Not my war. A useless, nasty war, and nothing to do with me.
Eleven years of grueling, bitter combat, ending in nothing. Uneasy detente. Contested status. They call themselves the Republic of Texas, but we keep their star on our flag. We created the Special Economic Zone to protect our oil interests in the Gulf of Mexico, and they formed the Gulf Irregulars to protect theirs. Status quo antebellum.
I was shaking. My arms were shaking. I drove back slowly to the hotel, my hands at ten and two, not even putting in a tape. Eyes on the road, deep breaths, hoping and praying for no checkpoints. I didn’t know what I would do.
Putting a bullet in a man’s leg. Leaving carnage behind me. In the hotel parking lot I sat in the car a minute or more, hands on my knees, trying to get my head right. Work your case, I said to myself. Solve your goddamn case.
Someone was on the phone in the horseshoe driveway of the Capital City Crossroads. There was a copse of tall hedges to the right side of the door, out of range of the streetlights, and someone was hidden by one of them, talking loudly and with emotion into a cellular phone.
I could hear this private conversation as I came across the parking lot, and my instinct was to veer to the right, keep my head down, get to my room as soon as I could. It was 9:20. I had half an hour until Bridge called, and I wanted that time. I needed it. I needed to sit in the room with my hands on the desk until my body quit the shivering it had started up with. The tension of the confrontation at Slim’s—the buck and kick of the firearm. I wanted time for all of it to sluice out of me and leave me empty.
“No, but that’s just not—” said the voice. It was Martha. My white friend from the breakfast area, from the pool. “That makes it very difficult for me to—no—wait, what? No. Wait…”
I had walked past her. She had not seen me. I stopped at the threshold of the building, and the automatic door sensed my approach and whooshed open.
“Fuck!” Martha shouted. She had not seen me. “God fucking damn it.”
I stepped back, let the door whoosh closed again. No. Fuck this. Come on. I stepped forward, and the door whooshed open, then back again. Whoosh.
“You okay?” I said, and she smiled, stepping out from behind the hedges.
“Well, that’s—good question.” She stuffed the phone in her pocket. She was wearing the same jean jacket, the same jeans. She did not look as if she had slept. She twisted her small mouth into a wry grimace. “Are you okay? That’s the million-dollar question, right? My mother always told me to watch out. For that question, I mean. Because, like, are you or aren’t you, right? It’s not usually one or the other, you know?”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. That makes sense.”
“But no. Not really.” She tugged the phone out again and looked at it, and I studied the side of her face. I had been thinking of her as a girl, a sassy kid who’d become a mother much too early. Now—sighing, frustrated, anxious, in the moonlight outside the hotel—she looked like what she probably was: a woman in the first years of her thirties, with a few worry lines at the corners of her mouth, with some of life’s grief already in her eyes.
“Everything all right with your boy?”
“Lionel, remember? Like the train.”
I remembered. I remember everything. “Oh, yes, of course. Lionel.”
A long, rolling shudder passed through me, and I held myself still till it was gone. I had put a bullet in that man without thinking. Without hesitation or regret. What were you fighting for? What was I doing?
“The kid is fine.” She gestured inside. “Sleeping like the proverbial…whatever. Do you have kids, Jim?”
“Nope,” I said. “Nope. I never went down that route somehow. Never went down that road.”
“Right. I asked you that. Your traveling.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s just it.”
The door whooshed, and a couple came out, a man and a woman, arm in arm, whispering together. The man lifted his keys, and we heard the bloop-bloop of a car door unlocking somewhere out in the darkness of the lot.
When I looked back at Martha, her head was tilted back, and she was studying the stars.
“I’m just trying hard. You know? Real hard.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“Trying so hard.”
I saw myself again an hour earlier at Slim’s, wielding that rifle like a lightning bolt. That was a different person who had done all that. Now, this, here—this was Jim Dirkson, speaking softly to a distressed stranger in the parking lot of a hotel. Jim, kind and calm, lending a comforting presence, and me underneath, searching, hunting, pushing. Doing my thing.
“I think you said…” I began, and when she jumped I said, “Sorry, sorry. But I think you said you were from here originally. Like, you grew up here?”
“I’m from Indiana. Not Indy. My sister lives up here, though. Sometimes we come and visit.”
“But not this time.”