* * *
Lyle.
By the twenty-sixth of August, I had already seen him more in a month than I had all year. He had always been on the edge of my life, first with Oren, later with Sophie. I’d ignored him mostly, swatted at him like a fly, shunned him like a leper. But he just kept coming at me, kept showing up. Unstoppable. Unbeatable.
That day, he came over to my table in the old casino, wearing sunglasses and a battered, long-sleeved T-shirt, even though he was inside, even though it was the dead of August.
“Hey, Sis. What are you doing here?” he said, his jeans whispering as he slid across the red Naugahyde of my booth like a mouse sneaking into an occupied room.
Startled, I looked up from my laptop. My nerves were shot, my paranoia acute. I’d been holding my breath, intent on the dots and lines splayed across the map on my screen, desperate to quiet the anxious thoughts bouncing through my head like Ping-Pong balls. I gulped in stale air, tried to answer. Failed.
He swiped one cold French fry and then another, dangling them in the puddle of ketchup on my abandoned plate before stuffing them into his mouth. But he winced when he opened his jaw, winced again when he began to chew.
“You okay?” Lyle asked.
“Yeah,” I said, fascinated, repulsed, watching him shovel more of my leftovers into his mouth, like he always did. He was like a vulture, always waiting for carrion. But he didn’t eat like one, didn’t have the sort of slow, relaxed cadence of a bird that knew its dinner wasn’t going anywhere. No, Lyle always ate like it was a desperate act, like he had to get it all in his stomach before the plate was taken away. It was like watching a refugee with an MRE.
“What are you doing here?” he mumbled, his mouth half full, his eyes still fixed on the plate.
“Eating lunch.”
“You ever even been in here before?”
I hadn’t, but it was the only place I could think of where no one would look for me, not even Darren Moses. For the hundredth time since I had arrived, I scanned the room, touched the butt of the M9 in the holster under my jacket. It felt good to have it back, reassuring.
“Why?” I said, snot dripping from my voice, then turned back to the screen. “Am I on your turf?”
Lyle laughed at that, but thinly.
“What’s with the sunglasses?” I said.
Lyle laughed again, unconvincingly. “Nothing.”
“Yeah, ’cause it’s real sunny in here.”
“It’s a new style.” He looked up; his eyebrow bobbed like he was winking behind the dark lenses.
“Yeah, like Miami Vice,” I said. “Okanogan Vice.”
For a moment, Lyle smiled blindingly, his strangely white teeth shining, and I knew that behind the glasses, his blue eyes sparkled. This was “The Smile,” the one he trotted out when you’d been a good little boy or girl. It was a gift to you, from him.
But then he reached for the bottle of ketchup, and I saw the wince that crinkled the skin around his eyes. And I saw what he wanted me to see when the cuff of his shirt rode up. I seized his wrist and held on when the tendons beneath my fingers tightened, strained to break free. But he stopped, yelped, when I pressed too near the cigarette burns, black and crispy, ringed with tender skin that was too pink. In the tussle, his sunglasses slid down, and the bruises, fresh and dark and ringing his eyes, showed.
“Nothing,” I sneered.
I loosened my grip; he snatched his hand back. “It was just a little disagreement,” he muttered, pushing the sunglasses back over his eyes.
I closed my laptop, put it to one side, and waited: he’d talk if I gave him enough empty air. He always did.
“With one of my business partners,” he said.
With spectacularly bad timing, the waitress arrived. Lyle started to sidle out of the booth, but I put my foot up to block him, ordered him a Coke, and glared at the waitress until she took the hint.
“Who?” I said when she’d left.
Lyle, doing the little boy act, collapsing in on himself: “No one you know.”
“Who?”
“Look, I’m fine.”
And maybe he was. It wasn’t the first time he’d been knocked around, and it wouldn’t be the last. He liked the pain, I think, liked playing the underdog. It was a sort of justification.
“Was it that guy at Hank’s,” I said carefully, “the one with the tats?”
“Nick?” he said, conveniently forgetting—or maybe not forgetting at all—that neither of us was supposed to know the dark-haired man’s name. “No, it wasn’t him.” The tip of Lyle’s tongue appeared at the corner of his mouth, traced a crusty split in his lip.
“What about the other one?” I said quietly, uncertain how far I could take my suspicions about Lyle’s involvement in the underbelly of Okanogan County, uncertain how much he remembered about that night at Hank’s, who was there and who wasn’t. Lyle had always acted stupid—the harmless loser, the victim—but even back then, I had never really bought the act. “What about the blond one?”
His eyebrows darted above the rim of his sunglasses. “Who, Jimmy?”
“Yeah,” I said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
He shook his head, took another French fry, skipped the ketchup. “Naw, it wasn’t King.”
Jimmy King. Yeah, that fit the cocky blond lieutenant, pumping gas on the video, and the ripped, shirtless bully who flicked a lit cigarette into the bushes rather than go after my daughter with a shotgun.
I watched Lyle finish the food on my plate. His golden-brown fingers were rough and dry, the nails peeled down to nothing, just like when he was the little blond ten-year-old I’d known way back when. When he tagged around after his big brother Oren, already out of high school and living in the trailer out on the corner of the Res, living the high life with his buddies.
Because Oren had been like their dad, big and tall and broad shouldered, a “model” Indian straight out of some crass Western movie. And he was absent, distant—like their dad. He was always telling Lyle to stay out of it, to go home, to go keep their mom—already teetering on the edge—company at the apartment on the fringe of Omak. And at the time … at the time, I guess I thought Oren was being mean. So I was nice to little kid Lyle who took after their slight, weak, blonde mother. I bought him chocolate milk when Oren wasn’t looking and gave him a ride home when he still managed somehow to show up just in time for Billy Boykin, Oren’s right hand, to smack him upside the head or stick out a foot to trip him. Even though everyone would laugh, even Lyle. Everyone except me.
And then … I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know why I say anything sometimes. The pathways in my brain, the neurons or whatever, they go to a lot of strange places since the war.
“Was it Billy?” I said quietly, my eyes narrowed.
Lyle looked up, the skin between his eyebrows bunching. “Who?”
I studied his face, watching for a lie. Then said, just as quietly, “Billy Boykin.”
Lyle snorted, shook his shaggy head. “Billy Boykin?” Then he laughed, shook his head again. “No, Sis. He’s down in Seattle. In the pen.”
“Prison?” I said, surprised, but not surprised. “What for?”
But Lyle wasn’t telling any more. He shrugged and flashed that perfect smile again. And there was that tickle again, way back in the corner of my brain.
“Who’s this business partner?” I asked eventually.
In a neat flyby, the waitress set a tall glass of Coke on the table. Lyle unwrapped the straw instead of answering me, then sucked the glass dry, hunting down the last dregs of soda from the joints between the ice cubes.
“Lyle.” I snapped my fingers in front of his face. “The business partner. Who is it?”
“How’s Sophie?” He was bent over the table, the straw almost brushing the five o’clock shadow on his chin. But behind the sunglasses, his eyes darted around the room.
“She’s fine,” I said, even though I didn’t know if it was the truth.
The truth was I hadn’t spoken to her, had just received a short text saying she was in Michigan, and then another a couple hours later saying she had gotten to my aunt Martha’s place safely. And that was enough for me. The truth was that I had no idea how she was, not that she would have told me if I’d asked.
He nodded his head like he was bouncing to a beat. “That’s good. That’s real good.”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward. “What are they into, Lyle?”
He shrugged, the bones of his skinny shoulders lifting the thin fabric of his shirt.
“I know they’re into something. Nick and King and … and Patrick Beale.”
Lyle raised his eyebrows and looked squarely at me. “The dead kid?”
“He was working for them, wasn’t he?”
But Lyle just shrugged, looked away again.
“Is it meth?” I said quietly, maybe too quietly to be heard over the tinkling and beeping of the slot machines on the other side of the bar.
He turned toward me again; I could feel the crystal-blue stare coming through his dark lenses, even if I couldn’t see it. Then he leaned back, laid one arm on the back of the booth, and slid, putting one foot up on the seat and scrunching up in the corner.
“Well?” I said.
He looked over his shoulder, and then he said so quietly I almost didn’t hear it, “You didn’t hear it from me.”
“And Sophie?” My jaw was tense; hell, every muscle in my body was tense. “Is she involved?”
“She’s a good kid, Sis.”
I snorted. “So was I.”
I sat back in the booth, tried to see what he was seeing out among the sullen lights of the casino. But there were only machines and a few old women with flowers on their tatty sweatshirts and the ghosts of curlers in their hair. Hardly anything worth whispering over.
“How is she anyway?” Lyle asked. When I jumped, he added, “Sophie.”
“You already asked.”
“Oh.” He sucked a thin layer of Coke-tinted water out of the glass and kept sucking, the harsh, manic burble shredding my last nerve.
“Where did you send her again?” he asked, his lips still around the straw.
“To my aunt. In Michigan.”
“I didn’t know we had family in Michigan.”
“We don’t.”
His shoulders fell, caved. For a second, he was that little boy again, shaking the ice in his glass like it was a beggar’s cup. And for a second, I felt like an ass.
“Look,” I said, trying to make up for it, but not really. “Whatever you’re into, you can tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”
He winced when he looked up, then slowly took off the sunglasses and used a dirty napkin to wipe a fresh tear of blood away from a gash in his cheek, a gash like a ring might make upon impact with human skin.
“Jesus, Lyle. Whatever it is, it isn’t worth it.”
When he looked up at me, his face had that sad look, the one he trotted out every other time I saw him. But above his lips pursed in pain, inside the squinting rims of his eyes, his pupils were hard blue icebergs caught in a lacy web of broken capillaries. They were their mother’s eyes: hard, calculating, greedy—even at the end.
Then—something snapped in my head, and I wasn’t at the casino anymore. I was in my apartment, and it was the other night, the Saturday before, when the truck blew and I got my rifle, and there was so much fire, so much smoke, so much noise, and I called Lyle and told him to come now, come for Sophie—
Sophie. She ran to him when he got there that night. He came up the stairs and pounded on the door, and I shot up like a rocket from the couch where I had been sitting with my head between my hands, trying to hold everything in. When I opened the door, he was upset, he was excited, he was— And then the door of Sophie’s room flew open, crashed against the wall, and she ran, sprinted past me, crashed into him, sobbing. He’d held her like a child, smoothed her hair, whispered in her ear. And when he looked up at me, all I saw were those eyes, those hard blue icebergs: triumphant. Like he had won, and the prize was—
Jackpot.
The siren on a slot machine wailed, plastic chips crashed into a plastic basin. A woman squealed.
I blinked and there was Lyle in the casino, Lyle staring at me with those eyes, Lyle clutching the bloody napkin. But then he tossed it away and put on his sunglasses without wincing at all.
“Thanks for the fries,” he said, sliding out of the booth. “And the Coke.”
Then he swaggered off past the bar and disappeared into the thicket of machines.
After a while, the waitress came back and cleared the table.
Little boy Lyle. Playing the innocent, pretending to be the fool. The one everyone took advantage of. The one it was easy to pity. But he was also the one who knew everyone and everything useful in the Okanogan. At least, useful for certain things. Was he right about Jimmy King? Was I?
I opened my laptop and connected to the internet.
It’s easy to find a dead soldier. Obituaries litter the internet. Just search for “U.S. Army”, and you’ll find hundreds. It’s a lot harder to find a survivor. There are some news stories that name names. Mostly, the articles date back to when the war was hot, when the public was still horrified by the blood and the body count. Before they became numb to the photos of sand and rockets, grungy soldiers and tattered civilians. Before the atrocities of war became boring. That’s when I was there. In the early days. But you won’t find my name in any news story. I’m just another anonymous soldier who went and fought and was sent home alive. Sometimes the obits seem like they were written for the lucky ones. But Jimmy King was not one of the lucky ones.
I searched for what felt like hours, in and out of every corner of the Web, using every name I could think of that was similar to Jimmy King. Department of Defense sites. News sites. Archives for every local newspaper I could find. Archives for the whole internet. Then, finally, an obit. Not for him, but for his brother. Lee Kingman had stayed home when President Bush, the second one, had stumbled over 9/11, even after he called for Saddam Hussein’s head. Lee, the brother, had stayed at his job in retail, fighting the good fight in Thanksgiving Day sales for minimum wage in Oklahoma. And when he died, on July 19, 2005—the obit didn’t say how—he left a grieving mother, a girlfriend, and a brother—James Kingman, Captain, U.S. Army, stationed in Iraq with the infantry.
2005.
The last year I was there. The last year Private Havers was alive, stationed at a forward medical facility with me and the infantry, out there in the sandbox, keeping as many as we could alive. How ironic that Kingman’s brother gave me what I wanted. Maybe another brother would too.
I opened Facebook and messaged Mike Havers, not expecting anything after the bombshell I had dropped, but hoping that he had thought about it. That he had realized that what he thought he knew didn’t stack up. That his brother hadn’t been killed in combat, that there wouldn’t have been any reason for the Army to hide that. Location, time … yeah, maybe they’d hide that. But not the raw fact of combat. Maybe Mike Havers had realized my truth was the truth, and now he would remember something important. Maybe the name—Kingman or Jimmy—would jog his memory of something his brother had mentioned. Something that would tie Jimmy King to Private Havers, that would make him the link between Havers and Patrick Beale.
I sat in that booth for a while longer, hunched over the laptop, waiting for a response, flipping between Facebook and a search for federal prisons. By the time I found the number I needed, Havers still hadn’t responded. So I shut down the computer and headed for the doors, waiting for a human being to pick up at the federal detention center in Seattle as I wound through the flashing lights and electronic blare of the machines. Outside, I squinted in the glare of the late afternoon sun, my cell phone pressed against my ear as I struggled to hear the prison guard on the other end of the line. Visiting hours were Tuesday afternoon and, no, I wasn’t too late to sign up.
As I tore up the hig
hway, the stench of manure and the funk of fertilizer flying out the windows of my borrowed Bronco, I crossed my fingers and hoped my luck would hold.
* * *
I spent that evening driving all over the county, my mind spinning as fast as the wheels on the Bronco. Havers smuggling supplies—narcotics, other precursors of synthetic drugs—from the hospital. Patrick, meth precursors caked into his jeans. Both of them cocky and sure—too sure—that they were above the rules. Both of them trying to get away from the humdrum, from the middle-American numbing boredom. Running to something new and exciting and different. Running into the jaws of a monster, then trying to retreat when they realized that what they knew, what they had done would be their undoing. But both of them were tethered like sacrificial lambs by the people who held them back—Havers by me, Patrick by his father. And both of them were tortured and strung up to die.
Before, they were just two sad stories. But now I had Jimmy King. Jimmy in Iraq and Jimmy in the Okanogan. Jimmy on the video tape with my daughter and that punk, Nick. But could I prove he knew Havers? Was he really the link?
I pulled over for the tenth time that evening and checked Facebook on my phone. When the message icon appeared on the refreshed screen, I killed the engine and waited breathlessly for Mike Havers’s response to load.
Fuck.
Mike didn’t remember his brother mentioning any Jimmy or James or King or Kingman. Not any captains; not any officers at all. He had sent me a message about that in the late afternoon. Then—maybe he had kept thinking, or maybe he had remembered more—an hour later, he had sent another message that scrolled down the screen, a hundred times longer than anything he had ever sent before. It was like a fire hydrant had broken, and all the frustration and anger and suspicion were gushing out of him. It was like I was his therapist instead of some random chick on the internet destroying his dreams about his not-so-heroic brother.
He knew some guys in the infantry, but I don’t got names. He said once that they took him off base to shoot up shit in the desert. He told me I had to keep quiet about it because his sergeant was a real bitch.
Little Falls Page 17