Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“Nick Memphis.”

“Nick, it’s Wally Deaver.”

A little burst of excitement went off in Nick’s chest.

“Wally, Christ, how are you? You got the pictures?”

“Yeah,” said Wally and Nick didn’t like the tone in his voice.

“It’s not him?” he asked quickly. “That’s not the guy you talked to in Cartagena? That’s not Eduardo Lanzman of the Salvadoran National Police?”

“Shit, Nick. That’s the terrible thing of it. I wish I could say one way or the other. I wish I could just tell you. But…I don’t know. I was only with Eduardo during the meetings which lasted maybe a day or so. Two days max. And a bunch of us went out to dinner, had a few drinks. I can’t say I knew him well. We exchanged cards, you know, the way cops do. Now these pictures – ”

“Yeah.”

“Nick, death doesn’t do anybody any favors. Maybe this is the same guy. Maybe it isn’t. It could be. It might be. Maybe it is. But… maybe it isn’t. You didn’t have the passport photo?”

“It didn’t look a goddamned thing like him.”

“What about any corroborating evidence?”

“Nothing. It all checked out, at least as near as we can tell. You know I can’t get budget to go down there. And the Salvadorans, they say they don’t know him at all, except that this is through our formal liaison with them which is run by the State Department, which means it’s got to go through so many layers – ”

“Yeah, that’s why I bailed out, Nick. So many layers. Look, Nick, to be fair, it’s a pretty dead horse without corroborating evidence. I mean, in good conscience, I couldn’t go before a grand jury and – ”

“Yeah, sure, I understand.”

“Great.”

“But tell me this. It could be. Just maybe, just somehow? At the outside.”

“Okay, Nick. Yeah, yeah. It could be.”

“Great, Wally.”

“But Nick. Don’t bet your career on it.”

“Sure,” said Nick. “I won’t.”

But he realized he already had.

She was rebandaging him.

“You must be a very tough guy, Sergeant Swagger. Looks to me like there isn’t a weapon made they haven’t tried out on your hide. You’re a one-man proving ground.”

“They had some fun with me, ma’am.”

“I count – what, four gunshot wounds? Old gunshot wounds, that is. As opposed to the two new gunshot wounds, which resulted in three holes. The hole total comes out to – five? Six? You’re a piece of Swiss cheese, Sergeant.”

“I was only hit three times. Twice the first tour, none the second, then the bad one, the bullet in the hip that ended the third tour. They had to glue and wire the whole gizmo back together again. Don’t know how they did such a thing. I thought I was set for the wheelchair my whole life. And that one old hole isn’t a bullet.”

“What is it?”

“You’re not going to believe this. It’s from a curtain rod.”

“Oh, now there’s a new weapon. Your wife, I presume, and I’ll bet you gave her very good reason.”

He laughed.

“My aunt. My mother’s sister. A sweet woman. I was helping her in the farmhouse. 1954. I was eight. She lost her balance and the curtain rod she was hanging fell and she fell on top of it and it went through my side. It didn’t hurt much. Bled a lot, didn’t hurt much.”

“I’ll bet.”

“That was before my daddy died. The year before. It was a happy year, I remember. Now let me ask you: How long before you think I’ll be able to get out of here? The longer I’m here the more danger I’m putting you in.”

“Another few weeks. Don’t worry. The neighbors have seen men live here before. I’ve been around the block a few times myself.”

He just nodded blankly. This didn’t please him, though he didn’t want to face it.

“How long has it been?” she said.

Since when? he wondered.

“You don’t even know what it’s called anymore? You know. With a woman. Wo-man. Female.”

“Oh, that? I don’t know.”

“A month? A year? Ten years?”

“Not ten years. More than a year. I’m not sure.”

“You could live without it that easily?”

“I had other things to keep me busy.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He paused, considering it.

“I didn’t want the complications. Someone said, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ ”

“Ann Landers?”

“No,” he said earnestly, “it was some old guy called Thoreau. He went and lived by himself, too, as I understand it. Anyway. I wanted to simplify. No wants, no needs, no hungers. Only rifles. Crazy as hell now that I think of it.”

“So you went off and became Henry Thoreau of Walden, Arkansas?” Julie said.

“I was at my best with a rifle in my hand. I always loved rifles. So I decided to live in such a way that the rifle would be all I needed. And I succeeded.”

“Were you happy up there in your trailer in the mountains without any people?”

“I didn’t know it then. I suppose now that I was. I was raised and then trained not to think a lot about how I feel.”

It was twilight of the third day since he’d been awake. The sun suffused the room with an orange glow. The quality of light was almost liquid and held everything it touched in perfect serenity. Her face had acquired a grave look in this fantastic light; and he loved the way she had of slyly making him see how ridiculous he could be. She seemed like some kind of angel to him, so radiant a savior that he could not hold her strong gaze and instead looked out the window, to where the mountains stood like a savage old bear’s teeth on the rim of the earth. He remembered looking at her picture in the boonies. Donny always had it with him.

“Why is it men like you always have to be so alone?” she asked. “Why do you want to live by yourself and contrive situations under which you can go against everybody to prove how smart and tough and brave you are?”

Bob had no answer.

“You see, you make it so terrible for us,” she said. “For the women. Because normal men want to be like you, they learn about you from movie versions of you, and they try for that same laconic spirit, that Hemingway stoicism. They manufacture themselves in your image but they don’t have the guts or the power to bring it off. So they just exile themselves from us, pretending to be you and to have your power, and we can never reach them. Are you aware that Donny was scared every single day? He was so scared. He was no hero. He was a scared kid, but he believed in you.”

“It doesn’t matter if he was scared. He did his job; that made him a man. That made him as much man as there is.”

“I’d rather have a little less man, who is alive now and could sleep with me, and be father to the children I never had and never will have. His being a ‘man’ didn’t do me a hell of a lot of good. It’s the same craziness that makes these poor Indian boys cut each other up on Saturday night. What do they get out of it, I wonder?”

“It can’t be explained,” he said. “It can be foolish as all get-out, yes, ma’am. It doesn’t make much sense. But I was just taught to hurt no man except the man who hurt me and mine. I have no other star to steer by. That and to do my duty as I understand it. If I followed those two rules, I’d be okay.”

It was so quiet you’d have thought it was the last second before a nuclear bomb was to go off, ending life on this earth. But instead, through the metal walls of the trailer, there came the shriek of a child.

Something came into her eyes and onto her face that he’d never seen before; it was pain.

“And I suppose the joke is, none of us care about that kind of man, the kind that you want to be. What we want is the kind that would stick around and be there the next morning. Mow the grass. Bring home a paycheck. That kind of man. And I see how funny that is now,” she said, her anguish suddenly palpable. “You come in here, and I care for you, patch you up, and hide your car and get myself so deep into this I can never, ever get out, and never, ever have a normal life…and you don’t care. You have to go off. And be a ‘man.’ ”