Enemy Combatant

by Ed Gaffney

  I realized right then that I wasn’t ever going to get used to the feeling this woman put in my chest about every fifteen seconds. And I also realized that I never wanted to.

  Henley was awake when I went in to see him, and ready for the new day. Despite the absence of his regular chair and the bars and other aids I had come to take for granted at the old place, we managed to get him through his toilet with less of a struggle than we’d had the night before. He happily joined Erica out in the living room for a bit of coloring while I began the best day of my life.

  The cinnamon sugar toast was a spectacular success—Erica, Henley, and I had several pieces while Amy got showered. When she emerged, she made coffee while Henley and Erica returned to the crayons, and I got a turn in the bathroom.

  We spent most of the rest of the day relaxing. Cliff and Iris stopped by with some provisions, including refills of Henley’s prescriptions they’d picked up on the way, down in Winston. They stayed for a late lunch before heading off to Iris’s office to do her Internet radio show. She broadcast for two hours every Saturday afternoon, and used every single one of the one hundred twenty minutes to blast what she saw as the racist, fascist, sexist oligarchy ruling our country. She included in that gang Governor Hamilton, whom she thought of as nothing more than an amoral, power-hungry authoritarian who would do anything to get ahead. Iris had a small but growing national audience, which included some fairly impressive political insiders with whom she regularly exchanged e-mails. But thanks to her connection with Cliff and his family and friends, she was huge in the local Navajo community. They especially appreciated her oft-repeated message that traditional Navajo society’s philosophy of freedom with responsibility was far more egalitarian and democratic than anything found in modern-day America.

  After Cliff and Iris left, Henley fell asleep, and Erica curled up with a puzzle book, leaving Amy and me sitting beside each other on the couch. Nobody’s shirt came flying off in a dramatically erotic and romantic gesture. But trust me—just holding hands with Amy that afternoon with the promise of a future together was giving my heart a very respectable workout.

  In rough outline, our plan was to wait for a few days before fleeing far to the east. We expected that Henley’s and my disappearance, and the destruction of our house, was going to become a big news story. We didn’t want to try to go on the run when our faces would be on every tabloid cable news show on the air.

  That night, after a simple dinner of hot dogs and hamburgers that was nearly as delicious as the tuna and canned corn of the night before, we shared some ice cream and went to bed early. Amy thought it was best if she stayed with Erica that evening, which was just as well, as a thunderstorm rolled through, and I needed to spend much of the night with Henley.

  The next day, Erica woke me up with a series of gentle taps on my shoulder, and a whispered question. “Don’t you think this is a Morning of Special Significance?”

  Decoded: May we have pancakes for breakfast?

  When she was three, and proclaimed that her favorite food in the world was “canpakes,” I first learned that Erica and I shared a deep and abiding regard for the flapjack. As my niece soon thereafter learned—and I say this with all due humility—I make an exceptional pancake. The two keys are to use real butter on the skillet, instead of oil or margarine, and to use seltzer water in the mix, instead of milk. The results for me have been consistently outstanding. Ever since, Erica and I have had an agreement, that on so-designated Mornings of Special Significance, like Christmas and the first day of school vacations, I would make my specialty for us all to share.

  So as I arose that Sunday morning, I assured Erica that she was absolutely correct, and asked her to wait until her mother woke up, and then tell her that I was going to the store to pick up what I needed to make breakfast on this beautiful day.

  Of course, as I left the cabin, I had no idea that was the last time I would ever see it.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE MINUTE I stepped outside and saw the large blue pickup truck parked next to my rented VW, I considered my options. I could try to confront the danger immediately, or I could retreat indoors, and attempt to hold back the assault from within.

  Before I could decide, the passenger door opened and a tall, smiling Native American sporting an impressive beer belly and an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap emerged. “You’re Cliff’s friend, right? He asked us to keep an eye on you and your family last night. He said he was coming by sometime this morning.”

  I introduced myself to the big guy, David West, one of the tribe’s police officers, and to his brother, Jack, who was driving the truck. I told them I was on my way into Winston to get some things and that I’d be back in about an hour. Then I took off, significantly more grim than I’d been just fifteen minutes earlier.

  It wasn’t that I was ungrateful for the help. In fact, I felt much safer knowing that someone would be watching the place while I went into town.

  It was just that an ugly reality was invading the little fantasy world that I had so eagerly inhabited since dinner two nights before. Normal people don’t need Navajo tough guys in pickup trucks to keep an eye on their family while they go to the store for butter and seltzer water. And normal people do not think of the presence of an unfamiliar vehicle in their driveway as a mortal threat.

  But as I drove the narrow, empty road down the scrub-pine-dotted hills, toward the desert valley scarred by dozens of yellow and brown arroyos, I found my mind drifting away from suspicion and threat, and instead, shuttling back and forth from a blissful future to survivor’s guilt.

  Amy and I had talked about moving to Virginia, or possibly North Carolina. We were going to buy a house in wooded hills, so Henley would feel at home. But we’d be close enough to the cities so that Erica could go to a good school, and Amy and I could find work.

  We’d buy a dog, teach Erica how to swim in the ocean, maybe have a baby of our own. And on summer evenings, I’d chop wood for Henley’s stove until it was time for dinner with my family.

  The family that Dale should have had.

  He’d died before Erica was even born.

  I knew that beating myself up over the many injustices surrounding Dale’s fate was not a particularly healthy train of thought to ride. But by succumbing to the passion that I felt for Amy, that was the ticket I had purchased.

  I knew Dale wouldn’t have disapproved of what we were doing. He was one of the most unselfish and practical people I ever knew. “What’s the most important thing?” he’d ask, whenever I came to him with an ethical dilemma. Admittedly, my problems were considerably less thorny back when I was ten—I recall many seemed to revolve around denying or admitting to eating cookies before dinner. But if Dale’s spirit could have spoken to me in the car that morning, he would have asked the same question. And the answer, of course, would have been Amy and Erica. Which made me feel a little better.

  Until I turned on the radio and the song that was playing was “La Bamba,” by Los Lobos. Dale loved that song. He didn’t speak Spanish, so he had no idea what the words meant, but that didn’t matter to him. He just loved it.

  Thinking about my brother as a twelve-year-old kid phonetically singing along to Tex-Mex rock was not helping my frame of mind, so I changed the station on the radio, and forced myself to acknowledge my situation. Dale wasn’t here anymore. Henley, Amy, and Erica were. And they needed me.

  But however I managed, or failed to manage, my guilt, it was ridiculously naive of me to think that all we had to do was hide out for a few days and then move to a different part of the country to be safe. I’d been pulled into a dark hole where soulless things murdered without the slightest remorse. A simple cross-country driving trip was not going to solve our problems.

  But I didn’t know that then.

  My destination that morning was Winston, Arizona, the center of commerce in the area. It was located just outside the reservation, and featured a grocery store/drugstore/department store, two gas statio
ns, two bars, three small restaurants, and a post office.

  Two major roads come into the town: one from the reservation, to the town’s east, and one from the southwest, which ultimately leads to Scottsdale and Phoenix.

  Since almost no one was on the road, it only took me about twenty-five minutes to get from our little hideout to the supermarket. The parking lot behind the store was almost empty as I pulled in.

  As I walked around the store, gathering up what I needed for the pancakes, I kept hearing Dale’s voice one aisle over. What made the experience that much more disquieting was that I knew it couldn’t be Dale, and yet, as I paid more and more attention, it still sounded just like him.

  I came out of the soda aisle with a bottle of seltzer water and turned down the cereal and breakfast foods aisle, fully expecting to run into whoever had a voice that was just like my brother’s. But there was no one there.

  And then the voice said something about having to finish up some work before starting on a long trip. It seemed to be coming from the front of the store, where the cash registers were located. And as much as I tried to doubt it, the timbre, the accent, the hint of gruffness—it all really sounded like Dale.

  I grabbed a box of pancake mix and hurried to the checkout station. I had to see what this person looked like.

  I moved toward the only store clerk who was at the cash registers that morning. But he was standing alone. The customer he had just rung up was leaving the store. All I could see was that he had light hair and stood about six feet tall.

  The guy didn’t just sound like Dale. From the back, he was a dead ringer for him, too.

  But it was simply impossible that the man was my brother. Which was why I didn’t chase after him.

  We had buried Dale over five years ago. But my thoughts of him that morning, coupled with the eerily similar voice I kept hearing in the store, had somehow pushed the impossible into the realm of the possible. And I’m sure that sleeping with Amy had added an extra ingredient to my personal psychological stew.

  I blinked a few times, trying to clear my head. The world of the living was challenging enough—I was going to have to keep my concentration if my family was going to have any chance of surviving over the next few weeks.

  As I’d planned from the start, I paid for my purchases in cash, on the off chance that someone might be tracking my credit card purchases. I wanted to give the impression that I had disappeared not just from the Juan Gomez trial, but from the planet Earth, as well. At least for a little while.

  When I exited the store, I saw that a beat-up old white minivan had parked near my car. Its plate number was 0A1E-82. I remember that specifically because the zero was shaped like a rectangle, and so if you looked at it quickly, the plate seemed to spell out DALE-82. At least it did to me. I wanted to look at that morning’s omens as signs that my brother was with me somehow, but it was becoming hard not to see them as a series of subliminal messages from a conscience that was slowly becoming overwhelmed with guilt.

  As I opened the door to my car, I noticed a large, late-model, black SUV, stopped at the intersection near the store’s parking lot. I don’t know what drew my attention to it—maybe because the image of a big, black Cadillac Escalade sandwiched between a white Toyota Prius and another little white car seemed funny. But then I noticed that in profile, the man in the passenger seat of the Escalade looked a bit like Paul Landry.

  I distinctly remember thinking that I was going to need to take a nap after breakfast this morning, because my imagination was running way too hot. First, I heard Dale in the grocery store. And then, I saw Landry at a stoplight.

  And then the man in the SUV turned to face me, and it became immediately clear that the problem that morning wasn’t my imagination.

  The problem was that the passenger in the Escalade was Paul Landry. Who was now pointing at me, and shouting at the driver of his car.

  I jumped in my VW, and took off.

  I knew that it was going to take the Caddy some time to extricate itself from between the two smaller cars, but I didn’t have much of a head start. And I didn’t have much of a choice as to direction. Because of the layout of the roads in Winston, I had to take the route back toward the reservation.

  Traffic hadn’t picked up at all, so I was able to speed down the road into the reservation. I was driving north on the main road along the western edge of the territory. To my left an occasional clearing revealed a terrifying vista showing just how close to the edge of a cliff I was traveling. About five miles ahead was the right turn which led farther up the mountains, and ultimately to our little cabin. If I could make it to that turn before Landry was in sight, I could disappear.

  But a couple of miles before the turn, I noticed that the Escalade was behind me.

  And it was gaining on me.

  Rapidly.

  Even though I was going as fast as I thought was prudent, given the condition and the location of the road, I sped up. My right turn toward the cabin was coming up soon, and I had to make a decision. I could head toward the house, and hope I could reach help from the two guys sitting in our driveway before I got caught. But that would bring the evil that was riding in that black car right to my family’s doorstep.

  Or I could drive past the turn, and lead them away from the house, taking my chances that I could outrun them.

  It was only seconds before I had to choose. The turn was coming up so quickly that if I didn’t slow down, there was no way I’d make it without rolling the car over.

  I accelerated, and blew right through the intersection, as if I’d never been considering the turn. Thanks to the turbo, I was going eighty-five now. I looked into the mirror, expecting that over the past minute, I’d have put some distance between me and my pursuers.

  But the Cadillac was relentless. It was now only about one hundred feet away.

  The road we were on was a two-lane highway with a posted speed limit of fifty-five mph, mainly because it was relatively narrow. There were stretches with some significant curves, and from time to time, a cardiac-inducing drop-off presented itself to the left. I had to avoid looking in that direction. The last thing I needed was to try to race these murdering thugs while fighting a case of vertigo.

  At the next straightaway, I floored the beetle’s accelerator, popping it up to ninety before I had to back down a little to handle a fairly sharp bend to the left.

  But still, the SUV was closing. Seventy feet. And then sixty.

  It was at about that time that Landry’s arm emerged from the passenger window, extending toward me with a gun in its hand. A moment later I heard a crack, and then another.

  Good-bye, stomach-clenching fear. Hello, unbridled terror.

  I wanted to dodge the bullets, but I was going too fast to swerve.

  I pulled my gaze away from the rearview mirror and noticed that there was a turnoff to the right coming up. I had never been on that road, but I assumed that like the route that led to our place, it ran roughly east, up the foothills, into the heart of the reservation. Since I didn’t seem to be able to outrun this big car, I decided I’d try to outmaneuver him. I slammed on the brakes, skidded down to about forty-five, and pulled the car into the turn.

  A quick glance in the rearview mirror crushed my hope that the Escalade would take the turn too fast and flip over. It continued its pursuit with regrettable gusto.

  The road we were now on was narrower and more winding than the first, so although our speed was significantly reduced, it was hard for the SUV to get a good shot at me. I knew that if Landry was capable of murdering a paralyzed man by burning down his home, he was certainly capable of killing me while I was driving.

  About ninety seconds after I turned off the main road, a tight S-curve forced me to slow to under forty. Coming out of the last bend, I saw a large, abandoned roadside stand off to the right. I yanked the VW off the road onto the old blacktop parking area surrounding it, and flew around behind it. I was hoping they’d drive by and I could double
back and get away.

  It almost worked.

  As the black car sped past, I backed up, turned around, pulled out of the parking area, and headed toward the main road. But before I reached it, the Escalade appeared again in the mirror.

  I turned right with as much speed as I dared, and floored it, heading north again. I didn’t want to go back toward our cabin. Even though I had managed to put a little more distance between me and Landry, I was going to have to keep the VW over ninety to have any chance of keeping him from getting close enough to get a shot off at me. There was no way I’d be able to keep that kind of speed up near a populated area.

  As the road stretched out in front of me, I realized I was going to have to keep my eyes focused to the right. There was now a sheer cliff to the left. Even though there was a guardrail at the edge of the shoulder, the vista in that direction, dropping down hundreds of feet to the mesas below, was textbook vertigo material.

  Five minutes into the chase, though, it didn’t look like vertigo was going to be my primary problem.

  Because no matter what I did, I couldn’t shake the SUV. In fact, it was closing.

  When I was a kid, I was always annoyed by car chases on television and in the movies. They all seemed so formulaic—the pursuing car, usually full of bad guys, would catch up to the hero’s car, and then, idiotically, bang into it from behind. It seemed like such a stupid, futile gesture. There was no way they were going to hurt the hero by tapping him on the rear bumper. Inevitably, the hero would whip his car into some kind of remarkable spin, and the bad guys would go sailing off a cliff, or crashing into a pile of rocks and bursting into flames.

  When the Cadillac finally caught me, and started ramming into the VW, my perspective on car chases underwent an immediate transformation.

  Unless you’ve tried, you have no idea how difficult it is to maintain control of a car going ninety-five miles per hour when you are being bashed from behind by another car.