He hung up and started to drive home. But in ten minutes the phone rang. He picked it up.
“Duane?”
“Yes sir?”
“Duane, you keep an eye on Sam Vincent. He may be old but he’s sharp.”
“Yes sir.”
“You may have to break in and find out what file, do you see?”
“Yes sir,” said Duane.
Bob stood in the sun in the field of the dead. Around him, neat as Chiclets in a child’s game, the gravestones fell away in rows. So many dead, from so many American wars.
He took a look at the picture. In the light it seemed to fall apart on him. He’d stopped that morning at a photography shop to inquire about a more useful enlargement but the man pointed out that without the original negative, he’d simply be enlarging the dots of which the photograph was composed in the old hot-metal rotogravure technology: the bigger the photo, the bigger and farther apart would be the dots. It was at its clearest as it was in the paper.
Russ had a thought about computer enhancement and thought they could FedEx it back to Oklahoma City, where a friend on the staff of the Oklahoman might be able to do more with it. But Bob said no, that would take too much time and he wasn’t letting it out of his hands, so he would make do with what he had. So he sent Russ to the historical society in search of names that might link up with Bob’s efforts in the boneyard.
He turned to the four compass directions, hoping to identify the mountain silhouette in the background, but it was difficult to make out, because only fragments of the line could be seen in the photo and even then he wasn’t sure that it was mountain or some imperfection in the photographic process. And he didn’t want to look too hard at the photo: the more he looked at it, the more the details disappeared among the dots. It was like a magic photo: it was only potent in small glimpses. To study it was to destroy it.
He looked up from the picture to the stones.
Martin.
Feamster.
O’Brian.
Lotsky.
Kummler.
Kids’ names. Lost boys, what did it earn, what did it matter? Why? A darkness settled over him. He could remember still the name of the boys in his first platoon, 1965, or at least the thirteen out of the twenty-six that didn’t make it back. And the five that lost limbs or the ability to walk. And the one that went into the nuthouse. And the one who shot himself in the foot. That left seven who made it home exactly as they’d gone, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Those names he could not remember at all.
He looked about: so many of them, a starry skyful of them. Too many of them. Maybe coming to this place by himself in the middle of the morning was a mistake. He yearned to talk to Julie or to YKN4, to someone human and whole and normal. Get me off this frozen star, he thought, let me back in the world.
Bensen.
Forbes.
Klusewski.
Obermeyer.
As he moved, his perspective shifted and it seemed almost that the parade of white gravestones was itself moving. He thought of old Roman armies, phalanxes they called them, which moved in steady company formations against hordes of savages, calm, determined, believing in the unit concept and the spirit of the legion. That’s what it felt like: moving through phalanxes of the dead, who stared at a living man and wanted to know: Why aren’t you among us? Why are you special?
Gunning.
Abramowicz.
Benjamin.
Luftman.
Because I was lucky, he answered. Why did a line come at him? It was some poetry thing he’d read years back when he tried to understand what a war was and read every goddamn thing on it there was: the orient of thick and fast.
That’s what it was too: an orient of thick and fast, a total world where one damn thing after another happened, and maybe you got out and maybe you didn’t, and not much of it had to do with skill. His daddy, now maybe there was a man with skill. His daddy was a hero. His daddy killed the Japanese on Iwo Jima and Tarawa and on Saipan. His daddy must have killed 200 men. He himself had killed 341, though the official fiction read 87. So much death, their boys and our boys, marines and Japs, marines and gooks or slopes or whatever they called them back then. He shuddered. So many men who could have had children or written poems or become doctors.
Bergman.
Deems.
Ver Coot.
Truely.
It was a great puzzle. He stood and realized that he was on a ridge, one of the folds in the land that wasn’t really visible until you actually walked it. He stood, now a little higher, and unfolded the photograph and compared what he saw with where he was.
The site in the photo seemed to be on a ridge too. Could he make out other ridges behind it, all the way to the trees? He could not. The background was lost in blur, as the dots became nonsense. He saw that the key had to be the trees, now gone for whatever reason. His daddy lay under a big tree. Maybe one hundred yards behind it was another tree. And that smudge in the dots, was that a tree? If so, that meant three trees in a rough line heading—in which direction? Couldn’t say.
Hey, boys, help me. Help the one among you who should have been with you, help him.
But the dead were silent.
Feeling lost and a complete failure, he took another step to leave the ridge and find another, when in his far peripheral vision some anomaly registered. He turned to track it down and saw nothing. He turned back, moving, and again there came a signal from his subconscious that something should be noted.
Were the dead speaking in some odd way?
Come on, boys, tell me. Give me your message.
No, nothing, only silence. Far off, the sound of a power mower. Above, a jet glinting high in the sky, a commercial job leaving a fat contrail. A white car in the distance.
Duane Peck’s, of course. Keeping watch.
Duane, who are you working for?
Someday soon, we may have to have a discussion with you.
He turned again: another strangeness assailed him.
He tried to sift through it. What was he feeling or noticing? It seemed only to come when he moved and in his peripheral, as if in focusing on it, it went away. He set out to duplicate the phenomenon.
He stepped, turning, trying to keep his eyes focused straight ahead and his mind emptied. Nothing. Did it again. Nothing. Felt like an idiot.
Did it the third time.
Now he had it. Far off, in the orthodox line of gravestones, was a gap. No, not a gap, an irregularity. One stone was slightly out of line. Why would that be?
He sighted on it and walked. It was 150 yards away.
Mason.
Mason, what’s your goddamned problem? You a fuckup, Mason? You a mama’s boy, you think the rules don’t ever apply to you? That’s how a sergeant would talk to a man out of formation. Why are you buried about a foot to the right of Shidlovsky and Donohue? Isn’t Murphy pissed, you moving in on his territory?
Was it a mistake or—
A tree.
It was gone now, but when poor Mason went into the earth back in 1899 with a Spanish Mauser bullet in his heart, a giant tree must have been right here on this spot, and so they made a slight adjustment. Later the tree died, but Mason stayed out of whack until eternity.
Bob took the picture out.
If he looked hard, he could force himself to believe that if this was the spot for the tree, and since this spot was quite close to the boundary of the cemetery, then maybe this was the third tree in the line.
He looked again at the picture. What time of day was the picture taken? He ransacked through forty long years of memories, putting aside much that was not pleasant, and a little that was, and at last he remembered a formidable presence named Miss Connie rushing him through breakfast and dressing him because his mother kept breaking down. That put the funeral in the morning, before noon in any case. Figuring then that the photographer would have moved until the sun was behind him, and that it would have been reasonably low, Bob guessed that the photographer was facing west, his back to the east. So if this was the last tree, then the other two in the rough line would be to the east.