"Uh-huh."

Marty looked at Pellam. He waited. He laughed. "What do you mean, 'uh-huh'? Did you do it?"

"Yeah, I remember that one."

Marty rolled his eyes and looked out the window at a distant speck of bird. "He remembers it…" He looked back at Pellam. "And I heard that the thing was you didn't get blown clear but you had to hang on to this cable while the bridge collapsed."

"Uh-huh."

Marty kept waiting. It was no fun telling war stories to people who should be telling them to you. "Well?"

"That's pretty much what happened."

"Weren't you scared?"

"Sure was."

"Why'd you do it?"

Pellam reached down and picked up a Molson bottle wedged between his scuffed brown Nokona boots. He glanced around the red and yellow autumn countryside for New York state troopers then lifted the bottle and drained it. "I don't know. I did crazy things then. Stupid of me. The unit director fired me."

"But they used the footage?"

"Had to. They'd run out of bridges."

Pellam floored the worn accelerator pedal to take a grade. The engine didn't respond well. They heard the tapping of whatever taps in an old engine when it struggles to push a heavy camper uphill.

Marty was twenty-nine, skinny, and had a small gold hoop in his left ear. His face was round and smooth and he had eyelids connected directly to his heart; they opened wide whenever his pulse picked up. Pellam was older. He was thin too, though more sinewy than skinny, and dark complected. He had a scrawny, salt-and-pepper beard that he'd started last week and he was already tired of. The lids over his gray-green eyes never lifted very far. Both men wore denim-blue jeans and jackets. Marty wore a black T-shirt. Pellam, a blue work shirt. In clothes like these, with his pointy-toed boots, Pellam looked a lot like a cowboy and if anyone-a woman anyway-would comment on it, he'd tell her that he was related to Wild Bill Hickok. This was true though it was true in some complicated way he'd distorted so often that he couldn't now remember exactly where the gunfighter had figured into his ancestry.