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I thought hard for a minute. “Are there any woods along the edge of the field?”

“What else would surround a field out there? They’re all surrounded by trees. ”

“I don’t know. A road, maybe?”

“Okay, right. A road, maybe. ” He waved a fork in a dismissive gesture and used it to stab a fat, crinkled fry. “But unless the road goes all the way around the thing like the Talladega track, there are going to be some trees for us to hide in. ”

I chewed another bite of burger and wondered how this was going to work out. Following a hard swallow, I said, “Let’s see—army surplus gear, surveillance equipment, federally protected property…”

“It’s a recipe for wackiness,” Benny agreed. “We’re going to have to be careful. ”

“We’ll need to be more than careful. We’ll need to be ninjas, for God’s sake. We are going to be in some serious shit if anyone catches us, you know that, right?”

“This is the part where you remind me again about the ‘no weapons’ part, isn’t it?”

Now that he mentioned it, this was as good a time as any to reinforce that point. “Precisely. Remember that we are doing this unarmed. Completely. Totally. Utterly. I want nothing on your person that could even be wildly misconstrued as something you brought in order to stab somebody with. ”

“Got it. ”

“Or shoot somebody with. ”

“Not a problem. ”

“Or bludgeon somebody with. ”

“No blunt objects. I get it. ”

“I’m not kidding, Benny. If we get caught it’ll be bad enough without any illegal accoutrements. ”

“But”—he raised his fork on high again, jabbing it in the air for punctuation purposes—“consider this, my friend: Now we know that somebody else is out there on that battlefield, and he—or, for all I know, they—are not following your rules. ”

“You’re right. I know you’re right. ”

“And something tells me that he or they will shoot at us as easily as they shot at the Marshalls. ”

“This is true. However, if there’s a gun-toting maniac roaming the battlefield, a couple of knives aren’t going to help us much anyway, are they? If someone is shooting at us in the dark and we get hit, a knife is going to serve no purpose at all except to leave us as a pair of very sharp corpses. ”

“I can live with that. ”

“No, you can’t—which is the point. ”

“No pun intended?”

“Oh shut up, Benny. ”

11

Digging for More

SAND MOUNTAIN, ALABAMA, SIX WEEKS EARLIER

Rudy went into town for some reason or another, and while he was gone Pete snuck into his mother’s old room. He didn’t know why he was sneaking, but he felt like sneaking was called for. The room was not his—it had never been his. Now it wasn’t even his mother’s.

Pete didn’t know where Rudy kept the letters, but a few minutes of digging through cedar-scented drawers turned up a likely-looking manila envelope. Inside he found the aging photocopies of dirty paper covered with chicken-scratch handwriting.

He sat down on the ugly, patchwork comforter that covered his mother’s old bed, and he began to read.

The reading was slow going at first. Reading had never been Pete’s best subject, and the dead Confederate’s tiny, slanted script was difficult to make out in some parts, nearly impossible in others.