“I will. I’ll call you.”
Carson returned to his bike, mounted it and tugged on his helmet. “And Brad, Ranya’s just about the only ‘family’ I’ve got in these parts. I’m sure you’ll be a gentleman, won’t you?” He smiled when he said this, but his concern for her welfare was evident.
“I’m going to be gone soon. You won’t have to worry about me.”
Carson answered him by firing up the engine, and then he snapped his bike into gear and turned back toward the state road. He stopped on the edge of the pavement behind Lieutenant Mosby’s patrol car, and Mosby walked over and briefly spoke to him. Brad and Ranya watched as the two men shook hands, and then Carson took off riding his black Harley toward the south.
****
“Man, he’s a trip” said Brad. “Is he serious about all that civil war talk? I mean, I expect a lot of problems, the country’s going to crap, but a civil war?”
“Sure he’s serious. He’s the real deal, that’s what I always heard. I used to hear some other customers at the shop talking about him. They said he was into some pretty crazy stuff in Vietnam. Special Forces, that deal. Phil never talks about it, but some other guys, they told my father some pretty amazing stories about him. So yeah, if he’s talking about a civil war coming, I’d say he knows what he’s talking about.”
“I don’t see how a civil war can happen in this day and age, but I definitely feel the hate—it’s right under the surface. I can see all the dividing lines. America really is two countries today. One half still loves freedom, and the other half’s already socialist, even if they don’t call it that—yet. The free half is keeping them from going all the way to having the kind of socialist government they want, but they can’t quite shove us out of the way while we’ve got so many guns. I think that’s really what all this is about: once they’ve got our guns, they’ll just pass all their damn socialist laws. They’ll just increase our taxes until we’re like Sweden, and if we don’t like it, tough shit. Anybody that fights back will get a free ride to a special camp for problem children. That’s where it’s all heading, and that’s why I’m leaving now, before I need to get permission to go.”
“Brad, I think your plan’s pretty smart. Get out of Dodge while you can. But as far as what he said about a new civil war goes, well, it’s already started for me. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but somebody sure as hell declared war on me when they killed my father.”
“Listen Ranya, I didn’t mention this when your friend was here, because I didn’t want to bring up the FBI coming out to my boat, or the thing at Lester’s. The only credential I saw when the FBI came to my boat was from an older agent named James Gibson, but the main guy who dealt with me said his name was George, just George, and he didn’t give his last name. He didn’t show me any ID, so I assumed he was FBI too like Gibson, but now I don’t think so. He was definitely a crew-cut gorilla, and he had a Boston kind of accent, just like the ATF agent Phil saw in your store. It’s got to be the same guy.”
“So the FBI and the BATF are working together down here. Probably because of the Stadium Massacre,” she replied. Her tears were gone for now, pushed back, replaced by a new steely-eyed interest. “So Gibson is an older FBI agent who was at your boat, and George is the guy who was at your boat, and at Freedom Arms.”
“Right. I think so,” said Brad.
“Well, that’s good to know, that’s something anyway.”
“What are you going to do next?” he asked her.
“What do you mean, next? Today?”
“No, I mean are you going to stay in Suffolk, or go back to Charlottesville?”
“I’ll stay a few days, maybe a week, I don’t know. I don’t even know all the things I have to do. I’ve got some high school friends around here. I can stay at somebody’s house.”
“Okay, well, if you need anything, let me give you my cell phone number, and if you need my truck to move your other motorcycles, any thing like that, just call me, and I’ll be glad to help. Do you know where my boat is?”
“I think so. I can find it.”
“Well, if there’s anything you need, just call me. And Ranya, I’m really glad I met you, I’m just so sorry about what happened to your father, about everything.” They walked down the dirt road and along the fence by State Road 32 until they were back at the gutted store. Brad climbed into his truck, jotted his number on an old receipt, and handed it to her. Then he said once again, “If there’s anything I can do…”
“I’ll call you. Thanks Brad, thanks for all your help today.”
There was nothing left to say, so he pulled out of the parking lot and headed back to Guajira. Ranya was still standing on the parking lot; he could see the American flag waving in his rear view mirror.
10
After Phil Carson and Brad Fallon departed, long after her father’s body was taken away, there was nothing left for Ranya to gain by lingering on her property except more painful memories. At the age of twenty-one she was burdened with the crushing knowledge that she was utterly alone in the world. She had no living relatives in America that she was aware of, and only scant knowledge of any family left in Lebanon. All that she knew of her family history in Lebanon was that many of the Christians in their native village had been wiped out during the civil war in the 1970’s, and the survivors had been forced to flee in an unlamented modern-day Diaspora. Now, thirty years later, the last remnant of her tribe was again faced with extinction.
She would have had an older brother named Michael, but he did not survive to see his sister born. He had been killed when only a toddler by a car bomb in East Beirut, where her parents had taken refuge. He was buried somewhere over there, somewhere Ranya could now never know. Her mother, Elise, was buried in a Catholic graveyard here in Suffolk County Virginia. As for her father, she could not bear to think of where he was, because then the agonizing images of the morning stormed back into her mind and paralyzed her with another layer of grief.
Only the clarity of onrushing asphalt could push back the images, so she twisted her ponytail up under her helmet and blasted up State Road 32. She passed anonymously through Suffolk’s business and commercial district, and a few minutes later she parked near her mother’s grave in a sunlit granite-studded meadow. Her entire family was now lying in graveyards, or even worse, in some cold stainless steel drawer. On the short walk to her mother’s grave, Ranya knelt to pluck a few yellow wildflowers that were growing at the base of a hedge, ashamed that she had not remembered to stop at a proper florist’s shop.
She had last seen her mother alive a week before Christmas in 1992, bald and puffy after months of radiation and chemo. Her mother had always been beautiful, with Ranya’s hazel colored eyes and thick brown hair, but her last months on earth were a horror show. Ranya extracted a pair of small color snapshots of her mother and father from her wallet, and set them in the grass at the base of the grave stone. On the left side of the rose-colored marble was chiseled “Elise Marie Bardiwell, Beloved Wife and Mother, Eternal Peace.” The right side of the stone was smooth and uncarved—another task to add to my list, Ranya thought.
She sat on the lawn facing the marker, and then gently placed her father’s silver cross between the two pictures. The cross came from her mother’s family, one of their few family keepsakes to be brought out of Lebanon.
There was no one else nearby, and Ranya spoke softly. “Hi Mom, I’m sorry I haven’t visited in a long time. I guess you already know what happened… I hope that Dad has found you and you’re together again.
“I’m trying to keep it together here. I’m trying to hold up. I’m trying to understand everything, but I don’t know if God hears my prayers at all. Mom, what happened to our family, why am I left all alone?”
There didn’t seem to be much of a future in being a Bardiwell, and not much point in trying, when they all died so young. She fell asleep crying on the warm grass above her mother’s grave.
The afternoon sun move
d behind a nearby stand of Poplar trees. A burial service awakened her, and she sat up and brushed the grass from her hair, and put away the cross and their pictures. She knew she looked awful, and she was grateful to get on her bike and be able to hide again beneath her full visor helmet.
A mile from the graveyard, at the northern edge of the ‘city’ of Suffolk, was the brick and plaster Saint Charles Catholic Church. Ranya parked in front of the small adjoining rectory and hesitantly rang the doorbell. She had stopped attending weekly Mass when she went away to college three years earlier. The white-painted door finally creaked open and to her relief Father Alvarado greeted her.
Ranya Bardiwell had been blessed with a face that was not easily forgotten, not even by an elderly parish priest, not even after hours of crying had taken their toll. It took him only a few moments to recall her name. She had attended Saint Charles Elementary School through the eighth grade, and her father Joseph Bardiwell never missed the eight o’clock Mass on Sunday.
“Ranya? How are you? Come in, you don’t look so well. What’s the matter?”
“My father’s dead. He was killed last night.”
“Oh, God help us all! I saw something on the news, gun stores were burned, was he...?”
“He was shot, and he was burned. Oh Father, it was terrible what they did to him!” She fell against the frail priest, sobbing again. There was no end to her tears today.
****
After leaving the church rectory, Ranya rode north to the home of a high school friend. She had only vague ideas of where she might stay, so she was letting her Yamaha pull her along rural lanes remembered from happier days. Valerie Edmonds was in her senior year at nearby William and Mary, and spent most weekends at her family home in northern Suffolk County. Her house always seemed like a mansion to Ranya, located on a dozen acres of high ground overlooking a bend in the Nansemond River near its mouth on the Chesapeake Bay. Valerie’s house had numerous guest bedrooms, and Ranya hoped that they would offer to put her up for a few days while she sorted out her father’s affairs.
Valerie’s father Burgess Edmonds had been one of Joe Bardiwell’s best customers over the years. He was a prolific gun collector, with tastes running mainly to custom-made hunting rifles in the latest ultra-magnum calibers. Joe Bardiwell had done much of the customizing himself, delivering rifles that were not only works of art to behold, but were invariably capable of astonishing accuracy. All of Bardiwell’s rifles came delivered with proof targets, demonstrating that they had been zeroed in to shoot groups of under one-half inch at one-hundred yards. This was the minimum acceptable level of accuracy for a rifle out of Bardiwell’s custom shop, which on a paper target produced a single ragged hole resembling a cloverleaf. Joe Bardiwell charged a lot for his custom work, and Burgess Edmonds had been happy to pay the premium, often while waiting months for the gunsmith to work through his back orders.
Ranya had been a guest of Valerie’s on social occasions from grade school birthday parties, all the way through high school to their senior prom pool party, complete with a band. They had been friends, but Ranya was always aware of the social gulf between them. Upper class Valerie had her horses and piano lessons, middle class Ranya had her motorcycles and shooting. Something they had still in common were their dogs. The Edmonds had two Dobermans from the same litter that had produced Armalite; they had been sold to both families by another regular customer of Freedom Arms. Ranya expected to see the two black dogs come sprinting down the hill to meet her, and then lope alongside her on her ride up to the house, and she knew it would hurt.
So Ranya reached the Edmonds’s private road with mixed hope and dread, but she stopped far from the big white house when it became obvious that a social event of some kind was taking place. A dozen or more gleaming luxury SUVs, convertibles and foreign touring sedans were parked on the circle and the lawn in front of the house, and there was a white canopy tent the size of a tennis court visible on the lawn. Music from a live band drifted down the long private driveway to her.
Ranya held in the clutch, standing over her bike, imagining her entrance: a poor ash-smeared Orphan Annie, sweat streaked, her hair pulled back in a dirty ponytail, wearing boots and jeans. She pictured the smiles and whispers among the satin-gowned debutantes as they struggled to recall Ranya What’s-her-name, the gun dealer’s daughter. Perhaps they would sit her in the big trophy room on one of the stools made from an elephant’s foot, place her between the stuffed lion and the polar bear rug as a new exhibit: “wild Arab girl.” Maybe they would let her earn her room and board in the kitchen, or perhaps she could help the caterers, but suitably behind the scenes.
No. She was resigned to being the outsider, the loner. It was part of her inner core anyway, why else had she owned seven motorcycles, but never once a car? Ranya Bardiwell had always been able to stand her own company, and now she would have to. First she had been an only child, then she had lost her mother, and now there was the final loss and she was alone. Alone.
She drove to the outskirts of the city of Suffolk to the Super K-Mart, and bought what she would need for a few days: toiletries, shorts, running shoes and plain black t-shirts, a conservative black dress for church and the funeral, and a nylon zipper bag to hold it all on the back of her bike. She ate as an afterthought, a tasteless sandwich she picked up at a fast food place next to the K-Mart.
****
Ranya bypassed the Suffolk Holiday Inn and drove to the old motel located at the intersection a mile north of her former house on State Road 32. The “Colonial” hovered between quaint and seedy, with twelve units in a straight line, set well back from the road under towering loblolly pines. The Indian manager in the office did not stare at her or ask questions; his sari-clad wife was also behind the desk.
The air conditioner in her unit was loud but at least it pumped out a steady stream of cold air. The bed was not too soft, the sheets and the room were clean. The austerity matched her spirit. She showered, glad to shed her very stale running clothes and sports bra, then she changed into entirely new clothes from the skin out: black nylon running shorts, a black bra and a black t-shirt, and mostly-black running shoes. The shower and new clothes gave her a lift, and at last she felt ready to examine what she had taken from her father’s floor safe. She sat cross-legged on top of the bed, and spread out the contents of her daypack.
A sealed business-sized envelope was on top of the stack, on the front her father had hand written “Ranya, read this first.” She opened it carefully with her folding pocket knife, which had been in her jacket pocket when she had thrown it on back at her apartment in Charlottesville. She withdrew the single sheet of stationery and unfolded it slowly, savoring her father’s imagined touch.
Hello Ranya My Love,
If you are reading this letter, then I have either died or I otherwise cannot communicate with you, so I am terribly sorry for leaving you all alone my beloved, please forgive me. I have prepared a list of all of our bank accounts and insurance agents and attorneys to call now.
In the small yellow envelope you will find a bank safe deposit box key and instructions. The deposit box contains some items and papers which you may find useful as well as some family photographs and records. The white envelope contains some emergency money to hold you over temporarily. The box wrapped in brown paper contains my graduation gift to you.
Now that I am gone, there is a good chance that our family business is gone as well, or Freedom Arms is no longer under your control. In that event, I have prepared some items and put them into a safe location for you. Do you remember where you separated your shoulder, and where I found you? Go there. Going west, take the left fork, and stop at the stone tower. From the tower walk 200 feet (80 paces) at 300 degrees by the compass. Look under the southwest corner.
Ranya, if you are reading this after my passing, always remember your Mother’s undying love for you, and try not to forget your father, who loved you so dearly.
Ranya read the letter a second and a
third time, and then she folded it into a small square and put it into her wallet next to her parents’ pictures. She slit the fat white envelope with her folding pocketknife and riffled through the cash; there was a half-inch thick stack of fifty-dollar bills.
In her mind, Ranya tried to picture the location of the arms cache her father had described in his personal code. At age fifteen she had slammed into a hole on her 125cc Enduro and badly dislocated her left shoulder. She clearly remembered the accident and thus the general location of the cache. She knew that she could reach it in twenty minutes on a dirt bike, or a bit longer on her Yamaha.
Finally, she turned to the wrapped gift box, which was as big as a medium sized textbook. Under the brown paper was a polished rosewood box. She lifted open the top and saw a gleaming blue-black pistol set into red velvet padding, along with two spare magazines, and a plastic compass the size of a large coin. She understood at once that the compass was to guide her way to her father’s arms cache. He was a methodical man, and he had left nothing to chance.
The pistol was a highly customized compact .45 caliber “Colt Commander.” Ranya lifted the pistol out of its velvet bed: it fit her hand perfectly. She noted all of the improvements: the extended beavertail grip safety for softer felt recoil, the checkering cut into the front of the grip, the glow-in-the-dark tritium sights, and the extended slide release for quicker reloading. Importantly, the pistol had safety release catches on both sides just above where her thumbs would rest for ambidextrous use. She was right handed, but if she needed the pistol while riding her Yamaha she would have to draw and fire left handed. Her father knew this, and put safeties on both sides.
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