The Coldwater Warm Hearts Club

by Lexi Eddings

  Then she saw something on the back wall that made the corners of her mouth lift.

  There in the corner was a framed work that appealed to her sense of symmetry and color. With sinuous curves and thin lines, it had the look of an early Erté. His classic portfolio of fashion templates was legend.

  Of course, this one had to be a fake. What else would be hanging in a place called Gewgaws and Gizzwickies? The idea of a genuine Erté languishing in someone’s attic for decades before finding its way to a junk shop was laughable.

  “But it seems real enough to me,” Lacy murmured, unconsciously repeating her mother’s earlier words. Its beauty raised her spirits. She didn’t have money to burn, but it was marked only $25. The piece would look great in her new living room.

  Just like her mother’s new ceramic chicken, whether this painting was “real” or not, it satisfied her sense of composition and made her smile.

  Lacy glanced down the aisle at her mom. Maybe that was the ticket to understanding her. Shirley Evans was emotionally invested in her treasures, almost to the point of ferocity. Lacy could understand that. She had a passion for symmetry and color and clean lines herself. Even if she couldn’t understand why her mom picked the items she did, Lacy realized how she felt about them.

  The value of a piece wasn’t necessarily in itself. Its worth was determined by how it made you feel. Lacy tucked the painting under her arm and headed to the front of the store, where her mother was still in raptures over the broody hen.

  Somehow, some way, I will say something nice about that ridiculous chicken if it kills me.

  Chapter 15

  I wish I was a dog. Then someone might take me in and feed me and keep the rain off my head. And if I was a dog,

  I’d dream of chasing rabbits, instead of the Cong.

  That’d be even better than three hots and a cot.

  —Lester Scott, Private First Class, Honorably Discharged, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart. Left his wife ten years ago. Never paid a dime in alimony.

  When Jake stepped into the alley to take out the trash, he nearly tripped over Lester Scott on the Green Apple’s back stoop. The homeless vet had been camping there since Jake had invited him to use the covered alcove in case it rained. Last night, Jake had left one of his pillows for the old man. He was glad to see that Lester had claimed it. The blue pillowcase peeked out of the fellow’s pack, a surprising spot of relative cleanliness amid the general grime.

  “How you doing today, Lester?”

  “Fair to middlin’, marine.”

  “Did Ethel bring you some lunch?”

  Lester nodded and lit a half-smoked cigarette. “Love that Green Plate special. The meat loaf was A-okay, considering it was slapped together by a jarhead cook.”

  Jake ignored the backhanded compliment and tossed the garbage in the Dumpster. Then because the old vet sounded pretty lucid for a change and didn’t reek of alcohol as much as usual, Jake sat down beside him on the stoop.

  “Those cigarettes will kill you, you know,” Jake said.

  “So I heard. Last week, I decided I wasn’t going to smoke anymore.” Lester shrugged philosophically, ignoring the butt hanging from his lower lip. “O’ course since then, I haven’t smoked any less either. Just depends on whether the cigs come my way, you see. I can’t help it if I happen to find a half a pack here or there. A feller’s got to deal with what comes to him, don’t he?”

  “Guess so.”

  Jake had to deal with what had come to his life or it’d swallow him up like Lake Jewel had swallowed his dad’s boat. He knew if he didn’t do something about those flashbacks, his chances with Lacy would go down the tube. He just wasn’t sure what he was willing to do. Unlike his titanium leg, the flashbacks were a wound no one could see. Admitting he even had them made him feel weak. Like something was broken inside his head.

  No, he told himself sternly. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t broken.

  But coping with the episodes that hurled him back to Helmand province was every bit as hard as learning to deal with his stump. He shoved the issue aside.

  “Have you seen Daniel since you got back into town?”

  “I got no call to. Reckon my boy don’t want to see me much either.” Lester blew a perfect ring of smoke into the air. “Can’t say as I blame him.”

  “Lots of time has passed since you parted ways,” Jake said. “Things can change.”

  “For some things, there ain’t enough time in the whole world.” Lester took one last drag and then stubbed the cigarette out before it burned his fingertips.

  Jake figured Lester wouldn’t want pity. Lord knew, he couldn’t abide it when it was directed at him, but he did feel sorry for Lester Scott. Granted, the man was as contemptible an excuse for a husband and father as you could find. Lester had actually made his family’s life better when he left them.

  But he was still a vet and for that reason alone, Jake figured he deserved not to be written off completely. There was no telling what had happened to him while he was in Vietnam. Unlike Jake, who’d enjoyed a hero’s welcome when he came home from the Middle East, Lester and his fellow Vietnam vets had been reviled and spat upon when they returned from that unpopular war.

  Jake had promised Lacy he’d find someone to talk to before next Thursday. He hadn’t promised it would be a shrink. Maybe if he told her he’d talked to another vet, she’d be satisfied. She didn’t have to know the vet was Lester. He decided to come at the problem sideways to get the man talking. “You were in Nam, weren’t you?”

  The man nodded. “Part of the last unit to leave before the fall of Saigon. You serve in Iraq?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  Lester grunted. “That where you lost your leg?”

  Jake nodded.

  “Guess that explains the way I caught you trippin’ the other day. You was back there for a minute, weren’t you?”

  Jake stiffened. He wasn’t as ready to talk about it as he’d thought. Not even to Lester. “I wasn’t tripping.”

  “If you say so.” Lester stretched out his legs and crossed his bony ankles. “Still, if you served, reckon you know well enough about being downrange. Back in Nam, bein’ on base was as safe as a body could feel in that stinkin’ place, but any time you left the gates, you were in Indian country. No tellin’ who the enemy was. Makes a fellow a might jumpy, don’t it?”

  Jake frowned at the words “Indian country.” His Native American buddy David White Eagle had served alongside him from day one at boot camp. White Eagle had died in the same explosion that took Jake’s leg.

  But he understood what Lester meant by “Indian country.” Beyond the base, all bets were off. The typical rules of engagement didn’t apply in Helmand province. The Taliban didn’t wear uniforms to identify themselves as combatants. They hid among civilians. They used women and children as living shields.

  “I know what you’re talking about,” Jake said. “Sometimes, it was hard to spot the real enemy.”

  “Damn right it was hard. Near impossible sometimes. I remember this one time when . . .” Lester fell silent.

  “What?” Jake prompted.

  Lester glanced at him and then looked away. “There was . . . this buddy of mine, see? He . . . well, he had this thing that happened over there and he wasn’t never the same after that.”

  Jake wasn’t fooled. The buddy was likely Lester himself. If Jake had an appointment with a VA shrink, he might have tried to pass off some cockamamie story about some other amputee he knew who had flashbacks. Now he realized how lame that bluff sounded. “What happened to this buddy of yours?”

  Lester’s eyes glazed over. “I need a cig. Got a smoke?”

  Jake shook his head. “Never developed a taste for ’em.”

  “Just as well. They’ll kill you, you know.” Lester clammed up again, studying his cracked nails.

  “You were saying . . . about your buddy?”

  “Who? Oh, him, yeah.” A muscle in Leste
r’s cheek jerked. “He’s messed up, man. A real head case. All on account of this one patrol.”

  Jake had thought he’d tell some of his story to Lester, but the old vet seemed to need to do the telling. Lester was carrying enough weight of his own. Jake couldn’t drop his on him, too. “What happened over there?”

  “Things were comin’ apart pretty fast toward the end. Everybody was pouring into Saigon so they could get out and one day, instead of humping it on foot on patrol, we . . . I mean my buddy’s unit, went out in a jeep to rendezvous with a convoy that was coming in. It was a pretty day, as I recollect, sunshine shooting through the jungle canopy in long stripes. Too pretty a day for war. And everything was going OK till we got stopped by this tree that’d fallen across the road.”

  He’d forgotten to distance himself from the story this time. Jake wasn’t about to correct him.

  “Wasn’t no way to go around. Southeast Asia, leastways the part I saw of it, was all jungle. Green stuff grows so fast there, it’s like to eat you alive if no one cuts it back, you know? Well, we start to get out of the jeep to see can we move the tree out of the way.” Lester’s voice broke. His eyes swam. “And then up pops this little boy.”

  Jake’s gut churned. He feared where this story was headed.

  “Couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.” The old man’s chin quivered. “‘Watch out,’ my sergeant says. ‘He’s got a grenade!’ Then I—I mean my buddy—he don’t even think. He whips up his rifle and takes the boy out just as he’s pulling the pin. One shot. Slick as snot.”

  Lord, have mercy. Jake had no words. Lester, however, seemed to have a few more.

  “I remember the boy, he went down slow. Just sort of... crumpled, easy like. His little chin kinda dipped to his chest like he was falling asleep on his feet.”

  A tear left a salty trail on the old man’s cheek. Then as if that one tear was enough to break the dam, Lester started to shake. He made no noise, but his chest heaved and he grabbed at his shirt front as if someone were trying to snatch his next breath from him. He wept without restraint.

  Jake had no sense of time passing. Maybe none did. He just sat still beside Lester while the old vet grieved over a day too pretty for war, a day more than four decades old. Then finally Lester mastered himself, swiped his eyes, and sat up straight.

  “That boy weren’t old enough to know what he was doing with that grenade,” he said, his voice husky with spent tears. “Some bastard taught him to pull the pin and give it a toss. And . . . some other bastard killed him for it.”

  Remorse rolled off Lester in waves. He’d hauled around the guilt of that day for all these years. Jake decided it’d take a better man than Lester not to stagger under the weight of it.

  Some wars were a sad testimony to failed diplomacy. Other fights had to be fought, but even “good” ones took their toll on a warrior’s soul.

  “War turns us all into bastards,” Jacob said softly. He put a hand on Lester’s shoulder and Lester covered it with his own, grasping Jake’s knuckles in a surprisingly strong grip. Jake wondered how long it had been since anyone had touched the homeless vet.

  Lester pulled a ragged bandanna out of his pocket and blew his nose like a trumpet. “I ain’t told you the worst of it though.”

  What’s worse than killing a child? Jake couldn’t bring himself to ask it aloud, but Lester plowed ahead without encouragement.

  “The boy had got the pin out, see? And the grenade fell to the ground when he did. And who comes up with it, but his baby sister. She’d been hiding in the brush with him, see?” He swallowed hard, as if he might squeeze his Adam’s apple tight enough to keep his next words from coming out. “Four, maybe five years old, she was. So tiny. But before she can give it a heave toward us, the thing blows her apart.”

  The anguish in the man’s eyes made Jake’s water in sympathy with him.

  “So you see, I . . . my buddy, I mean . . . the blood of two children . . . that’s on him.” Lester held his hands before himself and studied the backs of them. The blue veins stood out like a road map of his troubled life. “Baby killers, they called us when we got home. Turns out, they were right.”

  Lester leaned forward and covered his face with his hands. He rocked slowly, shoulders shaking.

  Jake had no idea what to say. What to do. There was no pat answer in the field manual for this sort of thing. But for God’s grace, he might have been on a patrol in Afghanistan just like Lester’s. What if he’d seen a kid burying the IED that tore apart his Hummer, the one that killed his buddies and took his leg? In the heat of a split second to decide, would he have done the same thing as Lester?

  Jake decided there were some things he never wanted to know about himself.

  Just then, Ethel poked her head out the back door. Lester straightened, his face suddenly like granite, but the waitress paid him no mind.

  “A bus just pulled in, full of tourists headed out on a Talimena Byway sightseeing trip,” she said. “I can hold ’em off with coffee and sweet tea, but we need you, Jake. Pretty darn quick.”

  The door flopped closed after Ethel as she hustled back in to deal with the sudden influx of Green Apple customers.

  “I gotta go, Lester.”

  “That’s okay, marine. You been chewin’ the fat with me long enough.”

  Lester had done most of the chewing, but Jake didn’t feel the need to point that out. How did a guy come back from something like that? Damaged, clearly. Overcome with guilt. No wonder he’d dived into a bottle and only came up for air long enough to be a horrible husband and father.

  How could Jake help the man? He was no shrink, no counselor. He didn’t have the training for this sort of thing.

  So he decided to tackle a problem he could fix. If Lester would let him.

  “Look.” Jake rose to go back into the grill. “If you want to, you can slip in and go up the back stairs to my place and take a shower. I brought home a pair of jeans and a work shirt from the lake last week. They’re folded on the foot of the bed up there. The jeans might be a little big, but they’re clean and I bet with a belt, they’d fit you.”

  “I’ll give it some consideration.” One corner of Lester’s mouth twitched. His gaze shifted suddenly to the right. He cocked his head as if he were listening to something. “My buddy says he still thinks as jarheads go, you’re a good’un.”

  “Yeah, well, tell your buddy he got dealt a bad hand, but he saved the lives of every man in his unit.” Jake stopped at the back door with his hand on the knob. “And that means he also saved the kids and grandkids they had after that day, too.”

  “He knows. He’s thought about it once or twice, but I’ll tell him again anyway.” Lester’s shoulders hunched. “I expect he’ll still say he ain’t sure it was worth the trade.”

  Chapter 16

  I’ve always wondered why they call them “human interest stories.”

  As opposed to what? Animal interest? Vegetable? Just make every story interesting to as many readers as you can.

  That’s how you sell papers. And that’s all I ask.

  —Wanda Cruikshank, editor of the Coldwater Gazette since 1973

  Not everything reported in the Coldwater Gazette was vital enough to warrant a deadline. Most of what happened in town wasn’t terribly earthshaking. In fact, a resident was likely to make the front page simply by calling in to report the first robin sighting of the season.

  Lacy had started writing some of her stories, human interest and otherwise, at home in the early evening instead of at the Gazette office. Even though the town news was rarely urgent, the atmosphere at the paper usually was. Wanda Cruikshank thrived in chaos and arranged for it to swirl around her like a small tornado most of the time.

  As a result, it was always too busy and loud in the office for Lacy to concentrate. Even if Wanda wasn’t on a rampage over something, every time a decent train of thought chugged out of Lacy’s mental station, someone would come in to fuss that their pape
r boy had tossed the Gazette into their hydrangeas again, or complain because their fifteenth letter to the editor about daylight savings time hadn’t been printed yet. And if their readership gave them a break, Georgina and Tiffany could be counted on to fill in the gap with a running stream of gossip.

  Granted, Lacy wasn’t writing War and Peace, but she still wanted to do a decent job.

  She’d positioned her desk in front of the bank of windows in her postage-stamp living room, giving her a bird’s eye view of the Town Square if she wanted. She could also retreat from the world just by pulling down the Roman shades. Since the Green Apple was across the way within easy view, pulling the shade also helped keep thoughts of the grill’s owner at bay. Jake was beginning to be many things to her.

  Conducive to rational thought was not one of them.

  So Lacy blocked out the world in general and Jacob Tyler in particular with the tug of a cord. Now she only had to worry about being sucked into that Erté-esque painting she’d hung on the same wall as the windows. Occasionally, she wondered if it could be genuine, but dismissed that as a pipe dream. If it was an Erté, its value would go a long way toward repaying the O’Leary brothers.

  She shoved away the idea as improbable, took a sip of her tea, and settled to review her notes from an interview with Junior Bugtussle for a piece she intended to write. Junior wasn’t the head of the family. That honor belonged to Senior, but he hadn’t been able to come down to the Gazette office to meet with her.

  “On account of his unfortunate incarceration,” Junior had explained. “Seems there’s been a misunderstanding with the state police about the family business.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, them dern revenuers misunderstood when they thought the Bugtussles was going to pay taxes on our moonshine.”

  Then Junior gave her the lowdown on the upcoming Bugtussle reunion.

  The gathering of Bugtussles would be held at a rest stop on the highway near the tiny town of Twicken on the same weekend in June as last year. Junior wouldn’t give Lacy the actual dates. Everyone who was supposed to be there, he’d assured her, would know, without being told, when to show up.