Painless

by Derek Ciccone

  Moving behind her, still wearing the Big Bird costume, sans the head, Chuck swooped his daughter into his yellow-feathered arms.

  The smile instantly returned to her face. “Daddy—you came!” She then viewed him up and down with a perplexed look. “You are wearing Big Bird’s clothes, you silly.”

  As the party began to dwindle, they were approached by a portly man flanked by his equally portly kid. It took Billy a moment to recognize him; the night before was a little hazy. But then he placed him as the loud sports talk radio guy named Hawk.

  Hawk hit Billy on the arm like they were long lost friends. “A different woman every time I see you, Harper.”

  Billy smiled awkwardly.

  “Hey, if this is your wife then I’m just kidding,” he said in Dana’s direction, laughing his obnoxious laugh.

  Dana grinned sheepishly. “I’m not his wife or girlfriend, but I’m very interested in Billy’s other women.”

  “Let’s just say I saw him at this Mexican joint last night and he likes the hot and spicy, and I ain’t talking about salsa, if you know what I mean.”

  Dana’s brow crinkled. “You do know your child is standing right there, right?”

  Hawk was oblivious. “Oh, I should have introduced you to my boy, Little Hawk. He’s as pissed as his old man that he’s missing the first week of the NFL season to look at some friggin animals.”

  Suddenly Hawk began staring down Billy.

  Billy felt uncomfortable. “What—you’ve never seen a grown man in an Elmo costume?”

  “I swear I know you from somewhere. Harper,” he snapped his meaty fingers as if it was helping him to think. “Billy Harper, where do I know that name?”

  “As far as I know, we met for the first time last night.”

  He kept staring at Billy and then something clicked. “I knew it! The Amish Rifle—Ohio State—the comeback against Michigan—Rose Bowl MVP—quit like a little sissy.”

  “My dad knows everything about sports,” Little Hawk said as he pulled candy from his goody bag and stuffed a handful into his mouth.

  “That was a long time ago,” Billy said.

  “The Amish Rifle?” Dana inquired with smiling interest.

  “It’s a long story,” Billy answered.

  “Lucky for you, sweetheart, Mr. Sports is here to explain it for you.”

  “My dad knows everything about sports,” Little Hawk added, in case nobody heard him the first time.

  Carolyn’s arrival ended the interrogation. “Billy, Aunt Dana—can you come watch me ride my big girl bike in the coldysack?”

  “Why don’t you get your bike and race Carolyn,” Hawk told his son, flashing a competition glare.

  Carolyn looked with annoyance at the pudgy child, seemingly remembering the “sand box incident.” “Are you gonna be mean to me?” she asked the boy.

  “Nobody is going to be mean to you or I’ll have The Amish Rifle take care of them,” Dana interjected with a laugh.

  “My kid ain’t afraid of anyone in no Elmo Suit!” Hawk growled.

  Carolyn never met a challenge she didn’t like. “Then what are we waiting for? I’m not getting any younger!”

  The Tour de Cul-de-sac ended with Little Hawk winning by default when Carolyn crashed to the pavement, badly scraping her elbows, and almost giving Beth a stroke. But Billy couldn’t help but to admire the fearlessness in the girl, who only cried because she wasn’t granted a rematch.

  Following the party, at Beth’s request, Billy retrieved one of his latest versions of Peanut Butter & Jelly and met Carolyn in her room for a bedtime story. Her room really was fit for a princess. The cavernous area looked like an airplane hanger, taking up the entire top floor of the barn, about the size of a football field. The roof was twenty feet high and secured by large timber beams. Back in the day, it was used to store bales of hay.

  Despite its grandiosity, the room was set up like a typical little girl’s room. It was filled with dolls, including mop-topped replicas of the Hanson Brothers from Slap Shot fame. Beside them sat half the population of Sesame Street. Beside her bed were pictures of Chuck in his hockey days, along with Carolyn’s hockey stick that she had named Mr. Stick, and her fish, which keeping with the hockey theme, was named Puck. Chuck had told Billy that the independent Carolyn would begin each night in the lonely warehouse of a room, before finding an excuse to slide into bed with him and Beth during the night.

  In the story, the school bully was picking on the quiet Peanut Butter and stole her lunch money. Jelly designed a gimmicky plan to set up the bully so he would be caught by the teacher. After the bully got escorted to the principal’s office, both girls got a lecture about not taking the law into their own hands. A lesson learned. Then, later that night while they are lying side by side in their twin beds, they realized they had learned another lesson about sticking up for each other. Jelly then put an exclamation point on the story when she exclaimed, “We will always stick together!” To which Peanut Butter replied, “Stick together!” before the lights went out.

  The story enthralled Carolyn. Billy shut the book and put on his reporter hat, still bothered by the “incidents” surrounding her.

  “You know you aren’t going to school tomorrow, right?”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Because I made my tongue bleed?” she answered in the form of a question, as if she wasn’t sure.

  “And you thought that was fun?”

  “It was at first, but then everybody got mad at me.”

  “Is it fun when everybody’s mad at you?”

  She went into pouting mode, whimpering, “No, that’s no fun at all.”

  Billy started reading another Peanut Butter & Jelly story, hoping to cut any potential crying off at the pass. The moral of this one was not talking to strangers. Midway through the story, Carolyn took the conversation in a completely different direction.

  “Will Peanut Butter and Jelly help us if Osama Banana comes to get us?”

  Billy was caught off guard. “What?”

  “Osama Banana.”

  “Do you mean Osama Bin Laden?” he asked, confused. Terrorism was the last topic he was prepared to discuss with her.

  “You say banana funny,” she said with a laugh.

  “Where’d you learn about Osama…Banana?”

  “I saw it on TV this morning when I was getting ready for my party. He had a really big beard and they said he knocked down a big building.”

  Billy forgot it was September 11, an infamous day of remembrance.

  “Is he like a dragon?” she asked. “He looked real mean!”

  “Nobody’s going to get you,” he said, sadly thinking that her worst enemy was herself. He was afraid the only dragon was the one inside of her.

  “Promise?”

  He grabbed her tiny hand and looked into her hazel ovals, trying to avoid viewing the gruesome mouth area. “I’ll keep the bad people away from you on one condition.”

  She sighed dramatically. “I promise to eat all my vegetables.”

  Billy smiled. “No, you promise to stop hurting yourself.”

  She again looked mystified. So Billy rephrased, “Stop making boo-boos and blood. It makes your mom and dad sad.”

  “I promise,” she said, then climbed up on Billy like he were a jungle gym and hugged him around his neck. Emotions rushed back that he hadn’t felt in a long time. “We will always stick together,” she said.

  Billy choked back his emotions. “Stick together.”

  Carolyn then pulled away, a fun-loving look spreading across her face. “Let’s pretend we’re dragons.”

  They made odd sounds, pretending to shoot fire. Their laughter echoed through the cavernous room.

  “You be a girl dragon,” Carolyn then said.

  “I’m not going to be a girl dragon.”

  “Girl dragon!”

  “No.”

  “Girl dragon!”

  “No.”

&
nbsp; “You’re funny, Billy,” she said and laughed her contagious laugh. It seemed like all was well in the world once again.

  But like many of the other numbing agents he’d tried, Billy knew the pain was still lurking. He couldn’t help but think that something was wrong with Carolyn Whitcomb.

  Chapter 15

  In the wee morning hours of September 12, a black stretch limousine drove out of the gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The car carried one passenger—U.S. Director of National Intelligence Kerry Rutherford. The silver haired sixty-one-year-old rubbed his wrinkling temples—it had been a long night.

  As the September 11 anniversary passed like a ship in the night, sighs of relief could be heard from the many cabinet members who were pulling an all-nighter in the Situation Room. But a lone day without American bloodshed wouldn’t lift the weight from Rutherford’s shoulders. He knew the shadowy terrorists weren’t as concerned with the symbolism of that date as the politicians were. They wanted to color every day of the calendar the color of Western blood. And when the mushroom cloud filled the sky above New York or Los Angeles, there would be a new date on the calendar to mourn.

  As if the anniversary of 9/11 weren’t enough motivation, the execution of the Iranian hostages had put the president and his cabinet on high alert. The chatter in intelligence circles consisted of everything from contamination of the water supply to infecting cows with a deadly disease, along with the usual suspects: bridges, tunnels, and nuclear reactors. But Rutherford knew the biggest concern for the politicians in the room was an election only fourteen months away.

  He didn’t believe they were bad people who were apathetic to human life. He just felt they were in way over their heads. Rutherford worked under numerous presidents and politicians in his rise from a young marine intelligence officer in Vietnam to the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an influential US intelligence agency run by the Department of Defense and stationed in the Pentagon. With the CIA usually getting the headlines, the DIA often operated under the radar.

  To Rutherford, this president was no different than the others he had served. The current “leader of the free world” happened to be a left-leaning Democrat, but Rutherford had learned that all politicians were made from the same cloth, no matter where they fell on the political spectrum. The Republicans tended to spend more money on defense, but in the end, all politicians were tied to the special interests and started seeking re-election before they even got elected. Rutherford didn’t want to get elected; his goal was to save lives.

  So another day passed without incident in the most thankless of all thankless jobs. No credit for doing well, but ultimate blame when things went wrong. And in his job, wrong was measured in body bags. But despite the drawbacks, Rutherford didn’t hesitate when asked to take the job of intelligence czar. He had just left his job as head of the DIA and was pondering retirement from public life. But he took it because he felt it was his duty to serve the president when asked. To quote his hero, Nathan Hale, his only regret was having only one life to give for his country.

  But any goodwill for surviving the arbitrary September 11 deadline ended around the break of dawn. As the sun rose over the Potomac, word came down of impending congressional hearings regarding the Iran hostage incident, with Rutherford being the star witness. Senator Oliver LaRoche from Pennsylvania, the president’s chief adversary and biggest roadblock to his re-election, would chair the hearings.

  Fearing LaRoche’s grandstanding, Rutherford was peppered with questions by the nervous cabinet. But he didn’t answer truthfully. In the intelligence world, telling the truth was not a virtue—it was a sure way of getting people killed.

  They maneuvered through morning D.C. traffic, eventually crossing over the Potomac River and arriving at the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery.

  “I’ll be about an hour, Benny,” Rutherford told his driver. He then began his daily trek to pay homage to some old friends, which he made every morning when he was in the D.C. area.

  Upon departing the car, he meticulously fixed his suit. A career military man, he was always punctual and his uniform in perfect order. He was more comfortable in his military uniform than the dark “civilian” suit he wore this morning.

  The morning was warm and muggy, with rain expected later in the day. He struggled to walk the rolling hills of the cemetery, passing an endless ocean of white crosses. Crosses representing sacrifice. He felt sweat seeping through the back of his suit jacket and his aging knees creaked, but he pushed on.

  Unlike most tourists, he walked past the eternal flame of John F. Kennedy without a glance. He wasn’t here for politicians. He avoided the trip to view the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The soldiers he came to visit were very much known to him.

  He laid patriotic ribbons on the scattered gravesites of those from his Vietnam unit, just as he did during each visit, including his best friend Greg Ponson, who died in the arms of the doctor who saved his own life during the Tet Offensive in 1968.

  Rutherford then moved to Section-59, where twenty-one fallen comrades were buried. They made up a portion of the over two hundred US military personnel killed at the hands of terrorists on October 23, 1983, in Beirut, an event for which he still felt responsible, and which had shaped his views for the last twenty-plus years. He read the names—Corporal Angellini 1962-1983, Sergeant Laird 1954-1983, First Lieutenant Brewer 1960-1983, Javier R. Heredia, #m-3 United States Navy 1958-1983. And so on, twenty-one times. Kerry Rutherford saluted the men, remembering it like it was yesterday. Tears leaked out from underneath his sunglasses. He wiped them away as if he were wiping away perspiration.

  It was just after six a.m. on that fateful October morning in 1983 when a large delivery truck drove to the Beirut International Airport, which also contained the US Marine barracks. After turning onto an access road leading to the campus, the driver rushed through a barbed-wire fence, passed between two sentry posts, and then crashed through the gate to deliver a direct hit on the lobby of the barracks. The driver detonated the explosives and the four-story building crumbled to the ground, crushing numerous US servicemen while they were sleeping.

  Kerry Rutherford was a DIA intelligence officer in the region and believed that the agency was also asleep, although not in a literal way. He felt they should have been awake to the danger, but politicians and bureaucrats didn’t allow them to do their job to the best of their ability. If they had, then maybe they would’ve recognized the complexity of the enemy the US now faced, one willing to trade lives in return for a carton of Western blood. It foreshadowed the modern day quandary: how does a civilization fight an enemy who is willing to sacrifice their own lives for the cause, when its own society has embraced a culture where such a sacrifice of life is unacceptable? Rutherford was convinced if the storming of the beaches at Normandy occurred in today’s society, there’d be protestors in the streets. Newscasts would promote body counts, declaring it a failure, and demanding that Roosevelt pull out.

  He knew America would have to create its own clandestine fighting force to match this new enemy. Much sacrifice would be necessary, and failure was not an option. Operation Anesthesia would come to symbolize that sacrifice.

  But he now concluded that Anesthesia had run its course. He knew that being exposed, which the Iran hostage debacle almost did, would ruin all the work they had done the last twenty years for the greater good.

  Chapter 16

  Billy thought they had crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s last night concerning his gig as Carolyn’s babysitter, which began Monday morning. But he grossly underestimated the neurosis of Beth Whitcomb.

  The house was littered with notes like a Post-it bomb had detonated. He spotted the first note on the kitchen counter. It provided instructions concerning Carolyn’s pain medication for her tongue. Another hung inside the refrigerator, banning solid food, and providing a choice of applesauce, pudding, and strawberry milk, which Billy was sure wouldn�
��t disappoint her. In the breakfast nook was a note reminding him to check her for fevers every half hour. The largest of the memorandums was taped on the front door. It stated in threatening language that they were under no circumstances to miss, or be late for, the long overdue ceremony to spread Beverly’s ashes over the Long Island Sound, which was to begin at seven o’clock sharp. It was going to be a long day.

  Billy’s first challenge was to get the notoriously deep sleeper out of bed. As always, she began the night in the airport hanger disguised as her bedroom, but after her first dream about dragons she was planted neatly between her parents in their bed. The room was usually full of sunlight from its surrounding windows, which provided a greenhouse effect. But with drapes drawn, Billy entered into darkness.

  He softly shook her, not even receiving a budge. Just a slight whistling snore between the toothless window in the front of her mouth, exposing the healing, but still gruesome, battle-scars on her tongue.

  Mesmerized by the tongue, Billy sat beside the sleeping girl. He was no child psychologist by any means, but knew that people mutilated themselves in an attempt to fill a painful void. So why would such a carefree, happy child commit such an act?

  He never gave any credence to Beth’s genetic hand-me-down theory, which she sadly clung to. He also doubted that Carolyn ever witnessed Beth hurting herself, resulting in a copycat crime. He did believe Beth when she said she stopped any self-destructive behavior the day the Healing Angel of Pain allegedly talked to her. The only other motivation he could think of was attention. But he doubted the charismatic kid would need to go to such extremes to have the class in the palm of her hand. Nothing added up. She was a happy child—she had no painful void.

  Lacking answers, he stood and checked a few more notes, one reminding him to bring Carolyn’s raincoat because of a “40% chance of rain” later in the afternoon. He then turned his attention back to Carolyn, trying to be firmer. “C’mon, sleepy head, time to get up.”