“Buddy, if the road’s out, there’s no help getting through,” Albert replies, doing his best to remain calm and measured. “Best I can do is spread the word around town and pass the info along to the main office.”
The man lunges toward the desk, almost succeeding in making it over the counter between them, but Deputy Weber sees the attack coming and slides his chair to the side on its stiff rollers. He’s out of his chair fast enough to tap the enraged lunatic at the base of his skull with his fist as the man slides into the desktop, trying to stop his forward momentum, dragging numerous items to the floor with him as he falls.
The man hits the ground hard and the deputy has the man’s arms pinioned behind his back before he’s even fully settled into his prone position.
He leverages the stunned local up to his feet and shoves him into one of the two cells available for the Sheriff’s office, remnants left behind from when the town was still a successful mining community.
The man begins furiously beating at the bars, opening gashes in his knuckles.
The deputy watches the man curiously for a bit before sneering and returning to his desk. He spends the next few minutes picking everything up, straightening it out, and putting it back in place before grabbing the radio to call in both the road conditions and the subsequent altercation with the man finally calming down in the cell.
He tries to get through multiple times before resigning himself to suspecting that the signal repeaters must have gotten knocked out by the storm. There is no return to his call, only static.
He picks up the phone and dials the county office. As he is relaying the details of the attack from the prisoner, after he’d already advised them of the road closure, the line goes dead.
He tries to get a new tone, checking the hard line’s connections before accepting what he knows has happened.
If the road is as badly flooded as the maniac in the cell claimed it to be, it was only going to be a matter of time before the phone line got knocked out as well.
Clearly, this was not going to be his day.
With a glance at his prison, Deputy Weber collects the keys to his cruiser, puts on his coat and leaves the building, locking up behind himself and almost immediately regretting the fact that he’s gone out into the rain.
No phones mean that he needs to actively drive from business to business, letting them know the situation concerning both the road out of town and the phone lines. They will spread the word effectively to the rest of the folks so that he doesn’t have to go door-to-door.
The last thing he wants is a bunch of accidents or injuries on his watch thanks to residents trying to leave in these conditions.
First things first, though, he needs to put cones out to block the road, far enough back that they won’t get swept away by rising floodwaters. One of his counterparts is probably en route to do the same thing at the other end of the affected area.
This sort of thing had happened before, maybe seven years earlier, if he recalls correctly.
Thankfully he hadn’t been on duty back then, but it had taken more than a week before anyone could get through, in part because one of the bridges had been entirely knocked out at that time.
As he stands there in the rain, placing sandbags and orange cones across the road, he wishes to himself that he could just go back home. The thought of staying here in town for another week or even longer is not something he’s pleased to imagine.
Maybe, he thinks, it won’t be as bad this time.
15
The interior of the bar is dim and country music plays at a subdued volume. This is a blessing for all of them but Abraham, the only one who openly enjoys that style; though Kateb secretly considers it a guilty pleasure of sorts and finds himself tapping his feet unconsciously to the rhythm. The bar is imbued with the sort of rustic ambiance that seems entirely fitting there in the Western foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The country music seems as natural as the unpolished woodgrain of the tabletop around which they sit.
While they do get loud on occasion, eliciting sideways glances and intermittent glares from the other patrons, everyone else in the bar keeps to themselves, including the waitress carrying their drinks from the bar.
Gale and Abraham stick to soda, for the most part, being nominated as designated drivers. Abraham opting for a single beer upon first arriving, knowing that it will be out of his system by the time they get around to leaving.
Ben sits back and enjoys being treated like one of the adults, interjecting his thoughts in the conversations as he gradually becomes more comfortable with his new status among his father’s friends, no longer thinking of them as strangers. Aside from a bitter sip from his father’s beer, which led to his face contorting in ways the rest of the group found hilarious, Ben also spends the evening drinking soda.
Hours pass as they enjoy the drinks and the company; Hewitt most of all, feeling for the first time in a while as if he is with family. For the five years since Tristan’s death, he’d been feeling like he was drifting, lost. Mariah’s presence in his life had become the only constant he could depend on, his only source of actual comfort. Having lost Tristan, he had also lost the one person he’d felt closest to for as far back in life as he could remember. With all of his friends together again, separated from the immediacy of the tragedy that had tainted their last gathering, he was feeling whole and complete in a way he hadn’t for so long.
This whole thing had been good for him and he suspects it’s been good for all of them to come together without the specter of Tristan’s suicide looming over them like before. In a strange way, to Hewitt, it feels like their friend is still there with them, and maybe he always will be when they are together.
Gale is feeling relaxed as well, so much of his life over the previous years consumed by his work, even here in the place he thought of as being his mountain retreat. Here he is, surrounded by the people closest to him and bringing them into his life in a way he never had before. He’d been wanting to dispense with the compartmentalization between work and the limited personal life he barely even had, and here he is doing precisely that.
He’s proud of himself for what he’s managed to do in bringing them all together in this secluded place where he hopes they can all get in touch with who they are at the core. Gale sees this as an opportunity to accomplish, for real, the sort of transformation promised by self-help seminars and corporate retreats. This, he believes, will be a real life-changing experience for all of them.
Mariah looks around the table at her friends gathered together, a smile is plastered to her face and her cheeks burn from laughter. It’s a shame, she thinks to herself, that they’re so rarely able to get together like this. She glances at Hewitt from the corner of her eye and smiles wider seeing how jovial and unreserved he seems. As happy and content as she knows he is during the time they spend together, just the two of them, this is something different and he looks healthier.
She can only imagine how different she looks compared to her everyday life if this vacation is having such a profound effect on the man she loves. The cheer and pleasure on all of the other faces around her must be reflected in her own features and she is almost overwhelmingly grateful to Gale for bringing them all together like this.
The whole evening is a dizzying whirl for Miles. So much of his life has been spent separate from the civilian world and not much less has been spent outside of the US and a fair amount of that has been squandered in hostile territory. There was plenty of downtime and drinking through the years he spent in the Marine Corps, but Kateb was the only one of his childhood friends present for any of that, and even he wasn’t always in the same regions at the same time. This is different and it is deeply refreshing, in its way, to relax with people where there is no consideration of judgment unless he counts the small group of locals who have been glaring over at them on and off the whole time they’ve been at the bar.
He thinks the waitress clearly isn’t accustomed to larger groups bein
g present either, since she’s spending so much of the evening casting side-eyes when she thinks no one is looking.
Of course, he thinks, this is Idaho, and maybe she’s just not fond of black and brown folks. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s fallen outside of someone’s preferred color palette. At least he hasn’t overheard anyone muttering, “nigger,” under their breath, and he probably would have ignored it even if he had. No sense in letting anyone’s ignorance ruin what should be a good time.
Kateb has been picking up on the same tension and undercurrent of hostility and he likewise ascribes it to the same shit he’d dealt with all his life; whether it was the darker skin, the obvious Middle Eastern descent, or the less obvious sexuality, he’d learned to cope with biases and negativity long before. Coping with it typically meant brushing it off and partitioning it away to the back of his mind and moving on with his life, precisely what he was doing now.
Besides, there was no sense in letting it bother him. Strangers wouldn’t know it but he’s hardly devout in his faith, most people, he discovered, don’t know enough about Islam to know that he shouldn’t be drinking. It could be that he likes drinking a little too much. Being surrounded by friends as he presently is, he’s certainly intent on enjoying himself. It’s traditionally just been himself and Miles hanging out like this, and the additional company is something he considers to be worth celebrating.
Too much drinking has always made him want to smoke and he was the last of his friends still doing so. Miles had never been a smoker and is always the first to give him shit over the habit, comparing kissing him to the process of licking clean an ashtray, which hardly seems accurate or fair.
Since Tristan’s funeral, both Hewitt and Mariah had quit the habit, leaving him as the last holdout with respect to the vice they’d all picked up as teens.
As he stands unsteadily and excuses himself to step outside for a cigarette, he receives the expected taunting and mockery from everyone at the table, the former smokers and the child somehow managing to be the most relentless in haranguing him.
“I’ve made it two full hours,” he replies with mock indignation. “Two hours of you insufferable people, and I am going to smoke before I strangle one of you. Of course, any of you is welcome to join me, you know, aside from the boy.”
Laughing, Kateb dramatically spins, almost losing his footing having overestimated his coordination, and makes his way to the door.
Miles considers joining him outside, not for a cigarette but the company, but decides that he should take advantage of seeing the others while he has the chance to do so. He’ll be seeing plenty of Kateb after the vacation has ended.
16
Kateb was born to Pakistani immigrants, a father who came to America on a work VISA as an engineer and a mother who, though she hadn’t worked in Pakistan, soon established herself as a seamstress with a fantastic eye for detail. Both of them Shia Muslims, they looked to America as a place to escape the everyday persecution and casual bigotry that came from the Sunni majority in their home country during the 1970s.
By the time Kateb was old enough to learn anything about his parents’ faith, they had both largely adopted a more secular perspective and practiced their religion more out of tradition and familiarity than any deeply-rooted devotion to Islam. The personal God of American Christianity had influenced their faith in dramatic ways.
Kateb benefitted from growing up in a household with both great respect for history and tradition and the flexibility and openness of a normal American family. His parents balanced those two things better than most. The bilingual upbringing instilled a love of language in him at an early age that followed him through the rest of his life.
During his childhood, and especially into his teen years, he often enjoyed teasing his friends about his superior grasp of the English language even though he’d been raised by immigrants who spoke it exclusively as a second language. It was always good-natured and never spiteful or cruel.
Kateb didn’t seem to have a cruel bone in his body, a perspective shared by everyone who knew him. His parents, teachers, and friends always knew he was sensitive in nature and empathetic. Some of these people suspected, well before he realized it for himself, that Kateb was gay. He was already in high school before he came to terms with his sexual orientation and he spent a long time dreading coming out to his parents, his perception of Islamic families being influenced by American media and what he’d seen of bigotry from plenty of the mainstream Christians out there.
He’d had no cause to have worried though. His parents had suspected as much for a long time and had numerous times discussed their son’s preferences, just waiting until he was comfortable sharing that part of his life with them.
He never doubted how lucky he was to have the support system he had and the inclusive family he was raised by. Miles, as the friend closest to him and the person he confided in the most, hadn’t been so lucky where his father was concerned, which surely contributed to Miles’ intense desire to leave him and not look back once high school graduation was out of the way.
Because of the bond they shared, Kateb followed Miles into a life of military service and his bilingual upbringing and cultural heritage guaranteed his value overseas. He learned additional Arabic dialects and was invaluable as an interpreter.
Serendipity combined with some careful planning led to Miles and Kateb running into one another frequently during their respective deployments, but Kateb left the service for college after his four years were up, studying journalism and mass communication, something his friends teased him about as being a dead or at least dying field. He took the mockery in stride and excelled in his courses.
With no interest in pursuing anything beyond a Bachelor’s, he struggled to find a place for himself in a field that was indeed dwindling.
Local papers and small market network affiliates gave him some experience, but no sense of fulfillment and it was still a struggle finding decent work in the Midwest, where most of the opportunities for someone fresh out of school could be found. He wasn’t sure where to go, but he knew that dead-end reporting and copywriting wasn’t it.
It was only after he and Miles spent a weekend together in Las Vegas that he found his calling. Hashing things out with Miles, he began reaching out to his connections within the Corps and within the DOD, obtaining approvals and background clearances necessary to get himself embedded within infantry groups and patrol units.
His reports to the AP needed to go through review and redaction, but he was more than familiar enough with the red tape that he saved someone in the Pentagon some work. The money was nothing to write home about, but the experience felt far more rewarding than anything else he’d done since graduation.
Kateb continued with his work alongside the troops until shortly after Miles’ injury, deciding it was time for him to take a break of his own while his friend convalesced. Watching Miles chomping at the bit and fighting to remain a Marine was heart-wrenching for Kateb, knowing he couldn’t do a damn thing, though he tried to pull every string he could imagine.
It was during this unexpected downtime when he began tossing around the idea of putting some of his experiences together in a book. Dick Marcinko had made a decent career out of embellished and adequately tweaked versions of his exploits within the Navy, and Kateb certainly believed he was a better writer than whoever had ghostwritten those books.
Six months it took him to compile and revise articles he’d written and to supplement them with suitably altered details he’d left out. The manuscript changed hands via numerous friends and acquaintances within the media and Kateb had a contract not long after.
The next year his first novel was published.
There were no bestseller list breakthroughs or guest invites for Ellen or Oprah, but he was successful enough that the publisher advanced him on a follow-up and he was able to live more comfortably than he had while he’d been working his way up to that point.
The second book
did better than the first, and within certain circles, he was considered quite a success. He toured military bases both in the US and overseas, signing copies of his books for troops who appreciated the way he managed to portray their lives in a way that made them seem noble for their sacrifices and human for the way they still tried to live their lives in conditions that were sometimes virtually unbelievable. He tried to remain stoic while in front of the troops, but all too often he found himself shedding a tear as he found cause to look away for just a moment.
His third book and one his agent believed might hit the bestseller list, was about time he’d spent out of the service and the things he’d witnessed while following private military contract escorts in both military and civilian environments overseas. He knew he would be rubbing some people the wrong way and making some enemies in the process, Miles might even be one of them, but he was playing the story close to his chest until he got it finished and finally heard back from his editor.
He left for vacation, expecting to hear back from his editor any day, keeping his phone off during the time away from the world to avoid needing to have a conversation he didn’t relish having with Miles.
17
Of course, it’s still raining outside but the overhang at the entrance of the bar provides shelter enough that Kateb manages not to ruin his cigarette in the process of extracting it from the pack and lighting it.
Inhaling that first bitter breath filled with smoke, Kateb sighs. It’s the taste he doesn’t want to give up.
He’s tried vaporizers, nicotine gum, and other smoking alternatives, and they simply did nothing for him. It was that taste of the actual smoke that he loved so much about the habit. If he could find an alternative with the same satisfying flavor, he would have quit long before now.
But instead, here he stands, barely sheltered from the rain, breathing in smoke and smiling uncontrollably because the last few days have been a whirlwind of happy memories and nostalgia shared with excellent company.
Innocence Ends Page 5
