.’
‘Broken Arrow,’ she mused. ‘As in the Jeff Chandler film?’
My turn to feel stupid again. I’d made nothing of the name. I could see it now, even as she said it.
‘I’d say that that was a film about a warrior who wanted peace, wouldn’t you? Jeff Chandler as Cochise. He looked gorgeous, didn’t he? Hardly believable as an Indian, though.’
Of course I’d seen the film. Lois and me. A night out while the old man babysat in ’51 or ’52. Jimmy Stewart and Chandler trying for peace between the white man and the Apache.
‘This man—’
‘You mean Broken Arrow?’
‘Yes. He met with Mel Kissing shortly before he was killed. He mentioned two names. Your son’s was one and the other was the New Nineveh Nine. Does the New Nineveh Nine mean anything to you, Mrs Fawcett?’
She got up again, went to the mantelpiece and took a plain black-framed photograph off the end. It was tiny, about as small as a postcard. Seemed almost odd to have framed it at all. It was group of men. A formal, posed shot of ten guys in uniform. Beyond that almost impossible to tell.
‘It’s the only photograph of Marty and his friends I have. He sent me nothing once he’d got to Vietnam. Letters at first, but no photographs. And then the letters stopped. And then suddenly he was home. It all happened so fast. These are the New Nineveh Nine, Mr Raines. Marty and his friends in training at boot camp. Marty is third from the left, front row.’
I’d guessed right. So far, so good.
‘Did Marty ever tell you their names?’
She shook her head.
‘No. As I said it’s all I’ve got. I know Marty emerged as team leader, that was his nature after all, and they made him up to corporal when they shipped out. But, again as I said, he was gone only to be back. His tour was over so quickly. I’d expected him to be gone a year. It was a matter of months. Don’t ask me how many. He went back to work—he’d worked briefly in my husband’s business after college and before the draft—and it was as though he’d never been gone. He no more talked about his war than my father talked about his time in France in 1918. Life went back to normal. Until he got ill. Then nothing was the same.’
‘Could I get this copied?’
She lit up another cigarette, blew another ponderous trail of smoke.
‘Why not? And as tomorrow’s Saturday if you drop the photograph off my husband will be home. He and Marty were close. Who knows. Perhaps there are things he could tell you that only a father would know?’
I slipped the photograph into my pocket.
‘Do take good care of it, Mr Raines. It’s all I’ve got of Marty now. A part of all I’ve got. If you see what I mean.’
I drove into downtown Chicago. I found a small photographic shop in the Loop, a two-room shop nestling right under the L tracks. A window full of dusty adverts for Kodak, and carefully dusted, lovingly cared-for cameras, all the way from tripod and bellows to 35 mm. Inside a man of seventy or so was replacing the hood on a pre-war Rolleiflex. A small array of tiny screwdrivers laid out on a sheet of baize, a magnifying glass lodged in one eye like a monocle. I put Carrie Fawcett’s group shot in front of him.
‘Can you copy this postcard for me? I don’t have the negative.’
He picked it up. Didn’t look at the image, turned over the frame and looked at the back.
‘Sure. I can make an inter-neg. But I’d have to break the seal on the frame. You want it good as new?’
‘Yes—and if possible I’d like the copy enlarged.’
‘Sure, a little time, a little money. Be tomorrow morning—that OK?’
I told him it was, drove straight around the corner to the Bismarck Hotel and checked in for the night. I sat in my room, ordered room service and flipped through the TV channels and ordered more room service. Nothing would have induced me to venture out into downtown Chicago on foot. It was too soon. It was less than a year. As far as I was concerned Chicago still burned. I wondered if Chicago felt the same about me.
In the morning I called in the photoshop around eleven. The old man came out of the back room clutching a ten by eight blow-up of Carrie Fawcett’s postcard.
‘We got lucky, son. Your “postcard” turned out to be a contact print. You know what that is?’
‘Sure.’
‘Whoever took this worked on an old plate camera—five by four negative. Normally, if I tried to copy and enlarge from thirty-five millimetre you’d get a kind of grainy finish—kind of what happens when you photograph a photograph. But you can see the buttons on these boys’ jackets.’
He turned the picture to me. There was Marty, third from the left and the features of all his buddies resolved into focus.
‘Speakin’ of whoever took it. The man is in shot. You see that black line snaking out of the foreground?’
He traced a line up the shot with his finger.
‘It’s a remote trigger for the shutter. Leads right to our photographer. The black guy on the far right.’
I followed the snake. It led to a grinning—they were all grinning—huge black face, set on a thick neck, on a chest three feet across. He was several years older than the other boys in this picture but that explained why there were ten in the New Nineveh Nine. This guy was wearing sergeant’s stripes. It was easy to imagine the scene in Georgia, a day or two before they were all shipped out—Sarge lines ’em up in front of the camera, and the kids get sentimental: C’mon Sarge, we want you in this shot too.’ So Sarge rigs up his remote, steps into shot and becomes one of the boys. But, then that was his nature. He’d been no different when I knew him as plain Maurice ‘Mouse’ Kylie back in Lubbock. Two hundred and fifty pounds of fun, and one of less than half a dozen black kids I’d grown up with. I’d not seen Mouse in more than ten years. Not since his going away party in 1958, the day before he enlisted in the army. It was hardly believable then. Mouse just didn’t seem the type, but from everything I’d heard from Lois and Huey over the years he’d made a go of it. Sergeant Mouse.
‘Y’OK, son? You looked to be miles away.’
I was. I paid the man and left.
I was sitting in the car in West Rogers Park for about five minutes, listening to rain pour down on the roof. One of those sudden, torrential summer storms. At ten I gave up and dashed for the Fawcetts�
�� front door, hunched over my bag, wanting to keep the photograph dry at all costs.
I was expecting to see Alice, the Fawcetts’ maid, but when the door opened there stood a big guy, my height and a lot heavier, aged about fifty and wearing a suit and tie. Saturday morning and the guy was in a suit and tie.
He stepped across the threshold, indifferent to the rain, stuck out his right hand, palm up.
‘The photograph,’ was all he said.
‘Mr Fawcett, I’m—’
‘The photograph.’
I fumbled around with my bag, rain rolling off me in rivulets, and found the framed postcard. He snatched it off me with one hand, stuck the other, finger first, into my chest.
‘You ever come here again, you ever bother my wife again, you ever call, you ever write and I will have you run out of town on a rail. You understand me, Mr Raines?’
‘Mr Fawcett, I’m—’
Never could get to the end of that sentence. He swapped the prodding finger for the flat of his hand and shoved me down his drive, blow by blow, foot by foot, phrase by phrase, me staggering backwards fighting to keep my balance.
‘Leave. Leave now. Go back to where you came from and do not bother us again. My son died for his country, Mr Raines. Leave us in peace!’
It was turn and run or let him push me over. I ran. I sat in the car and dripped puddles onto the floor. I wiped the wet hair from my forehead and reached for the ignition. Before I could turn the key, the passenger door was yanked open and a slim body in a transparent plastic rain cape slipped in beside me. Her mascara was running and I had the romantic notion that it was only the rain that hid her tears.
‘Drive around the block,’ she said. ‘My husband thinks I’m taking a nap. We’ll have a few minutes that’s all.’
I glanced in the rear-view as we rounded the first corner, half-expecting to see a fat man running after us and ruining a good suit in the process. He wasn’t.
‘George got very angry,’ Carrie Fawcett began. ‘I thought he’d welcome anything that shed light on what Marty went through over there. But he just exploded. “What were you thinking of?” and “Good God, woman, what have you done, what have you done?” Called me stupid. Married twenty-five years and he’s never called me that before.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. He’ll pay for it. Did you copy the photo?’
‘Yes.’
‘You keep it. You do what you have to do. But when you find out what happened, I don’t think I want to know. George is right about that. Marty died for his country. Maybe not much of a hero, but a hero all the same. My hero. I’d like to hang onto that. I’d like to hang onto as much of my son as I can. I don’t want to know—whatever happened.’
‘Whatever happened?’
‘Whatever. All I know is . . . something happened.’
It was a considered phrase, she’d put a lot of power into two words. Eyes not looking at me, both hands chopping down in the air toward her lap as though she was taking the measure of some invisible object.
‘Something happened?’
‘I know. It sounds meaningless. But that’s what I know, something happened. That’s all I know. Something happened. I heard George saying to Marty, last spring, not long after Marty came home, “These things happen, these things happen in war”.’
‘But you don’t know what they were talking about?’
‘Mr Raines, if I knew I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you in the middle of a thunderstorm while my husband pushes my marriage to the edge of divorce. Of course I don’t know.’
§
I had more than a ‘feeling’ this time. Something that soon coalesced. Could not help thinking that a ’69 tan Ford I’d caught sight of in the rear-view had been there on and off for a while, and that, while I wasn’t sure of the make or year, the car that been behind me for a spell on the way in had been tan too. It was too obvious where I was going—back out to O’Hare. Who would be driving a rental out to the swamps of Wisconsin? O’Hare in all likelihood was where they’d picked me up in the first place—if they had. It was impossible to lose them, and, besides, I’d never had to do this sort of thing before. The most amateurish thing about this whole amateurish set-up was me.
I got lucky. I pulled out past an eighteen-wheel oil tanker on the freeway, expecting the tan Ford follow, only to see the tanker go into a skid that jack-knifed it. The noise was deathly. A gut-wrenching screech of brakes and rubber. The guy in front braked so hard at the sound of it I had to swing past him to avoid rear-ending. I looked in the mirror. The tanker was sliding towards the guy I’d just overtaken. It bumped him right off the road, spun through one hundred and eighty degrees and skewed to a halt. The road was blocked. The tanker sprawled full width on the highway with two of its tires blown out.
I didn’t know how long I’d have. I roared into O’Hare with my foot on the floor, annoyed the shit out of the rental guy by rushing him through the paperwork, and ran for the terminal. I went to two airline desks and booked tickets for Atlanta and Seattle on my American Express. Then I went to a third and bought a ticket to Lubbock via Dallas for cash. This left me about twenty minutes before boarding. Maybe enough time for whoever to find me, maybe not.
I stood in a payphone booth, my back to the concourse, called Lubbock collect and got Huey.
‘Do you still see anything of Gabriel Kylie?’
‘Sometimes. He works in a body shop out near the airport. He’s waiting on the draft, just like me.’
Huey laughed, trying to take the sting out of what we both knew was true. Eighteen years old and life and death were a government-run lottery.
‘Could you go see him, ask him if he knows where his cousin Mouse is stationed now?’
‘No need. I saw Mouse only a couple of days ago. You can ask him yourself.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Mouse is out of the Army. He got home last year. I think it was March or April. If you’d been back you’d know. He took his discharge and opened a studio downtown.’
I didn’t ask what kind of studio. I was more interested in why Mouse was out of the forces. I thought he was in for life. A twenty-year man. Then a pension at forty-something. Then endless years of sitting around reminiscing like a cracker-barrel philosopher. Job done, money earned, glory gone.
‘We all did,’ Huey said, when I’d rambled out my thoughts. ‘But he’s home. I know his mom was surprised. Mouse just got off the bus one night, right in front of their old house, gave her a hug and said he’d never leave her alone again. No letter, no phone call. Just turned up with everything he owned in the bag over his shoulder. Way Gabe tells it, he and Mouse spent the next night out back with a bottle of whiskey and a can of gas and drank themselves stupid and burned Mouse’s uniform. Gabe told me ’cause he was scared. He’s none too smart if you recall. Got it into his head they’d done something illegal, that maybe burning a soldier’s uniform was like burning the flag. Y’know?’
For all I knew it probably was illegal.
I gave Huey the flight time and told him to meet me at the airport.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What are brothers for?’
Six hours and several packets of peanuts later I found myself looking around for the unreliable little runt, and for a moment or two completely missing my stepmother.
She was parked across from the exit. Station wagon pulled up in ‘dropoff/pickup only’. Shoulders back, one foot pressed against the car, arms folded, a billowing red blouse, stretch jeans, neat little two-tone cowboy boots and billowing red hair. She was forty, and looked younger than me. Thank God, for all her jeans and boots she was not one of those Western women who aped the men to the point of wearing over-large Stetsons so they looked like Calamity Jane. She knew her assets and only the fiercest sun would make her hide the hair.
She draped both arms around my neck and kissed me.
‘Aw—he’s got his own life to lead.’
Kissed me again.
‘Now, say “hello Lois” and “you sure are a sight for sore eyes”.’
I did. She was. From the day she entered our lives I doubt that I had seen a woman as beautiful as Lois this side of the silver screen.
She sashayed round to the driver’s side, walking like she’d got oil wells in her backyard—well, she had—yanked open the door and revved the engine.
Lois never thought I came ‘home’ often enough. Never said so. But I knew it. It was implicit in the almost earnest way she brought me up to date on family and town gossip. By the time we got out to Bald Eagle I knew not who was screwing who—that was not Lois’s idea of small talk—but whose cattle were thriving, whose were sick, who’d just bought a state-of-the-art John Deere, how the price of beef and oil and cotton and sorghum were holding up, and how most of my school friends were faring. Most of them, needless to say, were married, had kids, and were working locally. Some, the ambitious or the feckless, were on their second marriages before I’d gotten around to my first.
We pulled up in the shadow of the mountain. I have never been able to see what my father did to it as anything but monstrous. A great glass zitty on the face of Mother Nature. He’d even given us a choice. You could climb forty-eight steps to the lobby or take a glass and chrome elevator. As a kid wild horses would not have dragged me into the elevator. It was, not that I would have known to use the term, vulgar. Today I was bushed. Flying had drained me. I let Lois lead me up the mountain, out onto the deck, and stick a cold beer in my hand.
‘Where is Huey, by the bye?’
Lois settled herself back in a recliner. It must have been around eight in the evening. A heat-hazy July evening and not a hint of a breeze. If we sat long enough I’d catch a West Texas sunset for the first time in a very long while.
‘Out. I wouldn’t rightly know where. Anywhere out of your father’s way, I guess.’
‘Are things that bad between them?’