By the time he was walking across the yard, optimism was tugging his center of gravity by its string. The men were sitting quietly this time, waiting and wary, but they snapped to attention when he entered the room. As he spoke, he amped up his speech a little, and instead of “attempt,” he said “high-octane effort,” and instead of “senseless deaths,” he said “magnificent contribution.” And then he talked about balancing kinetics with human intelligence and diplomacy. As he spoke, he saw that there were valuable lessons to be learned after all and that he was articulating them forcefully. Fuck the papers and reports. It was he, along with the men and women arrayed before him, who would make the difference in this war.
“There is nothing you cannot do,” he said, and he saw his belief reflected in the faces in front of him. The troops who had been sitting back leaned forward, and the ones who had been leaning forward squinted and tensed their jaws.
“If you fall,” he said, “you will pick yourself up and do your job. And if the enemy pushes you down, you will pick yourself up and you will push back harder, and then you will do your job. But if he pushes you down and steps on you…”
Now the colonel was feeling the old sort of ecstasy, the kind that could only be forged of forces that were nameless and primal. He thought of quoting General Patton, who had said, We will twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him, decided not to, and then the words burst past his lips and had on his own mind the effect he hoped they would have on his troops. And for an instant, in spite of everything that had happened before that moment and everything that was to come, he felt pretty goddamned ready for the surge.
5.0 EVIDENCE
A cougar, isn’t that what you call it? I think she was looking for a little action on the side.
It was Will who was the love of her life, and he didn’t need her anymore. I think that hurt her feelings more than she let on.
I have to admit that I underestimated Will. He was one of those kids who blossomed almost overnight.
Months after I started making inquiries, I got a call from a professor at OSU. But that was right around the time Danny was coming home, so for a while I put it out of my mind.
There was a small notice in the classified section seeking people with information about environmental toxins. So I called.
That notice scared the pants off Winslow, so he and the mayor and I went on down to the Sentinel offices, right there behind the Main Street Diner. The publisher, whose name is also Martin Fitch, assured us his nephew was under control.
5.1 Will
Soon after taking the SAT, Will had fractured his wrist sliding home. He had gone for x-rays and a cast, which is what he was thinking about as he filled out a questionnaire aimed at getting the juniors to consider college and the future. For many of them, that meant following their parents into local jobs, with the more adventurous signing on to an oil rig or enlisting for the war if it wasn’t over by graduation, which was still a year away. Will was picturing the curvy nurse in the tight white uniform who had pressed up against him as she set his arm and remembering how the word “x-ray” sounded like “sex-ray” when the nurse mentioned retakes to the technician. The long, thin bones of Will’s arm stood out in sharp relief, edged by shadowy soft tissue, and nestled into the radius just above his wrist was the BB that had been there since the day he’d gone rabbit hunting with Tyler Hicks and Tyler had gotten angry about something and banged his air gun against the ground, causing it to catch on a root and go off as it fell.
“Is that an old war wound?” asked the nurse in a gravelly voice.
“Yeah,” said Will. “I guess it is.”
“Tough guy, huh?” said the nurse, and the way she said it still set Will’s heart racing whenever he thought about it.
Will’s test scores surprised everyone. Because he was quiet in class and so was a relative unknown, the doctor idea caught hold among the teachers, who were eager to have a story of unexpected success to put in their end-of-year report. Even Will was not immune to the fiction, and the day the report came out, he sat for a while in an echoing stairwell as students flowed past him like a river around a sturdy rock. He started to see paths and possibilities. He started to wonder if he actually was becoming the person profiled in the report, if a shifting idea of who a person was could change things about the person himself. Just that morning, the principal had stopped him in the hallway and put a hand on his shoulder. All he had said was, “Well done, Will,” but the words carried a freight train of meaning, as if Will and the principal had many such conversations behind them and many more ahead. He felt like Bon Jovi for a moment, or Spider-Man, or Barry Bonds. He wasn’t arrogant, just newly aware that packed within his body and brain was something unusual, something most people only recognized in others and wished they had.
But then Tyler Hicks thumped into him and said, “Jeezus, Rayburn. What’s up with that report?”
“Anybody can fool some of the people some of the time,” said the boy who was with Tyler. “Even Rayburn.”
“I guess they can,” said Will amiably. But then he muttered to Tyler’s retreating back, “Why the hell not!” He could do anything if he put his mind to it. He took a sharpened pencil out of his backpack and pressed the point against the skin of his arm until it went in a little way. He had a high pain threshold, and now that he had proved he was smart, he wanted to prove the nurse had been right when she had called him tough. Tough enough to kick Tyler’s ass if he wanted to, but smart enough to leave it alone.
That’s what he was doing when Tula Santos appeared in the stairwell and said, “Hello.”
“Why hello, Tula,” he said, without hesitating and without putting his hands in his pockets the way he would have done only the day before.
To his surprise, Tula paused with her hand on the railing even though they were blocking the way for the other students. When one of them muttered, “Move over. Can’t you see you’re in the way?” Will glared at him in a way that made Tula laugh.
“I’ve got to get going anyway,” she said. “I don’t want to be late for class.”
“Can you meet me later?” asked Will. “I could use a little advice.”
“I guess so,” said Tula. “Is tomorrow okay?”
Will sat for a little while longer contemplating how one thing led to another in the chain reaction of cause and effect. When he finally got up to change into his practice uniform and make his way down the hill to the ball field, he could feel his aura moving with him, perfectly in sync with the movements of his muscles. The cast on his arm was due to come off in another week, but now it seemed like an enhancement rather than a deficit. It felt sturdy, like the arm of a cyborg, and the scrawled signatures of his friends seemed confirmation of his new status despite the fact that most of them had been written before any mention of doctoring or college had been made: WAY TO GO, GENIUS and SEE YOU AT STATE.