“First things first,” she said. “I must get out of these tennis shoes. I didn’t realize how much they would hurt my feet. They’re burning again.”
“Roger that. Go take care of yourself. I can make the decaf, and I’ll put your gun here on the bar and leave it with you tonight.”
“Take it with you, Cody. My dad will have his .45.”
Brandi walked into the bathroom to deposit her shoes and athletic socks. She returned with a wet towel, sat on the sofa, reached down, and attempted to bring relief to ugly carpet burns and abrasions on her lower extremities. Cody was busy with the coffeemaker.
“Ooh! My feet are on fire.” She lost her breath. “My ribs are bruised and I’m getting stiff. It’s not easy bending over like this.”
Brandi groaned and stretched but couldn’t reach down past her ankles. She glanced up at Cody, who stared back at her like a bronze statue.
“Yeah, your feet are really banged up. Not pretty. I mean they’re pretty, but…you know what I mean.”
She finally straightened up, took two deep breaths, and spouted off. “I hear that all women in Texas go barefoot.”
“What? Wrong again!” He took a couple of steps toward her, still focused on her feet. She dropped the towel over them to break his gaze.
Cody smirked. “The women in Texas wear big bubba cowboy boots with huge jingling spurs and bells. It’s the only way we can keep track of our females.” Then he stepped closer. “Uh, could I help you do that?”
“Too late!” she snapped. “I’m finished!” She tossed him the towel. “Be sweet and ditch this rag someplace while I get the Blue Tech from my bag.” She walked toward her luggage, then turned and looked back. “And for your information, that bogus crack about the boots was disgusting.”
He shuffled to the bathroom and dropped the towel into the dirty laundry hamper. When he returned, he sat at the table and watched as she dug through her gear. Finally, he asked if her wounds felt better.
“I must have left the Blue Tech at the apartment. Can’t find it. My ankles and feet are screaming. I couldn’t reach my toes, or did you even notice?”
Cody brought a chair and placed it beside her. “Here. Have a seat.”
“What?” Brandi bristled. “I’m not one of your Texas women or one of your subordinate military officers. What do you have in mind?”
“Please. I just wanna measure you for some boots.”
“Oo-hoo, well, why didn’t you just say so?” She plopped down and crossed her arms. “This could get interesting.”
He knelt on the floor in front of her and forced his hand into the left pocket of his jeans. Brandi’s eyes were fixated. What was he reaching for? A tape measure maybe? Was he serious?
“Cody? What do you think you’re doing?”
When he pulled his hand free, it held the blue vial she had been searching for. He reached down, gently lifted her feet off the floor, and began to massage them with the contents of the tiny bottle. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
She caught her breath and put her hand over her heart. “I said be sweet, but I had no idea. Where did you find my Blue Tech?”
“Picked it up at your place. It got knocked to the floor during the blackout. I saw it with the flashlight. Thought you might need it.”
Her eyes twinkled. “That already feels better.” She wiggled her toes. “Now if only I could get you to smile.”
“Nothin’ to smile about,” he grumbled. “Injuries like these aren’t funny.”
“I’m sorry, Cody. I wasn’t thinking about —”
“I apologize for my rough hands,” he broke in. “Calluses from batting practice and traces of pine tar.”
She shook her head. “Don’t apologize. I have nothing to compare your hands to. No other man has ever —”
“So you mean I’m the first guy you ever let rub your feet?”
“No, sweetie. I mean you’re the first guy who has ever offered.”
After he had finished, Cody walked to the coffeemaker and poured two cups. They sat down at the table. An awkward silence seized Brandi’s tongue for a moment after he had served her the decaf. Could anything soften his drawn, leathery face?
“Next time I snicker-doodle through the mall,” she jested, “I’ll remember to wear big bubba cowboy boots with jingling spurs. That should keep me out of trouble.”
“Yeah. And that way I can keep track of you.” He played along, but his hard countenance never showed one sign of cracking.
Brandi sighed. “This has been quite the evening. What now? Will they hunt us down?” She took a sip.
“Well.” He hesitated. “You’re the one with the research and editorials. What do you think?”
“I don’t really…” She paused. “Don’t really want to talk about that. I want to finish telling you about my roots and how it relates to what happened tonight. It might change the way you feel about yourself.”
Cody nodded and lifted the cup to his mouth.
Now her pulse raced. She had never spoken of this to another man, and her distrust of the opposite sex was a habit that did not die easily. Why should he care about my story? He must have hundreds of women wanting him. Am I going to make a fool of myself?
Brandi spoke slowly with feeling. “My mother’s name was Whitney Bonner. When she was sixteen, she was assaulted and raped by a man wearing a ski mask. She knew only that he was white and had blue eyes. After that, she was pregnant. Her parents were dead and she had been living in a shelter.”
Cody never moved a muscle.
Brandi gripped her cup with both hands and continued. “An uncle in West Virginia had offered to pay for an abortion if my mother would come live with him, but he was a convicted molester. She scraped together the bus fare to West Virginia, but while waiting to board the bus at Pittsburgh, she became so despondent she decided to end it all with a bottle of pills.”
Brandi closed her eyes and her lip began to quiver. Cody reached across the table. She opened her eyelids when she felt his fingers touch hers. Could this be the man for whom she had saved her tears?
“Go on,” his voice quiet and scratchy, “I’m listening. Cry all you want to.” He never let go of her hand. His expression never changed.
Brandi attempted a smile. “Right then, while holding the pills in her hand, my mother remembered something from her childhood. When she was just four, she had heard a Holocaust survivor speak at church. Something the woman had said that day flashed through her mind again — ‘There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.’”
Cody reached up to brush her tears with his fingertips.
“Excuse me for a second.” She got up, went back to her suitcase, and pulled out a box of tissue. “I never leave home without these.” She brought them to the table. When she sat back down, she began shaking and shedding tears again. “I’m sorry, Cody. Tonight has been more than I can —”
“So what did your mother do after she remembered the quote from Corrie ten Boom?”
“Corrie who?”
“Corrie ten Boom, the woman your mom heard. She’s the one who said it — ‘There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.’”
“You know that quote? Um, what was her name again?”
“Corrie ten Boom, from Holland. She was from a Christian family who hid Jews in their watchmaking shop. Her whole family was arrested. She was in her fifties when she was sent to Ravensbrück and was scheduled to be gassed, but eventually the Nazis released Corrie cuz somebody screwed up — made a clerical error. Later, she was honored by Israel as one Righteous Among the Nations.”
“Cody, you sound like you’re reading from a history book.” She blotted her puffy eyes. “You surprise me more every minute. I can’t believe you know about all that.”
“I read her biography — The Hiding Place.”
The room was quiet. Brandi was hoarse. “You know, Cody, if it hadn’t been for that woman, Corrie ten Boom, I might not even be here.”
H
e lowered his brow. “How’s that?”
“After my mother remembered Corrie and the pit so deep, she had second thoughts about killing herself. She hadn’t prayed in years, but right there on that bench, crying in the bus depot, my mother prayed that if God were really there, would He please send someone to lift her from that deep pit she was in.”
Cody’s eyes flushed red around the edges. Brandi reached for his hand, then turned her face away momentarily.
“Immediately, my mother heard a man’s voice, ‘Are you okay, miss?’ She turned around. Standing there was the most handsome nineteen-year-old man she had ever laid eyes on, wearing the uniform of a US Marine. Private Raymond Jackson Barnes loved her the minute he laid eyes on her and took her home to his parents. He married the sixteen-year-old pregnant girl and became the only father I have ever known and the best father a girl could ever have.”
The air in the room was heavy. Brandi blotted her eyes again and waited for his reaction. Cody was pensive, inscrutable. Would he say something? Anything at all?
He finished his cup. “What an honorable family you have. What an honorable way to be born.”
Brandi caught her breath, put her hand over her lips, then spoke barely above a whisper, “I suppose you can see that I’m an emotional wreck tonight.”
His eyes softened. “Nah! I hadn’t noticed.”
She broke into a chuckle. “You’re such a bad liar.” Then she sniffled. “I’ve never had a night like this — not ever — and I’m not through crying, because I have one more thing to tell you. You said you felt like a monster?”
He stared back, curiosity wrinkling the brow above his seasoned eyes.
Brandi spoke slowly. “My life was over tonight when those men were on top of me in that hallway,” her voice wavered. “I knew that my parents and Knoxi would miss me. My baby girl…” She covered her eyes for a moment. “But just then, I remembered my mother calling out to God in that bus station twenty-four years ago when I was still in her womb, so I closed my eyes and screamed a silent prayer. ‘God, please send an angel, anyone, someone to save me.’
“The next moment, I heard that cement-grinder voice of yours. I looked up, and there you stood.” She paused, fixated on his eyes. “Cody, the light in your face —”
He stared down at the table. "Maybe you saw what you wanted to see."
“What I saw and what they saw was not a monster.” She reached out and lifted up his chin.
“Listen to me, Mr. Texas. I tell you they were the monsters, and they were terrified. I could feel the wind go right out of ‘em. They feared you, not because you were like them, but because you weren’t.”
One tear ran down to the tip of his nose. She gently brushed it with her finger. A smile broadened across his lips for the first time, and suddenly the troubling, spinning world around them faded from view. For one perfect moment, their universe — all that mattered — made perfect sense within the confines of a forty-eight-inch circular breakfast table.
Finally, he stood to his feet. She looked up and searched his face for a clue to his intentions. His eyes were bright and fiery — smiling, playful. After a few seconds, he came around to her side of the table, gently picked her up, cradled her in his arms, and kissed her.
“Whew! Where did that come from? Would that be standard procedure in Texas? How’d you know I wouldn’t slap you?”
“I took the chance. Figured you were too stiff to fight back.”
“Hmmm. A kiss can be a lovely trick, designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.” She was giddy. “You know who said that?”
“Rodolfo Lorenzo?”
“Nope. It was Ingrid Bergman.”
“Careful. I might do it again,” he warned.
“Well, since I am your captive and too stiff to resist, I suppose I have no choice.” She closed her eyes, waiting for a second kiss.
“Do you like baseball?”
She wrinkled her nose, eyes wide. “What? Do I like baseball?”
“It’s not a trick question, Brandi.”
She giggled and kicked her feet playfully. “Of course I like baseball.”
“Good answer. So come to the game tomorrow. I can get you and your parents seats behind the Astros dugout.”
“Do you know what I’m thinking?” Brandi asked, displaying the same grace with which she had charmed the men in black at CoGo’s.
“This ought to be good. Who can possibly know what a woman’s thinking?”
She reached up with both hands and grabbed the scrubby beard on the sides of his face. “I was thinking that…that I went to see the Superman movie and walked out with a new friend — a real man of steel.”
“Hmm.” He reasoned. “Good friends do kiss sometimes, right?”
She licked her lips, threw her arms around his neck, pulled herself toward him, and closed her eyes. At that moment, a loud bell startled them. They looked toward the kitchen counter where she had finally plugged in her phone.
She paddled the air with her feet again. “Cody, put me down. I need to get that. My parents must be downstairs.”
He set her down. She scrambled to the kitchen. “Hi, Daddy! Are you downstairs? Come on up.” She ended the call and tossed her phone onto the bed.
“You probably want some time alone with your parents after what’s happened,” Cody suggested. “Mind if I wait ‘til morning to meet ‘em? It’s been a long day.”
After he had left her, Brandi did a free fall backward onto the bed and gazed straight up at the ceiling fan — turning, turning, and turning. Was she dreaming? Three hours ago, there were no good men left in the world.
But could anyone know his thoughts? He was emotional and unpredictable — cold and stoic at one moment, tender and compassionate the next. She had read that some plants take a thousand years to bloom. Others take less than a day. Can love bloom in three hours?
His smell lingered. His lips still pressed against hers. Is it true that falling in love simply means having your heart break in a good way? The Astros would leave town in two days. She would miss him. Would she have been better off had they never met?
She opened her laptop, determined to learn everything she could about Cody Musket.
Who is Cody Musket?
Ray and Whitney Barnes arrived a few moments after Cody had left the room. “Hey, who’s the security guy outside the door?” Ray wanted to know. “He asked for our IDs before he’d let us in.”
“The Astros team arranged it. Cody insists on keeping me safe.” Brandi’s calm smile took Ray and Whitney by surprise — not what they had expected after their only daughter had been treated so brutally.
Whitney jumped right in. “So where is he, this Musket guy? Musket sounds like a violent name to me. Some sort of gun, isn’t it?” No one could say whether she liked to fake ignorance or sarcasm more. In any case, it never fooled anyone.
“Oh, Mama, don’t be ridiculous. He stayed here with me until Daddy called. I asked him to be here. Didn’t want to be alone. He’s coming back tomorrow.”
Ray put his stout arms around his daughter. His eyes were red and glassy. “If I had only been there at the mall. The first thing I’m gonna do is shake this guy’s hand.”
“I think he wants to shake your hand too. You know, Daddy, he —”
“Second thing I’m gonna do is find out what his intentions are.”
Whitney with raised eyebrows, “You gonna interrogate him, Papa?” She was holding Knoxi, Brandi’s twenty-month-old daughter.
“Interrogate? Well, I just want to find out —”
“Find out what, Daddy?”
“Oh, baby, don’t let your father upset you. He’s just protective. You know how these military guys are.” Whitney gave her husband a token peck on the cheek. “The two of ‘em will work it out between them.”
Brandi took her toddler into the other room to put her in the bed and then returned. “I am so thankful Knoxi wasn’t here for the last couple of days, especially ton
ight.”
“I warned you about the serious nature of death threats,” Ray asserted. “That’s why I wanted you to come stay with us.”
“So what’s this guy like when he isn’t beatin’ up people?” Whitney crossed her arms. “Musket? Is that his real name? Seems like he could have come up with a gun name more modern, like Colt or Clock.”
“Clock? Ha-ha! Mama, it’s Glock with a G. Beside that, baseball players don’t have stage names.”
Ray snickered. “I’ve never figured how your mother’s brain is wired.”
Whitney knew how to push Ray’s buttons. She loved to play the fool when it came to subjects she considered part of a man’s world — guns and military protocol high on her list. She had learned to be the heroic comic after he had returned from the Gulf with his Purple Heart, depressed and aimless. He had needed the laughter.
Her act had grown old through the years, but they still played the game, and it sometimes amazed Ray how original and creative she could be with her ignorance.
Brandi shrugged it off. She was too hyped. “Do you wanna see who Cody Musket is? Take a look.”
She sat at the breakfast table, opened her laptop, and showed them stories with embedded videos of Cody entertaining children before ballgames. He gave away Cody Musket T-shirts to kids in parking lots and handed out Cody Musket model baseball gloves at children’s shelters. He performed several corny magic acts — the kind that only small kids would appreciate.
“Daddy, Cody told me about being held by Taliban warriors — something about children involved. He was not able to finish the story because he lost his composure.”
After a moment to consider, Ray spoke pointedly. “The Taliban abducts hundreds of children. Turns ‘em into killers and even sex slaves.” He sat down on the end of the sofa.
Brandi moved over and sat on the edge of the bed facing him. “He said something about children at the prison where they took him, but there are no reports of such a thing.”
“Baby girl, there are a lot of things in war that never get reported.”
No Pit So Deep: The Cody Musket Story Page 9