by P A Duncan
Mai had waded a bit deeper, her fingers trailing in the water as the waves lapped at her. The phone call could only be someone from The Directorate. Mai hadn’t been this untroubled since last year in Bosnia, and the fresh trauma of their recent Sarajevo trip was, well, too fresh.
Even if she declared it his “paternalistic protectiveness,” he’d spare her having her relaxation disrupted. “I’ll take it,” Alexei said, holding out his hand for the phone.
Still smiling, the young man said, “But the caller specifically said this was for Lady Fisher.”
Alexei’s hand delved into the pocket of his swim trunks and emerged with a twenty-dollar bill.
The young man smiled, took the money, and handed over the phone. “Yes, sir. Very well, sir. Anything else, sir?”
“Two cocktails in twenty minutes,” Alexei said. “Something frozen. Surprise me.”
“Of course, sir,” the young man said and hustled away.
Phone at his ear, Alexei said, “Bukharin.”
“Well, Mai, you’ve certainly changed,” said Grace Lydell.
“My wife is wading in the water, utterly relaxed. Tell me whatever bad news you have.”
“We’re scrambled on my end, but careful how you answer,” Lydell said.
“All right. What is it?”
“Remember the guy in Pollock, Louisiana, Mai interviewed some weeks back?”
“Yes. Brian Paul.”
“He was scheduled for a transfer to that new SuperMax prison in Florence, Colorado, the one for the most dangerous of federal prisoners. He didn’t make it. You see, the warden at Pollock had never separated Paul from the general population.”
“Why not?”
“Strength in numbers. White supremacists in prison tend to protect each other, and there were enough of his Aryan Nation buddies there he didn’t have an issue with the black prisoners. However, two days ago, he was attacked in a secluded hallway he used daily to get to his work area in the penitentiary.”
“Is he dead?”
“He’s beyond dead. Using shivs they skinned off every one of his white supremacy tattoos, castrated him, decapitated him. Guards caught the guys literally red-handed. It seems word got around he’d talked to the FBI.”
“So, you’re telling me it wasn’t a group of black prisoners getting a little justice?”
“No, it was three Aryan Nation guys, already in for murder, so nothing to lose. They freely admitted they’d killed ‘a traitor to the white race.’”
The air around him seemed to go cold, but he ignored it and said, “This is only peripherally pertinent to our current…job. Why couldn’t this wait until we were back?”
“Paul must have had an inkling this would happen. Not long after his interview with Mai, he updated his will on file at the prison and requested the ‘beautiful Aryan woman from the FBI’ take care of his funeral because of ‘her love for the white race.’ And here’s the other thing. When Mai arrived in Pollock in her FBI persona, she was escorted by a woman guard, a white woman. The day of Paul’s murder, that guard called in her notice and disappeared.”
“You think she ratted to the Aryan Nation prisoners about Paul’s interview with the FBI?”
“I can’t prove it because we can’t find her, but as you always say, there’s no such thing as coincidence in this business. And, the penitentiary keeps contacting the FBI to get in touch with the agent who interviewed him, and, of course, that’s not working out at all.”
“Get someone on your staff to contact the warden as FBI Agent Katherine Burke. I don’t want this filtering up to Fitzgerald. He could make a mess of it. I’ll tell Mai.”
“Roger that. So, how’s the beach?”
“Beautiful. Wish you were here.”
“Ha! You old liar you.” Grace hung up.
Alexei turned the phone off and set it aside, once again looking at Mai. She’d shed her beach coverup and hat and had moved to the deeper water, where she swam parallel to the shore. He kicked his flip flops off and rose from the lounger, digging his toes into the warm sand as he walked toward the beach. Once he was in deep enough water, he dove in, swimming toward her. She stopped when he neared her and tread water. He joined her.
“You finally emerged from beneath your umbrella,” she said.
For a moment he stared at her, at the face showing no worries, the droplets of water in her hair catching the sunlight. “I did,” he said.
“And how’s the water?”
“Definitely better than the Black Sea.” He looked around. The nearest people were a good thirty feet away. “I had a call from Grace.”
Her relaxed forehead pursed in a frown. “What is it?”
He told her, no words minced. He studied her face for a reaction and found none. Her frown deepened.
“What?” she said. “Are you expecting me to be upset?”
“You usually are when our work has unexpected consequences.”
She glanced away, chewing her lip. “I didn’t tell you all of what he said. If I had, you’d have gone down there and emasculated him yourself. And, no, I’m not telling you now. And, no, I’m not taking care of his funeral. Anything else to ruin this lovely day?”
This was his Mai, now, harder, more phlegmatic since Bosnia last year, since Sarajevo two weeks ago, and he didn’t want to think about where this would lead her, to a place in her life where he’d already been, where she’d rescued him from. She hated being rescued.
“Cocktails arriving at our loungers in about ten minutes,” he said.
Her smile returned. “Ah, thoughtful husband at last. Shall we race back?”
“You’re on.”
With a laugh, she dunked him under the water and took off, swimming for the shore. Let her win? No, she hated that, too.
He caught up to her and passed her before the water shallowed at the beach. She emerged from the water, her slim figure in the dark blue bathing suit striding toward him. She paused only to snag her beach cover and hat from the sand.
“What are you smiling at?” she asked.
“You know how those Bond girls always emerge from the water?” he said.
“Better not go any further with that, Bukharin. I’m not one of your girls.”
You’re my only one, he thought. “Sometimes a fantasy is best kept to oneself. Are you sure you’re okay?”
They headed for the loungers. “Alexei, I have little respect for white supremacists, and the fact that they turn on each other… Saves us the dirty work.”
She strode ahead of him, leaving him to speculate about how the prison guard might have been tempted to rat out Brian Paul.
————-
*See part two of The Yellow Scarf.
55
Hope and Possibility
Port Town, New York
Nothing about the holidays had been right since he was nine years old. That was the first Christmas without his mother, when no one would answer his questions about why she’d left or if she’d come on Christmas Day.
Sixteen years later, different uncertainties surrounded John Thomas Carroll as he lay on the sleeper sofa in his father’s basement, a grown man still crying over a child dead a month, a grown man with no job and no prospects.
The day’s thick clouds and the snowfall brought darkness earlier than usual, but he wouldn’t turn on a light. If he did, he’d see them. The dead Iraqis. The dead Jared Parker. He’d see what he’d become, and he didn’t want that.
He hadn’t left the bed all day, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t dressed beyond pulling on a pair of sweatpants in case his sister dropped by. His father wasn’t here to criticize because he was going to a company party after work. That would only postpone the inevitable lecture. The reminders he was making nothing of his life. The lectures which began, “When I was your age…”
Carroll had heard them all before, and the shitty thing was his dad was right. He was nothing and no one.
His father would see the not-dressing, not bothering to get
out of bed as a characteristic of a generation he didn’t understand. He’d let that pass. What the old man wouldn’t tolerate was the crying. That was unacceptable under any circumstance. Carroll had to shut down, pack it all inside, right where a man was supposed to keep it.
The night before, while he, his father, and his sister ate dinner, the dead Iraqis had bled all over the basement floor, and Jared Parker lay in the blood, plastic bag over his head. When Carroll had tried to sleep, they all got up and pointed fingers at him.
His father believed men worked things out on their own, and Carroll hadn’t mentioned Jared’s death. His father would show no emotion. His sister would give him her dumb-blonde expression and go off to party with her friends. Both of them would leave him alone to “work out” his feelings on that premature death.
And to take a good, long look at the wreck of his own life.
This morning, he’d opened his eyes from a night of disjointed and disturbing dreams and realized all that loomed before him was darkness and emptiness and purposelessness. He’d wept off and on all day, for Jared, for the men he’d killed in Iraq, for himself, for all of the above.
He’d tried sleeping to stop the crying, but that only brought more dreams, full of fire and burning sand, tank shells exploding in the desert, tracer fire cutting the dark, dead bodies burned beyond recognition, dead eyes staring at him through a plastic bag.
Crying made him angry because he couldn’t stop, angry at his mother for leaving, angry at his father for not stopping her, angry he hadn’t saved a child’s life, angry he’d fucked away the promise everyone had said he had.
He should be able to get it back, but everything eluded him, a meaning to his life, a decent job. Once, he’d been so certain of his future. He’d seen it before him: an Army career, a wife, kids of his own. Somewhere along the line that had changed; something had taken that from him. His future was now a black hole from which dead soldiers and a dead child stared at him.
Last night, over dinner, his father had brought up the armored car company where he’d worked after high school had an opening.
“I mentioned to the guy you were out of the Army and looking for a job,” his father said. “They’ll take you back. Your combat experience, you know. You got those medals. They’re a foot in the door anywhere, if you’d get after it.”
In bed last night, Carroll had wept because he was twenty-five years old and his only job prospect was the one he’d had at eighteen.
He longed for meth. It pushed the dreams and visions away because it kept him awake, but it also made him remember the things he was supposed to forget. Remembering brought hurt, an elusive inner pain no amount of meth or painkiller could touch. When he was a kid, his mother would take his pain into herself, but her absence was its own pain, borne in stoic silence because men didn’t cry.
He couldn’t talk to his father about this desperate loneliness, this pervasive sense of failure. Because men didn’t.
No one had called him a failure to his face. His father had to think it, though. He measured success in the fact he’d had the same job for more than thirty years, had a good retirement coming. Carroll had nothing. He could have had job security in the Army, and even though his father hadn’t liked it when he joined he was also dismayed when Carroll hadn’t “gutted it out.”
His chest felt ready to burst, like that movie, Alien. He wanted to scream and not stop. The walls of the basement, the things from his old bedroom in boxes, closed in. He was buried alive, suffocating in his uselessness. The walls would crush him, and no one would notice.
He grabbed his wallet and car keys and ran upstairs, through the house, and out to his car, bare-footed and still dressed only in sweatpants. He drove, still crying, no destination in mind. He met cars and must have run stop signs or strayed across the line because horns blared.
Why didn’t one of them hit him?
Without his seat belt, he’d fly through the windshield out into the snow where the dark could swallow him.
After a long time, he realized he’d stopped. He looked at the warm, inviting lights of a house he knew. The wrenching sobs began again, from so deep in his gut they carried pieces of his soul with them. Wallet in hand, he ran from the car, not feeling the snow on his feet and leaving the car running. He pounded on the front door, his fist in sync with his sobs.
The man who opened the door was an older version of his father, but with a kind and caring face. “Oh, my God, son, what’s wrong?” his grandfather asked as he pulled Carroll inside.
Carroll couldn’t answer. He could only cry. An adult, a man, standing in his grandfather’s house, half-naked and shivering. The older man wrapped his arms around his grandson and hugged him, telling him, “It’s all right. Everything is all right.”
He asked no questions; this love was unconditional.
The words wouldn’t come, only the body-wracking sobs. His grandfather rocked him in his arms, shushed him gently, and told him whatever it was, he was okay. That loving touch, the soothing voice, much like his mother’s had been, worked. Carroll stopped crying and breathed in hiccups. And he was exhausted. His grandfather had to hold him up.
“Don’t tell dad, please,” Carroll murmured.
“None of his business, is it?”
His grandfather steered Carroll to his own bedroom, tucked him in as if he were a child, told him to rest. On the bedside table, he switched on a light and left.
No, Carroll didn’t want to be alone. He wanted someone who would listen, to take away the loneliness.
There was no solace here, no end to the pain, the blackness, the desolation.
Wait. Right here in this room was a purpose at last.
Carroll threw back the covers and sat up, pulling open a drawer on the bedside table. There. The revolver his grandfather kept for protection, the gun he used to teach Carroll how to shoot. It would be loaded with .38-caliber hollow points. Whether Carroll put the barrel in his mouth or at his temple, one pull of the trigger would end the pain, stop the crying in less than a breath.
His hand certain, he pressed the gun to his head and cocked the hammer. Before he could close his eyes and accept the bullet, he saw himself in the mirror of his late grandmother’s vanity. He was on the verge of suicide in the house of the man who’d taught him about the stars, about the outdoors, taken him camping, had always been there for him without reservation. Even tonight. Especially tonight.
Carroll’s hand dropped to rest on the bed, his ingrained sense of safety kicking in as he de-cocked the hammer.
What a selfish son of a bitch he was, repaying his grandfather’s love by splattering his brains all over the walls of the old man’s bedroom.
No, no, he could take the gun, drive into town, do something to attract a cop’s attention, and pull the gun. Overworked because of the weather and holiday traffic, the cop would shoot first and apologize later.
Now, that was a real plan, and he couldn’t help but be proud he’d figured it out. An end to the pain, the emptiness. No more dead Iraqis. No mess in his grandfather’s house.
And a lot of unanswered questions, his pain transferred to others.
No, write a note, explain it so they’d understand.
And they’d still be disappointed in him.
What had seemed so clear clouded over. New tears brimmed.
He spotted his wallet, on the table beside the bed. The bright, white edge of a piece of paper peeked from the slot where he kept his money. For a moment, he didn’t remember how it got there.
Carroll pulled it free. A note in his handwriting. Sometimes when the meth wore off, he didn’t remember things. This must be something he wanted to remember.
He held the folded note between his fingers. His heart fluttered with anticipation at seeing what he’d written. Let it be the answer to everything, he thought. The folds were still crisp, so he’d written it not long ago. With care, as if it might disintegrate, he unfolded it and read.
“MW Convention. She
evahn Doherty. Red hair. Great body!! Ireland. Said she’d be coming to gun shows. Wants to see me again. Look for her!!!!!”
A drowning man reached for any lifeline, and he brought an image of her to mind. Her BDUs had fit her ass good, and her eyes had been warm and inviting. Brown, he remembered. He also remembered she was older than he, but his first sexual encounter had been with an older woman. Some women went for younger men.
He brought their conversation to mind, savored every remembered nuance of her voice, relished again the sway of her hips as she’d walked away. By the time he reached that point, he was hard.
John Carroll looked at his hands. A note giving him hope and possibility in one; a gun and finality in the other.
He shut the gun away in the drawer and propped the note up against his wallet. He lay down on his side where he could see it. A sigh escaped him, his eyes drooped, and desolation lifted.
He would find her and tell her she’d saved him. Somehow he’d endure all the family crap for the holidays, and he’d hit the road and look for her. If he had to go to gun shows in every state in this country, he’d find her.
Carroll masturbated and fell asleep. For once, there were no dreams.
End of Book One.
Continued in Book Two.
A Perfect Hatred: Bad Company
Coming December 2018
Acknowledgements
This may surprise some, but I’d like to thank my ex, W. Michael Sacrey, III. He was with me through most of the rough draft writing and listened to my interpretation of countless hours of research on the siege at Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing. His encouragement and belief in me, despite the subject matter, bolstered me when doubt would inevitably emerge.
I lovingly acknowledge, as well, two of my favorite writing groups, the Author Transformation Alliance and SWAG Writers. From them came critiques and beta readers, support and cheerleading, and ego-boosting when needed, not to mention ego-deflation when needed as well. Thank you beyond words.
