Past Crimes

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  I made it halfway up the walk before I was spotted. Juliet knocked on the dining-room window and waved an eager hello. I waved back, and she vanished. An instant later the front door opened.

  Davey stepped out onto the concrete stoop. “I knew it. You forgot the beer.”

  “Is that Van?” Evelyn’s voice, from somewhere within. “Hang on, hang on.” Davey and I stepped inside, jostling for room. The house smelled of pot roast and spices.

  The living room was crowded with furniture and knickknacks and framed photographs. I was afraid I’d knock something over each time I turned around. Dono’s house had more than twice the square footage and less than half the belongings.

  Evelyn Tolan hurried in, wiping her hand on a red dish towel and beaming.

  In the three seconds before she hugged me, I was struck by how much she still looked like her elder boy. The delicate features and wide blue eyes that made Davey almost too pretty were mostly unchanged in Evelyn. Her black curls had been invaded by a few gray and white strands I could see up close, as she pressed her head to my chest.

  Evelyn had been very young when Davey was born and was probably still south of fifty. She wore a blue silk blouse and a long charcoal-colored skirt, cut to fit her small frame. A turquoise necklace and earrings. She’d dressed for company.

  I remembered Davey being mocked by our classmates for having a hot mom when we were kids. Maybe his coworkers still teased him about it.

  “My Lord, look at you,” she said, releasing me. “You’re so tan!” Her eyes touched only momentarily on my scars. Davey must have given the family fair warning.

  Evelyn smiled haltingly. “You’ll come in and sit. Dinner’s nearly on the table.”

  There was a child’s angry wail from deep inside the house, and Juliet breezed through the living room toward the back, grinning. “Hi, Van!”

  “You can meet Her Highness,” Davey said.

  Mike was filling the doorway to the dining area, waiting his turn. He stuck out a hand, almost formally. “Good to see you,” he said.

  We shook. Mike was also dressed up, in a light blue button-down and black trousers. Even Davey had on a clean T-shirt.

  “Get Van something to drink, Michael,” said Evelyn. “I need to see to the roast. Van, you make yourself at home here.” She hurried out toward the kitchen.

  “He should go thirsty,” said Davey. “Seeing how he turned up empty-handed.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “A roast?”

  “The prodigal,” Davey said. “You don’t rate the fatted calf.”

  “Shush.” Juliet came back in, carrying a red-faced and huffing toddler. Frances saw Davey and reached for him.

  “Daddy’s girl,” Davey said, taking her. Frances glared at me. Her hair was so blond it was nearly translucent, but she had her dad’s blue eyes.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  Juliet petted Frances’s head. “Ninetieth percentile for her height.”

  “But still a chubmuffin,” said Davey, and he buried his nose in her neck. Frances squealed delightedly.

  “And she’s overdue for jammies,” said Juliet. “I wanted her to see her Uncle Van before bedtime.” Frances recognized a word or two and started whimpering. “Now, it’s all right.” Juliet whisked her away from Davey. “I’ll be back after Pat the Bunny. Don’t wait on dinner, Davey.”

  Mike came back in holding two bottles of Blue Moon. Davey took one from him and looked at it sorrowfully.

  “Only two in the fridge,” he said, and held it out to me. “Call it a welcome-home present.”

  “I had enough at the Morgen,” I said.

  “Bullshit you did.”

  “Last night was the most booze I’ve had in months. Afghanistan’s a dry zone. My head’s still pounding.” The headache was from taking Dono’s shillelagh across my skull, but it counted just the same.

  “Hell, you don’t have to ask me twice,” Davey said, and took a swig.

  Juliet called from the kitchen. Davey set his bottle on the coffee table. “Relax,” he said. “Don’t touch my beer.” They left the room.

  Left to my own devices, I wandered into the hallway. The striped green wallpaper was mostly hidden under dozens of framed photos. I stepped carefully around piles of children’s toys to look at them. Davey as a baby. Juliet and Davey on their wedding day, squinting into the sun. Mike’s kindergarten class. A stiff-looking couple that I guessed were Evelyn’s parents, the man wearing a suit that looked like burlap and the woman with hair piled into a black beehive.

  There were no pictures of old Joe Tolan, Evelyn’s estranged husband. Not that I was surprised. He’d cut and run even before Davey and I had met in second grade.

  Mike came up the hall, lugging a basket of folded laundry. “Hey, you see this one?” he said. He leaned down to point to a color five-by-seven in a birchwood frame.

  It was a photo of Davey and me and Mike as children. Davey and I must have been about twelve years old, Mike only six or so. We were all in swimsuits, standing ankle-deep in water. We looked pasty and as skinny as fence posts and had huge smiles on our faces. Davey was holding a hot dog.

  “Lake Washington,” I said.

  Mike nodded. “For Seafair, I think. We went to somebody’s house and walked down to watch the hydroplane races. I don’t remember, but Mom’s talked about it.” He straightened up, an inch taller than I was. The six-year-old kid in the picture had become a big dude.

  He glowered. “Are the cops going to catch this guy?” he said. “Because I read if they don’t find a suspect in the first couple of days, the odds go way down.”

  “You and Dono seem to get along. That’s pretty rare, for him.”

  “He’s been a good boss. He and Luce.” Mike leaned back against the stairway banister. “I just keep thinking about this time I was bitching about him for making me clean out the back room at the Morgen and paint it. I had tickets to some stupid show with my girlfriend, so I rushed it. He made me scrape the molding clean and do another coat. Took up the whole weekend. Man, was I pissed.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “You kidding? I just whined about it when I got home. But Mom shut me up immediately. She wouldn’t hear a word against Dono.”

  “Maybe Evelyn’s being too nice. Dono can be pigheaded.”

  Mike smiled softly. “Yeah, I guess.” He looked again at the photograph of us as kids. “You coming back to town. Davey was so psyched when he found out.”

  “I should have kept in touch.”

  “Nah, it’s okay. It was tough on him when you left, sure. But having Juliet around helped a lot. At least Davey was smart enough to figure that out.”

  I followed Mike’s gaze to the wall of photos, to another of Davey and Juliet’s wedding pictures.

  “Women civilize you,” I said.

  Mike almost smiled again, before his broad face fell back into its usual thoughtful expression. “Is there something I can do? Anything’s better than just waiting around.”

  “It’s still a family thing right now. Look after his bar. That’s what he’d want.”

  Evelyn came into the hallway and laid a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Michael, would you please set the last of the table? I’d like to speak with Van for a moment.”

  When he’d left, she closed the sliding wooden door to the kitchen. The hall was quiet.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Dono,” Evelyn said, “about how he’s really doing. Before we sit down to dinner and the children are around.”

  “What the doctors don’t tell me is more than what they do. I have to guess the rest.”

  “Still. I need to know the truth.” She looked up at me, her jaw set.

  “They don’t believe that Dono will wake up,” I said. “Even if he does, he’s not going to be anything like the same. The bullet did a lot of damage to his brain. There may not be much of him left at all. His surgeon didn’t come right out and say it, but he thinks it would be a blessing if Dono slipped away.”
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  Evelyn nodded twice, very slowly. Her eyes looked down and focused intently at about the level of my chest. I reached out and caught her just as her knees sagged a fraction.

  “Michael,” she said.

  “I’ll get him.”

  “Wait. No, I’m all right,” she said, but I held on to her arm while she leaned against the wall of framed pictures. “I’m sorry. I thought I was ready, and then—” She inhaled and stood straighter. “Strange that you never know how you’ll fare until you hear the news for yourself.”

  I swore at myself. Evelyn was such a rock with her own family that I’d stupidly blurted out the whole story without thinking how she might react to the kind of violence around mine.

  “Do you agree with the surgeon?” she said.

  “I know what Dono would prefer.”

  Evelyn nodded. Her eyes were red. “Then we’ll hope for what’s best.”

  “Guys!” Juliet called out from the dining room. “We’re ready.”

  Evelyn slid the wooden door open again, and we walked through the narrow kitchen. A massive table of oiled pine took up most of the dining room. I edged sideways along the wall and bumped against a shelf, grabbing a small white leather Bible before it fell to the floor.

  Davey carried the roast out in its pan and placed it on the table. The juices were still bubbling around the edges. My stomach did a half gainer in anticipation.

  After we all took our places, Evelyn bowed her head. The rest of the family went immediately quiet. “Bless us, Lord, and this meal we receive from your bounty. Thank you for seeing us through the darkness that we may be returned home.” From the corner of my eye, I could tell she nodded her head toward me. “And watch over Van’s grandfather. Through Christ, your child, amen.”

  We nodded, and Mike said “Amen” and stood to pick up the carving tools by the roast. Juliet began dishing from a bowl of mashed potatoes. The potatoes had been whipped to the consistency of pudding and coated with enough butter to be more yellow than white. It took some restraint not to bury my face in them.

  “How is Dono?” Juliet said to me. She’d changed into a floral-print dress for the meal, with a gold necklace. “Any better?”

  “The same,” I said.

  Mike put a thick slab of roast on Juliet’s plate. “Do they have any clues on who did it?”

  Evelyn shook her head. “Later. Not at the table.”

  As the largest, Mike and I had been given the ends of the table. He was clumsy with the knife and made chunks of the meat, taking six or seven passes for each plate until he’d built a small cairn of beef on each.

  Frances slapped her high chair. “No green bean.”

  “Eat a few and you’ll get po-ta-to,” said Davey, making faces on the syllables. Frances cackled and grabbed a bean but didn’t put it in her mouth.

  My plate returned to me, overflowing. Evelyn stood to reach a bottle of wine on the sideboard behind her. “Davey tells us you’re only back on leave. How long can you stay?” she said. She had the cork popped in ten seconds, showing off thirty years of experience waiting tables.

  “A few more days,” I said. “I’m trying to learn more about Dono’s life now. Have you seen him lately?”

  She nodded. “At the bar. He was there when I came by to see Michael at work just a week or two ago. When was that, honey?”

  Mike’s ears went pink. “I don’t know. It was a Sunday, before we opened.”

  “Yes. To bring you your study guide, I remember. Your grandfather was there, Van, working on something or other behind the bar.”

  Juliet looked at Mike. “Study guide?”

  “Don’t get revved up,” said Mike. “I’m just taking the GRE, see how I do.”

  Evelyn beamed. “Michael’s economics professor from Seattle State thinks he’d do well in the graduate program.”

  “It’s a very highly ranked school,” Juliet said to me. She smiled at her brother-in-law. “You know you can get in, Mike.”

  Davey chuckled. “Mike’s never doubted that for a second.”

  “Davey’s doing very well, too,” Juliet said, like she might be accused of disloyalty. “They gave him a bonus.” She touched her gold necklace and smiled at her husband.

  Davey winked at her. “Hey, I like spoiling you. A little profit sharing is the least they can do.”

  “Van doesn’t have anything to drink, David,” said Evelyn.

  “There’s wine open,” said Juliet.

  Davey got up. “Van’s gone all Methodist on us tonight.”

  “Water’s good,” I said.

  “Château de Faucet it is,” he said, and left. He was joking, but I tried to remember the last place I’d lived where you could drink the water straight from the tap.

  “I’d love to know more about your life, Van. We’ve heard so little since you left.” Evelyn was serving a bit of guilt along with the side dishes tonight. “Why the army?” she asked.

  Because they could take me fastest, and I could stop sleeping in the backseats of cars in the Green Lake Park & Ride.

  “They had the most options for new recruits,” I said.

  Juliet took a few quick bites from her plate while Davey distracted the baby. “It’s worked out well for you, from what Davey tells us,” she said.

  Then she looked at the side of my face and flushed.

  This, I had learned, was how it was with civilians. Sometimes you had to confront it for them. I tapped the white line running along my jaw with my fork and smiled at her. “It worked out just fine, Julie. Kind of a rough start, though.”

  “Can I ask … I mean, how?” said Mike.

  I spooned some potatoes onto my plate. “I was about two months out of RIP—Ranger training—when I deployed to Iraq. Twenty years old. I was sent to a unit that cycled through these tiny outposts in central Tikrit. One of the hot spots. About every third or fourth night, our unit would catch a bird and go hunting, checking for possible insurgent camps.”

  Evelyn held her water glass with both small hands. “A bird?” she said.

  “Helicopter. It doesn’t land, just pauses while we fast-rope down from a few meters up.”

  “Fun,” Mike said, grinning.

  “You know it,” I said. “Anyway, on that night we dropped half a mile from this narrow path that wound down into the valley. About the only way in or out. We figured the camp we were looking for couldn’t be too far off the path, so we moved parallel to it for an hour or so. The plan was to find and evaluate the camp, hit it if it needed hitting, and take any prisoners or intel with us back to the extraction point.”

  “What happened?” said Juliet. Baby Frances was nodding off in her chair, her food forgotten.

  “Ambush. Probably some goat herder saw the chopper come in for the drop and called his neighbor, who called someone else. Damn near every family has a cell phone, even out in the boonies. So they had about twenty minutes’ head start to get every bad guy with a gun and a grudge out of bed. They opened up with RPGs—rocket-propelled grenades—and then they just sprayed the area. We were really lucky.”

  Everyone around the table had stopped eating.

  “Lucky?” Evelyn said.

  “The bad guys were too eager. RPGs are meant for vehicles and urban assault, not a few soldiers spread out across a hundred yards. They made a hell of a lot of noise, but that was about all. We ducked into the rocks and just kept our heads down.”

  The roasting pan was empty except for the bone. There was plenty of meat still on it. But I wasn’t hungry anymore.

  “I would have died right there,” said Juliet. “Weren’t you terrified?”

  I had been. When the first grenade flashed, it felt as if a thunderbolt had reached out and slapped me on the head. I’d been scrambling on autopilot, doing what months of backbreaking practice had drilled into me. But I was keeping the story light tonight. Dinner chat.

  “We made sure everyone was accounted for,” I said, “and started hauling butt out of there. I was bringing u
p the rear with another Ranger, Scoves.”

  I winked at Juliet. “That’s when I got my tribal marks.” I traced a finger firmly along each of the three white creases on my left profile. Dividing the eyebrow. Where a bit of my cheekbone was missing. Following the jawline.

  Seeing me touch the scars always seems to put people at ease. Reminds them that the wounds aren’t raw and painful. Not anymore.

  I washed down what was left of the roast with water and pushed away my plate. “Somebody told me later it was a rocket, the last one they fired. It hit a boulder near us, and a lot of shrapnel went flying.” I shrugged. “I went down. Scoves went down. When I came to, my ears were ringing and Scoves was still out.”

  There had been more. The part that the Tolans didn’t need to hear.

  Still half gone, I had turned toward a movement in my peripheral vision. Two men holding AKs with full banana clips were walking toward me through the tall grass. One so close that three steps later his foot tripped over my leg. It freaked me right out of my daze. I reached up and grabbed his rifle, and he fell down on top of me.

  My pistol was already in my hand. I put two rounds into his center mass. He collapsed next to me. His friend still hadn’t figured out what was happening. Two more rounds for him. Another for each of them through the head, just like I’d been trained, after I’d staggered to my feet. So jacked on fear and focus I hadn’t realized yet that the left side of my face was pulp.

  “Where were the other guys?” said Mike.

  I wiped my mouth with my napkin, to give me time for a long breath.

  “Fighting their way back, trying to retrieve us,” I said. “But I didn’t know that. My headset radio was trashed. I did my best to break the record for the quarter-mile dash out of that valley.”

  “What about your friend?” Evelyn’s eyes looked as if she were in pain. “Scoves?”

  Scoves had been bleeding out. I risked staying in the grass for an extra minute to slap some QuikClot and gauze on his neck and arm to slow the red wash that had soaked his entire upper body. Then I’d thrown him over my shoulder and started running, grateful with every step that he was about the smallest guy in our unit.