Tell Me When It Hurts

by Christine Whitehead

  Archer felt a strange combination of repulsion and attraction. Bennett’s agenda repulsed her, and she felt violated, as if he had just ransacked her personal desk and read her journal. Maybe he had. Moreover, she hated being “handled.” Still, she hated being bored even more. She hated preparing tea for visiting heads of state and being window dressing. He was right on that point: she wasn’t cut out to be an office worker bee. In truth, some aspects of the “program” intrigued and attracted her, and in spite of herself, Peter Bennett’s zeal was intoxicating, and the man himself was inspiring. Spending another six or seven months at the training center would at least be interesting—maybe even useful.

  She made up her mind. “I’ll finish the training, but then I decide.”

  “Absolutely,” Bennett said, putting out his hand. She shook it firmly, then turned to go. As she grasped the doorknob to leave, he added, “Oh, and, Archer, I’d suggest you keep this little assignment to yourself. No need to tell Adam. Easier for everyone, you know. We can help you with the cover, if you like.” He picked up the phone.

  Archer stopped and turned around, finally nodding. She was at her old table in the basement before she realized she had never mentioned Adam’s name to him or anyone else at the job.

  * * *

  For the first time in her life, Archer couldn’t make it home for Christmas. Her father said he understood that her career had to come first. She would miss seeing his eager face peering out as she pulled into the driveway on Christmas Eve. Adam was disappointed, too, but seemed to revel vicariously in her trip to Paris on government business. He told her the best places for a Christmas Eve dinner on the Left Bank, having gotten the scoop from Cody Geronomo.

  In fact, Archer was in Syracuse, not Paris, mastering the cleaning, assembling, and loading of various firearms in the dark, while on her knees in a forest blanketed with ten inches of snow. On Christmas day, Archer and her colleagues ate turkey while sitting on benches at a long table. Archer put a bouquet of wildflowers in a glass, and three candles on the table—for “atmosphere,” as she put it. The rest of the group teased her.

  “Oh, yeah, Arch, now, that makes all the difference.”

  “Hey, Arch. Are you sure those flowers aren’t wired, Arch? Everything else around here is.”

  “Oh, yeah, I never noticed what a gorgeous place this is by candlelight, Arch. Thanks for making all this possible. You’ve opened my eyes. In fact, I think I love you, Loh.”

  Archer gave him a mock sneer. “Shut up, Dobbs, or I’ll forget it’s Christmas and give you the finger.”

  “Oooh, no, not the finger.”

  “Yeah, Arch, when we run into the bad guys, be sure to give them the finger. That should scare them to death.”

  “Just be sure, Arch, that some finger, any finger, is on the trigger of your Uzi.”

  Everyone hooted, including Dobbs.

  “She’s got your number, Dobbs.”

  “Hey, Dobbs, even in the dark, you’re stump ugly.”

  Banter aside, they were touched by Archer’s gesture and pleased they weren’t alone on Christmas on this dreary Syracuse afternoon. One of the West Point guys, Davis Jones, sat down at the spinet piano wedged haphazardly into one corner of the dining room. To Archer’s surprise, he was a more than competent player.

  “Man, I loved Christmas as a kid,” said Davis, getting up from the piano to eat with the others. “My brothers and I lived for it. My mother could get us to do anything just by saying, ‘Just wait till Christmas.’ We were poor as church mice then, but we remember a really happy childhood, and Christmas was the happiest day of the year.”

  “That’s funny, I always hated Christmas,” said Deke Curran, taking a bite of stuffing but not before scrutinizing its lumpy texture. “So many expectations, and then my father would get drunk by five on Christmas Eve, my mother would end up crying and yelling at us kids, and we would cry and yell at our father for hurting our mother. I couldn’t wait for it all to be over and go back to school. How about you, Archer? Bleak House or It’s a Wonderful Life?”

  “Hmm. Well, I had a pretty happy childhood, guys. No dark stuff, and I loved Christmas. Still do. But it’s different now. When you’re a kid, it’s about the stuff. Now it’s more about getting together with family, since we’re all going in different directions the rest of the year and don’t live together,” she said thoughtfully. “Guess we’re each other’s family this year.” She paused. “And come to think of it, I barely even like you guys.”

  “Hey, it is just like family. I hate my sister Sherrie; what an asshole she is. And I’m not too crazy about my brother, either. This is just like Christmas at home, now that I think of it. I hate you guys, I really do!” Harrison Dobbs exclaimed, grinning and helping himself to more turkey and gravy.

  Everyone laughed, and Davis uncorked the champagne, provided courtesy of Uncle Sam, and they toasted one another and the future. They even sang a few Christmas carols; then Davis played ragtime tunes into the wee hours.

  * * *

  On Valentine’s Day, when Adam thought Archer was in Rome attending a midlevel diplomatic conference on global warming, she was in El Salvador, collecting intelligence on a guerrilla group in the mountains after the military’s assassination of Archbishop Romero. When her six months of training ended in March, Archer stayed on. She spent Easter in Baghdad, observing the movements of one Mohamed Al Jahad for future targeting if necessary. Memorial Day found her in Israel, learning advanced scope shooting and escape options.

  Peter Bennett showed up monthly to give a pep talk and observe the day’s maneuvers. Although he never made notes, Archer knew he was sorting them, evaluating them, planning their futures for them. Still, when Bennett grabbed a long-range sniper rife to illustrate the optimal stance for executing a shot from a vertical position, strong wind at the shooter’s back, Archer was impressed. Not just a suit, then.

  Archer saw Adam once every six weeks or so, in New York City. Her work and home phones were rigged to forward calls to a line in Syracuse, where the home phone rang in Archer’s barrack room and the work phone went to an office at the main training building, where it was answered, “Justice Department.” Archer felt bad about the deception but rationalized it as a short-term expedient.

  When Adam suggested visiting her in Washington, she protested that New York was the only city in the world worth living in, and she wanted to be there. It was a schizophrenic existence. While she was in New York with Adam, her other life seemed preposterous and unreal. She ate in restaurants on Fifth Avenue, wore clothes from Barney’s, and laughed with Adam’s friends, drinking beer at a brasserie. Then, when she was back in Syracuse or on assignment, New York was barely a memory.

  * * *

  Archer got out at the end of her year. She’d never had to do a hit, but could. When she told Peter Bennett of her decision, took his glasses off and rubbed his forehead.

  “Archer, Archer. You don’t know what you’re saying. All the reports I’ve had on you have been superb. Everything I’ve seen has been as close to perfect as it gets,” he said as he flipped through a manila file on his desk. “Look at this,” he said, stabbing at the page with his finger. “You’re the number one shot in your class. Think about it: number one. Better than every guy from West Point and Annapolis. My instructor says there are two Marines who can match you in the right conditions, but still, it’s nothing short of remarkable . . . and priceless.”

  He got up and walked over to the big freestanding globe. “Christ, Archer, you can’t possibly find more important work than what you’re doing now, here, for us. After two years you’ll have a fantastic start on financial security, at the age of twenty-three or -four. And you want to quit—have you lost all reason? What‘s the matter with you, girl?”

  “What happened to ‘It’s your choice; we’re not the Mafia’?” she asked coolly.

  He gave the globe a spin. “Of course it’s your choice, Archer, but no one leaves. No one wants to leave,” Peter sou
nded uncharacteristically angry, dismissive.

  “Look, Peter, I finished the training—did the full year and then some. I gave a lot of thought to this, but this is someone else’s agenda, someone else’s decisions about what’s fair, who lives, who dies. And they may be well qualified to make those decisions, but I’m not in on them. I’m just doing someone else’s wet work, with no explanation. It’s not for me, Peter.”

  Stopping the globe with his hand, he looked at her and said, “Bullshit, Archer. All you need to know is that someone else further up—someone imminently qualified—decided it was right for this country. That’s all you have to know. You’re a perfect candidate, and you’re throwing it all away.”

  “I’m going to law school. Columbia deferred me for only one year, and I’m taking them up on their acceptance. I start in two weeks.” Archer hesitated. “I’m . . . sorry, Peter. I hate being a disappointment to you.”

  “You’ll never be as happy as you would be working here. You know it and I know it,” Bennett said.

  “Getting your ego stroked and making good money isn’t the same as being happy.”

  “That‘s not what this is about, Archer. You think about this. And when you’re ready, you call me. Joke or not, you are special to me. You are my favorite intern. There will always be a place for you here. You will be our finest shooter. I feel it.”

  “Good-bye, Peter.”

  Archer left Peter Bennett’s office without looking back.

  * * *

  Straight through law school, Archer received contacts regularly, urging her to reconsider. Some were subtle, some not so subtle. There were phone calls from Peter Bennett, casually asking how she was doing, and letters from a trainer in Syracuse, suggesting she visit them sometime. On the one year anniversary of leaving the program, she received flowers with a note saying only, “Miss you. —the Syracuse crowd.” Adam asked who the Syracuse crowd was.

  “Oh, a bunch of kids in Washington who went to Syracuse. I told you about them, remember?”

  “Oh, right,” he said, absently.

  Once she had Annie, the calls and letters slowed to just a card on her birthday. The year of Annie’s death, Peter’s card just said, “Still waiting for you. Peter.”

  Each time she opened one, Archer felt apprehensive. She would let it sit for a day or two, then sigh, slip her finger under the edge of the flap, and slide the card out to read the annual sentiment. What she disliked most was that she opened the cards at all and didn’t just throw them away. She liked hearing from Peter.

  In truth, she had felt challenged by the work. She had enjoyed the camaraderie with the guys. She had liked being needed. What she didn’t like was death and almost death, and anxiety and fear. El Salvador had been one of those near-death experiences, she recalled with a shudder. At the time, U.S. support was on the fence, and either side, the muchachos or the military forces, would have killed Archer and her five colleagues if they’d been discovered crouching in a jungled ravine outside a small town.

  Her six-man unit survived only because they had pushed out of the mountains forty, maybe fifty minutes before the military moved back in to kill anyone they missed the first time around. A helicopter picked them up with no time to spare.

  Archer had been scared, no question about it. She would have killed if necessary—no question about that, either. She had felt hyperalert, quick, ready, but also dead-bang scared. And then in one of the villages, when she saw her first dead body up close, she’d felt sick and weak. It was a woman of about sixty, skirt hiked above her hips, legs splayed, shot mid abdomen, blood staining her thin cotton floral blouse. She still wore a little hat, just a slip of white lace bobby-pinned to her graying curls.

  The hat got to her. Poor soul, Archer groaned silently, poor soul. She’d never get home again. Someone would wait and wait, then go looking, then find her, then scream, then dissolve. Archer couldn’t stop thinking about it. This was someone’s mother, or grandmother, or maybe sister, with her legs splayed in public. She would have been humiliated if she knew. Archer bent down and pushed the woman’s hair from her eyes, secured the bobby pins to the hat, and closed her eyelids. Then she pulled the skirt down over her knees, gently folded her legs together, and tucked them under her. At least when killing, you weren’t the victim. That was something.

  “Let’s go, Arch,” called Dobbs, grabbing her arm and pulling her up. “No time to waste—they’re getting way too close.”

  Wiping away a tear, Archer bounced up and ran beside Dobbs as the shots from the government forces drew closer.

  CHAPTER 7

  Connor sat on a blanket in front of the fire at his camp. It was early evening; the sun was low in the sky but still warm and bright. By now he’d been in the Berkshires almost a week. He had originally driven out to see if the land left to him by his uncle George was marketable. It had some frontage out to the road, and its sale prospects were good. Now, however, after six days of walking every hill and swale of its three hundred acres, he found himself less and less inclined just to sell to the highest bidder.

  It was a lovely piece of land: part meadowland, part wooded rolling hills, and wonderfully isolated. The only resident for miles was the reclusive lady who lived a short walk-away, through the woods, along an old logging trail.

  Connor poked the fire. His original plan for the evening had been to cook the chicken he’d bought this morning in town. Just getting it had been a trek. He’d ridden Millie down to the clearing, a good mile from his camp, where the trailer and pickup were parked, some two hundred feet off the main road into Lenox.

  Connor had tied Millie securely to the trailer, unhitched it from the truck, and started into town, a twenty-minute trip each way. But then he fretted that some random passerby might poke around Millie or even try to take her. So he had turned back, hitched the trailer back up to the truck, put her in the trailer, and taken her along. Now he’d committed himself to getting dinner for the hermit next door—an attractive woman, to be sure, but so grim it was wasted.

  Connor sighed and poked the fire again. He had planned on staying here only long enough to get a break from Tara—that’s what he sometimes called his stark, dusty Wyoming ranch, in an ironic nod to his mother, Colleen, who hadn’t lived to see it. Its actual name was Three Chimneys Ranch. All the local ranchers guffawed at that one.

  Hey, Connor, you took a real wrong turn, son. This isn’t Lexington, Kin-tucky. Just what do you think you’re raising there, thoroughbreds? Three Chimneys? What in hell does that even mean? Bad luck, that name . . .

  The area spreads had names like Giant Bars Ranch, Twin Oaks, and Big Sky. Connor would just laugh. “The sheep don’t seem to mind,” he would say.

  He knew the ranch was doing fine—Christ, it probably functioned better without him always double-checking everything and driving everyone else crazy. No need to rush back. Felix was a topnotch manager, and, for the past three years, the herd had grown at a good pace and cash flow had been robust, thank God.

  Connor had always been afraid of being poor. His family had been solidly middle-class—his mother was a librarian at the Boston Public Library, his father a PE teacher at Milton Academy outside Boston—but it was middle-class basics only. There was never much in the bank for a “pamper,” as his mother put it. That was no longer true for him, yet here he was in the New England woods, living in a tent and trying to figure out if it was time to reinvent himself—again.

  The tent living was no big deal. Connor and the hands often camped out for weeks at a time when tagging or moving a herd. On his arrival at the Massachusetts property, he’d made an arrangement with the motel two miles down the road. For the princely sum of sixty dollars a week, he had full use of a motel room between nine and ten thirty each morning. So far, it had worked fine for basic hygiene. The solitude, however, was trying. Sometimes he found himself longing for a beer and some good conversation with Jordan Hayes, his vet and best friend back in Wyoming.

  He glanced at his w
atch. It was getting late; he’d better get moving if he was going to make dinner for his crabby neighbor. He wondered if she ever smiled or lightened up. He sighed, grabbed his lantern for the walk back, and headed for the logging path.

  * * *

  When Connor arrived at Archer’s front porch, the sky had turned navy blue, with fingers of pink reaching through it. He knocked on the door. “It’s Connor McCall.”

  He heard movement inside, and the inner door opened. Archer leaned on a walking stick, but she looked alert. She peered out at him without opening the screen door.

  Seeing him standing alone, she asked, “Where’s Alice?”

  “This is Alice,” he said, pointing down.

  Archer looked down—though not too far down—at the black, bearlike creature standing next to Connor. The dog was wide and woolly, eyes hardly visible, and she lowered her head suspiciously, looking out through long ropes of hair at Archer as Archer studied her. Alice’s stump of a tail was not wagging.

  “God, what is that?” Archer asked.

  “Hey, don’t say it like that. She’s very sensitive. She’s a Bouvier des Flandres, a Belgian herding dog. She goes where I go; that’s a nonnegotiable.”

  “Fine by me,” Archer shrugged. “I generally prefer dogs to people. Hello, Alice. How are you this evening?” Archer pushed the screen door open and leaned forward to scratch behind Alice’s pointy ears. Her tail began to wag a little.

  “Yes, Alice, you are a lovely, big girl, aren’t you?” Archer crooned to the Bouvier, whose stump now wagged as if it had been switched on. Archer looked up at Connor. “Is she basically friendly?”

  “Depends what you mean by ‘friendly.’ If she takes to you, she can be. Just watch the sudden moves toward me. She views protecting me as her mission in life, and she’s been known to misinterpret things,” he said, as he and Alice stepped in.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll control myself.” And for just an instant, a smile played on the edge of her full mouth.