“Forty-three.”
She stopped still. “You kept count?”
“The Army did. Probably a whole lot more.”
“I can’t deal with this. Not right now.” She stepped around me and started to make the bed.
“I was with the good guys, remember?” My voice tightened, trying to calm myself, knowing I should leave.
“I’m sure they thought the same thing.” She turned. “Most of them were just farmers, you know, don’t have all this high-techno stuff that you probably used. Shit, you’re no better than those bastards who sit in Nebraska, kill people with drones.”
I had her by the neck, the throat, in a moment, her right hand twisted up between her shoulder blades, my face an inch from hers. “We didn’t crash airplanes into their cities. Remember?” She was gasping, eyes bulging, righteous vindication all over her puffy red face. I pushed her away and she fell onto the bed, wriggling back to the headboard.
“Maybe we had it coming. Asshole.” Her voice cracked, a sob before I slammed the door behind me.
–––
I paced my apartment several times, feeling like I was wearing someone else’s clothes, then walked down to the 7-Eleven and bought a pint of chocolate milk and drank it on the way back, unbalanced, noises way too loud, the sun too awful. Chocolate milk was one of those things that made me feel better when I was a kid, but it didn’t help that much. It used to come in a carton with soft paper edges; now it was in a plastic bottle and didn’t taste right.
I felt set up, sold out, ambushed, but absolutely horrible about grabbing her like that, certainly not how I was trained, not by the book, not a civilian, and she’d become the enemy in a heartbeat. Not how a good soldier soldiers. For a moment she probably thought I was going to kill her. I know that I wouldn’t have, but she didn’t. The wound from a gun will heal, the wound from the tongue does not; another proverb I brought home.
Fucking pot. Would have to avoid any piss tests for a month or so. Totally fucks with your situational awareness.
Never had much chance to get into the drug culture. Mr. Dunham, I’d figured, could smell drugs as well as any of those checkpoint dogs. There wasn’t any meth at the high school then, either. I read Carlos Castaneda, a book that had been Mrs. Dunham’s in college, all about eating hallucinogenic mushrooms and becoming enlightened, and I didn’t take much away from the book because I knew I was already enlightened, watching my mother slowly embalm herself, and taking a substance to heighten reality was so much bullshit. I do remember, however, finding one’s place. A truism that maybe some Buddhist wandering by whispered in Carlos’s ear while he was stoned, and he attributed it to the mushrooms. It stayed with me all these years. In Iraq, in college, at Fort Benning, in the brush in Afghanistan, it was like a religion for me, finding my place. A kind of balance there, to take a shot, or sleep, or find a place in a room with other guys. Next to Jennifer was not my place. I knew this all along and deliberately overlooked it; selfish of me, but I just wanted to have her and now I felt even more ashamed of myself. She must have known it too. She just wanted me to be what she was looking for, a copy of herself. And she wanted to fuck me. And I wanted to fuck her and actually remember it this time. Two greedy people. I wanted to apologize but didn’t even know where to start because she wouldn’t see it like I did.
Sniper school taught me patience. Hours of thought, careful observation, and the occasional exchange with your spotter. The spotter could be the voice of reason as well. Jordan would lie there with his spotting scope, which had a wider angle of view. He sensed body language between the men we watched that I couldn’t get with my narrower field; he could distinguish harmless intent from malicious. Sometimes we’d come back without taking any targets. I miss that sense of perseverance. Seems like nothing in this life calls for it—everybody shoots from the hip, so busy texting and complaining, we don’t look at each other anymore.
“Just farmers,” she’d said. All caught up in rooting for the little guy, probably watched all the Star Wars movies. Sometimes the little guy is one nasty bastard that will rape your wife before he guts her, disembowel your baby daughter, peel the skin off your face while you’re still alive. She didn’t believe in guns. Like saying she didn’t believe in concrete, or eggplants.
I reached the apartments and her car was still there, so I walked another couple of blocks and wondered what conversation had unfolded before her previous boyfriend put his fist through the wall.
6
It was almost ten. I took my morning pill and threw a backpack in the trunk with the Gerber and a change of clothes. Whitefish was about 250 miles away, an easy four-hour drive. I could be there by three in the afternoon local time, spend a couple of hours at the post office or the county assessor’s office. Maybe the auditor’s office. I looked at my laptop on the seat. It might be in there, on the web somewhere.
Now I was on a mission. I function best when I have a point to work toward, after which I can say “that’s done,” or look at order restored, stuff where it belongs, where it will help. Threat removed. Understand the mission, identify the target, preparation, execution. There’s not a lot of difference between taking the garbage out and taking out a hostile. I looked around me, at the homes along the highway, and it occurred to me not everyone had their mission down. Some little ranches nice and tidy, other places surrounded by disabled cars and rusting farm equipment, bristling with spines and levers, cockeyed old mobile homes, sheds with metal roofs flapping in the wind, horses standing in shit beneath their shelter. Maybe some single drunk mother in there, raising a fifteen-year-old boy.
Maybe they had too many missions. Or too many distractions. Or too much TV, or too many people telling them their lives were shit and somebody else was supposed to take out their garbage. Or their kids were fucking up, drinking, doing drugs, getting pregnant—too many disasters in too many directions. Perhaps that’s how Julia’s parents thought we would end up, so they did their best to hustle me out the door. Some of the old guys on the ward talked about their families that way. Eventually, the kids end up running the farm, sometimes over a cliff. It was a painful way of thinking and made my head hurt. Made me wish I was back in, with my family, my kids.
Every other car or truck had a yellow ribbon stuck somewhere on the back, and it got annoying. How many of them really contributed to some cause for vets? Most of them just gave some pathetic amputee outside a grocery store a buck to make themselves feel better. Want to support our troops? Give us a purpose when we come back, give us a job that matters, at least a fraction of the one we just gave up, a place where we belong. Then leave us the fuck alone. Stop treating us like cerebral palsy kids.
–––
Divided highways are always a relief; something goes down, it’s on the other side of that space and moving the other direction. I keep my distance from the cars ahead, a hundred yards minimum. Shrapnel slows down a lot in that distance, but it fucking unnerves me when people get right on my ass and stay there, or just over my shoulder and won’t pass. I’ll check my mirror—Are they rolling down the windows?
It was almost one, and I realized my head was pounding because I hadn’t eaten anything since the chocolate milk that morning. I turned into Plains, Montana, and made a sharp left into the first restaurant that advertised Breakfast Served All Day. I sat in the car and tucked my shirt, looked the place over for a moment. Blue and white and peeling clapboard siding, probably hadn’t been painted since the interstate went through. A woman stepped down from a gunmetal-gray diesel Ford, maybe her husband’s, crossed the parking lot, hair a storm of walnut and honey curls, windblown and thick.
She might have been in her thirties or forties, had a nice chin, and a black Velcro brace wrapped around her right knee. A healthy pair of Wranglers, and boots worn buff with just a bit of a heel. Her posture, her stride even as she limped, spoke all kinds of confidence. I reached the door just before her and could see some pain as she swung her right leg up on the step.
My own knee was rigid from the drive. “We should be on Limping with the Stars.” I held the door open for her.
She turned and regarded me indifferently, maybe expecting someone she knew, and didn’t answer, but took a menu from the hostess, who seemed to know her and seated her immediately. A few minutes later I was shown to my own table and, after limping back from the restroom, opened my menu.
“Excuse me.” She sat facing me, one table over beyond a table-height partition dividing the dining room. “What was that you said to me, at the door?”
“I said, ‘We should both be on Limping with the Stars.’ Dumb joke. Sorry.”
She puckered, then smiled briefly, and little laughter lines formed at her eyes. “No. That’s good. That’s real good.”
“What happened to your leg?”
“Horse fell on it, a couple of months ago. It’s getting better. Yours?”
“Infection. Some kind of fungus from Afghanistan. Turned out to be a real cluster.”
The waitress brought her coffee and she stirred in two creamers and a packet of sugar.
“You were going to say clusterfuck, weren’t you?”
I nodded. “Too long in the Army.”
“My father used to say that all the time. And FUBAR, and SNAFU, and BUFF. I was an Air Force brat.”
“He’s gone now?”
“No, just had a stroke. Still gets around pretty well but can’t talk. Now he says ‘Quafer-fuh.’ He used to scare me when he got mad. Now it’s kind of entertaining.”
“Hope Dancing with the Stars isn’t a favorite.”
She shook her head. “Don’t even own a TV. My daughter watches it at a friend’s house. You?”
“Don’t own one either. Watched whatever was on in the hospital. Tabloids always talking about it at checkout stands.”
She had strong hands, nails painted warm red but short, arms tanned up to the elbows. She set a bundle of mail on the tabletop, opened a pen knife and started slicing each envelope.
An old man wandered between the tables, carrying a coffee can and a bundle of red silk poppies, dressed in a uniform that might have been from World War II. DAV charity. When he came to my table I palmed him a dollar and he laid the flower in front of me. I sat twirling it between my fingers, then reached over the partition and placed it on her mail.
“Why thank you. You don’t like poppies?”
“I spent a whole summer in Helmand province. Taliban spent half their time trying to kill me, other half growing poppies.”
“But you bought one from him anyway.”
I shrugged. “Only thing he had to offer, I guess.”
She glanced sidelong, a half-smile.
My omelet came and we both ate quietly. I took in all of her—the gray-flecked tangle of hair, pulled back now in a band, Carhart vest, denim blouse, the piece of turquoise around her neck on a strand of leather, the quick scan of her eyes on each page unfolded—not really meaning to stare, but eventually she caught my glance.
“Sorry. Have a lot of accounts to catch up on. Rude of me.”
“Not sure I’m always the best conversationalist.”
“There’s a time for everything, they say. Even staring at a woman you’ve just met.” The waitress brought her ticket and she put a credit card in the folder. She turned to me again. “Just kidding you. Cheryl Redding.” She extended her hand, a solid handshake.
“Robert Kent.” I almost said Robby. Not sure why I didn’t.
“Usually there’s some bills here in town, and instead of mailing checks I just walk around and pay them. Catch up on gossip. And you?”
“Going up to Whitefish. Found out I have an uncle up there I didn’t know about.”
“Your parents never said anything?”
“Dad’s brother. I never knew my dad.”
“My daughter’s never known hers.”
“Mine went missing in Vietnam.”
“So you really don’t know.” She sipped her coffee, took a long time to swallow. “That’s a lot to carry around.”
“I’ve carried worse, probably. Just trying to dig up some history before I move forward. And your daughter?”
She smiled, a question on her lips that she didn’t ask, and didn’t answer me. She stood, gathered her mail, and wrapped the wire stem of the poppy around one of the snaps near her lapel. She slipped a card from her purse. “If you get tired of digging and want to see a real old-fashioned dude ranch right out of the Fifties, stop by sometime.” She put the card on my table:
Harbour Ranch, Vacation Rentals and Retreat.
Robert and Cheryl Redding
“Robert’s my dad’s name too.” She gave a quick smile. “It’s a good name.” And she turned and walked out.
I watched her traverse the parking lot, where she tossed some of her mail on the front seat of the Ford, then disappeared into a crowd at the crosswalk. I looked for her across the street but couldn’t spot her again. I folded an unused napkin, Heather’s Country Kitchen, over the card and shoved it in my shirt pocket.
–––
Mom used to talk about how Dad would come home someday, just walk up to the trailer and let himself in. I used to picture that, and he was always in his class A when he did. As I grew up I imagined what he’d look like as he aged, like those missing persons on TV where the artist sketched what they might look like twenty years later. On the drive to Whitefish, all those imaginings came back with a tremendous sense of arrival. Getting close.
–––
“Even if there were ten Danny Kents in Flathead County, I couldn’t tell you where they were if I wanted to,” the auditor’s clerk apologized. “So you’ve got the same last name. I believe your story, but the system isn’t indexed that way.” He closed his registry. “You got to have at least a plat number.”
I had searched the phone books first. Nothing, but then again almost everybody has a cell phone now. I was sitting in the archives of the Whitefish Pilot, looking up births and weddings, when a baseball-capped policeman stepped in, tossed an envelope on the counter. “Week’s records.” He touched his brim and stepped out.
“Thanks, Bill,” the receptionist called after him.
I sat for a minute astounded by my naïveté. That was it, and I’d glossed right over it. My uncle, colorful as he seemed, would have a police record. Something trivial, probably.
I went to the counter and posed my question, and she hesitated but came to my monitor and clicked a different tab: Public Records.
Danny Kent, a.k.a. Daniel Kent, could have occupied an entire hard drive alone. Seventeen parking violations. Three DUIs. Eleven assaults. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor— two violations. Carrying a handgun into a public building. Hunting on public land without a license—four violations. Taking deer out of season—two violations. Possession with intent to deliver, three citations. Seven failures to appear. Twice urinating in public. All of it in the last eight years.
Assault. Hard to picture exactly what that meant. Did he pick out a friendly and cut loose on them? Or just disputes with fellow drunks? Address 12400 Cedar Lake Road. Maybe he lived on a lake. Couldn’t be that difficult a guy to communicate with. I had smoothed the hackles of more than one old Afghan patriarch carrying an AK-47. It’s body language—keep your horns covered, don’t look too much at their eyes. Come up with a proverb or two. I could talk to anyone. And this guy was family.
The next morning, I checked out of my motel and headed north to Cedar Lake Road, gaining altitude, passing an occasional address sign or a wicket over a drive, sometimes a steel cutout of a cowboy with a mailbox welded to it, the silent foothills of the Rockies watching over me in the distance, peaks veiled in slow-moving storm. Collapsed barn in a pasture, a doublewide near the road here and there. If the county had assigned addresses, very few of them belonged to anybody. The pavement turned to gravel, and I slowed where 13105 appeared on a small placard nailed to a power pole next to a gravel drive. I made a three-point and ret
raced the last quarter mile, found 11400 marked in reflective letters next to another drive, the name Waters just below. I turned in and rounded a bend to a small metal barn and a two-story farmhouse from the Thirties. In the small pasture adjacent, a herd of brown-and-white Nubian goats, a boy herding them. As I slowed he sank into the grass. A bull-chested, white-haired man was dragging hay bales onto the back of a flatbed.
He came over to the window when I rolled it down. “Yeah?”
“You know a Danny Kent that lives in this area?”
“You a bail bondsman?”
“No. They come by a lot?”
“Sheriff’s just over there a bit. He’s an odd type.” He took off his work gloves and pointed. “Go back out to the road, take a left, then turn left at the second drive you come to. Really just a break in the fence.”
“How far to his house?” I watched the goats but the boy never reappeared.
The man squatted down so we were eye level. “I ain’t never seen his house. Might live in a teepee for all I know. But you go in there, he’ll find you.” He started to stand again. “He’s not too sociable. You go over there, be real, real careful.”
At the break in the fence there were two furrows in the earth, and after a hundred feet or so they vanished into two depressions in the deep pasture grass. I rolled along in the Corolla until it was clear I’d be boxed in by dead scrub and killed the engine. I slid the Gerber into the top of my boot, pulled my BDUs over it and got out. The ground was uneven, as if it had been tilled and then allowed to grow over. The midday heat poured across the field, the back of my neck, my scalp; insects launched like spring darts from the weeds. Even the trees smelled hot. I had walked about fifteen minutes uphill when a twig snapped off to my right and I dropped instinctively, no weapon to shoulder.
“You’re trespassin’.”
“I need to talk to you,” I called.
Silence.
I repeated myself, louder. The grass muffled my voice, and my notion of bonding on the basis of family was crumbling already.
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 10