The lieutenant colonel continued: “And nine months later, after hundreds of firefights, Sangin is secure. The schools are open. The Taliban has fled. The marketplace is busy. Your sons, and brothers, and husbands are heroes. You already know this, and now the world does, too.”
Patrick looked at the men mostly standing to either side of him and he saw that all had solemn young faces, few of them more than thirty years old. Many had been flown in from military hospitals around the country. Some had tears in their eyes and some were missing hands and fingers and feet. He saw amputees and double and triple amputees. There were wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs gleaming in the sunlight, and rebuilt faces and men with only one good eye and men with no good eye, and there were tears in eyes both good and bad, flesh and glass alike. Patrick saw brain-injured men who could not easily process what they were doing here or fully control their bodies, and those so severely wounded they could no longer care for themselves.
Patrick also knew that many of the men sitting around him carried scars and damage that few could see, except maybe for the people who loved them most. They carried anger, distrust, boredom, frustration. They bore flashbacks and sleepless nights and fits of temper. They wondered why their countrymen knew so little about what they had done. They were embarrassed and angered by the sudden effusive thankfulness they received from strangers—the applause, the beers bought, the meals on the house—and the uneasy silence that always followed. They wondered why the civilians used their freedom to spend hours at malls or in front of televisions and monitors watching insipid entertainment and playing games. They wondered why there were no bond drives or food drives or rubber drives to aid the war effort, like in the past. They wondered why it was all up to them, why the war felt like some bizarre excursion that only they were asked to take. They worried about how they were going to handle growing families and mounting debt with skills so often viewed as inappropriate for civilian work. They wondered how to make employers see that not every ex-fighter was a ticking bomb. They wanted something they could do and do well, something specific that had meaning. Most of them wanted, deep down in their burdened young hearts, Patrick knew, to go back and fight again, because war was by far the greatest excitement they had ever known and it was honest and selfless and brought meaning to some.
Patrick knew that there were other men here who, like him, had derived no meaning from the death and destruction. And he believed that this was a wound too—the shock of being hit by a truth that was difficult to speak and painful to hear—that these deaths and mutilations, these last full measures, had gained nothing. He remembered patrolling the enormous fields of opium poppies not to destroy them but to protect the crop and the farmers from the Taliban. And he remembered realizing, as the weeks wore on and they patrolled and fought and died for meager portions of ground, that after they went home the Taliban would come down from the mountains, and the poppies and the profits and Sangin would be theirs again and there would be no one strong and generous and brave enough to fight them off.
* * *
Then some of the returned men came to the mic and spoke of their brothers-in-arms, and these tributes were tearful and filled with love and respect and gratitude.
“McClellan was a brother to me…”
“I think Corporal Lavinder was personally sent to me by God. He saved my life and because of that, his is gone…”
“Fenwick was one of those guys, he walked into a room and lit it up…”
“What hurts most is knowing that Randy isn’t here…”
Patrick thought of Myers and Zane and the many others he had known who had died, and as the sunlight warmed his face he closed his eyes for just a moment and endured again the flash and the sound that strew Myers and Zane like rags to the steep rocky hillside. He let the sound ring in his ears until it quieted and he offered an open prayer to any God willing to hear it.
Then the families spoke. Wyatt Chukas, the brother of Private First Class Paul Chukas, brought Paul’s bomb-sniffing Labrador to the podium with him. Buddy was yellow and small for a lab and he sat with calm alertness as the man spoke. Wyatt told of his brother being mortally wounded by a Taliban sniper, and how when he fell, Buddy ran to him and stood over him until help could arrive. The Marines had brought the dog back and delivered him to the Chukas family and Buddy had gravitated to Wyatt. Patrick wished he had Zane back here and thought, You feel the tears piling up behind your sunglasses because Buddy was Zane, and Myers was Chukas and you were all in hell together but only Buddy and you are alive to remember it and who was it, exactly, got to make that fucking decision? You stand here now but you can’t be blamed for living. You pray: don’t blame me. Your throat aches and it feels like something inside is going to break loose but it doesn’t. It hasn’t yet. The breeze cools your face and your back aches from standing in one place for so long.
* * *
Later Patrick excused himself from his family and Iris then drove Bostik, Salimony, and Messina to a liquor store in Oceanside, where they stocked up. They doubled back to the beach on base, which was open only to military and their guests. Today there were few people. Patrick used four-wheel and drove right down onto the sand. The waves were small and the surface of the water was burred by the breeze. They drank bourbon and tequila mixed with soft drinks and played two-on-two football and got soaked to their knees in the cold water. They dug into the sand around a concrete fire ring and slept.
By late afternoon the day was cool so they got to drinking again. They built a fire with wood they’d bought and found some sticks to cook the hot dogs on. They talked about the war and the women they’d fucked since coming home but mostly the war. Patrick said nothing about Iris Cash because he hadn’t even kissed her and he didn’t like that word applied to her, even though he’d do that with Iris in a heartbeat. And he suspected that his friends were mostly just talk anyway.
“Well, how about the hottie that was with your family back there, Pat?” asked Messina.
“She’s just a friend.”
This brought chortles and around went the bottle again, each man in turn upending it. “To friends, then,” said Bostik. “To fuckin’ Myers, man.”
“And fuckin’ Zane,” said Salimony. He had a nervous leg that bounced whenever he sat and even now in the sand it twitched rhythmically. Salimony balanced the bourbon bottle on his knee and watched the liquid slosh. “I wish he could have made the party today. I loved that dog.”
“I read this made-up fiction book once,” said Patrick, “that said heaven is a big barn where you get to live forever with all your dogs and every woman you ever had.”
“It’d just be one fucked-up brawl,” said Bostik.
“Yeah,” said Salimony. “Like when we grappled Sergeant Pendejo. And then, goddamn, two days later he’s at the cooker yelling for us to come and get a burrito and the sniper hits him right between the eyes! I mean the spatula’s still in his hands and his brains are actually on the wall! On it! Oh, man!”
“So here’s a toast to Sergeant Pendejo,” said Messina. “He was an asshole but he was our asshole.”
“To our asshole!” they called out.
And so it went past dark and into the night until they saw headlights down by the waterline bouncing toward them. What with the wild up and down of the lights and the liquor swirling through him Patrick saw an entire enemy convoy but it turned out to be only two jeeps. The jeeps stopped and the headlights seared into them and four MPs got out and came to them. “Drunk Marines,” said one of them.
“Says who?” demanded Bostik.
“You guys going to be cool? Because if not, we’re getting out the batons right now.”
“We’re cool,” said Patrick.
“Look how fuckin’ cool we are,” said Messina.
“All right. Get out your IDs, you drunk jarheads.”
“Excuse me but we’re United States Marines,” said Bostik. “And we served in Helmand and we don’t take one drop a shit from boot POG rent-a-
cop cherries like you.” Patrick watched him take a swig of the second bottle of tequila, then hurl it at the lead MP.
The bottle missed badly but smashed the left headlight of the front jeep. Patrick saw the glittering shower of glass and light, then the fight was on. He was drunk and stupid and slow against the sober MPs with their truncheons. The first time he went down he thought he’d just stay down, but he could hear Bostik moaning and Salimony cursing and a baton landing hard, so he stood up and surged forth. Bostik was swinging into the blows and Salimony advancing on his attacker with a bottle he held by the neck, and Messina was besieged from two sides. Patrick whirled, realizing too late that the fourth MP could only be behind him.
* * *
He woke up on a concrete slab with a thin mattress on it and a scratchy olive green blanket bunched up under him. There was an unexplained and weird tightness to the back of his head. He sat up then eased himself back down, so great was his headache.
“You may as well stay up,” said Bostik. “They’re letting us out at o-six hundred.”
Patrick looked at his watch but it was gone. “What is all this?”
“This is morning,” said Salimony. “Before was beach. Drinking. Fight. Hospital. Brig. You got ten stitches in the back of your head. They’re not going to charge us because they beat the shit out of us so bad.”
“That seems fair,” said Patrick. He sat back up and reached a hand toward the agony. He felt gauze and tape and shaven scalp. He heard a steel door open and shut, then the sound of footsteps coming toward their tank.
CHAPTER TWELVE
With an iron headache and occasionally blurred vision, Patrick worked a full day on the groves. His father and brother offered him the easier tasks, but Patrick worked even harder than usual. It was the Marine thing to do. He was black and dripping sweat after an hour and his scalp burned along the stitches. He guzzled water to help his brain fire right. The three men finished off the irrigation repair and half of the remaining trunk painting. But there was a heavy quiet among them as they rode back to the house in Archie’s work truck, because Escondido Farm Credit Bank had refused to loan on the replacement trees.
Patrick skipped cocktails with his family, cleaned up and was waiting for Iris Cash in the Village View lobby at sunset. He walked her to his truck. Her face with the sunlight on it was lovely. His head ached all the way down to his toenails. He told Iris he dinged himself roughhousing with buddies the night before. “I apologize for ditching you yesterday.”
“That memorial was one of the most emotional moments of my life,” said Iris. “And you were the only person there I knew, and I’ve known you for less than a week. It was just really, really … I’m not sure what it was, Patrick. I can’t describe it. I’m writing a series about it for the paper. Trying to find words.”
“I never expected anything like that. Even when I enlisted for infantry I never thought it would include such a thing. A ceremony for the mangled and dead and all their families.”
Iris considered a long moment before speaking. “You must be terribly proud and terribly sad.”
“Those words are good, Iris. And really, I’m sorry about leaving you there with my family and just running off.”
“I’ve been reading about soldiers coming home.”
“I’m a Marine, not a soldier.”
“I didn’t know there was a distinction. But I do know from my reading that after deployment, Marines really need their friends.”
“I know I need to move on, get out of Afghanistan.”
They came to the truck and Patrick held open the door for her. She put her soft fingers on his freshly shaven cheek and turned his head to one side for a better look at the wound. “Roughhousing with buddies? You’ve got stitches, Pat!”
“It was purely foolish.”
He handed her up to the cab and watched her as she swung in. They set out for La Jolla. Patrick could smell Iris’s scent and he felt like he was gliding down I-15 on it. Iris talked of the Marines of the Three-Five she’d seen at Pendleton, and how she’d like to talk to every one of them and put it all in a book. She said it would be fiction and Patrick wondered why you’d make things up about a war that was actual. You couldn’t make it any truer than it was. Iris said she talked to some of the Gold Star families and absolutely refused to cry, even if they did, because she felt superfluous and trivial in their presence.
She told him the Village View was going to run her story on the discovery of the arson evidence front page, and Fallbrook Fire might even give them a photo of it to accompany the article. The point of the whole thing was to get people involved, maybe find a witness, or someone who had overheard someone saying suspicious things.
She said this DHS arson specialist, Knechtl, was a very intense man who wouldn’t say much about his investigation. He wore a dark suit and had a pale complexion and a big forehead and a small mustache. He looked more like an undertaker than a special agent of the DHS, in her opinion. Knechtl said that he’d questioned several persons of interest but he wouldn’t say who, or where they lived, or if there were any leads. He addressed the whole Village View staff, then asked each of them to list three local people they thought might set a fire like this. He passed one sheet of blank white paper and one pencil to each person in the room, then asked them to meditate for one full minute before answering. About one minute into the silence Iris had peeked and caught Knechtl checking his wristwatch. She’d left her sheet blank, as had her editor, who was sitting on one side of her, and the art director, sitting on the other. She did note two people writing away, voluminously, it looked, arms around their papers for privacy.
Iris looked intently out the truck windows, often turning back to study something they’d just passed. She was alert and curious. Just a glimpse of her did something good to Patrick’s heart. She talked about the latest developments in the Cruzela Storm benefit concert for the lighted Fallbrook crosswalks. She thought it was weird that some people were trying to make their town better while at least one other person was trying to burn it to the ground. Fire Chief Bruck had told her that no terrorist organization had stepped forward to claim responsibility for the Fallbrook fire. He doubted that Al-Qaeda was behind it. He went on to say that 80 percent of arsonists lived within five miles of where they started their fires, which put this guy in Fallbrook, Bonsall, Rainbow, or De Luz.
“He said guy, because there are very few female arsonists,” said Iris.
“You ladies have too much good sense to do that.”
She looked at him dubiously. They made La Jolla in an hour. Patrick looked up at the LDS temple aglow in the night, and the golden trumpeter fixed to the top of the east spire and he wondered if Mormons were anything like Presbyterians. They take care of their own, he thought. He followed his GPS toward the address, which turned out to be a mansion that stood in a neighborhood of mansions staggered high upslope above the city.
Patrick looked down at the ocean below and the lights of La Jolla flickering. He used the intercom and the gate slid open quietly. He came up the drive and spotted the Mako, trailered and displayed beautifully as a jewel in the driveway lights. He felt a quiver of excitement and he braked carefully and pulled up in front of the house. The front lawn was an emerald expanse and sprinklers hissed upon it. Patrick got out and smelled the ocean and thought it went well with the smell of Iris.
He walked slowly around the craft, port to starboard. It was a foam-construction skiff, seventeen feet long, with room for two clients and one captain. It was old but looked well cared for. There were dents and scratches in the decks and gunwales but Patrick saw no patches or dark spots or other signs of waterlogged foam beneath. The cleats and latches looked new. The engine was a Mercury, to which Patrick was partial. Her CF tags were soon to expire but her name, Fatta the Lan’, was clear in black cursive and recently redone. He felt dizzy with hope. He chanced a glance at Iris, who was looking at him.
A man came down the walk from the house. Patrick heard him be
fore he saw him. He wore a white dress shirt tucked into dark slacks, suspenders, and dress shoes, and he was not much older than Patrick, who half expected the man’s father to come out next. Instead, two small blond boys, dressed in matching red polo shirts, hustled through the door and came down the walk. The man introduced himself as Kevin Pangborn and shook hands with Patrick and Iris. He had a small potbelly—not a couch-potato’s potbelly, Patrick thought, but the potbelly of a well-off man, a man who ate well and played some sport—and his brown hair was short and brushed back. He wore gold cuff links.
“Just back from overseas?” he asked.
“Ten days now.”
“Thank you for keeping this country safe and free. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”
“You’re welcome, sir.” Patrick watched the boys watching him.
“You said you’re going to guide fly fishers in the bay?”
“That’s right.”
“Great.”
“What do you do for a living?” asked Iris. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“We raise capital and turn around ailing companies. I’ve done some fly-fishing. It’s not easy. Maybe I can hire you to guide me.”
“I’ll need a boat first,” said Patrick.
“No!” said one of the boys. “It’s ours!”
Pangborn turned to face them and the boys looked down into the Fatta the Lan’. “Well, Patrick, this Mako would be good for guiding fly fishers. Both casting decks are nonskid and that fore railing I had built will keep your clients from falling overboard. The Mercury’s only got twenty hours on it. The beam is wide so it’s a dry ride even when the chop is bad. The aerator for the bait tank is touchy. I’ve got the GPS and sonar inside the house, and they’re part of the deal. I paid sixteen-two, have the records and service receipts.”
“Why are you selling it?”
“I bought my dream boat, a Triton. And a slip down in San Diego. I don’t need this one anymore.”
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