by Skip Horack
“Isn’t there anything more you can tell me about Tommy?”
“Like war stories? That what you’re after?” He put a hand up in helpless defeat. “We trained together for almost a year, then our platoon spent about a month deployed before he died. I’m sorry, but again, there’s really nothing else to tell. Truly.”
I didn’t want to believe him, didn’t want to accept I was going to leave this mountain no more enlightened than when I’d come. “But was he happy?” I asked.
“Happy? How would I know? I thought a lot of him, though. Ahab was a good kid.”
“Did he seem to like his life? That’s all I mean.”
“What a question.” He bobbed his head as if thinking hard about it. “Well, I’m pretty sure he liked wearing the Trident.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s tough to say. He was a free spirit, at least for an operator. Was why I enjoyed him. Close with his cards, but in a trickster way. Not so serious like you. We’d badger him with those Ray Stevens songs, but he gave as good as he got.”
“I’m not all that serious.”
“Fine. You’re a comedian.” Lionel handed me the binoculars and grinned. “Now let’s get back to me and a Joseph boy, fighting the enemy.”
It was almost noon when Lionel announced that several snow cocks had appeared. I wasn’t able to find them with the binoculars, but he passed me the spotting scope so I could get a better look. An I’ll-be-damned moment. This wasn’t a snipe hunt after all. There were six of them, each a mix of gray and black and brown with some white along the throat and head, and they were indeed the size of chickens. Lionel thought this was most likely the flock he’d busted that morning, and I watched one of them through the spotting scope while he consulted the range finder. It stood motionless on the slope as the others fed nearby.
“Which you on?” Lionel asked.
“The highest.”
He peered back into the range finder. “Got it.”
“How far? Six hundred?”
“Seven hundred three.” There were foam earplugs lying next to the rifle, and we both slipped a pair in. “We’re talking a Hail Mary shot here, but you good?”
I nodded. His voice was muffled now, but I could still hear him okay. He pushed his cowboy hat back. Grabbed ahold of the .308’s pistol grip with his trigger hand. Flipped the lens caps on the rifle scope. His cheek was settled against the stock, and he began to sight on the snow cock. “Doping the scope,” he said, as he clicked at two dials to match the yardage from the range finder and, I assumed, account for the slight breeze blowing across the valley. He finished with his adjustments but kept talking. “I’m locked at a hundred, so at this distance my bullet drops about thirteen feet. The skinny air here will flatten that arc out some, but not lots.” He switched the safety off with his thumb. “And uphill, no less. You watching?”
I put the spotting scope back on the snow cock. It was staring straight up at the blue sky, looking out for danger. Hawks, eagles. “Yeah,” I said.
“Don’t blink.”
His breathing became steady and even, and just when I thought he might not shoot there was a pneumatic yawp from the rifle like a nail gun punching on top of the roaring whip crack of the bullet breaking the sound barrier as it made the lobbing trip, then a quick puff of rock dust and maybe feathers. Something —a spent cartridge, I realized —had bounced off the side of the spotting scope. I began to search for snow cocks and saw only a lone bird moving up the summit, confused and desperate, scrambling for the safety of the reverse slope.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered. “Did you actually hit it?”
Lionel dropped the magazine from the rifle. He was on his knees, and he took the spotting scope from me, storing it in the day pack along with the binoculars and the range finder. “We probably shouldn’t dawdle,” he said.
I started to stand, but then he stayed where he was. “Everything okay?” I asked.
“I’m an asshole.”
“What?”
He ejected the round still chambered in the rifle, began to spin the cartridge in his hand. We were both on our knees now, and from across the valley, in the scope of some other hunter, it would have looked as if we were praying.
“There was a crash,” said Lionel.
“I believe you. I never meant —”
“Stop. Let me talk. January ’91, well over a month before the ground campaign. Iraqi troops were occupying an offshore oil field east of Kuwait, and on the eighteenth the navy would be going in to clear them. That was the Battle of Ad-Dawrah. You familiar?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t matter. But that was what we were practicing for. SEALs might be needed for fast-rope inserts onto some of those oil rigs, so they had eight of us flying from a destroyer to an abandoned Aramco platform. Dress rehearsal for the op.”
“Where?”
“In the Persian Gulf, off the Saudi coast. You got the truth from the navy, just not the goatfuck particulars.” He shook his head. “Like how there should have been another helo with us, but the ship’s CO needed the other SH-60 for mine watch. So it was decided we would Charlie Mike and run the rehearsal with the single helo, and yup, corners were cut. Still —friendly waters, nothing too complicated. We’d done the same run twice already, but of course something went wonky with the 60’s hydraulics on this one. We were flying doors open, seats out, and wearing flight suits and helmets, light tactical setup, MP5s and pistols, our climbing harnesses clipped to floor fittings. The pilots were getting us lower, coming down in a swoop, and me and Ahab were to be the first pair off. Nighttime, easy seas, but not much moon. Couldn’t see dick, couldn’t hardly hear the crew chief’s commands, so I told Ahab, Unclip your carabiner. When we feel the spray hit our face, we jump.”
Lionel ran his tongue across his front teeth, and then the cartridge he’d been holding went sailing into the valley unfired. He was speaking like a hypnotized man, channeling another Lionel Purcell. A version he didn’t know anymore. A minute could have passed, and in that quiet minute he was hands on his thighs and chest to the world —a knelt samurai preparing to die with honor. I knew I shouldn’t ask him to go on. I shouldn’t, but I did.
“So what happened?”
He closed his eyes, then opened them, returning to the here and now. “Don’t really know. Chaos and Murphy happened. Everybody was busy, so nobody quite saw, but I guess Ahab either got bucked or jumped too early, too high. I glanced over to check on him, but he was already out. I jumped, the rest jumped, and we collected up. We each had our own flotation, but he never showed. He wasn’t anywhere.”
I felt like I’d been smashed against that mountain, crushed by that sky. “The navy looked for him, though, right?” I asked. “Later?”
“They looked, but we’d gone into the water ten klicks seaward and a windstorm blew in that lasted almost two days.” Lionel’s shoulders slumped, as if sharing that memory had only made it heavier somehow. “That was that.”
After all those years, I had a story. The same story, but with details. A story I’d have to tell Joni —how there was a good possibility her boy SEAL father had made a mistake. Or maybe Joni would get old pictures from a photo album and the simpler story. The fleeting story Lionel had told me in the very beginning. He was aiming his finger at me now, and I wondered if he was reading my mind.
“Who cares how it played?” he asked. “Just know this —you die in the line, you’re a hero. That’s who your brother is to me, Roy. And I’m sorry, but I won’t ever talk about that night again.”
It was nearly dusk by the time we had the Willys parked back inside Lionel’s shed. The Walker hounds were at full volume, and when I let Sam out of his kennel he touched noses through the chain-link with one of the hounds, then hopped around like he hadn’t seen me in a year. I rubbed at his ears to calm him, and he followed m
e to the shed.
Lionel handed me a Coke from an ice chest and cracked one for himself. “You still leaving tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yeah. But I appreciate you taking me in, telling me what you did.”
We settled into lawn chairs, and he drained his Coke in two slams. “I’m glad you came looking.”
“Me too,” I said. And in spite of everything, I meant it.
“Don’t let it be another sixteen years.”
“I won’t.”
“Sure you won’t.” He stood. “I need to snag something. Sit tight.”
He jogged off to the trailer in his limping canter, and I started picking kennel hay from Sam’s blond coat. When Lionel rejoined us he had a pistol in his hand. A small black automatic. I had a panicked thought that for some Natural Law reason he was about to shoot me, but instead he spit the magazine and racked the slide to show me the pistol was unloaded.
“Here,” he said, popping the empty mag back in place. “That’s for you, little brother.”
My eyes stayed on the gun.
“Chop chop. Free gat. Thank you for your service.”
“But why?”
“Just take it already.”
Finally I reached out and accepted the pistol. I’d been forced to sell off all Joseph guns prior to striking my plea deal with the D.A., and it felt awkward in my hand. Lionel returned to his lawn chair, and I sat down across from him, examining the pistol in the light. I didn’t recognize the make or the model or even the caliber, but according to the markings on the barrel this was a Walther PPK in 7.65 mil.
“Same as James Bond used,” said Lionel. “And same as what Hitler put to his head.” He removed his hat, and his hair fell loose as he hooked the crown over his knee. Between that hair and his horseshoe mustache he looked sullen. A half-yeti already missing his mountains. “Ahab gave that to me.”
“Come on.”
“It’s a fact.” He pulled a rubber band off his wrist and tied his hair up. “We’d always spring some gag or another on newbies. The guys told him he had to buy the oldest man a present out of respect, something expensive. Said that was a Team FIVE tradition.”
“And Tommy bought you this?” My brother the worm.
Lionel nodded. “I told him they’d been jerking his chain, but I think he knew that. He wouldn’t take it back, so now I’m giving it to you.” He pointed at the ceiling of the shed. “Hooyah. I win, Ahab.”
“I can’t take it either.”
“Nope. You can and you will. That’s a direct order.”
“I’m a felon.”
He floated one of his eyebrows. “No lie?”
“I got into some trouble when I was young.”
He waved me quiet. “Not any of my concern. You’ve seen I kick the chalk off the sidelines myself.”
“I had sex with a minor. She was sixteen. I was nineteen.”
He waved his hand again. “I absolve you. It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. Fake it till you make it.”
AA platitudes, I supposed. I looked down at the Walther. It was against the law for me to be holding a gun, but this was something different. Tommy had held that pistol, and I could sense him now, in the shed with us. This was like a holy relic. Those tangible reminders that dead saints once walked the earth as people. Twenty-year-old boys don’t leave much behind when they die. Here was an artifact to be cared for and venerated. A splinter from the True Cross, the finger of Doubting Thomas.
“Screw ’em, Roy. Don’t beat yourself up over the past. There’s no bottom to that.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Take it one day at a time. The only easy day was yesterday.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
He laughed. “Who says I’m talking to you? I might still have a box of ammo for her. I could look.”
“That’s all right.”
“Now you listen. I wrestled over whether to give that to you because I can tell you’re a bit unglued. I don’t want you getting itchy, hurting yourself.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Well, I do. Don’t make a jackass of me.”
He stood, and I realized he was asking me to shake on it. To promise I wouldn’t go out like Hitler, a coward in his bunker. I stood up myself, and he grabbed my hand as if I was falling and he was there catching me, steadying me. After that we talked some more, but not about anything important, not about anything I can remember now. Words I forgot almost as I was saying them. He’d given me all he could, and we each drank another Coke, then called it a night. I thanked Lionel again for everything, and he told me to keep careful, that a strange and crowded city like San Francisco was no place to be. The last thing he said to me was maybe you are Orion. Happy hunting.
On Thursday I would ride out of Battle Mountain with the rising sun, and though I think Lionel probably heard me and Sam bumping around, he didn’t emerge from his bedroom to see us off. I left the Walther lying among the books on the iron coffee table. For now that relic would remain with him for safekeeping. Though I didn’t question that Tommy would have wanted me to have that gun, if I got caught with it I could be looking at prison. And despite my occasional displays of bullshit swagger and disregard, and the hero I’d apparently had for a brother, the reality is that life had made me a good slave. That in any real moment of truth, I was never not afraid.
PART III
The San Francisco Notes
So this is the battlefield?
—Red Dawn (1984)
Beyond the soft, buttery sunlight of postcard San Francisco is a low-slung and oftentimes foggy neighborhood locals refer to as the Outer Richmond. My sublet was on Forty-Sixth Avenue, in the bottom floor of a guacamole-green building between Fulton and Cabrillo Streets. About a quarter mile from the ice-cold Pacific, and a half block north of Golden Gate Park. Many of my neighbors were Chinese or Russian, and our stretch of Forty-Sixth Avenue was nothing but salt-mellowed two- and three-stories crammed together like the worn toy cubes of a child. I’d hate to see what a fire might do there. A thrifty lady buys a used toaster, then everyone dies.
Viktor Fedorov’s house was just eight blocks away from my tiny apartment, and during our Kansas phone call we had arranged to meet in the park the morning after I got into town. “I will see you at nine thirty,” he’d said on the phone. “By the windmill at the end of JFK Drive.”
And though Joni wasn’t for Viktor to know about, the apartment was also a mile and a half from Marvel Court. Thursday, my date of arrival, wouldn’t count toward my five working days of amnesty, but starting tomorrow I’d be on the clock. I only had a week to both find Joni and charm her, so after my check-for-key exchange with the serene, apple-cheeked Karen Yang, I left Sam in the apartment and trudged up Cabrillo, then Thirty-Second Avenue, alone.
The Hammons house was a yellow, entrance-beside-garage stucco, flat across the front save for ten feet of balcony built into the second floor. It sat wedged between a pair of similar two-story stuccos on Marvel Court, not far from where that short, dead-end lane hit up against a steep and bushy hillside belonging to a park called Lincoln Park. A trail through the trees and scrub along the eastern portion of Lincoln Park brought me to the hill above Marvel Court. I could see the house from there, and I reckoned if I returned tomorrow and waited long enough I’d spot Joni coming home from school. That tomorrow I would know what she looked like.
Friday morning, and an overcast sky. Golden Gate Park. A thousand-acre rectangle of land running from the middle of the city to the ocean. Way west by the quiet Outer Richmond the park felt unfinished. Wild, almost. There were sad cases who dwelled within its thickets: addicts in blanket tents, loner combat vets, small homeless confederations. So, condoms and needles, trash and misery, but also things I never expected to find in a big American city. Peac
e and beauty. Raccoon, possum, and skunk tracks. Various songbirds, raptors, and waterfowl. Ravens and crows. There was a restaurant that looked over the Great Highway and the Pacific, two dormant windmills and an archery range, some soccer fields, and even a nine-hole golf course —but pretty much everything else was forest.
The windmill on JFK Drive was only a ten-minute walk from the apartment, and I found it without any trouble. A Brothers Grimm windmill, about seven stories high with brown shingles and four still sails. We were early, so I figured I had let Sam nose the green hedges of the tulip garden there. And I had just taken him off leash when I saw a silver-haired man coming up the sidewalk with a dog of his own. A Saluki —like a greyhound, but with a feathered and fawn-colored coat. The man saw Sam roaming loose and stopped. His Saluki was leashed, so I was the one in the wrong, no argument there. I hollered for Sam, but it was too late. He’d seen the sight hound and was bounding over to say hello. I kept yelling, but Sam wasn’t listening.
A dog will sometimes become nervous if it’s on a leash and gets approached by a rowdy Fido that isn’t, and once the man saw Sam wasn’t going to peel off he dropped his Saluki’s lead so she wouldn’t fluster. At first the two dogs were only sniffing each other, and I’d almost reached them when the Saluki bit Sam on the ear. Sam made a sound like tires squealing. Now he was pissed. The Saluki hauled ass, and Sam tore after her —but she was the fastest dog ever. The man was shouting in Russian and I was shouting in English, until finally we got our dogs in check.
Sam was pawing at his ear and whimpering. I knelt beside him, then looked to the Russian. He was pushing sixty, moonfaced and bull-necked, about my height but way broader and with short, Caesar-cut hair, a downturned mouth, and half-lidded eyes. He was wearing a black leather jacket and black pants, and had the Saluki sitting between his splayed feet.
“Are you Viktor?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “You are Roy? Is she all right?” A statement of concern, but in the same bored monotone I’d heard on the phone. Like he was flipping each word over for a tedious inspection. “I am very sorry. I have never seen Dina bite.”