One Was a Soldier

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “I don’t want to…” Clare’s voice trailed off. Her ring, her engagement ring, glittered and winked in the light of the torches.

  Is that really as high as you can aim? To be the consolation prize for someone who can’t have what he really wants?

  She held the glass close to her nose and inhaled the golden oaken smell of the whisky, closing her eyes. She could hear Tally and the big man whispering, and then Tally said, “How long you been back, Major?”

  “Nine weeks.” Clare took a long drink. “Isn’t that funny. I counted every day I was in-country. I didn’t realize I was still counting here.”

  “Sandbox messes up your head.” Tally ruffled her dark brown hair as if shaking bad thoughts out. “Running that soup kitchen probably doesn’t help. There are some weird people there.”

  “I don’t—” Clare began.

  “She doesn’t work for BWI?” Drago asked.

  “Hell, Drago, does she look like a riveter or something to you? She’s ex-army. Like me.”

  The big man’s face creased. “I was just gonna tell her the company’s got a doctor you can talk to for free. If she didn’t know. I dunno about the army. Can you see a VA shrink for free?” He looked down at Clare, worried.

  Even shaken and slightly sloshed, Drago’s misplaced concern made her smile a little. He had clearly figured a soup kitchen employee didn’t have deep pockets.

  “The problem with VA isn’t the cost. It’s getting in in the first place.” Tally unsnapped her purse and dug inside. “Look. Here’s something you should think about. No pressure, and the lady, when I called? Said they didn’t report anything to anybody if you didn’t want them to.” She handed Clare a photocopied brochure showing an American flag, an earnest and multiracial group talking, and a soldier silhouetted in the glow of a desert sunset. It was the same brochure she had tried to press on Will Ellis.

  Clare let out a barking laugh. “The community center veterans group.” She handed the brochure back.

  “You heard about it? Yeah, they’re starting up next week. I, um, I’m thinking of trying it out.”

  “Why?”

  “Jesus, Dragojesich.” Tally slugged him. “Try and show a little sensitivity here.”

  “Clare?”

  Over Dragojesich’s backhoe-sized shoulder, she saw Russ striding across the flagstones. Even in the flickering light, she could see his worried frown.

  “Here,” she called.

  He crossed to her. Took her by her upper arms and shook her slightly. “I thought you were going to stay put.”

  “I’m sorry, I … I wanted a drink. Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, just a couple assholes who didn’t learn how to use their words in preschool.” He spotted Tally. “Pardon my French.” He did a double take. “Ms. McNabb?”

  Tally was looking from Clare to Russ and back to Clare. A knowing smile spread over her broad face. “That’s why you told me to drop your name with him.”

  Russ wrapped his arm around Clare. “What?”

  There was a swirl of bodies near the bar. Clare caught a glimpse of an expensive suit. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Are you done? Can we go now?”

  “Sure. A couple uniforms from Lake George showed up. It’s their problem now.”

  “Tally, thank you.”

  “No prob. We even about that soup kitchen thing?”

  Clare waved her free hand. “It never happened.”

  “Good enough.” Tally leaned forward and snapped Clare’s clutch open. She stuffed the brochure inside. “Think about what I said, huh?”

  “I will.” Clare handed the empty glass to Dragojesich. “Thank you for the drink.”

  He shrugged, a movement akin to the uplift of mountains in quick time. “No thanks necessary. Those of us who been over there gotta stick together, right?”

  The expensive suit seemed to be moving. Coming their way. “Right,” Clare said. “Thanks. ’Bye.” She headed off toward the porch stairs at such a clip it took Russ three or four seconds to catch up with her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were awfully chummy with McNabb. Considering she’s the reason you sprained your ankle. You were complaining about not running just a couple days ago.”

  “She apologized. I forgave her. Can we go now?”

  “Are you—” He looked around them at the dancers as they passed. “Are you mad I left you alone to go stop that fight?”

  She nearly tripped over her own feet. He steadied her. “Are you kidding? Of course not. That’s your job. It doesn’t end when you take the uniform off. That’s one of the things we have in common.” The booze was hitting her system, warming her from the inside out, calming her down. She smiled. “You ought to know that by now.”

  He looked down at the steps as they climbed to the wide, winged porch. “I guess … Linda would’ve been. Upset, I mean.”

  She caught his arm. He turned to her. The light spilling from the resort’s open doors washed him golden, picking out his crow’s-feet and smile lines and frown lines. He was the most attractive man she had ever met. He was fifty-two. He had been married twenty-five years. Someone who can’t have what he really wants.

  “I’m not Linda,” she said.

  “I know.” He took her hand, interlacing his fingers with hers. “I’m not trying to compare you two. It’s just that I have this whole set of reflexes that come from being Linda’s husband. They’re gonna come out now and again. I figure the best way to deal with that is to be up-front about it, and ask you what’s going on instead of just assuming I know.”

  A laugh that was very close to a sob bubbled out of her chest.

  “What?”

  “That’s my entire third marital counseling session condensed to one sentence.”

  He looked at her closely, a sliver of a smile on his face. He carefully rubbed one thumb along her cheek. “Are you sure you’re okay, love?”

  She could feel Opperman out there, gliding through the press of bodies like a malignant presence just under the surface of the water.

  “Just … overtired. Overwhelmed.”

  “Yeah, I have that effect on women.”

  She laughed.

  He tugged her toward the door. “C’mon, tired girl. Let’s get you home to bed.” He shook his head when she opened her mouth. “Alone.”

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

  In her dream, Clare was flying. The radio crackled and spat with an endless flow of chatter, air-to-air, ground-to-air, reports from the AWACs flying miles above them.

  Clare checked the airspeed, yawed the rooters another ten degrees so that they were looking at the ground through the windscreen. Drying fields. Irrigation pumps. And there, the narrow Nile green river that led to the town. She picked up speed. “Target coordinates in. Unlocking missiles.”

  “Confirmed. Range five hundred,” her copilot said.

  Clare tapped her mic. “Alpha Tango, this is Bravo Flight five two five, ranged three hundred meters from one-three Company Foxtrot. Do we have a confirm to go hot?”

  Her helmet’s headset blared. “Bravo Flight five two five, you are confirmed to go hot.”

  “Roger, Alpha Tango.” She flicked the switches. “Missiles on.”

  The radio cracked again. “Bravo five two five, this is the one-three Foxtrot. Not to rush you or anything, but where the hell are you?”

  “We’ll be on top of you in two minutes, one-three. Are you still under fire?”

  “Hell, yes, we’re still under fire. We fell back to the house across the street. There ain’t no more place to go. We’ve got wounded. We need an extract, and we need it five minutes ago.”

  “We have signal,” her copilot said, and she glanced at him and saw it was her SERE instructor, Master Sergeant Ashley “Hardball” Wright, his lanky frame taking up all the cockpit space and then some.

  “Master Sergeant? I didn’t know you were flight-certified.”

  “Pay attention,
Fergusson. You might live longer.” The sun on the water flashed unbearably bright as they overflew the river. Then they were roaring over low buildings, dun and cement, and he said, “Target acquired,” and she said, “Fire,” and the Black Hawk’s frame shuddered as the AGM-114s launched out of their cradles, and they streaked away faster than the eye could follow and half the target building exploded into dust and fire and oily black smoke. They flew into the black roiling column, the sound of the explosion carrying over the rotors, through her helmet, and she rode up, up, up on the high hard thermal, rising out of the smoke as the remains of the building burned beneath them.

  “One-three Foxtrot, I need an LZ,” she said into her mic. “Do you have enemy fire?”

  “Negative, Bravo five two five. You smoked ’em. We’re establishing a perimeter now.”

  She dropped the helo like an express elevator, leaving her stomach somewhere above the floating debris. The ambulatory of the one-three had cordoned off a dirty square flanked by burning rubble and mortar-pocked houses. She touched down and cut the engine. She looked around. There were bodies everywhere. Everywhere, circling her landing zone, heaped over the dirt and the cement, men, women, children, white shattered bones and black burned skin. “Oh my God,” she said.

  Then they were standing outside. The stench was beyond bearing, shit and burned insulation and rotting meat. Hardball said, “The lawyer, testing Jesus, asked, ‘Who is my neighbor?’”

  So many bodies. So many lives. So much death. The wounded of the one-three squad were lying on the broken concrete, body after bloody, blasted body, all in urban camo except for one. One was in khaki and brown. “We need extraction!” a sergeant yelled.

  The helo was gone. Clare looked around, panicked.

  “What does the Lord require of you,” Hardball asked, “but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?”

  “Where’s the ship?” Clare cried. “Where’s the goddamn ship?” A pair of EMTs hoisted a gurney. The man in khaki and brown was on it, packed with blue emergency bandages that had bled through in ragged purple blotches. “Where are you going?” Clare screamed. “We’re extracting as soon as I find the ship! Bring him here!”

  The EMTs passed her and she saw him in fragments: his sandy hair, the oxygen mask, one boot lolling off the stretcher. She saw his hand, tan, limp, still wearing his wedding ring. She lunged toward him and Hardball was in the way, soaking in blood, reeking of it, and he caught her and held her, saying, “This is my commandment to you; that you love one another as I have loved you.”

  Then the EMTs threw Russ Van Alstyne’s dead body into the charnel house flames and she sat bolt upright, screaming and snot-faced in the darkness of her bedroom.

  “Oh, God, help me!” Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she might stroke out. She half fell, half crawled out of her sweat-tangled sheets and staggered to the bathroom. She braced her hands on the cistern and vomited into the toilet, spasming over and over again until there was nothing left. She sank weeping onto the tile floor.

  She sat there for a long time, tears smearing across her cheeks, her whole body shaking. She squeezed her eyes shut against the flashes of shattered and burned flesh, afterimages imprinted on her retinas. She tried to pray, but the vision of Russ, bloody, broken, dead, wiped all the words from her mind, and she was left with nothing but the most elemental plea. Help me, God. God, help me.

  I don’t think I’m fine at all.

  She had left her clutch on the shelf over the towel rack, emptied of the lipstick and compact she had carried earlier this evening. Yesterday. She pushed against the edge of the tub and listed to her feet. Reached for the clutch. Pulled out the creased brochure. There would be somebody at the community center starting at eight o’clock when the gym opened. Nine at the latest.

  She looked out the bathroom’s small window. Venus blazed large and bright among the fading stars. She could see the silhouettes of rooftops and chimneys and trees against the sky, but she couldn’t make out any colors yet. She smoothed the brochure against her aching stomach, over and over again, and then sat down on the cool tiles to wait out the coming of the light.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

  Hadley Knox stretched her legs out on the grass and watched the other parents waiting for the Millers Kill Middle School cross-country team to reappear from walking the meet course.

  There was a trio of mothers near her, women she had seen at the school but never met. They were chatting and laughing in canvas camp chairs with their pedicured feet propped up on coolers. They wore crop-legged chinos and drapey cotton sweaters, bits of gold dripping off their wrists and circling their necks. Hadley was in jeans and her police academy T-shirt, with nothing but a Goodwill windbreaker to keep the grass from staining her butt. She must have missed the memo that said they were supposed to dress like they were going to the damn country club.

  She recognized a few faces here and there, from school concerts and open houses. There was one man she knew she had seen at St. Alban’s, and another she had ticketed for doing fifty in a thirty-five zone, but there wasn’t anybody she knew well enough to wave over and start shooting the breeze with. Two years she had been living in Millers Kill—two and a half—and she didn’t have a single friend.

  Jesus, listen to your pity party. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. Her life was exactly the way she wanted it. She had Hudson and Genny and Granddad. She had a job, and a house to run, and she even went to church every Sunday, although that was more for the kids’ benefit than her own. The occasional bout of loneliness was the fee for controlling her own life. It was a fair trade.

  A stir of excitement brought her attention to where the woods opened up to clear land. She recognized the Minutemen blue-and-white on the ragged clump of middle schoolers emerging from the trail, spotted Hudson and his best friend Conner and Eric McCrea’s boy, and a grown-up in the midst of them, impossibly tall and redheaded and what the hell was Kevin Flynn doing with her kid’s cross-country team?

  Hudson was half a length ahead of Flynn, who seemed to be hanging back, talking to the stragglers. Hadley propped a smile on her face as she approached the snapping tape dividing the runners from the spectators. “Hey, babe. How’s the course? Any cow patties you have to watch out for?”

  Conner and Jacob McCrea cracked up. Hudson looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or be embarrassed. “Oh, man, can you imagine,” Conner said. “Stepping in one and it sticking to your shoe?”

  “Stepping in two!” Jake started clomping around, his sneakers encased in imaginary cow patties. Hadley thought about Eric, already planning for this kid’s future in college. Hard to believe these boys would ever be mature enough to leave home.

  “Okay, guys.” Kevin’s voice carried over the boy’s snorts and moos. “Go see Coach. He’ll get you signed in. Remember what I said about the final downhill stretch.” He paused in front of Hadley while the team moved on toward the crowded starting line, Jake demonstrating the double-manure maneuver to everyone. “Hey, Hadley.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  He frowned. “Coach Bain needed an assistant. I’m helping him out.”

  “You’re not a parent. Why on earth would you be hanging around a bunch of dopy middle school kids?”

  “You don’t need to be a parent to volunteer.” His face stiffened. “Wait a minute. Wait just a goddamn minute. Are you trying to imply something?”

  “Yes. I want to know if you volunteered because my kid is on the team.”

  “What?” He stared at her a moment, then snorted a half-laugh. He scrubbed his hand over his face. “Shit. Okay. I thought you were accusing me of being a pedophile.”

  “Euww! No!”

  “Well, euww, no, I didn’t sign up for this gig because Hudson is on the team. I didn’t know the roster until I got to the first practice. I volunteered because I used to run for Coach Bain, and because none of the parents stepped up to the plate.”

&nbs
p; “I’m busy!”

  “Then you ought to be grateful that somebody who has a little more time stepped in to take up the slack.”

  “Is that what this is about? Me being grateful?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake—” He blew out a breath. “Look, I gotta meet up with the team and see them off. Will you be here?”

  “Of course. Are they going to—” He was already loping toward the throng of kids at the middle of the field, giving her a nice view of the arch of his thigh and the spring of his calf. Stop that. Most of the trouble in her life began with the fall of a guy’s hair over his eye or the edge of his narrow hip bones peeking out from the low-slung waist of his jeans. She’d start out thinking he’s hot and end up cosigning a loan for the loser.

  The starting gun cracked, and an uneven line of boys surged toward the forest. She could see blue and white shorts and singlets, but she couldn’t make out Hudson as the runners quickly closed into a pack and disappeared into the trees. Then there was Flynn, walking back toward her, oblivious to the appreciative glances from a couple of well-groomed moms who must have been twice his age, for God’s sake. He held the tape up with his forearm and ducked under it. His hands were filled with two sweating water bottles. He gave her one.

  “Thanks.” There. She could be gracious.

  “Did you bring a chair?”

  “I brought a windbreaker.” She gestured toward the crumpled nylon, weighted down with her purse. He collapsed onto the grass next to it in a tangle of long, pale limbs. As she sat—with a lot more care and a lot less athleticism—she caught a glimpse of the chino-and-gold-bangle crowd checking them out. That’s right, bitches, she wanted to say. You may have the goods, but I have the young stud.

  Oh, God, what was wrong with her? They probably thought Hadley was his aunt or something. Big sister. She popped open the bottle’s flip-top and swallowed half the contents in one go.

  “So, not to put too fine a point on it, do you want to tell me why you have a hair up your ass about me helping Coach Bain?”