Fallen Angel

by Chuck Logan

  Hyperalert since the memory dump, Jesse swivels her head, checking out the crowd, and fixes on a young female army officer in digital camo who strides by. She’s a major who affects a short, practical haircut similar to the style that Jesse favored, and she’s moving with purpose, never missing a beat, as she checks the iPhone in her hand. And Jesse thinks, Three months ago,that was me.

  The major is focused dead ahead, the rest of the world peeling off on the periphery, too busy taking care of business to worry about keeping her memories straight.

  C’mon. Move. Tony’s watching. There’s no safety net down here like on 4J.

  As Tony falls back several paces, she walks past the commissary, turns right, and spots a young man with sandy-colored hair standing at the entrance to the cafeteria. He has a medium build and medium good looks and a titanium bear trap for a mind hiding behind his mild brown eyes and the easy smile that parts his regular features as he sees her and hurries forward. She notes that he was careful not to overdress; he’s wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt that molds his V-chest and lets her know he still looks good with his shirt off.

  “Jess, damn, it’s great to see you,” he says.

  She had practiced this moment and raises her hand, meaning to shake his, but he steps in close and hugs her with an appropriate amount of familiarity. It’s a careful, friendly hug, but the pressure of his encircling arms and the smell of his aftershave ignites all these little fuses.

  “I’ve been better,” she says tightly.

  “Look all right to me,” Terry says with a perfectly calibrated smile.

  He, however, does look different. The small earring he used to wear is missing from his left ear. His hair is shorter. She points to the haircut, raises one scar-split eyebrow, then tugs on her ear.

  He shrugs and says, “I decided to go back to law school, so bye-bye English Department eccentricities, huh? Figured it was time to cut down on the ornamentation. C’mon,” he nods toward the cafeteria, “lets grab some coffee and catch up.”

  So they order their coffee and find a table. For a moment Jesse is distracted, flatfooted because Tumbleweed Six is back, cranking in her chest, and she has to find the ignition and turn it the fuck off. For now.

  “Ah, Jess,” Terry points to the chair he holds out for her. She takes her seat, and he spends a few minutes in polite warm-up chatter, bringing her up to date on who’s still together and who isn’t in Grand Forks. Then, deftly, he turns the conversation to her.

  “You were in Newsweek, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Indirectly. They didn’t exactly mention you by name. This article about some Congressmen who questioned how many women the army should put in one helicopter.”

  “Soldiers are soldiers, Terry,” Jesse says deliberately, looking past him to Tony’s reassuring hulk standing at the corner of the service bar sipping on a smoothie.

  “Sure, that’s the company line, but, as usual, the culture hasn’t caught up,” he says. “There’ll always be a double standard for some people . . .”

  Jesse forces a smile and changes the subject. “So now it’s law school. You thinking of going back to Grand Forks?”

  “Well, Dad went to UND. And I put a semester in there. But since I’m over here, I thought I’d drive by the University of Minnesota and check out their law school.”

  “Out-of-state tuition,” she mentions, which is the practical thing to say.

  “True. But it’d only be for a few months. Maybe I could just audit classes.”

  “Why only a few months?”

  “Because when they let you out of here, you’ll go into an assisted-living situation, essentially a halfway house. I thought it might be a good time to get reacquainted, as you ease your way back into things.” It comes out smooth and reasonable and sincere.

  “So you’ve been checking up on me?”

  “C’mon, Jess. Just because I didn’t go through the VA system doesn’t mean I don’t know how it works,” he protests, still smiling.

  “You’ve been checking up on me,” she repeats.

  He takes a sip of coffee, puts down the cup, and looks her directly in the eye. “I just thought you might like some company going through the transition,” he says.

  “Transition?”

  “Sure, you know, back into the messy business of civilian life.”

  “Last time I looked, I was getting a paycheck from the army.”

  Terry leans forward and the luster in his eyes appears genuine. Then the warmth turns to concern. “C’mon, they’ve talked about this, haven’t they?”

  Jesse starts to pick up her coffee cup and realizes her hand is shaking. When she sets the cup back down, it rattles on the table. “Say what you mean,” she says carefully.

  Terry sits back in his chair and raises his hands, palms out, in a “whoa” gesture. “Maybe I’m talking out of school here. I just figured . . .”

  “Figured what?” Eyebrows knit, Jesse has leaned forward across the table.

  “I’ve been talking to your folks about what you’ve been going through, the progress you’ve made and the future and . . . all that,” he finishes with a halting tick in his voice.

  Jesse stares deliberately into his eyes. “Since when did you start having trouble expressing yourself?”

  Terry circles his finger, taking in the surrounding lobby. “So they haven’t talked to you about what happens next?”

  “Sure, more rehab, the halfway house, like you said,” she answers. From the corner of her eye she registers that Tony is now paying attention to the tense body language at the table.

  “I mean where you stand with the army.”

  “Where I stand? I got shot at and hit, in case you didn’t notice.” The slippage is clear in her voice. She’s becoming annoyed. Not in her plan at all.

  “Jess, Jess, take it easy.” He exhales, sets his teeth on edge, and taps them together. “All I mean is I know how much you had your heart set on flying . . .”

  Past tense.

  Jesse takes a deep breath and plants both elbows on the table and places her hands alongside her face to compose herself. Talk about knowing exactly where to stick in the needle. “Oh, boy,” she says as she lowers her hands.

  Now Terry purses his lips and lets annoyance trickle into his tone. “That’s government doctors for you, bunch of hacks.”

  Calmly Jesse parses through his meaning. “You’re talking about my flight status.”

  He nods. “Army aviation medical standards. You’ve been treated for seizures. You’ve been given antipsychotic medication. I don’t think they grant medical waivers for pilots with that profile in their records. There’s language in the regs about a review of medical history for physical symptoms that can develop during times of stress.”

  “You researched it, I suppose?”

  He nods. “I read a few things, talked to a few people.”

  For a moment they lock eyes across the table. And suddenly Jesse can’t suppress a laugh–a deep, rollicking, you-gotta-be-shitting-me soldier laugh. She knows it’s rude, but she can’t help it because there’s a tough, resilient feel to the sound in her throat. It sounds like me.

  “Okay, look,” Terry says patiently after waiting out the laughter. “I think you’re going through a rough patch and you could use more support than these government bureaucrats are giving you.”

  And she’s thinking how utterly sincere he looks, leaning slightly forward, every hair and word in place. More than sincere actually, sure of himself. And she gets it. Terry, the army, the VA—they are all sincere to a fault, and helpful, and they all have an agenda because now she’s certain that old Sam was right: Marge Bailey didn’t die in a helicopter crash because I saw her shot. And here’s Terry telling me I’m basically crazy, huh?

  “You’d do that for me?” she asks, unable to resist putting a hint of purr in her tone.

  He’s more earnest now, leaning forward. “Jess, just say the word and I’m in it for the long haul.
I’ll help you get back on your feet.”

  “How sweet.” She reaches out and pats his hand on the table.

  Encouraged, his voice lowers a register and approaches intimate. “And down the line we’ll clean up the damage on your face and your knee. You’ll be good as new.”

  Leave it to Terry the leg man to remember to airbrush the knee. “Good as new,” she repeats and smiles fondly. “Aren’t you Johnny-on-the-spot now that you think my wings are clipped.” Then, abruptly, she glimpses this tall young soldier in camos and desert boots who appears at the back of the cafeteria. Then he disappears, sidestepping a gaggle of older, overweight vets in motorized wheelchairs.

  Christ, for a second there, that looked like Toby. Be careful now. Her mind, turbocharged on the new memories, is playing tricks. She catches herself staring at a background of tall schefflera, yucca tips, fiddle leaf fig, ficus, and bamboo palms that edge the atrium. Throttle down, girl.

  She finds herself standing up, biting down on the scar on her lip. “I gotta go,” she says as she ratchets her head back and forth. From the corner of her eye she picks up Tony setting his drink aside and moving toward her.

  Terry is on his feet now, hands up, conciliatory. “Calm down. Seriously. I can help,” his voice pleads.

  “Thank you, Terry,” she says, backing away, her own hands waist-high, palms out. “I mean it, thanks. But I gotta go.”

  Then Tony’s there, his hand on her elbow, guiding her away, and just that quick, Terry is forgotten. “That good, huh?” Tony speculates deadpan.

  “Hey, I landed like a cat.” Jesse forces a grin. “On all four broken feet.” Then she tugs his arm and asks, “Hey, can we go somewhere, not the ward, away from here and . . . talk?”

  “Sure.”

  After a trip through basement corridors, they wind up outside on a long patio that overlooks a loading dock. Men and women staff in scrubs lounge at tables, smoking. When Tony eases a tin of Copenhagen from his pocket, Jesse puts out her hand.

  “You sure?” His brow furrows and he says, “This is long cut; it’s the strong.”

  “Gimme. It’s not a boy-girl thing, it’s a pilot thing. I only used it once, at the end of a long night mission. Pretty disgusting stuff but, like the guys say, it gives a little edge and smoothes out the jangles. Less downside than go pills.” Jesse opens the tin and inserts a chew under her lip.

  “I guess,” Tony says, doing up himself.

  Grimacing, Jesse probes the noxious cud with her tongue and feels the nicotine claw into her bloodstream. “Thing is, it’s the closest I can get to putting my head in a cockpit in this place.”

  That gets Tony’s attention as Jesse takes a deep breath, exhales, and laughs. “We’d have these maps loaded on our computer screens. When you fly off the grids and run out of map, there’s a line where the map ends and everything past that is black.”

  Jesse leans over and spits.

  “We used to call it ‘flying off the edge of the world,’ and we’d kid each other, like, ‘Hey, that’s where the monsters are.’” She turns to Tony with a frank stare he’s seen before, in Afghanistan. “There’s all kinds of maps with edges you can fly off and get lost in the black. No joke.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Jesse nods and looks directly into Tony’s patient eyes. “My memory is coming back, Tony, and it isn’t coming back easy.”

  Chapter Forty

  Hot goddamn night in the Wisconsin woods. The dew point hovers, dripping at 80 percent, and Davis feels like he’s growing gills on the bottom of a black, sticky ocean. Across the lake, a loon calls, and the thrilling avian cry pierces through the soupy air only a little friendlier on the shiver scale than a howling wolf.

  Blinking sweat, he looks up for relief among the icy stars and scans the constellations until he picks out the Big Dipper and sights along the arc of the handle, like his dad taught him as a boy, and spots Arcturus by its reddish-orange hue. He leans back in a deck chair and sips from a glass of Jack Daniel’s sour mash. He’s turned off all the lights, and the surrounding woods block out any sign of neighbors. A muted trill of insects joins the cry of the loon, and then he hears a far-off yip-yip call that is probably a pack of coyotes.

  Mouse’s hideout looks out over a medium-sized lake and is no shack. The emailed instructions contained a map and directions to locate a key hung on a hook behind a porch piling. More lake home than cabin, the place comes with four bedrooms, a fireplace, satellite TV, and a pool table in the basement. The freezer is piled with frozen steaks and salmon, and a pantry contains boxes of fancy freeze-dried dinners. After the wicked turn of events in Maryland and the long drive, he was grateful to discover a well-stocked liquor cabinet.

  Lay low, the Mouse said, while I try to get a line on the people who are after you. He takes a long sip of the Jack and snuggles deeper in the chair.

  Then a branch snaps in the dark and he is instantly alert and oriented toward the sound that he judges to be fifty yards into the tree line along the right side of the lake. Simultaneously he calculates the time and distance it will take to slip into the house and ease up to the kitchen island where he disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled his cache of weapons first thing after arriving this afternoon.

  He processes all the possible moves in two seconds flat because he’s learned to build lethal reactions into a mere startle reflex. But he’s also learned to court danger with common sense.

  Ease off, man. It’s a friggin’ deer looking for something to eat.

  After another big swig of Jack, he lights a cigarette with the dead Mexican’s lighter and shifts his eyes along the dark shoreline. Yep. The wild things are out there. He can sense their eyes ranging in on the flaring coal of his cigarette.

  He takes another drink and relives the sensation from the old days, of squatting in the dark, a night watcher with a knife in his hand, tasting the air the way a mountain lion tastes it. And he can almost feel the bright bundles of his nerves bunch, getting ready to pounce. Back then, obedient and patient, he’d wait for the hearth to burn down to embers. He’d been good at it, like he was good at a lot of things.

  But it wasn’t really him. And, for all his precision, inevitably there were the civilians who got in the way.

  The sweaty reverie ends. He raises the glass again but decides he’s had enough for tonight. So he sets the drink aside . . .

  Snap, crackle, pop.

  One of the night critters is making a move out in the thicket, but this time Davis just heaves to his feet, flings his arms at the sound in the dark, and shouts “Boo!”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The wooden crate that arrives from Balad is the size of a small footlocker and has the whole flight company’s signatures for a return address. It’s so heavy that the mail room sends it up to 4J on a dolly pulled by a maintenance man from building services, who explains that he used a Wonder Bar to pry it open.

  “Security got concerned about the weight,” he says as he sets the lid aside. “After I got it open, they got concerned about the shape.” He points to the 16 K kettle bell that weighs thirty-five pounds and looks exactly like a cannon ball with a hoop of steel handle. The bell nestles in Jesse’s old Fighting Sioux sweatsuit and is wedged in with her running shoes. But the real surprise lies hidden in the folds of the warm-up jacket. Pulling back a sleeve, she finds the charred, somewhat mangled remains of the hula boy doll that used to occupy the dashboard above the instrument panel on her Hawk. Now her former good-luck charm hangs together by virtue of several strategic wraps of duct tape. With Sam gone, she wonders who reclaimed it from the wreckage of Tumbleweed Six.

  It’s the first time she’s been directly confronted by a relic from that day. The springs that allowed the hips to sway are broken. Hula boy has lost his tinsel grass skirt and now wears a duct tape sheath. But that doesn’t matter.

  Because he was there.

  And survived.

  And now we can talk about what we saw, you and me. The question is—h
ow much do I tell Janet?

  Six days off the meds. Two days after the encounter with Terry Sherman. The change continues to be dramatic. The young woman taking a seat beside the desk in Janet’s office speaks and moves normally and is attentive to small details. Today she shows up for the session with a touch of foundation makeup to tone the scars on her chin and forehead. After months of ignoring her hair, she’s been to the shop for a style. And instead of hospital blues she wears jeans, a Nodak T-shirt her folks sent, and a pair of sandals that show a fresh coat of blue polish on her toenails. But Janet notes a quietly wary edge to Jesse’s eyes and so begins with, “Tony tells me things got a little tense during the visit two days ago. And you told him your memory has improved?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jesse answers with a guarded eye roll, “came back all at once like a load of hay crashing on my head.”

  “So tell me about it, starting with the visit.”

  “It was great. Terry came all this way to tell me I’ll never fly again. Because of the diagnosis, the seizures, and the drugs I’ve taken. He offered to take me away from all this and install me in a suburban kitchen.” She leans forward. “I’m curious why the subject hasn’t come up—the not-flying part—here, in this office, between you and I.”

  “Because this is primary care. You’re recovering from an injury. Vocational rehab comes later . . .”

  “Jesus. Vocational rehab? You mean like weaving baskets? Terry’s right. You do sound like a bureaucrat.”

  For a beat they engage in a stare until Janet purses her lips and says, “And you sound like a smart-ass officer dressing down an enlisted man. You must be getting better . . .”

  “C’mon, Janet, given the cards in my hand right now, will I ever fly again?”

  Janet shrugs and gives it to her straight, “Go out to Minneapolis–St. Paul International and book a flight. Then, just after you strap on your seatbelt, ask yourself how’d you’d feel if you learned that the pilot had struggled with active amnesia.”