The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 20

  Two marines had shed their ILBEs—their backpacks—in the shade of a spindle tree. The remnants of their lunch still lay strewn across the dirt—foil pouches, a grimy bandanna, a rocket-shaped NeuroGasm bottle that had been shot clean through. When the sniper had started firing, the boys had run up the hill and taken cover behind a pile of logs. Above the gravelly plain where they’d sheltered, there was a higher level yet. The shooter had picked them off from there.

  One of the fallen, a kid named Punk, had been almost eighteen, but he looked as if he’d barely started puberty. He was plump, pale as uncooked bread dough. Splinters from the logs had raked across his face. Dashed with his blood, the boy’s round cheek looked almost like a peach that had been crushed underfoot.

  The other marine, Bello, had been a little older, and looked it. Spots of black stubble—five o’clock shadow at noon—covered his chin and upper lip. Between his eyebrows there was a cluster of acne scars. He’d been shot only once, in a spot marked by a surprisingly, pitifully small black mark in the center of his forehead. The back of his skull had blown off and taken his helmet with it. The PRP crew had yet to find the helmet.

  Flores and Pittman were working the search area. They were something of a matched set—identical height, similar stringy build, same short black hair, same cinnamon skin—though Flores was the son of fruit pickers from Paso Robles, California, and Pittman was the daughter of an injury lawyer and a judge from Clearwater, Florida. Without a word between them they crept across the plateau.

  Standing at the southern end of the plateau, Littlefield clamped a sheet of paper to a clipboard and sketched the site. An oblong lot roughly the shape of Vermont, the old logs halfway along on the east side, three trees in the northeast corner, a dirt track feeding into the southeast corner and starting up again from the northwest corner. The ground dropped steeply on the east side and rose just as steeply on the west side. Somewhere above, Evans was keeping watch.

  Littlefield paced off the distances. From the northeast corner of the site, he could see across a dusty valley to another craggy ridge. He walked sixty-seven paces, about eighty meters and a half, to the pile of logs. At his feet the slope dropped away into a grove of trees. Somewhere among them stood the spindle tree where Punk and Bello had left their packs. Closer, a few meters down, he saw something that could be a dusty rock or Bello’s helmet. He marked it and then went on measuring the length of the east side of the site. A hundred and ninety-eight paces.

  When he’d finished, he looked over his sketch and checked the numbers. Good enough for now. He handed the clipboard to Pittman. “I think I saw Bello’s cover,” he said. “I’m going after it.”

  She nodded, said nothing. Flores looked over, nodded, said nothing. The two of them were eerie as fuck sometimes.

  Littlefield trudged up the hill. Evans sat on a low limb of a tree, swinging his legs in the air. Mary had been dozing on the ground below him. At the sound of Littlefield’s step, she woke up and licked her chops and thumped her tail on the dirt. He’d thought by bringing her along on searches he could make good on the lie he’d told La Flamme, that he really could train her as a cadaver dog. So far, she’d learned that when he and Evans suited up and made for the motor pool, she had a ride and a nap to look forward to.

  Shielding his eyes with his hand, Littlefield squinted up at Evans. “Saw the brain bucket,” he said. “Going after it.”

  “‘Kay. So?”

  “While I’m at it, let’s go back for those boys’ deuce gear. Want to?”

  Evans screwed up his mouth. “Dumb idea, ain’t it? We have to go right by there on the way back.”

  “You’d rather sit on your increasingly flabby ass?”

  “I’m looking out.”

  “Get down here, dumb fuck.”

  “Sheet far,” Evans said, but he hopped down. He sprang clear of the tree and held his arms out to either side like a gymnast sticking a tricky landing. “Lead on, MacDouche.”

  Littlefield blinked at him. “Was that a Shakespeare reference? Did you just—” He shook his head. “You’re one-third monkey, one-third pig, and three-thirds gonad. You could not have thrown down a literary allusion right there.”

  “Shows what you know, Einstein. It’s from a game.”

  Barely, just barely, Littlefield resisted the urge to slam Evans in the nose with the heel of his hand. Instead, he set his jaw and gestured toward the track that led down the hill. As they descended, half-jogging because of the sharpness of the pitch, Mary loped ahead of them.

  “The cover’s down the hill there,” Littlefield said, pointing toward the log pile and the slope beyond. “Or at least I think it’s the cover. It’s too far down to reach from the top, and too steep to come up from the bottom. It’ll save some boot leather and time if I just slide down. Go around. I’ll meet you below.”

  “What about my boot leather and time?”

  Littlefield answered with a sigh and both middle fingers. At the end of the track, Evans went around to the right and made for the path on the opposite side. He slapped his thigh and whistled for Mary, and she stayed with him. Littlefield went to the left, walking along the north side and then the east. At the stand of logs he sat in the dirt and crawled frogwise down the bank.

  The object he’d seen from above was Bello’s helmet, as he’d suspected. He kicked away some of the dust. Pebbles and porous clumps of dirt rolled away, exposing a jagged outcrop of an enormous boulder or perhaps of the mountain itself. The helmet had come to rest in a crag, its front side facing downhill.

  Wedging the heel of his boot against the outcrop, Littlefield shrugged off his rucksack. From it he took a pair of recovery tags, a pen, and two ziplock bags, one large and one small.

  He called out to the crew up top. “Pittman. Flores. Echo number.” They were so long in replying that he started to repeat himself more loudly. “Pittman. Flores.”

  Pittman answered. “Seventeen.”

  “Papa number?”

  After a moment, Flores answered. “Three.”

  “Lima Charlie.” Loud and clear.

  On one of the recovery tags, Littlefield wrote E-17. On the other, P-3. Below those numbers, once on each tag, he wrote a code that tied the helmet to the present search operation. He dropped in the E-17 tag into the large bag and P-3 tag into the small one. Once he’d stowed the pen, he hunted up a surgical mask and a pair of nitrile gloves and put them on.

  With care, he picked up the helmet. It was intact, and it was Bello’s—his name was on it, front and back. It was intact—no bullet hole. With his index finger, Littlefield touched the center of his own forehead, the spot that corresponded to the entry wound on Bello’s forehead. If Bello had had his head down, the helmet might or might not have saved him, but the round would definitely have struck armor. He must have been looking right at the sniper, whether he’d known it or not.

  Where the helmet had come to rest, blood had blackened the ground. Littlefield turned the helmet over and looked inside. Blood, bone, globules of brain tissue. They didn’t call these things brain buckets for nothing. Littlefield opened the large bag and slipped the helmet into it with all the care he could manage, as if it were an object of unimaginable fragility, as if all the Belloness of Bello resided in the helmet along with his brain matter. It was the best Littlefield could do—all he could do.

  He zipped the bag and set it aside. Sitting on the ground, now, with his legs splayed out on either side of the outcrop, he examined the bloodstained swath of ground where the helmet had come to rest. He scanned minutely for splinters of bone and scraps of tissue. No piece or portion was too small—that was the protocol, that was the mantra.

  From a side pocket of his rucksack he took a plastic container not much bigger than a child’s pencil box. He popped it open and took from it a pair of plastic forceps in translucent cellophane. With his teeth and the fingers of one gloved hand, he peeled open the cellophane packet. Plying the tiny tips of the for
ceps through the bloody muck, he found a bit of bone after all. He placed it in the small bag. He found another chunk, no bigger than a toothpick. Into the bag. The blood had congealed, and it came away from the rock in strings that immediately fell apart. Mixed in with that he found scraps of skin and tissue and more chips of bone, these nearly infinitesimal. He collected what he could find. It added up to about a quarter cup of red-brown goo. He sealed the bag and attached the P-3 tag to it.

  Standing again, he bagged his trash and stowed it in his rucksack. From here, the rest of the way down looked far and steep. No way to be dignified about it. He shouldered his pack and, cradling Bello’s cover and the bag of partial remains on his lap, he slid down.