Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“No,” I say, “I been out.”

“Sure. Bad news. The dinks jumped it a few days after you got hit. Sappers got in with grenades. Killed thirty guys, wounded sixty-five more.”

“Oh, fuck.”

He shaves me expertly, a man who knows what he’s doing.

“Brophy?” I say.

“I don’t know. They got a lot of officers; they hit the command bunkers. I know they got the CO and a bunch of grunts. Poor guys. Probably the last Marines to die in the Land of Bad Things. They say there’ll be a big investigation. Careers ended, a colonel, maybe even a general will go down. You’re lucky you got out, Gunny.”

Loss. Endless loss. Nothing good came out of it. No happy endings. We went, we lost, we died, we came home to — to what?

I feel old and tired. Used up. Throw me out. Kill me. I don’t want to live. I want to die and be with my people.

“Corpsman?” I grab his arm.

“Yeah?”

“Kill me. Hit me with morphine. Finish me. Everything you got. Please.”

“Can’t do it, Gunny. You’re a goddamned hero. You’ve got everything to live for. You’re going to get the Navy Cross. You’ll be the Command Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps.”

“I hurt so bad.”

“Okay, Gunny. I’m done. Let me give you some Mike. Only a little, though, to make the pain go away.”

He hits me with it. I go under and the next time I awake, I’m in full traction in San Diego, where I’ll spend a year alone, which will be followed by a year in a body cast, also alone.

But now the morphine hits and thank God, once again, I go under.

The light awakened him, then noise. The door cracked open and Sally Memphis walked in.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

“Oh, Christ, what time is it?”

“Mister, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning and you ought to be with your wife and daughter, not out here getting drunk.”

Bob’s head ached and his mouth felt dry. He could smell himself, not pleasant. He was still in yesterday’s clothes and the room had the stench of unwashed man to it.

Sally bustled around, opening window shades. Outside, the sun glared; the three-day blow had lasted only one and then was gone. Idaho sky, pure diamond blue, blasted through the windows, lit by sun. Bob blinked, hoping the pain would go away but it wouldn’t.

“She was operated on at seven A.M. for her collarbone. You should have been there. Then you were supposed to pick me up at the airport at nine-thirty. Remember?”

Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of Bob’s few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who now ran the Bureau’s New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New Orleans district attorney’s office that fall; but she’d come here out of her and her husband’s love of Bob.

“I had a bad night.”

“I’ll say.”

“It ain’t what it appears,” he said feebly.

“You fell off the wagon but good, that’s what it appears.”

“I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I had to go.”

“You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never are wrong, are you?”

“I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don’t happen to be wrong on this one. Here, lookey here.”

He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three-quarters gone, and walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.

“There,” he said. “No drunk could do that. It’s gone, it’s finished, it won’t never touch these lips again.”

“So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were hopeless on the phone.”

“Nope. Sorry, don’t remember that.”

“Why the booze?”

“I had to remember something that happened to me long ago. I drunk for years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again.”

“So what did you learn on your magical mystery tour?”

“I didn’t learn nothing yet.”

“But you will,” she said.

“I know where to look for an answer,” he finally said.

“And where would that be?”

“There’s only one place.” She paused.

“Oh, I’ll bet this one is rich,” she said. “It just gets better and better.”

“Yep,” he said. “I don’t never want to disappoint you, Sally. This one is really rich.”

“Where is it?”

“Where a Russian put it. Where he hid it twenty-five years ago. But it’s there, and by God, I’ll dig it out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s in my hip. The bullet that crippled me. It’s still there. I’m going to have it cut out.”

It was dark and the doctor was still working. Bob found him out back of the Jennings place, down the road from the Holloways, where he’d had to help a cow through a difficult birth. Now he was with a horse called Rufus whom the Jennings girl, Amy, loved, although Rufus was getting on in years. But the doctor assured her that Rufus was fine; he would just be getting up slower these days. He was an old man, and should be treated with the respect of the elderly. Like that old man over there, the doctor said, pointing to Bob.

“Mr. Swagger,” said Amy. “I’d heard you’d left these parts.”

“I did,” he said. “But I came back to see my good friend Dr. Lopez.”

“Amy, honey, I’ll send over a vitamin supplement I want you to add to Rufus’s oats every morning. I bet that’ll help him.”

“Thank you, Dr. Lopez.”

“It’s all right, honey. You run up to the house now. I think Mr. Swagger wants a private chat.”

“ ’Bye, Mr. Swagger.”

“Good-bye, sweetie,” said Bob, as the girl skipped back to the house.

“Thought those reporters chased you out of this place for good,” the doctor said.

“Well, I did too. The bastards are still looking for me.”

“Where’d you go to cover?”

“A ranch up in Idaho, twenty-five miles out of Boise. Just temporarily, waiting for all this to blow over.”

“I knew you were something big in the war. I never knew you were a hero.”

“My father was a hero. I was just a sergeant. I did a job, that’s all.”

“Well, you ran a great lay-up barn. I wish you’d come back into the area, Bob. There’s no first-class outfit this side of Tucson.”

“Maybe I will.”

“But you didn’t come all this way to talk about horses,” said Dr. Lopez.

“No, Doc, I didn’t. In fact, I flew down this afternoon. Took the two-ten American from Boise to Tucson, rented a car, and here I am.”

Bob explained what he wanted. The doctor was incredulous.

“I can’t just do that. Give me a reason.”

“I am plumb tired of setting off airport alarms. I want to get on an airplane without a scene.”

“That’s not good enough. I have an oath, as well as a complex set of legal regulations, Bob. And let me point out one other thing. You are not an animal.”

“Well,” said Bob, “actually I am. I am a Homo sapien. But I know you are the best vet in these parts and you have operated on many animals, and most of ’em are still with us today. I remember you nursed Billy Hancock’s paint through two knee operations, and that old boy’s still roaming the range.”

“That was a good horse. It was a pleasure to save that animal.”

“You never even charged him.”

“I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months, Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the next century.”