by Chuck Logan
Now on a regimen of enforced bed rest John, maintains a stoic distaste for all the fuss and grumbles that, “You have to die of something.”
Given John’s medical issues, Morgon sees no need to burden him with Brian Cawker’s side assignment to determine whether Davis had support in the bureaucracy. Best to remain positive and give no hint that the Turmar tar baby may drop yet another sticky shoe. So he’s sitting on the veranda with his bare feet hoisted on a wicker ottoman, keeping it positive.
Through the screen door he can hear the muted whoosh of the kitchen-sink faucet, then the soft clatter of plates and glasses. The help has gone home, and Amanda is loading the dishwasher. Kelly is upstairs sitting vigil with John.
And Morgon’s musing: Just lookit this place, the way the freshly mowed acres stretch out in the humid evening like a golfer’s vision of peace. Amanda thinks he should take up the game. He has the hand and eye for it, along with a natural feel for ground and distance, and it would be useful for his future in the community.
Across the lake, the dark-veined clouds mushroom up on the horizon and, ever so slowly, blades of storm charge churn the air and spread an inky cool as Amanda pushes through the screen door. She’s wearing a short, sleeveless paisley shift and no shoes. Her bare throat, arms, thighs, and calves gleam dull olive in the fading light, and a moist lemon steam of dishwashing liquid and hot water clings to her. “Look at you,” Morgon says. “Talk about domestic.”
His playful comment sails right past her as she rolls her eyes back into the house and up the stairway.
“It’ll be fine; he’s a tough old bird,” Morgon says, coming forward in his chair.
“Don’t minimize and don’t baby me. He is a very ill old man,” she says. “You, on the other hand, are young, healthy as a horse, and have options . . .”
“I’m not going anywhere; regardless of what . . . happens,” Morgon protests, seeing where this is headed.
In the middle of composing her response, she cocks her head and watches him fold up the cuffs of his jeans. “What are you doing?” she asks.
“I’ve got an urge to walk barefoot on the grass. C’mon. With any luck we’ll get caught in the rain.”
Holding her hand, Morgon wanders across the lawn to the gazebo and his wall project. She surveys the plumb, interlocking pattern of stone, then turns her eyes toward the window of John’s bedroom in the house and thinks out loud. “So now that, ah, Davis the loose end has been dealt with, it’s over? The rough stuff, I mean. They can’t call you back, can they?” For emphasis, she turns and scours his face with one of her gray-eyed practical looks. He takes a moment to compose his answer.
He understands that Amanda considers the “work” that her grandfather and he perform as being similar to her own philanthropic duties as foundation director. Cornball rhetoric aside, they were guardians who protect people’s rights and property. And just as he knows there are two types of soldiers—the ones who fight and the other kind—there is a natural division of citizens bred into her Calvinist DNA. She assumes a destined few are born to wealth and privilege—like her—and then there are all the rest. And she expects him, as her consort, to continue in his role as protector.
So carefully he explains, “I’m separated service. They can ask favors . . .”
“Don’t be coy. You mean the Agency,” she says.
“Yes.” Now he turns and looks at the second-story window, behind which John Rivard lays in his bed hooked to a beeping monitor. “It’s all based on trust, on a handshake . . .”
Amanda nods and recites, “Nothing written down, strictly face-to-face. Before he went in the hospital, John told me you’ll be giving the orders from now on, not carrying them out.”
“Strictly case by case. They can ask, and I have the option to refuse.”
She folds her arms across her chest and prods at a limestone slab with her bare toe. “So you’ve been promoted. What if you get tired of moving rocks around and become bored?”
Morgon shrugs and says in all honesty, “I had to change once before. I can do it again.”
She drops her eyes, then slowly raises them to his. “You mean from working for me to working with me?” A faraway blush of heat lightning molds their features, and they are standing as close as two people can without actually touching.
“Is work really the word you want here?” he asks.
“So-o-o,” she draws out, “come up with a better one.”
He just smiles, and Amanda can’t suppress a tiny thrill the way his tawny eyes travel over her face and down her body. It’s more than an intimate glance. It’s primal and triumphal, like encountering a lion’s stare—a happy lion that’s standing outside an open cage door.
She had dropped out of the migraine-plagued grind of med school to make her father comfortable as he sunk like a stone into the death spiral of Stage IV malignant glioma—the worst kind of brain cancer.
In the process she’d closeted with her grandfather, listened to his concerns, and then audited the foundation books and appreciated the shambles her father’s reckless ventures into real estate had made of the estate. With John’s blessing, after the funeral, she threw herself into the task of restructuring the family investment portfolio.
Morgon understood she was attracted to strength, to rectitude, to reliability and, because she was John’s granddaughter, not a little bit to danger.
It didn’t hurt they were good in the sack.
“I guess you’re all better?” Amanda allows as she flops back on the rumpled bedding.
“Just your basic Motown Double Scream Back Crawler,” Morgon says with a mussed smile. “Probably didn’t catch many of those when you were hitting the books in Ann Arbor.”
“You,” she slaps his arm. “Answer the question. The headaches, the insomnia?”
“All better,” he admits as he studies their grass-stained bare feet. “I think we ruined the sheets.”
They slowly untangle, get up from the bed, and step, naked, onto the pitch-black carriage-house balcony. Morgon lights a cigarette and smiles because it’s nice out. The smell of approaching rain in the breeze cools his sweat. Then he blows a stream of smoke and raises his hand. “You hear that?” This haunting string tune carries across the lawn . . .
“There, on the balcony off John’s room. It’s Kelly playing his violin,” Amanda says absently as she plucks the cigarette from Morgon’s fingers and tosses it over the rail. She insists that he quit. An occasional cigar would be okay, say during a round of golf with the county board.
Morgon slowly shakes his head. “No, darlin’, that’s fiddle music. That’s ‘Ashokan Farewell.’ Remember from the PBS Civil War . . .”
“Yes, I do,” Amanda says, hugging herself. “It’s a little spooky.”
“Spooky’s a bit strong, but it’s sad and it’s pretty. It’s a Scottish lament,” Morgon says.
“No,” Amanda says, “it’s spooky, because John’s in there with his heart flopping in his chest and there’s nothing we can do about it but wait. It sounds like Kelly is practicing for the wake.”
Morgon reaches out and affectionately fluffs her hair. “You know what Roger said? We’re all standing in line . . .”
Amanda wrinkles her voice. “Roger is an animal.”
“That’s more hyperbole. Roger just gives you a peek at a different world that’s out there, beneath the everyday. John lived in it all his life. So did I, for a while. Roger still does.” He raises two fingers of his right hand in a reflex, finds them empty. “You want to insure your car, you call Allstate. You want to safeguard your dirty op in the desert, you call Roger. It’s just a more elemental level of reality.” He laughs soundlessly and waggles his fingers in a booga-booga scare gesture. “Dark energy. Subatomic political particles. Invisible little shits like Roger make the world go ’round.”
“I’m just worried it’ll come back on us,” Amanda says.
Morgon softly kneads her shoulder. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”<
br />
“You promise?”
“I promise. You’ll always make a soft landing smack in the middle of that plush oriental carpet you picked out for John’s living room.”
Their eyes meet in the dark, and Morgon thinks,Not that I planned it this way, but soon it’ll be our living room.
Now it’s time to watch the storm explode over the lake and wait for the rain. Far off, silently, a lacy tendril of lightning shoos the dark, and towering cumulus clouds appear like giant chess pieces. Then it goes black again. A second later, smaller flashes trip and, in the flickering light, he turns and sees Amanda methodically draw a brush through her tangled hair.
A huge flash lights up the whole horizon, and he counts, “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .” until, after eight-one-thousand, the thunderclap shakes so loud they instinctively duck.
“First you see the flash,” he says. “You get hit, you never hear the bang.”
“Lightning,” she says. It’s dark again, and he can’t make out her face.
“Yes,” he says, but he’s thinking of the soft light of an early Mexican evening refracted through a ten-power scope and the man sitting on a golf cart on his estate outside Juarez watching his children play croquet on a brilliant, green, chemically drenched lawn in the fraction of a second before the bullet hit him.
Then Morgon puts his arm around her shoulder and gets lost in the second round on the fiddle Kelly is serving up as a treat, rushing it a little to beat the rain. It’s one of his favorite songs in the world. If there’s a heaven for Americans, that song should be nonstop on the jukebox. And now that he thinks about it, Amanda is probably right: it is a little spooky, and sometimes—like now—it makes him think of walking through a graveyard.
And obviously it’s having the same effect on Amanda, who chooses this exact moment to remark, “It was necessary what we did to the girl in the hospital, right? I mean, we’re not bad people . . .”
Morgon thinks about it for a moment, then says, “Not anymore.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Okay, Captain Kraig, you have to do this. It’s part of recovery and you’re on stage and the show must go on. Jesse is kibitzing with her image in the bathroom mirror, fussing at her hair with a comb. What she sees is more like a head full of golden weeds that sprouts, tufted and untended, over her ears. She probably should have gotten it styled. But that would look like primping—and she isn’t about to give him the satisfaction. So she’ll have her hair done as a reward, if she survives this morning’s little exercise.
She smiles. She’s been smiling more lately, since Sam told her she rode Tumbleweed Six down, since she’s been repeating the phrase You didn’t lose control over and over like her private little mental-health rosary. Just saying it, along with stopping the meds, the pressure in her head is clearing like a plugged sinus.
Onward.
Okay. Terry Sherman is, at this moment, waiting downstairs in the lobby. They’ll have lunch in the cafeteria and then perhaps walk the grounds. It’s like a date—a formal kind of date chaperoned by a light-footed ogre. Tony will trail them and undoubtedly take copious mental notes on her behavior and then report back to his keeper, Janet.
She places the comb on the sink and cocks her ear. Out the doorway, down the corridor, she hears a scrum of staff go into scramble mode. A patient is screaming, and his hoarse, slurred howls bounce like a basketball down the brightly lit, waxed hall. The outburst is followed by the clatter of something tipping over and crashing to the floor.
It’s just a little hemorrhage of time-released terror hosing down the drugged ambiance of the polytrauma ward. Perhaps the guy is tormented by “intrusive memories” that have punched through the buffer of his meds.
As she applies a light coat of lipstick, she almost envies the screaming soldier; at least he has specific memories of the thing that turned his life upside down. And she’s got this tip-of-the-tongue-type cloud where shadows stir like uneasy undersea shapes. Like Tantalus in the myth, the shapes move away when she reaches out.
Jesse sets her jaw. She’ll get there, but first she must pass the Terry Sherman test.
She steps back, turns, and inspects herself in profile in the glass and plucks a piece of lint from her crisp white blouse that still has the creases down the front from when her mother ironed it, folded it, and tucked it in a package along with the short denim skirt that is a relic from her freshman year in college and still fits her.
The skirt’s hem falls two inches above the knee and showcases the fact that grueling attention to exercise has restored the tone to her legs. Terry always rated legs, like sex, on a sliding scale from mediocre to good to great to “to die for.” So she’s curious how he’ll judge the thick scar that curls out of her lower quad, zigzags across her right kneecap, and burrows into her upper shin like a slick purple eel.
She turns back to the mirror and mugs her lips to blot the lipstick. The cosmetic does not quite span the sturdy bright scar that splits her upper and lower lip and puts a deep dent in her chin. Another scar, like an accessory to the one that cuts through her lips, cracks her right eyebrow. Compared to what she sees every day on 4J, the scars are superficial scratches. She got off easy on the outside, but the fact is—and this she says out loud to the mirror—“You’re not what the boys call pretty anymore, are you?”
No eye shadow, no mascara. It’ll be a come-as-you-are party. Her feet are bare in flip-flops and she’s put off applying new polish to her toenails because she has a distinct memory of painting her toes the night before the flight into amnesia, shooting the breeze with Laura in their quarters. She catches herself going into a glide, staring at a chip of the old polish that still obstinately clings to the nail on her left big toe—this little curl of blue like a comma. Still there, like an abrupt punctuation to her life. Then, in a single ringing heartbeat, Jesse shivers as, first, she flashes on the hula boy doll that she kept taped to her cockpit dashboard, then the thrum of a thousand hours of Hawks’ and Kiowas’ motors in her blood. And it’s like a shadow flies through her chest.
RPG two o’clock!
Laura’s voice—her headset-cupped voice—echoes in the bathroom as if it’s trapped inside the mirror. Sonofabitch. She peers at her face’s startled reflection. Imagination? Playing tricks? No, that was a freakin’ memory. No fanfare, no big deal. Just. There.
Both hands extended, she steadies on the counter. Talk about cold shivers. Then, shit! Another acoustic ambush: Keep coming around, I’m on him. Now it’s Marge’s voice that momentarily freezes her in place. Low and cool, a Chuck Yeager aviator voice in a radio.
Gingerly she touches her face and gets a numb prickling sensation like after the dentist when the Novocain wears off. Needles yanking out all at once.
And okay, no foolin’, this is no hallucination. Her knuckles whiten, gripping the counter. And suddenly she’s right there in the sensation of gut-churning free-fall, breathing pure adrenaline and smoke and the blades coming apart.
Very clearly the entombed moment is back. Buried again, yes. Helpless, yes. But now something more. A white-hot anger because she sees Marge Bailey suspended in the cloudy mirror, horribly burned, strips of flesh hanging on her raw arm and belly, her flight suit and vest in tatters. Blood dribbles with oil and mixes in the adobe dust.
And this guy is standing over her in a dirty tribal headdress. Then he removes the scarf. There’s another Iraqi, who pours water from a bottle on the first man’s head, to clear dust from his face. Now she can see the back of his head, his reddish hair, the muscular column of his neck. She can hear him swear in English. He’s taking out a pistol. She hears Marge’s voice in a croak of pain: “American.”
“Yo, Captain.” She snaps alert. It’s Tony’s voice echoing from the doorway. “Time to roll.”
Tony waits in the hall that now has returned to drugged status quo with only a few residual whimpers to punctuate the shuffle of walkers and wheelchairs.
“So the captain’s got her war
paint on,” Tony’s flat face is split by a game grin, just trying to ease the tension.
“Screw you, Tony,” she quips back, striving for normalcy because it feels like she has to hide the sudden memories, like she just shoplifted them. “Let’s get this over with.”
As they sign out and exit the ward, he asks, “You good?”
“Good.” They bump knuckles as they get on the elevator. “Doctor’s orders. He may be totally pleasant, or he may try to mess with my mind . . .”
“And either way it breaks?” Tony raises an eyebrow.
“Smile where appropriate, don’t pick my nose, practice my social skills. C’mon.”
“Okay, here’s the drill. I lay back a couple removes. You get to hang in the coffee shop and go out on the lawn. You get uncomfortable, shoot me a look, and we’ll work it out from there.”
Jesse nods. “Let’s do it.”
Jesse’s trip to the first floor means Dr. Prasad had to sign off as well as Dr. Halme in psych, and, of course, Janet, who had gone out on a limb letting Sam in for an unscheduled visit and now feels vindicated. Jesse seeing her old sergeant worked a tonic effect, and Janet was feeling pretty good, having trumped the senior staff with her educated guess that Jesse had been misdiagnosed and overmedicated.
Now they’ll see how she’ll handle a social situation, off the ward, that presents some moderate stressors—like meeting with her former fiancé who might harbor feelings of being jilted. Jesse is determined to finesse this challenge and mind her footwork, her recent memory eruption notwithstanding.
So she squares her shoulders and steps off the elevator into the bustle of the lobby. She pauses to get oriented. This is the first time since admission that she’s been plunged into a throng of people going about everyday routine—outpatients, visitors coming to see inpatients, employees leaving or coming to work, and military personnel doing whatever. And it strikes her that a VA hospital is a big house full of people who get broken in a particular way. A regular hospital caters to the aged, the diseased, the victims of accidents. She’s here because her government invited her out to play in traffic and she accepted—to go looking for it.
