He had not been. The helicopter came down into a clearing that a kid from Ohio — Corporal Dale Finch, nineteen, one of the twelve, though James had not known yet there would be twelve — had cleared with a machete and his own bleeding hands, waving them in like a man flagging down a bus. James went back twice more. He brought out one man who lived and one boy who did not: Thomas Albright, twenty, from a town in Indiana James had once driven two hundred miles out of his way to pass through, slowly, without stopping, without telling Maggie why — though she had known. She put her hand over his on the gearshift for the whole six minutes, and said not a word.
Noah said his name, quietly, and James came back to the highway, to the sun, to his grandson's hand on the handlebar. "I'm here," he said. "Just visiting the scenery."
Ortiz stepped in smoothly, a commander reclaiming his morning. "The offer of the staff car stands, and I'll make it once more so I can tell my father I made it twice. Beyond that — the escort is yours. Two vehicles ahead, the rest behind, at whatever pace you set. If you'd rather ride at the front with no one ahead, say so."
"I'll ride in the middle of it, where a man my age belongs," James said, "with good vehicles in front of me to watch for fools and good vehicles behind me to watch for worse fools. But Daniel — the pace is fifty-two. I won't be hurried on this road, not today."
"Fifty-two it is," Ortiz said, and there was the ghost of a smile. "My father warned me about that too. He said, 'He'll set a pace like he's reading the road a story, and you'll follow it, and you'll be glad.'"
"Your father talks too much for a man I carried out of a jungle because he couldn't walk."
"He walks fine now, sir. Two miles every morning, and he complains about the Arizona heat like it's a personal insult. He wanted to be here. His cardiologist said no, and Elena backed the cardiologist, and for once he lost a vote in his own house. He'll be on the telephone tonight, and on a screen at the dedication tomorrow. He made me promise to tell you—" Ortiz paused, and his composure showed a seam. "He's sorry he can't stand beside you at the wall. And there isn't a morning he wakes in his own bed, with his grandchildren in the next room at Christmas, that he doesn't know whose account it's drawn on. His words. I was told to deliver them exactly."
James was quiet a moment. "Tell him," he said at last, "that the account was settled in nineteen sixty-eight, in full, and that if he brings it up again I'll drive to Arizona and settle it again in his kitchen. And tell him I expect him on that telephone tonight at eight, his time, and if he's asleep I'll know he's faking, because that man never slept before midnight in his life."
While this was happening, Carter had drifted a few steps toward her patrol car, because the moment was organizing itself toward departure and there was a loose end in her hand she had to face. She had taken James's license at the beginning of the stop and clipped it, in the escalating middle of it, inside her citation book — in the possessive way of an officer who has begun, without admitting it, to think of a document as leverage, something she might make a man wait for. She had come within one signature of keeping it. That shamed her more than the registration, more than the plate light, more than anything.
The citation book was in her hand. The license was in the book. She stood there with the convoy idling and the old man swinging his leg, carefully, over his motorcycle, and understood that if she did not move now, the whole procession was going to pull out onto Highway 47 with James Walter Harris's driver's license clipped inside her ticket book — and that small, ugly fact would become the thing the whole morning was remembered for, by her, forever, whatever anyone else chose to remember.
"Sergeant Major!" she called, and started forward at something between a walk and a run, gravel crunching. "Sir — wait. Please wait."
James, seated on the bike, turned his head. The drivers watched her come. She stopped beside the motorcycle, out of breath in a way that had nothing to do with the twenty yards she had covered, and held out the license with both hands, like an offering, like evidence, like an apology that had found its shape at last.
"You still have — I still have your license, sir. I never gave it back. I had it clipped in my book and I — here. Here it is. I'm sorry. For this too. Especially for this, I think."
"Thank you, Emily," he said.
"I almost kept it," she said, because she had decided, somewhere in the last ten minutes, that she was done protecting herself at the expense of the truth, and the decision, once made, applied to everything. "I was angry, and I was going to make you wait for it, or worse. That's not the officer I'm supposed to be. It's not the one I thought I was this morning, either, which is — I suppose that's the part I have to go home and sit with."