Lostport

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

 

The young black man kneeling at the military history section of Volumes was calling himself Bobby Patton now. The book he was reading was about Henry V’s victory over the French, a story he knew well. This author thought it was the advent of the longbow that helped decide the battle of Agincourt. The arrows not only decimated the first two lines of French infantry, he wrote, but sent the initial wave of horses into a panic. They were half-blind to begin with because of the armor plates fitted over their heads; when arrowheads pierced their flesh or felled their riders, they started turning back and trampling their own men in the rush for safety.

But there was more to it than that, Bobby knew. There was the theater of war itself: the thick woods that forced the French to walk slowly out in narrow columns, unable to use their vastly superior numbers to mount a great wave that would have swamped the English. The field where the armies met, according to the books, had been freshly plowed and then rained upon heavily, the mud so thick the men could barely trudge through it carrying fifty, sixty pounds of armor on their slender frames.

So was Henry a fool for having marched his starving army from Harfleur to Agincourt on short rations, or a genius for forcing the action there? Was he lucky that some French farmer had plowed the field before the rain, or brilliant for making his stand where the French could least attack? People talked about his leadership, his charisma, as if his locker-room speeches had won the day, but the big speech everyone quoted—Once more into the breach, my friends—had happened weeks before at Harfleur. And words alone could never have roused the troops as did the sight of the French piling up on each other, the second line falling over the first, the squelching, sucking mud dragging them down, unable to get close enough to swing their swords at the lightly-armored archers.

When he was still in custody in the admin wing of Missouri State Prison, long days and nights waiting to testify, he’d close his eyes and try to smell the mud, the sweating horses, the vermin-infested cloaks that shrouded the miserable half-starved men. To hear the panicked cries of the fallen as their faces were pressed down into the mud by the weight of their own armor, the mud filling their mouths and eyes and noses and slowly drowning them. To picture the chaos as the French nobles tried desperately to fight their way back from the lines, knowing it was them the English would be after now the rout was on, them that were worth ransom if ransom would be paid.

Some nights he would use chess pieces to play out the battle. The white pieces were the French men-at-arms, advancing slowly ahead of the cavalry through the crowded woods out into the open field. The blacks were the English archers, the longbow men, spread out on both flanks, ready to rain down their deadly hail of arrows from two hundred and fifty yards out. In between them, a tangle of sheets on his cot served as the sucking ground in which the battle would be decided.

It was not how he had pictured protective custody. He’d always thought once he was done testifying against Darien Whitlock, had told the U.S. Attorney every damn thing he knew, he’d be hanging in some kind of hotel suite with a couple of burly marshals. Instead, all his time waiting for the marshals to organize his new life, they kept him in Missouri, segregated from the other prisoners, any of whom—most of whom—would knife him first opportunity to get on Darien’s good side. Bobby couldn’t even watch the tube with other inmates. Wasn’t allowed access to the Net, or even a damn Game Boy.

Not what Bobby had pictured at all.

But angels come in all shapes and sizes. They’d have to, Bobby thought, to account for Hoss Fielder. a correctional officer who worked the admin wing. Hoss was a big white motherfucker, enough tattoos on him to give him an Aryan look, but none of them related to that shit. He was just a nut about war and military strategy, no matter what tribe or civilization it came from. Hoss could go on for hours—“Did you know the Blitzkrieg concept was invented by the British, not the Nazis?”—and Bobby, who had witnessed all kinds of warfare on the streets of East St. Louis, found himself strangely fascinated. Since it wasn’t safe for him to go to the prison library, Hoss started bringing him books and Bobby ate them up. Never a student of any kind, he read it all and, to his surprise, always having thought of himself as book-dumb, retained it.