The Slab (15 page)

“I looked up.”

“I crooked my neck and looked up and I actually saw the thing coming, the shell spinning as it flew into the square like something in slow motion. I guess it was, or I never would have been able to make out any detail. I turned back and looked at where it was headed, and I knew it was going to hit the church.

“Which is just what it did. It hit the church and exploded, and the air right over my head was filled with what must have been tons of stone and glass and flaming wood. You know those pictures on the TV of the World Trade Center?”

“Yes,” Virginia said. “How could I not?”

“It wasn’t the same as that, not by a long shot. But it was similar. Not tens of thousands of people on the ground, but just me, and just one building coming down on my head, but it was the biggest building in town and any one of those chunks of stone that hit me, that would’ve been the end right there.”

Virginia squeezed his leg. “I’m glad they didn’t.”

“Oh, they did,” Harold said. “See, that’s why I’m telling you all this. Because that morning when I woke up, July seventh, 1944, there was a funny taste in my mouth. All my food—and it wasn’t much, some hardtack and a cup of coffee and we’d managed to get some bread from a bakery—all my food tasted bad that morning.”

“Like today?” Virginia pointed at his water glass, barely touched.

“Yes. Like yesterday, and today. I’ve since come to think of those days, when the taste gets really strong in my mouth like it has today, as magic days.”

“Magic?”

“Let me finish,” Harold said. “I’m down there on the ground, kind of twisted around though because I’m watching everything that’s going on above me, and the church is blown to smithereens and I’m looking up at all the debris that’s going to crush me, and there was nothing I could do about it. Just nothing. I was going to die there in St. Fromond-Eglise.

“And then the magic happened. That’s the only way I can think about it, the only way I’ve ever been able to explain it. Instead of a few tons of stone and glass and wood falling on me, in mid-air, right over my head, all of it turned into some kind of glittery powder or dust, like that fairy dust in Peter Pan or something. Like that shiny confetti they throw at parades. Suddenly it’s all that, and it’s practically weightless, washing over me like a gentle snowfall. I stood up and put my arms out, put my hands in the air to catch it, and it was still falling, still falling. Just as soft and gentle as could be. And then it started to rain, a heavy, pounding shower.

“When the dust hit the ground it just vanished, as if it was washed away by the sudden downpour. Just gone, like it was never there at all. I couldn’t even save any of it, it vanished from my hands, my shoulders, wherever it landed. An entire church tower turned into this snowfall of glittering dust, and then it was gone.”

Harold chuckled. “Now you see why I never told anyone,” he said. “They’d have called me crazy. They’d have sent me back home and put me in the loony bin, I can guarantee you. Because how could I explain that? How could I explain that it was a magic day—my first magic day, for that matter? Even I didn’t really understand it, not then. I was grateful as hell, but I couldn’t understand what had saved me.”

He stopped then, picturing himself as a young man, facing the sky, arms spread wide. In his mind’s eye he was among the flakes of glitter, drifting down toward himself. He saw his own huge smile, watched himself laugh out loud as he realized that whatever this stuff was, it wasn’t going to hurt him. A man didn’t get many moments like that in life, moments where happiness was pure and undiluted by stress or fear or anxiety, and that moment was one of Harold’s. It still made him grin to think of it.

Virginia put an arm across his chest, and pressed her face against his. “I can’t explain it either,” she said. “Except I guess God wanted you here with me.”

“I never presumed that He paid attention to me,” Harold said. “But if that’s what you want to think, I guess it’s as good an explanation as any.”

“And that’s why you’re telling me today?” she asked him. “Because the magic’s back?”

“The magic’s back,” he confirmed. “Stronger than ever. I don’t know what’s going to happen, Gin. I never do. But something is. And I have a feeling it’s going to be something big.”

***

Virginia stood at the pump basin, washing off the dishes in the water-efficient way that had become second nature to her over their years on the Slab, thinking about her husband. She was delighted that his memory was so good today—it was rare that he could remember that much detail about anything, and if the “magic” explanation seemed a bit bizarre, she was willing to accept that he believed in it, at least. She hadn’t known him until after the war, when he’d come to New Mexico to work on the interstate highway that spread across the American west in the postwar years. They’d met in a luncheonette where she, fresh out of high school, was applying for a job, and he had come in while working with his road gang. After chatting for a few minutes, he’d asked her out to dinner that night, and they had never looked back.

That had been fifty years ago this past June.

She hadn’t regretted a day of it, anyway. But Harold had. He had never been satisfied with his lot—his jobs never led to the promotions he wanted. He looked for a big score, a main chance, that never came. And when it didn’t, he thought he’d failed at life. She tried to tell him that wasn’t true, that he had her and the love and respect of their friends, and why couldn’t he be content if she was? He wouldn’t buy that argument, though, and sometimes she found his recalcitrance infuriating.

As she dried the saucers, she thought about the way he looked in his Army pictures, not so terribly different than when she’d first met him except that he’d been in uniform and his brown hair had been a bit shorter. He still had a good bit of that hair, white now, as hers was, but enough for him to palm some Vitalis into every morning and comb back off his forehead. She imagined him in his Army days, laden with full pack and a rifle in his arms, as the church tower exploded and rained rubble down on him.

But in her version, the tons of broken stone and sharp glass didn’t turn into some kind of mystical pixie dust. Instead, as Harold squirmed on the ground, his face contorted with terror, the rocks slammed into him, breaking bone, tearing flesh, smashing him into the cobblestones. The horrific downpour continued, even as the rocks ripped his body into pieces, an arm coming off and flopping onto the stones here, a section of skull bouncing under the steady assault there. Blood mixed with rain and ran between the cobblestones like grout between bathroom tiles. When at last the storm abated and the village square was quiet, the man with whom Virginia Shipp had shared a bed and a life for the last fifty years was torn into pieces no bigger than scattered coins, in her mind’s eye, and the only sound she could hear was the faint trickle of his blood as it flowed toward the lowest ground.

She put the dishes back into the cabinet and looked in on Harold, who had drifted off to sleep on the couch, head back, mouth open. For a moment she was surprised; the vision had been almost more real than this, her real life, living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere with a man who had somehow become old. Life had always been full of promise, getting out of bed in the morning had always held an expectation that something wonderful might happen that day. But now Virginia looked at Harold, a man near the end of his life, and realized that she was only twelve years younger than his eighty-one years. If his life was virtually over, what did that say about hers?

She sat down in a chair across from him, where she could see him but not touch him, and watched him as he slept, her daydream all but forgotten now except for the faint, warm tingle she’d felt as it happened.

Chapter Ten

Mick had packed his gear and started down the trail, back toward where he’d parked the van—after two more hugs—when the first Harrier flew overhead. Penny froze in mid-squat, a sketchpad across her knees and a pencil between her fingers. She had left camp when Mick did, to catalogue and sketch some of the abundant plant life in the area. She was no artist but she could do fairly accurate representational work if she had a subject in front of her.

The warplane passed over quickly, and she turned to watch it as it circled and came back for another pass. It didn’t drop any bombs or fire any weapons—she highly doubted that there would be any live fire practice with a real war in the offing—so she guessed that its purpose was to take a second look at the messages her group had written on the ground, in letters big enough to be seen from a thousand feet up.

After the Harrier’s second pass Penny closed her sketchpad and hurried back to camp. She hoped that Mick had sense enough to find cover, or at least drop and freeze, when he heard the planes, but honestly she doubted that he would. He seemed to go through life with a big red flag that he waved at every metaphorical bull he encountered, she thought. Instead of hiding from the planes, he’d be more likely to fire flares in their direction just to make sure they got his message. His heart was definitely in the right place, but his brain often seemed MIA.

She stayed in the shade of her camo net, making some notes and reading a book, for the next forty minutes, putting it down only when she heard the unmistakable sound of Mick Beachum returning to camp. The plane had been gone and the air silent since the second pass.

She met him at the edge of camp, coming out from under the net. “I thought you’d be at the van by now,” she said, shaking her head in dismay.

“I got worried when that jet came back for a second time,” he said. “I thought that meant they’d seen the message.”

“They’re supposed to see it,” she reminded him. “That’s kind of the point, right?”

“Well, of course. But…I don’t know, Pen. I just didn’t want them to find you.”

Penny shook her head. “That’s why we took such pains to wipe away our tracks,” she told him. “That’s why we hiked for an hour before we wrote it. It’s a big desert out here—even if they put troops on the ground it’ll take them a while to find us. By then we’ll have moved on. Only it was supposed to be just me, because one person is harder to find than two. Remember the plan?”

“I remember,” Mick snapped. He grabbed Penny’s shoulders and shook her, suddenly enraged. “Remember flexibility? I was worried about you, for fuck’s sake.”

She shrugged out of his grip, her voice like ice. “Take your hands off me, and don’t ever touch me again.”

Mick’s face fell. He looked stricken. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Penny, I am so sorry. I don’t know what…really, I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine, Mick. You’re sorry. Just don’t do it again. I mean it. No hugs for luck, no squeezing my ass like a football player or copping a cheap feel disguised as adjusting my backpack’s straps or anything like that. If I ever feel your hand on me again I’ll break your arm.”

“Jesus, Penny, do you think maybe you’re overreacting a little?”

She ignored the question, working on keeping her voice level. If she relaxed it would quaver with emotion and she didn’t want that. “Don’t think I can’t do it.”

He stood before her for a moment, blinking under the fury of her onslaught but not making any reply. Softening her voice a bit, she continued. “Do you know how to win a war, Mick?” she asked him. “You outlast the other side. That’s why we lost in Vietnam—we found out that no matter what we threw at them, they could outlast us. That’s why in the Gulf and then in Kosovo we pounded them so hard while keeping our own people out of their reach. If we’d been taking heavy casualties, public opinion might have gone against us and we wouldn’t have outlasted them. I don’t know if our war, right here in these mountains, is one we can win—I doubt it, though. So all I want to do is last as long as I can before I let them win. That means staying on this range, undiscovered. And I can do that better by myself than with you here. I’ve been trained.” She laughed once, harshly. “Those guys trained me! The United States military. I know what they know. All you’re going to do is get in the way, slow me down, make me a target. Do you understand that? If you want this action to work at all, I have to stay in here, to keep writing new messages, to keep obstructing their ability to drop bombs because they don’t know where I am or how many I am or what I’m up to.”

“I get that, Penny,” Mick said. “I know the plan.”

“You’re not acting like you do.”

“So what you’re saying is that I should turn around and go back to the van, go back and get a motel room.”

“Yes,” she agreed flatly. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Okay, then.” Mick started to move as if to hug Penny, then caught himself and backed away, running a hand through his dreadlocks. “I, uhh…I guess I’ll see you, then.”

“I guess so.”

But Mick had only taken a few steps from camp when Penny heard the distant stutter of helicopters, coming from the east, over the hills. “Shit,” she breathed. She ran after Mick, caught his arm.

“Get under the net!” she said. “Now!”

Mick turned, surprisingly light on his feet when he wasn’t being contrary. They both ran back to the tarp spread under the camo netting. He tossed his gear down and they sat, legs crossed, watching the sky.

The helicopters came closer. Two of them, Penny thought. “Hueys.”

“That’s not the one that keeps crashing, is it?” Mick asked.

“No, that’s the Osprey. It’s a Marine bird, too, though.”

The pitch of one of them changed, deepening.

“One’s landing,” she said. “The other’s not.”

“You can tell that from here?” Mick asked.

“I told you, I know these people.”

“What are they doing, then?”

“The one that’s landing will be dropping off a ground force. They’ll undo our message, and look for our tracks so they can find out who wrote it. We were careful enough that they won’t find any tracks, at least not right away. The second bird will fly low, in an organized search pattern, looking for us.”

“How many men do they carry?”

“Probably ten, fully loaded. If they’re traveling light they could squeeze another couple on board, but they probably don’t need to.”