by Ninie Hammon
He smells smoke and dead pig and his own fear sweat. And the copper, metallic stench of the blood that has puddled behind the hole in the back of Haystack’s head.
Nguyen stands on the other side of the road near the trees.
She’s smiling, but the smile’s not real, not genuine. It never reaches her dark, terror-filled eyes as she continues to walk slowly toward him, agonizingly slowly.
KFC and Dollar Bill are behind him, crouched by a cart next to the bloated carcass of the pig. The others are strung out farther back.
“She’s wired,” Dollar calls out to him in a hoarse whisper. “The”—he growls a mouthful of expletives—“Cong’ve got her packed in C-4.”
“Gray, you can’t let her get any closer,” KFC pleads. “She’ll blow us all into the middle of next week.”
Gray, not Padre. Padre is a chaplain; Gray is a soldier.
There is, of course, only one way to stop her from getting close enough for the blast to reach them.
“I want see Mickey Mouse, okay?” Her voice is tear-clotted now. “See Goofy. See”—she pauses—“Oot-shay ee-may.”
Oot-shay ee-may. Shoot me.
“Gray, you gotta do it; you gotta stop her,” Bagpipes rasps in a fierce whisper. “Now!”
Grayson is, of course, the only one who has a clear line of fire. As in a dream, he lifts his rifle. Then he becomes a piece of solid granite that only looks like a man. This is beyond the pale of doin’ the necessary. No, he can’t send a bullet to rip open that little girl’s chest, the child who has been the only light in his darkness.
“Padre, she’s gonna blow!” Dollar cries.
“She’ll kill us all,” Beanie yells, and Grayson can hear raw terror in his voice.
There is more sadness than fear in Nguyen’s voice.
“Oot-shay e-may,” she says. Her phony smile is so wide it is a slash across the bottom of her face, like it’s been cut there with a bayonet. Tears stream down both cheeks. “You do that for me, Grape.” She pauses. “Ease-play.”
Grayson fits the rifle to his shoulder and bends his head to fix the sight on the little girl’s chest. He curls his finger around the trigger and unconsciously sighs out a relaxing breath as he’d learned to do hunting squirrels.
“Grayson, drop that rifle! Drop it!” somebody shouted.
The bright sun faded, as if someone had opened up a beach umbrella like the one he and Piper’d had in the sand in Hawaii. A cool breeze ruffled his hair, stuck his sweat-soaked shirt to his skin. And he heard…a chicken hawk?
“Now!” the voice called out. “I won’t tell you again.”
And then the haze fell away like scales from his eyes, and he saw Piper, sprawled on her back in the front yard, and the sheriff crouched behind the half whiskey barrel full of pansies, pistol in both hands, pointed at his chest.
Grayson slowly lowered the rifle and set it carefully on the ground.
***
Piper got Marian settled in bed, made her as comfortable as she could. The old woman refused to take additional pain medication, though the trip to Charleston had obviously left her in agony.
“That nasty medicine makes my tongue thick and my eyelids droop. I ain’t gonna sleep through the last days I got on this earth.”
“Mommy, come see,” Sadie cried, and Piper stepped out of Marian’s room to find the child standing on the back of the sofa. “Sabie fly like a birdie.” Before Piper could say a word, the little girl hopped down from the back of the sofa to the cushion with the protruding spring, flapping her arms frantically. Then she bounced up and down on it.
Well, that explained how the spring got broken.
“Sadie, no,” she said and started toward her. “You can’t—”
Out the front window behind the sofa, Piper saw a car pull up in the dirt driveway. Her recurring nightmare slammed back into her chest with such force she actually grunted out loud. Two officers in dress uniforms, solemnly getting out of the vehicle, then walking with respectful gravity up the walk to—
But it wasn’t a black military car. It was dark blue and had a big bubblegum machine light set in the center of the top. The man who got out of it was Sheriff Bayless. He was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man with eyebrows that looked like tangles of black barbed wire over his deep-set gray eyes and had a mole the size of a piece of popcorn—and about as lumpy—on his left cheek.
He was unsmiling, had the same grim look on his face the soldiers would have had if Gray—
Gray was here, home, safe!
Then it hit her that the sheriff was about to break her heart nonetheless. He wasn’t here to deliver bad news about her husband on the other side of the world; he was here to deliver bad news about the little red-haired girl who had taken Sadie the birdie into her bedroom to play dolls.
They’d found Maggie’s family. Sheriff Bayless had come to take the little girl away, and Piper didn’t think she could stand that.
Piper crossed the parlor and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door firmly behind her. She met the sheriff halfway up the walk.
“Piper,” he began, “I have some bad news for you.”
“No!” Piper said.
He looked confused.
“I know why you’re here and”—she squared her shoulders—“you can’t have her.”
“Have wh—?”
“You didn’t see the bruises, the black eye and split lip. They beat her, Sheriff Cliff. Somebody smashed their fist into her face.” Piper felt herself edging into hysteria, but she couldn’t stop. “You go in there and take a look at that little girl your own self.” She stepped aside and made a sweeping gesture toward the house. “Go on. She’s mostly healed up now—but you look at her face and tell me you can hand that child over to somebody who’d—”
“Piper, hold on. I—”
“You hold on, Sheriff. If you think I’m going to let you—”
“I’m not here about the little girl.”
“What?”
“Phillip told me you’d found a lost—”
“She’s not lost. She ran away!”
“But I don’t know any more about her than he did.”
“Then why…?”
“It’s your brother, Piper. Zeke. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but he’s been shot.”
The air turned as thick as creek mud, and Piper couldn’t seem to get any of it into her lungs.
“Is he—?”
“It happened this afternoon in the woods. Riley found him and brought him in, and they sent him on to Bishop Memorial in Charlestown.”
Piper gasped.
“I saw! The ambulance, I saw it. It flew past us…” Her mind was reeling. “How bad is he hurt?”
“I’m not sure, but you gotta know they wouldn’t have turfed him out to Bishop if it was only a flesh wound.”
Piper’s gut tied in a knot so suddenly she felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach with a steel-toed boot.
“Well, I…I have to go…to Charlestown…back to Charlestown to the hospital.”
But what about Marian? She couldn’t leave her here alone. And Sadie and Maggie?
“Grayson went hunting and until he gets home—”
“Looks like he just did.”
The sheriff was looking past her toward the hillside above and behind the house where Grayson had come out of the woods with his rifle in the crook of his arm.
Piper let out a gasp of relief. Grayson was home and—
Grayson had almost made it to the back fence when he stopped abruptly, merely stood there staring at them. Then he slowly lifted the rifle and pointed it at them. He paused for a moment before he lowered his face to the sight.
For a big man, Sheriff Bayless was lightning quick. He reached out a burly arm and shoved Piper so forcefully toward the house that she lost her balance and fell backward on the ground. Then he yanked his handgun out of his holster, crouched behind the whiskey barrel of pansies, held the weapon out in front of him with both
hands and pointed it at Grayson.
Piper tried to scream no. But the breath had been knocked out of her. She stared at Grayson. Every detail of his image was seared into her brain. His hunting hat cocked back on his head, his army fatigues—she’d washed and pressed them and cleaned his boots last night. The .22 held with such ease and confidence in his hands. She saw him squint down the barrel.
“Grayson, drop that rifle! Drop it!” the sheriff called out. Piper heard a sickening click as he thumbed the hammer back on his pistol. “Now! I won’t tell you again.”
Grayson paused and Piper held her breath. Then he slowly lowered the rifle and laid it on the ground at his feet. Piper leaped up and raced to the clearing where Gray now stood with his hands hanging limply at his sides. She threw herself into his arms with such force that she knocked him backward a step, and the two of them very nearly went tumbling into the dirt.
“Gray! What were you doing? Why’d you…you looked like you were about to…”
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice hollow and unnatural.
With astonishing speed, her fear and confusion morphed into anger.
“You’re sorry! You point a rifle at me and—”
“What do you want from me, Piper? Do you think I meant to—?”
“And the sheriff almost shoots you—” Shoots you! “Zeke’s been shot.”
Gray looked at her like she’d slapped him.
By now, Sheriff Cliff had reached them, huffing a little. He picked up Gray’s rifle off the ground but didn’t give it back to him, merely stood there holding it.
“You wanna tell me what that was all about?” he asked.
Piper had no time for this.
“Zeke’s in the hospital in Charleston. I don’t know how bad it—I have to…”
To what?
“Go!” Gray said. “I’ll see to things here, Ma and the girls.”
The girls. He said girls!
Without another word, Piper turned and ran back to the house to get her purse and car keys.
Chapter 22
The sheriff didn’t make a move to give his rifle back to him so Gray reached for it. For a moment they both held onto it, Gray trying to take it, the sheriff reluctant to give it up. Then the sheriff let go, and Gray placed the rifle in the crook of his arm, barrel pointed at the ground.
“What was you doin’, son?” the sheriff asked.
Well, I was actually pointing my rifle at an eight-year-old child I loved dearly.
He did! He loved Nguyen. And he had—what? Shot her? He didn’t know. That part was gone, still in the black box. Obviously, the bomb the Cong had strapped on her had gone off because he’d awakened with a concussion and explosion-roar rumbling in his head. So Nguyen was dead. Then he had been yanked out of Vietnam like Beanie’s father pulling a tooth. Painfully. With blood still dripping.
“Gray, can you hear me?”
He realized he’d stood there ignoring the sheriff’s question.
“I’m sorry, Sheriff Cliff. I’m still…not over what happened.”
“’Course you ain’t, son.” He gave Gray a knowing look. “And you ain’t gonna be for a while. Maybe not for a long while.”
Grayson remembered then that Sheriff Bayless had served in Korea.
“That’s why it ain’t a good idea for you to be carrying a gun around. Not till you’re…more yourself.”
“Guess not. But it felt, you know, right.”
“You mean normal? Safe, maybe? I know how that feels. It’ll pass.” Then he stopped. “But you was a chaplain. You didn’t have no gun, didja?”
Gray took a deep breath. Might as well start coming clean. “Not when I got there. Not at first. But later, yeah, I had a gun.” He paused for a beat. “And I used it.”
There was compassion in the big man’s eyes. Then something else began to form there, too, that Gray couldn’t identify. Wariness? Suspicion?
Zeke!
“What happened to Piper’s little brother?”
“He was out in the woods this afternoon, and somebody shot him’s all I know. Clinic called me ’bout the gunshot wound and by the time I got there, they was loading him into an ambulance for Charleston.”
“How bad?”
“Bad, I think. He wasn’t talking, least not to me. And Riley was…a madman.”
Gray nodded. He had no trouble imagining the little weasel foaming at the mouth.
“You see anybody strange in the woods?” the sheriff asked. “Or hear anything out of the ordinary?”
“I didn’t see anybody, period, strange or otherwise.”
Piper rushed out of the house and ran to the car, calling to Grayson over her shoulder, “I don’t know when I’ll be home.” She jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
“Don’t you go tearing outta here and run over somebody,” the sheriff hollered to her. “Be careful, drive safe. If you got any message for Gray, you call me, and I’ll see he gets it.”
Gray wasn’t even certain Piper heard the sheriff. She said nothing, just started the engine and sprayed dirt out behind the old white Rambler as she took off down the road.
***
Piper’s only memory of the two-hour drive to Charleston was that it felt like one of those dreams where you’re running down a long, dark hallway toward a door, but no matter how fast you run, the door stays in front of you, just out of reach.
When she burst into the waiting room outside the hospital’s surgery suites, there were maybe a dozen people there. Some of them she knew—mostly relatives—others were folks she recognized but couldn’t place. But the first person she made eye contact with was Riley. It was the first time she’d seen or even spoken to him since she eloped with Grayson. One look told her nothing had changed in those eight years. By the time she was ten years old, she was a full six inches taller than he was. She still was, and he was still mad about it.
The chip on her older brother’s shoulder had started to form when he was seven and she was only four. Granny Lucille Campbell had come to visit, and when she spied the two children playing together in the yard, she’d bawled, “Why, lookit that. Riley’s such a puny little runt, even his baby sister’s almost big as he is.”
That single remark changed Piper’s relationship with her brother and his relationship with the world for the rest of his life.
Piper’s mother had been a Donahue—a family of pale-blonde, small-boned people. Her mother’d never seen the top side of five feet tall. Her grandfather had been only five-four, and when her mother was a teenager, she could wear the old man’s boots—size seven.
The Campbells, on the other hand, were big and raw-boned, tall and rangy, with the black hair and eyes of the Cherokee blood in their ancestry.
Rooster Campbell was six-foot-four and probably weighed near three hundred pounds on the day William McCollough put a bullet in his belly. Zeke was six-foot-five, Piper was a fuzz over six feet herself.
But Rooster Campbell’s oldest son, Riley, had taken after the Donahue side of the family. If he stood up straight and tall, which he always did, he could have nudged the bottom side of five feet six. His size, or lack of it, had molded his character as profoundly as the hands of a potter on warm clay. “Small but scrappy” as a little boy became “meanest dog in the junkyard” as a teenager and “devious, back-stabbing little weasel with a hair-trigger temper and a mean streak the size of Pittsburgh” as an adult.
The perfect size for a coal miner coupled with his absolute fearlessness should have numbered Riley Campbell among the elite, the handful of miners the company always kept on when everybody else was laid off. He never earned that distinction, however, because he didn’t play well with others. Fellow miners actually walked off the job rather than work with him.
When Riley saw Piper, his blond eyebrows knit together in the deep creases above his nose, and his lips curled in a snarl.
“What’re you doing here?” he growled.
She ignored the remark.
“How’s Zeke? The sheriff said—”
“That some McCullough shot him in the back? ’Zat what he said? ’Cause that’s what happened. One of them—”
“The back? How…where is he?”
“In surgery, been in there four hours already. What do you care?”
Piper lost it. She was bigger than he was, and he didn’t scare her one bit, wouldn’t have if he’d been twice her size.
“Zeke is my little brother, the only”—she glanced around the room pointedly—“member of my entire family who has said hi, bye or kiss my foot to me since I moved back home.” She spoke the next words slowly, distinctly, accusingly: “While my husband was fighting a war on the other side of the world!”
Though the Addingtons were McCulloughs, most Campbells gave Grayson a pass when he became a minister like they had his father. And he was a soldier, too. Had been in combat! Everybody knew about the massacre of his unit, and the room fell uncomfortably quiet. Even Riley had no comeback. In fact, it appeared that most of the fizz had gone out of him. Like a shaken soft drink, he’d spewed all over Piper, but now was flat and mostly calm.
Piper knew he wouldn’t be for long. The moment Carter walked into that room, Riley’d go off again like a bottle rocket.
The woman working the information desk on the ground floor had been maddeningly slow locating where Zeke had been taken. There’d been a phone on the desk, and Piper had asked to use it.
To call Carter, of course. That he was the one person she wanted to see right now, that she’d instantly turned to him in a time of crisis, that she needed his comfort…all those things said something, but she refused to consider what it might be.
She now realized it had been a terrible mistake to call him, and if there were any way she could undo the blunder, she would. But there wasn’t.
“What did the doctor say about Zeke’s condition? About what damage—?”
“Said he wouldn’t know nothing till he got in there where he could look,” Riley said, now sounding tired and depressed. And more than a little scared. “He was up Blood Creek…coon hunting…and I’s waitin’ for him and when he didn’t show up, I went looking. He was laying facedown on the ground, wasn’t even much blood, and for a minute I thought…” His voice trailed off. “He never did wake up, never said nothin’ about what happened.”
