KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  So I Expedition myself through the bucolic splendor of Jefferson to Goose Hill Road and over some lovely sweeping ridges to a hilltop meadow with a gravel road climbing through two aisles of towering oaks to a squarish white saltbox and a rambling white barn. Over the front door an oval plaque said 1767. Damn, I thought, I can barely remember back then.

  “Come in!” he yelled before I knocked.

  Burrowed in a rocker by the fireplace, a tattered afghan on his lap, he gave me a beady tobacco-toothed grin. He was ancient and wrinkled, freckle-pated and thin as a rail. A tall coffee cup and a jug of blackberry brandy sat on a table beside him. He offered me a bony hand and pointed at the kitchen. “There’s coffee on the stove, cups on the shelf and,” he eyed the brandy, “we’ll sweeten it up a bit. Unless, of course, you’re not a drinking man.”

  “I usually drink gin but that brandy looks fine.”

  “I like sin too but brandy’s better.”

  “No,” I said louder, “I’m happy with gin.”

  “Special Forces guys like you, should be able to drink women under the table.”

  “That’s not what I said –”

  “But not Bucky as I remember. Said it steals your edge.”

  “Yeah, Bucky doesn’t drink.”

  “Not lucky?” Silas snorted. “Maybe you’re right –”

  In the kitchen a pitted blue enamel coffee pot sat on an ancient black woodstove with ornate chrome trim. The stove’s front door said Art Eureka.

  This ain’t gonna be easy, I told myself. “I like your stove,” I said, coming back with coffee.

  He cocked his head. “Who drove?”

  “The cookstove. The Art Eureka.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? Made in Boston, 1845. Brought up here by horse and wagon.” Silas poured lots of brandy into my coffee. “Makes the best corn bread in the world.”

  The coffee was the kind that eats metal off a spoon. I understood the reason for the blackberry brandy. “My father,” he said, “was born on that stove.”

  “Born on it?”

  “Right out there in that kitchen. January 12, 1889, so cold they couldn’t keep the house warm even with three fires. So when his mother – my grandmother – was in labor, they laid her on her straw and feather mattress on that stove, to keep her warm.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Lazy? I think not. We worked night and day.”

  “That’s not what I said –”

  “You hard of hearing, son?” Silas fumbled in the afghan and tugged out an old tin oil funnel, the kind you use to pour oil into your engine. “Hold this to your ear – you’ll hear better.”

  So I sat with the galvanized oil spout against my ear, lending it to him on occasion till we finally shared it back and forth, and each understood the other better. “Bucky’s having trouble finding a lawyer,” I said. “Nobody wants to represent a guy who supposedly shot some environmentalist.”

  “I don’t care what the doctors say. This potion here,” he raised his cup, “I been drinking it every day for fifty years. Keeps me going. Used to help me get it up too, but we’re past those days now.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said consolingly, wanting to get back on track. “Do you know if anybody in the family could help pay Bucky’s legal costs?”

  “You young guys, don’t realize how lucky you are.”

  I thought about that. Any time you’re not in jail or dead or wounded you’re lucky. “I do.”

  “You just seen Bucky?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “How is he?”

  “Down. It would help if…”

  “He don’t think he’s getting out.” Silas shook his head, an exasperated look.

  “He may not.”

  “Bucky’s like a steel spring, never relaxes. Even as a kid he was always watching out. Didn’t have a bad childhood, worked the farm nights, weekends and summers, we all did. No sir, no watching television for us.”

  “Bucky was that way in our outfit. Which was a good thing. Saved some lives a few times. Including mine.”

  “He said you were right to shoot that girl but he wouldn’t have.” Silas adjusted the afghan. “Said it took guts.”

  I was going to say anybody would’ve done it but that wasn’t true.

  “He also said you’re a pain in the ass.”

  “So’s he.”

  “He’s a pain in the ass to everybody. Keeps us all at a distance, won’t spend time with people –”

  “That’s just PTSD.”

  Silas glowered at me. “I fought the Germans from Normandy till we met the Soviets on the Elbe. Never got none of that damn PST. Got so many bullet holes in my jacket and so many friends killed… had so many grenades go off in my ears… You young guys ever hear of the febelwerfer? Goddamn thing’ll kill a whole division – you know how many of them went off around me?”

  “I don’t wish that on anyone. I hate war.”

  “So what did you do with those Talibans? Kiss their asses?”

  “No. We didn’t do that.”

  There was no point to tell him I’d killed more than I wanted. That I had hated Afghanistan till I realized how we had loaded all this misery on them years ago. When we attacked them after 9/11 we said it was because a few Muslim terrorists who lived there had destroyed our towers, but hadn’t we been the ones who installed those terrorists there?

  And hadn’t we been using Afghanistan as a geopolitical tool and military pawn for decades? Hadn’t we even started their Nine-Year War with the Soviets? Which destroyed much of their country and killed a million Afghanis, mostly civilians? Then used them like cannon fodder? Hadn’t we even given them Osama bin Laden to poison their souls?

  Like I mentioned in that other book, the trouble with defending freedom is it ain’t always what you think. “So,” I says, “Bucky came to see you the night Ronnie Dalt was killed –”

  Silas waved his hand. “We’ll get to it.” He picked at the moth-chewed afghan. “Life passes so fast it could’ve happened in one night. And when you get old and look back, most of it didn’t seem to happen at all.”

  “You mean like with Bucky?” I was still trying to keep him on track.

  He gave me a watery glare. “I worked most of my life as a precision lens maker in New York City. More than forty years.” He shook his head in wonderment. “And I don’t remember any of it. The only damn times I remember is that war, and before then two years riding the rails – it was the Depression, all the tramps’ camps, looking for work all over America.”

  “So why were those times different?”

  “Because I lived every moment. Nothing was familiar. Except fear. Or hunger.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Except fear.”

  “But how amazing to be young,” he added, off on another side trip. “To look at me now you’d never believe I could run faster than the wind, climb trees and swim across Casco Bay and dance under a foot-high bar – of course the dances back then were all about sex – you were showing the girl what you and she were going to do later…”

  “You were talking about the night Bucky was here – last December twenty-ninth.”

  “Yes, yes. We’ll get there.” He held up the brandy bottle, glanced into his empty cup. “Young man, you wouldn’t get me some more ice, would you?” He held up three fingers. “Just three cubes.”

  When I came back with the ice he’d tucked that afghan over his knees and half-filled the cup with brandy. I dropped in the three cubes.

  “Now,” he took a long drink. “Bucky never came here that night. Though I was supposed to say he did.”

  Oh shit. “Why?”

  “He went to see his girlfriend.”

  Double

  BUCKY WAS TOO STRAIGHT to have a girlfriend. “Who is she?” I said to Silas, nonchalantly as I could. He leaned forward, rheumy eyes on mine. “Damned if I know.”

  “Will she testify?”

  “That he was with her that night? Seems not.”

&n
bsp; “How can she let Bucky do life when she knows he’s innocent?”

  He chewed an ice cube. “They both get blamed for it?”

  This was the loony bin. The whole deal was loony. I stood. “Who is she?”

  “I’ll ask, maybe she’ll talk to you.”

  “Silas!” I almost screamed. “Why didn’t you say this to the cops? If you knew he was with her why didn’t you just fucking say he was with you?”

  He shook his head, clacked his teeth. “Hand of God.”

  I waited. “The hand of God?”

  He nodded as if I’d said something profound. Finally I said, “What’s that mean?”

  He’d wandered off somewhere, came back. “Comes down, strikes you. When you lie.”

  “But it’s not a lie! Not if you know he was with her!”

  He smiled at me fatuously, as if I’d fallen into a trap. “Just because he said it, doesn’t mean it was true.”

  I wanted to pick up his chair and dump him outside in the snow, get rid of that sappy grin. “I’m going to the cops.”

  He looked surprised. “You, a two-time jailbird? Who’d believe you?”

  “I’m saying you lied.”

  “I have so much trouble remembering things. Don’t forget, I’m ninety-seven…”

  He had me there. By now the cops would pay scarce attention to anything he said. But they might get very interested in me. More than I wanted.

  It was time to see Bucky again. Lucky for him there’d be a half inch of bulletproof glass between us. Otherwise I’d kill him.

  DRIVING BACK TO LEXIE’S got me distracted by the beauty of Maine. Hill upon hill of serrated conifers rising toward far blue ridges and raw granite peaks. Some of the world’s loveliest mountains cloaked in forests a thousand shades of winter. Wide blue rivers, flashing streams, clear lakes – the greatest outdoor paradise left in eastern America.

  So why did these Wind Mafia guys want to destroy this? Like Pa says, the people who never have enough money are the poor and the very rich.

  It isn’t just “guys” who want to destroy it. Take a look at an industrial wind company and often their lawyers are women who will do anything for money, or they have brainless cuties to spout at public meetings about how environmental they are. It’s unlikely any of those women ever had a good lay in her life. Or she couldn’t be like this. Good sex gives you a deep connection to the world, makes you love beauty. If you had that you couldn’t build industrial wind projects.

  Speaking of good sex, it was sorely missing from my life. I couldn’t have Lexie, and there was no one else. Yet to hold a lovely woman in your arms, to get to know and feel her body and who she is, to give her excitement and pleasure and have hers in return is a wonderful gift. One we could give each other much more often, in my view.

  But jail will do that to you – all those days in that little cell and there’s never a way afterwards to get enough good sex to make up for the months or years you’ve lost.

  6 WEEKS AFTER THE BULLET hit my helmet in Afghanistan I was back with my unit checking a village in the Kush when hideous screams, a sound of crackling flames and the nauseous smell of burning flesh burst from a side alley. We raced toward the sound, watching for trip wires and ambushes and other nasty shit.

  It was a girl about fifteen on fire and terribly burned, her face and half her torso carbonized, while a group of men clustered around her, one holding a gasoline can. “I’m sorry,” she begged, “Father please please kill me now please oh God please kill me!”

  “What happened?” I yelled at the men in my lousy Pashto. They turned toward me angrily, the woman howling and writhing.

  “She looked at a man,” a white-bearded guy said. “A man not her husband.”

  “She what?”

  “In the market. Raised her eyes to him. A woman’s eyes trap men in Hell, the Koran says… It is our family’s honor –”

  Her eyes were gone but maybe she heard my voice, this foreign soldier’s voice. “Please kill me,” she screamed, voice raucous with pain and fire, “Oh God please kill me!”

  One of my buddies grabs my shoulder, ‘C’mon, man, let’s go, this shit happens all the time here –”

  “It is a just punishment,” a young Afghani in a dirty headscarf says. “God’s will.”

  “Who did it?” I yelled at the old man.

  “That is her husband,” nodded at the younger man. “It was his duty.”

  She was dying. In the most horrible pain. There was no way to save her. I shot her in the head. Her body quivered once, stretched out and lay still.

  “Infidel criminal,” the younger man screamed. “She needed to suffer!”

  I shot him too, full of hatred for them all, for this vicious evil culture, this maniac religion.

  And that was the start of all my troubles. Perhaps I should not have shot her. She was dying, I just tried to lessen her pain. For the men to burn her was an honor killing, common in Muslim countries, where a girl can be beaten to death or stoned or burned with fire or acid by her father and brothers just for showing her face.

  The Army didn’t see it that way. I was shipped back to the States and after a couple of months in Colorado’s Fort Carson lockup I got a brief trial and a twenty-year sentence in Leavenworth Army Prison. A civilian massacre, the Army said. Bad for our image.

  And Bucky testified at my trial that I should not have shot her because my killing her and her husband intensified hostility against American troops. Maybe so, but everybody there hated us already, and what would you have done?

  Lexie came to my trial and that’s where Bucky decided he wanted her.

  And I’d still be in Leavenworth Army Prison but for the West Point grad and lawyer who went to bat for me and got me out five months later. Just long enough Inside to learn what a horrible Hell prison can be. I beg you if you’ve never been Inside don’t go there. And if you have, please don’t go there again.

  It’s better to be play by the rules, no matter how crooked they are.

  Which I usually did, to begin with. It’s just that events crept up on me.

  THERE WAS STILL GIN in the Tanqueray handle so Lexie and I went through that as well as some home-grown and pretty soon it began to feel like the good old days.

  But I couldn’t decide if I should tell her about Bucky’s girlfriend. “If you had to do this all over,” I said, “what then?”

  She looked at me speculatively. “You son of a bitch –”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “If I knew you were getting out, all that?”

  I shook my head. “Not all that –”

  “I’d have waited.” A caustic grin. “But not twenty years for a guy I’d known five weeks.”

  “Like I kept telling you.”

  She gave me a kind smile, squeezed my hand. “I remember.”

  “And now we can’t. Be together.”

  She looked at the white empty wall, back to me. “That’s up to us.”

  I poured us more Tanqueray, forgetting the vermouth. “Suppose Bucky’s ever had another woman?”

  Her eyes widened. “Since he was with me? Never.”

  I downed my glass. “How you know?”

  “What?” her voice rose, “you’re saying he was fucking somebody?”

  I shook my head, retreating fast. “Just wondering.”

  She seemed pissed for a moment then forgot about it. “I’m going up the mountain tomorrow,” I said. “See if I can figure where that .308 went.”

  We fried some home-grown burgers and sliced home-grown potatoes and onions, and she steamed some peas she and Bucky had picked and frozen last August. I felt bad for him being in the slammer and I here with his wife. But I wasn’t going to cross the line, and I was only here because of him.

  I should explain you that before my final tour in Afghanistan I had spent two months back in Hawaii, surfing all day and hitting bars at night. Wonderful times with beautiful women, sometimes the same one, sometimes two – I was filling mys
elf up with life so when I returned to those deadly mountains I had fewer regrets.

  Because I expected to die in the Hindu Kush. You would’ve too, in my place.

  Then I met Lexie with her long cashmere blonde hair and sinuous dancer’s body that never quit all night, how she inhaled life at speeds that would kill ten normal people, with her razor tongue and even sharper brain. The lovely way she could skewer you with one sentence. And all the way down inside her bones a deep kindness. A love of people. A love of truth. Of life.

  Lexie emanated sex the way a rose does perfume. As the sun does heat. And the sexiest part was she didn’t even know it.

  So it was intense sex at first sight. But we soon fell in love.

  She was doing a masters in vertebrate biology at U of H and working nights as a pole dancer in a Honolulu strip club called Tropical Palms. So all day she was in classes or labs or studying and most nights working till two am. I would wait for her, nursing martinis at Tropical Palms, till hand in hand we walked the seven blocks back to her place through the cool misty Honolulu night.

  Suddenly I had only twenty-one days left. We watched each day tick off as if awaiting our mutual execution. Numbed by the hope it would never come. That we could lose ourselves forever in this loving sexual bliss, this endless intense investigation of each other’s feelings, minds and bodies.

  When I left for Afghanistan we agreed no ties, just the warm memories of being together and the promise to meet when, and if, I got back. When they arrested me for shooting that girl who’d been burnt alive and I got sent for trial to Fort Carson, Colorado, Lexie came from Honolulu often as she could – an expensive ten-hour trip. And that’s when she met Bucky, who had to testify too. And when I got twenty years in Leavenworth Military Prison the last thing I told her in my state of benumbed despair was forget about me, I’ll never get out.

  So when that wonderful West Point grad and lawyer did get me out five months later I never called Lexie. Because by then she was with Bucky.

  Now she was sitting across the patchwork vinyl tablecloth, her fierce green eyes digging into mine. “Things happen like they’re ‘sposed to.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  She bit her lip, hard. “I tell myself that.”