“Nope,” she said, getting a box of Lucky Charms from the pantry. “Not,” she said, pouring a glass of orange juice. “No, I’m sorry. No.”
Peep came in and seated himself in front of the refrigerator. Blue obliged him by opening the door and taking out the milk jug. “You, at least, are consistent. I, on the other hand, have been under the misimpression that I had a clue about life and my own best interests.”
She couldn’t have a romantic relationship with Mitch, a man who inspired in her, at most, sisterly affection. “That’s the first part,” she told Peep.
“The second part…” The second part made her swallow hard. It was a feeling like she’d had that night when she was sitting at the stoplight in the Chevelle, shivering with the cold, looking at the sky and wishing her life were different.
26
he’s something to see, isn’t she?”
Julian, foot poised to climb inside an armored vehicle called Golan, had a sense that the “she” in question was not, this time, part of the armored fleet he’d been photographing for the past week or so (along with other static objects, like sandbags, and stones), having been restricted to the base and then given nothing better to do.
He turned around to see who the sergeant meant. Heat rising from the macadam made the entire landscape seem to undulate. He spotted Lieutenant Davies leaving the motor pool office. Julian used the front of his T-shirt to wipe sweat from his neck and ears. “Oh, yeah. Very attractive woman.”
The sergeant, who went by the name Sims, poked Julian in the thigh. “Take a picture. Your camera might make it back in one piece even if you don’t.”
Sims was joking the same way the other soldiers he’d met all did. Gallows humor, to deflect the intensity of a truth that was not too far removed from reality. Julian raised his camera and looked at Lieutenant Davies once again. Her long neck. Her dimpled smile. “Is she attached to anyone?”
Julian swung around and sighted Sims in his viewer. The guy’s face was smooth and brown as melted chocolate. Angular. Great bone structure.
Sims tried to ignore the camera but his vulnerable smile betrayed him. “Lieutenant Davies sticks to the fraternization rules, far as I know. I guess she could date another officer, but who’d want to?”
“Right,” Julian said, taking one picture, two pictures, before Sims put on a more practiced stern look and began stowing his gear.
He could ask her directly—assuming he got the chance, when they returned from their three days at wherever they were going. They gave him no information up front, a security precaution in case he was overcome by the urge to broadcast the mission details from his BlackBerry or laptop. Photojournalists, and journalists in general, did not rate highly here, considered to be slightly more trustworthy than the local hires whose agendas were similarly opaque.
Maybe he should ask her. It wasn’t like he had any sane, sensible reason not to.
He and Sims climbed into the Golan. Sims said, “You take the center row, passenger side.”
“What, do you guys have assigned seats or something?”
“We have habits, yeah—but this is for your safety. It’s SOP for us to put journalists far enough from the driver to be less of an inadvertent target for snipers, far enough from the wheels that you don’t take the full blast of an IED.”
SOP. Standard operating procedure. IED. Improvised Explosive Device. Sobering didn’t begin to describe the effect of this seat assignment on his mood. That they all approached these things so matter-of-factly told him everything.
Today was Thursday; he’d been here for eleven of the sixty days he’d planned, and without having documented a single mission yet, he was ready to go home.
While he waited, he took out his BlackBerry and tried again to access his email. He hadn’t been able to stay connected for more than a few seconds since sending the bee-eater photos last week. If not for knowing that no one he’d asked was having any better luck, he’d think he had jinxed the device.
“What’s the deal with service out here? Is it ever reliable?”
Sims watched him. “It’s hit and miss, man, be it phones, women, or insurgents. Welcome to our way of life.”
“And I thought scorpions would be my only problem.”
“You ain’t seen a firefight yet.”
“Mm,” Julian agreed, still trying to connect. “But at least you don’t get surprised by a firefight when you’re putting on your boots.”
“Not usually,” Sims said.
Nine hours later, Julian was sure the most serious danger in this mission was boredom. They’d bumped along rutted streets in three nearly abandoned villages so far; his most interesting photo was of a dirty white dog, apparently stranded atop a flat-roofed house. They didn’t stop.
Sims sat beside him, legs outstretched, iPod playing just loudly enough that Julian could hear the noise but not the music. He tried checking his email again. This time, it worked. There were twenty-four new messages—he scanned the list, knowing that he was looking for a particular name, hating that he was looking for a particular name … there, there it was, halfway down the list. Blue.
She’d sent the email a week ago, apparently right after she got it.
Hi, Julian-
How good of you to send these Bee-eater photos. It is a lovely bird.
Stay well,
Blue
All right then. Okay. Nothing here that he shouldn’t be pleased with. Reading it again … nothing here that should please him, especially—which was fine, appropriate, not in any way a letdown, why would it be?
He felt the vehicle slowing and looked up. Sims did the same, pulling off his headphones and snapping to alertness. Ahead of them on this narrow hillside road was a short bridge, and two boys near its side, squatting down next to an animal that appeared to have been dead for some time. A trio of crows waited on the bridge’s wooden railing thirty feet behind them.
Specialist Parker, riding in the front passenger seat, released his assault rifle’s safety, and the rest of the soldiers followed suit.
“What gives?” Julian asked. Already he could smell the sweat of adrenalin, sour in the confined space.
They came to a stop fifty feet or so from the bridge. Sims said, “Looks to be a jackal.”
Julian set his BlackBerry aside and switched on his camera, aiming it as the soldiers were doing with their weapons. All thoughts of women, of birds, evaporated.
The boys, dusty, dark-haired kids who were still on the early side of puberty, stood up and waved.
“Watch ’em,” Parker said. He fastened his helmet’s chinstrap.
The driver, a twenty-year-old private named Barredo, said, “It’s a dead jackal. They probably want to take it home for dinner.”
“They’re not gonna eat roadkill.”
Julian kept the boys in his frame, zooming in on their faces as he said, “If they have to, they will.” They looked hungry, having left lean behind and become gaunt. Huge dark eyes in unreadable faces. He widened his view as he shot, saw the boy on the left put his arm around the other boy’s shoulders.
“Let’s go,” Barredo said.
Sims shook his head. “Nah, this doesn’t smell right.”
“It’s roadkill in ninety-five-degree heat, course it don’t smell right.”
“That’s you who don’t smell right,” Parker said.
The boys remained near the carcass, watching them.
Barredo drummed the steering wheel. “Why don’t they move?”
Sims fastened his chinstrap. “Maybe they think we’re gonna take their dinner.”
“Bullshit,” Parker said, scanning the rocky hillside that rose steadily to their left. He opened his door and stepped out a few feet, looking down the road behind them, then back up at the hillside, rifle at his shoulder, finger on the trigger.
Julian scooted forward so he could see whatever Parker saw out the front—which was nothing. Stones and scrubby bits of vegetation and dirt.
The first
sound was faint, a small thwack like a friend flicking your arm, and then a sharp crack, a rock hitting bulletproof glass. He looked to his left, at the driver’s window, still intact but with a dark crater the size of his fist blooming in its center. Curses erupted, his own included, but it was the alarmed gurgle that made him look at Barredo, whose neck appeared to have become a fountain spewing dark blood out its side.
Parker jumped back into the vehicle, slamming the door shut before pressing his hands over Barredo’s, which were now clasped around his own neck. The sniper’s bullet had sped straight through. Parker’s stricken face confessed what the reports would later conclude, that his leaving the Golan’s door standing open had given the sniper the shot he’d been hoping for.
“Aw fuck,” Parker said. “Aw Jesus. Hang on, buddy. Forrester, get the kit.”
Julian had seen blood before, had seen gunshot wounds, had pressed wads of gauze, as he was now doing, to injured men’s bodies, his own heart beating double time as if to make up for the slowing one beneath his hands. You kept pressing, and praying, hoping for the miracle that never came. There were no miracles, only luck, and Barredo’s was pouring from him despite the pressure, the only mercy being how rapidly it poured.
This is what he was thinking as he looked out the windshield and saw the boys turning, running from the bridge, saw the burst of dust and smoke as it exploded, making the Golan jump. He thought at first that the second boom was in his head, a reverberation, until Sims said, “Oh Christ.”
He looked at Parker, then at where he and Sims were looking. The road behind them was hidden in black smoke.
27
fter pouring his beer into a pilsner glass, Mitch took it and the draft of his Tennessee Williams script out onto his front porch. The floorboards were chipped and the paint was peeling in some places, stained with mildew in others. He really should get the azaleas under control; they were blooming now in an explosion of fuchsia, pink, and white that threatened to overtake the porch. Fortunately there was room, still, for the pair of rockers he’d bought on his first weekend here; you couldn’t live in a North Carolina house with a covered front porch and not put rockers on it. One look at his neighbors’ homes had told him that.
He pulled one of the chairs away from the overgrown shrubbery and sat down. It being mid April, the sun had eased back out of the southern sky, leaving his porch shady at noon. If he sat here long enough, he’d see the rich Carolina blue of the sky hold on to its color well into the evening. Then the sky would turn a silky red violet with a sliver of orange glow on the horizon, before the night went fully dark.
He liked that the porch faced west, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. True, his view was partly obstructed by other bungalows, by pines and magnolias, and by some hundred or more miles of interposed land. Those miles, however, contained the promise of far-off mountains in the rolling hills that he could see. In his soul he was a man of landscapes—maybe that was why Hemingway drew him the way he did.
He needed his landscape today, as badly as he needed this day away from the university and the craziness he’d brought to the place after kissing Blue in public eleven days ago. In those eleven days, he’d had to change his home telephone number and make it unlisted; he’d had to withstand his colleagues’ questions, his students’ questions, the questions emailed to him by journalists, questions left as messages on his office voicemail. Every day, a new magazine or newspaper clipping showed up in his English department mailbox, as his colleagues seemed to be making a Where’s Mitch? game of finding every published reference to him and Blue.
There was no hope of keeping his or his students’ attention on the remaining Wharton reading assignments; he’d dismissed the class with instructions to work on their research papers, and to find him during his office hours if need be. By rights he should be keeping office hours right now, but he couldn’t bring himself to face one more question or comment—even a well-meaning one—about what he expected to happen next.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, enjoying the melodic singing of a wren that had roosted at the far end of his porch. He heard a car’s engine, heard it cut off, heard a door shut, but didn’t look up until he heard a voice, Brenda’s, saying, “Can we talk?”
Mitch stood up and pulled the other rocker over. “Have a seat. Want a beer? Maybe some tea?”
“I’ll have a beer. Inside might be better,” she said.
“All right. Come on in.”
He led her into the kitchen and took his time getting the beer, opening it, pouring it. “S’posed to get to eighty-three today,” he said, as though she would have nothing more pressing than weather on her mind.
She wasn’t so reticent. “Our office staff is about to mutiny,” she said. “The phones don’t stop ringing. Every English-speaking reporter on the planet wants to talk to you, or to talk to someone who knows you. Half of the faculty have turned off their phones. The other half are making up whatever version of Mitch-plus-Blue they think fits and telling it to whoever is on the line. It has to stop.”
He sat down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”
“They’re relentless. You’d think a person needed to actually do something of import or merit to rate this kind of attention.”
“Brenda, I’m sorry. I … I’ll do something. I’ll… I’ll hold a press conference and ask them to lay off.”
She sighed. “Don’t do that, you’d just be feeding the fire. It’ll die out, I know that. This is just a slow news week, they have nothing better to do.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, and Brenda smiled. “You should be more careful about what you wish for.”
Mitch smiled too, ruefully. “How do people live like this?” He was accustomed to the simple and quiet routine of books and classes, intellectual inquiries about his opinion of Heidegger, or Fitzgerald and the unreliable narrator. “Really, I never imagined …” He let the statement trail off. She was nodding. She knew.
“How long have we been friends?” she said. “Fifteen, sixteen years? Here’s what I know about you: You act before you think. Sometimes you succeed—often you do, often enough for you to keep using that haphazard approach—”
“But sometimes I end up in a what the hell? situation,” he finished for her. “Like now.” He wiped condensation from his glass. “It’s not Blue. She’s, well, she’s as wonderful as ever.”
“So maybe when things stabilize, you’ll stabilize too.” Though her words were supportive, her tone was flat.
“Maybe.”
“Or … maybe all you really have in common is nostalgia.”
He looked up at her. “I’ve thought of that.”
“And?”
“Here’s the thing: When I met Blue, I was a mess, but somehow she saw the man I wanted to be.”
“That must have been very flattering. Not to mention attractive.”
“It was. She was … and is.”
“But?”
“But… she’s not that same young woman. She seems fond of me, but the chemistry isn’t… well, forgive me for bringing this up, but it isn’t what we—that is, you and I—had. Julian says I don’t know her at all, so maybe that explains it.”
Brenda’s interested expression became a curious one. “Julian said that.”
He nodded. “We were arguing.”
“About Blue?”
“No, about his mother and all that mess, but it started when I asked him if he’d go find some flowers for Blue, last-minute.”
“Hold on,” Brenda said. “I’m confused. You wanted him to buy flowers for her, and …”
“And he resisted. He was saying, in essence, that no gesture of mine could matter to someone like her.”
“As though he would know,” she said.
“Right, he wouldn’t. He was being judgmental.”
“And protective of you, from the sound of it, which is sweet, really.”
Mitch thought again of the argument. “No … no, I didn’t get
the sense he was being protective of me …” He brought his hand to mouth, rubbed the haze of whiskers he hadn’t bothered to shave this morning. “He was angry at what I’d done to him, way back when, but also about what I’d done to her.”
“Ah.”
When Mitch looked at Brenda, she wore an expression that matched how he suddenly felt. An expression of discovery.
She said, “Well, Blue makes a pretty strange cause for Julian to take up. And that’s interesting … But honestly? My concern is you.”
He liked those words, liked the way she said them, with warmth and acceptance and, he was pretty sure, willingness to look upon his digression as if it was nothing but back-story that in some ways made her like him better.
“I’m real glad to hear that,” he said. “If we’re right about Julian, though …” He shook his head. “It’s hard to imagine a happy ending there.”
28
hey had no options except to wait and hope, and so Julian had called his grandparents, only to get their machine. He’d kept his message simple: “Things are not working out as well as expected. My phone’s low on power so I’m turning it off, but I just want to say I love you both. Please tell my parents, too.”
They waited—him, Parker, and Sims, all three of them silent, no need to state the obvious. Julian was unsure whether he thought the metallic smell, the blood, was the worst of the stink; it was more wrong than the other odors, though, he was sure of that. Sure, too, that a person could not die from nausea, but unsure whether a Golan was so airtight that they might, if they were stuck here a lot longer, have to open a window or else be asphyxiated. Once it was full dark, the risk of that open window would be smaller. Meantime, he pulled his T-shirt up to cover his mouth and nose and waited.
A mix of profound and troubling thoughts tumbled around in his mind, adding to the nausea and dismay. When there was nothing else for it, he turned his BlackBerry on again and began typing.
Nothing like being trapped in an armored personnel carrier with a dead soldier, all adrenalin leached out of your pores, darkness falling, bulletproof glass and door locks the only defense you’ve got, hoping what THEY’VE got isn’t a grenade or rocket launcher, to make you see what matters most to you in your life.
Reunion Page 24