"You're the writer fellow I was talking to? Suppose you tell me what outfit you were in." I told him.
"You bring your discharge papers?"
"No, sir," I said. "Was that part of the agreement?"
"How do I know you're not some peacenik?"
"I have a few genuine scars," I said.
"What camp were you stationed at and who was the CO there?"
It was like talking to Glenroy Breakstone. "Camp Crandall. The CO was Colonel Harrison Pflug." After a second, I said, "Known as the Tin Man."
"Come out and let me get a look at you." He gave me a complicated set of directions involving a shopping mall, a little red house, a big rock, a dirt road, and an electric fence.
At the rental counter, I signed up for every available kind of insurance and took the keys to a Chrysler Imperial. The young woman waved her hand toward the glass doors at what looked like a mile of parking lot. "Row D, space 20. You can't miss it. It's red."
I carried my briefcase out into the sun and walked across the lot until I came up to a cherry-red car about the size of a houseboat. It should have had a raccoon tail on the antenna and a pair of fuzzy dice in the front window. I opened the door and let the ordinary heat trickle into the oven of the interior. When I got in, the car smelled like a Big Mac box.
About forty minutes later, I finally backtracked to a boulder slightly smaller than the one I had chosen, found my way to a dirt road that vanished into an empty field, and bounced the Chrysler's tires along the ruts until the road split into two forks. One aimed toward a far-off farmhouse, and the other veered left into a grove of oak trees. I looked into the trees and saw flashes of yellow and the glint of metal. I turned left.
Huge yellow ribbons had been tied head-high around each of the trees, and on the high cross-hatched metal fence that ran through them a black-and-white sign said: DANGER ELECTRIFIED FENCE NO TRESPASSERS. I got out of the car and went up to the fence. Fifty feet away, the dirt road ended at a white garage. Beside it stood a square, three-story white house with a raised porch and fluted columns. I pushed a button in the squawk box next to the gate.
The same deep, anxious voice came through the box. "You're a little late. Hold on, I'll let you in."
The box buzzed, and I pushed open the gate. "Close the gate behind you," the voice ordered. I drove in, got out of the car, and pushed the gate shut behind me. An electronic lock slammed home a bolt the size of my fist. I got back in the car and drove up toward the garage.
Before I stopped the car, a bent old man in a white short-sleeved shirt and a polka-dot bow tie appeared on the porch. He hobbled along the porch, waving at me to stop. I cut the engine and waited. The old man glowered at me and got to the white steps that came down to the lawn. He used the handrail and made it down the steps. I opened the door and stood up.
"Okay," he said. "I checked you out. Colonel Pflug was the CO at Camp Crandall right up until seventy-two. But I have to tell you, you have pretty flashy taste in vehicles."
He wasn't kidding—Hubbel didn't look like a man who had ever wasted much time on humor. He got up to within a yard of me and squinted at the car. Distaste narrowed his black little eyes. He had a wide flabby face and a short hooked nose like an owl's beak. Liver spots covered his scalp.
"It's a rental," I said, and held out my hand.
He turned his distaste to me. "I want to see something in that hand."
"Money?"
"ID."
I showed him my driver's license. He bent so far over that his nose nearly touched the plastic covering. "I thought you were in Millhaven. That's in Illinois."
"I'm staying there for a while," I said.
"Funny place to stay." He straightened up as far as he could and glared at me. "How'd you learn my name?"
I said that I had looked through copies of the Tangent newspaper from the sixties.
"Yeah, we were in the paper. Irresponsibility, plain and simple. Makes you wonder about the patriotism of those fellows, doesn't it?"
"They probably didn't know what they were doing," I said.
He glared at me again. "Don't kid yourself. Those commie dupes put a bomb right in our front door."
"That must have been terrible for you," I said.
He ignored my sympathy. "You should have seen the hate mail I got—people used to scream at me on the street. Thought they were doing good."
"People have different points of view," I said.
He spat onto the ground. "The pure, they are always with us."
I smiled at him.
"Well, come on in. I got complete records, like I said on the phone. It's all in good order, you don't have to worry about that."
We moved slowly toward the house. Hubbel said that he had moved out of town and put up his security fence in 1960. "They made me live in the middle of a field," he said. "I tell you one thing, nobody gets into this office unless they stood up for the red, white, and blue."
He stumped up the stairs, getting both feet on one step before tackling the next. "Used to be, I kept a rifle right by the front door there," he said. "Would have used it, too. In defense of my country." We made it onto the porch and crawled toward the door. "You say you got some scars over there?"
I nodded.
"How?"
"Shell fragments," I said.
"Show me."
I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and pulled it down over my shoulders to show him my chest. Then I turned around so that he could see my back. He shuffled forward, and I felt his breath on my back. "Pretty good," he said. "You still must have some of that stuff inside you."
My anger disappeared when I turned around and saw that his eyes were wet. "Every now and then, I set off metal detectors," I said.
"You come on in, now." Hubbel opened the door. "Just tell me what I can do for you."
3
The crowded front parlor of the old farmhouse was dominated by a long wooden desk with high-backed armchairs behind and before it. An American flag stood between the desk and the wall. A framed letter on White House stationery hung on the wall behind the desk. A couch, a shaky-looking rocker, and a coffee table filled most of the rest of the room. The rocker faced a television set placed on the bottom shelf of a unit filled with books and large journals that looked like the records of his hardware business.
"What's this book you want to write?" Hubbel got himself behind his desk and let out a little puff of exertion. "You interested in some of the boys you served with?"
"Not exactly," I said, and gave him some stuff about how representative soldiers had been affected by their wartime experience.
He gave me a suspicious look. "This wouldn't be one of those damn pack of lies that show our veterans as a bunch of criminals, I s'pose."
"Of course not."
"Because they aren't. People go on and on gassing about Post-Traumatic Whatzit, but the whole damn thing was made up by a bunch of journalists. I can tell you about boys right here in Tangent who came back from the war just as clean-cut as they were when they got drafted."
"I'm interested in a very special group of people," I said, not adding that it was a group of one.
"Of course you are. Let me tell you about one boy, Mitch Carver, son of a fireman here, turned out to be a good little soldier in Airborne." He went on to tell me the story, the point of which seemed to be that Mitch had come back from Vietnam, married a substitute schoolteacher, become a fireman just like his dad, and had two fine sons.