Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  I was settled into one of four green canvas-backed chairs that neatly surrounded a classic, green beveled glass-topped, round patio table. Adams enjoyed the good life. He liked having his comfortable life style easily accessible but he indulged in it less frequently than most: The hot tub, gas grill, and fireplace looked too clean from where I sat.

  The sliding door between his kitchen and deck screeched open. Adams passed through with two bottles of beer and an opened, official-looking envelope that he’d just picked up from his mailbox. He put them on the patio table and sat down across from me.

  “Read this, Tom.” It was a letter from the governor of Minnesota urging Adams to run for the position the governor himself was about to vacate. It pledged his support during the upcoming campaign.

  “Wow,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve got a small folder full of letters like this and a couple dozen e-mails. I haven’t responded to any of them yet. This should be the high-water mark of my career in politics, but I just can’t muster the energy and focus I’ll need to take the next step. To tell you the truth, Tom, I’m not sure I can do the job.” His right hand shook slightly as he raised his beer bottle to his lips. “Besides the project I bungled in Iraq, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to manage anything bigger than my senate staff.”

  Episodes of hypercritical self-assessment afflicted Jonathan Adams—like malaria does to people who have the disease. I’ve frequently witnessed his outbreaks. He should have been immune. That Thursday, the symptoms were bubbling inside him. They were beginning to ooze out through his pores. But just as he was about to break into an uncontrolled sweat, Adams did what he often does when he’s caught face-to-face with himself: He changed the subject.

  “Tom, what do you think about our reaction to this political/economic meltdown? How do you think people will handle doing more with less? Does our generation have the gumption to deal with hardship? Have we the ability anywhere inside us to defer gratification?”

  I smiled. I knew what he was doing. I enabled him.

  “It looks like our friends’ grandchildren are going to be the first generation in American history whose quality of life won’t be as good as what their parents enjoyed. You’re the politician. How are you going to address selfishness, greed, and deal with no sense of community or pretense of civility?”

  In spite of what he had said about running for governor, I was hoping he was still weighing his options. My words were meant to encourage him.

  He raised his gaze from his beer bottle. “I’m on the wrong side of public opinion these days, Tom. I’m damn lucky I live in the most liberal senate district in the state. I’m pro-choice, pro-gun control, and I support affirmative action programs.” Adams paused and took a drink. “I was hammered in Hibbing last week when I spoke against a bill that would chop the legs out from under public-employee unions. I believe a school teacher’s health care plan and retirement package ought to be models we emulate. Most of the people I’m acquainted with think it’s a bloated fringe benefits package that should be shrunk to the size of a pea.” He ran his finger around the rim of his green beer bottle. “I’m getting tired of going to town hall meetings and listening to people living on Social Security and Medicare demand that the government get out of their lives.” Adams straightened himself in his chair. “That’s a few of the reasons why I’m not the guy who ought to run for governor next year.”

  A shroud of silence temporarily covered the patio table.

  “I wish I had the interest, energy, and the patience to grapple with the big issues of the day,” he said wearily. “If only I were forty years old again.” He peeled the green label off his sweating beer bottle. “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

  “Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band: ‘Against the Wind.’”

  I did a poor job of singing the song’s chorus. Adams laughed. Then we looked at each other too seriously, and he got up from his chair and walked over to the deck railing.

  I’d lost him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Standing with his back to me, his arms rigidly attached to the top railing of the deck, my friend was like a mechanical pen on one of those machines that measures earthquakes. I can’t recall exactly how he resumed the conversation. But I remember the way his words crackled and scatted back and forth. Discussion ping-ponged between two disparate subjects: making choices and falling in love. Adams somehow managed to weave them together.

  “What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? Get married again and settle down? Move to California? Start a new career? Write a novel? Learn how to fly an airplane? I’m adrift and there’s no shoreline in sight, Tom.”

  The sentences that spilled out of him filled blank pages in the first chapter of a familiar story. We’d had this talk before. But this time the narrative was more intense and substantial.

  “I have no faith in things I used to believe were true and important. Iraq blew them up. I can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

  Adams turned toward me, weakly smiled, and took a seat on the deck railing, one leg touching the deck, the other dangling in the air.

  His journey back to normalcy had barely been abetted by Minnesota’s safe harbor and sea of friendly faces. His sails were deployed, but everything was dead calm—not the relaxing kind of calm, but the stagnant kind.

  “As usual, I’ve put myself at a place where the road branches off in different directions. I’ve been standing there ever since I got home. I’m afraid I might be stuck. I desperately need to fall in love, Tom, with somebody or something. What do I do?”

  What he’d exclaimed seemed at first disconnected. During the brief quiet that followed, I thought about what he had said. It began to make sense.

  Adams didn’t wait for me to offer the advice he asked for. He shrugged his shoulders and continued: “The best thing that’s happened to me lately is that I’ve been able to compartmentalize things.” He told me that his gut-wrenching experiences in Iraq had been shoved into an untidy drawer. The drawer was finally closed and would be paid no attention for a while, he said. “I’ll crack it open for you to peek inside, but I’m going to shut it closed after you get your look”

  I moved to the edge of my chair and listened to him talk.

  Three wonderful people in their full flower of life had been yanked from the earth on account of him, he reminded me. My mildly offered challenge to his indictment was chased away by the brush of his hand.

  “The day after Hind, Farah, and Nur were killed, I ran straight into the fog of war, and stayed lost there for a while, on purpose. I got tangled up in things that were illegal, vengeful, and savage. I witnessed the torture of two of the men who were involved in the attack. After they finally confessed, we turned them over to Iraqi authorities. They never made it to the police station. They vanished. I knew they would. I paid ten thousand dollars to make it happen.”

  Adams moved off the railing, turned around, and faced his backyard. “I thought I could turn those feelings off when I stepped back in the world. It doesn’t work that way.”

  That was all he said before he closed the drawer. He changed the topic so fast that I briefly worried about his sanity.

  “God, I wish I could be in love. I need the distraction. I need the excitement love gives everything going on around it. The best way for me to recapture a passion for living is to throw myself into what I’m so god-awfully bad at.”

  I watched Adams closely. Like someone trying to teach himself how to swim by jumping into water over his head, he was flailing in a lake of proof that we can’t control when we fall in love, nor do we have the ability to choose with whom it happens.

  He stared blankly in the direction of a faraway stand of trees, a fallow field away. “The big, bad wolf is here and I’m the pig who built his house with straw.”

  With the exaggerated effort of a man over fifty, I left
my chair and stiffly walked over to Adams. He was upright and rigid, his arms folded across his chest. He didn’t acknowledge my presence with even a casual glance. My short trip over his redwood deck was made to remind him I was somewhere in the picture, available if he wanted to share more.

  “I’m here to see if you’re still breathing.”

  My clumsy attempt at humor blew by him, as snow flies past a gnarled fencepost in the middle of a January blizzard.

  I turned my attention to where he stared. Our eyes saw the same panorama of an expansive restored prairie, bordered by a thin line of trees, gradually descending to a thick stand of maples and birch that hid a river at the slope’s end, just out of sight. Adams’s field of tall golden grass waved like a flag in the gentle breeze.

  Before I could lose myself in the landscape, our silence was washed away in a cloudburst of Adams’s thoughts.

  “‘A man without a cause is nothing. He has nothing to look forward to. He has nothing to work toward.’ I wrote that down in a diary I kept when we were in high school. I have no idea who said it. I claimed it as my own a long time ago.”

  Adams turned and finally looked at me. “Have you ever worked hard to get somewhere you’ve always wanted to be, actually been in sight of it, and let it slip away? Have you ever been given something you’ve always wanted—had it simply fall in your lap? Have you ever lost what you’ve earned or been given because you did something stupid, or because you just plain didn’t accept, understand, or appreciate the significance of it?”

  He leaned back against the deck railing. He stretched, raised his arms toward heaven, and clasped his hands together behind his head. “Maybe I’m where I am because of the decisions I didn’t make, rather than the decisions I made—because of what I failed to do, rather than what I did.”

  He turned away from me and faced west. With bowed head and lowered eyes, he cast his tribulation out over a freshly mowed lawn that separated his deck from his field of prairie grass, as if he were Saint Peter fishing with Jesus, throwing his net into the Sea of Galilee.

  “How have I come to this point, alone and with nothing to show for it?” he mumbled.

  The warm front that Adams took great care to show the world had collided with his concealed cold front to form a billowing cloud of gloom.

  “I know why, I just don’t know how.”

  He reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his wallet, and extracted a photo printed on a worn folded piece of white copy paper. He handed it to me. It was the picture that Hind had downloaded from her camera and e-mailed to him right before she was killed. I looked at it for a long time. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  I glanced through the walls of Adams’s house, hoping Jim Breech was turning into the driveway. I needed him to help me pull Adams out of the imperfect present and push all three of us back into our Arcadian past. I passed the picture back to him. He carefully refolded it.

  Adams put his wallet back in his jeans pocket and brushed past where I stood, as if no one were there. He marched the length of his deck. I followed him halfway, taking a seat on the railing.

  “The reason I’m alone and where I am is because I’ve managed to chase away every woman who’s ever loved me.”

  His theory didn’t surprise me. Since we were twelve years old, his recurrent self-critiques were inevitable, predictable, and almost always traceable to women. He enjoyed spending time with women and he needed to be around them. The things they said and did expressed the acceptance, admiration, and encouragement he craved.

  Serenity and consistency signaled his involvement in a steady and exclusive relationship. More likely were a string of exuberant connections with younger women—all of them beautiful and creative, every one of them initiators of their brief entanglements, which burned bright like flares shot out over a battlefield. These affairs drained Adams. He claimed that exhaustion was a fair price for a few consecutive weeks of not having to act his age. That Thursday he was dormant and lethargic—someplace in between—sleeping alone.

  “I need to be in love again. I need another chance at it,” Adams concluded. “I know how to fall in love, but I don’t know how to stay in love. Can I learn how to give all of me up? I’ve never done that. I don’t know if I can pull it off at this stage in my life. I live how I drive, Tom. I’ve been cruising in the passing lane, ten miles an hour over the speed limit, for as long as I can remember. It’s fast enough to get me where I’m going before almost everyone else—fast enough to get noticed but not a speed that demands attention or threatens anybody’s safety—at least until Iraq.”

  Adams looked down at the deck and rubbed his forehead. “My rearview mirror is suddenly filled with the silver grill of a Mack truck hauling a heavy load of reality and squandered time.”

  I looked at him and frowned. Adams was consumed by the blast of the truck’s bellowing horn. But he was incapable of changing lanes.

  *

  I was sitting on the rail, facing the wall of glass that looked into his living room, when my eyes were diverted to a gaping wound in a neat row of gray cedar shingles above the frame of the doorway that separated the deck from his kitchen. A white chalk circle and yellow police tape marked the place where a shingle had split. A hole the size of a golf ball had been dug into the exposed wooden beam. I pushed away from the railing. Adams was talking again but I wasn’t listening. I walked to the place and reached up. I could barely touch the spot. It was large enough and deep enough for me to be able to probe it with two fingers.

  From the far end of his deck, Adams stopped and stared. He was anticipating my question and appeared to be forming a careful answer.

  This was the fourth time I had been to Adams’s house since he had moved into it. His house perpetually looked like it was about to be photographed for Architectural Digest . The only room that looked lived in was a converted downstairs bedroom that he used as an office. A broken cedar shingle with a chalk-marked hole was easily noticed. I am a trained observer, after all. How could I have missed it?

  “That’s a bullet hole,” he said. “The police dug the bullet out of the beam behind the shingle and bagged it for evidence. They think someone might have taken a shot at me last Monday evening.”

  My jaw dropped. I was more stunned by the casual manner in which Adams offered his explanation than I was by its content.

  He continued, matter-of-factly: “The police found a rifle with a scope out in the field, just beyond where the lawn ends and the prairie starts.” He pointed in the general direction. As if on cue, a police car drove slowly through the prairie grass, along a hidden rutted tractor path Adams allowed a neighboring farmer to use to access his corn and bean fields. The path was halfway between where we stood and the far, forested west end of his property that hid the river that marked its boundary.

  “The police are more concerned about this than I am. They’ve been watching things pretty carefully since Monday night. I feel like I’m living in a fishbowl. That’s the third time I’ve seen a police car down there.”

  Adams stopped, waiting for a response so he could temper the tenor of his story to it. I offered none.

  “I think it was an accident, and I told the police that. It was probably a kid wandering around in the field out there, looking for a rabbit or a turkey to shoot at. Anyway, it was quite an experience. I heard the shot and ducked, an instant after the bullet whistled past my head. It literally whistled past my head. I think I actually felt the bullet brush by my face. Right after I ducked, I looked out over the railing, out at the field—the place where I figured the shot had come from. I saw someone running through the tall grass, toward the woods and the river. If the person with the rifle were really trying to shoot me, he would have stayed where he was and taken another shot. Don’t you think so? It had to have been a stray shot from a mischievous kid doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, somewhere he shouldn’t be doing it. You’re not too old to ha
ve forgotten when we used to get ourselves into those kinds of predicaments, are you, Tom?”

  Adams’s eyes opened wider, his expression fatherly.

  “It had to be something like that. I haven’t been involved with anybody’s girlfriend, daughter, or wife lately. And when is the last time you heard of a part-time state legislator being assassinated? We’re not that high on the power ladder.”

  Adams laughed out loud. I smiled, but only slightly. Why would a panicked kid be hunting rabbits with a rifle that had a sniper’s scope on it?

  During the telephone conversation we had after Adams returned home from Iraq, he mentioned he had spent his last two months in Iraq pursuing the people who killed his staff, generating leads for the police investigation. He had paid Iraqis who lived and worked in his compound for any information they had about who might have organized the killings. He passed what he learned on to the remnants of U.S. Army intelligence that lingered in Iraq after most of our troops had gone home. Earlier in our conversation on his deck, he’d confessed to me his active involvement in the torture killings.

  His effectiveness as a vigilante counterterrorism agent earned him a middle-of-the-night passage out of the country through a Kurdish/Turkish checkpoint, instead of a more routine, predictable, and unprotected road trip to the army base in Mosul, a helicopter ride to Baghdad, and a flight to Jordan. In spite of the secrecy that surrounded his departure, his three-car convoy was ambushed halfway between Mosul and Dahuk. His security people drove through it. Adams had touched nerves in the insurgency reforming in Iraq. He had helped roll up a few of its leaders. Al Qaeda was upset about it.