“Doubt not.”
She tended the city booth until late afternoon, a long day indeed, her butt aching from the metal folding chair, her heart troubled. She was surprised that her colleagues in government had let her spend so many hours alone here, disappointed that Brian hadn’t stayed around for long, and that neither Ethan nor Gwen had at least stopped by as she’d asked them to. Although she certainly understood that at age thirteen and eleven they had lives of their own. Selfish little lives, it often seemed.
She also didn’t like that the DHS or HSI or former ICE or JTTF or whoever these people claimed to be were all over Fallbrook, snooping rather than helping. Maybe it was just Max Knechtl’s nonradiant face and personality. Maybe she was just hungry. She walked over to the soup stand sponsored by Major Market. But the big kettles were empty, nothing but thin furrows of soup left drying on the bottoms where the ladles had last come through.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After church Sunday morning Patrick met up with Salimony and Messina in Oceanside. Bostik hadn’t returned calls or messages and Salimony thought he might have just up and gone back to Crescent City. None of them had seen him since the beatdown on the Pendleton beach.
Bostik’s new apartment was in a complex east of downtown, away from the Pacific. It was called the Timbers and Patrick noted the pine trees. The buildings were wood-sided and peak-roofed to suggest an alpine look, with the garages downstairs and the apartments above them. The wooden stairs were solid underfoot as he climbed. Patrick knocked on the door and they waited. He rang the bell but still no one answered and he heard nothing within.
He leaned against the railing as Salimony sprang down the stairs two at a time and Messina lit a smoke. Patrick could smell the pine trees that grew between the buildings. Bostik had grown up in a house near a pine forest and Patrick wondered if the Timbers reminded him of home. He thought of the Mako now trailered out in the barn, and felt the same giddy satisfaction he’d felt years ago when he saw the first bicycle that was his, brand-new, black, and gleaming, waiting for him under the Christmas tree. It was interesting to him that before he bought the Mako it was just a used boat of debatable value, but after he’d handed over the money and hitched the trailer to his truck, it became the most valuable inanimate thing in his life. His present and his future. And it added to Patrick’s satisfaction that Iris had been there when he bought the boat, because she was his present and future too, in a way that felt real but almost too precious and fragile for him to look at straight on. She had been there. She had seen and approved. “I bought a boat,” he said to Messina.
“Then let’s go fishin’.”
“You got it.”
“We could have a perch fry.”
“We can get yellowtail out there, even tuna when the water is right.”
“I’ll bet Boss went back to Crescent City.”
Salimony came back with the manager, a husky ex-Marine who pounded on the door and got the same response that Patrick had gotten. He pounded again. “I don’t know what to tell you. He paid his deposit and first month, and he didn’t say anything about taking a trip. The policy here is, if the tenants want their mail collected or their patio plants watered, they have to let me know. Or set it up with a friend.”
“Well, is his car here?” asked Salimony.
“The garage doors are remote and I don’t keep spares,” said the manager. “You can open it by hand, but if you damage it, you pay to replace it.”
The four men went down the stairs and around to the garage entrance and Messina knelt and spread his fingers under the weatherproofing and lifted. The door rolled up noisily and Patrick first saw the upended patio chair, then the shoes and pants, then the limp white arms, bare torso, and acutely angled head of John Bostik, USMC, roped to a garage rafter. The smell was bad and his eyes were bloodshot protrusions in the purple swell of his face.
Patrick’s mouth parted open as he looked at his friend, but no words came. Then he was aware of setting the chair upright near Bostik and stepping onto it, his pocketknife out and open and in his hand. He heard himself order them to hold the body, then he reached up and started sawing through the rope. He stood almost face-to-face with Bostik. The smell and the sight of him sickened Patrick. He heard himself speaking, words of comfort but no joy, a soft monotone, a caress. Then the knife hissed through and the rope jumped and Bostik glided down feet first, borne by friends. Patrick helped them settle Bostik to the oil-stained garage floor, then worked off his dog tags. Patrick found a roll of blue shop rags and broke off two and set them over Boss’s face. Salimony went outside and puked in the bushes. Then the three of them sat down around Bostik, cross-legged, stunned and silent.
And you realize this is not what he had promised. This was not the mission he had accepted. He beat the hajjis, beat the heat and the cold and the snakes and the odds, and he made it home. But the war came after him, across mountains, oceans, and time. And it caught up. So he kicked the chair and finally got away. You know that a part of him will stay with you and a part of you will go with him. And this is what you all had promised, to be always faithful—semper fidelis.
* * *
While Oceanside Police and Fire processed John Bostik, Patrick got the Bostik family number in Crescent City from 411 and made the call. He felt like he was in a nightmare but knew that it was real and he wouldn’t have the blessing of waking up. He told Mrs. Bostik what had happened to John, and said he was very, very sorry but wanted her to hear it from somebody who knew and loved him. She was speechless. Mr. Bostik took the phone from her and Patrick explained again, then asked if they could stop by, very briefly, to pay their respects. Sixteen hours later the three men rolled into Crescent City in Patrick’s truck. It was four in the morning and raining hard and luckily they’d brought jackets for the cold.
The Bostik home was off of Kings Valley Road, midway between town and Pelican Bay Prison. They found the driveway and parked away from the house. Patrick, who had driven the first five hours and the last five, spilled out of the truck and tried to shake the blood down into his legs then climbed back in. He lay his head against the rest but his stitches stung and he couldn’t doze. He listened to the roar of the rain on the roof and looked through the fogging window at the darkness.
Sunrise came late over the redwoods and a small yellow house appeared. It was tucked back in the trees and smoke wobbled up from the chimney. In front of the house was a small square lawn with a concrete birdbath exactly in its center. It was raining lightly and the tops of the redwoods were intermittently lost in the shifting fog.
“Think they’re awake yet?” asked Messina.
“It’s almost eight hundred,” said Salimony. “They have an afternoon flight out, right, Pat?”
Patrick nodded, this information given him by Jake Bostik yesterday evening when Patrick called to make sure they were still welcome to come by. He saw a light come on in the house.
Jake Bostik was tall and slender, a corrections officer at Pelican Bay. Janet Bostik was petite and pleasant-faced though her eyes were puffy and red. They were much younger than Patrick had pictured them. Mrs. Bostik put mugs beside the coffeemaker and a stack of salad plates and two boxes of supermarket donuts on the kitchen counter. Jake set up TV trays in a living room with a picture window. While the coffeemaker gurgled and wheezed Patrick listened to the rain tapping overhead and watched it spill over the gutters into a brick planter dense with ivy.
He heard shuffling and turned to see a boy come from the hallway. His face was slack from sleep and his hair was peaked up on one side and down on the other and he looked very much like John Bostik. He was skinny and peach-fuzzed and had a blanket over his shoulders. Patrick guessed sixteen. Without a word or a look the boy went into the kitchen.
“Nine-Eleven was what got John going,” said Jake. “He wanted to go fight. He was ten years old. I was thirty-one and I think I’d have enlisted if I wasn’t married and a dad.”
“Me, too,” said Salimo
ny. “I really wanted to do something. I wrote Bush a letter saying I’d keep an eye out for terrorists at school. And I did. Never saw any.”
“But later I had a bad feeling about the wars,” said Jake. “It seemed right at first to go after bin Laden. Then Iraqi Freedom, the way they marketed it like a car or something … it seemed not necessary. Honey, we talked about this?”
She nodded and looked out the window. “And way back then, neither of us thought both those wars would still be going on by the time John could enlist, which he did, at seventeen. I was against it but there was no stopping him. Seventeen—that’s a year older than Kirk is now. That’s Kirk in the kitchen. I didn’t think either war was worth John losing his life over. Or Kirk or any American boy. Not worth it. I’m just a nonpolitical mom. That’s what I thought about those wars. I still do.”
Kirk came into the living room holding a cup of coffee in one hand and the blanket snug around his shoulders with the other.
“I’m still going to join up,” said Kirk. “The second I’m seventeen.”
“Why?” asked Salimony, one leg bouncing.
“Because this place is dark, cold, rainy, and gets tsunamis. I’ve had enough.”
“I think that’s a good reason to join,” said Messina.
“Why don’t you go to college?” asked Patrick.
“D’s. I’ll use the GI Bill when I’m out and know what I want to do.”
Patrick wondered what John Bostik would be like if he’d gone to school rather than to war. Alive, for starters. Even young Kirk knew that a distant war had killed his brother, so what could Patrick say to dissuade him? Still he felt compelled to try. “There’s only one reason to go to war, Kirk—to defend your country. Make sure you got a good war, one that does that.”
“How will I know if it’s good or not?”
Patrick had to think about that a moment. “I think the good wars come to you.” The room went silent and Patrick felt six minds arcing away in six different directions, like bright tendrils of one firework. “I’d like to say that the thing I loved most about John was his sense of humor. The first time we almost died together it was close. Real close. They caught us out in the open in the brown zone, not far from Route Six One. Machine guns lit us up—must have been half a dozen of them dug in on a hillside. We hit the dirt and the bullets were thick and all we had for cover was this scrawny little fallen tree. And after about half a minute of this, Boss started laughing. Hard. And the bullets kept ripping past us and slapping into that tree and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Pat, but when I get this close to dying and I’m not dead, all I can do is laugh.’ And I got what he meant and the bullets were still coming at us and I started laughing too and I couldn’t stop. I just could not stop. Because it was absurd. Because we were supposed to be dead but we were flat behind a scrawny tree that was saving us. We finally returned fire. The air cover arrived and they laid down the rockets and killed every Talib on that hill. We lost two men in the ambush. Sisley and Ocampo. There were another maybe hundred times I should have died over there. At least. And every time death failed to get me, I laughed. John taught me to laugh right in its face.”
Salimony told the family about John’s easy kindness with village children, how he shared all the stuff in the care packages they sent, except for the peanut-butter-filled pretzels, which he hogged for himself and his best friends only. Luckily, we all three qualified as best friends, said Salimony. Messina told them about the time their son ran to the side of a platoon mate, Evans, who’d set off an IED hidden in the rocks—got the tourniquet on him like right then—and saved his life and his foot. Patrick told them how he and John would follow PFC Reichert out at night with SAW machine guns, to cover the crazy kid on his critter patrols. Reichert collected anything weird he could find, took pictures and made notes on them. He kept his treasures in jars and cans at the FOB—all sorts of lizards and snakes and bugs. He staged fights between the camel spiders, the Marines betting and cheering like it was UFC or something. “My brother, Ted, always had crawling things in cages when we were kids. Still does. So, when we covered Reichert on his night missions it was like we were covering Ted. And I thought it was an example of why we were in the war. How the war related to America and home.”
Patrick saw that Kirk was listening to him. The boy had a pugnacious expression but he was alert. “Then are you saying it was a good war or it wasn’t?”
“After going I know it wasn’t good and it wasn’t necessary. Before going I never thought about it. That’s why I’m telling you to think about things first. It might give you an advantage. Maybe your brother sacrificed so you won’t have to.”
“I just flat-out disagree,” said Salimony. “We kicked ass, made a difference, and made our country safer. It’s as simple as that.”
“I’m with him,” said Messina.
Patrick shrugged. “Either way, John Bostik was a great guy and I’ll remember him forever. I looked up to him.”
“Amen,” said Salimony and Janet Bostik in unison. Patrick handed Bostik’s dog tags to his father.
* * *
They set out for home. Patrick steered his truck through the looming redwoods, which even near noon permitted little sunlight into the world. The rain had stopped and tufts of fog snagged in the treetops. This place made Patrick feel sullen and nervy, and he saw why John and Kirk wanted out. At least in Afghanistan there was sun. He pictured Boss the last time he’d seen him, then quickly banished that horror.
Messina demanded they see Pelican Bay Prison because he’d heard about it in a movie. So Patrick found Lake Earl Drive and followed it out. “The prison’s got a special cell block, right in the middle,” Messina said. “It drives you insane if they lock you in it too long. The cells are concrete cages with no windows.” Patrick pulled onto the grounds which, upon first sight, looked tranquil and parklike. The parking lot was very large and only one-third full. Behind the electric fences stood the prison, which to Patrick looked efficient and not quite humane. “My old man took me to Joplin Prison when I was a kid,” said Messina. “On account of I’d been doing some shoplifting. Just candy and football cards and stuff but he wanted me to see what was waiting for me. It pretty much worked. Except ever since I’ve been kind of fascinated by prisons. Well, that’s good enough—I doubt they give tours.”
They pulled out of the Pelican Bay parking lot in silence. Patrick followed the signs for the highway. Salimony got the sudden inspiration to visit Sergeant Pendejo’s family, too. He remembered that Pendejo had lived in Coalinga, where the big-ass earthquake happened a long time ago, and which was right on the way to home. “I mean, if we could tell Boss’s family what a great guy he was, we could tell Pendejo’s.”
“But he wasn’t a great guy,” said Messina. “And his name wasn’t even Pendejo.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No, pendejo means pubic hair in Spanish.”
“I always wondered why his tag said something else.”
“Pendejo was just a nickname, Salimony. You never knew that?”
“Pendejo’s name was Alejandro Reyes,” said Patrick.
“So it rhymed with pendejo,” said Salimony.
“Kind of not very much,” said Patrick. “He wasn’t bad. I always thought, down inside that guy who always did every damned thing he was told to do, was an okay human being. He wasn’t mean enough to be a Marine. But he was terrific on that barbecue. He made the thing out of a fuel drum, remember?”
“He died making burritos for his men,” said Salimony. “So let’s go see his family and tell them he wasn’t such a bad guy.”
“Oh, they’re going to love hearing he wasn’t so bad,” said Messina. “Sal? You really are full of shit. Maybe we could get some beers for the road.”
“It’s way past noon,” said Salimony.
Heading south they played the radio and threw empties out the windows and stopped at rest areas. Patrick quit after two beers but the rest of the twelver was gone before Patterson. T
he two other Marines fell silent then asleep. After six hours on the road Patrick pulled off for Coalinga. The evening was warm in the central valley and the land lay flat. He saw late-season cotton still in the fields but most of the soil was brown and groomed and ready to be planted. He saw the sign for the prison and the sign for the mental hospital then Messina’s head pop up from the crew cab into the rearview. “How come they got so many criminals and crazies in this state?” he asked. “That’s the third prison since Pelican Bay and I been asleep for three hours.”
“Any of those cheese things left?” asked Patrick.
Messina held the bag upside down and nothing but orange dust came out. Next to Patrick, Salimony finally sat up, yawned loudly, and burped. He took out his phone. A moment later he was leaving messages and talking to people, trying to track down the family of Alejandro Reyes.
Finally Salimony got Alejandro’s mother, who gave him Alejandro’s father, who gave him directions. Patrick drove to a convenience store and they bought a cold twelve-pack and three bags of expensive jerky and one artificial rose—pink, unrealistic, wrapped in a clear plastic cone and heavily scented.
The Reyes home was a travel trailer in a row of other trailers, all lined up for shade along a windbreak of drooping greasewood and oleander on the edge of a cotton field. Behind the windbreak was an irrigation canal. As he approached, Patrick saw that the trailers were old and faded, their shapes softened by weather and time. There were big air conditioners dripping water, some resting on wooden decks in front of the trailers, and some propped up on concrete blocks. Between the coaches, vehicles were nosed into the shade of the windbreak too, and they were older and dusty and some had folding sunscreens over the dashboards. He saw laundry drying on lines and children playing stickball and others sitting on upended wooden produce boxes in front of a TV that someone had set up under a portable shade screen. The sun hit the TV screen so brightly Patrick couldn’t make out what they were watching. He saw a group of five or six young men, wiry in their singlets, heavily tattooed, drinking beer and eyeing him. “Pendejo wasn’t exactly from Beverly Hills,” said Salimony.
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