Spencerville

He looked around at the burial mound and, for the first time, made the connection between this mound and the similar burial mounds he'd seen in Vietnam. The burial mounds being the only high terrain in otherwise flat wet rice paddies, his platoon would often dig into them for night defensive positions. This was desecration, of course, but good tactics. Once, an old Buddhist monk had come up to him while his platoon was digging and said to him, "May you live in interesting times." Young Lieutenant Landry had taken it as a blessing of some sort, and only afterward learned that it was an ancient curse. And much afterward, he came to understand it.

The sun had set, but the moon illuminated the fields as far as he could see. It was quiet here, and the air smelled of good earth and crops. It was one of those beautiful evenings that would stick in your mind for years afterward.

He came down from the mound and walked between the rows of corn. He remembered the first time his father had planted forty acres of corn as a test crop, and, as the corn started to get higher, Keith had been fascinated with it. It formed an incredible maze, acres of high green walls, an enchanted world for him and his friends. They played hide-and-seek, they made up new games, they spent hours getting lost and pretending that there was some danger lurking in the maze. The fields were deliciously scary at night, and they often slept out under the stars, between the rows, armed with BB guns, posting guards through the night, getting themselves worked up into a state of pure terror.

We were all little infantrymen in training, he thought. He didn't know if that was biological or perhaps a cultural memory from the days when this place had been the western frontier. Lacking any real danger, we had to create one, we resurrected long-dead Indians, transported wild beasts to the cornfields, and imagined bogeymen. Then, when the real thing came along — the war — most of us were ready. That was what had really happened to him and Annie in 1968. He knew he could have gone to graduate school with her, they could have married and had kids and roughed it together like so many of their college friends. But he was already programmed for something else, and she understood that. She let him go because she knew he needed to go slay dragons for a while. What happened afterward was a series of missed opportunities, male ego, female reserve, failures to communicate, and just plain bad luck and bad timing. Truly, we were star-crossed lovers.

Chapter Nine

It rained all day, and it was not one of those summer storms from the west or southwest that came and went. It was a cold, steady rain from over Lake Erie, a taste of autumn. The rain was welcome because the corn was not ready and wouldn't be until sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Keith thought if he was still around then, he'd offer the Mullers and the Jenkinses a hand with their harvests. The machinery did most of the work these days, but an able-bodied man who sat around during the harvest was still thought of as a slothful sinner, predestined for hell. People who pitched in, on the other hand, were quite obviously among the saved. Keith had a little trouble with Protestant predestination and suspected that most of his neighbors, except for the Amish, weren't too sure about it themselves anymore. But to play it safe, most people acted like they were among the saved, and, in any case, Keith wanted to bring in a harvest again.

There was some work to do in the house, so he didn't mind the rain. He had a list of handyman chores — plumbing, electric, ripped screens, things that were too loose and things that were too tight.

His father had left the entire workshop in the cellar, complete with tools and hardware.

Keith found he enjoyed the small chores, which gave him a sense of accomplishment that he hadn't felt in some time.

He began the task of changing all the rubber washers in all the faucets in the house. This may not have been what other former senior intelligence officers were doing at the moment, but it was just mindless enough to give him time to think.

The week had passed without incident, and Keith noticed that the police cars had stopped cruising past his house. This coincided with Annie's absence, and for all he knew, Cliff Baxter had gone to Bowling Green as well, though he doubted it. He doubted it because he understood a man like Baxter. Not only would Cliff Baxter be an anti-intellectual in the worst tradition of small-town America, but on a personal level Baxter would not go to a place where his wife had spent four happy years, pre-marriage.

Another type of man might be secure in the knowledge that his wife had only one lover in four years of college and hadn't screwed the entire football team. But Cliff Baxter probably considered his wife's premarital sex as something he should be pissed off about. Surely, the woman had no life before Mr. Wonderful.