I only want to say, Burnette said. You need to tie me into this chair.
The master sergeant’s voice bristled. Excuse me?
You know what I’m saying.
Yeah, I know what you’re saying, said the board member who had been trying to settle him down. I’d just like to know when you walk out of here, will you regret what you’re saying.
No regrets, said Burnette, and that was that. The board members exited the room and left him there to contemplate his fate, a castoff sitting alone on shore as his ship sails away, struggling to remain upright under the awful downhearted weight of his tremendous weariness, his eyelids one blinking iteration away from being out of commission, and then the door swung open and Colonel Hicks was in the room, his evangelical joviality as offensive as the master sergeant’s insinuations.
God led me into Delta Force, and He said to me, This is where you ought to be.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Missoula, Montana
October was more of the same back inside the exclusive domain of the Wall, Burnette training intensively, ingesting forty-unit bottles of Motrin by the week, rehearsing with a four-man assault team, fast-roping out of choppers or kicking in doors. There were multiple Lone Ranger and Tonto sessions with his long rifle and spotter, the arduous calculations of wind and elevation, dialing the scope and acquiring aim, yogic breathing and visualization, squeezing off hundreds of rounds. There was the daily language instruction, a class in fear management that made him feel bored, a continuing class in biometric data collection and, almost like recess, a Schoolhouse course in the history of Islamic fundamentalism, Burnette avidly consuming the assigned texts with a microwaved dinner back in his apartment at night. The notion of any ingrained, innate conflict between civilizations, between the Orient and the West, one of the authors argued, was a specious myth. What should we call it then, Burnette asked himself, when we turn on the TV and see Muslim wankers chanting, Death to America, and, We hate your guts? What was the proper response, the inborn response. We love you?
Reading accounts of the Gulf War brought to mind a diatribe of Steven Chambers, one of the more adamant voices from State who had lobbied against regime change in Baghdad. What in God’s name were we doing in Iraq? Saddam killed a million Iranians for us. He should have kept going, right through Kuwait to the peninsula. Muslims killing Muslims, my God, that was the beauty of Afghanistan after the Soviets left. All those weapons we gave the mujos, they turned on themselves. Abdul Hatfield and Abdul McCoy. The last items on his reading list were a pair of manuscripts commissioned by the US Marine Corps, the first a collection of interviews with the Russian generals who had been humiliated in Afghanistan, the second a similar collection of parallel interviews with the victorious holy warriors who had handed the Soviets their ass.
Then in November he disappeared for three days, partnered with a lanky thatch-haired D-boy from Kansas everyone called Scarecrow, the two of them flying to Dulles and driving over to an office building in Tysons Corner where the Agency had established a working group on the fifth floor called Alec Station, a subsection of the counterterrorist center down the road at Langley. Alec Station’s specialty was unearthing financial links between guys with banks and charities and guys with guns and bombs but it seemed to be giving all its love to just one person, a messianic war-declaring sheik hunkered down in Afghanistan. There was an odd duck posted at the station, a lone Bureau agent from New York sent to Virginia to check out the intelligence the Agency had collected on this obscure network of Islamic radicals. The Bureau agent and two US attorneys had just returned from Germany, where for two weeks they had interrogated an Islamic turncoat, an informer from Sudan with close ties to the Saudi financier and mastermind.
Division heads and subs were more inclined to pass around their wives than share their databases, but the command at Delta wasn’t going to stand out in the cold while other people masticated the information that might one day get a D-boy his horse-drawn caisson and cortege at Arlington. And so Burnette and Scarecrow were directed to pay Alec Station a quiet visit and find out what they could to keep trigger pullers in the loop. Burnette had not been quite clear on the nature of the mission, but when he finally put it all together, he told himself, Okay, the colonel and FOG, the Cassandras of Western civilization, were way out in front on this.
In Germany, photographs had been presented, identities confirmed, organizational charts sketched. A few days into the benign interrogation, the Sudanese informer mentioned the name of a network none of the Americans had ever heard of—an Arab-centric group of extremists called the Base, with training camps, lines of finance, recruiting protocols, annual budgets, sleeper cells, and even a health care plan. On their quick mission to Tysons Corner, Burnette and Scarecrow became the first American servicemen to ever speak its Arabic name, eight years after the Base’s formation. They listened and took notes and returned to Bragg having glimpsed the real enemy at Alec Station, the most powerful opponent of all and the ally of all others: the status quo. The looming war that Burnette and Scarecrow saw coming down the pike was what insurance companies called a pre-existing condition and nobody wanted to underwrite it in any way that might hold them to account.
Ding-a-derry, said Scarecrow, his trademark critique of screwups. Life would be so merry, if I only had a brain.
In December, without fanfare, Sergeant First Class Burnette was informed he had successfully completed his training and, as required, would now enter a six-month probation period as a D-boy. Colonel Hicks stopped by his deputy’s office long enough to open the door and shout Eville’s way, Outstanding! He was issued a pager, reminded of his twenty-four-hour on-call status and his mandate to carry a sidearm at all times, then furloughed home for Christmas, flying out of chilly Fayetteville on a sun-teased morning and landing in Missoula in a gap between late afternoon squalls, the granular snow pelting down like rice at a Viking’s wedding by the time he had retrieved his gear from the baggage area and walked out into the polar bite of winter to Joaquin Zertuche’s late-model Dodge Ram, the manager of his parents’ ranch treating himself to a new truck every spring, the only self-indulgence Burnette knew him to have. The truck was a perquisite for running the outfit—six hundred acres, two hundred head of cattle, a cadre of seasonal employees. That, a rent-free cottage, and four weeks annual leave, two in September for his family’s huge Basque jamboree in northern New Mexico, when the sheepherders would drive the flocks down out of the high country, and two midwinter weeks, when Joaquin would take his wife Deolinda to the Florida Keys. His mother could survive without her husband and three sons, but she couldn’t make it all these years of abandonment without the man she addressed as Mr. Joe.
The twenty-mile drive northeast to the Potomac Valley took forty minutes on slippery roads and then he was home again on Camas Creek, the timbered ridgelines above the hay ground and pastures scrimshaw outlines in the falling snow, the summits of the Garnet mountains whited-out by the storm. The arthritic Sweetpea, Dawson’s last living English setter, greeted him at the door, burying her old snout into his crotch. His mother had a pot of hot brandied cider on the stove when they arrived, stamping the snow off their boots in the mudroom and sitting with her at the kitchen table with their hands wrapped around the steaming mugs, Bing Crosby crooning on the radio. She couldn’t keep herself from sneaking sideways glances at him until he said, Okay, what? and she asked, Where’s the spit and polish, Scout? He told her without telling her much that he’d been upgraded to a unit with relaxed grooming standards, but she knew the military too well to find this answer anything but disingenuous, and she picked at it until she got him to say more—Mom, all I can tell you is counterterrorism.
Omerta, she stage-whispered. Isn’t that right, Mr. Joe?
Mom, come on.
You’re right, she said. I’m better off not knowing, a chatterbox like
me.
She stared at him with maternal regard, searching his face for deeper truths, her flat mouth offering the hint of a forlorn smile, before she said, My God, Ev, it takes my breath away sometimes, you look so much like your father. Then she seemed to buck up, swat the emotion back to its hole, coming at him again with her sly formidability. During Vietnam, you know, Dawson was in that Phoenix program, she said, a laconic reminder to her eldest son that she wasn’t born yesterday, and he told her he hadn’t thought about it but yeah, something like that. Who’s the enemy this time? she asked, her voice crab-apple-tart and facetious. I swear, I didn’t know we had any enemies left. That’ll be the day, he told her and she sighed and said, Have I not been paying attention? He said he detected an undertone of pacifism in her voice and she said she had always been a pacifist.
You? The hell you say. Now that’s a whopper.
Half a whopper, she said, pushing her chair back from the table to come stand behind him and wrap him in her slender arms. Put your coat back on, she said, her unpainted lips pecking the top of his head, shaggy by her exacting standards of masculinity. I want to show you my new mare before the sun goes down. She gave him her hand, ungloved, as they walked to the barn.
The holidays with his mother were a balm massaged into his soul, a rejuvenating quietude of snow-hushed walks up into the foothills, horse-love and dog-love, the holiday scents of fir wreathes on the stone mantel and blazing piñon (the New Mexico connection) in the fireplace, the four of them—Paige and Ev and Joaquin and Deolinda—playing canasta, then Ev reading himself to sleep each night in his boyhood feather bed, the range outside bluish with freeze and pierced by coyote lullabies, a banshee music he found more soothing than any other. For the first time since he had left to go thirty miles down the road for college, returning home was not a chore marred by restlessness or boredom or tragedy or guilt but a restoration of place and belonging, a prescription for a deeper sense of serenity than any he could remember since he had walked off into the world, exchanging one hard center of gravity for another, equally hard, but here was the pull again of the first, renewed and not unwanted, emerging from his memory. He loved Montana’s mountains, as plentiful as prayers inside the mind of a preacher. But it was possible for a life to be bigger than the mountains, and for Eville the possibility channeled into the tighter outbound path walked by his father, who showed him that the things and places and people you never wanted to leave you left anyway. And then managed the regret, if you found yourself with any.
After a gluttonous ranch hand’s breakfast on Christmas Eve, he followed the shadow of his longing for his father into the den, where he unlocked Dawson’s antique cherrywood gun case and spent the day on the lumpy brown corduroy couch cleaning his father’s collection of shotguns and hunting rifles, taking a sweet luxury of time to do it right, his mother coming to the door at lunchtime, bringing him a brisket sandwich and a bottle of beer but standing there for a moment watching him with a reluctance of sorrow, finally saying in a terse whisper, I was wondering when you were going to do that, then bucking up again to give him his lunch and leave him be. Telepathically, she probably experienced the same blow as Eville when she turned her back, her son suddenly bent in half, gut-shot with the pain of his God-stolen father, and she paused perhaps to steady herself to come back to him. With the sun going down he asked her about church and she said she loved the singing but it was an ordeal for her to stay up so late these days and so they remained behind while Joaquin and Deolinda risked the ice-slick roads to drive to St. Francis Xavier’s for midnight mass, his mother standing a moment before the crèche on the mantel, blessing herself with the sign of the cross, saying a silent prayer before she slipped off to bed.
The idyll with his mother endured a predictable but only temporary disruption on Christmas Day when his brothers and their people turned up for dinner, his mother waking at dawn to begin slow-roasting two wild turkeys she had shot in the fall, Joaquin’s wife joining her soon after the birds were stuffed and in the oven, the willowy pair of cowgirl housewives shoulder to shoulder at the chopping board and stove, like two laughing sisters encamped in the kitchen throughout the morning, their shoulder-length gray hair pinned back in wispy buns. His middle brother Wayne arrived at noon with wife and kids; Ross, Ev’s youngest brother, made a chaotic entrance just as dinner was about to be served, blasted on schnapps and meth. Since Ev had last seen him he had adopted a skinhead look, wearing a hooded camouflage parka and black jeans and motorcycle boots, towing along his latest female acquisition, a wan stringy-haired retro-hippie in a calico granny’s dress draped over red longjohns, sporting a nose ring. Eville, bloated with cheer, surrounded by family and friends, found it impossible to stop smiling, even as the day’s tidings of comfort and joy began to dissemble with the unaccustomed challenge of being all together.
That night after his brothers had left, Wayne for his in-laws in Missoula and Ross for an all-night rocket flight back to his hidey-hole in the Yaak, his mother came to his room in her terrycloth nightgown with her hair let down to sit on the corner of his bed and talk, the starting point of the conversation a present she had not wanted him to open in front of his brothers.
It was my dad’s pistol in World War Two, she said, opening an old wooden cigar box and he took the weapon, kept in an oiled rag, in his hand with reverence. I never knew you had this, he told her—spoils of war, a German Luger. They’re antiques now. You sure you want to give it to me?
I do, she said, sighing with a tired wistfulness. All my life I’ve lived with men who thought too much about something that does not matter to me, Eville. Glory. I think it was an instinct in them. They were always humble men, and you’re just like them. They found glory I guess, and maybe you will too, but I never knew them to find a use for it. But anyway, your granddad’s sidearm—he carried it during the Battle of the Bulge—should go to you. I was thinking the other day, when you were a boy and I yelled at you, you listened, thought about it, sometimes you experimented with sassing back but mostly you just looked horrified and nodded like a half-pint stoic and went away and thought about what you had done wrong, or were accused of doing wrong, and then you’d come find me and apologize, even if you had decided I was wrong and you were right. Your brothers only seemed to know how to yell right back at me, and Dawson would chase them all over the ranch to catch and spank them. Remember?
Ev, I came in here tonight to say I love you and to give you my daddy’s pistol but I wanted to talk about the future too, if you’ll allow that, and I’ll start by telling you my health is fine, so that’s not the issue, understood? But I’ve been thinking a lot about the ranch, she continued. Maybe I should sell it, maybe to Mr. Joe and Deolinda or maybe to another true soul who’ll work it but not to Wayne or his crowd, who’d break it up into ranchettes to make an easy fortune off the shitbirds. And you saw for yourself, Ross is out of the question. He’d trade the whole spread for a month’s worth of getting high. What if one of my fool horses throws me someday and I break my damn fool neck? Then the three of you would have to work it out, and I don’t like to picture that one bit. You want to say something?
No, Mom, he said, although he was thinking that it had never crossed his mind that he was the good son, and that his brothers were not, for whatever reason. He was the absent one, they were nearby, on call, should they be needed. No, he said, you just say what you want to say.
Well then, I’ll ask you, she said. How much time do you have left? In the army?
I’m committed to three more years. After that, I can’t say.
Do you imagine you’d ever want to return? Here, I mean. To the ranch.
Just like Dawson, he said. I would.
You don’t want to ponder on it some more?
Nope.
Your brothers will get some money. One doesn’t need it, the other needs to burn through it.
Whatever you want. It’s
your place. It’s your money.
We understand each other?
We always have.
Merry Christmas, Ev.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s advanced at the same luxurious pace as his first week home, the bracing freedoms indulged in moderation by the fine laziness of books, coffee talks at the breakfast table, helping his mother tend her stable of Appaloosas or riding snowmobiles with Joaquin to drop feed for the herd, solitary walks toward the Camas or up into Ponderosas and Lodgepole pines along the ridges, Ev and his mother on no particular schedule one afternoon when they joined in a sentimental pawing through Dawson’s desk, searching for the man in his papers and scrapbooks, then candlelit dinners at the oak table, the warmth and pine-glow of sheltering against the elements, sensible talk about their country and about their world and outrageous gossip ripped with fits of laughter, and they talked about the future too, both resigned and hopeful, on the cusp again of separation. On New Year’s Eve the grand dames spent the twilight hours holed up in their respective bathrooms—boudoirs, said his mother—preparing themselves for the big night out, a shindig at the American Legion hall, dinner and a dance and midnight champagne and noisemakers in the company of Missoula’s finest, lifelong friends and lifelong adversaries, both factions the real people, in his mother’s opinion, the homegrown permanent insiders indispensable to a place’s identity and memory and sense of trueness.
You couldn’t find anyone inside the legion’s steaming banquet hall who wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat and boots, Ev’s a Christmas present, made from the skin of a rattlesnake disposed of by Joaquin’s shotgun. You couldn’t find a female in the herd who wasn’t decked out like a Queen of the West. Every surviving member of Dawson’s old posse of smoke jumpers and veterans made it his duty to stand Paige and Eville a drink, Joaquin and Deolinda feted nearby with the same wet enthusiasm by Joaquin’s Korean war legionnaires, which meant they were all mutually tipsy by the time the waitresses brought the steaks and fixings to the tables. With everyone tucked into their meals, a country and western band set up on the small stage at the far end of the hall, the group fronted by a female vocalist who, by ten o’clock, began belting out her repertory of Patsy Cline. At some point his mother grabbed his hand and hauled him out of his seat.
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