“That was a neat trick.”
“This is Melody. She’s a neat horse.”
I glanced over and I swear that horse nodded.
“I was worried to death about you.” She gave my arm a terse little shake. “Afraid I was going to find little pieces of you up there.”
“I thought about taking my cell phone, but there’s no service for me here.”
“Kept looking for you last night. Hoped you’d come late, bang on the door.”
I wasn’t sure how to read her. “Told you I was packing to spend the night. Maybe two.”
She stiffened, tugged my wrist to a standstill. “Please, don’t ever do anything like that again. Let the Forest Service take care of it. I was a fool to go along.”
And she went on, but all I could feel was my arm around hers while I tried to figure out how to apologize. She pulled a water bottle out of the saddlebag and I drank half of it.
“You catch it?”
“Killed it.” Water dripped out of my mouth. “Very dead.”
“How big?”
“I tried to drag it. Maybe 200 pounds.”
“That’s a really big cat. Where?”
I stopped and we turned. “This side of the ridge.” I tried to point out an outcrop of rock but couldn’t be certain through the clouds. “About two hours walk.”
“Might be on our property. Forest Service can go find it.” She hugged me, kissed me. After a few minutes Melody grew impatient, the barn in sight, and tugged us to go.
–––
I lay in the tub and soaked. Between the wet afternoon, the cold night in the tree and bits of dream that still lingered, no amount of hot water could thaw the chill. There were times in the field I went unbathed for three or four weeks, just a little packet of wet wipes for crotch and ass; now I felt like I could never get clean enough. I ran the hot water longer, turned it on and off with my toe until the level neared the overflow. I decided I’d write to Garcia’s wife. That would be a start.
It was getting dark when I walked up to the house, the cloud cover breaking up, a hint of sunset on the mountain peaks. Cheryl had made soup and a loaf of bread, the air heavy with oregano and baked yeast. Her father rose from a beat-up wingback when I came in, extended his left hand. He nodded, then looked through the bottom of his glasses at my open shirt collar and carefully lifted out my dog tags, turned them in his hand like he was making sure they were real, dropped them back in my shirt.
“Rangh?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Rangh.” He turned his shoulder to me, slashed an invisible chevron on his bicep.
“Oh. Master sergeant. E-8.”
He seemed pleased with that, slapped me on the shoulder and went back to his chair.
“Dad was a colonel, weren’t you Dad?” She helped him to his feet again, to the table. “But he was Air Force, so you don’t have to take orders from him.”
He looked at her woodenly, pulled his arm away and sat at the head of an old oak clawfoot. He seemed embarrassed about speaking and preferred to point at things, face crumpled in thought. As we finished, he set his spoon down, wiped his mouth, shook his wrist at me and mumbled, a question on his face.
I glanced at Cheryl.
“I think he asked if you did any good over there.”
I really didn’t know. “Been asking myself that since I got back. Seemed like it at the time, but they seem to be tearing it down faster that we were able to put it back together. You can’t give people something before they really want it.” I wanted to tell him the only democracy they’d ever understand would be a separate little government in every single valley. “They have a humility,” I said, “with an incredibly ignorant kind of arrogance.”
Both of them stopped eating, in a somber reassessment of what I’d said, as if I’d been mean-spirited.
“Every Taliban we captured, really any Afghan we talked to, had this notion that the Taliban had brought about the collapse of the entire Soviet Union.”
“You can’t be serious.” Cheryl picked up her glass and some tension in the room relaxed.
“Dead serious. Soviets left in ’89, whole Eastern Bloc fell apart after that. They watched the wall go down on TV and thought they did it, that God was on their side.”
Her father shook his head and I think he understood my point.
“Now they think they can whip anyone. God is on their side. Hard to convince a Jihadist otherwise.”
“Do you think he’s on our side?”
“I’m not sure he has a dog in this fight. Whole business is a house of cards.”
Her father cocked his head like he might say something else, then picked up his spoon and went back to his soup. He seemed congenial but left after he was done, bidding us both goodnight with a wave. We watched him hobble down the steps, disappear into the gathering darkness.
“Your father’s had a stroke. My mother had a stroke, granddad too. Probably just a matter of time, I’ll have a stroke.”
“When you do, at least I’ll already know the language. You going to go see them again, your grandparents?”
“I don’t know. I think they’re expecting somebody else.”
“You should get to know them better. Give them a chance. They’re probably good people.”
“I don’t know what we’d talk about.”
“They’re your clan. Your real family. Besides, I think I’d like to meet them.”
“Really?”
She stood, shot me a coy half smile, and went into the kitchen.
When she returned she took the wrist of my shirt. “And what are these?”
I’d worn the shirt with pearl snaps. “Thought I might go into the Golden Horn, sometime. When you’re throwing darts.”
“Very fancy. I’m going to have to start thinking about you in a whole new way.” She paused. “Robert.”
I helped her clean the table until she shooed me onto the porch. She came out a few minutes later, drying her hands. We sat in the swing. A thin glow of pink remained on the highest peaks to the east, reflecting the sun that had settled behind us thirty minutes before, the sky birthing the first glitter of stars. I wondered if there was some way somebody could take a picture of that. She settled in next to me. The rain had left the valley cool. Both of us were tired, and we sensed we could be quiet with one another and it was okay. About thirty minutes passed.
“You handy with a chainsaw?”
“Used one a few times. We had them in the Army, part of the rescue gear.”
“Thought we might go up in the hills, get some firewood tomorrow. Cold winter coming, I’m told.” She rested her head against my chest. “Get any sleep at all last night?”
“I’m supposed to take medication at night,” I said. “I forgot to take it along.”
She was stroking my hand but grew still.
“I have dreams sometimes. Most of the time. If I don’t.”
“Things you remember?”
“Things that never happened, mostly, but might have, or might still.” I rubbed her shoulder. “They don’t mean anything. Sure can mess up a night, though.”
I told her about first sighting the cat, that first shot, my night beneath the stars, sleeping in the tree. I didn’t tell her about waking up with the cat staring at me. It seemed too pathetic. But I told her about the dream. And, finally, I told her about Marsden, and how the whole world that was Michael Marsden, his kids, his grandkids, all the good he might have done, wasn’t going to happen and it was my goddamned fault.
She pulled my arm around her shoulders and drew herself close. “Do you believe in God?”
The swing came to a stop. I don’t know if it was her or me who put their foot down.
“Afghans, Taliban, believed that if they hit one of us it was because Allah willed it. He controlled the bullet. If I shot and missed I just shot again, adjusted a little for windage. Usually hit them on the second try.”
“Your point?”
“I don�
�t really know how a god intervenes in wartime.”
“Maybe he brought you home.” She nudged the deck softly and the swing moved.
“That song,” I said. “God is watching us . . .”
“From a distance.”
“Yeah. A distance. Ninety million miles maybe. They say Saddam had a vat of acid to dispose of bodies. Sometimes he threw people in still alive. I think we make our own heaven or hell right here.” How much cynicism she’d tolerate I didn’t know. “I don’t think any deity is coming back for us, ever. Any of us. And the sooner everybody gets their dim little minds wrapped around that idea, the sooner the world will be safe again.”
She drew a deep sigh and I wondered if I’d trashed my chances.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m still mad about some things.”
I told her that I would try to be a good man but couldn’t promise that I’d always be right, that every shot I took in life would always hit its mark. I couldn’t promise that I could protect her, or anybody for that matter.
“How old were you when you started? Eighteen?” She pulled my other hand across, holding both of them in hers. “And now you’re thirty-five?”
“Just turned thirty-six.”
“I just turned thirty-five. Maybe we can protect each other. But you’re going to have to forgive yourself.” She stood, moved behind me, and buried her fingers deep into my shoulders, thumbs probing every weary thread of muscle, every taxed ligament. I loosened slowly and she rested her chin on my shoulder.
“They’re not out there, you know.”
“Who?”
“The enemy. They’re far around the world, in someone else’s lifetime now.” She kissed me long on the cheek, slipping slowly to my neck. “I need to shower. Go get your medicine, then come to bed soon. I’ll leave the hall light on for you.” A moment later the screen door closed.
I sat looking into the night, level and treeless until it melded into the base of the mountains. Her old man was right; it was defendable, a good perimeter. I sat a while longer, a light breeze from the mountainside rising, while the moon broke over the pines on the foothills, its reach crossing the black pasture, a shimmering trestle of green and yellow that ended just feet from the porch in the gravel drive. I thought about the cubs, high up in their cave, huddled upon one another for warmth, starving for a mother that would not return.
That same moon was high above Colville, the Dunhams’ house, the high school dark and empty up the hill, the trailer park in Addy, the gravel roads we cruised as kids in cars, thinking we would all live forever. That same moon above the hop fields and alfalfa surrounding the house where once my father lived, and eventually died, and then the house was ash as well.
That same moon shone down upon mothers of so many young Afghans, who wept in the night, who would never see their sons marry, young men infused with the notion that some righteous, angry god was on their side, had been on their father’s side and their father’s father’s side. All of them believing they were descended from some great line of warriors, death but a brief step to interminable ecstasy, but destined to be dust, fed on by the fungus in the soil of the Kunar Valley, and 10,000 places like it. How close I had come to joining them.
It was inevitable. They would be here eventually, or someone like them, fists and rifles and banners in the air, clumsy hatred on their lips. I would need to rest, stay fit, and practice, and always, always be ready for that time.
Credits
I never went to war. I never received an invitation. My lottery number was just too high in 1972. I have—perhaps an unintended penance—spent ten years or so caring for veterans of a half dozen wars, in VA hospitals, listening to their stories. Collectively, I don’t think there are a finer cohort of individuals on this planet. This work of fiction, of course, does not reflect the life experience of a particular soldier, but might easily relate to any soldier.
Many, many books were helpful to me in my research. The few that repeatedly come to mind are listed here, and I highly recommend each of them for a better understanding of those who have served in combat and lived to tell their stories.
War and Redemption: Treatment and Recovery in Combat-related PTSD. Larry Dewey, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004
Cat Attacks, by Jo Deurbrouk and Dean Miller, Sasquatch Books, 2001
The Forever War, by Dexter Filkins, Vintage press, 2008.
And Then I Cried: Stories of a Mortuary NCO, by Justin Jordan, Tactical 16 Books, 2012.
WAR, by Sebastian Junger, Twelve Books, 2011.
Every Man in this Village is a Liar, by Megan Stack, First Anchor Books, 2010.
Black Flag Journals, by Dennis John Woods, Koehler Books, 2016
Afghan: Insurgent Tactic, Techniques, and Procedures, Vol II. Published by Marine Corp Intelligence Activity group, 2009.
“Driving Related Coping Thoughts in Post 9/11 Combat Veterans,” Maria T. Schultheis, et al, Federal Practitioner, December 2017.
The following works of music are quoted under the doctrine of Fair Use:
Chumbawamba, I get knocked Down, 1997
Andre Benjamin, Hey Ya! 2003.
And many thanks to my wife, Sheryl, the multitude of veterans, workshop participants, colleagues, cold readers and mentors who had the time and patience to read this manuscript and help form it into the book it is today. To you all, I am eternally grateful.
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 20
