Orphanage

by Robert Buettner

  He shrugged. “If you got discharged, you would have been back on my docket. I hate a messy docket.”

  “Oh.”

  He stared into his coffee, then looked up and grinned. “No. I just thought you were a kid with potential who needed a push in the right direction. I still do.”

  Just about now mat was the nicest thing anybody ever said to me. I shook my head. “Sir, that is such a coincidence that you served with the captain’s father. And that you and he, you know, smoked up.”

  The judge poured from the glass sugar shaker into his coffee with his remaining hand. He set down the shaker, picked up a spoon, and stirred. “Son, there’s a saying among the criminal defendants who come before me. They think I don’t know it.”

  “Sir?”

  “If the truth won’t set you free, lie your ass off.”

  He sipped coffee, shrugged, and watched my jaw drop. The mendacious old son of a bitch.

  We sat and drank coffee for minutes.

  The mess-hall door opened and Jacowicz’s orderly poked his head in. “Wander! Captain’s ready for you.”

  I squeezed my cup tighter.

  “Move your ass, man!” The orderly pulled his head back and let the door slam. I must’ve jumped a foot.

  When we got back, Jacowicz shooed the judge out.

  The captain rocked in his chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “About that marijuana business. My father told me all about Colonel March. Dickie March was a good soldier but a rule-bender. They drank together but neither of them ever touched a joint.”

  My blood chilled. Jacowicz had caught my defender in a lie that slandered Jacowicz’s dead father.

  “Wander, do you know how Judge March won his Medal of Honor?”

  I shook my head.

  “During the Second Afghan War, my dad and Dickie March were the only survivors when a surface-to-air rocket knocked down a helicopter. My dad broke both legs. Major March’s arm was crushed and pinned by wreckage. The wreck caught fire. Dickie March used an entrenching tool and hacked off the tissue threads that attached his own arm so he could drag my dad out before the wreck exploded. Then he evaded enemy patrols for three days, carrying my dad on his back, until they were rescued.”

  Jacowicz rocked back in his chair and fingered another frame, a holo of a pretty woman holding a baby. “I’d sacrifice anything for my wife and my son. But parents and children rarely actually have to make those sacrifices. Soldiers do. In combat, what we fight for isn’t God or country or even the people we love back home. We fight for the GI next to us. They’re more family to us than anyone else we’ll ever know.”

  I swallowed. “Sir?”

  “I owe Dickie March. My dad owed him. Dickie March is family. If Dickie March thinks you’re worth lying for, that’s enough for me. So don’t think you’re staying in the army because some naive West Pointer be-lieved a lame lie. You’re staying because somebody I care about believes you can make a difference.”

  Staying. My heart leapt.

  “Sir, I’ll be the best soldier—”

  “Save it I hear promises of life-changing experience daily. I’m sure the judge does in his court, too. If you stay in, mis incident goes in your record jacket. You’ll be denied every decent assignment in the army.”

  It couldn’t be worse than Basic. I just drifted with the moment while my heart fluttered.

  “… make us bom late for graduation, Wander. I said “dismissed!’” He waved his hand.

  I nearly forgot to salute as I spun an about-face. Basic was behind me! The worst mistake of my life was behind me!

  Graduation was all the better because the judge stuck around and watched. Afterward, in the mess hall, we ate cookies and drank Beverage-Grape-Powdered and shook hands with everybody’s mothers and fathers. I tried to buy the judge a steak dinner over in Hershey, Pennsylvania, but he got the tab. We both cried as I put him on the train back to Colorado.

  We all got two weeks’ leave after Basic. Most trainees had family to go home to. The closest person to me left on Earth was Metzger.

  He flew out of Canaveral. With no commercial air, I had to deadhead a lift with a military truck convoy to Philadelphia, then hitch another lift with another convoy headed south.

  The truck ride to Philly was bumpy and cold and gave me time to think. I thought about Walter, about the fate of the world, but mostly about what an idiot I had just been.

  Jacowicz had said I could have walked away from the army.

  Instead, I had fought my way back into a low-paying, dirty, dangerous job. A job where my screwups left me with no shot at advancing. Recruits like Druwan Parker, my broken-leg bunkmate with the high-ranking relative, might make a career in the army. Not me. The farther I got away from Indiantown Gap the more clearly I saw reality.

  The freight depot in Philly was in a warehouse district. A big room with a supply sergeant behind a gray metal desk, vending machines on one wall, and a couple vinyl sofas, it smelled of wet cardboard. I had hours to kill before the southbound convoy left for Florida.

  A couple civilians, guys near twenty, sat atop their luggage. Recruits, bound for Basic at Indiantown Gap with another convoy. Shaggy, impressed, smart-ass. In short, me a few months ago.

  I sprawled across a sofa and watched the supply sergeant run inventory on his screen. His olive skin was acne-pocked, and a scar twisted along his jawline.

  “Where you from, Sarge?”

  “The Bronx.” His name tag read “Ochoa.” Regular noncommissioned officers weren’t like drills. Anybody could shoot the breeze with them.

  “What you doin‘ there, Sarge?” I pointed at his screen.

  “Entering paper goods inventory we got in this warehouse.”

  “Like what?”

  “Toilet paper. Wrapping paper.”

  “Gotta keep ‘em separate, huh?”

  He shrugged. “This is the army. Paper is paper.”

  “You like your job?”

  He shrugged. “I’m short. As in short-time-until-discharge. Never figured I’d get to retire.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve had my share of admins.”

  As in administrative-punishment hearings. A resource!

  “What for?”

  “Bar fights, mostly. I was stationed on a navy base.” He spit tobacco juice into a bucket alongside his desk. “Who can drink with squids?”

  Fair point

  “It didn’t keep you from getting promoted.”

  “The army takes care of its own.”

  My chest swelled.

  He shrugged. “Unless you got a drug incident in your record.”

  My heart sank.

  “You dope, no hope.”

  “You mean coke addicts. What if somebody just did Prozac?”

  He shook his head. “This is the army. Drugs is drugs.”

  I stared at my low-cuts. A fat lot of good it had done me to learn how to keep a shine on my shoes. This guy was me in twenty years, even if I didn’t have a drug incident reported in my records.

  I drifted outside the depot Across the street a storefront church offered meals. A line of bundled men stretched from its door to the end of the block. They weren’t homeless derelicts. They were responsible, respectable men from whom this war had stolen hope. I was made to melt into that line.

  It would be easy just to disappear right now. Into the ranks of the homeless, the orphaned, the jobless. The army overflowed. Deserting would be a favor, making a spot for a new guy. The army couldn’t spare resources to pursue deserters.

  I had a couple months’ pay on me and civvies in my duffel. I remember some comedian’s epitaph had been “Better here than in Philadelphia.” Philly was no prize, but it was big enough to get lost in.

  I slipped back inside long enough to retrieve my duffel and hike it onto my shoulder. I’d find an alley down the block, change into civvies, and blend in.

  Sergeant Ochoa looked up from his screen. “Your convoy to Canaveral rolls
out at 0400. Don’t get lost, Specialist!”

  I already was.

  I pushed my palm on the swinging door and the door pushed back. A black man in civvies came through, suitcase in one hand, steadying himself with an aluminum cane in the other.

  I dodged around him.

  “Wander!”

  I turned. Druwan Parker, broken leg and all, grinned at me.

  He dropped his bag and stuck out his hand. “Look at you! Sharp and rock-steady! You made it through Basic!” He looked me up and down while he pumped my hand.

  “What are you doing here?” I managed.

  “Second chance.” He held out his arms and lifted his leg. “Pins came out a week ago. I’m getting recycled through Basic.”

  “Still Infantry? Can’t your uncle get you a soft deal now that you got hurt?”

  His grin faded. He looked at his feet. “I lied. I got one cousin who was an air force sergeant. I got no more life outside the army than you have. And this leg healed crooked. I’m probably gonna wash out of Basic, again. But you never know. My old man used to say 90 percent of life is just showing up.”

  I had only known Parker for one day before he broke his leg. Then he had been an optimist. Now he was a realist. But he was going to show up.

  He looked at me. “So where you headed, now that Basic’s over? You lucky son of a bitch.”

  Lucky. Maybe. I shrugged, dropped my duffel to the floor, and sat down to wait for the convoy. “Wherever the army sends me.”

  By the time I had wished Parker luck and ridden yet another diesel truck for a day and a half, my eyes were clogged with sleeplessness and the road grit of a half dozen states.

  I tossed my duffel over the tailgate to the gray pavement skirting a warehouse complex. The buildings squatted at the edge of what was now known as United Nations Space Force Base Canaveral, Florida, USA. I followed my duffel and as my boots hit concrete, the earth shook.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The earth kept shaking. Incoming Projectile? I looked around for something to cling to, then looked up. In the distance an Interceptor lifted off, slow, majestic, and rumbling. Perched on an orange flame pillar, it arrowed skyward from blooming white smoke.

  Silhouetted against the smoke and fifty feet from me Metzger stood, arms folded and grinning, a regular recruiting poster. His Class-A’s were blue and fancier than mine. He wore those plink flyboy ribbons on his chest. Okay, the Rocket Jocks were saving the world. He deserved them.

  He walked toward me, silver captain’s tracks on his shoulder boards. I saluted automatically, and he returned it, sloppy the way the Space Force does. Ord made us press our tattered fatigues like they were Armani tuxes. World War II pilots thought nothing of burning aviation gas, flying beer to thirty thousand feet to cool it. Maybe flyboy ribbons were plink after all.

  He rested his hands on his hips, looked me up and down, and whistled. “You got in shape.”

  I shrugged. “Infantry runs for its life.” I guess I could have punched his arm or hugged him or something.

  I had my head tipped back, still gawking like a hick at a skyscraper.

  He jerked a thumb at the Interceptor, now a speck atop a curving contrail, white against the cold, gray Florida sky. “Rocket Jocks fly from here, from Vandenberg on the West Coast and Lop Nor in China. Johannesburg covers the Southern Hemisphere alone. Not a lotta targets to protect south of the equator.”

  He reached across the space between us, took my duffel, and led me to his car. Vanity tags read rokjok on a Kia Hybrid.

  I whistled. “These cost the brick!”

  “She’s fine on batteries, and she flies when she’s on gasoline.”

  “You can get gasoline?”

  “Rocket Jocks get everything.” He tossed my bag in the back seat “Get in. The girls are meeting us at the party.”

  “Oh.” My social life since puberty consisted of doubling with every zit-faced, prude sidekick of every cheerleader who ached to lose her virginity to Metzger. Of course, my dates probably saw me the same way.

  “No Your date’s cream. Honest.” That was the nice thing about being with somebody you grew up with. You could talk without saying much.

  We passed few cars. Nobody else got a Rocket Jock’s fuel ration. The cars we saw drove lights on to penetrate the impact-dust twilight. We didn’t even need our lights because Metzger’s car had a night-vision heads-up display.

  The perpetual overcast and the lack of traffic made the civilian world quieter. Or maybe it was the funerals.

  Metzger’s hands on the wheel seemed older, more surgical. He asked, “How’d you swing leave?”

  I told him. The whole mess. Walter. The admin hearing.

  “Oh.”

  I knew he meant it sounded bad.

  I shrugged. “So, how’s Large Ted and Bunny?” He wouldn’t have brought up his parents because it sucked that my mom died just for taking a trip to Indianapolis. I had to ask about them.

  He grinned. “Still living in Denver. Saw them last month. Large Ted still thinks you made a good choice with Infantry.”

  Metzger lived off post in Greater Orlando. Disney Universe had closed down for the duration, but the Orlando Metroplex was the closest thing to a playground left in the US. Temperatures still got up to sixty in Florida some days. We rolled past condo complexes fronted with palm-tree trunks hung with brown, drooping fronds.

  “Metzger, you think we’ll ever go after the bad guys? Really win this thing, instead of just slowing down the end of the world?”

  “Maybe.” He looked down and sideways. The last time he looked away from me like that was when a babe I idolized passed him a note that I had wolverine breath. But she made him swear not to tell me. He knew more than he could say.

  “Oh.” My reply told him I knew he knew something.

  The party was in a gated community with dark streets. Well, all streets were dark, now.

  The party house was more like a hotel, set behind vast lawns with its own gate and a grumpy, tuxedoed bouncer out front. He leaned into the car, smiled at Metzger’s uniform, shrugged at mine, and waved us in.

  You could have played ball in the house’s foyer, but we chased the live music through it and back outside to the pool deck. A couple hundred guests glittered poolside in sunshine.

  Sunshine?

  I looked up. From the still-green fronds of the palms that lined the deck shone man-made sunshine. Days ago in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, the survivors had been burning candles at noon. There was something about the sleek, bronzed crowd. Bronze. Since the war, the bare, Caucasian butts in barracks showers and the faces in Philadelphia bread lines were the color of risen dough. But these people afforded suntans.

  My jaw dropped, and I grabbed Metzger’s elbow and hissed. “Whose place is this?”

  “Aaron Grodt’s. The holo producer.”

  The band played an excellent cover on a Cannibal hit. I looked again. It was Cannibal. They finished and left the muted buzz of clinking crystal and laughter. Metzger and I were the only ones in uniform, and heads turned.

  Our dates were already there, cocktail-dressed in spiderwebs of fabric that would have frozen them anywhere else on the planet. Metzger introduced me to his girl. Shelly had the most perfect face and the best shape I’d ever seen.

  Until he introduced me to Crissy. She was blond and stood as tall as I did, on Everest-high heels. I smelled perfume when she pecked my cheek and as she bent forward other Himalayan comparisons leapt to mind. She drew back and ran her eyes up and down my uniform. Uh-oh. Ground-grant green, not Rocket Jock blue.

  Her eyes widened. “Metz says Infantrymen have incredible stamina. That absolutely makes my tummy flutter.”

  Mine, too.

  “So, Crissy, what do you do?”

  “Can’t I just show you later?” She giggled. “Really, I model. Lingerie and swimwear. Not for the big weblogues. They say my breasts are too large.”

  Thank you, God.

  The buffet would have b
een impressive before the war. Filet mignon so real they left it pink in the middle. Pyramids of roasted quail. Whole bowls of fresh fruit. Apples. Bananas. You name it.

  As the four of us balanced our plates and looked for a table, I spotted a redhead, my age and as perfect and empty-looking as Crissy. She hung on a bearded, tuxe-doed guy Ord’s age but soft and round. They glided toward us, and the old guy took Metzger’s hand in both of his. “Captain! Wonderful you could come!”

  They say holos add twenty pounds but I did recognize him from the Oscars. It was Aaron Grodt.

  He held his champagne flute above his head, then tinged it with a sterling fork. Everyone shut up and stared toward us.

  “Here’s me man who made our picture possible! Even if he wouldn’t play himself.”

  I rolled my eyes. Hollywood was making a holo about Metzger while I was humping a machine gun through the woods. Story of my life.

  Grodt kissed Metzger on both cheeks, then said to everyone, “We all owe so much…”

  My stomach chilled, and my plate felt heavy. How could I be so stupid? These days, not even a Hollywood producer could throw a bomber like this without collecting a cover. Cannibal, alone, probably cost as much as a house. Between me and my date, I’d just blown a month’s pay and allowances.

  Grodt dragged me next to Metzger, an arm around each of us. Instead of whispering what the tab was, he said, “Where would we be without brave men like these?”

  People applauded. One by one, they came up to us, shook our hands and thanked us for serving. It was nice, and nobody knew I was such a hick I’d thought I had to pay for the party.

  I read in a history chip that during one of the ancient wars, Vietnam I think, some GI on leave was at a party like this. A flat-screen star came over and spit on him. And the other guests clapped for the movie star.

  It just goes to show you can’t believe everything that’s burned on a chip. I mean, America could never have been that ass-backward.

  For the next couple hours, Metzger danced with his date and got talked to by important-looking people. I drank too much free champagne, listened to the band, and watched Crissy giggle and nearly fall out of her dress.

  Metzger had been visiting with our host, Aaron Grodt. Grodt came and sat between Crissy and me, in Metzger’s empty chair. The producer laid his hand on my shoulder. “Captain Metzger tells me your military experience hasn’t been good lately.”