Authors: Christopher Rice
John hugged her right back. He assumed it was a coincidence, running into the wife of a Marine whose life he had saved, and his heart did a jump he hadn’t thought it to be capable of doing. Surely this was some sort of sign from an otherwise cruel universe that he was on the right path—that just bringing this kid to this pizza place was a good act. How many hours did he spend replaying what Bowers had done for him nine months earlier? And he spent almost no time acknowledging himself for the life he had saved.
“What are you doing here?” John asked.
“Looking for you,” she said. “We stopped by your…place, talked to some guy named Emilio.”
“You and Charlie? Where is he?”
“Outside. He needs to see you, John.”
“How is he?”
She nodded and looked at some spot over his shoulder, then glanced down at her feet as if she might find her next words there. But all she could manage was, “I don’t know. He just says he needs to see you.” John had no trouble believing it, given that they had driven all the way up to his trailer park, and then another twenty minutes south to find him.
After he had introduced Li’l D to the woman who would be watching him for the next few minutes, John headed for the patio where Trina had told him he could find Charlie.
It’s Bowers,
he thought.
Charlie knows why Bowers isn’t calling me back. Something’s happened to him and he’s here to tell me.
After taking a couple of deep breaths, John realized how absurd this thought truly was. For all he knew, Bowers and Charlie Miller had never even met each other. The two men came from separate halves of John’s Marine Corps career—he’d met Charlie in boot camp, only to end up fighting next to him during the Battle of Fallujah years later. Bowers, on the other hand, had been the first captain John had ended up under after officially becoming a “Reconnaissance Man,” a title that had been assigned to him only after he completed twelve weeks of backbreaking training that made boot camp look like summer camp.
In some ways, Charlie Miller was from a former life, a life in which John had been a hero, pure and simple, a life in which no one had been forced to give up an eye to save his life.
During the Battle of Fallujah in the fall of 2004, John had been part of a four-man sniper team doing sweeps for IEDs in Ramadi. The team went inside a seemingly abandoned house, when a grenade was tossed into the room by an insurgent cowering on the floor of the hallway. Charlie Miller was blasted out onto the balcony, where he was hit by insurgent sniper fire the minute he got to his feet. The grenade took out half of the insurgent’s head, so John crabwalked out onto the balcony to cover Charlie while another member of their team went to call the Quick Reaction Force. For three hours, he and Charlie lay together, John counting his blessings that the concrete spines of the balcony railing were too thick to allow a bullet to pass through. But mother of God, those sons of bitches tried. Volley after volley of AK-47 fire splintered against the concrete railing while John told Charlie dirty jokes and tried to keep him talking, because checking Charlie’s wounds or trying to carry him back inside would expose them both to sniper fire.
Outside the Golden Door, he found Charlie sitting at a concrete patio table, a pair of metal crutches leaning against the bench seat next to him. His long legs were sticking out almost straight in front of him as he rested his back against the edge of the table. He almost looked relaxed, but John knew the reason for his extended posture was that he couldn’t move his left leg thanks to the bullet that had felled him on the balcony that day. His brown hair was now a shaggy mess, and John thought he resembled the pimply-faced Tennessee hick John had met long ago in boot camp, the kid who could barely suck down an entire cigarette and who held a rifle like it was a cottonmouth that might sink its fangs into him, not the Marine he had grown into by the time they went to Iraq.
Charlie sat up as straight as he could to receive John’s one-armed embrace, and John emitted a high, barking laugh that sounded surprised and relieved at the same time. “You look good,” John said before he could think twice.
Charlie lit a Marlboro Red and blew a thin stream of smoke from pursed lips. “I look like shit, man. I didn’t come all this way for you to blow smoke up my ass.”
“Good,” he said. “’Cause I don’t smoke.” Charlie’s laugh was tense and almost silent—it worked his shoulders and eyes more than it did his mouth.
“What you gonna say next, John? Trina look good, too? Shit—she’s gained like twenty fucking pounds since I got back, and she walks around the house like I beat her with a stick.” He sucked a quick drag off his cigarette. “She wants to move close to her parents in Kentucky, but I can’t get the same kind of care out there, so the answer’s no. But she keeps bringing it up and the answer keeps bein’ no.” Charlie’s eyes caught on John’s, as if he had suddenly heard himself. “Shit, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to start off this way. And I don’t mean to rain on your little pizza party, but sometimes when you can’t move your legs so good, you just gotta sit in it, you know what I mean?”
He didn’t know what Charlie meant, so he just nodded gravely for a few seconds. Then he asked, “What are you
starting off
here, buddy?”
Charlie’s eyes focused on some point in the distance; then he started digging in the plastic drugstore bag on the bench next to him. As he pulled out a large manila envelope and handed it to John, he said, “Did I ever tell you I’ve got a cousin who’s a PI over in Murietta? He owed me a favor, so…”
John opened the envelope and extracted a manila file folder. In the series of eight-by-ten photographs that slid onto the stone table, the man who had raped John’s younger brother walked his dog through a grassy neighborhood of one-story tract homes. The dog was a healthy adult boxer with an alert expression. As for the man himself, not much had changed about Danny Oster in the ten years since John had almost beaten him to death outside of their house in Yucca Valley. Oster still had the same shaggy blond hair that made him look like an eighties rock star; the same long, fat-lipped mouth; the same flabby arms and freckled shoulders.
As he studied the photographs, John tried to focus on the sound of his own breathing. He groped for some memory of when he had shared this dark chapter of his life with Charlie. After a few minutes, he remembered—the same BBQ in Oceanside where Charlie’s wife wept and thanked him for saving her husband’s life. Considering he had never shared the story with any other Marine, he had to have been seriously overserved, so overserved he could barely remember doing it.
Charlie said, “The reason you couldn’t find him is that he left the country for a while. Came back about a year and a half ago and changed his name to Charles Keaton. He’s got a job at the IT department at the University of Redlands. Computers and some shit.” That made sense, considering Oster had been a computer freak back when everyone in Yucca Valley was willing to sell their soul for a dial-up connection.
“I told you I tried to find him?” John asked.
“Yeah. You don’t remember?”
“Barely, Charlie.”
This answer and the sluggish tone with which John delivered it made Charlie shift against the bench and run one hand down his paralyzed left thigh. “You saved my life. I sat up nights thinking about how I could repay you.” Charlie looked his way. When he saw that John’s attention was on him and not on the photographs, he bit his lower lip a few times and said, “Did I do the right thing? Tell me I did the right thing, John.”
As his father had liked to say, Charlie had opened up a can of snakes, each of which had nine lives. Yes, he had tried to find Danny Oster, but that had been years ago, back when his little brother was still alive and John was convinced that some final reckoning with Oster might lift Dean Houck out of the life of a heroin junkie. Back then finding Oster had been a desperate, last-ditch effort to bring his brother back from the land of the living dead, one he had turned to only after all his attempts to reconnect with Dean had failed. And ultimately, another deployment to the Middle East had driven out all thoughts of his broken family and derailed his search.
Now John was confident he had only mentioned this pursuit to Charlie because he had wanted to come off as the protective older brother. But he couldn’t fault Charlie for trying to pay John back for what he had done for him that day, even if he believed Charlie would have done the same for him in a heartbeat.
He had become so lost in his thoughts that he had failed to notice the transformation Charlie had undergone. His eyes were wide and fearful and he was leaning forward slightly, as if it were helping him to breathe. He had raised one crutch on the pavement next to him, as if at any moment he might try to push himself to his feet.
“I thought it might be good for you to have the information,” Charlie whispered. “That’s all.” He sounded like a man whose marriage proposal had just been rejected.
“I appreciate that, Charlie. I really do.” But it sounded pathetic, and all John could think about was that tonight he would have to put his head to his pillow knowing that the man who had ruined his brother’s life was also turning in for the night about twenty miles south of him.
Charlie looked to the crowded parking lot, placed both hands atop his crutch, and said, “Whatever you go and do, John. It’s all right with me…. And your brother—well, I bet wherever he is, he’s proud to have a brother like you.”
He didn’t tell him that his brother had been in the ground for going on a year. He didn’t say anything at all, because the words were all tangled up and Charlie seemed to be headed to some far-off place that didn’t have a lick to do with John Houck. John was searching for some way to close out their meeting when Charlie said, “Mine was a teacher.”
John didn’t ask him to elaborate. He didn’t need to. But what struck him was the phrasing Charlie had used, the way he had taken possession of the man who had violated him. And oddly enough, there was something about this confession that made John feel exonerated, as if it revealed Charlie’s reasons for finding Danny Oster had everything to do with Charlie and barely anything to do with John.
Maybe because he was relieved by this, or maybe because it felt like the right thing to do, John reached out and laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. For a few minutes Charlie didn’t pull away, but then he sucked in a breath through his nostrils and stamped out his cigarette under his good foot. “Sorry. Like I said, when one of your leg’s busted, sometimes you just have to sit in it. Whatever the fuck
it
is.”
John went to help him to his feet, but Charlie pulled away and bowed his head, refusing to meet John’s eyes, then pulling away farther when he found himself staring down at the spread of photographs on the stone table.
He knows it was a bad move,
John thought.
He knows he screwed up, but he was trying his hardest, and who are you to not let him have his moment? He’s got more balls than you do, driving all this way to find you when you’ve written Lightning Mike out of your life because he won’t respond to a goddamn postcard.
“Let’s find Trina,” John said.
“It’s cool, John. I’ve got it,” Charlie said, putting both crutches to the ground and starting for the entrance. “You just do what you need to do.”
John was about to follow him when he looked back and realized the photos were still spread out all over the table. He collected them hurriedly, shoved them back inside the envelope without bothering with the folder that had held them. He was about to throw the folder away when he saw that there was a sheet of paper stapled to the inside flap—a list of relevant details about Charles Keaton, aka Daniel Oster.
For what felt like hours, he stared at the second detail on the list.
An address.
Li’l D nodded off as soon as they pulled out of the parking lot, which gave John a chance to consider taking the on-ramp to I-10 East and heading for Redlands. Instead he joined the Vegas-bound motorists who turned the 15 North into a chromium river every weekend.
Even though he was now stuck in gridlock traffic on a freeway headed in a different direction, John managed to pull a map from the glove compartment without waking Li’l D. He opened it against the steering wheel and found the street Oster lived on; it was on the north side of Redlands, a block away from where the city dissolved into vacant lots and a cluster of gravel pits. Something about those gravel pits, which were marked on the map with the same dotted lines used to delineate dry lakebeds, seemed like an invitation to John. The proximity of so much empty space so close to where Oster rested his head each night—it could be a kill site or a dumping ground or just God’s way of saying that even though he’d traded up from the high desert, Danny Oster was still living right next door to purgatory.
The last half of John’s teenage years had been spent an hour’s drive east, and to him, Redlands had always been the first piece of Southern California civilization that sprang up on the drive to Los Angeles, its canopy of palm trees and healthy oaks looking out of place against the parched lower flanks of the San Bernardino Mountains, the entrance to a world his big sister had only been able to bring them to the edge of in her struggle to give them a better life
“John?”
Even though he was moving only about five miles an hour, he was about to roll into the back of an eighteen-wheeler idling in front of him. But the kid hadn’t noticed—he seemed more upset by whatever expression was on John’s face.
He folded up the map, without taking his eyes off the road, and asked Li’l D to put it away for him. Another few minutes and their trailer park would come into view, carved out of the mountainside and set high above the 15, like a landing pad for a UFO. But John knew the silence before they reached home would be too full of dark possibilities for him, possibilities that involved the Sig currently resting in a holster behind his headboard.
John said, “You tell your mother everything we did today, okay? Whenever you go anywhere, meet anyone, I want you to tell your mom about it. Make sure she knows who you’re with and all that stuff. Are you listening?” The kid nodded, but John barely noticed, because he was seeing in his head the sequence of images that always slugged him when he thought about how he had failed his brother and sister that day—Oster’s fleshy ass, the rumpled green comforter riding up over the foot of the bed as he thrust himself forward into Dean’s prone body, the matching green curtains pulled so hastily shut over the window most of the rings were crooked. “You want a good mom? Well, you’ve got to give her a chance to be one, okay?”
“Okay,” Li’l D mumbled.
John held his tongue so he wouldn’t say anything more. The last thing he wanted to do was frighten the kid. And it wasn’t like he and Patsy hadn’t known about Danny Oster—John had just assumed the guy was a harmless computer geek interested in helping Dean with his homework. Knowledge was one thing. What he had lacked was an accurate perception of who Oster really was, and it wasn’t Dean’s job to give that to him. John had been the big brother; it had been an unwritten rule that he had to look out for the guy while his sister worked herself to the bone to keep them in school, to keep them fed, to keep the AC running.
“John?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t feel so good.”
The kid stopped throwing up by the time they reached Devore Meadows, but only after John had been forced to pull over to the shoulder of the freeway, where they had drawn the attention of a highly amused CHP officer, who couldn’t stop laughing into one fist long enough for John to tell him he was about to start cadet training in a few weeks.
Now Li’l D was practically hanging on to John’s right leg for support as they walked toward his mother’s trailer. The door popped open when they were just a few feet away and Mandy flew down the steps, still dressed in the burgundy polo shirt and khaki slacks that he figured were her gas station uniform. John had barely managed a greeting when she took Li’l D by his free arm and escorted him back inside the trailer as if he had been caught trying to set fire to something small and defenseless. She shut the door behind her, and when he heard her blessing out her son, John fought the urge to intervene. Instead, he held his ground, because she was clearly pissed and he wasn’t going to hang the kid out to dry by himself.
After what felt like ten minutes, Mandy opened the front door. “You two had quite a field trip today.”
“We tried calling you. Did you talk to Emilio?” She responded by lighting a cigarette. “You know, if you’re mad about it, yell at me, not the kid. I was ju—”
“You couldn’t have watched him here? You had to take him halfway across the Inland Empire?”
He realized she was embarrassed, not frightened, and this made his tolerance for her foul mood lessen by a third. “You know what? I apologize. Next time I’ll just leave him with Emilio so by the time you come home he can be covered in auto grease and smoking a doobie.”
“How many more weekends you going to have for my son John? How many more little field trips you all going to take before you become a cop, huh?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mandy.”
“I’m just saying—I don’t need any grand gestures from you, okay? And he doesn’t either.”
“Fine. Tell your son where you work and I’ll drop him off with you next time.”
“Should you really be acting like we’re married when you’ve got other lady friends dropping by?”
“Trina Miller?”
“Tall, thin, too much makeup,” Mandy said. “Older. Long brown hair with some kind of crazy white streak running through it.” John’s heart thudded at this description of a woman he had not stood face-to-face with in almost ten years. “She tried to leave a note, I think.” At this, John turned on his heel and headed back for his trailer. His heart fell when he didn’t see anything on the doorstep, so he threw open the front door and stepped into the kitchen and spun in place, his eyes on the floor as if he were looking for a mouse.
“It was
yesterday
!” Mandy said. She had followed him but was standing at the bottom of the steps, as if she thought a prowler might be waiting for John in his bedroom. When she saw John’s desperate expression, she grimaced and rolled her eyes. “Jesus, John. If I’d known trailer trash was your taste I would have knocked out a few of my front teeth before you came over the other night.”
“My sister doesn’t live in a trailer. You do.”
Her cheeks flushed at her own misperception, but she wasn’t about to relent. “Yeah, well so do you.”
“Which is why I think twice before I call people I don’t know trailer trash.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“My father was a minister. So—yeah, I do.”
“Fine. You want to do something nice for my son? Try spending an entire night with his mom, instead of sneaking out at three in the morning like she’s some five-dollar whore.”
He wanted to suggest that her son might be better off if her bedroom were a little less active, but he knew this was a low blow, and a cover for the fact that he didn’t want to tell her the real reason for his predawn departure.
The last time he had tried to spend an entire night with a woman, she had awakened him at four in the morning for another go-around, and before he was even conscious, he had hurled her halfway across the room into a dresser. Thank God he hadn’t injured the woman physically, but he had so frightened her that she could only react to his attempts at comfort by nodding her head and staring at him wide-eyed, like a woman being held captive by a solicitous lunatic. When he finally volunteered to leave, the light came back into the woman’s eyes and she had happily showed him to the door, as if her life had been given back to her.
“There’s no envelope here. Did she give it to you?”
“No,” Mandy said. “It was big. It looked like it wouldn’t fit under the door. Call her.”
“Thanks, Mandy. I’m glad we could light up each other’s lives today.”
“You practically jump up and down like a little kid when you find out she’s paid you a visit, but you can’t pick up the phone and call her?”
“Good night, Mandy,” he said firmly.
The disappointment in her eyes surprised him. She had attacked him suddenly and forcefully, and now she seemed to want him to come back across the line she had been so angry at him for crossing. Maybe she had just needed to vent her jealousy.
She was halfway back to her trailer before he could ask her. But, of course, that wasn’t the question that came out of him. Instead he said, “I’m sorry I got him sick. If you need me to run out and get something for his stomach, I will. I don’t have to give it to him myself. I could just pass it to you through a window or something.”
“That’s nice of you, John,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry I left, Mandy. Nights…they aren’t so good for me.”
She turned to face him, but she didn’t move to close the distance between them. “You’re sweet, John. But come on—it’s not like you’re going to
stay
here.” She gestured to the park all around him. “I mean, you’re a friggin’ war hero, for Christ’s sake, and you’ll probably be the best damn cop in the state.” The qualifications for being a war hero were a lot higher in the Marine Corps than they were in Devore Meadows, but he didn’t rush to disabuse her of this notion. This was her version of the comment Emilio had made to him that afternoon about being able to have any woman he wanted based on his time in Iraq. But she didn’t finish the thought; she seemed embarrassed by her sudden candor and hurried back to her trailer, shaking her head at the ground.
As usual it seemed like the people around him were expecting a lot more out of him than he expected out of himself. But the message from Mandy was clear; it was the same message that had been telegraphed to him day after day in Iraq: go help someone who wants it. And the sadness that rose in him as he watched Mandy slip inside her trailer sidelined him; he wasn’t sad because he had seen a bright future for the two of them. Her departure meant he’d probably spend the night alone with the file Charlie Miller had delivered to him that day, pondering all the ways to get revenge on Danny Oster. But with his brother almost a year in the ground, John couldn’t see how that would help anyone at all. So Mandy’s challenge remained: go help someone who wants it.
A few hours later he had used a putty knife to scrape all the frozen blotches of Corona from the inside of his freezer, and had downed a few good bottles in the interim. He spent another hour cleaning his gun, telling himself for the hundredth time that he didn’t keep the gun in his bedroom because he had nightmares; he was afraid of other men whose nightmares were as bad as his. Then, before he could think twice about it, as if it were just another task in his long evening ritual, he went to the phone and dialed his sister’s number in Yucca Valley. He had looked up the number months before, but he usually never made it through the first four digits before he hung up. This time he made it all the way to the machine.
The sound of her voice, the faint traces of her Southern accent that put the emphasis on the last syllable of every other word, greased his palm with sweat against the receiver.
In the second before the beep, he hung up and spoke his message to his empty trailer: “I’m sorry, Patsy.”