Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [105]
“Just to set the record straight, the breed who buried you wasn’t coming back. He’s in Durango now, drunk out of his senses,” Jack Collins said. “You would have died underground of thirst and starvation. If I had my druthers, I’d take a bullet anytime.”
“I’ll take a bullet just so I don’t have to listen to you no more,” R.C. said.
Jack Collins laughed again and picked up the canteen and looped the web belt over R.C.’s head, easing it down so as not to clip his ear. “Stay on the edge of the hillside and go due north for about three miles, and you’ll hit a dirt road. Follow it eastward, and you’ll intersect an asphalt two-lane that’ll take you to the border.”
R.C. stared at him dumbly, the backs of his legs shaking. He tried to think about what Collins had just said. The words made no sense. He felt as though the horizon were tilting sideways, the mountains going in and out of focus.
“You really thought I was going to cap you?” Collins said.
R.C. didn’t answer. He glanced sideways at the spot where his mother had been standing, but she had disappeared.
“I wouldn’t do that to you, kid. You’ve got sand,” Collins said.
With that, he and his friends walked away like Halloween trick-or-treaters who had lost interest in their own pranks.
A FEW MINUTES later, Hackberry Holland and Pam Tibbs came over the crest of the hill and looked down on the riparian landscape and the empty streambed that resembled a pale scar cutting across it, and the graves where the half-breed named Negrito had buried his victims, some of whom may have been alive when they went into the ground.
There was no one down below. Pam swept the area with her binoculars and then pointed at the north, handing the binoculars to Hackberry. In the moonlight, he saw a solitary figure walking alongside the streambed, a canteen slung from his shoulder, his shirttail hanging out, his shadow as sharp as a fence post on the ground. “R.C.,” he said.
“How’d he get loose from the guy who kidnapped him?” Pam said.
“I don’t know,” Hackberry said. He focused the lenses on the southern horizon and thought he saw headlights dip over a rise and briefly reflect off a sandstone bluff and then disappear. “Let’s find out.”
They climbed back down the opposite side of the hill and drove north in the Jeep until they were out on the flats again and could drive past the hill and intersect the streambed R.C. was following. As they drove toward him, their high beams suddenly defining him among the pale greenery that grew out of the sand, burning the shadows away from the youthful angularity of his face, Hackberry experienced one of those moments doctors at the navy hospital in Houston defined as post-traumatic stress disorder but that Hackberry thought of as the natural entwining of events and people, past and present, that seemed to take place as one reached the end of his life.
The totality of a man’s days eventually became a circle rather than a sum, and one way or another, he always ended up at the place where he had begun. Or at least that was what Hackberry believed.
As he looked through the windshield at R.C., he saw himself in the late summer of 1953, crossing the wooden pedestrian bridge at Panmunjom, the last man in a column of prisoners being returned from the camps south of the Manchurian border. He had been emaciated, barely able to walk and control his dysentery, his marine utilities stiff with salt and faded almost colorless. A photographer from Stars and Stripes took his picture with a big Speed Graphic camera, and later, the photo was picked up by the wire services and published all over the country above a cutline that began, “The last American soldier to cross Freedom Bridge . . .”
But he had not been the last man across Freedom Bridge. Others would follow and others would be left behind, perhaps four hundred of them who were moved by their captors across the Yalu River into Communist China and forgotten