Bob nodded.
“Has anybody seen it?”
“No.”
“Mrs. Carter, could—”
“Of course,” the old lady said. “I’ve been waiting all these years for someone to look at it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
he thing was dirty. Thick and motheaten, it had the softness of old parchment, but also of filth: the lead of pencil and the dust of charcoal lay thick on every page. To touch it was to come away with stained fingertips. That gave it an air of tremendous intimacy: the last will and testament or, worse, a reliquary of Saint Trig the Martyr. Bob felt somehow blasphemed as he peered into it, pausing to mark the dates on the upper right hand of the cover: “Oxford, 1970 — T. C. Carter III.”
But it had this other thing. It was familiar. Why was it familiar? He looked at the creamy stock and realized that it was in this book Trig had drawn his picture of Donny and Julie, then ripped it out to give to Donny. Bob had seen it in Vietnam. The strange sense of a ghost chilled him.
He turned the first pages. Birds. The boy had drawn birds originally. The first several pages were lovely, lively with English sparrows, rooks, small, undistinguished flyers, nothing with plumage or glory to it. But you could tell he had the gift. He could make a single spidery line sing, he could capture the blur of flight or the patience of a tiny, instinct-driven brain sedate in its fragile skull as the creature merely perched, conceiving no yesterday or tomorrow. He caught the ordinariness of birds quite extraordinarily.
But soon his horizons expanded, as if he were awaking from a long sleep. He began to notice things. The drawings became extremely casual little blots of density where out of nothing Trig would suddenly decide to record “View from the loo,” and do an exquisite little picture of the alley out back of his digs, the dilapidated brickiness of it, the far, lofty towers of the university in the distance; or, “Mr. Jenson, seen in a pub,” and Mr. Jenson would throb to life, with veins and carbuncles and a hairy forest in his nose. Or: “Thames, at the point, the boathouses,” and there it would be, the broad river, green in suggestion, the smaller river branching off, the incredible greenness of it all, the willows weeping into the water, the high, bright English sun suffusing the whole scene, although it was a miniature in black pencil, dashed off in a second. Still, Bob could feel it, taste it, whatever, even if he didn’t quite know what it was.
Trig was losing himself in the legendary beauty of Oxford in the spring. Who could blame him? He drew lanes, parks, buildings that looked like old castles, pubs, rivers, English fields, as if he were tasting the world for the first time.
But then it all went away. The vacation was over. At first Bob squinted. He could not understand as he turned to the new page; the images had a near abstraction to them, but then they gradually emerged from the fury of the passion-smeared charcoal. It was the girl, the child, reduced to shape, running out of the flames of her village, which had just been splashed in American fire. Bob remembered seeing it: the war’s most famous, most searing image, the child naked and exposed to the fierce world, her face a mask of shock and numbness yet achingly alive. She was shamelessly naked, but modesty meant nothing, for one could see the cottage-cheesey streaks where the napalm had burned her, as it had incinerated her family behind her. Even a man whose life has been saved by napalm had a sickening response to that image: Why? he wondered now, all the years later. Why? She was just a child. We didn’t fight it right, that was our goddamn problem.
He put the book down, looked off into the long darkness. The black dogs were outside now, ready to pounce. He needed a drink. His head hurt. His throat was dry. Around him, in the empty studio, the birds danced and perched. The eagle fixed him with its panicked glare.
When will this shit be over? he wondered and went back to the sketchbook.
Trig too had had some kind of powerful emotional reaction. He’d given himself over to flesh. The next few pages were husky boys, working-class studs, their muscles taut, their butts prominent, their fingers naturally curled inward by the density of their forearms. There was even one drawing of a large, uncircumsized penis.
Bob felt humiliated, intrusive, awkward. He couldn’t concentrate on the drawings and rushed forward, skipping several pages. At last the season of sex was over; the images changed to something more noble. Trig seemed stricken with admiration for a certain heroic figure, a lone man sculling on the river. He drew him obsessively for a period of weeks: an older man, Herculean in his passions, his muscles agleam but in a nonsexual way, just an older athlete, a charisma merchant.
Was this Fitzpatrick, or some other lost love? Who would know, who could tell? There wasn’t even a portrait of the face by which the man could be recognized. But the pictures had somehow lost their originality, become standard. The hero had arrived, from a Western, or out of the Knights of the Round Table, or something. Bob could feel the force of Trig’s belief in this man.
The drawings went on, as the weeks passed, and as Trig’s excitement mounted. He was actually happy now, happier than he’d been. The explosion became a new motif in his doodling; it took him but a few tries, and suddenly he got quite good at capturing the violence, the sheer liberation of anarchistic energy a blast unleashed, and its beauty, the way the clouds unfurled from the detonation’s center like the opening of a flower. But that was alclass="underline" there was no horror in his work, no fear that any man who’s been around an explosion feels. It was all theory and beauty to Trig.
The final drawing was of a shiny new TR-6.
Bob closed the book and held it up to the light and saw a kind of gap running along the spine of the book suggesting that something was missing. He reopened it and looked carefully and saw that, very carefully, the last few pages had been sliced out.
He left the studio and walked back to the big house, where the old lady nursed a scotch in the study.
“Would you care for a drink, Mr. Swagger?”
“A soda. Nothing else.”
“Oh, I see.”
She poured him the soda.
“Well, Sergeant Swagger. What do you think?”
“He was a wonderful artist,” Bob said. “Can’t ask for more, can you?”
“No, you can’t. I made a mistake just then, didn’t I?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I called you sergeant. You never told me your rank.”
“No, ma’am.”
“I still know a fool or two in State. After you called me, I called a man. Just before you arrived, he called back. You were a hero. You were a great warrior. You were everything that my son could never understand.”
“I did my job, somehow.”
“No, you did more than your job. I heard about it. You stopped a battalion. One man. They say it may never have been done in history, what you did. Amazing.”
“There was another Marine there. Everybody forgets that. I couldn’t have done it without him. It was his fight as much as mine.”
“Still, it was your aggressiveness, your bravery, your willingness to kill, to take on the mantel of the killer for your country. Is it difficult to live with?”
“I killed a boy that day with a knife. Now and then I think of that with sorrow.”
“I’m so sorry. Your heroism aside, nothing good came of that war, did it?”
“My heroism included, nothing good came of that war.”
“So tell me; why did my son die? You of all men might know.”
“I’m no expert in these matters. It ain’t my department. But it looks to me like he was picked up by a pro. Someone who knew his weaknesses, had studied him, who knew of his troubles with his father and played on them. He’s in the drawings as a heroic rower. I can feel Trig’s love for him. He may be this Fitzpatrick. Trig was different, you said. When he came back?”