The Unwilling(85)

“And you think he knows who killed this girl?”

“We do.”

“And that there is your problem.” Darzell withdrew his hand, but was gentle about it. “The man likes his secrets. That’s not on me.”

“It’s on me,” I said. “He’s doing it for me.”

“Why?”

“He’s protecting me, I think. Bad people, he told me. Inside the prison, or outside, I don’t know. He said they’d hurt me to get to him.”

“You don’t know much,” Darzell said.

“I know the DA wants to execute the man who saved your life.”

Becky said, “Please, Darzell.”

But Darzell kept his eyes on mine.

“One brother died in the war,” I told him. “Jason is all I have left. That means I am in the shit.”

Unsmiling, Darzell drummed his fingers. Eventually, he looked at his father, who nodded. “It’s the right thing, son.”

“All right,” Darzell said. “I’ll tell you what I know. It’ll take a while, and I need to do it in my own way. So don’t interrupt. Don’t ask questions. We can circle back later, but this isn’t something I want to do.” Darzell settled into the decision, not happy about it but willing enough to loosen up as he lit a second cigarette. “Jason is a hero, all right, and any marine that knows his story will tell you the same. Two full tours and most of a third. But it ended badly. Military prison, dishonorable discharge. That’s all most people see, so I’m going to start there, and then we’ll go back for the rest of it. Cool?”

“Very.”

Darzell nodded, satisfied. “You ever hear of My Lai?”

“You mean the massacre?”

“The slaughter, yeah.”

He looked at Becky, but she knew about My Lai, too. Most everyone did. In 1968, a company of U.S. soldiers murdered five hundred villagers in what, even now, was considered the worst atrocity of the war. There’d been no reason for the killings—they’d found no VC in the village, met no resistance—but over the course of that day, a company of U.S. soldiers systematically slaughtered innocent men, women, and children, blowing them up with grenades and rocket launchers, lining them in ditches and gunning them to death. Infants. Pregnant women. Anything that moved, breathed, or crawled. There’d been a massive cover-up followed by congressional hearings, a trial, national outrage …

Darzell had been clear about questions, but I couldn’t help myself. “My Lai was U.S. Army. Jason was a marine.”

“All very true, but Vietnam is a big, out-of-control, great, ugly mess of a war.” Darzell blew smoke, and stared me down with those hard, brown, soldier eyes. “You think My Lai is the only place bad shit happened?”





30


Darzell was right about one thing. Telling the story took time, and in the warm sunlight of after, I felt disjointed, cold, and overawed. Thoughts of my brother, the things he’d done …

“How about I drive this time?”

Becky took the keys, and I looked back at the pool hall, squinting in the bright light. Darzell was still inside, but his father stood in the open door, giving me a long look and a somber wave before stepping back into the gloom.

“Come on, handsome.”

Becky got me back to the car, and inside. Even behind the wheel, she left me alone; as if she understood the kind of processing I needed to do in order to understand the many pieces and all the complicated ways they fit.

“It’s not fair,” I finally said.

“No, it’s not.”

“I don’t know him at all. I don’t think anyone does.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I ran the movie Darzell had put in my head, a silent reel of bodies in a blood-soaked river, of all the people dead, and all the ones not dead. “Why didn’t Jason tell me? Jesus, Becky. Why didn’t he tell any of us?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did.”

“It makes sense, though. The drugs. The way he is.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“That I know the truth? I don’t know. I feel like my head is going to explode.”

“Just breathe, okay? In and out, nice and deep.”

I closed my eyes, and did as she asked. When I opened them again, I had no idea where we were. “Wait. Where are we going?”

“You trust me, right?”

“I do.”

“So trust me.”

She showed cool eyes and a slender smile, so I watched the city pass, thinking of cops, reporters, and prosecutors, thinking, They don’t know him, either, none of them do …

Ten minutes later, I knew where we were. The abandoned hardware store. A tumbledown and familiar house. “We’re going to your place?”

She flashed another slender smile, but drove past her street, turning at the next one, and pulling to the curb at an empty lot with old, small houses on either side. “Come with me.”

She took me into the vacant lot, and we clambered through the foundations of a long-gone house, then out the other side, and down a steep bank, wading through waist-deep kudzu until trees appeared and the vines grew up and over. She pulled me deeper into the forest, and when we reached the creek, she turned along the bank, parting vines until the same pool of deep, clear water appeared.