The Old Man(54)

He made his plane reservation to Little Rock. Then he ate dinner in the hotel’s restaurant and went to bed in his new room.

The cell phone that military intelligence had issued him never buzzed or vibrated during that night or the next two days and nights. On the morning of the fourth day he packed up, checked out, and hailed a cab outside the hotel. When the first cab stopped, he stepped off the curb. He said, “I’d like to go to the airport, please.” When he was inside the cab he said, “Delta Air Lines, please.”

His parents had taught him the value of being polite when he was very young. If he was polite, nobody in the neighborhood outside Jonesboro where he grew up would report his rudeness to his parents and get him punished. The other benefits had come to him one at a time. The most obvious involved women, but there were others. Strangers who had not had a bad impression of a man forgot him as soon as he was gone.

Julian pretended to read his newspaper, and then boarded his plane when his seating section was called. He sat at the window and closed his eyes. By the time the plane rumbled along and lifted into the air, he was nearly asleep. He had acquired the fatalism of people who had flown often to remote places, and the combat soldier’s ability to sleep anywhere and at any time. He slept through most of the flight to Dallas/Fort Worth, ate lunch, and stayed awake during the second flight to Little Rock.

He liked seeing his part of the country from the sky. He knew the short flight was taking him over Texarkana and Arkadelphia toward Little Rock. He liked to watch the ground below him changing. The first time he had taken this flight, after he enlisted at seventeen, he had thought of the view as the way land would look to God—green mostly, with ribbons and spots of blue-gray water reflecting the sun heavenward.

The plane bounced on the runway and rattled until the brakes overcame the plane’s momentum and the pilot taxied to the terminal. Julian waited for the long line of people ahead of him to stand, open all the overhead compartments at once, and bump into each other. Then they tugged down suitcases and bags that were too heavy and full for the compartments and swung them to the floor, where there was no room for them among people’s feet. When the passengers began their lockstep trudge toward the forward hatch, he plucked his small carry-on off the floor and followed at a distance.

Julian rented a car. He was always careful what sort of vehicle he drove when he was home. Nobody had ever told him to do this. That would have been as unnecessary as telling him to think. He selected a white Toyota Corolla, because it didn’t look too fancy or too powerful. It didn’t have tinted windows or too much unseen space in back. The Corolla was the sort of car that a prudent man might drive to work.

He put the carry-on bag in the trunk because leaving it on the seat beside him might arouse curiosity if a police officer pulled him over. A bag might raise the suspicion in a Southern cop’s mind that Julian had a hidden weapon or other contraband. The danger was probably intensified by the fact that Julian looked much younger than he was—not the sort of man who might be a state legislator or judge. Instead he looked like the sort who might mysteriously injure himself while in custody.

Julian had fought battles, including a few with people who believed that dying would lift them to heaven in an instant. He no longer felt the urge to prove his bravery to himself, and he had lost interest in persuading anybody else of anything. He believed in arriving quietly, avoiding confrontation, and moving on without notice. His family was the only reason he ever came back.

He felt better once he was outside Little Rock and beyond its suburbs. He drove along Interstate 40, took the exit for US 49 North, and kept going toward home. His part of Arkansas was the northeast in the Mississippi Embayment, where the land was rich alluvial soil from the Mississippi’s tributaries. The rocky range of hills along Crowley’s Ridge, where Jonesboro had grown up, was a border for him. There were oak and hickory forests where he had hunted, and then the flat plain where his family had built their vegetable farm.

He drove to the farm, parked the car, and got out. The air smelled the way air was supposed to smell, as though a summer rain had just fallen and the droplets had exploded into mist. The late afternoon sun was warm and comforting on his shoulders. In many of the places he had been sent over the past six years, the sun had been another enemy. Today it felt the way it had at the end of a day when he was a kid coming home from working with his brothers and sisters.

As he went to open his trunk, the front door of the farmhouse opened and his mother stepped out on the wide wooden porch. He remembered sleeping on that porch sometimes as a kid. It was enclosed in screen to keep out mosquitoes and deerflies, and had a pair of ceiling fans to keep the air moving on hot evenings.

“It’s about time,” his mother said. She was the one from whom he had inherited his short stature, young complexion, and slim body. Her serene expression made her look about half her age.

“Sorry, Mother,” Julian said. “I got called back in at the last minute for a project.”

“You already told us your excuse,” she said. “And I still say it’s about time you got here.”

His father appeared on the porch too. He was tall and lean, with square shoulders. It seemed to Julian that he was aging much faster than his mother. The upper part of his spine seemed to be contracting to bend him forward a little. He grinned. “I had to eat your pie, or it would have gotten stale. Nice to see you, though.”