Authors: Christopher Rice
The phone woke him at a little after 9:00
A.M.
A few extra bottles of Corona the night before, three more than his nightly allotment, had left him with a dull headache. As soon as the man on the other end identified himself as Kyle Marsh, John remembered the website he had found four months earlier, a website with photos of middle-aged, middle-management types marching across empty baseball fields in full Spartan regalia. On his site, Marsh claimed that he could locate high-quality replicas of most ancient Greek weapons “for the serious collector only.”
“It’s finally in, buddy,” Marsh said. “Last time we spoke, you seemed pretty eager to get this to your friend, so I had my guy put a rush on it. I know four months may not seem like a rush, but in this business…anyway, it’s here and it’s a real beauty.”
“When can I come see it?”
Marsh gave him directions to an address in Hesperia, and a shower and three strong cups of coffee later, John was in his Toyota Tacoma, heading north on the 15 toward the desert. Kyle Marsh was watering his parched front lawn when John pulled up. Most of the homes in his subdivision were still under construction—John had to navigate among Dumpsters and pallets of sandbags just to get down Marsh’s street—but all the lots boasted views of the San Bernardino Mountains and the miles of empty desert that lead up to them.
Marsh gave John a handshake that was almost as firm as his own, then led John into a garage where a dusty green minivan sat parked with its nose flush against a mannequin outfitted in a Corinthian helmet and crimson tunic. John was so distracted by the intricate uniform that he almost missed it when Marsh drew the weapon he had come for.
“It’s probably a lot shorter than you were expecting,” Marsh said. “Thing is, the Spartans liked to use their swords as a weapon of last resort. Lots of close-quarters fighting with this baby—after the spears broke, that is.”
“Right. And the swelling of the blade created a weak point at the blade’s neck—near the hilt.” John indicated the spot on the sword Marsh was holding almost protectively to his chest. “After a while, even the best of them would eventually shear.”
“You certainly know your stuff,” Marsh said. Then, as if in recognition of this fact, he handed John the sword. John gave him a respectful nod and took the sword gently by the handle. “My friend—my
captain,
I mean—he’s the one who taught me.”
“He the one you’re getting it for?”
“Yep.”
“Well, he should be real pleased. Now, unfortunately, none of the original Laconian swords have survived, but this one’s modeled after a bronze sword they found on Crete in the late 1800s that they think is probably the same shape. To get the rest of the details right they used old vase paintings.”
John turned to face Marsh head-on, tried to put as much desperation into his gaze as he could. “How much?” he asked quietly.
The look on John’s face made Marsh laugh nervously. “Starting price for this guy is four hundred, or it should be, at least. Now, you could probably find another one at a major retailer online for around one hundred and fifty, but the blade’s going to be stainless steel, and I doubt you’ll have the same attention to detail.”
“Four hundred’s just a bit out of my range.”
“Yeah, I figured, given that you’re young enough to be my son.” He rested his elbow against a shelf and stared down at his feet, his cheeks puffed out. “Three hundred fifty going to do it?”
“Three hundred fifty’s tough. Now, three hundred would mean I’ll be doing Tyson’s frozen dinners for a couple weeks instead of Applebee’s. But it’ll be worth it.”
“Fine. Well, after I add on my discount in honor of your fine service to this country, that would bring us to about two hundred seventy-five. How’s that sound?”
“Perfect. Cash okay?”
“If you got it.”
John returned the sword to him as the man gave him directions to a nearby ATM. He was almost out the door when Marsh said, “Let me guess. Marine?”
“How could you tell?”
“You look like you could break me in half.”
“Yeah. Then I could just take the sword and leave a few dollar bills on the table.”
Marsh laughed, but it was nervous and high-pitched, as if he thought Marines rarely kidded around about breaking people in half.
John was almost back to Devore Meadows, the sword rattling in the backseat of his truck, when he realized that his having a nice gift for him didn’t change the fact that Mike Bowers had acted like a man with no interest in seeing John again. But then he thought of Charlie Miller driving all that way to deliver a gift that may well have implicated him in an act of violence against a man he had never met. It didn’t exactly fit with the accepted translation of
Semper Fidelis,
but it was closer than anything John had done for Bowers in the past nine months.
No, he had no choice but to sit down face-to-face with Bowers, whether Bowers was looking forward to the meeting or not. He couldn’t see himself putting on another uniform and swearing an oath to uphold the law if he didn’t make some attempt to turn his gratitude into action. And maybe then Bowers would be able to hear the truth about why John had fucked up so badly that day.
Emilio was the one who suggested that Bowers might have moved. He let John use his laptop to Google the address in San Clemente where John had sent two unacknowledged postcards four months earlier. A little while later John was on the phone with the building’s manager, who didn’t need to hear much of John’s sad story about two war vets separated by too much time and distance before he told him that Mike Bowers had moved two months ago. Not long enough to prove that John’s postcards hadn’t reached him, but he had left a forwarding address behind—a P.O. box in some town called Owensville.
“Where’s that?” John asked.
“North, I think.”
The map he had used to find Danny Oster’s new home the day before told him that Owensville was nestled in the low north-south mountain range that bridged the distance between the southern terminus of the Sierra Nevadas and the mountains circling the L.A. basin. Another Google search took him to a professional-looking webpage for the Owensville chamber of commerce, which featured pictures of rolling green hills dappled with wildflowers. It was a nice town, nice enough to dispel images that Bowers had gone there to hide out in some shack while he picked at his scabs and saw hajjis peeking in every window.
By three o’clock he had driven out of the northern mouth of Cajon Pass for the second time that day, then west into Antelope Valley, where Joshua trees studded the landscape and the towns looked like scattered assemblages of corrugated tin. Fear and hunger forced him to pull over in Palmdale, where he chewed KFC chicken and stared out at the parking lot as he rehearsed the apology speech he hadn’t been allowed to make in Balad.
The straightest shot to the mountain highway that would take him to Owensville was a two-lane blacktop, which meant hours of trying to pass lumbering flatbed trucks hauling chickens, vegetables, and who knew what else. The heavy storm clouds that had piled on the northwestern horizon winked lightning at him—not a warning so much as a taunt. Given how long he had waited to make this journey, a rough drive was the least he should have to endure.
At eight o’clock he was barely a quarter of the way up the mountain when rain started sheeting across the road and he hit a traffic jam at two thousand feet. A long red chain of winking brake lights snaked through the grass-flecked mountains. He only traveled several feet in an hour. Some of the other drivers got as fed up with it as he was and started pulling off onto the shoulder and speeding toward a Valero gas station that sat on a small plateau above the road. The place had no snack bar, but some motorists were sitting in the aisles, and one of the clerks was passing out cups of coffee. People were saying there was a mudslide ten miles up the road that had covered one of the up-mountain lanes. No injuries, but it would be another few hours before the cleanup crews were finished and traffic was back to normal.
He asked for a phone book from the clerk and got a slender volume with a photograph of a grassy wildflower-dappled hillside that said it covered the entire Hanrock County, including the towns of Briffel, Gallardo, and Boswell. What it didn’t have was a listing for Mike Bowers.
He handed the phone book back to the cashier without thanking her, walked outside, and stood under the fluorescent-lit overhang. He didn’t like that Mike wasn’t listed—it brought back the nightmare images of a PTS-demolished vet cowering in the corner of an abandoned shed. But he knew he wouldn’t have bothered to call ahead even if his name had appeared in the phone book. Given that he had no idea how Mike would receive him, John knew surprise was his best approach. The late hour would certainly give him that. And if it was too late to bother Mike, at least John could get some kind of glimpse into the life Mike had been able to build for himself in the wake of his great sacrifice.
Owensville sat in a narrow valley between the rounded flanks of the mountains that cradled it. At one in the morning, the town was a small grid of weak amber light. The main street was called Graham Road, and it was lined with fussy log-cabin-style buildings, some of which had plastic replicas of animals out front. A bear reared up on its hind legs in front of The Hunter’s Outpost, and a mother deer delicately sniffed her doe’s neck by the locked entrance to a gift shop with a front window full of ceramic animals conducting their own petrified tea party.
He was about to leave the town center when he saw a gas station that was closing up for the night. The attendant was an older woman with a long mane of gray-streaked black hair and the gaunt facial features of a lifelong smoker. She tensed when she saw John moving toward her across the parking lot. He lifted both hands and decided to cut right to the chase.
“I’m looking for Mike Bowers,” he called to her. “Do you know him?”
She took a step toward him, then peered at him as if he were out of focus. She hadn’t asked him to repeat Mike’s name but he said, “He was injured in combat. He’s missing his—”
“I know who he is,” the woman said. A light rain had started to fall, and she didn’t seem to mind that she was safe under the overhang while he was exposed and hesitant to come any closer lest she make a break for it. “You’re a friend of his?” she asked with evident suspicion. John felt his face flush. He had never had to work very hard with women, but everything about this chick said she could smell the twin stink of Louisiana coon ass and desert trash. The town was nice, but it was no Lake Arrowhead for Christ’s sake, and even there, the rich weekenders from L.A. had been nice enough to nod and smile as they passed the construction site where John had worked.
Because he was getting rained on, John said, “We served together in Iraq. It’s been a long time and it’s late, I know, but I went through hell trying to get up this mountain.”
She uncrossed her arms and rubbed her hands together, as if he had gotten something sticky on them in the past minute. “It’s been a while, huh?” she asked. There was hesitancy in her tone. “Well, I guess…” She shook her head, as if ridding herself of some fear. A fear of contamination by outside elements, John guessed. “About five miles west, over the next rise, you’ll come to Graham Valley. It’s smaller than it sounds. I’m not sure of the address, but it’s on Nesbit Road, which runs right along Nesbit Creek.”
“Thank you,” he said, but he stayed where he was, trying to get her to look him in the eye. He wanted to tell her:
I didn’t go to Iraq to fight for the rights of women like you to judge men with battle scars on their faces and distant looks in their eyes. While you were safe in your little mountain town with all your fake little prancing animals, I was meeting children with no skin on their legs and no compassion in their hearts.
But he said none of this, and it left him with a feeling of helplessness and dissatisfaction.
Just as she had told him, he crossed over a rise and came to Nesbit Road, which curved along the base of a mountainside. His headlights revealed cottonwood trees crowding the sides of the road, hiding whatever was on the other side of the stake fences. Some of the houses had placards next to their mailboxes announcing their names, but John couldn’t see Mike living in a place called Rabbit’s Warren and Shelia or with a family who called themselves the Fussy Fawns. The size of the lots made John wonder if Mike’s parents were wealthier than he had let on. The most he had ever said about them was that they were Bible-thumpers, which Mike hated, but he had taken care to explain to John that it wasn’t the essence of their faith that Mike couldn’t abide. Their fundamentalism prevented the kind of cool-eyed inquiry Bowers felt was required to move through the world as a complete man.
Finally, he reached the end of the road, was about to turn around when his headlights flashed off a tiny decal posted to the fence. John only got a glimpse of it, but it was familiar. The insignia of Force Recon, not the Marine Corps globe and anchor most civilians were familiar with, but a skull and crossbones girded by the words
Celer, Silens, Mortalis
—Latin for “Swift, Silent, Deadly.” Against his will, John looked back at his truck, at a patch of shredded adhesive paper stuck to the lower right-hand corner of the rear window. A few months after returning home, and after a few too many beers, he had pulled a Recon decal from his junk drawer and stuck it on the truck. The next morning, after the beers had faded, he had scraped it off with the same putty knife he had used to clean out the freezer the night before. Yes, he was proud to call himself a former Marine. But he couldn’t deny that his fuckup with Bowers had called his status as a Reconnaissance Man into question.
The fence was locked. He jumped it, then made his way beneath dripping cottonwood branches and up a muddy pathway that appeared to be the driveway. He passed a small woodshed off to his right, then followed muddy tire tracks. He’d taken a Maglite out of his truck but he didn’t use it because he wanted his eyes to adjust to the dark, didn’t want his field of vision to shrink to a bright halo at his feet. He’d also tucked the Sig into the back of his jeans.