“Yessir, that’s the operation.”
“What did he do, this man?”
“Do how?”
“Do to get in trouble that they’re looking for him.”
“He didn’t do nothing. He’s innocent.”
“What do they say he did?”
Elroy said gravely, “They say he fired without leave.”
“Did he hit anybody?”
“Yessir, then he run off.”
“Who did he hit?”
“But that’s what I mean. He’s innocent because it ain’t a person he hit. It’s a animal. It was a water buffalo.”
“What’s this joker’s name?”
“They won’t tell me.”
“You’re back in the rear getting reports and you’re in charge of a division. That makes you a major general probably, and they won’t tell you the fellow’s name?”
Elroy seemed to think about this.
“I vaguely recall someone wanted to know what division I was in,” Tilly said. “That wouldn’t have any bearing on the current operation?”
“Nossir,” Elroy said. “And you were in two divisions.”
“You probably remember which.”
Elroy lowered his head and gripped his temples.
Tilly said as if to himself, “Now I’m trying to remember what I told you.”
“Hold on! No hints.”
“They were—”
“Stop, I know it. You were in the Second Division, then you were in the First.”
Tilly didn’t frown, so Elroy knew he’d remembered right, and he smiled. Then Tilly smiled a bit and said, “You got it, citizen. And what do you call the Second Division?”
“The Silent Second.”
“And what do you call the First?”
“You call them the Old Breed.”
“How come these jokers won’t tell the major general who they’re after?”
“It was you said I was a major general. I ain’t. I’m enlisted. I’m on the needenow.”
“The needenow.”
“Like, the basis. Like you say.”
“I see. Tell me when they find him?”
“Yessir,” Elroy said. “Shut the door please, or they won’t tell me squat.”
Elroy meant this. Understandings came to him of the people present yet unseen only when he was in the dark alone.
* * *
• • •
A MONTH LATER, Elroy was sitting in the kitchen figuring his addition tables, and his ma was bent over the sink laundering his reeky Denver Broncos stocking hat, and Tilly was crouched in the doorway untying his work boots when something happened that seemed an appeal from the infinite population of those who preceded us to the people of the present household: the phone rang.
“What the hell?” Elroy said.
Tilly said, “Elroy, language.”
Louisa aimed her chin toward the pantry and the phone. “Is that your idea of a present?”
The phone rang again.
“It sure isn’t,” Tilly said.
“You’re going to spend money we don’t have and not tell me, and I’m supposed to be surprised and delighted? Take off your radioactive boots or don’t come in.”
From TV Elroy knew the protocols of the phone but he’d never answered one. “Our number is top secret,” he said. “Can I pick it up?”
“We don’t have a number, Elroy. Stay away from there.” Tilly said to Louisa with quiet emphasis on each word, “I did not have the line turned on.”
“I sure didn’t,” she said, seeming to believe him now.
Again, the phone rang.
“It can’t ring,” Elroy said. “But it’s ringing.”
They were paralyzed each with his own uncertainty, and Elroy feared that this first and maybe final chance to speak with the people he had known only in his mind would slip away and he said, “Please let me answer.”
Tilly gave him leave by nodding. Elroy scurried to the pantry and shut the door behind him.
Louisa said, “Keep the door open, Elroy,” as the phone rang once more. Each ring might be the last.
Elroy swung the door open again and took the heavy earpiece from the hook and said into the device, “Heflin residence, Elroy speaking.”
The miraculous voice that came into his ear said, “Is this number 18422 Highway Fifty-three, Ramah, New Mexico?”
“Yessir,” Elroy said. He listened a moment. “Yessir,” he said again. “He wants to talk to D. E. Tilly. That’s you, ain’t it? He says to say . . . ‘Dishonest money . . . dwindles away, but . . . whoever gathers money . . . little by little . . . makes it grow.’”
“Drop that phone,” Tilly snapped.
Elroy let the earpiece fall like a live grenade down the mouth of a cave and scrambled to the sink by his ma, fearing Tilly’s sudden tone.
Tilly shot into the pantry and grabbed the earpiece and put it to his head.
The dark kitchen floor was marked by a yellow dusting of uranium ore in the pattern of the lugged bottoms of Tilly’s boots.
He shut the pantry door and said, “This is Tilly.”
The world of souls.
At supper that night Elroy was still in the grip of the miracle, whatever it meant, and when the time came for him to give his thanks he said, “For the ones that come in before us.”
* * *
• • •
TILLY WOULD WEAR for years that same flannel jacket that had belonged to the one called Conrad. Likewise for years he would peel fruit with a folding knife that had belonged to Bobby’s progenitors, left in the back of a drawer on the ranch. Ignorant of how Louisa’s other companions had really looked, he would see them many years later in the guise of strangers: convivial hikers coming his way on desert trails in the Jemez Mountains where he would walk alone when he was old, laughing people in insulated Gore-Tex coats marching with collapsible trekking poles. They never asked for their belongings back, they had left them behind with their previous selves and continued down the snowy path. If he ever met any of those faceless people from Louisa’s time at the ranch before him, he never knew.
* * *
• • •
THE MORNING AFTER THE DAY the phone rang, Louisa was working a comb smeared with oil through her hair when she noticed Tilly’s razor missing. His trimmed socks were missing from the bureau they shared. And his folding knife, from the kitchen windowsill.
He was gone from their lives utterly. He left not a boot print, not a shirt.
He had dematerialized—just as he had first appeared from nothing on the Heflin place with his killer’s eyes, which had looked at her forsaken body as if to touch it could redeem the deaths he had caused, and as if she were not a rag wrung out and dropped but the tree in full flower that he was discovering only at that moment he had come across the country to find; and now on the morning she discovered him gone, Elroy, recognizing immediately the new order of things, looked at her over his breakfast for the first time with that same killer’s cast of eyes, which swore with the zealotry of an eight-year-old that he was never going to forgive her for this: she had arranged it using whatever means for whatever purpose, and with the slow silent manly licking of the yolk of the eggs from his knife, forgoing the effeminacy of toast, he pledged silently by the knife in his mouth to hate her to the end of the earth.
A coffee can sat on the counter, full of crumpled money amounting to $423.
* * *
• • •
IF SHE HAD LONG KNOWN that someday Tilly would take off, with no notice and no trace except whatever cash he would leave them—so that she had all along sequestered a tithe from her wages under the false bottom of her sewing box, and had already decided before it happened that she wouldn’t try to find him—if she had not suspected but known, then why was she surprised
when it really happened? Later, she understood: it had not been her surprise. She had partaken of Elroy’s surprise.
She would take the boy with her to McAlester, Oklahoma, to an apartment where a friend from high school lived. Louisa would get a job in the state penitentiary there. Over the years she would work her way up to the position of administrative coordinator to the Office of Behavioral Clinicians. She would meet a junkie from Pennsylvania who was going straight while in the prison and training to become a welder and learning for the first time to regard his future with hope. He would be paroled.
He would ask to marry her. She would say yes. But she and Tilly would never have properly divorced. She would then make a few unsuccessful stabs at finding Tilly through former employers. An attorney in McAlester would advise she accuse him of desertion, though that would take longer than a regular divorce.
It would be Elroy, age twelve, who would make a project of tracking Tilly down. Beginning with Alabama, he would search the phone books in the stacks of the public library. With sharp pencil on four pages of loose-leaf binder paper, he would compose a list of likely candidates. He would come to know his country by the Tillys in it. The maps of area codes, the place names repeated state by state. The Georgetowns and Franklins and Salems and Bristols. He would walk his bike home cool and collected, and he would hand Louisa this list with the most likely candidate inscribed within a heavy pencil box, Tilly Drilling & Co., in the little town of Vado back in New Mexico in Doña Ana County. He would stand looking into the refrigerator pretending not to listen while she dialed the number. The slow ringing in the receiver would be audible throughout the room.
Then the metallic voice. She would start to say who she was. She would stop and listen. She would say it was good to hear his voice too. She would say she was doing real good and so was Elroy.
Louisa and Elroy would meet Tilly halfway between them, in Amarillo, Texas. They would eat eggs and rye toast at a diner as in old times. In the passing of the jelly jar and the half-and-half, they would all agree to an implicit treaty: no explanations asked, none offered. Elroy, now taller than Louisa but less so yet than Tilly, would smile shyly across the table at him, saying nothing. Tilly would have bought a small drilling rig and made himself some prosperity installing residential water wells. Two men would be working for him part time. He would be saving to buy a second rig.
Not all would be forgiven.
Louisa and Tilly would consummate their divorce before a judge in Tulsa. They would leave the courthouse, and Louisa would tail Tilly’s westward-headed pickup for more than a hundred and fifty miles, willing him to notice her Chevette behind him and pull to the shoulder of the interstate so she could pull over too and get out and confess she’d made a mistake on the desert night when he’d asked to come in. She had said no, and she should have said yes. And she would want him to ask again right there with the eighteen-wheelers shaking the very earth as they passed, so now she could say yes. This time—please—she would say yes. But a Monte Carlo and then a Buick LeSabre would merge between them, and the Chevette would be nearly out of gas, and at Weatherford she would stop and fill up the tank and go back to McAlester and marry the other man.
Her mother would drive up from Lufkin, Texas, for the ceremony. A diffident old woman in a dark dress, her withered eyes made ripe again by pencil and bifocals. The old woman would be introduced to Elroy. She would grin with her invisible lips and would fish in her handbag and give him a silver dollar. Once she would understand he was not Louisa’s own blood, she would ask to have the dollar back.
Years would elapse. Louisa and Tilly would fall out of touch again.
Then Louisa would call him at the office of his drilling business and relate how Elroy, now sixteen, had come into manhood and gone immediately berserk, throwing a chair through the screen of the television when her husband told him to lower the volume while they ate, slugging a teacher in the mouth, dumping Louisa’s laundry onto the highway, his hatred of her like a bomb that had finally gone off, slamming the hood of a car on the hand of another boy in engine-repair class and now expelled from the only high school in McAlester. He had not hidden the drugs he used. He had stolen her husband’s truck on a dare from one of his cronies on the football team and smashed it into the front of an abandoned wood-frame house to see if he couldn’t bring the house down.
Leonard, her husband, would have demanded that she choose. He was in recovery; he couldn’t have Elroy’s drugs in the house. Choose. Elroy or him. One would have to go. He would have made his demand in the kitchen of their two-bedroom rented ranch house with Elroy standing right there fresh out of the shower, dripping, wearing only a towel, with steroid acne on his inflated chest and shoulders and smoking a cigarette and drinking vitamin D chocolate milk from the carton and saying with a smirk, “Ma, don’t listen to this guy. He don’t mean nothing.” She would say on the phone her heart was cattywampus. She had to have a place to live, didn’t she? She could never make the rent here on her own. And she loved Elroy all the time but okay, yes, all right, sometimes she was afraid of him. And didn’t Tilly think they needed right now to get Elroy under the roof of a man he trusted? She didn’t know. She would cry on the phone while he failed to volunteer.
Then she would ask Tilly in plain speech to take custody of Elroy, for at least a while, if he could possibly manage it. She would say, “I don’t want him to turn out a killer.”
Tilly would arrive in McAlester and get out of the pickup sheathed in the dust of three states and open the tailgate, and he and the boy would load and secure and cover with a tarp the few plastic bags of the boy’s worldly belongings while Louisa would stand outside the rented house pruning the plumbagos and crying soundlessly with outrage at what she had authored, how she had found no better way. And the truck would drive off with the man and the boy, leaving her pale, thin, strong, desolate.
Tilly and Elroy would drive through the yellow desert of the Texas panhandle and into the redder one of New Mexico. Then to the boy’s everlasting bewilderment and outrage Tilly would take him not home to Doña Ana County to live with him but up to Albuquerque where he would install Elroy in a residential Catholic boys’ school. There Tilly would pay him weekly visits, and from there Elroy would periodically take the bus south for short stays at Tilly’s spartan house where no framed photographs of anybody would furnish the top of the mantels, only history books and drilling trade magazines, and where the rangy man of his earliest memories, who had brought him water in a dipper in the cot where he slept and who had spoken always with the tone of immediacy and mutual understanding that marked a permanent friend, would have been replaced in the intervening years by this heavier, dark-browed, concealed, and concealing person who would pay for Elroy’s school and board and room and for his clothes and dormitory coffee maker but would not any longer look him in the face frankly and composedly with knowingness in his eyes as in the days of their solidarity.
Elroy would do all right at the school and would finish, despite a charge of simple assault and battery and a second for inciting a public affray, both pled down to probation with the help of a lawyer Tilly would hire. Elroy would enroll at a community college and study aeronautical engineering. He would lose his temper in a dispute over a checkers game with one of his roommates and break the roommate’s jaw and clavicle. He would be convicted of aggravated battery against a household member with great bodily harm, a third-degree felony, and the judge of the Second Judicial District Court in Albuquerque would sentence him to eleven months at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas.
He would leave prison and travel as far as Maine, hoping for the world. He would call Tilly on holidays. When the occasional friend would ask where his mother lived, he would maintain her whereabouts were unknowable, deciding he had been asked about the person named Katerina on his birth certificate and not Louisa, from whom he had received many letters during his bit at Los Lunas, none of which
he had answered, all with the same return address in McAlester from which he had no reason to believe that she since had moved.
He would do six years at Maine State Prison in Thomaston for resisting arrest, reckless conduct, and Class B elevated aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon: a shod foot. The state would release him late in his term. The year would be 2003. He would lust for the world. He would be thirty-one years old. He would lust for hope of any kind. He would visit an army recruiter who after weeks of wrangling would get a waiver allowing him to overlook Elroy’s past criminal convictions. He would enlist and shortly be deployed to Eastern Europe. At a bar in Riga with the boys, a shy waitress in a zebra-print microskirt would say, “Tell me if there’s anything else I can get you, my friend?”
The last two words would have been picked up from an English-dubbed news item about the sales methods of kite vendors on the beaches of Beirut. Elroy wouldn’t know that. He would believe the gap between himself and womankind had been bridged finally by these two words from this woman who spoke them to him and not to the other soldiers and thereby revealed her intention to single him out for love. His conviction regarding her intent to choose him with these words would persuade even her, for a while, who had meant no such endearment.
He would be deployed to Kunduz and take shrapnel in his leg and would lay down a stream of M4 carbine fire killing three hajis and wounding a fourth, who would escape trailing a stream of blood through a dense street of stalls suddenly devoid of local nationals of any age. A skinned ram, still attached to its horns, its flesh aglow within the long veil of its blood, would hang among the stalls. The parrots in cages would squawk, some trying to fly. His carbine fire would explode a yellow kharbouza melon and riddle with bullets the dresses that had glittering beadwork and matching headscarves in scarlet and bright mustard, outfits women in this country would never let a Westerner see them wear. And not one live person would be among the stalls at midday, save the haji running from the live fire of the carbine and trailing his life’s blood.
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