The Sleeper

by Christopher Dickey

  “Kurt! Man! You’re back!” said Sam when I was shown into his office. The clothes were just what I’d expected, a white short-sleeve shirt and a striped tie, but the face was a lot heavier, and maybe sadder than I thought it would be. “I hear you’ve been off defending our country,” he said.

  “Reserve duty, that’s all,” I said.

  “The way you all disappeared caused a lot of talk around here.”

  “You know what the army’s like,” I said. “They want to do something quiet, they make a big noise about it. But there was nothing to it, really.”

  “Ranger stuff.”

  I was a little surprised he knew anything at all about what I used to do. But Sam made himself pay attention to other people. “Yeah, sort of,” I said, “but I really can’t talk—”

  “If you told me about it you’d have to kill me, right?”

  “Right.” I laughed a little and shook my head.

  “How’s Betsy and Miriam?”

  “Good. Yep, real good.” I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of his wife or any of his kids. “And your family?”

  “Caroline and the children are fine, thanks. Gosh, Kurt, it’s good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, too. Real good.”

  “What can I do for you?” he said. I was about to ask him, just sort of by-the-by, for a tour of the plant—ask him to show me what he did. But then Sam asked me: “You looking for a job?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well if you want one, I got one for you.”

  “Sam, I just came by to say hello, ’cause I was passing by and I thought it was a long time since I saw you.”

  “Yeah, and I’m glad you did,” said Sam. “And I know you’ll get your contracting business up and running again soon. But I was thinking—fact is, I could use your help around here.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Somebody with a little discipline is the first thing I’ve got in mind.” He got up to close the door to his office. “You look at the people I get here and you’d want to cry. The smart ones think they’re too smart for the job, and the others are just too stu—Well, not smart enough. And what none of them have is good old reliable discipline.”

  “What do they have to do?”

  “It’s mid-level supervisory stuff, watching the computer, monitoring equipment, checking charts. One of the main things you do is watch the chlorine supply to make sure there’s no leaks. There’s alarm systems and all, but you can’t be too careful. I mean, we’re not a nuclear reactor here, and you don’t have to be an engineer, so don’t worry about that. But we need somebody who’s serious about the work, and smart. You got any plumbing background?”

  “Putting in kitchens, I did some of the work myself.”

  “That’s enough, least for short term. But there is a lot of responsibility. If we don’t keep things working right, folks don’t get clean water. Or worse, they get bad water. And that chlorine gas—whoa, boy, you got to treat that with respect. So when I heard you were right outside my office door I thought, Sam, your prayers have been answered. I had to fire my last night-supervisor just last week. I’ve been doing double shifts myself since then. And I am just about beat.”

  Sam leaned forward over his desk. “Kurt, you’d be doing me a real favor if you’d come on board for a couple of months, just to tide me over until I can find somebody else. That is, if you decide you don’t want to stay. And if you do want to stay, then I’ll get the papers going to make you full time.”

  “Can I think it over?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let me know tomorrow?”

  I looked at my old friend, who was so different than he used to be, but still my old friend. “I’ve thought,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  When I got back to the house, the TV was on in the family room and Miriam was planted in front of it. The dishwasher was running in the kitchen, filling the room with clean white noise. The message light was flashing on the new telephone by the bed, but I didn’t see Betsy anywhere.

  I went back to Miriam. “Where’s Mommy?”

  The Scooby-Doo rerun was just about over, and Miriam waited a second for the titles to roll. “Mommy’s in the shower,” she said, without taking her eyes off the screen.

  Betsy was just wrapping a towel around her when I opened the bathroom door. “Oh, Baby,” I said.

  “No time,” she said. “You’re late and I’ve got to be on time at the Jump Start. I can’t believe Bill was so nice.”

  “I got news for you, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sam Perkins over at the waterworks gave me a job to help us out. It’s a night shift, but it’s money.”

  Betsy tried to judge whether I was serious about the offer, and then whether I was serious about taking it. “That’s real good,” she said.

  My second night on the job, I brought the Sword of the Angel with me. The waterworks furnace was fired up hotter than a steam engine’s, and the yellow-red glare showed through the old mica port. All this equipment was going to be replaced in a few months. Sam said it was a miracle he’d been able to keep it operating so long with such a low budget, but it was on its last legs. I opened the small door and popped the extinguisher inside like a shell into a breech, then slammed and bolted the door. In a second I heard the pop as the bottle exploded and melted. The Sword of the Angel was no more. My old war, my holy war, was over at last. But I was the only one who knew.

  Chapter 29

  The first few weeks we were back in Kansas, every time the phone rang I expected Griffin to be on the line. But the little display on our phone never showed the 703 area code, or 202, and only once, from 917, was it actually Griffin calling on a mobile phone, a little before midnight in the second week of May.

  “Just checking in,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Everything cool with you?”

  “Yep. How about you?”

  “Hang loose,” is all he said. Then, “Got to go.”

  I tried to call the number back, but all that came up was a digital-voice answering machine. It wasn’t easy to sleep on that conversation.

  It wasn’t easy to sleep at all. Betsy and I were in the same bed, but didn’t touch, didn’t spoon, didn’t snuggle. Didn’t talk.

  What was Griffin doing? He took a personal risk trying to get me out of Guantánamo. He went to bat for a terrorist, as far as his bosses were concerned, and what was worse for him in the bureaucracy, he won. They’d make him pay for that if they could. And now he wasn’t even using me. He was just letting me sit here, waiting for the world to blow up, or not. Waiting for the law to knock at my door again, or not. Waiting for my life to start again, or not.

  He was waiting for something to happen here, I realized as I looked at the blankness of the ceiling. He wasn’t going to tell me what it was. He probably wasn’t going to warn me. Or my wife or my child.

  I thought of a scratchy old film I was shown during a chemical warfare training session. A goat is tied up in an open space in some scrub-covered hills, like bait for a tiger. But there are no tigers here. There’s only a small explosion upwind, and a thin cloud of smoke from the charge. The sarin gas that was in the shell is not visible. The goat doesn’t see it or smell it. Then the symptoms begin—drooling, shitting, twitching. And the goat’s dead in thirty-seven seconds.

  I was staked out here. So was Betsy and so was Miriam. We were bait, or part of an experiment. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew it.

  “Betsy?”

  “Mmmm—what is it?”

  “Bad times are coming for us here.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe we should leave. Maybe we should get in the car right now and just get the fuck out.”

  “I told you I was going to stay home.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Where is safe?”

  “Not here.”

  “Ah, Jesus, Kurt. Do you remember what you said to me the day you left
in September? Do you? You said God himself couldn’t keep you from coming back to our home. And now you’re telling me you’re leaving again? And because you’re scared of you-don’t-know-what, and you want us leaving again with you? Well, you go, Kurt—wherever you think you have to go. Do what you have to do. But what I have to do is stay here. And anybody who wants to make me leave this place again is going to die trying.”

  “We could be—”

  “We could be what? Killed?”

  “We could be bait in somebody else’s trap.”

  “You know something that you’re not telling me? Hey—what am I saying? You never tell me a damn thing anyway. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “All I know is what I told you.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open,” said Betsy. “I’ll get a gun if I have to. My stepdad taught me how to shoot, and he taught me good.”

  “I know.”

  “So you do what you have to do. But I ain’t going anywhere. You told me you’d come back to me. You did. I told you I’d stay. I have and I will stay at home, in my home, in my kitchen and my bed with my baby in the next room and my husband right here beside me—if he stays. And the rest of the world? They can go fuck themselves. You hear me, Kurt?”

  “I hear you, Baby.”

  “You sound funny.”

  “I’m smiling,” I said. “Whatever happens, it will happen here—or not. I ain’t going nowhere. We ain’t going nowhere.”

  I felt Betsy move across the bed. She kissed me gently on the cheek, then pulled back again.

  “I love you, Kurt.”

  “Ah, God, Betsy, I love you, too.”

  “It’s going to be okay, isn’t it?”

  “Someday, yeah. It’s going to be okay. Soon.” I wished I believed what I was saying. I didn’t think Betsy did. But she kissed me again, then rolled over in the bed away from me, staring at the wall in the dark. “Let’s sleep while we can,” she said.

  The next morning I went to Wal-Mart with Betsy’s credit card and maxed it out. I bought a Mossberg twelve-gauge automatic with a pistol grip and buckshot loads, a Ruger Mini-14 with Remington .223 rounds, plus a new HP desktop and printer. The total bill was just shy of three thousand dollars.

  Chapter 30

  Months in the cage had worn down my endurance, and the running was harder now than I ever remembered it. The first time I set out on my old ten-mile course I made it about three miles, nowhere near to Jeffers’ Rocks, and I was so winded that I decided to walk, limping, back to the house. After that, I set a different program for myself, and through most of May and early June I took fairly easy jogs around town.

  Since I was on the night shift at the water company, I’d get off about six in the morning and that’s when I’d run, just as Westfield was waking up. Instead of heading away from the center, like I would have done in the old days, I headed into it. I passed little brick houses where the lights were almost always on, and I could see through the kitchen windows that the families were finishing sleepy breakfasts. Or maybe their dad was just getting into his pickup to head for the farm where he worked. And he’d wave as I ran by.

  In front of a lot of the houses, American flags were flying. Some hung from poles mounted over the front doors, some flew from poles put up in the yards. Small ones on sticks were tied to mailboxes. After September 11, every day was the Fourth of July in Westfield, I guess, and in a lot of the rest of America, too. There were flags on the sides of cars, and flags on the backs of cars, and lots of flags in the rear windows of pickup trucks, just behind the gun racks. And every morning that I ran by them, I thought they just weren’t the same flags I saw at Guantánamo. The ones here in Westfield were about pride and about faith in our country, which is all about faith in ourselves. The flag of quiet pride, that was the one I loved now, and there were dozens of them flying in front of me every morning when I ran through town.

  On a lot of those mornings, when I took the most direct route from the water company past the Super 8 Motel and along Coffey Road, I’d go by Kmart. It had a huge flagpole out front, but no flag flying on it. The Kmart had closed down while I was away. The entrance was all boarded up. The sign was gone. The company went bankrupt and it was shutting stores that weren’t doing well, and most people went to Wal-Mart these days anyway. It was bigger, newer, cleaner. So the Kmart parking lot was empty except for a beat-up old Buick station wagon with four flats abandoned there. And somebody had taken down the flag.

  You wouldn’t think you’d mourn a Kmart, but I did, a little, every time I ran past it. I remembered when it opened, when I was ten and my father was still alive. And my mother got a job there at the checkout counter and we’d go visit her, pretending we were customers so she wouldn’t get in trouble for talking to us her first few days on the job. And now my father and mother were gone, long dead, and even this place where we’d been, that had been so new, was boarded up.

  I kept on running.

  When I hit the center of town, near the courthouse and the Veterans’ Memorial, I started to pass people on the street, and just about every one of them would wave or nod in my direction, and I’d wave back. It was first light, but a farm town opens early, and sometimes there were so many people around that I must have looked a little crazy, waving here, waving there, like I thought I was finishing up a long race and waving at the crowd. But it made me feel so damned good just to know all those folks were around, even the ones I didn’t know well, or at all, and that they cared enough, just enough, to nod in my direction.

  It’s funny the way you take possession of a place by running through it. Not the same as when you just walk, when each little piece of the place—a newspaper on a doorstep, or something in a shop window—can grab your attention and hold it. When you run the details don’t slow you down. The smell of bacon coming out of a diner gives way to a single headline on a newspaper, then a flock of crows are calling each other awake, and your eye falls on the out-of-state plates of a rented Impala. You run through bits and pieces of experience, some of them that you expect, and some that you don’t, none of them really related to each other, but all of them coming together to make a whole town. And maybe because you’ve run for it, worked for it, and you’re tired, you feel like you own the place; like you earned it.

  Each day after I got a little sleep I sat down at the computer and tried to read up on all that happened in the world while I was on the ship and in the cage. It took some searching, but I finally found stories about the boat sunk off Japan and the freighter stopped in the English Channel. There was no hint in the articles about how dangerous those attacks could have been. And there was nothing at all to show what happened to the other boats I’d heard about.

  I read through the old news I’d missed: how alert followed alert in America and around the world, and every so often an arrest was announced. Abu Zubaydah, who was under Abu Zubayr, was the big one for a long time. The papers said he was caught in Pakistan, and eventually he started telling a lot of stories. But whether they were true or not, no one seemed to know. Every so often there’d be an alert about banks, or about nuclear power stations. And word would go out that the threat was learned from Abu Zubaydah. But he never talked about ships, at least as far as anyone could learn from reading the papers. Then news leaked, on purpose I figured, that Abu Zubayr had been caught. The papers said he was picked up in Pakistan, too, which was a lie of course, and that he was “critically injured.”

  Yeah.

  I read about Israel and Palestine and about all the slaughter there. I was never in those places and that was a fight that never touched my soul, but I knew the muj would use it to fire up their hatred. If you looked at the world from a Muslim view, then Muslims were under attack everywhere. Everywhere. But the heart of the action was in Palestine. Just like if you looked at the world from a Jewish point of view, then Jews were under attack everywhere, but the center of the drama was in Israel. And you saw a lot about Christian victims on the Web, too, like they didn’t want to b
e left out. One of the churches in Westfield took up collections for their brothers and sisters in Christ who were persecuted in Muslim Egypt.

  I sat there in my house in Westfield looking at the computer screen and through it at the whole world full of dangers, and thinking about what people thought they knew and all that they really didn’t know at all, and then I’d turn in my chair and look out the window at the lawn and the driveway and Miriam’s Barbie bicycle and the neighbor’s sprinkler fanning water back and forth and it all just seemed so far away, like we were back in the eye of the hurricane, and somehow we could stay there. And I wanted that. Much more than I wanted God and more than I wanted justice, I just wanted to keep the hurricane away. But if I closed my eyes and listened, I could hear the howling of the wind. And if I wasn’t careful the darkness of the storm would settle in around me, until I could not move or think or talk, even to myself.

  Al-Shami was still out there somewhere. Still a threat. Faridoon was out there, too, and whatever he was doing, and whoever he was doing it for, I figured I owed him a huge debt. Sometimes I wondered what Cathleen was up to. She’d been a great good friend. Would I ever see her again? Or hear from her? What happened to Nureddin? Did he survive? And Waris? No, I thought, I would never see any of them again. I was spent. My war was over. I had no more business in those places.

  The alarm went off on the computer every weekday at about three-thirty and whatever I was doing, however I felt, I’d get up and I’d walk over to Miriam’s summer playgroup, which was just about half a mile away, to pick her up. Then we’d walk back and she’d talk the whole time about the things she painted or made, and who her best friends were.

  “How is Charlene today?” I would ask.

  “I don’t like Charlene. She’s mean.”

  And then the next day I’d ask, “Did everything go okay with Charlene? She wasn’t mean to you?”

  “Daddy! Charlene and me, we’re going to be best friends forever!”