“I understand that,” Mason said. “I’m not trying to take food from the girls’ mouths. But you must have cleared about a hundred grand when you sold Mom’s place, right?”
Maggie glanced at Glen. Glen nodded, started to say something. Mason beat him to it. “You paid down the mortgage, I imagine. Probably socked money away for the girls to go to college, and I’m fine with that, Maggie. I’m not asking for half of what you made from that sale, or even a quarter. Just a couple grand to get me where I need to go, and you can count on getting that money back.”
Maggie looked down at her plate, seemed to be working out what she wanted to say next. Finally, without looking up, she went for it. “What do you really need that money for, Mase?”
Mason hesitated. “I’m done with all that old stuff,” he told Maggie. “I swear it. But I’ve got a friend from inside who ran into a jam out west on the coast. I need to head out there, try and make things right.”
Maggie raised her head to meet her husband’s eyes. But she didn’t say anything.
“It’s important, Maggie. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”
Another long silence. Mason studied his sister. On Maggie’s other side, Glen was doing the same. Finally she closed her eyes. Shook her head, slight, almost imperceptible, as she blew out a breath and muttered, “Fine.”
“Thank you,” Mason said. “I won’t ask for another dollar.”
They didn’t believe him, he could tell. But they were polite enough not to say so to his face.
“The bank’s closed already,” Glen said after a while. “We’ll have to get the money to you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s fine,” Mason told him. “Early would be best.”
Four
“Do not withhold good to those to whom it is due,” Proverbs said, “when it is in your power to do it.”
Mason hadn’t grown up religious. His mom had dragged both him and Maggie to the local Baptist church when they were youngsters, and as far as Mason knew, his mother had kept going long after she’d given up trying to force her son’s attendance. He was already sloughing off the Sunday services by the time he turned a teenager; figured he’d given the Lord twelve years to make his gospel stick, and it hadn’t. There were better things to do on a Sunday.
Maggie had kept going, more to placate her mother than out of any religious fervor. Mason wondered how long she’d kept it up, if she still went, if she ever felt she gained anything from it.
The library at the Chippewa pen had been a limited one, but Mason figured he’d read every book in there at least a couple of times before he finally picked up a Bible. The library had had plenty of those.
By that point in his incarceration, Mason was through feeling sorry for himself. He was through wishing he’d done something different, through being angry: at the world for how it had raised him, at himself for all the ways he hadn’t resisted. He felt guilt, above all, and an encompassing shame, a desire to be better than the angry, violent boy he’d been when he arrived there.
He built his body in the gym, day after day. He kept his head down, and he stayed out of trouble. And he read, every night, from the Bible and anything else he could find, and little by little, he laid himself guidelines, a blueprint for living better when he was finally free.
“Let the thief no longer steal,” read Ephesians, “but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”
The bus ticket to Deception Cove would cost Mason $161.50. Glen and Maggie drove him to the bus station directly from the bank, where Glen had handed Mason an envelope with twenty crisp hundred-dollar bills inside. Glen had played it cool, even cracked a joke, like, “You don’t have to count it, it’s all there,” but Maggie had shushed him, avoided looking at Mason as he climbed back into Glen’s Grand Caravan, and Glen had pulled out of the lot.
They were like a whole other species, Mason thought, watching his sister and her husband from the back seat of the minivan. Or Mason was the other species; his sister was living the normal life, doing exactly what a thirty-five-year-old woman was supposed to be doing: raising a family, paying a mortgage, saving for retirement. Meanwhile, Mason, thirty-three himself, had no skills, no money, no job, had wasted nearly two decades when he could have been learning self-reliance and normalcy and how to open a checking account.
He would start with Lucy, and then he would deal with the rest.
“Fifty-seven hours,” Glen said, shaking his head and laughing a little when Mason purchased the bus ticket. “Cripes, Mason. Are you sure you don’t want to fly out there?”
Bus would be fine, Mason replied. He figured he would need to save the money, figured he’d spent fifteen years in prison, what was three days on a bus? He didn’t mention he had never been on a plane before and didn’t expect he’d ever feel the need to change that. The bus would be fine.
When Maggie excused herself to use the restroom, Glen pulled Mason aside. Took him by the arm and leaned in, spoke softer. “Listen, Mason,” he said, “you’re sure you’re not in any trouble? I mean, this whole trip and whatever, it’s a little…” He gestured back over his shoulder. “Maggie’s worried about you. I told her you were fine, but she wanted me to make sure.”
Mason glanced toward the restrooms, no sign of Maggie. Wondered if his sister really cared, whether this wasn’t just Glen’s decent streak shining through all over again.
“If there’s anything we can do,” Glen said. “You know, if you’re in any trouble. You can always talk to us. To me.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Mason told him. “I just need to help out this friend.”
Glen rubbed his chin. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, look, you play it safe, okay? No sense in your getting mixed up in anything, now that you’re finally out.”
Mason promised he’d be careful. Held out his hand, and Glen shook it, firm, looked at Mason like he wanted to say something else but didn’t quite know how to put it.
Then Maggie was back, and Mason’s bus was announced, and the moment was over. Mason hugged his sister quickly, thanked her again and told her goodbye, and boarded the bus. And that was the last Mason saw of his only family in the world for a good long while.
Fifty-seven hours. Transfers in Chicago, Minneapolis, Billings, Missoula, Seattle. Bleary-eyed breakfasts in bus station diners. Long, lonely hours on the road. Mason made himself comfortable. Bought a Time magazine at a newsstand in Chicago, a Car and Driver, Rolling Stone. Paged through them as the bus traced the shore of Lake Michigan up to Milwaukee, recognized few of the musicians and none of the politicians, the cars nothing like the cars he remembered.
Fifteen years. He left the magazines on a bench in Minneapolis. Stared out the bus window and thought about the dog.
“Our job is to prepare these dogs for lives of service,” Linda Petrie said, walking patrol in front of the men and their dogs, three days into the program. “For some of you, this will mostly be a matter of basic obedience.…”
She looked at Bridges Colson, at his golden, and smiled. The dog was named Rascal, and the dog’s name was an apt one. Rascal couldn’t sit still, couldn’t help causing mayhem, tug-of-war with his leash, roughhousing with other dogs and with Bridges, chewing on everything he could get his teeth around. He was a good dog, and funny, the class clown. He was pretty well the dog Mason had had in mind when he’d signed up for the program.
Linda Petrie resumed her patrol. “For others,” she said, looking Mason’s way, “it’s going to require a little more work.”
Bridges Colson looked over too. “Bait,” he said, smirking. “Might as well save the kibble and put that runt out of her misery now. Be the only humane option, my opinion.”
A few of the other prisoners laughed, and Mason joined in. Figured Bridges was probably right, couldn’t see this dog serving anyone, anywhere. He didn’t laugh as loud as he had on day one, though; the bait shit was starting to get old.
Mason wa
s still working on coaxing Lucy out of her crate and into the great beyond. She was still shivering plenty when she saw him, still terrified, but Mason liked to think she wasn’t so much scared of him in particular; she just wanted him to know she was scared of just about everything else in the world.
She hadn’t pissed on him again, anyway; he’d learned his lesson. And she took treats from him now, haltingly, nibbled on them from his fingers, then retreated, then came back, cautious, to nibble again. She’d let him scratch behind her ears, even leaned in a little when he found the good spot. But then someone had slammed a door somewhere, and she’d spooked and bolted into her crate again.
“She’s got to learn to trust you,” Linda Petrie told him. “You’re going to have to be patient, and show her that you’re kind.” She looked at him, appraising. “Can you be kind?”
Mason didn’t quite know how to respond. Kindness wasn’t exactly a prized quality inside the Chippewa pen. Kindness meant soft, and soft meant you were a pussy, and pussies didn’t survive long inside. He’d spent fourteen years trying to erase anything in his person that might be construed as vulnerability. Kindness wasn’t really in his vocabulary anymore.
But the trainer was still watching him, studying him. Like she was looking, hard, for some hope for this dog’s future, and she wasn’t seeing it in the piece-of-shit convict in front of her.
Something about the way she looked at him made Mason angry. Like she’d written him off already, like everyone else in his damn life had, inside and out. Like Bridges Colson had written off the dog without even knowing her. Shit.
“Yeah, I can handle this,” Mason said, and he dug into his pocket, found another treat, a piece of the dried beef liver he’d noticed was Lucy’s favorite. “You don’t have to worry about us.”
It was a Wednesday morning when Mason boarded his first bus. On Friday night the sixth bus turned off of state Route 112 and pulled to a stop in an empty ARCO parking lot, and the driver opened the door and stood and called “Deception Cove” back to the half dozen passengers still on board.
Mason was the only one to get off the bus. He thanked the driver and stood in the cold drizzle, watching the bus pull away, listened to the sound of its engine until the taillights disappeared around a bend in the road and the sound diminished to nothing, until the only thing he could hear was the buzzing of the lights above on the ARCO canopy and, somewhere in the distance, the sound of the surf.
Mason stood there and thought for a while. He wanted to talk to the sheriff, the deputy in question, see if he could tease out the real story. See if there was any way the local law enforcement could be swayed to break toward leniency. At the very least, figure out what had happened and why.
But it was too late at night to start anything now. From the looks of the town, anyone with any sense had already gone to bed. Mason drew his coat tighter, squared his shoulders. Set out into the rain down the highway, the way the bus had come in, remembered seeing a motel a ways back, a bright VACANCY sign. Figured it would do to get out of the rain, get some sleep. First thing tomorrow he’d have to buy some dry clothes.
Five
Looking back, Jess realized the whole op had felt wrong—or maybe that was just hindsight. In her dreams, anyway, she could think of a million reasons why she and Afia should have just walked away.
They figured out pretty quick that the preliminary intelligence was wrong, or at least wildly optimistic, as they walked down from the forward outpost and south into the narrow, high-walled valley, that place of shale and pine they’d been fighting Haji over for the better part of their deployment, and seemingly every marine deployment before that, back to the dawn of the corps itself. The sun was baking hot, as usual, and it glared down from on high like an insurgent sniper, another malevolent force in that hostile land.
They were headed down the valley to check up on a lead Jess had unearthed with Afia, whispered rumors about the enemy falling back, redeploying men and machine guns to other places, other valleys, other fights with other Americans. It had sounded too good from the outset, but the marines didn’t give points for shying away from the tough stuff, and anyway, as far as the guys in the OP were concerned, they’d been brought here for one purpose, and that was to kill insurgents. If Haji thought they were crafty enough to outfox the baddest fighting force on the planet, well, let the motherfuckers try.
It sounded good in theory, but in practice, filing down goat trails with a parched throat and grit in your eyes and every fucking snapped twig the shot that might kill your best buddy? Jess figured most of the guys in the patrol felt like she did: i.e., this was a very bad idea.
They’d given her the dog for nights like this. For the desolate, lonely, desperate nights, the rain hammering down on the roof above her, the wind gusting through the trees like voices from beyond. These were the nights when even Ty’s little four-room shack seemed impossibly vast and filled with ghosts—Afia’s ghost, Ty’s, all the others Jess had collected. These nights, when the dreams came back visceral and cinematic, the memories inescapable. These were the nights when Lucy earned her keep.
The dog knew her; Jess couldn’t argue that point. They’d spent a month on a ranch together in eastern Washington, feeling each other out as the trainers watched. It wasn’t long before Lucy could pick out by Jess’s breathing that an attack was coming. Soon the dog learned to scout around corners in the grocery store for her, watch her six for surprises when they walked into town. And when the nights got long and empty back home, and Jess dreamed of the valley and woke up screaming herself hoarse, Lucy would climb into bed beside her, snuggle up close and lick her face, cuddle, until the nightmares were gone, and the valley gone with them.
But Lucy hadn’t been here since the night Kirby Harwood knocked on Jess’s door, a month or so back. As far as Jess could surmise, the dog wasn’t ever coming home. So now, with a storm raging outside and the dark house cold and empty, there wasn’t anyone to turn to when the memories came clawing back, nobody who could save her. Jess lay in bed amid tangled sheets, the rain pouring down outside and a bitter wind howling, and still she couldn’t escape the valley.
The feeling of foreboding only got worse as they neared the village, the sun directly overhead now and scorching hot, sweat dripping down Jess’s back beneath the body armor she wore. It was the noise, she realized, or the lack thereof; the closer they got to the objective, the quieter the valley seemed to get. No birds, no animals, no human voices. The air was still, waiting for what happened next.
The village was three or four clicks down the valley from the OP, nestled plumb on the frontier between American-controlled territory and the enemy. Go much farther down the road and you’d better have the whole damn corps at your back, unless you were suicidal.
The village was built up along the east side of the valley, the terrain so steep that no house sat level with its neighbor, and each row of houses stood entirely above the last, the whole place tied together by narrow, labyrinthine passages cut into jagged shale, the valley above choked with rock and dense forest.
They didn’t have the whole damn corps, but they did have Second Platoon spread out on the western side of the valley for cover, mortars and shooters alike, a couple of 240s, machine guns, and a .50 cal to boot. There were even supposed to be Apaches for air cover, so as far as command was concerned, all bases were covered. The Apaches never showed, diverted to more pressing concerns a couple of valleys over, but as it turned out, none of that would matter anyway.
They were almost at the village when Jess saw the boy. He was hiding behind a low stone wall, peering out at the marines as they passed, his eyes wide and serious. She recognized Selab, one of the villagers’ children; he was eight or nine years old, and precocious, if a little shy. He’d watched Jess and Afia drink tea with his mother and the other women in the village, lurking on the margins of the room, clearly curious but always silent.
He’d looked at Jess in awe then, as though he’d never expected to see
an American woman in combat attire, as though she were something larger than life and fantastical, a comic-book heroine. Now he just looked worried, and when she waved to him and smiled, he didn’t wave back, just ducked down quickly and didn’t reappear. And still the air was quiet.
Nobody else had noticed Selab.
Their contact, a woman named Panra, watched from the shade beside one of the village houses as the marines fanned out, forming a perimeter. She wore a chador, a scarf over her head, and a traditional patterned firaq partug, a flowing, billowy garment over loose, baggy trousers. Her expression was inscrutable.
Jess caught the eye of her platoon CO, Lieutenant Grieves, who nodded up toward the village and shook his head, frowning. His meaning was clear: no matter how many marines they brought to secure the area, the topography would give any enemy the advantage. From the cliffs overlooking the houses, any number of Taliban soldiers could camp out with rifles and RPGs, raining hell on any marine unlucky enough to be caught out in the open. It was not an ideal place to be spending time, not if you had an American flag on your gear, but Panra had sworn to Afia that her elders had good information, and Panra had always been reliable in the past.
Sweat had drenched Jess’s combat gear by the time she and Afia crossed the twenty yards from Grieves to where Panra stood in the shade. Afia and Panra exchanged a few words in Pashto, and Panra gestured up into the passageway behind her, a narrow stair cut into the mountainside, so steep it was impossible to tell exactly where it led. She smiled quickly at Jess, then gestured again, her eyes darting back to the marines spread out behind, ducked down behind low walls with rifles at the ready, waiting on the first shot that would reveal the ambush.
Jess might have woken at this point if she’d had Lucy with her. She might have called out in her sleep to Afia, a warning, or she might have moaned slightly or whimpered, and the dog, attuned to any sign of anxiety, would have saved her from what was to come. She would have woken to Lucy’s rough tongue on her cheek, or the dog might even have barked to rouse her. Jess would have opened her eyes, heard the rain outside, and the wind; she would have felt the dog’s presence, and she would have known, suddenly and clearly, that she was safe.
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