At six o’clock Scotty woke him, and they went in to supper. All of them dined quietly in the old-fashioned kitchen on fried chicken, fresh corn and peas, cornbread muffins, and iced tea. Father Harry, alone, seemed to have been sipping something else. Howell remembered meals like this from his childhood, at the homes of family friends whose people were dying, except at those meals, the food had been brought by sympathetic neighbors. Apart from her family, there was no one to attend Lorna Kelly’s death but an alcoholic priest and two fugitives.
They lingered over coffee until the sun was nearly on the horizon. Scotty got her camera gear from her car, and Howell gave her the film. He went back into the house.
“Can I borrow a flashlight?” he asked Leonie.
“Sure,” she said. She went to a cupboard and brought back a large, six-volt model. “Listen,” she said, tentatively. “I’d like to see this again.” She looked up at him. “And I’d like it delivered in person.”
He smiled at her and touched her cheek. “I’ll be careful. There’s not much to this; we’re just going to go up there and perch in the woods and take some pictures and come back.”
“See that you do. The baby might want to meet his father one of these days.” She handed him a thermos of coffee and a paper bag. “You might get hungry.”
Howell nodded and turned to join Scotty. They left the Kellys’ backyard and entered the woods, picking their way through the trees and brush. The sun was below the treetops, and dusk was nearly upon them. They tried to hurry, to be in position before it got dark. They were climbing slightly.
Twenty minutes later, the ground leveled off, and they came to the edge of the airfield and stopped, still well into the trees. Howell looked at the windsock. He pointed to the little shack next to a couple of small aircraft near the end of the runway. “Let’s work our way down there. Any airplane is going to land in that direction, and it seems like a natural sort of meeting place, anyway.”
In the fading light, they circled a quarter of the way around the airfield, walking as quietly as possible and not using the flashlight. They saw no one, no cars, nothing that hadn’t been there when they arrived. In the trees near the end of the runway, perhaps thirty yards from the shed, they found a depression in the ground, well padded with pine needles.
“This looks good,” Howell said, masking the flashlight with his hand and playing it briefly over the ground. It was something like a sandtrap on a golf course. The ground seemed to fall away rapidly from there. In the last moments of light, Howell could see tops of trees below them, and, in the distance, the lake. “The pine needles won’t make much noise when we move around. A lot better than leaves. What’s the longest lens you’ve got?”
“A one-fifty to two-fifty zoom, but it’s not very fast.”
“My friend says it doesn’t have to be. That film will make it look like daylight.”
“Good.” She sighted through the camera toward the shed. “Jesus, I can’t see much. It’s just as well the film can. We’ve got six rolls; I’ll use the motor drive; we’ll practically have movies of this event.”
“I hope to God there is an event,” he said.
“They’re going to be here at three-thirty,” Scotty said, firmly. “That’s what the teletype said, and I believe it.”
Howell looked at his illuminated watch. “Just past nine,” he said. “A long wait.”
The wind whistled through the trees and rustled the pine leaves around them. Scotty snuggled up close and Howell put his arm around her.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “I’m going to take this film back to Atlanta, write a big lead story, and hold up the Atlanta Constitution for the biggest raise in the history of the newspaper business.”
Howell laughed. “And what if they won’t sit still for it?”
“Then I’ll just call up AP or UPI or maybe the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the New York Times.”
Howell had once held that job himself. “They’d go for it, all right.”
“You think this story could get me on the Times?”
“It might. I think you’d be better off going back to the Constitution with it, though. Then, after you won your Pulitzer, you can accept the Times’s offer.”
She dug him in the ribs. “Listen, I’m serious about all this!”
“Jesus, don’t I know it!” he laughed. “I hope it comes off just the way you want it to.”
“Johnny, what do you want? What are you going to do after you finish the book?” She sounded as if she really wanted to know, so he told her everything he knew.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think maybe I’ve reached a point in my life where I should go back and figure out what’s happened to me, instead of always chasing what’s going to happen next.”
“Hey, there’s a country song in there somewhere. I think you ought to fool around with that a little and send it to Willie Nelson.”
“Aw, shut up.”
“Why don’t you go back to the Times?” she asked. “You said everybody could go back once.”
“Funny you should mention that,” he snorted. “I got an offer from the Times today. Nairobi.”
“Are you kidding? That’s great! You’re going to take it, aren’t you?”
“Are you kidding? Do you know what Nairobi means? It isn’t just the Serengeti Plain and the game parks, you know, you cover the whole continent. It’s Africa. The asshole of the planet. It’s flying to hell and back on poorly maintained, forty-year-old C-47s flown by half-trained African pilots; getting hassled by the police in South Africa; interviewing insane master sergeants who are suddenly running countries; having to look at the swollen bellies and pitiful eyes of starving kids; bribing customs officials in backwoods airports; having beggars hanging all over you every time you walk down a street; and finally, getting a bullet in the back of the head from some jungle corporal with a superiority complex and not enough reading skills to understand your press credentials. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“Gee, you sound really interested.”
“Interested? Do you know the sadistic sons of bitches would probably make me learn Swahili? They’re sticklers for their boys knowing the language, they are.”
“I think it sounds fascinating.”
“That’s because you’re young and stupid.”
“I think you ought to take it.”
“They’d be stunned if I did, I can promise you that. This is just their way of saying I had my chance; I’m not going to Nairobi, and they know it.” Howell was tiring of this conversation. “Listen, why don’t you get some sleep; nothing’s going to happen for a while, yet.”
“Mmmmmmm,” she said, and snuggled closer. She was breathing slowly in a moment.
Howell leaned his head against hers and closed his eyes. He was bone tired. Nairobi. Christ! Over the next hours, he stirred himself every few minutes to have a look about him, but nothing happened. Around midnight, he laid the sleeping Scotty on her side and had some coffee from the thermos and a slice of pie from the paper bag. Then, feeling full and contented, he drifted off into a deeper sleep than he had bargained for.
The noise was familiar, almost too much so to be disturbing. Then Howell was wide awake, trying to remember the sound, to place its direction. A car door, that was it; he had heard a car door slam. Now there was another noise, a sound of metal scraping on metal. He turned to follow its direction.
There was only starlight to see by, but near the shed a car had parked, and its occupant, a large shape, was unlocking a padlock on the shed door. Cursing himself for sleeping so deeply, Howell put a hand over Scotty’s mouth and shook her awake. Holding a finger to his lips, he pointed toward the shed, some thirty yards away. They sat up on their knees, and Scotty began taking pictures.