She nodded.
“I didn’t kill her intentionally. If you saw what happened, you know that’s the truth.”
“The truth is in the mind’s eye, Robert. In my eye, I know you were frightened by a Cong soldier at the other end of our backyard. You turned and fired and accidentally shot Hong. But this is not what my brother saw.”
“He saw me kill her in cold blood?”
“Yes.”
“But why would I shoot a little girl?”
“It was done, you know, by both sides. Maybe not by you but by others.”
“And so now he’s here.”
“To kill you.”
During my second cup of coffee, she said, “I am afraid for him. I do not wish to see you killed but even more I do not wish to see my brother killed. I know that is selfish but those are my feelings.”
“I’d have the same feelings.” I paused and said; “Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“I looked for him today, after the envelope came.”
“And you didn’t find him?”
I shook my head. “For what it’s worth, Mai, I never forgot what happened that day.”
“No?”
“When I got back to the states, I started having nightmares about it. And very bad migraine headaches. I even went to a psychologist for a year or so. Everybody said I shouldn’t feel guilty, that those accidents happen in war. Got so bad, it started to take its toll on my marriage. I wasn’t much of a husband — or a father, for that matter — and eventually my wife left me. I’d look round at the other guys I’d served with. They’d done ugly things, too, but if it bothered them, they didn’t let on. I was even going to go back to Nam and look up your family and tell them I was sorry but my daughter wouldn’t let me. At that point, she was ready to put me in a mental hospital. She said that if I seriously tried to go, she’d put me away for sure. I knew she meant it.”
“Did you talk to the police today, about his taking a shot at you?”
“You’ve got to understand something here, Mai. I don’t want your brother arrested. I want to find him and talk to him and help him if I can. There hasn’t been a day in my life since when I haven’t wanted to pick up the phone and talk to your family and tell them how sorry I am.”
“If only we could find Dang.”
“I’ll start looking again tomorrow.”
“I feel hopeful for the first time in many years.”
I stayed up past midnight because I knew I wouldn’t sleep well. There was a Charles Bronson movie on TV, in the course of which he killed four or five people. Before that day in Nam, when I’d been so scared that I’d mistaken a little girl for a VC, I had been all enamored of violence. But no longer. After the war, I gave away all my guns and nearly all my pretensions to machismo. I knew too well where machismo sometimes led.
Ten hours later, coming in from morning chores, I heard the phone ringing. Emmy said it was for me.
It was the motel man with the merry red suspenders. “I heard something you might be interested in.”
“Oh?”
“You know where the old Sheldon farm is?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well there’s a lime quarry due west of the power station. You know where that would be?”
“I can find it.”
“There’s a house trailer somewhere back in there. Hippie couple lived there for years but they moved to New Mexico last year. Guy in town who owns a tavern — Shelby, maybe you know him — he bought their trailer from them and rents it out sort of like an apartment. Or thought he would, anyway. Hasn’t had much luck. Till last week. That’s when this Asian guy rented it from him.”
The day was ridiculously beautiful, the sweet smoky breath of autumn on the air, the horses in the hills shining the color of saddle leather.
The lime quarry had been closed for years. Some of the equipment had been left behind. Everything was rusted now. The whining wind gave the place the sound of desolation.
I pointed the pickup into the hills where oak and hickory and basswood bloomed, and elm and ash and ironwood leaves caught the bright bouncing beams of the sun.
The trailer was in a grassy valley, buffalo grass knee-deep and waving in the wind, a silver S of creek winding behind the rusted old Airstream.
I pulled off the road in the dusty hills and walked the rest of the way down.
There was a lightning-dead elm thirty yards from the trailer. When I reached it, I got behind it so I could get a better look at the Airstream.
No noise came from the open windows, no smoke from the tin chimney.
I went up to the trailer. Every few feet I expected to hear a bullet cracking from a rifle.
The window screens were badly torn, the three steps tilted rightward, and the two propane tanks to the right of the door leaned forward as if they might fall at any moment.
I reached the steps, tried the door. Locked. Dang was gone. Picking the lock encased in the doorknob was no great trouble.
The interior was a mess. Apparently Dang existed on Godfather’s pizza. I counted nine different cartons, all grease-stained, on the kitchen counter. The thrumming little refrigerator smelled vaguely unclean. It contained three sixteen-ounce bottles of Pepsi.
In the back, next to the bed on the wobbly nightstand, I found the framed photos of the little girl. She had been quite pretty, solemn and mischievous at the same time.
The photo Dang had sent me was very different. The girl lay on a table, her bloody clothes wrapped round her. Her chest was a dark and massive hole.
I thought I heard a car coming.
Soon enough I was behind the elm again. But the road was empty. All I’d heard was my own nerves.
During chores two hours later, Lisa said, “You find him?”
“Find who?”
“Find who? Come on, Grandad.”
“Yeah, I found him. Or found his trailer, anyway.”
“How come you didn’t take me with you? I’m supposed to be your partner.”
I leaned on my pitchfork. “Hon, from here on out I’ll have to handle this alone.”
“Oh, darn it, Grandad. I want to help.”
There was a sweet afternoon breeze through the barn door, carrying the scents of clover and sunshine.
“All that’s going to happen is I’m going to talk to him.”
“Gosh, Grandad, he tried to kill you.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But he shot at you.”
“He tried to scare me.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
After washing up for the day, I went into the TV room and called Mai and told her that I’d found where her brother was staying.
“You should not go out there,” she said. “In my land we say that there are seasons of the heart. The season of my brother’s heart is very hot and angry now.”
“I just want to talk to him and tell him that I’m sorry. Maybe that will calm him down.”
“I will talk to him. You can direct me to this trailer?”
“If you meet me at the restaurant again, I’ll lead you out there.”
“Then you will go back home?”
“If that’s what you want.”
She was there right at eight. The full moon, an autumn moon that painted all the pines silver, guided us to the power station and the quarry and finally to the hill above the trailer.
I got out of the car and walked back to hers. “You follow that road straight down.”
“Did you see the windows? The lights?”
He was home. Or somebody was.
“I appreciate this, Robert. Perhaps I can reason with my brother.”
“I hope so.”
She paused, looked around. “It is so beautiful and peaceful here. You are fortunate to live here.”
There were owls and jays in the forest trees, and the fast creek silver in the moonlight, and the distant song of a windmill in the breeze. She was right. I was lucky to live here.