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"Murphy didn't need to pay cops to hit somebody."
His brow wrinkled. He wiped a piece of tobacco off the corner of his mouth.
"You said 'didn't.'"
"He's not a player anymore."
It took a second for the recognition to work into his eyes.
"Man, you don't fuck around, do you?" he said.
"Come on, Clete, why a cop?"
He waited a moment, and I saw the heat come back in his face.
"He said he worked for a guy, I suppose that general, what's his name, the guy whose house you got busted at, he said the guy didn't believe in whacking his own people. It's probably bullshit. All of them are slime, anyway."
"So you knew Murphy before?"
"No. He knew me. At least he knew I was paying a shylock." He drank from his beer can, inhaled from his cigarette, studied his hands, then raised his eyes again.
"Where do we go from here, partner?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Is a piece of shit like Starkweather this important?"
"You not only killed a man for money, you could have brought him and Murphy in. You could have gotten me off the hook."
"I don't read it that way. But I don't guess that's important now. Are you going to give them my piece?"
"I don't have it."
"What?"
"I just guessed you were dropping it and picking it up at the bus locker."
He shook his head and blew out his breath as though I'd kicked him in the stomach.
"Damn, if you aren't slick, Streak." He began to flick the fly clamped in the vise with his fingernail. "What do you think I ought to do now?"
"I don't care what you do," I said. "Get out of town. Go to Colorado. Take up Zen with Lois. I just know one thing for sure—don't ever call me 'partner' again."
* * *
TWELVE
Jimmie went into surgery at eight the next morning, and they didn't wheel him into the recovery room until almost noon. The doctor found me in the waiting room and sat down in his greens on the leather couch next to me. He was prematurely bald and talked with a west Texas accent. His fingers looked as though they could cover a basketball.
"I call this kind a dusting-and-cleaning situation," he said. "There was a messy spot or two, but most everything was on the surface. All things considered, it cleaned up beautifully. I'm still concerned about that eye, but at least I don't think we're talking about paralysis anymore. I hope that's good news for you this morning."
"It is, Doctor."
"Now, about the other stuff—general recovery, post-effects, psychological trauma, we can't really tell you. There's a lot about the brain we don't understand. I've had to cut 'em open and go in with an ice-cream scoop, and somehow the other parts of the brain compensate and the person can live a fairly normal life. Then I've seen a simple fracture cause a guy headaches that almost drove him to suicide. It's like the jack-in-the-box. Sometimes you just don't know what's going to jump up at you. But we've got a great eye man here and fine therapists, and every day it's going to get better for your brother. You follow me? In other words, we've got it turned around, and that's what counts."
We shook hands, then I stopped by the gift shop downstairs and had fresh flowers sent up to Jim's room. I saw a big plastic crawfish in the gift case, and I had the salesgirl tie it with a bow to the flower vase.
I went back to the files at the Picayune's morgue. Once again, the photographs and news stories sent me back across the sea, back into the era that would always be mine, whether I had wanted it or not. As I stared at the pictures of grunts loading their wounded into a dustoff, the elephant grass flattening around them, their dust-filmed faces streaked with dried sweat, their heads twisted back at the gunfire they still heard behind them, I felt like a leper who could not stop picking at his own crusted lesions. And like that leper, I knew I was about to sink my finger into a dark recess of pain and grief that did not cauterize with time. I flipped the frames of microfilm up on the viewing screen until I saw again the series of photographs taken during and after the My Lai massacre. I had never been able to rid myself of one of those photographs since I had first seen it in Newsweek magazine fifteen years ago. The villagers had been herded together, a GI with an M-16 was facing them, and a woman was begging with clasped hands while her little boy, not more than five, held her skirt and looked out from behind her with uncomprehending terror on his face. His mouth was open, the skin of his face was stretched tight with fear, and his eyes were wide with the knowledge that his mother's words could not protect him from what was about to happen.
