by Aaron Gwyn
Cairns just stared.
“Corporal,” he said, “why are we here?”
Russell shifted his weight, repositioned his hips, and lowered himself back against the mattress. “‘To provide overwatch,’” he quoted, “‘for our operators and support assets in direct contact with hostiles.’”
“Anything in there about rescuing horses or kittens or whatever the fuck else?”
“No, Sergeant.”
“Are you a Section Eight?”
“Negative, Sergeant.”
“Are you going to pull any more ridiculous shit?”
“Sergeant, that’s the first horse I’ve seen since I left home. I doubt I’ll see another.”
Cairns scooted closer.
“Corporal, are you going to fuck up my squad with any more of this dumbass behavior?”
Russell took a short breath and released it.
“Negative, Sergeant. I think that I’m done.”
Russell laced his boots in the half-light and the cold of the barracks and stood from the narrow aluminum cot. The lieutenant was waiting at the end of the building, her silhouette in the doorway, black against the purpling sky. He glanced at Wheels in his rack—the man’s face slack now and blank as a child’s—took the tan beret and the jacket from his footlocker, and went up the aisle. The woman nodded to him when he reached the door, and he followed her into the courtyard and then along the sandstone corridor that went curving against the inner wall. The air prickled the skin on his arms, and he threaded his hands through the sleeves of his jacket—left and right—shrugged into it, zipping as he walked. The lieutenant went on before him, her steps almost soundless and the hair at the nape of her neck in an intricate bun.
The mosque at Qara Serai was calling worshipers to prayer, the sounds traveling in the predawn chill with their own peculiar lilt, alien to his ears and yet familiar in the way of dreamspeech, the way of song. They reached the colonel’s quarters at the end of the passage, and Russell closed the storm flap up the front of his jacket, smoothing a hand across the Velcro fasteners. The woman motioned him through the doorway and took up a post outside. As he passed, he peeled the beret from his head and tucked it beneath an arm. He forced a smile at the woman, and she gave him just the slightest one back.
The hallway looked to have been carved from granite. He passed two doors on his right and three on his left, and at the next door he paused, straightened his jacket, and knocked lightly on the wooden jamb.
A voice told him to come in.
The room was small with very high ceilings, and there was a west-facing window that had been cut into the wall by hammer and chisel a hundred, maybe two hundred, years before. Stars were visible in the sky just beyond. The colonel sat at a mahogany desk, and when Russell entered, the man pushed his chair back and rose. He was in his early sixties, hair gone silver, the flesh beneath his chin just beginning to sag. He wore a precisely trimmed mustache whose bottom had been clipped so it didn’t touch his upper lip or extend beyond the edges of his mouth. He returned Russell’s salute and motioned him to one of the chairs in front of the desk, which was too large, Russell decided, to fit through the doorway. It would have been taken apart and reassembled, piece by piece.
Russell lowered himself onto the thin metal seat. His heart had begun to race. He tried to slow it, but that only made it faster. He focused on his posture: feet together, back straight, hands resting palm down on his thighs.
The colonel seated himself and scooted closer to his desk, glancing through his reading glasses at a sheet of paper, which he fingered briefly and set aside.
“Morning,” he said.
Russell told him good morning.
“Lieutenant Wilkins get you up?”
“No, sir,” said Russell. “I was awake.”
“Watch how you sit in that thing,” the man told him. “Leg wobbles. We had it taken over to supply; they sent it back with the same exact problem.”
Russell said he’d be careful.
The colonel nodded, brought a fist to his mouth, and cleared his throat.
“Dr. Halpern tells me you’re recovering.”
“Getting there,” Russell said.
“He tells me there was a concussion?”
“Yessir.”
“But you’re feeling better?”
“Much better. Yessir.”
The colonel rubbed his palm along his jaw and repositioned himself in his chair.
“That was a hell of a hit you took.”
Russell nodded.
“Watched the video on Fox. You’ve seen it?”
“Yessir. Just last night.”
The colonel leaned back in his chair and regarded him a moment.
“Kind of crazy, aren’t you, Corporal?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
The colonel stared at him. “You don’t know?”
“No, sir.”
“You were that Ranger in the video riding an unsaddled horse through a firefight?”
Russell shifted in his chair. He glanced at his hands on either knee, the knuckles white.
“Yessir,” he told the colonel, “that was me.”
“And you won’t own up to being crazy?”
Russell looked down at his hands again and then back up at the desk. He tried to speak but nothing came.
“Corporal?”
Russell closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he said, “Sir, I never done anything like that before.”
“Never done anything like that?”
“No, sir.”
“So your position is this craziness is kind of new to you?”
“Yessir,” Russell told him. “Pretty much.”
The colonel wiped the crease of a smile from the left side of his mouth. He reached and took up the sheet of paper he’d set on a stack of manila folders and held it at arm’s length, squinting.
“Message came through last night,” he began, his voice shifting into a formal cadence. “You been attached to us six months now, so you’re acquainted with the protocol.”
Russell nodded.
“You know about our sister company in Afghanistan?”
“I know we have one,” he said.
The colonel blinked several times. He glanced at the paper in his hand and then seemed to study a spot on the wall just behind Russell’s head.
“You also have to know that there are officers in this task force way up the food chain above me.”
“I assume so, yessir.”
The colonel opened his mouth to continue and then closed it. He exhaled a deep breath and tossed the paper back onto the stack of folders.
“Let me be as direct as I can.”
Russell nodded.
“I have received an order to release you from my command next Tuesday at nineteen hundred hours and put you on an overflight to Bagram. You’ll be reassigned to a Special Forces element operating in Nuristan Province, mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Captain by the name of Wynne. I assume you’ve heard of the man.”
“No, sir.”
“Haven’t heard of him?”
Russell shook his head.
“Do you know the region? Nuristan?”
“Sir, I do not.”
“There are loud voices,” said the colonel, “who don’t believe we should be anywhere near this area, and to be frank with you, Corporal, it chaps my ass to send one of my men on some Green Beret bullshit, but I have protested your transfer and have been kindly advised to fuck myself.” He stopped and shook his head. “I fought it hard as I could.”
Russell sat there a moment. His home was seven thousand miles away in northeastern Oklahoma, and for the first time in months, he wanted to be there very badly.
“May I ask a question, sir?”
“Ask it.”
“Do you have any idea why they want me?”
The colonel’s mouth tightened. He tapped the desk three times with the knuckles of his right hand. He said, “Captain Wynne’s made a bit of a n
ame for himself. He’s the one got those marine snipers out during that clusterfuck in Fallujah. Almost died doing it, but he’s got balls, and he’s not afraid to stand up to the Agency.”
“Which agency?”
“CIA.”
“How’s he get away with that?”
“He gets away with it,” said the colonel, “the way anyone gets away with it: he gets himself a different idea than the spooks and then he convinces the head-shed that it’s right.”
“Where do I fit in to all this?” Russell asked.
“Hard to say,” the colonel told him. “My guess would be that our captain got a look at your highlight reel and figured out a way to make use of it. Has himself some slick friends in higher.” The man shook his head. “Can’t say I envy your position.”
“No, sir,” said Russell. “I’m not all that envious myself.”
“Your grandfather was Second Rangers?”
“Yessir.”
“Normandy?”
“Yessir.”
The colonel nodded.
“And he trained horses for a living?”
“Yessir, he did.”
“That’s where you learned it?”
“That’s where I learned everything,” Russell said.
The colonel watched him a moment. Then he said, “I’ve been able to get your battle-buddy attached.”
“Sir?”
“Corporal Grimes. He’ll be coming with.”
“Wheels?”
The colonel nodded. “I got them to agree to that much. Kind of solves two problems at once.” The man cast Russell a knowing look, but whatever he’d meant to convey was lost on Russell entirely.
“You’ll have about a week to rest up,” said the colonel. “I assume you’d like some downtime.”
“Yessir. I’d appreciate it.”
The colonel looked down at his papers a moment and then back up at Russell. The smile creased the left side of his mouth again, but he didn’t bother to wipe it away.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Of course.”
“Why in the name of God did you take your Kevlar off?”
“Sir?”
“In the video. You aren’t wearing your helmet. What possessed you to remove it?”
Russell took a moment to think about this. He said, “I guess I was afraid it’d scare the horse.”
The colonel’s eyes widened momentarily and then they narrowed. “Scare the horse.”
“Yessir,” Russell said.
Russell would say that his grandfather had taught him to ride, but his grandfather always said he hadn’t taught the boy a thing. At stock shows and county fairs, at rodeos and clinics, men would tell Leroy Crider how well he’d instructed his grandson.
“I didn’t instruct nothing,” Crider would say. “Just the way he was born.”
The men would nod and smile and sip from their Styrofoam cups of coffee, small cups, six ounces. They thought the old man was being modest, but Crider never numbered modesty among his sins. Stubbornness, yes. Ignorance. He’d admit, at times, to outright lunacy. But he was not a modest man, and he’d taught his grandson nothing about horses he didn’t already know.
Elijah, for his part, had no sense of when he’d learned what he knew, and he couldn’t even recall the first time he sat a horse. They seemed to inhabit his memories in much the same way as sunlight or wind or his grandmother’s voice: they were inexplicably and undeniably there.
His first word was the name of his Welsh Mountain pony, a palomino named Cream. He had the white face and stockings, and he was only thirteen hands—a very gentle little horse. His grandfather would saddle him and lead him around the corral with Elijah on his back and still in diapers, Elijah’s grandmother standing in one corner of the pen with her arms cradled against her and her elbows in her palms.
“You get that baby off him,” she’d say.
“He ain’t hurting nothing,” Crider would tell her, and she’d respond it wasn’t the pony she was worried about.
“That thing could buck,” she’d say. “You don’t know what it could do.”
Crider ignored her. He led the pony very slowly by a leather halter, Elijah seated against the pommel with both hands on the horn, his toddler’s legs bouncing.
By the age of five he could ride this animal unsupervised to the barbed-wire fence at the end of the south pasture. By seven, he could saddle and cinch and push the horse to a canter. He was performing in children’s rodeos before his tenth birthday, and when he was thirteen he was employed by Lee Brothers Horse and Cattle Auction outside Skiatook, riding show ponies through the cast-iron chute and then down a short concrete tunnel, emerging into the half-acre expanse of loose powdered dirt skirted on four sides by an eight-foot wall, atop which bleachers ascended toward the fluorescent lights hanging high above. From the arena’s floor he could only see the first few rows of horse and cattle buyers, their stone faces and cowboy hats, many in ball caps advertising feed stores, barbeque joints and rib shacks, farm-equipment suppliers, and Tinker Air Force Base, where more and more would commute as the farms went bankrupt and the ranches sold to oil companies. He’d walk the animals in a slow circle while the auctioneer’s voice boomed from the speakers in its sharp, staccato twang and men in the audience lifted a hand or gestured their bids with the touch of a hat brim.
“Going four, four, four. Who’ll give me four? Got four. Now four and a quarter, four and a quarter, now five, five, five. Got five. Five and a half, five and a half, five and a half. Thank you, sir. Now six, six, six.”
He’d circle the arena floor at a slow trot, with the auctioneer singing in his ears and the smell of horse and dust and manure and the clean scent of straw still in his nostrils, turning the pony with a squeeze of his thighs and just the slightest pull of the reins, bringing the animal to a halt, turning it once more and then again at the auctioneer’s command—“Got seven, got seven, got seven, now eight, now eight, who’ll give me eight?”—gestures now from all over the stands, and the price is pushed to nine, nine-fifty, a thousand, sold for a thousand dollars to the man in the silver Stetson. And Elijah turns and rides back down the concrete tunnel past the owners and handlers, dismounts the horse, and quickly mounts the next, a nervous bay he must lean and speak to, and he feels her gentle and soften between his legs—“Now that’s a good girl, that is very good.”
Afterward, lying in bed with hair damp from his shower, Elijah would stare at the ceiling with his heart pounding high in his chest, still feeling their pulse in his legs and the articulated working of their spines, and he is in absolute love, this boy of thirteen years, father dead, abandoned by his mother, you’d certainly never know. His grandfather is a war hero and his grandmother devoted and doting, and the horse beneath him is every horse that ever was, eyes like stars and a coat like shining brass, galloping up, up, up, out onto the pastures of the night.
He went up the short flight of steps, past the guards, and into the aluminum-sided building that rested off the ground on concrete slabs. He’d grown up in a double-wide of similar manufacture, but this prefab had been built to military specifications and its roof was rigged with a satellite antenna and radar and electronic senders and receivers for which he knew neither the names nor purpose. The temperature outside was 107 degrees when he’d checked it after lunch, but this building was kept a consistent 63. All of the soldiers wore jackets, and a few of the women had stocking caps pulled over their headsets. He dug his ID out of his pants pocket, showed it to a sergeant seated behind the sign-in desk, and was directed to a row of what looked like the carrels in his high school library. There were four of them, and each was equipped with a computer and telephone. He went to the first nook, pulled out the chair, and sat. He spent a few moments collecting himself and then reached for the phone.
He heard the metallic click of the satellite hookup and then the sound of the digital ring. When she picked up and said hello, her voice was surprisingly crisp and he had t
o steady himself all over again.
“Teresa,” he said.
“Hello?”
“Aunt Teresa? Can you hear me?”
“Elijah?” she said. “Hello?”
“It’s me,” he told her.
She said, “Hold on a second, hon,” and he could hear static. “Let me get to this other phone.”
He brushed a hand across his face and leaned against the desktop, propping himself on his elbows. There was another click, and he heard her ask her husband to hang up the extension.
“Elijah?” she said. “You there?”
“Yes, ma’am. You hear me all right?”
“I hear you good. Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
She laughed nervously. “We’re building a room onto the south end of the house, and that phone in the den—you can’t hear anything on it. Are you home? Did they send you back home?”
“No, no. I’m still over here. I—”
“Oh, Lord Jesus. Are you hurt? You’re hurt, aren’t you?”
“No,” said Russell, “I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not, either. I can hear it in your voice. You better tell me what happened.”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I yanked out my shoulder a little. That’s not even why I called.”
“You’re not hurt?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You wouldn’t story to me?”
“No, ma’am. You know I wouldn’t. They’re just assigning me to another post.”
“Did you get the shirts we sent?”
“I did.”
“Do they fit?”
“They fit real good.”
“I was worried they wouldn’t fit.”
“No,” he told her. “They’re perfect.”
“And you promise you’re not hurt?”
“I’m absolutely fine,” he said. “I just got a chance to call you, is all.”
“You said they were moving you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t suppose you could tell me where?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Better or worse?” she asked.
