by Sharon Sala
Disgruntled and rapidly losing his patience with the situation, Aaron fed Wes a bowl of cold cereal in the morning, washed it down with a cup of warmed-over coffee, and left a bologna sandwich for him to eat at noon. Each night when he came home from work, the sandwich was right where he’d left it and so was Wes. Frustration was growing. He tried to hire a neighbor to come in and feed him, but the neighbor had taken one look at Wes and said no.
Now word had gotten out in Aaron’s apartment building that he had a head case living with him. The news was not well received, and the few friends that he had in the area were starting to shun him. It was putting a crimp in his social life, and that couldn’t go on much longer.
Meanwhile, Wes was in the same situation. He wasn’t comfortable hiding behind a wall of silence and pretending he didn’t know where he was, but there was nothing he had to say to Aaron. He’d wanted out of Fort Benning and away from anything that reminded him of war, and he’d used Aaron to make that happen. Now that he was out, his ambition seemed to have ended. He had no plan, and because he didn’t, he felt caught by his own lies.
So each night and each morning until Aaron left for work, Wes hid behind a wall of silence. It was only after Aaron was gone that he would put his head in his hands and weep. Some days it seemed as if he would never quit. The sadness within him was total. He was certain that he would never know joy again. And there were also the dark days when he did nothing but curse God for taking his family and leaving him behind.
Each night he let Aaron put him to bed, ignoring the verbal insults and abuse Aaron heaped upon his head for being a useless bastard, then waited until Aaron turned out the light and closed the door before he could let himself relax, confident that he’d managed to maintain his lie for one more day.
And each night, as Aaron went to his own room, he had his own conscience to face. He had to consider where Wes had been and what he’d endured. He knew that Wes had been repeatedly tortured. He knew he’d found his own wife and child under the debris from the terrorist bombing, and that he’d killed the terrorist with one shot between the eyes. He also knew that directly after that, he had shut down as completely as if someone had turned out the lights in his mind.
Aaron then had to accept that the same man who’d killed without thought was lying just a few feet away, with only a wall and a door to separate them. At that point, he would turn around and lock himself in. If his crazy stepbrother woke up in a state of confusion and started trying to kill people again, he didn’t want to be the first victim.
Aaron was reconsidering his plan to care for Wes and thinking of taking him to the first nuthouse that would accept him and forget he was there. But he wouldn’t make a dime if he did that. It would take all of those tax-free monthly checks just to keep him caged. That left Aaron uncertain as to how he was going to make this work, but either way, he knew he couldn’t keep a crazy man in his house much longer.
It was the fifth night in Aaron’s apartment, and Wes was beginning to make plans to leave. As soon as he heard Aaron go into his bedroom and lock the door, he rolled over onto his side and opened his eyes. A slow ache rolled through his heart as he thought of the home he and Margie had shared. It was nothing like the filth and drabness of the apartment that Aaron called home. Margie had loved plants, both green and flowering, and had some in every room of their house. He thought of the countless nights he’d lain with her wrapped in his arms, the faint fragrance of the roses growing outside their bedroom window wafting through the room.
There was nothing in this room but painful memories and a neon sign outside the window that created a garish slide show of green and yellow on the wall. He watched it flashing until his eyelids grew heavy. Finally he fell asleep, only to wake up some time later to the sound of rapid and repeated gunfire.
Wes’s heart stuttered to a complete stop, then started again with a hard, solid thud as he hit the floor. His first instinct was to get into the bunker, and he began crawling toward it on his belly. Only the bunker turned out to be a shadow on the wall, and the gun he’d expected to find was missing, as well. He crawled straight into the corner before he realized he was not back in the Iraqi desert. Sweat was running out of his hair and down the middle of his back, and his hands were shaking. He looked up at the wall with the neon lights, then down at the grimy floor on which he was lying, and groaned.
“Son of a bitch,” he said softly, then buried his face in the crook of his elbow.
Another round of gunshots rang out, then he heard the sound of a revving car engine and squealing tires. There were shouts, then more shouts, then a woman screaming. Within moments, he heard approaching sirens. When he was somewhat convinced that the gunshots were over, he got up off the floor and back into bed.
Oddly enough, the incident had given him a much-needed mental boost. It was the first time he’d considered the fact that he might not be ready to die, after all. And the drive-by had done something else for him. He’d already been in one war zone. He wasn’t stupid enough to stay in another.
The next morning, Aaron was in a foul mood, cursing about the drive-by shooting, as well as his disturbed sleep. He managed to pour the cereal in the bowl for Wes, but he didn’t take time to feed him. Instead, he shoved the bowl in front of him and slammed a cup of coffee on the table.
“Eat or starve, it’s no matter to me. I’m gonna be late for work.”
Without a backward glance, he left Wes at the table where he’d put him and walked out the door.
Wes sat without moving, staring down at the bowl of wilting cornflakes and listening for the sound of Aaron’s truck driving away. Even after Aaron was long gone, Wes was still there.
A cockroach appeared at the edge of the table, then made a hesitating march toward the soggy cereal. The faucet at the sink was leaking. The repetitive drip into Aaron’s empty bowl sounded loud in the silence of the room. The neighbor in the apartment next door was crying, and the one across the hall was fighting with her husband. Down the hall, a baby cried.
Wes’s senses were on overload. The heat, the stench, the sounds—they all crowded in, pushing and pushing until he finally stood. For a few moments he stared around the room as if assessing his options, then moved to the cabinets, took down a coffee tin and pulled off the lid.
Every night he’d watched Aaron empty his pockets into this tin. Since Aaron had access to Wes’s money, Wes felt no guilt in taking his. He moved to the bathroom, showered and dressed, and then began to pack.
With just under a hundred dollars in his pocket and a switchblade he took from Aaron’s dresser, he stuffed his clothes in the olive-green duffel bag that had U.S. Army and W. Holden stamped on the side. As he started toward the door, he stopped and took Aaron’s western-style hat from a coat stand and settled it on his head. But when he reached for the doorknob, he realized his hand was shaking. There was a knot in his belly and fear in his heart. He’d lost himself once out there, and there was a part of him that feared it could happen again.
He turned around, his gaze settling on the dreariness of Aaron’s life, remembering the lies and deceit with which Aaron had claimed him from the hospital. Wes knew that if he didn’t leave, something terrible would happen between them. There was enough left of the soldier he’d been to do what had to be done. He took a deep breath, gripped the doorknob firmly and turned it.
Minutes later, he was out on the street. He took his last look at his brother’s shithole of a building, then turned his face to the north and started walking.
Aaron had a flat coming home from work and no spare. When he tried to call for road service, he realized his cell phone was dead. He spent all day working on other people’s cars, but he couldn’t fix his own. By the time he walked to a pay phone and back to his car, it was almost dark. He was still pissed as he pulled into his parking space at the apartment. To make matters worse, the elevator was out of service again. By the time he got to his fourth-floor apartment, he was cursing. He jammed the key in the lock a
nd started to turn it when the door swung inward.
Unlocked? His apartment was unlocked?
His first inclination was that he’d been robbed; then he remembered Wes. His demented stepbrother could be lying in a pool of blood. But when he moved farther into the room, he could tell that the clutter on the floor and tables was all his. A quick look into the bedrooms and the kitchen also failed to give up an intruder, although he was looking at the mess with new eyes. But the search did reveal one fact that made his heart skip a beat.
Wes was gone.
That didn’t make sense. How could a man like Wes just get up and walk away when he hadn’t even been able to feed himself? The best Aaron had been able to tell, Wes had never moved from where he’d put him each morning until he came home each night. Now he was gone. Aaron went back into Wes’s bedroom, only this time he wasn’t looking for a thief. He was looking for clues.
It didn’t take long for him to realize that Wes’s duffel bag was missing, as were the clothes he’d come home with. He stood in the middle of the room, growing angrier by the minute.
“The bastard! The sorry bastard! All this time he was playing me. He had to be.”
He stomped out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. He got a beer from the fridge and was popping the top when he saw the coffee can on the table. At that point, he exploded. He threw the beer across the room, ignoring the fact that as it landed, it splattered beer all over the wall and floor.
“My money! He stole my money!” he screamed, and kicked over a chair.
He was on his way to the phone to call the police when he got a big reality check.
If he reported Wesley Holden as missing, and a thief, then how could he claim Wes’s money?
“Fuck,” he muttered, then plopped down on the sofa.
But the longer he sat there, the better his mood became. He had no reason to be angry. In fact, Wes had just done him a great big stinking favor. He was rid of the problem but not the dough.
He got himself another beer and then toasted the thin air.
“Thank you, brother dear. Thank you for your brief visit and your deep pockets. They were both a pleasure.”
Then he downed the beer and picked up the phone. It was time to celebrate, and he knew just the little redhead to help him do it.
Wes’s first night on the road was as close to a nightmare as anything could have been. Every large, unsettling noise threatened to trip him out of reality. Even after it got dark, he was afraid to stop walking. It wasn’t until the sky had begun to change from black to gray that he finally stopped at an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of a small Florida suburb.
He stood for a few minutes, checking out the distant lights of Miami, then the area around the old building. Except for the traffic of passing cars and a bird perched on the sagging roof of the empty station, there was no movement in the area. Satisfied that he was alone, he crawled through a back window that was missing its glass and then paused for a quick reconnoiter. Instinctively, his hand went to the switchblade as he did a quick walk-through of the building. He found the remnants of a small campfire, which told him he wasn’t the first person to find shelter here. Either someone was using it for storage or they’d just given up and left, because there were machine and engine parts scattered about the front of the building in varying stages of disrepair.
After checking to make sure he was alone, Wes kicked aside a stack of wooden pallets, dropped his duffel bag into a corner to use for a pillow, and lay down on the floor with his back to the wall and the knife in his hand. The last thing he remembered seeing was a small mouse coming out from under a stack of boxes and running from the room.
The downdraft from the rotors on the Black Hawk whipped sand into Wes Holden’s face as he and a young G.I. covered the pair of soldiers who were dragging a wounded comrade toward the waiting chopper.
“Colonel Holden! Colonel Holden! You’ve both got to come now!”
The call came from the Black Hawk. Wes did a three-sixty, scanning the area with a practiced eye as he measured the distance between the sniper shelter and the open bay of the waiting chopper.
“Now! Colonel! We’ve got to go now!”
He heard the urgency in the gunner’s voice and realized they knew something he did not. He turned abruptly to the G.I. and yelled.
“Go, soldier! Go now!”
“But, Colonel…”
“Now!” Wes shouted, and they both started running.
It was just what the sniper had been waiting for.
More than a hundred yards from the chopper, the sniper opened up. The first bullet ripped through Wes’s right shoulder. The numbness that came next caused him to drop his rifle. He didn’t even know it was gone until he saw the expressions on the faces of his men, screaming at him from inside the chopper.
He saw the young G.I. ahead of him stop and turn back, intent on getting his commanding officer. The next bullet hit the man straight between the eyes. The wind from the downdraft caught the spray of blood and brains that came out the back of his head and blew it away, along with the scream on Wes’s lips. Then a second bullet ripped through Wes’s body, this time in the back of his left leg. Within seconds he was falling.
He heard the first of the antiaircraft guns firing as his elbows hit the sand. He tried to roll out of the line of fire, but the bullets in his shoulder and leg left him flopping like a fish out of water.
He turned toward the chopper and began frantically waving them off.
“Go! Go!” he shouted. “Goddamn it! Go!”
The Black Hawk was about ten feet off the ground and rising when a fireball exploded, flaring into a firestorm of boiling flames and flying shrapnel. Wes screamed out in rage. When the flames turned into a rising column of black smoke where the Black Hawk had been, he knew he was looking at a funeral pyre.
The devil had belched.
Days later, Wes woke up with a rat crouched on his chest, staring at him with tiny black eyes that glittered from the deprivation of its own life of hell. He slapped at it with his good hand, then missed as it darted from his chest into a small hole in the wall. The movement caused enough pain to make him want to weep, but his mouth was so dry he didn’t dare waste the fluids. His shoulder was bandaged and in a sling, and there was another bloody, filthy bandage wrapped around his thigh.
He didn’t know where he was, but the enemy had him—and he could hear them coming down the hall.
Wes woke up with a gasp, swatting at an invisible rat and looking for a place to hide from the soldiers of Saddam Hussein. Then he saw the pallets and the boxes and the greasy engine parts, and he said a quiet prayer of thanksgiving. He might be lost and homeless and hungry, but he was free.
He got up with a groan, brushed the dust off his clothes, picked up his duffel bag and crawled out of the building the same way he’d come in, only to realize it was sometime past noon and the sun was already on its way toward the western horizon. At that point, his belly growled. He shouldered his bag, slipped the switchblade into his pocket and headed toward the light. He needed food. Beyond that, he couldn’t plan.
Two weeks later, a trucker pulled into a truck stop on a highway in the mountains of West Virginia. He stopped for gas, food, and to drop off the hitchhiker he’d picked up outside Savannah. A veteran of Vietnam, he’d recognized the army bag on the tramp’s back. With the United States back at war, he’d considered it his patriotic duty to give a buddy a ride. But when he’d seen the expression in Wes’s eyes, he’d almost regretted stopping. The man looked like he had less than a fingernail’s hold on sanity, and the cab of an eighteen-wheeler wasn’t big enough for an all-out fight.
But then Wes had spoken softly, thanking the man for stopping, and the trucker had changed his mind. Now they’d come to the end of their road.
“Godspeed, soldier,” the trucker said, and shook Wes’s hand.
“Same to you,” Wes said. “And thanks for the ride.”
“Anytime,” the trucker
said, then added, “Stay safe.”
Wes nodded, then went into the bathroom of the station as the trucker began fueling up. He washed up as best he could, then got himself a soft drink and a bag of chips, and began walking down the highway. The urge to keep moving was strong. He’d seen plenty of country in the past two weeks, and taken shelter from heat and storms beneath overpasses and inside culverts and bathed in ponds and ditches. With each passing day, he was growing stronger. Only now and then did he have a flashback, and when he did, he seemed able to come out of them in less and less time.
For the most part, he still shunned people, accepting rides only when he was too tired to walk. Once he’d come upon a man who’d lost a wheel off of a trailer he was pulling, and in doing so, had lost his load of sod. Wes had helped him put on the spare, then reload the heavy rolls of grass and dirt. The man had been so grateful for the help that he’d given Wes all the money he had in his pocket, which was just shy of sixty-five dollars. Wes still had most of it, but it wouldn’t last forever.
What he needed was a place of his own—a place to live where he would not be bothered. He still wasn’t sure of his ability to maintain composure in the face of adverse circumstances, so until he learned to trust himself again, he figured the best thing would be to stay as far away from people as he could. But to make that happen, he needed to find a place that felt right. So he continued in a rambling direction while telling himself that he would know the place when he saw it.
The mountains of West Virginia were lush with green and standing like sentinels along the highway. Now and then he would look up at the tall trees and thick underbrush and try to imagine the life up there. He heard birds calling, caught the occasional glimpse of a squirrel, and began to relax.
A dark sports car came flying past. Just as it drew even with Wes, the driver laid on the horn, pointing and laughing rudely as he went by.
