Divided We Fall (11 page)

I knew something like this was coming. “Sorry,” I said. “I, um … My alarm, I set it wrong and —”

He blew smoke in my face. “Cut the bullshit. I called your house already. Your mom said you left bright and early this morning. She started to panic a little, wondering why you weren’t here, so I had to tell her some story about how you’d been here, but then went to pick up some parts, and I was wondering if you’d stopped at home.” He spit into the gravel. “I don’t like lying for you, so maybe you could stop lying to me.”

“I …” What could I tell him that he’d possibly believe? Even if I told the truth, he might not buy it. “I had to go to the armory.”

“This ain’t your drill weekend.” Schmidty frowned as he drew on his cigarette. “This have something to do with that mess down in Boise?”

“It was …” I was scrambling to think of a story, but I could never explain why I’d been gone all morning. I looked down and kicked a rock across the lot. Schmidty’s wife had ditched him years ago, and from what I could tell, his life was a lonely stretch of cigarettes and cheap beer. I could probably tell him the truth. He’d keep it safe just because, in general, he hated talking to people. I looked up at him and held out my hand. “Give me a cigarette. There’s something I got to tell you.”

I told him the whole long stupid story, coughing a little as I tried to smoke. While I described the Battle of Boise, I kept waiting for him to start cussing me, the protestors, the governor, or the president out. He stayed quiet, though, watching me with his eyes sharper than I remember them being in a long time. I explained how I’d been at the governor’s mansion for the troop standoff. “So yeah,” I said when I finished. “Seems like everybody has it out for me these days.”

“Not everybody. Buzz Ellison’s been talking all week about how the soldiers did nothing wrong, about people jumping to conclusions and assuming you were all guilty.” He almost smiled. “Lot of people on Ellison’s side. On your side.”

“I … I felt so helpless there today. Our own soldiers about to fight against each other, damn near shooting down helicopters, and there was nothing I could do.”

“Something you can do. And you better get to doin’ it real quick.” Schmidty jerked a thumb back toward the shop. “Back your truck in. We need to get it ready in case something happens.”

“What’s going to —”

“Just go get your truck!”

I did as he said, and when I climbed down from the Beast, he was waiting for me with a big black metal toolbox. Inside he’d packed a couple lighters, a serious bowie knife, a hatchet, a length of rope, a blanket, a dozen military meals ready to eat, and some bottled water. “We’ll bolt this to the back of your truck so nobody can steal it and so it don’t rattle around.” He pointed up to the loft where I kept the Beast’s hard-shell cover for the back. “We’ll put that on today too.” I opened my mouth to complain, but he held up his hand while he lit another cigarette. He puffed smoke. “No, don’t give me no back talk. You’ll need the cover on that thing. It’ll be cold soon anyway. Keep that truck fully fueled at all times, and check the spare tire. Run a full maintenance check on it every week.”

“Geez, Schmidty,” I said. “You sound like this is the Army. We’re not at war, you know.”

“I don’t know what’s going on.” He pointed at me with his cigarette. “Neither do you. But shit’s gettin’ bad, Danny. Real bad.”

We started bolting the heavy toolbox down in the back of the Beast.

Once during our junior year, I overheard Sweeney talking to his girlfriend at the time — a girl from a different school, Emily or Emma or Ella. (He probably dated a girl by each of those names that year.) Anyway, he said, “So what do you want to do tonight?”

She went, “I don’t care. Whatever you want to do.”

He was all, “Want to go out to eat?”

She said, “Sure.”

“Where do you want to eat?”

“I don’t care. Wherever you think.”

Sweeney told me later that apart from how much she put out, it had been like dating himself.

JoBell was never like that. She always had an opinion about what she wanted to do on a date or about what the United States should do about the war in Iran. Well, about how fast the military should leave Iran. She wasn’t too bossy or anything. She’d just been raised to be passionate about her ideas, and that passion kept things interesting. Except for when she was complaining about Montaine or the Battle of Boise, I liked it.

I sat parked outside JoBell’s house early Friday morning, relaxing and waiting for her to come out so I could drive her to her student council meeting before school.

“Hey, soldier, your … National Guard armory is calling,”
said Digi-Hank.

I looked around for something to punch. “Damn it! What the hell do they want now!?”

“Sorry, partner. Should I ignore the call? Maybe you’d … like to listen to some of my greatest hits from your playlist instead?”

Drill was Saturday and Sunday, and Sergeant Kemp had already got in touch with me on Tuesday with his usual leader’s call, reminding me to get a haircut and make sure my uniform looked good. He had also asked if I wanted to volunteer for full-time state duty. They put out these requests sometimes, asking for soldiers to help fight a wildfire or flood. I turned him down. I’d had more than enough extra National Guard duty.

“No, Hank,” I said. “Put the call on speaker.”

“No problem,”
said Hank.
“You’re a great American.”

“Hello,” I said. “This is Wright.”

“PFC Wright, this is Sergeant Kemp.”

I felt a wave of relief. Better Sergeant Kemp than Staff Sergeant Meyers. Definitely better than a call starting with the code “rattlesnake.” “Go ahead.”

Kemp sighed.
“Bad news. I’m really sorry for the late notice, but I was just notified of this myself. Drill has been changed to a MUTA-Five. Formation tonight is at eighteen hundred hours.”

This was bullshit. Most drills were only MUTA-Four, meaning one Saturday and Sunday a month. They couldn’t just change everything the Friday before drill and make it a MUTA-Five. “I can’t make it. I have a game tonight,” I said. “Can I split train at least for tonight?” Sometimes a Guardsman could make up time before or after drill if he had something really important going on.

“Sorry,”
said Sergeant Kemp.
“Commander says everybody attends, no exceptions. Some big training exercise.”

I bit my lip for a moment, wondering if I should ask what I wanted to ask, but I didn’t need to. Sergeant Kemp went on,
“Don’t worry. This isn’t another Boise. We’re heading out to the woods to practice dismounted infantry tactics or something. I’m sorry you have to miss your game. I’ll see you tonight before our eighteen hundred formation.”
He tapped out.

“Damn it!” I punched the center of my steering wheel, sounding the horn. I’d signed up for the Guard to serve part-time. Now it was taking over my whole life.

JoBell came out of her front door and practically skipped down the stairs from her porch. She opened the passenger door with a big smile on her face. “Hey, I was hurrying. You didn’t have to honk.” She climbed in. With her bag on the floor, she strapped in, her comm in her lap.

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people,”
her comm said.
“Perhaps you would like to discuss several updates to news stories you’ve been following.”

“Not right now, Eleanor,” JoBell said.

Her fingers were already sweeping and tapping her comm.

“I understand. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.”

“Hey, I have to tell you something,” I said.

“Me first!” she said.

“No, this is really important.” She would be pissed when she found out drill had been changed to MUTA-Five. I knew I was mad.

But JoBell didn’t look up. “Eleanor, can you bring up the document that I was looking at last night?”

“Certainly, JoBell. I’m happy to help.”

“Can you put that thing away for one second!?” I said.

JoBell frowned for a moment, then closed her comm’s cover. “Sorry, baby. I really want to show you this —”

“Sergeant Kemp called a minute ago. It’s total bullshit, but they’re changing drill so I have to go in tonight instead of tomorrow. It’s an overnight thing. I’ll be gone all weekend.”

She froze with a worried look on her face. “Is something happening?”

I reached over and squeezed her hand. “Naw, it’s only drill. Some training exercise. One weekend a month and two weeks a summer, right?”

“Plus wars.” JoBell looked out the window.

“But I’m not deployable until after I finish my job training, and then it will be a while until my unit ships out again, because they’re over there right now. So they won’t be sending me to Iran for a long time. It’s fine, I promise. It sucks that I have to miss football, though. Coach will be pissed. I know I am.”

“Well —” She turned back to me and grinned. “I have something you might find interesting.”

What? I’d expected her to be a lot more disappointed about drill. We were planning on partying after the game and spending some time in the Beast on the Abandoned Highway of Love. The thought of it had kept me going through the week. “If it’s more bad news, I’m really not in the mood.”

She tapped her comm. “No, this is great!” She read whatever she had on-screen. “Dear JoBell. Congratulations! It is my pleasure to offer you admission to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington. After reviewing your strong academic record, blah blah blah … At the University of Washington, you will join a group of students eager to pursue academic excellence, etcetera, etcetera.” She leaned over the center console and hugged me. “I got in! Just like that, the next phase of my life is all set up.”

The University of Washington? In Seattle? When had she decided to go to U-Dub? We didn’t really talk about college much. I knew she’d always wanted to go, but for a while, she had talked about going to the University of Montana at Missoula, only three hours away. Seattle was, what? At least a five-hour drive?

I fired up the Beast, but something was a little off, a weird low growl under her normal engine noise. Something I felt instead of heard. I’d have to check it out next time I was in the shop. Why would JoBell want to leave? Why hadn’t she told me she applied to U-Dub?

“Well,” she said as I drove down the street. “What do you think?”

“It’s … That’s … You know, far away.”

She folded her arms. “How about a congratulations?”

“Well, yeah, obviously. Congratulations.” I couldn’t even look at her. “I didn’t know you’d applied there. You could have told me.”

“I guess I didn’t tell you because I was worried you’d react like this.”

“Like what?”

“Like mad.”

“I’m not mad,” I said. “Well … I’m pissed about drill. That’s all.”

“You
are
mad. At me. I know you way too well by now not to be able to see through your lame attempt to cover it up.”

First the drill change, then this news. I didn’t trust myself to say anything, so I drove on in silence. But JoBell wasn’t one to keep quiet.

“I know that you’ve had a lot on your mind lately besides college applications, but I think you should apply to U-Dub too. It would do you some good to get out of this old town. You know? Get out and see something new.”

How could she say that? Freedom Lake is where we grew up. Where all our friends lived. Where we fell in love. “I’ve been to Seattle before.”

“This would be different, and you know it.” JoBell rubbed my arm. “Okay, this has come as a shock, but think about it for a while. We could go to Seattle and get a brand-new start. It could be really great. Plus, you know, we wouldn’t live in a state where the National Guard was sent out to murder innocent people.”

Always back to that. I couldn’t think straight. I blurted out the first excuse that came to mind. “I doubt they’d take me with my straight Cs.”

“Your grades aren’t that bad,” JoBell said. “You have all year to bring them up. And even if they don’t accept you right away, you could still do a semester at Seattle Junior College until you had the grades to get in.”

She was living in a fantasy world. I didn’t want to go to Seattle Junior College. Shouldn’t she know that about me by now?

“We’re seniors, Danny. We have to start planning for the future.”

“I do have a plan,” I said. “Schmidty will want to retire soon. I’m going to buy him out of the business and run the shop myself. I’ll take some good auto tech classes at North Idaho Community College and —”

“Babe, that shop isn’t making much money.”

“It will when I update it, when we can do more work on natural-gas hybrids and solar tech.”

“You could find more advanced and interesting work with machines with something like a mechanical engineering degree. Why just change the oil on old cars when you could design new ones?”

“I do a lot more at the shop than oil changes,” I said.

She slid her hand down my arm and squeezed my elbow. “I know that. But I —”

“Anyway, I can’t leave Mom. She needs me.”

“I know she needs you, Danny,” said JoBell. “But you need to live your own life too.”

“I can’t abandon —”

“Hear me out,” JoBell hurried on. “We both know that even though she has problems, she is a strong woman. She doesn’t handle abrupt changes very well, but she does adapt in time. You had to start really slow with rodeo and football, remember? She got used to it.” She had a point. I let her continue. “When we go to Seattle, we’ll come home every weekend at first. After she handles that okay for a while, we’ll drop it back to every other weekend. Then once a month. Then every few months like normal college kids. I know she’ll be okay. I would never do anything that would hurt her. I love your mother. You know that.”

She made it sound like it would be almost easy. But I knew I wasn’t college material. I didn’t have the grades or the smarts to go to some big university to become an engineer.

I parked the truck in the school lot and leaned forward against the steering wheel. I felt JoBell’s warm hands sliding up and down my back. When I faced her, she leaned over in this great, low-cut sort of wrap shirt, and she smiled with the morning sun shining on her golden hair. We kissed for a long time. Amazing how that always made everything feel better.

She touched her forehead to mine. “I need to get out of this town, Danny. And you may not realize it yet, but you do too.”