“Getting rank was a little bit like having a family,” I said. “In the beginning we were all brothers, but by the end I loved them like they were my kids.”
“What’d they call you? Your kids.”
“Sarg.” I smiled. “Or Chief. When they knew I could hear ’em, anyway.”
“You miss that?”
“You see them arrive, full of bravado, grab-ass and badass, and after a few weeks they’re quieter. Professional, even.” I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. “Nothing makes a kid grow up faster than war. Then a couple of them die, usually fast, right in front of you. So, no. Don’t miss it.”
“Sarg,” she repeated. “Should I call you—”
“Anything but Sarg, okay? Robert. Or Robby would be fine.”
She seemed put off for a second, I could sense it in the darkness, but she took my hands across the table. “Then Robert it shall be.” There was strength in her hands. She let go and lit a citronella candle, and her face warmed with color.
“Why aren’t you married?”
“I was. Got divorced. I told you that.” She squirmed a bit and got that same expression she had the night she picked me up drunk.
“And nobody else was interested? I’m not buying it.”
“I’m not going to ask you about all of your—”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean. I just wondered what you’re doing with me. Why hasn’t some guy at the Big Horn brought you flowers?”
“Lot of guys don’t want a kid. Especially some other guy’s kid.” She relaxed, shook her head in disbelief and smiled, took my hands again. “You’re the first one who’s given me a flower in a long, long time.” She reflected a moment, pushed her hair back. “There’s a guy I went to college with. Lives over in Bozeman. Terry. Computer engineer, makes good money. He calls me every once in a while.”
“And?”
“He’s a nice guy, really. But still wears his cap backwards. Sits on his sofa, plays games on his big TV. Keeps telling me I should get on Facebook. But the real problem . . .” She stared into the dark, then turned back to the candlelight. “He’s afraid of horses.”
We were quiet for a while, me drifting on memories of horses, of the Dunhams, Mr. Dunham taking my knight at the dining room table. “You play chess?”
“No,” she said. “You?”
“When I was a kid. Not much since.” I started a game once in Camp Tillman but couldn’t remember finishing it.
“My dad and brother used to play. I’d like to learn.”
“It’s a deal.”
We were quiet again. From across the grass two wolfish silhouettes meandered up the steps and over to our feet where they lay down.
“Why Harbour Ranch? Nowhere near a harbor.”
“Dad said he wanted someplace we’d all feel safe, like we could always come back here, no matter what might happen to us.”
“A safe harbor.”
“Yeah. His first name choice was Fort Redding. Mom wouldn’t have any of it.”
“Fort?”
“Yeah. He said it was defendable.” She gestured into the evening. “Those trees, on the other side of the pasture? He used to point to them and tell me that was our perimeter.”
I looked around the expansive darkness. “It is defendable,” I started to say, but down the valley somewhere there was a pop and I stopped breathing. She heard me stop breathing.
A few seconds passed. “Hey. Are you alright?” She started to stand up, lean across the table.
“There was a guy. Big guy. A lieutenant named Dunbar, commanded my platoon my second tour, for a month or so. Came with a badass story you could smell; guys said he’d been dirty in Iraq, one of those guys that steals from the locals, does their daughters, in the name of looking for guns.”
“My God. And nobody does any—”
“Nobody wants to snitch because they’re scared.” I gathered my thoughts, wanted to tell her and yet didn’t want to risk anything, risk her trust that I wasn’t really fucked up. “So,” I said, “one night he’s sitting there with one of the squads, rambling on what he knows about war or what his daddy knew, and he liked to sit higher when he was talking, and he was tall anyway, and suddenly he stops mid-sentence. Mid-word, really. I look up and it seems like he’s shaking his face, but it’s really his face coming off, and his forehead turned into a mist.”
“Oh God. Oh no, please, no.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I reached out, took both her hands, found her gaze.
“Why did you tell me that? I wasn’t expecting to—”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that a second or so after, after Dunbar got hit, we heard the shot. A little shot way off in the distance, like that one. I just wanted you to know why I get nervous sometimes. You need to know about me.”
“They were probably just shooting at a coyote.” She wiped her cheeks and I realized that she had started to cry, but she managed a little smile. “I promise, that won’t happen to you here.” She rubbed my forearms briefly before getting up to clear the table. She looked back. “Maybe Dunbar deserved it. I know you don’t.”
–––
Deserved it. Didn’t deserve it. I don’t know. If you start divvying up the deaths like that, you go nuts way faster. People just want bad shit to make sense, and that helps them, and I was not going to argue with her. She was better off not knowing.
I fell asleep that night wishing I had more time to apologize for telling such a god-awful story, but mostly thinking how good her hands felt in mine, trying to relive that touch and the dim relief of her expression across the table, imagining us nose-to-nose in that little bed. Defendable perimeter, Cheryl at the center. Giddy, warm, feeling like I was fifteen all over again. Horses I could deal with, but I was still afraid of a lot of things. She asked me about my kids. I pictured her, round and full, even with her little streaks of gray, and the image glowed, and I think I fell asleep with that in my head. Garcia would have approved.
–––
It rained intermittently the following day, clouding over by the time I came out, a cool wind coming off the hills, pouring for twenty minutes or so, and clearing with a rainbow, a series of them across the floor of the valley by the day’s end. Amazing how densely green a pasture could look after a rain.
We sat that evening on the porch swing, a swing long enough we might have lain in it, and talked—about being little kids once, and what we’d thought we were going to do, and year by year how people could turn into something else. She had always, since girlhood, wanted a ranch in the mountains.
“You ever tell your dad that?” I plumped a cushion next to me and she slid closer.
“You mean, like he made all this happen just because his little girl wanted it?” She shook her head. “More like he planted the idea in me.” She rocked the swing gently with the tip of her toe and then stopped it, foot on the rail. “He might have done that for my brother.”
I turned, looked her in the eyes. “Where is your brother? You never told me.”
“I had a brother. He’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was ten. I cried a lot when it happened, but I really miss him more now that I’m older.” We both leaned back again; she pressed into me and spoke into the night air gathering beyond the porch. “He was twenty. Stationed in Germany.”
“Army?”
“You kidding? Air Force. Anyway, bought a motorcycle, got drunk on leave, got himself killed.” She turned on the cushion to face me and put her arms around my neck. “So you see, I’m not going to stay close to people who drink too much. Understood?”
“Understood.”
She pulled my arm around her shoulder and wove her fingers between mine. “So, what’s the worst thing you ever did?”
“That’s getting very, very personal.”
“Really,” she giggled. “It’s one of those questions you’re supposed to ask people when you’re—”
“When you’re what?”
&
nbsp; I felt her blush. “Getting to know them.”
“I’d have to think about it. Done a lot of awful stuff, really. You first.”
She crossed her arms. “Hmmm,” she said. Then looked at her feet and shook her head. “There was this girl, in high school. In Italy. Her father got her an Alfa Romero. Was real snooty about it. Picked up my boyfriend at the time and drove him up in the hills, never found out what they did.” She looked at me, lips pursed. “Took me and a friend into Latisana, left us ’cause she’d met some guy and didn’t want us in the car. Used to skip classes and go to Lignano Beach, lie around in her bikini. We followed her one time. Cut her distributor wire.”
“Cut it?”
“Yeah, cut it. So she couldn’t just pop it back on.”
“She get towed home?”
“Worse. She’d apparently been flirting with these older guys, Italians. When she went to her car, they followed. Hassled her. Polizia showed up, chased ’em away, then arrested her because she didn’t have any ID.”
“A high school kid?”
“Italians were big on terrorism, even back then. They called the Carabinieri. Carabinieri called the base, Air Force MPs had to come get her.” Cheryl laughed, then composed herself. “Didn’t get home till the next day. Rest of the year, a Jeep dropped her off at school, picked her up. Completely screwed her social life.” She scooted to the far end of the swing, her back against the arm, and faced me. “Now you.”
“Like I said.”
“Come on.” She poked with her socked toe.
“I—”
And Kamdesh came clear to me, like opening the roof of a house and spotting a secret room. Trying to reach a shooter, climbing a ladder. Guy at the window shouldering an RPG. I raise my rifle but it’s empty, action locked open. He turns, RPG discharges, exhaust burning my face, bounces around the room and blows down a wall. We struggle on the floor, me trying to break his neck when I slit his throat with my Gerber. I can smell him, he stinks, and I just keep sawing, his blood pouring, pumping out of his carotids all over my hand, wiggling the blade between bone until it tears free. I’m holding the head, taunting the enemy, sunlight and bullets coming at my face, mouthing off about virgins or something.
“You just flinched. Don’t make anything up, now.” She was still there, smiling.
I shook my head. How do you tell a woman you did such a thing? I have no idea why I did it myself. You scare people with shit like that, because in their safe little notion of how the world should be, they can’t picture themselves ever doing such a thing.
“There was this girl,” I started. “In high school.”
“No fair. You can’t use the same story.”
“Ninth grade, actually. Mom was still alive. We used to sneak out.”
“You and who?”
“Brandon. Best friend. Had a car when he was sixteen. Anyway, we drove to this girl’s house one night, about 3 a.m. Picked the window I thought would be hers. We lit a cigarette.”
“You smoked?”
“Brandon did. Don’t think either of us inhaled. But we took a string of firecrackers, put the fuse through a cigarette, left it burning on the windowsill.”
“No way to impress girls.”
“Turned out, it wasn’t her room.”
“Oh my God.”
“Was her dad’s. And he’d been in Vietnam. Really went berserk, I guess.”
“She ever talk to you again?”
“She didn’t talk much to me to begin with. But ruined my chances for good.” And in that moment I felt worse, worse than I’d ever realized—how cruel it must sound. “I think I know what it was like for her dad. Haven’t thought about that night for ages.”
We sat quietly.
“So, you speak Italian?” I asked.
She perked up. “Do you?”
“No. Just some Pashtu. Few phrases of Urdu.”
Eyes narrowed and scanning the heavens, Cheryl enunciated slowly, “Penso che—mi piacerebbe avere un figlio con te.”
“What did you just say?”
She just smiled, shook her head. “Just something all Italian girls say, sooner or later.”
“You’re not going to tell me.”
She scooted over and pulled my arm back around her. “Maybe someday I’ll show you.”
12
The third morning began overcast but blew over by ten, and I set out wearing my remaining pair of Danners and full BDUs, knowing it would take the better part of the day to reach the tundra where I’d have the best hunting. I spent the night prior in my cabin reading a book titled Cat Attacks, none of it especially sympathetic to cougars. They especially like to eat kids, grab them by the head. I mused for a while on making a fake kid decoy—drag it on a wire or something, few ounces of C-4 in the skull—a joke only the guys in the platoon would find funny. Cougars are sneaky bastards. Eat the liver out of your cocker spaniel while it’s still alive. Kill your house cat and eat it on your lawn. I learned a new word: Crepuscular—active at dusk and dawn. They creep around at night, too, but prefer to hunt in low light. They can spot your carotids.
I reasoned that if I took the higher route, with less cover and less likelihood of being ambushed from behind, I’d have the tactical advantage of high ground, a better vantage point to search from, and the remaining daylight when the brush was falling into shadow.
In addition to the rifle, I loaded a three-liter Camelbak and two sixteen-ounce bottles of water, six salted nut rolls, a blanket, and two sandwiches Cheryl handed me before I left. I didn’t plan on eating much; this was a mission. I’d learned about the enemy, Felis concolor, reconnoitered the terrain. Get in, do the job, get out.
I slipped the Tokarev in my pocket before I left, not so much for protection but out of fear she’d run across it while cleaning the cabin, this crude Russian pistol, and perceive it as a low-life factor. She would go through the things I left behind, I was sure of it. Who wouldn’t?
I started on a horse trail leading out of the pasture, beginning as tire ruts but narrowing to about five feet. I could walk uphill all day, but I couldn’t run with any kind of load at all, so triggering something to chase me wasn’t going to be a problem. Found myself briefly looking for Russian mines in the grass, PMN-2s, dusty little hockey pucks left over from the Russian invasion. After thirty minutes the trail grew abruptly steeper, still recognizable between the rocks, marked periodically with balls of dry horse manure. The sun grew hot in the afternoon. I had a round in the chamber and the safety on; not the responsible way to navigate uneven ground, but I trusted the rifle and my own discipline to keep the muzzle low.
Heading west first, walking into the sun, I waited for my vision to recover in the shade from one cluster of trees to the next, knowing that the ridge ended after a couple miles of steady rise, leaping one fissure after another, every fifty yards or so, thinking it might be best to search that section of the hilltop first, like you’d clear a house of many rooms, but not fully appreciating that each fissure housed another plane of travel, crisscrossing below me, and the ledges twenty or thirty feet down—so many hidden paths an enemy could backtrack and, without a whole platoon, it was impossible to recon with any credibility.
I knew this starting out, and the knowledge kept coming back, but I was too comfortable, falling into how I’d been trained. I drank little of my water. The sun splintered over the horizon and then it was gone, and I was falling into shadows quickly and hadn’t really established a perimeter, any sort of safe zone.
I dragged one fallen tree trunk near another to form a V, still thinking I needed ballistic cover, set my pack at the apex of the V, built a small fire near my feet in a shallow in the rock and stretched out under the blanket.
A crow screeched like a klaxon, bobbing on my foot, picking at my boot laces. I shook my foot and he spread his wings, rose a few inches, and settled to pick again. I smelled cold ashes. Morning. I sat up halfway and froze. Ten yards from my feet, motionless, unblinking, sat the cat. Even seat
ed it was nearly four feet tall. Imperturbable curiosity, or patience. Maybe it wasn’t hungry. I glanced at the rifle and remembered clearing the chamber before I dozed off. I took a breath and the cat did the same, a quick motion of its ribs, an inhalation of me, testing the air. I rolled, grabbed the rifle and screamed as I stood, launching forward, locked in the notion that the cat would fear the muzzle of a gun. The cat sprang back and, before I could work the bolt, had vanished down a ravine. I ran a few steps, limbs half asleep, boot strings untied.
I went back to my useless little camp of two logs and a fire long turned ash, chambered a round and set the safety. I tied my boots. I shivered and peed on the other side of the log, as if I were going to stay there. I sat down and realized I hadn’t brought any coffee.
Setting out as the sun rose, I ran the lower ledges, coming to the top every hundred feet or so, rolling my heels and stalking in a way I hadn’t since the days with Mr. Dunham, hunting deer, crossing from one side to the other, determined to clear that end of the ridge, looking down into the trees and trying to lessen the notion, the very likely notion, that the cat could shadow me under the mantle of the forest. They didn’t like midday, I’d read. They weren’t supposed to, anyway. Should have found out what time the girl was attacked or what time she had set out that day, then look for some shadowy area, a shallow cave, with a sleeping cat. But dwell too long on what you hope to find and you’ll get blindsided.
By midday I crossed the first short plateau I’d ascended the day before, and worked my way northwest, trying the same tactic, but the ridge’s width expanded to a half mile and it simply took too long to cross the top; the whole operation started to feel senseless.
My legs were tiring and my back hurt from sleeping on stone. When I thought I might fall asleep again, I shouldered the pack and went on. Sometime that afternoon, a song got in my head, a memory of Brits singing in a pub in Bosnia, getting drunk. “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you are never gonna keep me down . . .” It just went on and on in my head, might have even sung it out loud but couldn’t remember all the words.
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 18