Time to Hunt (52 page)

“Yet he was planning something else. He obviously was planning the bombing.”

“Mr. Swagger, let me tell you what has haunted me all these years. My son was incapable of taking a human life. He simply would not do it. How he ended up dynamiting a building with a man inside it is beyond my capacity to understand. I understand that it was meant to be a ‘symbolic act of defiance,’ against property and not against flesh. Yet another man was killed. Ralph Goldstein, a young mathematics teaching assistant, a name largely lost to history, I’m afraid. You see it in none of the books about my son’s martyrdom, but I got a wretched note from his wife, and so I know it. I know it by heart. He was another wonderful young man, I’m sorry to report. But Trig would not have killed anyone, not even by accident. The accounts that portray him as a naive idiot are simply wrong. Trig was an extremely capable young man. He would not have blown himself up and he would not have blown up the building without checking the building. He
was very thorough, very Harvard in that way. He was competent, completely competent, not one of those dreamy idiots.”

Bob nodded.

“Fitzpatrick,” he said, then over again. “Fitzpatrick. There’s not a record, a photo of Fitzpatrick, anything solid.”

“No … not even in the sketchbook.”

“I see,” said Bob.

It took several seconds before he made the next connection.

“Which sketchbook?” he asked.

“Why, Trig was an artist, Mr. Swagger. He had a sketchbook with him always. It was a kind of visual diary. He kept one everywhere. He kept one at Oxford. He kept one here, during his last days. I still have it.”

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.”

T
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 all: 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?”

“Yes. Excited, committed, energetic. Troubled.”

“He had to finish that painting?”

“Yes. Is there a message in the painting?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand it either.”

“But you think he was innocent of murder? That would be so important to me.”

“Innocent of first-degree murder, yes, I do. The death of that man may have been unintended. If so, it would have been second-degree murder, or some form of manslaughter. I won’t lie to you. He may be guilty of that.”

“I appreciate the honesty. Trig will have to face his own consequences. But at least someone believes he wasn’t a murderer and an idiot.”

“I don’t know what was really going on yet. I can’t figure what it was about, why it happened, what the point was. It seemed to have no point, not then, not now, and what’s happening to me would then have no point. Maybe I’m completely wrong about all this and am just off on a wild goose chase, because I’m under a lot of pressure. But tell me … are you aware that the last few pages in the sketchbook are missing? The American pages?” “No. I had no idea.”

“Do you have any idea where they might be?”

“No.”

“Is it possible they’re here?”

“You’re free to look. But if they were here, I think I would have found them.”

“Possibly. Did he have a place, a favorite spot around here?”

“He loved to bird-watch at a spot in Harford County.
Out near Havre de Grace, overlooking the Susquehanna. I could show you on a map. For some reason that was a spot especially alive with birds, even the occasional Baltimore oriole.”

“Could you show me on the map?”

“Yes. Do you think the pages are there?”

“I think I’d better look, that’s all I know.”

B
ob drove through the failing light across Baltimore County, then north up 1-95 until he passed into Harford County and turned off on a road that led him to Havre de Grace, a little town on the great river that eventually formed the Chesapeake Bay.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but there was always a chance. If Trig ripped those sketches out, he probably wanted to destroy them. But there was just a shred of the other possibility: that he learned something that scared him, that he saw something he didn’t understand, that he had begun to see through Robert Fitzpatrick. He was frightened, he didn’t know what to do. He came here to paint; because of some passionate psychological, stress-induced oddness or other, he had to finish the painting of a bird. He did, then he decided to remove the late sketches and hide them. He could have hid them anywhere, sure—but his mind worked a certain way, it was organized, pure, concise, it dealt frontally with problems and came up with frontal solutions. So: hide the sketches. Hide them in a place away from the house, for surely investigators will come to the house. Hide them where I will never forget and where someone tracking me sympathetically could find them. Yes, my “spot.” My place. Where I go to relax, to chill, to cool down, to watch the birds gliding in and out across the flat, silent water. It made a species of sense: he could have driven to this upcoming spot, wrapped the sketches in plastic or screwed them into a jar, hid them somehow, buried them, planted them under a rock, in a cave.

Trig, after all, had traveled the wilderness on his birding
quests. He’d been to South America, to Africa, all across the remote parts of the United States, its deserts, its mountains. So he knew field craft; he was adroit in the out-of-doors, not some helpless idiot. His mother even said so: he was
competent
, he got things done, he handled them.

So what am I looking for?

A mark, a possible triangulation of marks, something. Bob tried to think it through, and reminded himself that such a sign, if it had been cut into the bark of a tree, say, would have been distorted horizontally in twenty-odd years’ growth. It would be wide, not high, as trees grow from the top.

He drove for a time along the river’s edge. It was a huge flat pan of water here, though back beyond the town the land rose to form bluffs and he could see huge bridges spanning them. A train crossed one, an orange bullet headed toward New York. Beyond that was a superhighway.

At last he came to the site Trig’s mother had designated on the map, and he knew immediately he would have no luck. He saw not geese and ducks but golden arches, and where a glade by the river had once been, uniquely attractive to birds the region over, now a McDonald’s stood. A clown waved at him from behind the bright bands of glass that marked the restaurant. He was hungry, he parked, walked around a few minutes, and realized it was hopeless. That site was forever gone, and whatever secrets it may or may not have concealed, they had been plowed under in the process of making the world safe for beef.