by Ninie Hammon
As E.J. worked, Sam studied Charlie without appearing to stare. She hadn’t changed much, was still small, by Sam’s definition of small which meant she was a normal-sized woman, probably five-five, and strikingly beautiful, her features perfectly matched. Sam had read that somewhere, that beauty was about symmetry, that the faces of beautiful people were perfectly symmetrical, eyes the same size and shape, eyebrows matching … things like that. Sam definitely didn’t make the cut under that definition, not with a lone dimple on her right cheek.
Charlie had the same air of confidence she’d had years ago, a standoffishness that had been universally interpreted in high school as snooty. Sam later recognized it for a maturity the others in the class didn’t have until later, when they’d earned it. Sam figured Charlie was that mature in high school because she’d earned it along the way there.
Princess Diana! That was it. Charlie’s thick, shiny brown hair was cut in the same hairstyle as the Princess of Wales. A shaggy short look Sam was sure required the regular ministrations of a hairdresser. But in between those visits, all Charlie — and the princess, of course — had to do was wash their hair and shake their heads and it’d dry perfect. At least that’s what the hairstyle magazines Sam read in the beauty parlor said.
Charlie was dressed casual — jeans and a plaid shirt, untucked. But it was a studied casual look, one that was accomplished by designer jeans, probably a button-down shirt from Macy’s, and the shoes were … what? Ballet shoes? No, something clearly expensive that was made to look like ballet shoes, like Jackie O or Audrey Hepburn would wear. Her nails were perfectly manicured and her only jewelry were diamond stud earrings. Small ones, not ostentatious. Yes sir, Charlie Ryan … McClintock … was a picture of casual elegance. Designed to appear spontaneous, the look was as stylishly calculated as Cinderella’s dress for the ball.
Sam took particular note of the jewelry Charlie wasn’t wearing — a wedding band. No rings at all on her left hand, but a ring on her right hand was weighed down by a rock the size of a raisin.
As soon as E.J. and Charlie were engaged in conversation, Sam felt awkwardly unnecessary and started to back up. “I’ll wait outside.”
“No,” Charlie said, too forcefully and she knew it. “I mean …” She reached out and took Sam’s hand. “Would you stay and …” She looked deeply into Sam’s eyes and it felt like some long unused connection was re-fastened. “Something’s very, very wrong here. You believe that, don’t you?”
That was scary, because some part of Sam did know that what had apparently happened to Charlie didn’t fit neatly between the fence posts of reality. It was off, outside, different in a way that made Sam uncharacteristically uneasy. She felt a chill go down her spine, dripping like ice water from one vertebra to the next.
Even if she hadn’t played dolls with Charlie on the playground every day during recess for years, it would have been clear that the woman standing before her was not mentally unbalanced. Freaked out, yes. Crazy … not so much.
So if she wasn’t nuts, what had happened to her? And for reasons she couldn’t identify, Sam suddenly did not want to know.
Chapter Eight
You’d think that after all he’d been through, the last thing Malachi Tackett would want was a gun in his hand. You’d think that once he got home, got out of uniform, washed away the filth from his body and the horror from his soul, he would swear off all weapons for the rest of his life. You’d think he’d be sickened by the mere sight of one.
But it felt good.
In fact, nothing at all in his whole life felt good except the rifle.
The only times he ever felt the fear begin to ebb away were times like this morning, out before first light, gliding unseen and unheard through the shadows of the trees, from one to the next, waiting for the first of the dawn birdsongs, eyes adjusted to the dark so he could make out which of the lumps on the tree limbs over his head were clumps of leaves and which ones were squirrels.
He had grown up hunting squirrels in these woods. And deer, wild turkeys, the occasional wild boar and all manner of winged creatures from a brace of doves for supper to a fat duck felled from its spot in the V formation rising up off a pond. Some of his best memories had been made here, the early ones, being a little kid caught up in the smell of damp leaves, the sparkle of diamond-studded dew drops on the lacy spiderwebs.
His father had brought him. His brothers had brought him. But he had lived for the day when he didn’t need anybody to accompany him, the day when his father had finally put this .22 rifle in his hands and told him to “skin whatever you git before you bring it home. Yore mama don’t want that mess on her back porch.”
The boy with an unruly shock of black hair the color of the coal under the mountains and eyes as clear blue as the reflection of the sky in the streams winding through the hollows had grown to manhood with a rifle in his hands.
Even now, even after all he’d seen, Malachi didn’t quite feel whole and complete without one. Even after he’d seen the way they were used on human prey.
In truth, most of the Rwandans didn’t use guns. Guns killed victims too quickly and ammo was expensive. They preferred to slaughter with the tools at hand, the machetes from the fields, the hunting knives, clubs with nails in them. When they fell upon a hut and massacred the family, sometimes they just used sticks or rocks to beat the occupants to death.
Malachai’d seldom been witness to the actual killing, but usually showed up while the blood was still flowing from severed limbs, before the hearts stopped beating. He’d drawn the short straw. While his buddies from the Gulf War were packed off to Bosnia, he was one of only a hundred combat troops sent to Rwanda to secure the airport there during “the unrest.” That’s all: just secure the airport. No one expected the sudden grassfire of carnage that erupted around them. The violence was swift and staggering. Between April and July, the Hutu tribe butchered more than 750,000 men, women and children from the Tutsi tribe. Three quarters of a million people in just a hundred days. The American soldiers in Rwanda were not tasked with preventing the carnage. But they saw it. Oh, my yes, they did see it for a fact.
There was a movement in the leaves of a sycamore tree just ahead and Malachi froze. He’d already racked a shell into the chamber and he slowly lifted the barrel of the rifle, put his eye to the X3 power scope and sighted on the squirrel, a fat gray one, perched on a limb sixty feet away. His mama’d told him once “squirrels ain’t nothing but rats with good PR,” and that might be a fact, but he and his brothers had never gone out seeking fat rats for supper.
He hadn’t noticed the dawn light growing. Technically, it wasn’t “dawn” light, since it’d been dawn hours ago out there on the flat. But the sun didn’t crest the top of Beetroot Mountain until right about now and he’d been here waiting for it, watching it cast a glow into the tree shadows. His eyes searched the nearby foliage, looking to see how many of the fat gray squirrel’s cousins had shown up for an acorn breakfast this morning.
He lowered the rifle, took a quiet step toward the tree and then another to get a better angle. Then he lifted the barrel again. He had accidentally banged the rifle against the truck door a few days ago and knocked the adjustable scope off its zero, making all his shots low and to the right. He needed to readjust the scope. Until he got around to it, he compensated for that as he aimed. Another step and … he almost lost his balance, stumbled slightly when his boot connected with something on the ground.
Just a rock.
A round, white rock. About the size of a grapefruit.
And images of the soccer balls filled his head. At least that’s what he’d thought they were at first. But they were too small to be soccer balls and not the right color. They were balls of some kind, though. The floor of the hut was solid with them, side by side so snug up against each other there was no room in between. Who put balls on the ground in …?
Then he got it. Not balls, skulls.
And not adult skulls. These were too small
. These were kids.
He hadn’t responded in any way. Nothing. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t puke all over his boots like the captain did. Showed no indication that it wasn’t an everyday occurrence in the life of Corporal Malachi Tackett to see all that remained of a couple of hundred children displayed as household decorations.
He’d seen some of the Rwandan soldiers had teeth necklaces. He didn’t let himself know they were teeth when he saw them. They were just white stones, that’s all. Of course, he knew what they were same as everybody else did, but if you let yourself know a thing like that … really know it as a human being, as a card-carrying member of the human race, the only possible reasonable response was a horror and outrage so monumental it might just rip your whole soul out of your chest.
Every man dealt with it in whatever way he could. Some guys stayed blind drunk every off moment because as long as you were “on,” being a soldier, doing your thing, trying not to get your butt shot off, you could bury the images under “doing the necessary.” But when the danger abated, when the adrenaline stopped flowing, when the sun shone and butteries flew and little kids somewhere in the world were laughing … then it hit you.
You found a way to cope with it or … he didn’t know “or what” because he hadn’t yet found a way. The leg injury that had sent him back home had taken him away from all the other people in the world who had seen what he’d seen, had been where he’d been, had held onto their own souls with their fingernails.
The shrinks claimed that it had “aborted his healing process.”
He didn’t know about that. All he did know was that he wasn’t in charge of nothing anymore. He was just along for the ride.
Sometimes the ride took him back there to some battle somewhere and he had to fight to stay alive. There was a gaping black hole in the middle of back there in Rwanda where some awful demon dwelled, a horror worse than all the others in a place made out of horror, constructed with one brick of horror stacked up on another until you finally couldn’t see over the top anymore. In that black hole was what he’d done or hadn’t done — that’s all he knew about it — and when he finally saw what it was, it would destroy him.
Sometimes he didn’t know where he was, some place in between which wasn’t either one of them.
The leaving usually started with something like the white rock. The memories. But this morning he only felt the pain and the sorrow and the fear of … he didn’t know what … but he stayed in this world. Kept walking but not rightly hunting. Ignoring the squirrels and the rest of the animals as the woods woke up to a new day.
He headed out toward Bald Knob, on the other side of the county line in Drayton County, for no reason he could have articulated. He came to the clearing where you could see the knob and started out across it but stopped when he felt something splat into his face. Like a raindrop out of the clear blue sky. He looked up and saw then, the blood on the tree limbs. Coating the tree limbs. Another drip hit him on the forehead and one landed on his shoulder.
He heard the rattle of gunfire then, turned from the sound and bolted across the meadow …
Into darkness. No, it wasn’t dark, it was light. It was just that the light was black. And his head filled with a buzzing, static sound.
Chapter Nine
There was no chit-chat, no catching up on each other’s lives, no what-have-you-been-doing-since-high-school. There was no conversation at all in the examining room as E.J. carefully removed the makeshift bandage Charlie had affixed to the head of the squirming Merrie before she’d strapped the still-screaming child into the car.
She wasn’t screaming now, though. Merrie was as docile as if she’d been drugged. In fact, she was acting like she had been drugged, not really focusing when you spoke to her. Answered in monosyllabic grunts and didn’t respond in any way to E.J.’s poking and prodding of the surely-it-hurt cut on her head. Her eyelids weren’t at half-mast like they got at bedtime, though. She was just … staring. True, it was morning nap time, but under the circumstances, Charlie couldn’t imagine Merrie was sleepy. And asleep, Meredith McClintock was comatose. You could pick the child up, throw her over your shoulder in a fireman carry and haul her out of a burning building and she’d sleep right through it. She slept so soundly, in fact, that Charlie had asked her pediatrician if there was something wrong with her. He’d said he wished he could sleep that sound. Merrie didn’t even know there’d been a storm last night, but when she woke up this morning, her eyes popped open and she was instantly alert, flitting around in her cheerful, hummingbird fashion. Her behavior now was neither, and that weird, somewhere-in-between netherworld frightened Charlie far more than the bloody wound did.
“I can sew it up from the underside so it won’t leave a scar,” E.J. told her, “but you might prefer to take her to—?”
“Take her? In what?” Charlie bleated out inappropriate laughter again. “I don’t have a car. I … lost mine.” She suddenly felt very tired. “Sure, please, do sew it up. I don’t think I’m going to be taking her anywhere today.”
Merrie gradually began to focus, to wiggle. As the last vestiges of Charlie’s nausea were finally passing, Merrie was starting to whine, to pull away from E.J. Charlie was thrilled to see the return of her headstrong, maybe-just-a-little-bit-spoiled three-year-old. In fact, the little girl stuck out her lip in a pout and was teetering on the edge of being totally uncooperative until E.J. told her he was going to make the bandage on her head into a crown. That brought something resembling a smile to Merrie’s face. Of course, E.J. was now going to have to make good on the bandage-crown promise or suffer through the mother of all temper tantrums.
The easing of worry about Merrie freed Charlie to freak out over what had just happened, and she would have if she’d had any idea what it was.
She told E.J., and Sam for the second time, all she knew about the situation, and Sam filled E.J. in on the condition she’d found Charlie and Merrie in the bus shelter.
Had they been … drugged somehow? Why/by whom/where/how?
Or kidnapped? Where/how/by whom/why?
A car-jacking?
“This is crazy!” Frustration painted incipient hysteria on Charlie words. “I was driving along and then … it’s nuts!”
“We’ll figure out what happened,” Sam told her, and it didn’t sound like meaningless assurance. It felt like she believed it. And even if she didn’t, Charlie was grateful that she’d made the effort to put on a good show of meaning it. That counted for something.
When E.J. was finished, Charlie realized a couple of things.
One, she couldn’t pay him because she had no money, no wallet, no credit cards, no identification — all the human documentation necessary to establish your realness in the world. All that had been in her purse. And her purse was in the floorboard of her car … wherever that was.
He wouldn’t have taken payment anyway, was so nice she felt embarrassed to have bothered him … what was there about this to be embarrassed about? None of it was her fault.
This was crazy.
“Come on,” Sam said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
When they stepped out the front door of E.J.’s clinic into the bright morning sunshine they both saw him at the same time. There was a man with a rifle crouched beside the east plexiglass wall of the bus shelter, peeking out around the edge of it as if it were shielding him from enemy fire.
Sam gasped.
“Chai!” she cried.
“What?” Charlie was confused.
“That’s Malachi Tackett.”
And indeed, it was Malachi Tackett. How could Charlie not have recognized him? Well, duh, maybe because he was dressed in camouflage and looking for all the world like he might shoot anything that moved. Not just that, though. The hollow eyes. The ravaged face wearing a look that somehow managed to communicate terror and fury at the same time.
Malachi Tackett. The boy Charlie had had a crush on since kindergarten. The heart-throb quarterback of the high school
football team. The boy who’d been a man at seventeen and made all the other boys seem like children.
Malachi Tackett looked their way, saw them, but clearly didn’t recognize them. He appeared to see Merrie, though, because he called out, “Get her to the church with the rest of the kids. We’ll set up a perimeter, hold them off as long as we can.”
Charlie carefully shoved Merrie behind her, held her out of sight there. When Sam started toward Malachi, she grabbed Sam’s arm but Sam shook her off and kept going,
“Chai, what are you doing here?” Sam called out as she rushed across the parking lot toward him. “Where did you—”
“Hit the dirt,” he yelled at her. “Down … now!”
Charlie took three steps, grabbed Sam’s arm and whispered fiercely as she yanked Sam down into a crouch. “Get down! He’s not dragging a full string of fish — can’t you see that? He’s—”
“Around the other side,” he called out to nobody they could see. “They’re trying to cut us off.” He looked frantically from right to left and when he saw Sam start to rise, he cried, “Stay down. You trying to get your head blown off?”
He seemed to make some kind of decision, straightened and took a deep breath.
“I’m going to draw their fire. On my signal, you—”
The voice of the old man surprised them all. “You’ll want to put that rifle away now, son,” he said and all their eyes yanked to him. Nobody’d noticed his slow approach, leaning heavily on a cane as he made his way across the Dollar General Store parking lot, a mutt that looked to be about as old as he was at the end of a leash beside him. The man had a shaggy beard, bushy mustache and gentle eyes that radiated a thoughtful calm beneath his overgrown eyebrows, and that calm in the tension was as soothing as a cup of hot chocolate on a cold morning.
