Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

They were standing at the curb, darkness around them and sounds from the party spilling out from Jarrell’s house.

“Where were you the night he was killed? How did you find out about it?”

Jarrell put both hands on his brother’s shoulders and studied him intently. His eyes seemed puzzled, vulnerable.

Selby said, “Easy now. Want to drop this until later?”

“No, I want to talk to you, Harry. But I’m not sure I’ve got things straight myself. I wasn’t there that night, when he was shot and killed. He asked me to stay with him but” — Jarrell rubbed his forehead again — “I had to get back to school, exams or something. But he was expecting someone, I realize that now. He was worried about it, whoever they were. Maybe it would help if we went over everything, made that call to Breck or the cops in Truckee like you suggested.”

“All right then,” Selby said. “Tomorrow.” For the first time he felt a personal connection with his troubled half brother, a recognition of their relationship that could dissolve the strained civility between them.

“Sure, sure, tomorrow,” Jarrell said, smiling. But it was not an easy smile.

Lights had fallen across them from the apartment. The front door was open and Jennifer was standing there with Sergeant Ledge and Stoltzer behind her.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding,” Jennifer called out, and walked out to join them. Her mood was festive, gay. They stood chatting casually until the canopied bus turned into the street and stopped to pick up Harry Selby.

Selby opened up his duffel bag and took out his father’s diaries. Skipping through the Korean and court-martial entries, he read what Jonas Selby had written the night he had been shot and killed by “prowlers or drunken fool kids,” in Sergeant Ledge’s words.

On that night his father had written: “It’s worth it, goddammit, no matter what Jarrell claims. He can’t be here, he won’t be here is what he means. Never mind that I said please. Too long ago, he says, but they’ll be here, I’m sure of that. It hurts, what Jarrell says. That I can’t be sure, that I forget...”

The cramped, almost illegible words somehow brought him closer to his father and to his brother. He didn’t understand Jonas Selby’s pleas to Jarrell, but he could respond to their concern and dependence, and their helpless involvement with one another. Sitting in the bright, dismal room, the yellowed diaries heaped on a coffee table, Selby found himself envying them. At least they were linked together by something, never mind whether it was love, or some kind of fear. Something.

His own links were only a few faded snapshots. He had pictures of his mother too, taken in the backyard of his grandfather’s home in Davenport, Iowa, under cherry trees, a pretty young woman smiling self-consciously. He had lived there after her death, and he knew the cherry trees well. He had climbed all over them as a boy.

Selby often wondered why he thought so much more about his father than he did his mother. She hadn’t wronged him in any way, that must be it. She had just died. He remembered the funeral and the cut-glass vases of flowers and the smooth ivory feel of her forehead when he’d kissed her before they closed the coffin. The priest had sprinkled holy water over the mourners and Harry Selby’s hands had got wet while he looked carefully through the cards on the funeral flowers for his father’s name. (As a little boy, his mother had lulled him with the story that his father was “off in the army” and would come back to him one day. But after her death his grandfather made it clear his daughter had never been married to Jonas Selby, although she had given his name to their son, Harry.)

After college, Selby tried to find out the details of his father’s military service. A Corporal Thomas Nye at the Department of the Army’s Records Center in Washington, D.C., had provided him with information.

Jonas Selby had served in an intelligence unit in Korea with the rank of sergeant. At the time of his induction (in Peoria, Illinois), he had been unmarried and without dependents. After three years in Korea, Jonas Selby had been reduced to the rank of private and confined to a military stockade near Seoul. From there he had been transferred to an army hospital in Boulder, Colorado, for the treatment of service-related disabilities.

Jonas Selby had then returned to the anonymity of civilian life, and his shadowy profile had faded completely from the files of the United States Army.

The charges against his father had not been specified in Corporal Nye’s reply. A transcript of the court-martial proceedings were still not available. The trial’s referral symbols were K. (Korea), Gen. Crt. (General Court-Martial), Selby, J. — 36663864 (Selby’s serial number), but the material was classified operative-confidential and, as such, could not be disseminated to unauthorized persons.

Not even to his son, Selby had thought bitterly, a son he had never admitted having, or acknowledged in any other way, not until it was too late...

Unable to sleep, Selby put on his topcoat and went out for a walk. The neighborhood was familiar to him from many road trips, stretches of freeway and neon signs near airport hotels and liquor stores, sex shops and topless bars. In older cities there was always the bus station with Norman Rockwell soldiers, more neon, bag ladies, winos and young girls, and in the luncheonette off the waiting room, the steam counters with breaded meatloaf, watery coleslaw and flat, starchy pies.

At an all-night diner he stopped for coffee. Something about the waitress caught his attention. There was nothing unusual about her; she was plump and clean with her hair tied back behind her neck, but she puzzled him for some reason or other.

It was the way she took his order, he realized; no, not quite that, but the way she reached for the Silex when he asked for coffee. She didn’t turn around, just swept an arm back and picked up the glass pot without looking at it. But he couldn’t figure out why that simple gesture should have interested him.

When he returned to his room at the Delta Arms the red light was flashing at the base of his phone. It was his daughter, Shana, on the line.

“Where’ve you been, daddy? I called twice already.”

“I went for a walk. Is something wrong?”

“There’s nothing to be worried about, nothing at all . But Mrs. Cranston, she got all excited and just insisted we call the police, she acts like—”

“Are you all right, Shana?”

“Of course, I just—”

“Is Davey all right?”

“I’m on the other phone, dad,” Davey said. “I’m fine, I saw the car first and I told—”

“Davey, please be quiet. I was talking to daddy.”

“Goddammit, Shana, don’t ever start a conversation telling me Mrs. Cranston had to call the police. Start at the beginning now.”

“I’m sorry, really I am. I didn’t mean to scare you. That was really dumb. But a car was parked up on the logging road tonight, and Davey went up to find out what it was doing there. Tell him, Davey.”

“That’s right, dad. It was about nine o’clock and I heard Blazer barking. So I went up to the top of the meadow, and it was a sports car, sitting there with the lights out. I—”

Shana interrupted him. “It’s where people used to park for beer parties, daddy.”

“They used it for more than that, you know they did, Shana, until daddy and I planted that honeysuckle hedge along the blacktop.”

“Dave, did you get a look at the car?”

“No, it was too dark, dad. But it was low and kind of bulky, I could tell that much, a Corvette or maybe a Porsche. The driver was holding something shiny, binoculars, I think. He must have heard me coming ’cause he started the car and drove off. It was either dark blue or dark red, something like that.”