Bulldog screamed and thrashed, but I held on to the handle like a rodeo rider to the saddlebow of a kicking bronco. He rolled off and I scrambled to my feet. Bulldog reached to yank out the knife and I kicked him in the jaw with the steel toe of my boot, sending him tumbling backwards. I kicked a second and a third time. He struggled to his knees and I punted him off the cliff.
I looked for Doreen. She was inches from the cliff, clutching for dear life to Fielding’s leg, and screaming hysterically. I dove at him and we went rolling and wrestling on the ground. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Doreen lunge for her daypack. Fielding caught me in the nose with an elbow and I went blind with tears and stars. He turned me onto my stomach and cranked on my arm.
“Say uncle, you little fucker!”
I squealed in pain, certain he was about to tear my arm from its socket. “Go to hell!”
“Get off him!” Doreen yelled. “Now!”
I felt Fielding’s weight leave my body. I gasped for air. I spun onto my back, and cradling my arm to my chest, I saw Doreen pointing a gun at him. It was just like Zeeva’s Artemis. It was the gun Zeeva had given to Doreen as a present, and the reason Doreen kept going for her daypack.
“Doreen,” Fielding said entreatingly, his hands in the air. “You’re not a killer. You don’t want this on your conscience.”
“Like you said, lover. I’ll just have to deal with it.” She shot him between the eyes.
Stunned wasn’t an option. Bullets flew all around us and the last of the smoke was fanning out across the yellow waving weeds. We wanted to run for cover but the only place to hide was the outhouse, and two soldiers still stood between it and us. Recognizing we had no choice, we crawled up behind Fielding’s corpse and propped it onto its side. We nestled up tightly behind it and covered our heads with our hands.
The gunfire stopped. I hazarded a look around. The last two soldiers were on their faces, motionless, arrows in their backs. Melody and Noriko rolled out from beneath the bullet-riddled, windowless truck and scrambled soldier to soldier, making sure they were all dead. Melody held her left arm and the side of Noriko’s face was covered in blood. Doreen and I ran over to them. “Jeezus, are you okay?” I said.
“Yeah,” Melody said. She turned to Noriko. “You’re a sight.”
Noriko wiped the side of her head. “My agent is going to kill me,” she said. “What do I tell him this time? … Where’s Ellery?”
Melody said, “Where’s Piranha?” And then she said, “Shit…”
“Drop your guns, ladies.”
Piranha stepped from behind the outhouse. Ellery, clutching his stomach, his shirt soaked in blood, was propped up in front of him, a gun to his head. The girls turned their guns on Piranha.
“Drop the guns or he dies.”
“Then so do you,” Melody said.
Piranha grinned. “Maybe, maybe not.”
Behind me I heard the steely clatter of cocking rifles. I turned and saw three sharpshooters in foxholes, their rifles pointed at Melody and Noriko. Obviously they had been dug in and camouflaged before we had even arrived.
Piranha said, “Remember what I taught you, Guy? Backup plan. Even for your backup. Toss your weapons and get down on your faces, hands laced behind your heads, spread eagle. The girls looked at each other, cursed, and did as he said. “You too,” he said, nodding at Doreen and me. “Now!”
“What do you want, Piranha?” Melody snarled.
“Oh, but you know what I want.”
“They’re not here.”
“But I think they are.”
Ellery said, “You got all you’re gonna get, Piranha. Quit while you’re ahead.” He groaned and hugged his stomach.
Piranha stepped back and let him slide to the ground. “I hate to see you end this way, Ellery. After all you’ve been through. You deserve better. It seems so anticlimactic.” He scanned the surrounding area, turning slowly like a radar dish. “Yoo-hoo,” he sang, “Max, Aidos, come out, come out, wherever you are. Now, or I kill all your friends!”
I heard a sharp, piercing whistle, then, “Yo, fish man, over here.”
I turned my head and saw Max Stormer standing near the edge of the tall grass, about fifteen yards behind one of the fox holes. The grass waived about his waist.
Piranha said, “Where’s your girlfriend?”
“Up here.”
Piranha turned and looked. Aidos, dressed in camouflage and a black headband was kneeling on one leg on the roof of the outhouse. In her hand was a bow with an arrow pointed at Piranha.
“Well, hello,” Piranha said. “My, you’re even more darling that I imagined. Didn’t your mother teach you not to play with sticks? You could put someone’s eye out with one of those things.”
Aidos smiled. “At forty meters.”
“You don’t say? Well, come on down now, okay?”
“Sure, be right there.” She backed away and disappeared.
Piranha turned again to Max, but Max was gone. “Oh, no you don’t,” Piranha hollered. “I’m not in the mood for any more games.” He waved to one of the men in the foxholes to check it out. The man climbed out and began to cautiously wade into the tall grass, rifle at the ready.
“Here I am.”
I looked and saw Aidos standing at the corner of the outhouse, her bow drawn and pointing at Piranha. He too had turned to face her. He aimed his pistol at her head.
“Put down the toy, sweetheart. I don’t want to have to kill you. You’re too precious for that.”
Aidos lowered her bow.
“’Atta girl…” Piranha glanced back to see how his man was doing. The soldier was nowhere in sight. When he turned back to Aidos she was gone too.
Piranha shouted, “I said no more games!” He pointed his gun at Ellery and shot him in the leg. Ellery groaned. “The next bullet is for one of the girls!” Piranha turned to his men in the foxholes. “Big Mac, what happened to Whopper?”
“Dunno, Sir. I didn’t see—”
“Go check!”
“Yes, Sir!” He started to crawl out of his foxhole, yelped, and tumbled back, an arrow in his eye.
“That was stupid, girl,” Piranha called out. He thrust his gun at Doreen.
“No!” I flung myself on top of Doreen and tried to cover her like a blanket. A shot exploded, followed by a commotion of scrambling feet, then another shot. I was afraid to open my eyes; I was afraid I’d see Doreen’s closed.
I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Guy?”
I looked up and saw Max smiling down at me. I let out a huge sigh of relief.
“Guy,” Doreen squealed, “get off of me. I can’t breathe.” I rolled away and she leaped up and threw her arms around Max.
I looked around. The last man in the foxhole was still there, an arrow in his chest. Hamburger. Piranha was on the ground, his back against the wall of the outhouse. His eyes were open and his gun was still in his hand. He had a hole in his forehead. Ellery lay on the ground where I last saw him, a gun in his hand, and bleeding to death. Melody, Noriko, and Aidos were kneeling beside him.
“What happened?” I said.
Max said, “I jumped on Piranha from up there and knocked his shot away. Aidos tossed Ellery a gun and he shot him.”
“And those bastards?” I said pointing to the soldiers in the foxhole with the arrows in them. “Aidos?”
Max shook his head and hiked a thumb over his shoulder.
I saw Zeeva, hi-tech bow in hand, emerge from behind a manzanita tree forty meters out. Doreen ran out to meet her.
“How did she get here?”
“She ejected from the glider under cover of the smoke and gunfire. Johanna piloted.”
“And you and Aidos?”
“We’ve been here the whole time. We watched the soldiers dig in.”
“But how could you have known?”
“Aidos and I have been tailing Mongoose since he first contacted Doreen. He led us to them.”
I turned to El
lery. His head was on Noriko’s lap and Melody was holding his hand. I walked over to him and kneeled at his side. Both Noriko and Melody had tears streaming down their cheeks, something I thought them incapable of until now.
Human after all.
I saw on their pained faces and within their watering eyes a love for the old man as deep as any child’s. Together the girls bowed and laid their heads on his heaving chest.
“Arigato, Ellery,” Noriko said in Japanese, her voice catching, tears cascading down her cheeks. “Thank you for our lives.”
Melody cursed and whipped away the tears from her face. “We love you, dear old man,” she said. “We love you and we will miss you so bad…”
“Aidos,” I said, urgently. “Can’t you do something? You know, do-whatever-you-do stuff? Help him!”
“I can’t, Guy. He’s lost too much blood.”
“But you can! You can!”
“It’s his time, Guy.” She stroked Ellery’s head. Doing so seemed to relieve some of the pain he was in.
Ellery looked at me. “Guy…” He rasped. “I’m sorry for all the harm I’ve brought to you.”
I didn’t know what to say, and now I had tears running down my cheeks. All the different tongue-lashings I had played out in my head for the day when I finally met the son of a bitch were suddenly irrelevant. I shook my head and wiped the tears from my eyes.
He coughed and continued. “I wanted to tell you my reasons in person, but…it seems I won’t have the chance.” He reached into the side pocket of his blood-soaked cargo pants and pulled out a book, a journal. He tried to smile. “Probably the last thing you want to see…but it might help you to understand.”
I took the book.
By now Zeeva and Doreen had joined us. In the distance I heard a shout. Sprinting up the road towards us, arms pumping, legs spinning, rushed Johanna. I made room for her and she came sliding in on her knees to Ellery’s side, tears and sweat spraying everywhere. The three sisters hugged over Ellery, and wept. “Thank you, Ellery,” Johanna cried. “I’ll miss you more than you can ever know!”
We were all together, Johanna, Noriko, Melody, Zeeva, Aidos, Max, Doreen, and Dost, and in the center—a man anonymous to all but us—Ellery. With great effort he raised his arms and wrapped them around his girls. Through his brown, moist eyes, which took each of us in one by one, I saw such heart-tugging adoration that I thought I was going to start bawling like a baby.
He coughed once and then in a dry, soft voice he said, “Piranha was wrong. This is the only way a man should die. … His family at his side. … My family….” He smiled, closed his eyes, and drifted across the great river to the other side.
A Super Snowball
Although the last journal was shorter than the others, the time period it covered was longer, almost a decade, concluding with a tender passage about Anya and their final days spent together before her tragic death. Smiling, drooling, baby ‘Dost’ was there bouncing on Ellery’s knee, and we were all very happy. How weird is that? I wished that I could remember, but I was just an infant at the time. The touching passage was written only a week before Ellery’s death.
The journal confirmed most of what Piranha had already told me. It also described how Ellery had stolen the disc and engineered his disappearance from the Organization. Details were skimpy as usual, and he said nothing about what the disc contained. Ominously, however, he did write that the disc held “information of tremendous importance to the future of mankind.” An unsettling line in itself, but the real chiller came a few sentences later where he wrote:
…Mankind is in for a rude awakening, and I believe that it will be up to people like Max and Aidos to differentiate between opportunity and oblivion. I believe they have the wisdom and courage to choose correctly; I just pray that they have the time. Such young shoulders have never carried a grimmer responsibility.
It was a cryptic and spooky oracle, but true or not I took refuge in the knowledge that there wasn’t a damn thing Guy Andrews could do about any of it. Good luck, you two. And Godspeed!
The rest of the journal was for the Almighty to comment on, not me. I liked to imagine the two of them sitting together smoking cigars and drinking port wine, and having the heart to heart Ellery said he yearned for.
As to why exactly Ellery chose to reinsert himself into my life, the journal was no help at all. He did, however, pen the following, which consoled me somewhat. He wrote:
True power does not reside in the talents and strengths that you are born with, but in weaknesses overcome.
When we are born, talent, good looks, genius, health, and even money, are all doled out willy-nilly. To those who have received heaps of one, some, or all of these favors, I say to you—thank your lucky stars my friends, because you surely didn’t deserve it!
To everyone else, which is most people, I’d like to stand you up in front of me, look you in the eyes and say with all sincerity that no person, group, or government can dictate to you who you are or what you are capable of doing: so little has been imagined, and even less has been attempted. You and you alone have that right and that power. Will your life be lived meaningfully and with dignity? You decide.
Every person has weaknesses worth overcoming; fears that must be faced to find the meaning and self-respect that he or she desires. And although it often seems that Life is in conspiracy against you, that it takes some demented pleasure in seeing that you never get there, it isn’t so.
Life just knows better than we do. Life knows that it’s all in the struggle. After all, who knows more about the meaning of struggle and adversity than Life itself? It’s seen and been through it all. From primordial slime to the eagle perched upon the highest branch of the tallest pine tree, right up to you and this very minute. Life never says uncle, and neither must you.
If it weren’t for Ellery my path would never have crossed those of the remarkable people I came to love. I knew after reading the last journal that I’d probably never know for sure why he decided to haul me into his world. Perhaps he just wanted someone from the outside world to remember him; to clear his cursed name and keep some memory of Ellery the man alive. Noriko, Johanna, Melody, they were like daughters to him, but their lives were much like his; to be spent forever in the shadows and the secret byways of international intrigue. As unique and important as such people might be, I thought, they’d disappear from human chronicles without so much as a footnote. By having given me a glimpse of his life and his journals, Anonymous Man had rescued himself from the waters of Lethe.
I wondered if I should tell my folks what I knew. I thought it sad that his relatives would always remember him as a criminal and a coward. Ellery Channing was many things, and no doubt to the uninformed eye had committed numerous reprehensible acts, but he wasn’t the louse my Aunt Paula made him out to be. Ellery knew all too tragically well the meaning of sacrifice, duty, and suffering.
I understood too that despite my resentment, Ellery had his reasons for not explaining his motives to me. From his journals and from what I had seen and heard over the past year I learned enough to know that Ellery Channing lived in a world I could never comprehend or appreciate. I didn’t have to like it, or him, but acceptance was my only recourse. I hoped, and believed, that he was sorry for all the danger he had put Doreen and me in.
Funny, I thought, how one seemingly insignificant event could alter a person’s life so dramatically. What if Ellery had never stuffed that snowball down Sharc’s pants when he was young, when he was my age? Had he been less cocky then, would he have been sitting with me and Freud last Christmas, telling me war stories and giving me sorely-needed advice on school and girls and life, instead of on the run, scheming and plotting, trying desperately to save what was left of his soul?
And where and when does the snowball stop? Where would Lena, Hiromi, and Millie, Zeeva, Max and Aidos all be today if young Ellery had left that snow on the ground? Without that snowball what would have become of Hennes and Chaim and Jaso
n? Would Zeeva, Aidos, or even I ever have been born? And on and on it goes.
No, dear Aunt Paula, Ellery Channing was something more than a wayward son and family curse. He was an explosion of white light—a glistening, super snowball, rolling and thundering through life, and setting into motion an avalanche of people, events, and changes that would continue long after he was gone, imbuing all with his unique character.
The Graduate
The morning before Doreen and I were to go to Tucson to start the fall semester of school, I climbed Piestewa Peak Mountain for the final time that summer. Ellery’s family was already long gone. They wouldn’t tell me where they were headed. They also denied that there was ever a secret handshake.
I gently placed a baby pine tree into the hole that Ellery and I had dug together and covered it with soil. I poured the contents of five canteens over it and the other two trees, and then pulled from my ruck a little wooden sign I had made the night before, and hammered it into the ground. I stepped back, tugged on my Apple ‘Think Different’ cap, and admired my work.
A couple of the sunrise regulars strolled over to me. Marshal read the sign out loud:
Welcome to the world’s smallest forest. Please deposit all leftover water from your canteens with these struggling trees so that your children may someday climb their branches and see your lives and theirs a little differently.
—Anonymous Man
“Anonymous Man?” Willow said.
“That’s right,” I said.
Marshall said, “We never did get his name, did we?”
“A legend is born,” Willow said. She took a swig from her water bottle and emptied the rest on the ground around one of the trees. “He’s not coming back?”
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