Wings to the Kingdom

That reminded Pete—he was going to have to be careful about how he broached the subject. Orin could smell money a mile away, and Pete didn’t want an accomplice. He wanted someone with information.



So he went to Kilroy’s. It took him nearly an hour to find the place, snuggled against the ridge and in the shadow of a big strip mall. Pete didn’t remember the strip mall, but it’d been a while since he’d been out that way, and a lot of things had been built in his absence.



Inside it was dark as hell. It took his eyes a minute to adjust, and when they did, there wasn’t much more detail to greet him. The bar was half-empty, but to be fair it was still mid afternoon and there was no reason to expect a crowd. Pete couldn’t blame Orin for disliking the place. It was filthy and bleak, and the neon advertisement signs within didn’t do much to brighten things. The bar was sticky, and so was the floor. Pete watched his step.



He didn’t know if the fat man at the bar was Orin’s dad, and he didn’t ask. He just asked for Orin, pretending that he knew all along the guy would be there. He was right. In the back, asleep in the stockroom, he found the red-haired Cherokee wannabe.



Orin sat up and slapped Pete’s hand in a friendly greeting. “How the hell are you, man?” he asked, drawling out the vowels with alcohol and leftover sleep.



“I’m good, real good.”



Pleasantries were exchanged and offers of beer were made. Pete wasn’t a man to decline a freebie; so together the pair stepped to the counter, and Orin made arrangements to score them a couple of bottles.



The bartender, or Orin’s father (Pete never did figure out which), opened the tops under the bar with a crank of his elbow. He set them on the counter and let the pair talk.



Orin looked just like Pete remembered, with his curly red hair tied into a bandana with a beer slogan. He had a new tattoo—a buffalo rearing up like a mustang. It reached from under his left armpit to his belly button. He showed it off with glee, even though it hadn’t quite healed yet. It looked to Pete like it needed to stay covered for another week or two, but Pete didn’t have any tattoos, so he didn’t feel qualified to offer advice.



Instead he admired it, as politeness seemed to call for. “It looks real good,” he said. He made note of the steam snorting from the creature’s nose and talked about how it must’ve hurt.



“Naw, naw, it didn’t hurt. Not like you’d think. Took forever, though. Felt like someone drawing on me with a red-hot fish-hook. But not really bad. I almost fell asleep, on account of it took ’em so long.”



“That’s real good work. Where’d you get it done?”



“Downtown. A little place by the river. So what you come here for, anyway? Not that I’m not always happy to see an old friend,” he added.



Pete thought that calling them “friends” was a little much, but he didn’t object, because he’d come there wanting something. “Well, I’ll tell you.” He had a story ready and everything. “It’s like this: A couple of stupid cousins of mine went out onto the battlefield down at Chickamauga the other day.”



“Went down there? Were they up to no good?”



Pete lowered his head with associated shame. “I’m afraid they were. They’re kids, you know, that’s all. Stupid as a pair of bowling cleats, without a clean thought between them. They took some spray paint out there and tore the place up in a bad way. I’m more embarrassed about it than I could tell you. But I’m not here to apologize for them; I’m here to ask you if you might know something about what they…well, they think they saw something. It scared them to pieces; I mean, it scared the shit right out of them.”



Orin straightened up on the stool; his mouth set itself in a knowing line. “They saw something out on the battlefield? They wouldn’t be the first.”



“I know it,” Pete said. “And we both know they shouldn’t have been out there. Their mother told them, too. She told them that they need to think of that place like a cemetery. It’s a place where people died in a war, and it’s where they’re buried. There’s no call to be disrespectful like that.”



“None at all,” his friend agreed. “But since they did it, it’s no wonder they got scared.”



“That’s what I told them.” Pete bobbed his mouth down to the beer and sucked down a gulp. “I said they deserved whatever it was they got from the place. And they’re real sorry—I can see it in them, even though they didn’t get caught. They’ve learned their lesson, boy don’t you know.”



“They should’ve.”



“They did. But you know, I got thinking when they were talking about how strange it was that, what those kids said they saw…hell. I don’t mind telling you, it would’ve scared the piss out of me if I’d seen it, too. Assuming, that is”—he felt compelled to call the story into doubt, if only to distance himself from it—“that the little shits were telling the truth.”



“They saw Old Green Eyes, didn’t they? And you can go on and tell me they did, and I won’t laugh at you.”



“All right then, I will tell you that. That’s what they say they saw. They said he was taller than a man and had them glowing green eyes everyone talks about, just like the stories say he does.”



Orin was unsurprised. “I can’t honestly tell you that it unnerves me to hear it, either.”



“You think he’s real then, eh?”



“I know he’s real. I believe with the certainty of the people who lived there long before the thieving Europeans came and took the land out from under them. They didn’t believe he was there—they knew he was there. It’s not no matter of faith when you see the fellow daily, now is it?”



“It’s not.”



“That’s right. He’s there, watching the land now like he did for the others before there was a park. It’s his mission. It’s his duty.”



“A duty?”



“A duty. He’s tied to that place as surely as if he signed a lease. Or that’s what some people like to say, anyhow.”



Pete wished he’d clarify, but he wasn’t sure how to ask him to without giving up too much information. Fortunately, Orin didn’t need much prompting. “There was the Trail of Tears, you know?”



Pete nodded, because everyone knew about how thousands of Indians had left the south along the Trail. “But Green Eyes didn’t leave when my people did. He stayed, tied to the place. And do you know why?”



“I don’t,” Pete confessed. “I’ve heard he made some sort of bargain, but I don’t know what kind.”



Bringing up the bargain Green Eyes had mentioned took some of the narrative wind out of Orin’s sails. “Oh. You know about that, then.”



“Only sort of. I mean, I know there was one, but I don’t know anything about it.”



“You mean you heard there was one. No one knows anything for sure. There’s no one left alive from back then, so it’s all passed into the realm of myth.”



Orin sounded like he was trying to do the voiceover for a film.



“So then…” Pete had stalled, trying to recover the threads of his questioning. “He’s staying around because he made a deal. With who?”



“With, well, with the park founders, at least. All of that happened some years after the war, but they were already having troubles with grave robbing and whatnot. The old guys who preserved the place, they were the ones who asked Green Eyes if he’d stick around and help keep the riffraff out.”



“Now how would they wrangle him into something like that?”



Orin hunched his shoulders and tipped the neck of his beer bottle to his mouth. “You tell me. But supposedly that’s how it happened.”



Pete was not perfectly credulous. “But that’s…well…I mean, what if he wants to leave? When does he get to go—or is he stuck here forever?”



“Naw, not forever. The way I heard it from my great-grandmother White Crow, it was more like Green Eyes would stay and watch the land until the last descendant of the generals had died or moved away from the valley. And then he was free to leave.”



Pete did a miraculous job of not rolling his eyes at the likelihood of Orin having a grandmother named White Crow. Instead, he took the new snippet at face value and thought on it while he sipped at the beer. Behind him, a television monitor detailed a football game that neither man had any interest in, and behind the bar the tender asked if they’d like another. Both said yes.



“That is something else,” Pete observed in a nonspecific sort of way. “It almost makes you feel sorry for Old Green Eyes,” he lied.



“Oh, I wouldn’t feel too sorry for him. I think if he really wanted to leave, he could. And for that matter, I doubt there are too many kin left around here anyway. The one guy, his family went back up north. And the other one…what was his name? Started with a ‘B.’”



“Boynton,” Pete said a bit too readily.



“Boynton, yeah. That’s not a name you hear around here much, is it? Not like the other old families, what’ve got their names on every other building downtown. I bet they died out years ago.”



“I bet they didn’t,” Pete said under his breath, but then he wished he hadn’t.



“What’re you getting at?” Orin suddenly demanded, his curiosity stoked. “What’re you wondering about, that you’d come all the way out here to hear it from me?”



Pete thought hard before he answered, and since thinking hard wasn’t his area of expertise, it took him longer than might have been considered mannerly. Maybe an accomplice wasn’t the worst of all possible ideas. Maybe it was too ambitious to try to do everything himself. “Two heads are better than one,” his mother’d always said. And in the case of the Bufords, that second head usually needed to belong to an outsider.