Fallen Angel

by Chuck Logan

  “It’s a gray area, right?” Jesse conjures with her hands. “Traumatic brain injury, concussion interacting with drugs. Hard to figure out what the real problem is. But at the end of the day, my medical records will say I had seizures, that I was treated for acting nuts and given antipsychotics. One thing’s for sure, nobody’s going to hire that pilot.” Jesse shifts her gaze, studies a point on the wall under Janet’s diploma, and enunciates, “Let’s say the thing I’m struggling with right now is not my memory; it’s the implications of what I saw.”

  “That sounds a little grandiose. Can you be more specific?”

  “I’m not sure you want to know.”

  Janet raises her eyebrows.

  “Okay,” Jesse says, “it’s like this. Lots of patients on the ward have more drugs on board and have been through things as bad or worse than me. But they don’t all have the memory problems I did.”

  “We’re on the same page there,” Janet cautiously agrees. “You were overmedicated in a major way. That’s on us, not on you. And you’re right, it is a gray area we don’t fully understand . . .”

  “Pretty convenient, too, I’d say.”

  “Hold on, define convenient . . .”

  “Like, what if I was deliberately overmedicated? I get pumped full of antipsychotics—no more flying, no more army. I’m just another crazy vet who imagines things.”

  Janet leans forward with a worry line denting her brow. “You’re not crazy. Just wait a second. I mean, you’re complicating it. We’re talking about your flight status, and you get defensive because you couldn’t control your memory, then you get mad at yourself for getting defensive.”

  Now Jesse also leans forward, so their eyes meet on the same plane. “For once why don’t you throw the books away and just talk.”

  Janet takes a moment to evaluate the intensity in Jesse’s eyes. “Sure. Street psychology. Give a tough kid a kick in the ass. So losing control is the worst thing in the world, right? You’re a hot-shit captain in the friggin’ army. Your records put you in the top 1 percent of your peers. And I know that it has to be twice as hard for you because it’s still a bunch of men. Plus you’re a pilot. Most army officers get distracted and nothing happens. You get distracted for a few seconds, and you lose control of the aircraft. You lost control. They shot you out of the sky, and your crew died in the crash.”

  Janet twists her hand is a reasonable gesture. “It’s like aikido, using your opponent’s weight against him—like to regain your control, you have to admit that you lost it. Could that be the step you’re hung up on? Doesn’t mean you’re crazy.”

  Jesse maintains strict eye contact and enunciates each syllable. “I didn’t lose control. Sam told me. I rode Tumbleweed Six down in a controlled crash. But what if I landed in a crazy situation? So crazy it doesn’t fit in one of the neat disorders in your DSM IV?”

  Involuntarily, Janet eases back in her chair. “Like how crazy?”

  “Like, say, I clearly remember seeing Marge die. Okay? And she didn’t die in the crash, like the after-action report said. I watched her die afterwards.”

  “Afterwards,” Janet repeats slowly.

  Jesse nods. “She managed to make it out of the aircraft and was on her knees and this guy stood over her aiming a pistol at the back of her head. Not ten feet away from where I was trapped. And not just any guy. He wasn’t Iraqi.” She points a finger for emphasis. “I accept going into shock, concussion, whatever. It’s waking up in drug world I don’t buy.”

  “You watched her die,” Janet repeats.

  Jesse nods. “She needed my help, and I just watched her die, and she still needs my help.”

  Taken aback by the cryptic intensity of Jesse’s last words, Janet responds firmly, “Marge doesn’t need help. She’s dead, Jesse. Along with Laura and Toby. They buried her eight weeks ago in Grand Forks. She got the flag, the firing squad, the works. You’re the one who needs help. That’s why you’re here. Survivor’s guilt . . .”

  Jesse glowers and interrupts, “You work here? I live here! Some nights, when the helmet heads down the ward are moaning and I can’t sleep, I get up and walk the halls. Don’t talk to me about . . . fuckin’ flags.”

  Janet pauses for several long seconds, recalibrating her balance and replies, “You’re angry.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Mad is good. Anything not passive is good. Jesse, listen. I’ve worked in this place for over a year, and you’re damn lucky to have landed here. There’s worse hospitals in the system. A lot worse. Even here outpatient is stretched thin, takes thirty days to get an appointment . . .”

  “What are you doing? Justifying your job?”

  “Nonsense. Dozens of soldiers have sat in that chair. And what a lot of them came to understand is that survivor’s guilt is manageable. It won’t ever go away. It’s like a cable channel on TV. But you don’t have to watch it all the time. You can look at something else.”

  Jesse is unimpressed. “I swear to God I feel like grabbing you and dragging you off your shrink soapbox. You don’t get it, do you? School’s out, Janet. Forget the fucking books!”

  The two women glare at each other briefly. For the second time in less than a minute, Janet feels control slipping away. “I’m not the one with my head up my ass, Captain,” she shoots back.

  Janet’s frustration elicits a belly laugh from Jesse, “You talk to the guys like this?”

  “Once in a while, the real stupid ones.”

  “Were you military before you started working on your psych degree?” Jesse asks, narrowing her eyes.

  “I was a St. Paul patrol cop, kiddo.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  Jesse smiles. “Well, that’s great. Let me know when you remember how to think like a cop because all this”—she waves a hand at the shelves of books and the framed master’s degree—“is bullshit as far as helping me from here on out.” Then Jesse spins on her heel and strides, swinging her shoulders, from the office.

  After her outburst Jesse pauses overlooking a mezzanine lined with historical flags. She fixes her gaze on one of them: Don’t Tread on Me. Then she watches an elderly man in a wheelchair who pulls himself along, methodically, hand over hand, on the guardrail fastened to the wall. Each grip and tug sends a plastic squeak echoing down the empty hall.

  She takes the stairs up to four, signs in on the ward, and starts toward the dining area to check the supper menu. Coming around a corner she encounters a young woman, slightly fleshy in shorts and a sleeveless blouse, with a dark ponytail and a butterfly tat on her left calf. Her right hand rests on the shoulder of a scrubbed little girl, perhaps five or six. The girl’s hair juts out at angles in short pigtails. She wears a party dress. They are standing outside the TV room, where patients receive visitors.

  Jesse slows her pace then stops. She can see the tendons on the top of the mother’s hand stand out as she steadies her daughter. She can hear the hush but not the content of whispered instructions. The little girl nods and stands completely still.

  Now two figures round a corner in the hall. A male nurse’s aide steers one of the shuffling helmet heads with gentle pressure on his elbow. By now Jesse accepts these men’s faces as part of the 4J wallpaper; this one’s few remaining recognizable features struggle through the raw welts of surgery to find common ground between determination and vacancy.

  “See, honey,” the mother says in a carefully normal voice, “Daddy’s home.”

  Jesse turns and retraces her steps. It’s not avoidance; she doesn’t want to intrude. Galvanized and absolutely centered, she reminds herself as she walks to her room, Never feel sorry for yourself. You took a soldier’s chance . . .

  And you got off easy.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  On a grand summer afternoon, Morgon Jump surveys the grounds of the Rivard estate from the site of his almost completed stone wall, and he’s thinking, I can do this. He’d meant it when he told Amanda he’d had to chang
e before and he could do it again. Last time he’d had to reinvent himself out of a heap of white trash in Warren, Michigan—the same environs that produced Eminem. When he was a kid his mom and dad’s worldview was summed up by the painting of Jesus standing next to Hank Williams on black velvet that hung in the basement.

  Mom kept a little box on the mantle over the fireplace that contained cards printed with Bible verses. She liked it when Morgon and his brother and sister would select a card and take the scripture to heart before they left for school.

  He seemed to get one card more than the others, and it stayed with him: Second Timothy 2:15: Study to shew thyself approved unto God . . . a workman rightly dividing the word of truth.

  First you study a thing. Like with this wall. He pictures in his mind’s eye the seamless, famous twelve-sided stone that is the centerpiece of the Inca Cuzco Wall. Fast moving-clouds have smothered the sun, and he notices that he no longer casts a shadow. So he stares at the grass where his shadow should be.

  ***

  Morgon spelled with an O because his father was loaded the night he was born and entered the name wrong on the birth certificate.

  By the time he was sixteen he had a reputation for handling himself, and kids would come to him with their problems, and he would figure out a way to fix them—usually by backing off some bully. His favorite movie was The Godfather, and he identified with Michael because Michael wasn’t crude like the other guys, had cool hair, and surprised people big-time once he got going, and Morgon was like that, sort of.

  Looking back, there was really only one similarity between his life and Michael’s because Michael’s family was powerful and lived in a big house and Morgon’s family was what you’d call “low ordinary living in a crummy rambler,” what you’d call “Michigan hillbillies.”

  Michael’s dad ran one of the five families in New York, and he made people offers they couldn’t refuse, and Morgon’s dad was a sad, get-along-go-along drunk who worked on the production line at Dodge Truck on Mound Road and rooted for the Detroit Lions. His mom worked the cosmetics counter at Horner’s Drugstore on Ten Mile and Van Dyke and lived for her duties as an orderly at the Bethany Missionary Tabernacle, where she lined her three children up with her on Wednesday nights and Friday nights and twice on Sunday.

  The similarity was that part of the movie story about Michael having no choice but to kill his brother, Fredo. Morgon understood how that could happen. Fredo broke the rules and betrayed the family. And Morgon had a brother, Billy, two years older. Billy was the favorite and was being groomed to be a youth minister in the church.

  By the time he was sixteen Morgon had figured out that his brother said one thing in church and did another at home. And what really bothered Morgon were the times Billy would make their sister, Darlene, do things that Morgon had only secretly thought about—because, well, Darlene was real developed at fifteen. Billy would crowd her in the bathroom and grab her hand and make her touch him. Then he’d grab a fistful of her red hair and force her mouth down there.

  Bad touch, like they taught you in school when you were a little kid.

  This was a thing that did bother Morgon a lot. It kept him up nights, listening. So he told Billy, warned him like—“Don’t be doing that anymore.”

  And Billy, who thought he was tough because he played football at Warren High, wiggled his fingers scary-like and said, “Oow, whattcha gonna do? Besides, you dweeb, she’s a cunt and she likes it.”

  “No she don’t, ’cause I asked her, and she hates it,” said Morgon.

  And Billy just laughed at him and told him to grow up.

  Morgon at sixteen thought football players were all pussies anyway because they wouldn’t hit anybody unless they were wearing half a sporting-goods store—Morgon said, “You do that again to Darlene, and I will fucking kill you.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Billy.

  “Yeah,” said Morgon.

  So Billy kept doing it, and so Morgon killed him.

  He looks up when Amanda calls from the porch. “You want something cold to drink?”

  “I’m good,” he yells back. Then he returns to his hammer and chisel and starts chipping away at a big obstinate stone that he’s decided will be his foundation rock, that will crown the whole job.

  Not just like that, of course. Killing Billy involved planning. Because sure, one on one, Morgon could beat up Billy easy. But then Billy would come back on him with half the football team, and there’d be a big scene. And Darlene was real clear that was not going to happen.

  And the fact was he was a kid and didn’t really know how to kill somebody and, more important, how to do it and not get caught. He read a lot and knew about crimes of passion and low impulse control, and that’s how dummies got caught.

  Morgon didn’t have impulses. He had plans. And he was no dummy. The teachers in high school kept saying, “You know, you scored real high on these tests and you could get some scholarship money.” And Morgon said, “Thanks, but I got something else in mind a little more practical. Like getting some training.”

  So it took a while—years in fact. During that time Billy kept at Darlene, who finally ran away and went back down South to Mississippi, where the family originally came from. And Morgon graduated from high school and joined the army and went through basic and then infantry and then airborne school and qualified for the Rangers. After he made sergeant he came back to Warren, Michigan, on leave, confident he could whack the whole football team if it came to that.

  Except all that was over, and now Billy was a flabby salesman on a Toyota lot, which probably made dad puke, his kid selling Jap cars. And Billy had this blonde wife with vacant eyes who stayed home and watched TV all day. And they had a little daughter. He was still living off Twelve Mile and Van Dyke about two blocks from Ma and Pa. Seeing that kid really bothered Morgon, thinking what she had to look forward to. And worse, what really bothered him was that Darlene had married this hamface crew-cut moron of a preacher down home who, swear to God, looked like Billy.

  It wasn’t like Billy knew he was there, or anybody else. Morgon came in real quiet. For two days he watched Billy’s routine—at work, at the house. Then he looked over the old neighborhood. Both nights, after dinner, Billy, who was about thirty pounds overweight, would go for a power walk wearing a weight vest and carrying an eight-pound barbell in each hand. His route took him along the wooded edge of a soccer field three blocks from his house.

  When Billy came huffing by, Morgon, wearing light rubber fishing gloves, was waiting just inside the tree line. He stepped out, whipped one of the barbells from Billy’s fat hand, and used it to cave in his skull. Bang. No words passed between them. Morgon didn’t come to talk. He was keeping a promise.

  Then he just walked away, slipping through the trees back to his car. A couple hours later he was into Ohio on his way back to Fort Bragg, running out a week long pass. Swung through Memphis. Checked out Graceland.

  He looks up and sees Amanda striding across the lawn toward him with her usually composed face set in an unabashed grin. She’s wearing the black Morning Glory skirt and the oyster top with the twist in front that accentuates her breasts. He knows this because he’s studied the clothes she wears in the Patagonia catalog that is full of pictures of scantily clad women clinging to rock overhangs like flies. He smiles as he remembers what the catalog said about the skirt, how it’s soft and stretchy and has a natural playful drape.

  Across the lawn, he sees Kelly trundle John out on the porch in the wheelchair that’s outfitted with a defibrillator and a tank of oxygen. Making eye contact, the old man raises a hand in a happy wave as Kelly eases the chair down the ramp.

  “What’s up?” Morgon asks, now curious.

  “It’s a gift,” Amanda says, eyes bright. “He just received a call from a Senate staffer. He’s been invited to testify at a Senate Oversight Committee. Special summer session. It’s the first time he’s been excited about something since the heart attack.”


  When John arrives, he leans forward, and Morgon agrees with Amanda’s assessment: there’s more light in the old crocodile eyes than he’s seen in weeks.

  “So what’s this about a Senate hearing, you showboat,” Morgon asks, grinning.

  “They’re assembling a gang of us old dogs from the Agency, part of the ongoing review of that disaster at Khost in Afghanistan, among other things.” John beams.

  “I figure we all can go,” Amanda says. “It’ll be like a vacation.”

  “When?” Morgon asks.

  “A week from tomorrow,” John replies. “It’ll be a chance to reconnect with my old gang of pirates.”

  “Sounds great,” Morgon responds to smiles all around.

  As Kelly wheels John back to the house, Amanda takes Morgon aside for a walk. “I know it’s short notice, but let’s throw an open house after the hearing. We could audition the architect’s model of the Lakefront Project. I could start phoning out invitations today, and Martha could do the follow-up with the food while we’re in D.C. We can hire a crew of high school kids to help with the grounds work.”

  Morgon deadpans, “Don’t think I can handle all the smiley faces breaking out all over the place.”

  Amanda playfully punches him on the arm and says, “Hey, I throw great parties, and it’ll give you a chance to remind the local bigwigs what a handsome, useful fella you are.”

  So he relents and smiles. “Can’t argue with you there.”

  “So it’s a deal.” She goes up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek, then, after she fondly touches the scar on his neck, she turns and runs back toward the house.

  Gifts. Deals. Parties. It’s all part of his transition to learn the art of untroubled sleep in Amanda Rivard’s clean pale arms. So he keeps the energy of it like a bright light to poke into some dark crannies of his life. Stuff he generally leaves off thinking about, that Amanda would index under repression.

  When word reached him about his brother’s senseless murder, he was granted compassionate leave. The family gathered in Warren, and Morgon was surprised when Darlene showed up without her shitbird husband. They had a private moment in the church, Billy tarted up in the casket. She never asked him the obvious questions, like why he never married. Must have been a hundred people at the service, and they were the best-looking couple in the place.