“What would they gain by killing you?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Probably a couple thousand dollars from the casino management firm.”
“Can you pay them back?” I said.
“I don’t even know how many times I won off them, or what casinos I won it from. I took a couple loans from bookies to cover myself. It’s an ugly mess.”
“That sounds bad,” I said.
“I came home one night late and turned on the TV and I think I fell asleep. I woke up and there was a cowboy and Indian movie on and I started to lose my mind. I thought, that’s all they show, is us being killed.” He pointed at his head. “My own mind is my worst enemy.” He looked over at me. “What did you do?”
“Got into a scrape up in Maine,” I said.
He nodded. “Did your father ever tell you about the scrape I got into in the late seventies?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.” The lights from planes moved slowly through the night sky, among the stillness of the stars.
Bob put his cigarette out. “I tried to make some money as a big game scout. Signed on with a guy out of Florida named Mackenzie, who arranged hunting trips to Africa for wealthy clients.”
“What did you take them hunting for?” I said.
“When they signed up, supposedly it was for antelope. Large game deer, mostly. But we were really going over to shoot rhinos,” Bob said. “Everybody knew that.” He pointed through the darkness to the little cabins. “Imagine an animal the size of one of those cabins, faster than your truck and basically plated with armor.”
“I’ve seen them on TV,” I said.
“Well, I saw it in real life,” he said. “That last afternoon, a rhino came out of the grass after the truck and we all started shooting. Five men. I had one of those newer Mauser rifles, but it was still bolt action, and I’m slamming that thing home and firing and the rhino hit the truck like a fully stacked freight train, wham.” He made a flattening motion with his hands, then lifted them into the air. “Up I went and down I came.”
“What happened?” I said.
“I couldn’t fire anymore, because I was out of shells. The rhino stomped and gored everyone but me. Put a hole in Mackenzie that I could see through. The ground was so soaked with blood that the natives who rescued me were afraid the smell of death would bring other animals to the spot. The natives took me to a ranger station.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Sometimes,” Bob said, “I used to stay awake for days at a time, so I wouldn’t have to dream about that stuff and what I’d seen in Vietnam. Drugs helped me keep the past quiet, in the short term. Till it got the best of me.” He paused. “Did you ever try to wash someone else’s blood off you?”
“No,” I said.
“For some reason,” Bob said, “it’s hard to get it off. Almost as if blood holds onto your skin, because it knows your skin is still alive.”
We picked up the plates and put them in the kitchen sink. I saw him smoke another cigarette on his small cabin porch before going inside.
It was about 4:00 a.m. when I heard the car door slam in the yard. I flipped the lights on downstairs and outside and opened my bedroom window. I put the barrel of the shotgun out first and racked the slide.
“What do you want?” I said.
The two men blinked against the light. “We’re looking for somebody,” the one man said.
“This is private property,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”
“We’ll be gone before they get here,” the man said. He had a pistol holstered on his right side.
“Get back in that car or you’ll need an ambulance,” I said. “Last warning.”
I hoped that Bob was awake at that point, ready to back me up if shooting started. They weren’t sure where he was, so he could get off a couple rounds from the middle cabin before they knew what hit them.
Both men walked back to their car, turned it around, and spit gravel going back down the road.
In the morning, I walked to the middle cabin and opened the door. There was nothing there. It looked as though no one had ever slept there at all. I went around to the back barn and found what I was looking for. Under the tarp that used to protect the old Jeep was Bob’s station wagon. A set of New York plates was missing too. Bob was on the road again. I called my father and told him.
I came home from work in the middle of the week and found everything torn apart. Whoever those men were, they must have come back while I was gone. The beds were out of the cabins, stuff spread across the lawn by the pond. The big barn door was open, exposing the cars. The tarp was off the station wagon and the doors were open. The door to the main house had been jimmied open and sat on bent hinges. But there was nothing to find.
The first letter I got wasn’t really a letter at all. It was an envelope with an Idaho postmark and two photographs. The first picture was of a huge fish-what appeared to be a white sturgeon-half in the water, ready to be released back in. The second was a similar picture of the fish from a different angle and the photographer had allowed his shadow to fall out over the water and into the shot, along with the tip of his right boot. The boot looked like Bob’s, and the shadow looked like it had a ponytail.
Two months later, a postcard showed up in my mailbox. It bore a Vancouver postmark. “Still OK still sober” was all it said on it.
One night I was sitting there during a terrible lightning storm. The cabin phone rang. Scared the hell out of me. I answered it and in the darkness, it sounded like someone was there.
“Bob?” I said. “Bob?”
There was no answer. The lightning must have made it ring. I was alone.
The stripers were hitting in the Hudson in April and May this year. I caught my share on the weekends, with my father and Rich. I fished from shore some weekends during the summer and got a pass to one of the reservoirs. I saw some eagles early one morning and the fireworks got rained out on the Fourth of July, so they shot them off the following weekend. I watched them from the porch of the farm, what I could see of the lights above the trees. The shale business kept on and I drove every day and got dusty and dumped and hauled all the loads my cousin gave me. I was grateful for the work.
I pulled up the dusty driveway one Friday in late August and my father’s truck was close to the house. He was sitting on the porch with his ball cap off. I got out of my rig and walked to the house and he didn’t say anything. He was holding something and when I got closer, it looked like an envelope.
“Hi,” I said. “What’s going on?”
He just handed me the envelope. It had an Idaho postmark and my father’s address handwritten on the outside. Inside was a newspaper clipping from a week earlier, from a newspaper in Spokane, Washington. I read it.
A man the Idaho State Police had identified as Robert Threepersons had died from gunshot wounds in a parking lot outside a truck stop casino near the Idaho-Washington border. The police were investigating the shooting, although there were no clues at this time.
“I should have told him to stay here,” my father said. He indicated the clipping. “His sister must have sent this from the reservation.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Between the war and the drugs and the gambling, the poor guy must have been afraid of his own thoughts,” my father said.
“He probably was,” I agreed.
“And people coming after him,” he said. “It was too much.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I can’t draw a straight line from the war to Bob’s problems for you to see, but I know it’s there,” he said.