by Rachel Lee
Damn. She shook her head at her own behavior and turned the corner toward the snug little house that she was renting. The Corps was serious about wanting "a few good men" and women. They wanted the pick of the litter, the few who really had what it took to be a marine. Consequently she had to always be on guard against signing up young people who didn't have what it took, or who had mistaken ideas about what was involved. At the same time, she was being measured by her recruitment numbers. She wouldn't last long if she recruited too many people who couldn't make it through boot camp, but she wouldn't last long, either, if she failed to sign enough recruits.
Anyway, she'd walked into Mahoney's and seen Yates looking like every mother's worst nightmare, and she'd snapped at him.
Dumb. Especially after looking into his eyes. She'd seen that thousand-yard stare too many times in guys fresh out of combat. She should have just left him alone.
She certainly wished she had when he'd buttoned his tunic and she'd seen the purple heart with cluster, not to mention the other medals. He'd been wounded twice. Twice! And she'd called him on his uniform.
Right now she felt about two inches tall.
And she hoped she never set eyes on him again.
Chapter 2
Morning came too soon. It always did. Joe sat up on the edge of his bed, robbing his eyes, trying to ignore the hammer and chisel that were working on his brain.
Night was his friend. Night was the best time to move safely through enemy territory. He'd gotten so used to living the life of a cave bat that morning seemed like an offense.
Especially when it revealed that he really was in a fantasy world of clean sheets, running water, and hot food right across the street.
There was even a coffeepot on the bathroom counter, with a packet of coffee beside it and two mugs. He could just walk in there and make a fresh pot of drip-brewed. No grounds in it, sitting at the bottom of a tin pot. He could drink it in comfort, leaning back against pillows instead of sitting on a hard boulder, or cross-legged on the ground.
It still didn't feel real.
He took a shower first. If that hot water wasn't real, he didn't want to know it. Head bowed, he stood under the pounding spray and soaked up the heat, feeling muscles let go as they hadn't been able to let go in many months now. Feeling tension seep out of him and run down the drain with the water. The scar on his arm was healing nicely, little more than a bullet nick. The other scars, more serious, were old enough now that he didn't think about them anymore.
Under the stinging spray, he worked his arm so the scar tissue wouldn't tighten up, and tried not to think about anything at all. A blank mind was a man's best friend.
But his mind refused to stay blank for long.
He needed to go out to the ranch and visit his sister and her family, but he didn't want to. In fact, he now wondered why he'd even come back to Conard County. Habit? Because going home was what you were supposed to do when you took leave?
Because home was the last place he wanted to go. It was beginning to occur to him that yanking a man out of combat and returning him to the civilian world in a matter of hours was a form of mental cruelty. The transition wasn't that easy to make. The wind-down was almost impossible. Since he'd left the Middle East three days ago, he hadn't really connected with anything around him. He'd been moving through a fog that had been punctuated only by the grief-stricken faces of Kara's family.
He braced his arms against the tile wall behind the showerhead and bent forward, letting the hot stream hammer on his neck and shoulders. The pleasure seemed almost sinful by comparison with what he'd left behind. Hell, even on shipboard, where the life of a marine was at its almost-best, you couldn't stand freely under a shower like this.
The temptation to stay just like that kept him still for a long time. Maybe the hammering of the spray could ease his transition into this strange new world. Maybe he could wash away the soul-deep grime and stain of the past months.
Eventually, though, he made himself get out and dry off. Civvies today. New jeans and a Western shirt he'd bought before boarding the bus in Casper. Jogging shoes because he didn't own a pair of cowboy boots anymore. A ball cap because his cowboy hats were at his sister's house, and he wasn't ready to face that scene yet.
Breakfast at the truck stop across the highway. Just him and a handful of long-haul truckers who didn't know him from Adam. The anonymity was comforting somehow. The only real people in his world anymore were the buddies he'd left behind, marines and some of the insurgents they were working with.
Joe sat at the counter, enjoying real fried eggs, pork sausage and hash browns with another cup of steaming, grounds-free coffee. Hot food was a blessing, and food without grit in it was nothing short of a miracle. As it began to fill his stomach, he started to feel a bit better. Enough so that he decided he was going to have to apologize to Gunnery Sergeant Mathison for his conduct last night.
He noticed the waitress behind the counter was smiling at him. After a couple of seconds, he realized she was a girl he'd gone to high school with. What was her name...Millie? Something like that. Some remnant of manners left from his life before war caused him to faintly smile back and nod at her.
And naturally, that brought her right over to him.
"Hi, Joey," she said almost shyly, using his nickname from high school. "I'm Millie Pestre, remember?"
He nodded, his face feeling brittle. "I remember."
"It's been a long time since you've been around. Where've you been?"
Well, he couldn't tell her the truth. I've been to war, and have been fighting and killing people in the name of something I've almost forgotten.... "I'm in the military," he said after a noticeable pause. "The marines."
"Oh!" Her eyes widened and said she was impressed. If only she knew. "Are you home for long?"
He shrugged. "I don't know." That much was true. For all he knew, he'd be on the road again tomorrow and spend his entire leave just bouncing from town to town.
Or maybe he'd get his head out of his butt and stop feeling sorry for himself. Because, God knew, in the last few days he'd started to get tired of himself.
"Well..." Millie said, letting the word dangle.
He didn't take the implied invitation. Getting close to anybody, even casually, was begging trouble. He was better off alone.
Millie's smile grew a little forced. "If you need anything, just holler," she said finally, and drifted away.
He returned to his food, thinking that he'd become a nasty son of a bitch somewhere along the way. He could at least have found something polite to say.
Sopping up egg yolk with a piece of rye toast, feeling guilty about every single delicious mouthful he was savoring, he thought that maybe running off to join the marines at the age of barely eighteen wasn't the smartest way to grow up. He could maneuver well within his world, maintaining good relations soldier-to-soldier, but it was becoming apparent he no longer knew how to behave in the world at large.
In fact, his sister, Sara, would have given him a stem talking-to for being so unfriendly to Millie. "Joey," she would have said, "this is a small town and we depend on each other. You be polite, hear?"
Sort of like the way it was in his unit. Bonds formed by interdependency were stronger than steel. This town was that way, he seemed to recall. Even a good feud didn't keep neighbors from coming together in a pinch. But this was different, he told himself. He hadn't been rude to Millie, exactly. He just hadn't wanted to express anything she might misinterpret.
So he was becoming a reclusive boor. The town would just have to deal with it. And wouldn't Sara laugh her head off to know her troublesome younger brother, who'd hated English classes as if they were torture, had picked up the word boor?
Thinking about Sara laughing caused him a twinge, and he wasn't ready to feel those tugs and twinges. He didn't want to think about the niece and nephew he hadn't seen in a couple of years now. Kids who surely must be growing up to a more interesting age than the last tim
e he'd seen them. Or about his grandfather, who was getting old and might not be around next time he came home.
Grandfather would want to give him a sweat. Get him to sit in a small lodge with hot stones and steam. Grandfather believed a good sweat would drive out all the evils that plagued a man. Joe had never been quite sure he believed all that Indian stuff, but his brother-in-law, Gideon, had sure taken to it.
So if he went up there, he'd have to do a sweat, and that would mean that he'd spend hours steaming with nothing to think about except the things he didn't want to think about. No thanks.
Throwing ten bucks on the counter, which included an extra-large tip, he left the diner without glancing Millie's way.
He walked back into town, past the stockyards and the auto repair shop, and didn't look either right or left because he didn't want to see anyone he recognized. Not yet, anyway. He supposed if he didn't get out of here by sundown, people were going to start noticing him and wanting to talk to him. He'd changed a lot in nine years, but he hadn't changed that much.
He had one goal: the recruiting office on the corner of Main and Elm. The same place where he'd signed his life away more than nine years ago, headed for adventures he couldn't really begin to imagine. Back then the recruiter had been Bill Ebsen, a barrel of a guy with a no-nonsense attitude, a gruff voice and the instincts of a father. Joe wondered why Bill had been replaced with a woman.
Not that Joe had any particular problem with women in the Corps. Nothing like that. It just seemed like an odd choice for a recruiter in this area, where there was only one recruiter, not a team.
Of course, given what Gunnery Sergeant Mathison looked like, chances were the marines were getting a lot of interest from those "few good men" the Corps claimed to want.
The thought almost made Joe laugh, the first real humor he'd felt in a while. It fit well with the brisk autumn day, and he decided he could do with more of it. Laughter, after all, even at the darkest of humor, was the best way to cope with most things, including the dissociation he was feeling right now. As long as you could laugh, you were still breathing. And surviving.
That was as much reassurance as he seemed able to give himself now.
Joe didn't get anywhere near the recruiting station until almost lunchtime. Somehow he spent some long hours sitting on a park bench in the courthouse square, only vaguely aware of the comings and goings around him. The bucolic peace of the day still seemed like a dream to him, something almost remote from his own reality. And thus the minutes had slipped away, lost in some never-never land between past and present.
He was startled when he glanced at his battered watch and realized it was past noon. Maybe, he thought with a sense of self-betrayal, he'd lost this time on purpose, because he didn't want to face the Mathison woman. And he didn't. He hated having to apologize for his misdeeds, especially to someone who didn't seem to have an ounce of understanding in her body. On the other hand, his sister and grandfather had raised him better than that. He owed the woman an apology, and he was damn well going to give it to her.
Besides, he didn't like his mind playing tricks on him. The mere notion made him feel uneasy. His mind, after all, was the only thing in the world he had to rely on.
Giving himself a mental shake, he rose from the bench and headed toward the recruiting station. Maybe she was still there. If she wasn't, he'd just have to come back later.
But she was there, looking as breathtakingly beautiful as his drunken mind last night had thought. Maybe more beautiful. This afternoon she wasn't wearing a hat, and the highlights in her dark hair were almost fiery. Her uniform was tightly tailored to a perfect figure, a figure that stood ramrod straight as he entered the small storefront.
As the door opened, she started to smile, but the smile vanished moments later as she recognized him. Those dark eyes of hers were a warm, sherry brown, warm even as her face grew rigid.
That warmth appealed to him somehow, like a fire on a cold night. He sensed that it was a deep-rooted part of her, not just the accident of a pair of eyes. But her posture was stiff, and her attitude as prickly as a porcupine on alert. He supposed he deserved that.
It also made him feel as awkward as a schoolboy. She waited, saying nothing, refusing even to greet him as the door swung shut behind him, closing out the rest of the world.
"Look," he said finally, resisting an urge to scuff his foot, "I came to say I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" A stiff, unyielding word, offering him no quarter.
The image of Joan of Arc leading troops into battle floated into his mind's eye. "Yeah," he said. "I'm sorry. I was out of line last night."
"Yes, you were."
Hmm. Maybe he was mistaken about those eyes. Maybe that warmth was a sheer trick of light. Well, he'd done what he'd come to do, and he didn't have to beg for her forgiveness.
Turning, he started to open the door.
"Marine."
He paused, hand on the knob, wondering if he should just keep going. Instead he turned slowly to face her again.
"Let me buy you lunch," she said. "I was just on my way to the diner."
He wanted to refuse, being close to another human being right now was about as comfortable as having his skin sanded off. But he knew it was her way of accepting his apology, and he knew better than to refuse an olive branch.
"Sure," he said, the word feeling like lead in his mouth.
She bent, pulling her regulation shoulder bag out of a desk drawer. He held the door open for her, letting her pass through into the sunlight, which seemed glaringly bright this afternoon. As she put her key in the lock and turned it, he watched, focusing on the small and inconsequential because it was more comfortable than looking at the larger picture. In silence they went around the corner to the City Diner, commonly known as Maude's.
The place was both familiar and unfamiliar to Joe. It hadn't changed one whit that he could see, but it felt different now. The same regulars, looking older, filled most of the tables, but nobody he had to do more than nod to. There was nobody from school, nobody who'd once been a close friend. The relief was almost overwhelming. Joe wasn't ready to face the questions that would come from those who knew him well, questions like, "Where you been? What was it like?"
Well, except for Maude. Either she'd ask the questions, or she'd act as if he hadn't been gone a day, and was still a skinny eighteen-year-old who put away her burgers and fries as if he had two hollow legs.
There was a booth near the back, and hardly realizing he was doing it, Joe guided Gunny Mathison back there. He didn't want to sit near the windows, where someone might recognize him. He didn't want to be exposed.
She took the urging without comment and, much to his relief, let him sit on the bench that was backed up against the wall, giving him a full view of the diner.
"When I was a little kid," he said, needing to fill the silence, needing to keep her from asking the questions he didn't want to answer, "there used to be a grill over there against that wall. Maude and her husband used to stand there from five in the morning until ten at night, cooking an endless stream of food." He shook his head. "It was some show. I think half the people ate here just to watch the two of them."
"What happened to it?"
Joe shrugged one shoulder. "About the time I was nine or ten, they decided they needed to expand. So they took the space next door and built a kitchen." He managed a crooked smile. "God knows what goes on back there. I suspect she has an army of gnomes cooking for her, but the food is just as good as it always was."
Mathison nodded and reached for one of the plastic-covered menus that were tucked behind the napkin dispenser and ketchup bottle. The diner hadn't yet graduated to steak sauce, and it was rumored the mayor carried a bottle of his own favorite when he came here. If Maude had ever taken note of that heresy, no one knew. Which was unusual for Maude.
Mathison spoke pleasantly enough. "She certainly hasn't heard about the rules for healthy eating."
"No. Rib-stickin
g is her style."
Those sherry-brown eyes lifted from the menu, and for the first time he got a true inkling of her smile. It didn't reach her mouth, but the humor was there around her eyes. "I'll run it off tonight."
"Yeah." He supposed he needed to start doing that again, too, now that he wasn't running up and down mountains like a goat.
One thing sure hadn't changed: it was Maude herself who came to the table to take their order.
"Gunny," Maude said, with a nod to her. The years hadn't been kind to Maude. Her face looked like heavily lined old parchment, and she'd lost some weight, leaving her skin sagging in folds around her mouth and on her arms. But her eyes were as sharp as ever as they settled on Joe. As sharp and malicious as always.
"Joey Yates," she said, her tone hardly welcoming. "Are you still eating enough to feed a crowd?"
"No, ma'am," he said automatically, the way his sister had always made him address older women.
"Been up to see your sister yet?"
A black feeling filled him, not far removed from rage. Who was this old woman to ask him such a thing? It wasn't as if she were a friend of the family.
"Better get up there," Maude said flatly. "Poor girl has been wasting away from worry over you. What'll you have?"
Joe ignored the unwanted commentary and ordered a steak he didn't think he'd be able to eat. Breakfast, even though it had been hours ago, was still sitting heavily in his stomach. But it would be a shame to pass up one of Maude's steaks. Gunny Mathison ordered one of Maude's steak sandwiches.
When Maude stomped away into her lair, Mathison looked at him. "My first name's Bethany," she said. "Beth."
"I'm Joseph Yates. Just Joe."
She extended her hand across the table and they shook. Cessation of hostilities. Good. The sooner he could forget about this woman and her disturbing eyes, the better.
"Well, Just Joe," she said with a small smile, "we got off to a bad start. I should know better than to come between a marine and his brew And sometimes I'm a little too, um, stiff."