Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

A case can be made: he snapped. He was a fugitive on the edge of rational control, his mind wasn’t working properly, and he saw that he had to act or wake up on death row. In a panic, he did that. Swagger thought: I suppose that makes sense, at least as much sense as anything, even if it contradicts his basic character.

But what happened next is even more peculiar and out of character. Why did Oswald walk to the prone body and fire a last shot point-blank into the head? You might say execution-style, but that would be wrong. It wasn’t style, it was execution.

It seems to have attracted little attention, but it puzzled Swagger deeply. He might concede that a fleeing man in a panic with no impulse control and abject fear for his life would draw and shoot. Almost certainly, he would turn and walk away rapidly. He is killing to live.

That is not what happened. Instead of turning, Oswald deliberately closed the ten feet of distance between them, bent over the fallen man, and delivered the brain shot at such close range that he could see the face as he drove the bullet into the head, see the spew of blood and the fall across the body of that utter stillness that marks the dead from the living. Why? It makes no sense in terms of his situation, and it really makes no sense in terms of his politics and previous behavior.

He never hated JFK. He wasn’t a punisher, a psychopath, a coup de grace giver, a scalper, a Bushido warrior who took the skull knot of his fallen adversary. His killing never had that personal edge of contempt. Yet in this instance, he goes the extra effort to lean over and deliver the final expression of contempt with the brain shot at close range.

Why?

The next day was the first stop on what Swagger thought of as the Hugh-Lon Grand Tour. From Georgetown, he traveled to Hartford and went through birth records, finding out that indeed a Hugh Aubrey Meachum was born in 1930, to Mr. David Randolph Meachum and his wife, the former Rose Jackson Dunn, both of whom listed their address as American Embassy, Paris, France. He found Lon as well, born five years earlier to Jeffery Gerald Scott and his wife, the former Susan Marie Dunn, address Green Hills Ranch, Midland, Texas. Evidently, the Dunn sisters preferred that their beloved Hartford OB-GYN deliver their children in the comforting confines of Hartford Episcopalian Hospital.

On then to New Haven, mostly decayed old city but part of it medieval university, with real ivy on the towers and buildings clotted with elm and oak, the whole thing a delusion of propriety and yet oddly comforting. He didn’t bother with Yale itself. Who’d cooperate with a cranky geezer with a cowboy accent and boots, who looked like Clint Eastwood on a bad-hair day? It probably intimidated him a little too, maybe the only thing that ever had.

The public library was more accommodating; it had bound copies of the Yale Daily News that yielded information without attitude, and paging through the lost and forgotten record of elite success on the gloried fields of New Haven had a weird feel, as if he were on a different planet so far from the squalor of his own upbringing in the hills of Polk County, Arkansas. But Yale in the forties: what a glorious place it must have been, as half the faces later achieved, under the camouflage of more chin and less hair, national distinction of some form or other. Of the cousins, Lon Scott was by far the more outstanding, particularly as a fullback and linebacker for the Bulldogs. Many old photos showed that particular form of American male beauty, the square, symmetrical face, the strong nose and jaw, the ease of smile and warmth of eye. Confidence: it was born into this man as surely as his blond hair and the aquiline blade of his nose, broken once to great dramatic effect on some ball field somewhere. Swagger remembered Lon – then calling himself John Thomas Albright – stuffed in his hole on the ridge over Hard Bargain Valley in the desolate Ouachitas of 1993, head destroyed by the energy of Nick Memphis’s six-hundred-yard shot. It came to that? Yes, it did. So sad. Three touchdowns against Harvard, led the league in points scored (few field goals in those days except by the rare drop kick), to say nothing of his spring glories, where, for four years running, he won the Ivy rifle championships in standing and prone. It was too bad the war couldn’t have lasted a little longer, for Lon’s skills at riflery and football would have done the American forces good wherever he served.

There was much less of Hugh five years later. He’d been no macho jock dominating the back pages of the Daily, only a sub on the Bulldog basketball five. Besides the cage mediocrity (best game: eight points against Brown his senior year), he appeared in only one other notice, his election to the board of the Yale Review, though Bob couldn’t force himself to look that up and see Hugh’s undergraduate poetry. Hugh was smarter: he graduated with cum laude honors; Lon did not.

Back in Washington, Swagger had the entire fifties-sixties run of the National Rifle Association’s American Rifleman publication shipped to his hotel room off an Internet purchase. He spent nights going through the volumes, tracking Lon’s early run of brilliant victories in competitive shooting at the national level, even finding a picture of Lon standing with a trophy exactly where Bob stood with the same trophy twenty-five years or so later. Bob had no father to stand behind him, but Lon’s beamed proudly from behind his so-accomplished son, who, in just a few years, he would paralyze from the waist down.

By day, at the Library of Congress, Bob combed the gun magazines of the same fifties-sixties for Lon’s work as a writer, as an inveterate reloader and experimenter, as a rifle intellectual, if such a thing existed, and saw that he was as revered as Jack O’Connor, Elmer Keith, and the others of that golden age. Bob could find no mention of the paralyzing accident, or the supposed “death” in 1965, but after a several-year interval, the byline John Thomas Albright began to appear and did so steadily for the next twenty-five years.

That left one more stop: a visit to Warren, Virginia, near Roanoke, where Lon “died.” Swagger learned there only what he already knew: the death was a thin counterfeit, all the documents forged, all the newspaper accounts based on a funeral-parlor press release. The body, naturally, had been cremated, the ashes scattered.

Suddenly, there was no place left to go. No one was following him. Nobody was cyber-mining him. Nobody was trying to kill him. It seemed that when he had lost Hugh’s scent, Hugh had lost his, even if it wasn’t clear whether Hugh Meachum existed.

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” writes the great Russian novelist Nabokov. Well, we’ll see about that.

I am undisputedly a murderer, but my prose style has been abraded of its sparkle, if there was ever sparkle to begin with, by four decades of filing largely unread administrative reports, a few research papers, too many after-action reports. My daily vodka intake hardly helps matters, nor does the arbitrariness of my memory. Speak, memory, I command; it responds with vulgarity. The issue is whether my old and creaky imagination will be stimulated by recollection and at least propel my words to the level of readability, or whether this record will disintegrate into drivel and incoherence. That would be a shame. I have much to tell.

For though I’m a dismal writer, I’m a great murderer. I’ve never pulled a trigger, but I’ve sent hundreds, maybe thousands, to their deaths in that bureaucratic intelligence-agency way: I’ve planned and authorized assassinations, raids, and commando assaults, the necessary by-product of which is murder. I supervised Phoenix for a year in Vietnam and made a jaunty figure with a boonie hat and a Swedish submachine gun slung under my arm, even if I never fired the damned thing, which was annoyingly heavy. Phoenix probably killed at least fifteen thousand, including some who were actually guilty. I put together and managed from close at hand all manner of paramilitary black operations, involving every sin known to man. Then I went home and slept in a warm bed in a very nice home in Georgetown or Tan Son Nhut. You’re probably right to despise me. But you don’t know the half of it.