Night Is the Hunter Read Online Free Page A

than just a letter from an inmate who was facing execution and desperate to save his life.
    Donnally felt a sourness in his stomach, and not only from the lukewarm coffee. Maybe the judge had fantasized the whole thing or had mixed up cases together in his mind. He pushed the thought aside for the moment and asked, “What’s the doctor seeing in him now that she hasn’t seen before?”
    â€œThat’s part of the problem. She’s hardly seeing him at all, and neither is your mother. He spends days on end in the basement studio. He doesn’t shower. Hardly eats. He fired his film editor and is making all the cuts himself. His producers are calling because some of his investors are nervous about where their millions of dollars have gone, and your father refuses to call them back.”
    â€œAnd I take it that he won’t let anyone look at what he’s doing.”
    Janie nodded. “Like always. Except . . .” She paused and looked over at McMullin. He held up his palms as though to say the secret would be safe. “Except when he went for a walk he left a DVD he’d made of some scenes from the film on the kitchen table. She only had a few minutes to look at it. And it was bizarre. Crazy. Not like Shooting the Dawn and more like the experimental stuff he did in film school. Four different men staring into the camera, none of them speaking the same lines, then turning andwalking toward the same white door. But not like screen tests. These were all famous guys, ones he’s worked with for years.”
    Donnally found he’d folded his hands, interlaced his fingers, and was rubbing his thumbs together. He stopped. He knew his father would be humiliated if word got out that the man who’d made what was considered the most important Vietnam war film in history had reduced tens or scores of millions of dollars of his investors’ money into a few thousand dollars’ worth of something not even worthy of a student film festival.
    Even worse, it might reveal what should’ve been obvious to Hollywood forty years earlier—that his father’s first films were less conscious acts of artistic creation than reflections of a psychotic break triggered by the death of Donnally’s older brother and his refusal to accept responsibility for his role in it. Even Shooting the Dawn, an epic that was still studied in classrooms around the country, portrayed both sides in the Vietnam War as maniacal, the American soldiers as Deer Hunter –like killers and all the Vietnamese—South, North, and Viet Cong—as devious and evil.
    The argument of the movie was that if the war wasn’t rational, then no one fighting it could be either, and no one, not even Don Harlan speaking from the safety of the American embassy in Saigon, could be held responsible for what he’d said and done.
    It was only in his father’s last movie that he’d displayed to the world the truth of what he’d done, and accepted responsibility.
    But by then few wanted to listen, for later self-deceptions, distortions, and deceits, ones that had led the country into the 2003 Iraq War, occupied the public debate and no one labored anymore about the lessons of Vietnam.
    Donnally wondered what other confession was left for his father to make and how he was choosing to make it.
    â€œShe’ll try to get another look at the DVD,” Janie said, “and make a copy, then send it up here so you can see it for yourself.”
    â€œHas she tried to talk to him?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    For a moment, Donnally felt protective of his father, who now appeared smaller and weaker in his mind, a yellow-haired old man shuffling in the shadows.
    â€œThen I’m not sure she’s in a position to determine what he’s up to.”
    â€œThat’s exactly the problem. She can’t determine whether he’s up to something and is in control of himself or whether something has risen