Hick lay on top of the sweat soaked sheets and tried to sleep. June’s heat had been building in the house all day and there weren’t windows enough to let it out once night’s coolness cloaked the land. His t-shirt and underwear stuck to him, and he lay perfectly still wishing for the smallest of breezes to pass over him.
He felt a storm brewing; the sweat stood on him damp and unyielding, the humidity pressing it to his skin, not allowing it to escape him. Hick closed his eyes, but not for long. As soon as they were shut, nightmares loomed before them, and when they opened the nightmare that was his reality crushed him.
He went to the office earlier each day. The death of Birdie Lee Stanton pricked at him, like a thorn embedded in the fleshy part of his foot, too deep to remove and always painful—something too close to his consciousness to be ignored.
The town was shocked when the mother was identified. Wayne Murphy declared it to be a rape, and therefore, another unsolved crime. Iva Lee had been a willing participant, of that Hick was sure, but there was a question of statutory rape, and because of this, the man would not come forward.
Adam was certain Iva Lee had killed the baby, not on purpose, but maybe accidentally trying to clean the afterbirth off at the slough. It was plausible, Hick admitted, but Iva Lee’s declaration that someone took the child put doubt into his mind. He didn’t think she had the wherewithal to make up such a tale, or comprehend the need to lie about drowning the baby. Though Adam and Wash were ready to close the case, Hick was not.
As he sat at his desk, dully staring out the window, the door of the station opened and Fay stepped in, looking relieved to find Hick there at such an early hour.
“Hick, Tobe’s real bad this time. He’s been drinking all night.”
Hick glanced at his watch. It was seven in the morning. “He got the gun out again?”
Fay nodded. “This is the worst I ever seen him. When I told him I thought he should put the gun up he looked at me real sad like and said, ‘Fay, I want you to take Bobby and get to your mother’s.’” She began to cry. “I’m afraid he’s gonna do himself a harm.”
Hick grabbed his hat and headed for the door. “Wait here for Wash or Adam and tell them where I’ve gone. Tell them to stay here. I want to talk to Tobe myself.”
She nodded, but grabbed his arm as he walked passed her. “Please, Hick. Be careful.”
He nodded and left the station, pausing to make sure Wayne Murphy was not watching. It was early and his office was still closed. At least there was that.
He raced to Tobe’s house out on Ellen Isle, a small rural community with no post office, school, bank, or church. It had a few tenant farm houses, but no one knew where it had gotten its name or why it even had one.
The Hill household was down a deserted dirt road, beside which ran Lem Coleman’s cotton fields. In the sunshine, the plants were blossoming, the recent rain helping them to grow tall and green. The ruts and grooves in the road were deep and Hick’s car jolted painfully through them. He zigzagged, trying to escape the worst of them and finally spied the house in the distance.
It was an old tenant house, used by the pickers who would migrate down to the county from the hills that lay to the southwest. They came to these parts every October for the cotton and made enough money from picking to live on most of the next year. The tenant houses were not designed for comfort and were not ideal for year-round living, but it was all they could afford on Fay’s meager salary.
The porch was rotten and caving in on one side and the steps were gone, replaced with a cinder block. Tobe sat sprawled on the edge of the porch with his feet on the block and his rifle across his lap.
Hick climbed from his car and approached slowly. He knew Tobe was unpredictable when drunk, and Fay had not understated his level of intoxication.
“Tobe, you know you’re not supposed to be firing that weapon. You’re scaring the neighbors again.”
Tobe wrapped his fingers around the barrel of the rifle, gently fondling the metal with his thumb. Hick remembered that motion, the long sweeping caress done with amazing fluidity for a thumb so rough from work. In high school, Tobe would hold a baseball behind his back before a pitch. It was as if he could see the ball through the pores and wrinkles and follicles of his skin. Hick admired this as he played shortstop behind his friend, but today, impeded by too much whiskey, it was doubtful Tobe understood the lethality of what he held in his hands.
Tobe looked up. He seemed confused as to how Hick got there. “I ain’t fired it, yet,” he protested with a slur.
“Fay came to the office and said you was about to. You scared her bad this time.”
Tobe seemed to consider. “Where’s she now?”
“Her mother’s.”
“Is she comin’ back?”
Hick hated to see his friend reduced to this. Tobias Hill, the boy who was going to the majors, who everyone believed was the best of the best. During basic training he was warned to shoot poorly at the rifle range. Everyone told him what would happen, but Tobe was nothing if not competitive. His score earned him a place with the snipers and he lost count of the men he’d killed.
“She’ll come back if you give me the gun.”
The hand on the barrel clenched tighter, the thumb firmly pressed. “My gun?”
Hick raised his foot and rested it on the porch, leaning forward and looking into his friend’s face. “Tobe, the war’s over.”
Tobe turned to Hick. His dark eyes were moist and he blinked quickly. “We both know it ain’t ever over.”
Their eyes met in mutual understanding. Hick held out his hand. “For Fay?”
Again, Tobe’s thumb caressed the steel barrel. Hick thought Tobe could never touch a woman with as much tenderness and love as he was touching that gun.
“Is it the only way?” Tobe asked, with a little sob.
“They’re after me to lock you up because of it. You need to give it to me.”
For a split second, Tobe’s eyes grew wide and fearful. They darted left and right, as if afraid some trick was being played. Then, he shuddered a little, as if trying to force his splintered mind back to reality. He rose unsteadily, and Hick took a quick step backward, thinking Tobe had been angered.
The drunken man stood there, helplessly, and then hesitantly raised his arm toward Hick, the butt of the rifle scraping the porch. Hick’s hand wrapped around the barrel and in a swift motion, he pulled it to his chest, afraid Tobe might have a change of heart.
Tobe stood there, stunned, looking at his gun in Hick’s hand. “I got a pistol, too,” he finally managed. “I’d like to keep it if you don’t mind. It ain’t what I fire that gets everyone riled up. The army issued it to me.”
“No one complained about a pistol,” Hick said as he walked away from the porch carrying the rifle. He paused as he put it in the back seat of the car. Tobe was staring at him as if he were taking his wife away, not with anger, but with hurt and betrayal.
Hick came back to the porch. “Why do you do this, Tobe? Why are you hurting yourself and everyone around you like this?”
Tobe sat down hard on the porch, the weight of the man causing it to groan and mutter. He picked up the bottle of Jim Beam and took a swig, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Do you ever see them, Hick? Do you ever see the faces of the men you killed?”
“Yes.”
“God, they were young.”
“So were you. You were just obeying orders, Tobe. We all were.”
Tobe took another long pull at the bottle and smiled drunkenly. “But that’s where you’re wrong, my friend. I wasn’t just obeying orders … I enjoyed it.” Thunder rolled far in the distance, the sound sweeping across the flat delta.
Hick folded himself onto the porch beside his friend. “What do you mean?”
“To me it was a kind of game. I’d tell myself I killed ten yesterday, let’s go for twelve today. I enjoyed hearing, ‘Good work, soldier’. I enjoyed the challenge.”
“Tobe, you’re a hero. Those men you killed could have killed one of our boys. You saved lives.”
“By taking them?” He laughed. “You know when it finally hit me, what I’d done? I came home and there stood Fay with my little Bobby. Shit, I’d never seen him before, and there he was. He looked just like me, and then it hit me. I didn’t just kill soldiers. I killed men like me—like you—men who were fathers or who would someday be fathers. I killed all the little Bobbys that would come after them. I killed them and their children in one fell swoop because it was a fun little game. Goddamitt, Hick! It was no game.” He began to sob and Hick sat beside him stricken.
Tobe took a long drink and held the bottle up in front of his face. “This is the only thing that helps me forget. It helps me forget what I’ve done.” His face dropped. “It helps me forget what I am, and one thing’s for goddamn sure, I ain’t no hero.”
“Tobe, you did what you were expected to do. What’d you think you were going to do over there?”
Tobe laughed. “I didn’t reckon on liking it.”
“You weren’t yourself over there. None of us were.” A small flash of lightning sparked, followed by the low rumbling of thunder. Hick saw rain in the distance, dark streams of water quenching the dusty earth.
“Oh, I was myself alright,” Tobe contradicted. “I was the big man. I always liked to be the big man. Best shot in the company. I’ve got a box full of medals congratulating me on the men I killed.” He took a long swig. “I’d trade ’em all if I could bring just one of those boys back. Give just one of them the chance to have a Bobby of his own.” He paused and smiled a crooked smile. “But I don’t reckon that’ll be happening, now will it?”
Hick shook his head and answered, “No, Tobe, they can’t come back.” He paused and then said, so quietly that at first Tobe couldn’t hear him, “I killed a civilian.”
Hick reached for Tobe’s bottle and drank deep. It burned all the way down and sat in his stomach burning and churning. “I killed an unarmed civilian. Hell of a soldier I was.” He took another long drink, noting that the storm was going around them, close enough to feel the cool dampness, but not close enough to wet the parched earth.
Tobe took the bottle back from Hick and asked, “What happened?”
The whiskey was already going to Hick’s head. The heat, the hunger, and the lack of sleep made his eyes feel heavy and his head light. He liked it and reached for another drink. “My company got hit pretty bad. There weren’t many of us left and we were all split up. Hell, I hadn’t been in Belgium a month. I didn’t know how to fight … I didn’t even have my bearings. None of us did. A bunch of green kids thrown out into an ice cold forest.” He took another long drink, vaguely aware that it no longer burned going down.
“I followed my sergeant into an old farmhouse. It should have been deserted. Hell, it was in the middle of a battlefield. We went inside and I got jumpy. I saw a shadow move and called for it to ‘Halt!’ Instead it ran. What the hell was I supposed to think? I shot it.”
Tobe nodded, drunkenly. “That’s what we do in war, my friend. We shoot to kill and we ask questions later.”
“Like you, I was a good shot. Right in the head. My God, I’d never seen so much blood. No weapon … too young to be a soldier.” Hick snatched the bottle from Tobe swallowing a long drink. He handed the bottle back with shaking hands. He shook his head. “Not even a soldier.” A small breeze blew up, cooling the sweat from Hick’s forehead.
“A life is a life whether they’re in uniform or not,” Tobe reasoned.
Hick shrugged, his speech beginning to slur. “That’s the face I see. I see it every day … a life wasted for nothing.”
“It was all for nothing,” Tobe contradicted, and then he began to laugh. “And here we sit, as good as dead ourselves. We sell our souls to Uncle Sam, and he gives us a flag-draped coffin and a free headstone.”
Hick took another long drink from the bottle, realizing that for the first time in a long time, nothing hurt. The cool breeze from the storm and the lightness of his head were pleasant. He felt nothing but a mellow softness in his brain that made the war seem very far away. For an hour, he sat beside his friend sharing the whiskey until it was gone. The last thing he remembered was Tobe rising to get another bottle.