Free Last of the Dixie Heroes by Peter Abrahams

gone too, wheeling the horse around in one easy motion without a word of command, and galloping back into the woods. The mist closed around him.
    Roy drove out of the lot and got back on the freeway.

SEVEN
    ”Funny, the golf joke,” Gordo said, coming into Roy’s cubicle. “Everybody got a kick out of it.”
    ”Even Earl?” Roy said.
    “Especially. Don’t sell old Earl short. The dealership? Built from nothing, and that’s not the only iron he’s got in the fire.”
    “No?”
    “Fact is”—Gordo took a step closer, which brought him up against the desk, and lowered his voice—“if things weren’t all of a sudden so promising for me around here, I might be looking to hook up with Earl in one enterprise or another.”
    “Enterprise,” said Roy. “That sounds good.”
    “Want me to put in a word?”
    “No.”
    Gordo seemed a little surprised that Roy didn’t even think it over. “How come?”
    “What do you mean?”
    Gordo opened his mouth, closed it.
    “What’s the big secret?” Roy said.
    “I’m probably out of line.”
    “Go on.”
    “The thing is, Roy, realistically speaking . . .”
    “What?”
    “I really shouldn’t.”
    “Talk.”
    “It’s just that sometimes you come to a dead end in life.”
    Their eyes met. Gordo had deep, dark circles under his; Roy wondered if his own were the same way.
    “Know what I mean?” Gordo said.
    “Not exactly.”
    There must have been something in Roy’s tone, some edge that made Gordo hold up his hand and say, “Correction, not life. I’m talking about the job, that’s all. Don’t you ever ask yourself—Where is this job taking me? Not me, Roy, you. I’m in the process of lucking out, which just goes to show, because in terms of job performance, the truth is there’s not all that much to choose between us.”
    Roy’s turn to say something, but what?
No, Gordo, you do a much better job.
Couldn’t say that, not with what was coming down. Roy settled for: “I’ll be okay.” Right away, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. How would that little sentence strike Gordo in retrospect, the day they announced the job was Roy’s?
    “Course you’ll be okay,” Gordo said. “Didn’t mean to horn in.”
    “You’re not horning in.”
    Gordo leaned over, squeezed Roy’s shoulder. “No offense?”
    “None.”
    Gordo’s face was close to Roy’s. “You’re a good buddy,” he said, then thought of something and smothered a little laugh. “Poor Brenda.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “She’s embarrassed.”
    “Nothing to be embarrassed about.”
    Gordo smiled, a confidential sort of smile. Roy smelled tooth decay. “You know what they don’t tell you about life back then?” Gordo said.
    “What?”
    Gordo’s eyes shifted. Curtis was walking by. Gordo straightened, said, “Thanks for the help,” a little too loudly, slipped a manila envelope onto Roy’s desk in what he must have considered a deft maneuver, and left the cubicle, knocking against the padded wall on his way out. Roy recalled how he’d moved in uniform, only the day before.
    He opened the envelope. Inside were two black-and-white photographs and a two-page computer printout entitled “Roy Singleton Hill—A Biographical Sketch.” The attached Post-it read: “Dug this up last night. Enjoy—J. Moses.”
    The first photograph: Roy and Earl posing by the cannon. Was this like a real Civil War photograph by Matthew whatever his name was? Not to Roy. He and Earl looked silly, that was all. But the second photograph, the one with Lee, was different. Roy and Lee stood side by side with their arms around each other, the way the photographer said the soldiers often posed. For some reason, this one wasn’t silly, not the photograph as a whole, not Lee, and not Roy, even though he was wearing exactly what he’d worn in the first shot, snapped only a minute or two before.
    Roy dug out a magnifying glass he had in the drawer, left over from when they dealt in printed labels.