Homefront pb-6

by Chuck Logan

  After tossing more wood on the fire, Broker unscrewed the cup from his thermos and poured some coffee. He looked out over the lake, felt the warm sun on his face, saw it sparkle on the calm water. The temperature was thirty degrees and rising. If this kept up, they wouldn’t need the fire to warm the sand and water. They could peel back the tarps and work in the morning light.

  The sunlight dissolved the harsh cold out of his crystallized breath. Panes of thin ice glistened, about to melt in the puddles. He could almost smell a softness in the air-sap rising-hear the tentative bird calls. A faint hush of green buds trembled in the branches of the aspen and birches.

  Buoyed by the caress of the sun, he thought, Damn. It was just possible, that, like Persephone emerging from the underworld, he and Nina and Kit had survived their black winter.

  Teedo plugged his radio into an outlet in the porch siding and filled the tent with a wail and groan of country music, punctuated with news of the war. Broker mixed mortar, shoveled it into the barrow, and wheeled it out of the sunlight into the limbo of naked lightbulbs strung in the tent. Teedo troweled the mortar down and leveled the patio flags.

  Broker was mixing the second batch of mud when Griffin arrived and waved Broker over to his Jeep, then handed him the new improved bunny and the cat’s collar. Broker stuffed the collar in his pocket and, after inspecting the subtle repair job, said, “Thanks. I’ll tell her I found it jammed under the seat.” He put the stuffed toy in the Tundra, came back.

  “I stopped off to visit with Jimmy Klumpe this morning,” Griffin said.

  “You been busy,” Broker said carefully.

  “Here’s the deal. You gotta come up with a face-saving gesture, something he will accept as an apology.”

  Broker shrugged, “No sweat, sure. After what I saw and heard last night-”

  “And he wants you to replace the shirt Teddy got bloody.”

  “Jesus, you got me running the gauntlet,” Broker made a mock show of protest.

  Griffin laughed. “Do you good. An exercise in making amends. Practice some humility. C’mon. Time to work.”

  As the morning continued warm, they fell into a rhythm. Griffin sliced the flagstone sheets into irregular slabs with his heavy diamond-blade saw. Broker loaded the wheelbarrow, ferried the pieces into the tent, and arranged them in a pattern on the concrete patio footing. Teedo followed Broker, adjusting the spacing, leveling, and mudding them in place.

  As Broker loaded the raw stone, he watched Griffin work. Years ago he’d speculated Griffin would watch Jeremiah Johnson one too many times, give up entirely on people, and migrate north clear through Manitoba into the territories.

  Griffin reminded Broker of a story from his youth about a hermit who’d lived in the canoe country north of Ely, who resisted being relocated when the government created the Boundary Waters canoe area. When it became clear that the law would come in and forcibly move him, the guy had forted up on an island with a crate of dynamite, sat down, and lit the fuse.

  Rather than return to civilization.

  Griffin preferred to work alone. Or in Teedo’s large, quiet shadow, which was the next thing to being alone. And Broker wasn’t sure if the repetitious lifting and placing of the heavy stone was a meditation or a form of solitary penance. One morning, returning for a second consecutive day, he noticed that Griffin had torn apart a mosaic of stone Broker had laid out on the concrete base and then rearranged it to his own satisfaction. The gesture was consistent with a theory Broker had about his friend; that Griffin constantly tore himself down and reshaped his image.

  Because he couldn’t accept who he really was.

  It was a persistent point of tension between them, going all the way back to the old days when they first operated together in Vietnam. More than any man he knew, Broker believed Griffin should have stayed in the Army. Not a particularly kind observation. But a true one.

  Half past eleven. Break time; they retrieved their lunch bags and thermoses, sat in a corner of the tent, ate sandwiches, and poured coffee. Then the jive games began.

  Griffin squinted through the smoke from the Lucky in his lips at Teedo. “You notice how Broker kinda creaks when he moves, like’s got sand in his crank case? Hey, Broker, when’s the last time you got laid, anyway?”

  Broker fired back without missing a beat. “I don’t know about you transplants from Detroit, but up on the North Shore, where I grew up, a guy only gets allotted about five hundred million erections. What can I say-when they’re gone, they gone.”

  Undeterred, Griffin winked at Teedo. “He ain’t seen all the ads on TV; Viagra, Cialis…”

  “That’s ’cause they ain’t aimed at him; they’re for old farts like you who can barely eat a little pussy between naps,” Teedo said.

  Broker grinned and held up a Ziploc bag full of raw cut broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots.

  Teedo passed, wrinkling his nose.

  Griffin grinned. “He don’t eat vegetables, among other things.”

  Teedo grunted. “We got a word for people who eat too many vegetables.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?” Griffin needled.

  “Bad hunter,” Teedo said with flawless timing.

  Broker felt the muscles of his face loosen in a genuine grin. Not to be outdone, Griffin appraised Teedo and said with great formality, “What I heard is you Indian guys don’t go in for oral sex.”

  Teedo’s round face revealed nothing. “My daddy always said that Ojibwa can eat beaver and stretch it too.”

  Griffin hung his head, laughing, unable to top that. After a pause, he turned to Broker. “Speaking of pussy, you ever find the cat?”

  “No kitty; one way or the other, she’s gone,” Broker said. “Kit’s pretty bummed-the cat was all she had to play with.”

  “Want me to find another?”

  Broker ground his teeth lightly. “Might be best to get one back in Stillwater.”

  “Oh?” Griffin raised his eyebrows. “You got something to tell me?”

  Broker shrugged. “Things are looking better. Let’s wait and see…”

  Hearing that, Griffin studied Broker for a moment and added, “Uh-huh.” Then he signaled that the break was over. “Enough grabass, we got work to do.”

  The early afternoon passed quickly, and Broker felt himself loosening up, enjoying the work tugging at his muscles. The tease and dig of easy male company was an antidote to the estrogen bends, he decided; he’d been too far down in that house with Nina and Kit. When he prepared to leave to pick Kit up from school, Griffin caught up to him at his truck.

  “You know,” Griffin said, “I was thinking about what you said-the cat being Kit’s only playmate…”

  “Yeah?”

  “You met Susan, right, at school?”

  “Yeaahh…” Broker drew it out, watching the wheels turning in Griffin’s eyes.

  “So I was thinking. Susan’s got this daughter, Amy, same age as Kit. Maybe we could line them up so Kit’s got somebody to hang with…might make it go easier.”

  Broker worried his lower lip between his teeth, his eyes weighing the idea. “I’ll think about it.”

  “If we get the kids together, could be a good idea for Susan and Nina to maybe talk…”

  “This one of your half-assed interventions?” Broker smiled when he said it, amiable.

  “Can’t hurt,” Griffin said.

  Broker turned and headed for his truck. “We on for tomorrow morning in the torture chamber?” Once a week Broker joined Griffin in his basement weight room, where they went through a lifting routine.

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll talk about it then, along with how much politically correct crow I gotta eat to make the peace with that asshole Klumpe,” Broker said, getting in his truck.

  Teedo walked over to Griffin. They stood watching Broker drive off.

  “You heard what’s been going on?” Griffin asked.

  Teedo nodded. “Heard the gang talking it up at Skeet’s. How Broker put Jimmy
Klumpe on the ground. Started when Broker’s kid knocked Teddy Klumpe on his butt at school. Then yesterday Broker dumped his garbage at Jimmy’s garage, right on the welcome mat.”

  “There’s more. Two days ago, after the scene at school, somebody came in on skis through the woods, punctured a tire on his truck, tried to poison his dog”-Griffin paused-“maybe got in the house…”

  “Country payback. Except he ain’t got a dog,” Teedo said.

  “Yeah. But they took some stuff, a kid’s toy, maybe the cat. Weird, huh? Can you picture a klutz like Jimmy going in on skis?” Griffin picked up two empty gas cans, started to put them in the open lift door of his Jeep.

  “Don’t sound like Jimmy. Day before last, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Day before last, I gassed up at the Amoco and the truck in front of me was that old beat-up Chevy Gator Bodine drives.”

  Hearing Gator’s name, Griffin stopped in midmotion, loading a gas can in the back of his Jeep. He turned, giving Teedo his full attention. “What time was this?” he asked.

  “Ah, midafternoon. We quit early, remember. And I stopped before I went to Skeet’s for a couple beers. Thing was”-Teedo paused for emphasis-“there was cross-country skis and poles in the truck box. With snow on them. And when Gator come out of the station carrying a bag, he was wearing those ski boots. And winter camos, like for bow hunting.”

  “Gator, huh?”

  “Yeah. He’s a demon for skinny skis.” Teedo turned toward his truck, climbed in, started the engine, zipped down the window, leaned out. “Griffin, you’re getting that look in your eye. Like when you first hauled me to an AA meeting.”

  Griffin shrugged.

  Teedo paused to let Griffin appreciate the serious shadow that came into his quiet eyes. “I’d be real careful around Gator. He ain’t true.”

  “C’mon, Teedo, what?” Griffin straightened up, prodded by the fast lick of danger in Teedo’s expression.

  Teedo gnawed his lip, looked away, and spoke into the distance. “Take a minute to think. You want to go into it, I’ll be at Skeet’s. You can buy me a beer, huh.” Then he zipped up the window, covering the bare hint of an ironic grin, and drove away.

  Alone behind the lodge, Griffin lit a cigarette and poured the last of the coffee out of his thermos, thinking about what Teedo had seen at the Amoco.

  Gator. It tracked. Cassie’s kid gets thumped. Gator always fought his sister’s battles. And if the story about the meth house fire was true, he had a propensity to go insane deep into vengeance.

  He ain’t true? What was Teedo getting at?

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It was game time.

  Nina sat on the back steps, smoking the one last cigarette allowed to the condemned. Except, in this case, to face the firing squad, she had to take off the blindfold. For the first time since the veil of darkness had cloaked ordinary life, she didn’t avert her eyes. She looked at her sorry ass directly, like a tactical problem.

  Among her talents was an unique ability to get inside an opponent’s time, his intent and tactics. Disrupting them. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Boyd’s celebrated OODA Loop. This reflex, which they now taught at the service schools, was hardwired in her synapses. It had made her military reputation.

  Instinctively she understood how to defeat the depression. It required a simple trick of personal jujitsu.

  All she had to do was face in the right direction, meet head-on the thing she dreaded more than her own death…

  Admitting weakness. Admitting defeat.

  She had been here before.

  That summer in 1988, the Olympic swim trials were held at the Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  One of the fastest pools in the world.

  Nina Pryce had finished her sophomore year in Ann Arbor. She had medaled in three events in the NCAA nationals, forcing herself through a grueling season, living on Darvoset to block the persistent bursitis in her shoulder.

  Mind over matter. Make the cut. Next stop Seoul, Korea.

  She knew the shoulder was a time bomb, and she kept it from her coaches. Hell, they’d done a lot to create the problem-an absence of moderation in the weight room, when they threw the girls at free weights with the football team. A dedicated Title Nine

  Hari Kari, she held nothing back. Probably the bench press did the damage. Along with too much weight on the fly machine.

  Seeded second in the 200 butterfly. Her best event.

  Only the top two would go.

  She ignored her coach’s advice to go out smooth, stay with the pack for two laps, and make her move on the third lap. Then bring it home hard. Once she got up on the starting blocks and took her mark, she only knew one way forward-get out in front from the buzzer and stay there.

  The humid air is charged, drenched with chlorine. The tiled walls rock with applause from the sweating bodies in the stands. In the pool, the quiet blue world of racing water churns with silent screaming muscles. Bursting hearts. Leading the pack, going into the wall on the third lap, she felt the shoulder start to freeze. Ignore it.

  Don’t quit, don’t cry.

  Make the turn. Now. Bring. It. Home. In mid-lap the shoulder locked. She thrashed on, lame on one flipper. Finished third.

  Missed a seat on the Olympic plane by four hundredths of a second. Pride. Vanity. That last obstinate twenty-five meters did more to wreck her than all the previous wear and tear.

  Who she was.

  It took a year with trainers to rebuild the inflamed muscles and ligaments around the shoulder. At a sobering meeting, the sports doctor stoically told her she had the shoulder of a thirty-five-year-old woman.

  You keep pushing like this, it’ll only get weaker, not stronger.

  Stubborn, she took her middle-aged shoulder back to swimming after rehab and was still fast enough to make the final heat. But she was never able to coax that extra surge from the shoulder-the surge it took to win. She never medaled again. Just outside lanes. After she graduated, she’d put the Olympic dreams away and joined the Army. There were other medals.

  Not even Broker knew how far she’d stretched the rules. He thought the skull-and-crossbones tattoo on her right shoulder was bravado going into Desert Storm. The tat disguised the needle marks from years of black-market cortisone injections, as she trail-blazed through the Army.

  Jump school. Ranger school. HALO. SCUBA.

  Desert Storm. Bosnia three times. Classified stuff in the Philippines. Undercover games in Italy, chasing the elusive Russian suitcase.

  A triumph of will, steroids, and prescription-strength Tylenol.

  After 9/11 she was invited into a clandestine Delta subset that eventually took the field as Northern Route. Before deploying, she discreetly met with an Italian physician in Lucca and wheedled a prescription for narcotics to control the pain.

  Now she had the shoulder of a fifty-year-old woman. No cushion left. She bowed to the needles one last time.

  Nina Pryce took a deep last drag on her cigarette and flipped it into the snow. Made a face. Kit would lecture her about littering. What would she say if she found out her mother, the steroid junkie, had been living a lie?

  She didn’t shy away from a nauseous wave of remorse, guilt, and shame. It was time to accept it, all her petty selfishness. Christ, she still had her arms and legs and fingers and toes. Men and some women were being blown to pieces in Iraq this very minute. Maybe people she knew.

  After the nausea came the wringer of self-pity. Broken wing. You’re never gonna fly again, girl; not like you used to. Never gonna get it back. Never rope out of a Blackhawk again in full gear. The fucking men always watched her for the slightest sign of weakness. They’d never let her back on the teams with a bum shoulder. Hell, she wouldn’t let herself back…They’d give her a desk for pasture. Training cadre maybe.

  Forget that.

  After self-pity, the bile of resentment. She whipped her head around, throwing a rueful glance
at this rented house Broker had brought her to. Good for housework, maybe. He’d like that. Down deep she sensed he’d always wanted her to fail. Like all of them.

  Finally the emotional binge dissipated. She stood up and dusted herself off.

  No, he was different. He’d exhausted himself caring for her. More than father, husband, lover, and friend. Her buddy.

  By midafternoon the sun had passed overhead and had started to decline in the west. The darkness, which had been driven into the woods, now regrouped, emerged from hiding, and started to creep out from the tree line, to counterattack over the ground it had lost during the day.

  Watching the clock, Nina showered, washed her hair, and drew it back in a clean ponytail. Then she dug in a drawer and found the clean, carefully folded sweat suit. ARMY in crisp black type across the front. Absolutely focused, she pulled it on, tied her running shoes, and went outside.

  She approached the somber western woods.

  Egged on by the lowering sun, a ragged phalanx of shadows now extended from the trees and lengthened across the snowy lot. Pointed toward the house.

  She lit a cigarette, paced, then walked right up to the farthest extension of the shadows and placed her foot inches from the tip.

  Waited as it slowly, relentlessly crept toward her.

  The shadows would cross the yard, mob the house, and penetrate the walls. They would fill the air, bleeding black, and finally find their way into her flesh and drain their darkness into her blood.

  Not today.

  “Fuck you,” she told the shadows.

  Okay, she’d come halfway back. Now for the rest. Get real, Pryce. Listen to your body. Her body told her she had turned into the thing she feared most in her life.

  She was weak.

  She saw it in her daughter’s eyes. In Broker’s. A mix of pity and shallow empathy. Nina had raised Kit to be strong and compassionate toward the weak-to an extent. But the fact was, as Nina had now discovered, that the strong, even as they vow to protect the weak, do not understand them.

  Nina took a deep breath and said aloud, “It’s over.”

  She opened her arms and walked forward, and as she embraced the shadows, she felt the last weights sloughing away. Unencumbered, she tilted up her face and felt the fading sunlight sink into her like an invigorating current. Lightly, she walked into the deep snow and the close-packed trees, breathed in the cold dark air. She turned, came out into the deep black hedge of shadows, and twirled; then, arms spread behind her, she ran in circles. Like Kit might do, enjoying the sheer kinetic thrill of motion.