South of Shiloh (40 page)

58

RANE SAT WITH HIS BACK AGAINST A TREE IN THE
grassy open space, midway between Hurlbut Field and the parking lot where Beeman stood conferring with the security detail. He sipped SWAT coffee from his tin cup and huddled deeper into Paul Edin’s greatcoat. Wood smoke drifting from camp fires put an autumn bite in the April haze.

Fast and sharp had always been his style.

He could not imagine living when his eyes and his body gave out. Among the few things he’d learned in his thirty-seven years was that the majority of people get trapped in little personal hells. Most of us settle for less than we want was the gist of what Jenny had said that night on her back deck.

Kept his distance from the herd, rode the thermals. Where the bovine eyes saw a blur, he spied a mouse dart in the stubble and swooped.

Rane plucked a handful of wet grass and threw it in frustration.

And now here was Beeman in his life. He watched the Southern cop, who had no discernible bottom that Rane could fathom, leave the parking lot and walk heavily through the indigo early evening. Corny Beeman, steeped in primitive superstitions, who alluded to invisible shit in the air. Who took his family to church every Sunday. Coming at him in his Confederate cowboy suit and dragging his chain of ancestors behind him across Shiloh’s killing fields like Marley’s Ghost.

Rane stood up in a clatter of leather bags and buckles and Beeman’s bayonet and useless rifle. He dumped the dregs of coffee from his cup, buckled it through his haver strap, and shook his head.

Fuck a bunch of Tex Ritter bullshit. Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do dah do dah…

“You tell them what Darl said?” Rane asked, knowing it was a rhetorical question before the sound was out of his mouth.

“Nope.”

“So what are they going to do?”

“The Hardin County boys will give it till noon tomorrow.” Beeman squinted past Rane, over toward a campfire, where the cavalry horses were picketed along the woods. Beeman shrugged. “So we’ll play it by ear. See if Darl shows in the morning…”

“Big if?”

“Nah. He’ll show. And more I think about it I might be wrong about Marcy,” Beeman said philosophically, pursing his lips. “She probably ain’t the reincarnation of Louise Hatchcock. More like Bonnie fuckin’ Parker,” he added with his slow smile.

“Riddles.” Rane shook his head, then opened his hands, “So?”

Beeman nodded toward the parking lot. “So maybe we’ll have to give those SWAT boys the slip…”

“Great,” Rane popped his eyes. “Go after him alone, into a fucking trap? With a rifle you’ve never shot? What if Mitchell Lee, Marcy, Darl, and the whole family is waiting out there?”

“Calm down, John,” Beeman said mildly. “You was ready to go it alone.”

Rane stabbed a finger. “That’s different. You know why?”

“No I don’t. You gonna tell me?”

“Yeah. Because
I know
I’m fucked up and arrange my life accordingly,” Rane blurted. “You
don’t know
you’re fucked up—you believe the local hype. Blood over brains. Chew tobacco and have a gunfight.” Rane had to laugh. “Jesus. I suppose I deserve this?”

Beeman nodded. “Yep. For how you lived your life. What you call karma.” Beeman narrowed his eyes in the failing light. “Good place for it, don’tcha think? Sun going down on the Shiloh battlefield?” Then Beeman started walking and said, “C’mon.”

“What now?”

“Over in the parking lot I ran into a boy I know with the Tennessee Cavalry. They got a big pot of venison stew cooking. We been invited to spend the night.”

The Tennessee troop camped along a tree line in a smog of wood smoke, damp hay bales, and wet horseflesh. As they approached, Rane detected an under-scent of sweet grains in burlap bags. The horses were tethered along a picket line and Rane noticed that saddles had been lashed to the trees in stacks of two and three and covered with waterproof ponchos.

A dozen men in rakish cavalry jackets and high leather boots bristled with pistols and sabers and huddled, shoulders hunched, around the fire. “Oh shit,” one of them drawled, seeing Beeman and Rane walk in. “Here comes Beeman. Gonna bring fire down on our ass for sure.”

“You got your Kevlar under that sack coat, Bee?”

One of the men held out a copy of the printout with Mitchell Lee’s picture. “Could you autograph and date this? Might be worth something if you get yourself shot.”

Beeman laughed, unhooked his tin cup from his haversack buckle, stooped, and poured coffee from the large pot next to the simmering cauldron of stew. He stood up and said, “Sorry about the fuss, boys. Probably nothing.”

“No problem. Breaks the routine. This Living History can get monotonous after twenty years.”

“Go easy on the bloodthirsty stuff,” Beeman said. “This here’s John Rane. He’s a photographer for a paper up North. Got eyes like an eagle and ears like a bat. Even got a camera somewhere.”

Rane endured a round of grumbling. Someone piped up, “Ain’t bad enough you’re drawing fire, Bee. Now we been infiltrated.”

As Rane shifted from foot to foot, one of the men finally hoisted the coffee pot in a gesture of welcome. He had a trim black mustache and was the only trooper wearing gray top and bottom. “Manners, boys,” he said amiably. Rane unclipped his tin cup from his haversack and accepted the coffee.

A general discussion ensued about the Kirby Creek incident—probably, Rane thought, for his edification—then spiraled into an account of accidents at Civil War reenactments. The consensus seemed to be a lapse in safety when it came to pistols. The famous casualty at Raymond was cited; the wound being consistent with a .36-caliber pistol ball.

“The problem with pistols,” one of the troopers said as he hefted up a Colt Navy and handed it to Rane, “is you have six charges to check, each one with its own cap. Infantry just slap on one cap, point the rifle at the ground and go pop.”

Another man offered: “What happens is, guys will bring one empty cylinder for the safety check and a pouch full of loaded ones. Gets hard to monitor.”

A natty fellow with a groomed beard and a stylish vest protested. “Remember at Gettysburg, that big Yankee sonofabitch stuck his pistol right in my face when we went over the wall…”

“Well, now Kenny,” a tempered voice came from the circle. “You
were
tryin’ to grab the flag out of his hand now weren’t you?”

“Was picking Cream of Wheat outta my face and eyes for a week.”

“Cream of Wheat?” Rane wondered.

“Use it to plug the powder charges in each cylinder,” said the man showing Rane the pistol, “otherwise the whole wheel can chain-fire when you pull the trigger. Blow up in your hand.”

Rane asked, “And Kirby Creek, was that another accident?”

One of the troopers pointed toward the horses where Beeman had wandered over to talk to a tall figure in a long duster and slouch hat. “They seem to be taking it pretty serious, don’t they?” he said.

The talk frittered away diplomatically as the stew was ladled out. The man in the long coat disappeared into the twilight, Beeman returned, and he and Rane took their plates a little back from the fire and sat on a log.

“Two of the SWAT boys will take turns staying up, watching us tonight. In the morning we change outfits and they’ll trail us to the blue camp at the landing,” Beeman said between mouthfuls. “We’ll take the first picket watch. When it’s quieted down, then you and me can talk.”

Rane nodded, scraped his plate, and then went through the motions of making his bed with poncho and blanket on a pallet of hay next to a row of shelter half-tents. Beeman kept the Sharps slung on his shoulder as he spread his bedding next to Rane’s. Then he left Rane alone and joined the circle at the campfire.

Rane lay on his back as night closed in, listening to the banjos and carousing drift from the fires at the infantry camp across the field. Slowly, the partying and the fires burned down and a vast, starless quiet descended, punctuated by the stamp and shift of tethered horses and snatches of talk from the cavalry campfire.

“You were on that Custer’s Last Ride event up the Little Big Horn?”

“Yep, back in, jeez, was the early nineties when I still had a full head of hair.”

Rane reached for a cigarette, decided against it, and instead stuffed his hand in his trouser pocket and closed his fingers around the manila card.

“That story true, what happened out there?”

“Uh-huh. See, we were playing Custer’s troopers, skirmishing our way up the valley with these local Indian boys from the Crow Reservation.

“Those guys were seriously turned out and they could
ride
. I’d wrangled with some of them playing extra on a few pictures. So this one big dude trots up in all his feathers and he says, ‘You guys look like the real thing, you could be the Seventh Cav.’”

Rane squeezed the crumpled card.
Talk
, Beeman said. He stared at the tremble of firelight, the way it played shadow peekaboo in the spidery canopy of branches, and tried to see it like Paul did. Father Abraham frowning down with black, tormented eyes.

“So the ride is supposed to stop at the Custer Battlefield Park boundary, right? Park Service don’t want you burning powder at each other on their land. But this Indian says, ‘Shit, you guys look almost good as us and, you know, this is
our
reservation. So fuck a bunch of park rangers.
Let’s do it
.’”

Faces.

Rane had interred the seven faces in synaptic holes burned in his nerves.

“So we did it. Formed up in twos, rode onto the battlefield and spurred right down Medicine Tail Coulee, whooping and blazing away with Colts and these big ole .45-70 carbines…

“And the Indians came boiling across the Little Big Horn River and up that draw. Yipping and yelling, all feathers and dust, and us banging away. Lemme tell you, man,” the speaker’s voice dropped to a hush that brought Rane up on his elbows to barely hear. “Them coming bent over those ponies bareback, shooting these padded-tip arrows they had. Those arrows going
whoosh
by your head. Talk about your period rush. I mean you
were right there
in the fuckin’ moment.”

The other storyteller laughed. “Those park rangers and tourists from New York and Chicago and such, they shit a brick and dropped their dentures.”

Rane lowered himself and huddled in Paul’s blanket.

Right there in the fuckin’ moment.

And he shut his eyes and saw the seven swarthy Sunni faces in the order that they died; a slender strip of negatives curling across the darkroom of his mind.

59

RANE WAS DOZING ON PAUL’S PACK WHEN BEEMAN
roused him. The conversation and the fires had died down. Shiloh slept in the dark. Rane got up, pulled the greatcoat around him, picked his way through the sleeping troopers, and built up the campfire while Beeman checked the horses. Then Beeman returned, carefully set the Sharps beside him on a log, and squatted by the fire circle. He packed his pipe, put a twig in the coals, raised it to his pipe, puffed, and turned to Rane. “So tell me about the sniper part.”

Rane scoffed, “A sniper’s like a nature photographer. He’ll lie up in a pile of rocks for days waiting for a bug to pop out of a hole. I was never a sniper. Shit, man, I don’t even
like
guns.”

“That may be, but back on Duncan Field you said seven kills,” Beeman said.

Rane eased his wallet from his pocket, extracted the pierced quarter, and handed it to Beeman.

“What’s this?” Beeman asked, turning it in the firelight.

“Souvenir for you. A 168-grain Sierra Boat tail out a Remington 700 Model 308 made that hole. Probably the same rifle those SWAT guys have. My ‘diploma’ from the police sniper school they have at Fort Ripley in Minnesota. They give you one round to carry during the course. Toward the end they put you out alone to see if you can make The Shot. Mine was a quarter at about a hundred forty yards in freezing rain, crawling through the mud and weeds with a dozen cadre trying to find me.” Rane shrugged. “They saw my military records and offered me the course. I did it to fast-track access, you know, to get to know more people in the department.”

“More research?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“It blew up in my face about a month after I got through the probation period, the first time they put me on a SWAT perimeter. I was supposed to sit tight and observe on the radio net. We had a guy who should have been in a mental hospital except he was barricaded in his house with a deer rifle, freaking out the neighbors. That’s when I realized I had a problem left over from Iraq.”

“What happened?” Beeman asked.

“I abandoned my post and rushed the door. Surprised the shit out of me
and him
. He ran out the back into a tag team of cops. So I get suspended pending a psych eval, for violating protocol. I declined the evaluation and left the department. I was dating Jenny at the time.”

“Hmmm, that sounds a lot like the standoff story in the St. Paul paper,” Beeman said.

“Yes it does,” Rane said, staring at the flames.

“John, you understand, I gotta draw the line at helping you commit suicide wearing Paul’s clothes,” Beeman said frankly.

Rane jerked alert when a drunken howl echoed deep in the trees.

Beeman explained: “Some of the boys get over-motivated and go off hunting haints every year.”

Rane turned to Beeman and said just as frankly, “I’m not haunted, Kenny. I don’t obsess about it. It’s not
what
I did. It’s
how
I did it.”

“That’s cutting a pretty fine distinction, don’t you think?”

Rane shook his head. “Look, I’ve read the whole damn
DSM
, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders
. This isn’t some stress-complex thing. Hell. I like stress. It’s…” Rane put his hand out, feeling at the night. “You were close when you said a veil. But it’s more like a transparent barrier. Like this lens between me and people. I keep charging it to break out.”

The fire crackled and cast war-paint streaks across Beeman’s face, and the ghost-seekers hallooed again in the distance and Rane lost his train of thought and wondered how many trees were still growing today that Lincoln had looked at?

Beeman brought him back. “What happened to you in the desert, John?”

“Okay, why not.” Rane held up a hand and let it drop. “Like your guy in Jackson found out, I went through the marine school at Quantico. The sniper course was divided into three blocks of instruction: marksmanship, observation, and field craft. I always could shoot a rifle. My uncle Mike taught me and he thinks there’s a natural connection between photography and shooting, that they use the same skill sets. He calls them kinetic instincts. But it’s a perishable gift. You have to practice it; that’s why I spent some time with the Sharps before I came down here.”

Rane probed at the embers with a stick, stoking the fire.

“You could really identify Darl all the way across that field?” Beeman asked.

Rane nodded and jerked a thumb at his face. “Twenty-ten in both eyes. But there’s more to it. I’d seen him that day in the bar; how he was built, how he moved.”

“And you remembered that?”

“Observation. That’s the part of the sniper course I really aced. We’d play this game. It’s called the Kim’s game. The name comes from the book
Kim
by Rudyard Kipling. Kim is this young guy being trained as a spy in India. They show him this tray full of various rocks and gems for one minute. Then they cover the tray and quiz him on the details of what he saw. We played a variation on the game every day for two months. Kinda like ‘junk on a bunk’: they lay out all these objects in the morning, then we’d train all day, and at night they’d have us write a detailed summary of what we’d seen in the morning. I think on my best day I identified forty different objects out of forty-five. There’s a variation of the game you play in the field, identifying stuff through a sniper scope.”

Rane paused, his face intent in the flicker of the fire. “And then?” Beeman asked.

“And then nothing. I go on to my next assignment.” Rane tossed up his hands. “Saddam invades Kuwait. I ship over. When Desert Storm kicks off I wind up following the 101st around taking pictures.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, staring at the glowing embers. His face worked and he said, “Thirsty.”

Beeman held up a canteen. Rane took a sip of rusty water, handed the canteen back, and said, “You remember when everybody was hunting Scuds?”

“I remember hearing them go over, seeing the Patriot light show,” Beeman said.

“Well, there was a scout platoon attached to this battalion so I’d hang with their sniper and do some shooting to establish street cred.”

“Showing off?”

“Maybe a little. So after a week burning rounds, I’m regularly punching bottle caps at two hundred yards with an M24. My new sniper buddy has this bright idea to take me on a reconnaissance. They had Intel on a Scud launch site way out in the desert. I get to fill in as a spotter plus I take my camera to document the strike if we confirm the target. The colonel likes the idea and gives us a go. Wasn’t much else going on.”

“A slow day in Bumfuck, Egypt,” Beeman chuckled.

“You got it,” Rane said. “It’s supposed to be simple. I’d seen it before. You go in with a sat phone and an IR light, a laser designator. There’s an F-16 on call with a JDAM five-hundred-pound bomb, has a targeting pod calibrated to your target designator. You sneak in, verify the target, contact the jet, then paint the target with the laser, and bang. It’s called lassoing the target.”

“So was it simple?” Beeman asked.

“Shit.” Rane gave his hollow laugh. “We jump off the Blackhawk before the sun comes up; two miles from the alleged target area. Except the pilot misjudges the distance to the deck and we hit hard. About an hour into the march we discover the sniper lost the laser designator in the jump.

“So he tells me to stay put, he’ll retrace our steps in the sand to the DZ, find the gear, and be right back. About twenty minutes after he splits, the wind does that scary change and the sand starts to blow in, slow at first. It’s getting light and there’s a wadi up ahead with some overhang along the ridge, so I head for that.

“As I get close I go to ground when I hear a motor. The Iraqis had the same idea because they are pulling this rig with a big-ass Scud missile in tow into the ravine to take shelter. There’s a truck with a security detachment of RGs. Counting the driver there’s seven all told.”

“Where’s your sniper?” Beeman asked.

“He’s the hard-ass ranger type so he’s carrying the big ruck with the water, the M2 A1, the sat phone. I’m the pussy photographer so all I carry is the back bag with his sniper rifle, my camera, and one canteen. Total brownout. The war stops. I don’t see him again for almost three days.

“My canteen didn’t last long. Ever go forty-eight hours without water in the desert during a sandstorm? Hollows you out, does things to your head.”

Beeman waited patiently as Rane stared into the dark trees when one of the horses shifted position. The fire popped a shower of sparks. A trapdoor opened briefly in the clouds and a crescent moon briefly limned the empty forest and was gone.

“I have the rifle out to use the scope. I can see them down there, through pauses in the storm. They’re hunkered into this sand cave. They have water in plastic five-gallon jugs. Six of these big fat jugs. I study them, get to know their faces, rank them numerically according to age. Number Seven, the oldest, had the most interesting face. Kinda like Anthony Quinn in
Lawrence of Arabia
. I watch one, two, three of the jugs fly, empty, cast on the wind across the bottom of the ravine. I can hear the empty jugs bumping on the rocks. Christ. What are they doing, taking baths? They’re drinking all the fuckin’ water…”

Rane reached for the canteen, drank, handed it back, and spoke methodically, like he was reading from a page. He never allowed himself to go all the way back there, not even now.

“Before dawn on the third day the wind falls off. You know how you tell severe dehydration? You stop sweating. Your piss turns dark. You have these severe muscle cramps and your spit is white paste. My lips and fingers were cracked and bleeding. Parts of my reflexes were starting to fall off. I was afraid of going into coma.

“I had a rifle that I’d trained on, that I’d been shooting regularly back at the base camp, and twenty rounds of ammo. The sniper’s cheat sheet with his scope settings was taped on the stock. You know how you figure the range with just a scope? You use the mil dot reticle on the scope like a slide rule to measure the height of a target…” Rane paused, shook his head, lapsing into technical jargon.

“Sure, I’d been to all the schools but I was just there to
watch
. I never thought I’d actually have to
do
any of that shit. And now they were rousing down there, getting ready to send people out. They had AKs and a light machine gun and I was too weak and cramped to get away. Then I felt the rising sun on the back of my neck and saw it was blinding them.

“No choice. I started at three hundred fifty yards, crawling down the elongating shadows. I caught most of them bottled up along the side of the ravine. They couldn’t locate the source of the fire. I reloaded twice.

“Number Seven knew what he was doing. He figured my general position by the sound of the shots and rushed me with Number Four. Might have worked with more guys, except it was just the two of them and they had the sun in their eyes.”

Rane heaved his shoulders; his voice hollow, matter-of-fact.

“The hardest part was crawling down to the water on my hands and knees. I was afraid I’d pass out before I got there. A couple of them still had light in their eyes when I took the first drink.”

Beeman started to say something, then stopped.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m no pacifist,” Rane said. “But it wasn’t war. And it wasn’t murder. It wasn’t even the water.” He gave a hollow laugh. “Shooters have a slang expression, ‘F/8 and be there.’ It means you set the aperture on your lens for enough depth of field to forget about focusing. You just point and shoot.”

Rane stood up and addressed the silent forest.

“It was just too damn
easy
, Kenny. Pure instinct. I was
taking pictures
, except my viewfinder was a scope and the pictures killed people.”

After a moment, Beeman slung the Sharps on his shoulder, rose to his feet, his face questioning in the firelight. “Then what happened?”

Rane shrugged. “I found their food. I ate their salt. Then I blew up the gas tank on the truck to make a signal fire. When the choppers came in I was drinking Iraqi tea and smoking Turkish cigarettes I’d found on one of the bodies.” Again the hollow laugh. “The colonel wanted a picture with his trophy Scud, said he’d write me up for a decoration. I told him to shove his commendation up his ass. He never got his picture.”

He turned to Beeman. “
What happened was
I had trouble getting involved with people, huh? Like the woman who was pregnant with my kid.”

Beeman toed some coals, stared at the fire, and said, “And now you come down here to revise your fate card.”

“Whatever,” Rane said. Then he pointed at the Sharps. “But if we run into Mitchell Lee, and it gets real tomorrow, you best hand me that rifle.”

Beeman shook his head. “I can’t do that, John. All this I learned about you ain’t gonna be some Hardin County prosecutor’s business.”