Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,101

It was exciting and dangerous. And freeing.

Frank Plumley didn’t fall. He hitched up his trousers with the heels of his hands and he said, “All I ever wanted was a son. A good, strong boy. And what’d I get? I got a miserable stinking sonofabitch like you. A pantywaist.” He pointed down at Vic. He was not shouting anymore. His voice had dropped into a dark running mumble. “Think I like cleaning up your damned messes? Think I like that? Gonna be paying off that goddamned deputy and that goddamned magistrate for years, you know that? No such thing as favors, boy. Only trades. Bargains. And I made a bad one. Tell you that.”

And then Frank Plumley’s voice dropped even lower, and he uttered the words that would forever alter the destinies of the three boys, but in a way that would not manifest itself for years. In fact they would not, on their own, ever have been able to mark this moment as special, and it was only in relation to each other that they would finally understand its significance:

“You ain’t never gonna change,” Frank Plumley said with a savage snarl. “Because nobody does. Nobody changes. You’re gonna be what you are right now for the rest of your goddamned life. I got your number, boy. Don’t you think I don’t. Not for one goddamned minute.” He leaned over and spat in the yard, sending forth a gooey wad of phlegm that ended up—or a good part of it did, anyway—on his chin. He was not aiming at Vic, but Vic still ducked, which made Frank Plumley laugh. Then he turned around and lurched back into the house, letting the screen door smack shut behind him. Harm’s dad once told him that Frank Plumley specialized in the fuck-you exit. Harm’s dad even used the word itself. He did not say, “F—you.” He said the word.

The three boys were completely still. A dog barked in a yard on the next block over.

Everything was exactly the same as it had always been.

Everything was different.

June 7, 1944

A story had come through the ranks, passed along from hand to hand, soldier to soldier, like a baby rescued from under the rubble. These days, stories always came that way—stories, jokes, rumors, gossip, slogans, dirty rhymes. Harm noticed that. One person gave the story to the next person, and then the next to the next. Stories were passed from shore to ship, from ship to shore, from officer to enlisted man, from one service branch to another, up and down, back and forth. It reminded Harm of how gossip made its way around Norbitt. Person to person, with things added along the way. Things to spice it up.

The story was about Eisenhower. Harm heard it that morning and immediately had to tell Vic and Alvie, because how could he not? It was a great story. And it had Eisenhower in it. So, of course.

Harm told it when the three of them were standing on the deck of the USS Arkansas, strung out along the rail, looking at the choppy gray ocean. They were as seasick as it was possible to be—Alvie had thrown up three times already this morning, Harm and Vic once each. No matter how many days they had been at sea, they still got seasick. They may have been officially designated as seamen second class, but they were boys from a landlocked state and the sea was like a germ against which their bodies had built up no tolerance. His Eisenshower story, Harm thought, might take their minds off the woozy dip and rise of the big ship, the chop and bounce and heave. So he motioned them into a ragged little circle.

Harm tucked into his tale like a hungry boy with a plate of pancakes in front of him—although if anyone had proposed that analogy to him right then, if anyone had even murmured the word “pancakes,” Harm would have been sick all over again.

It had happened two days ago, he told Alvie and Vic. The night before D-Day. The night before anybody knew how it was all going to work out, when a million things might still go wrong.

General Eisenhower was reviewing the 101st Airborne. The Screaming Eagles, they called them. Parachutists. Each man draped with so much equipment—three knives, one machete, two bandoliers, two cans of machine gun ammo with over seven hundred rounds, one Hawkins mine, four blocks of TNT, one Gammon grenade, and that was just for