by Ninie Hammon
Every man dealt with it in whatever way he could. Some guys stayed blind drunk every off moment because as long as you were “on,” being a soldier, doing your thing, trying not to get your butt shot off, you could bury the images under “doing the necessary.” But when the danger abated, when the adrenaline stopped flowing, when the sun shone and butteries flew and little kids somewhere in the world were laughing … then it hit you.
You found a way to cope with it or … he didn’t know “or what” because he hadn’t yet found a way. The leg injury that had sent him back home had taken him away from all the other people in the world who had seen what he’d seen, had been where he’d been, had held onto their own souls with their fingernails.
The shrinks claimed that it had “aborted his healing process.”
He didn’t know about that. All he did know was that he wasn’t in charge of nothing anymore. He was just along for the ride.
Sometimes the ride took him back there to some battle somewhere and he had to fight to stay alive. There was a gaping black hole in the middle of back there in Rwanda where some awful demon dwelled, a horror worse than all the others in a place made out of horror, constructed with one brick of horror stacked up on another until you finally couldn’t see over the top anymore. In that black hole was what he’d done or hadn’t done — that’s all he knew about it — and when he finally saw what it was, it would destroy him.
Sometimes he didn’t know where he was, some place in between which wasn’t either one of them.
The leaving usually started with something like the white rock. The memories. But this morning he only felt the pain and the sorrow and the fear of … he didn’t know what … but he stayed in this world. Kept walking but not rightly hunting. Ignoring the squirrels and the rest of the animals as the woods woke up to a new day.
He headed out toward Bald Knob, on the other side of the county line in Drayton County, for no reason he could have articulated. He came to the clearing where you could see the knob and started out across it but stopped when he felt something splat into his face. Like a raindrop out of the clear blue sky. He looked up and saw then, the blood on the tree limbs. Coating the tree limbs. Another drip hit him on the forehead and one landed on his shoulder.
He heard the rattle of gunfire then, turned from the sound and bolted across the meadow …
Into darkness. No, it wasn’t dark, it was light. It was just that the light was black. And his head filled with a buzzing, static sound.
Chapter Nine
There was no chit-chat, no catching up on each other’s lives, no what-have-you-been-doing-since-high-school. There was no conversation at all in the examining room as E.J. carefully removed the makeshift bandage Charlie had affixed to the head of the squirming Merrie before she’d strapped the still-screaming child into the car.
She wasn’t screaming now, though. Merrie was as docile as if she’d been drugged. In fact, she was acting like she had been drugged, not really focusing when you spoke to her. Answered in monosyllabic grunts and didn’t respond in any way to E.J.’s poking and prodding of the surely-it-hurt cut on her head. Her eyelids weren’t at half-mast like they got at bedtime, though. She was just … staring. True, it was morning nap time, but under the circumstances, Charlie couldn’t imagine Merrie was sleepy. And asleep, Meredith McClintock was comatose. You could pick the child up, throw her over your shoulder in a fireman carry and haul her out of a burning building and she’d sleep right through it. She slept so soundly, in fact, that Charlie had asked her pediatrician if there was something wrong with her. He’d said he wished he could sleep that sound. Merrie didn’t even know there’d been a storm last night, but when she woke up this morning, her eyes popped open and she was instantly alert, flitting around in her cheerful, hummingbird fashion. Her behavior now was neither, and that weird, somewhere-in-between netherworld frightened Charlie far more than the bloody wound did.
“I can sew it up from the underside so it won’t leave a scar,” E.J. told her, “but you might prefer to take her to—?”
“Take her? In what?” Charlie bleated out inappropriate laughter again. “I don’t have a car. I … lost mine.” She suddenly felt very tired. “Sure, please, do sew it up. I don’t think I’m going to be taking her anywhere today.”
Merrie gradually began to focus, to wiggle. As the last vestiges of Charlie’s nausea were finally passing, Merrie was starting to whine, to pull away from E.J. Charlie was thrilled to see the return of her headstrong, maybe-just-a-little-bit-spoiled three-year-old. In fact, the little girl stuck out her lip in a pout and was teetering on the edge of being totally uncooperative until E.J. told her he was going to make the bandage on her head into a crown. That brought something resembling a smile to Merrie’s face. Of course, E.J. was now going to have to make good on the bandage-crown promise or suffer through the mother of all temper tantrums.
The easing of worry about Merrie freed Charlie to freak out over what had just happened, and she would have if she’d had any idea what it was.
She told E.J., and Sam for the second time, all she knew about the situation, and Sam filled E.J. in on the condition she’d found Charlie and Merrie in the bus shelter.
Had they been … drugged somehow? Why/by whom/where/how?
Or kidnapped? Where/how/by whom/why?
A car-jacking?
“This is crazy!” Frustration painted incipient hysteria on Charlie words. “I was driving along and then … it’s nuts!”
“We’ll figure out what happened,” Sam told her, and it didn’t sound like meaningless assurance. It felt like she believed it. And even if she didn’t, Charlie was grateful that she’d made the effort to put on a good show of meaning it. That counted for something.
When E.J. was finished, Charlie realized a couple of things.
One, she couldn’t pay him because she had no money, no wallet, no credit cards, no identification — all the human documentation necessary to establish your realness in the world. All that had been in her purse. And her purse was in the floorboard of her car … wherever that was.
He wouldn’t have taken payment anyway, was so nice she felt embarrassed to have bothered him … what was there about this to be embarrassed about? None of it was her fault.
This was crazy.
“Come on,” Sam said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
When they stepped out the front door of E.J.’s clinic into the bright morning sunshine they both saw him at the same time. There was a man with a rifle crouched beside the east plexiglass wall of the bus shelter, peeking out around the edge of it as if it were shielding him from enemy fire.
Sam gasped.
“Chai!” she cried.
“What?” Charlie was confused.
“That’s Malachi Tackett.”
And indeed, it was Malachi Tackett. How could Charlie not have recognized him? Well, duh, maybe because he was dressed in camouflage and looking for all the world like he might shoot anything that moved. Not just that, though. The hollow eyes. The ravaged face wearing a look that somehow managed to communicate terror and fury at the same time.
Malachi Tackett. The boy Charlie had had a crush on since kindergarten. The heart-throb quarterback of the high school football team. The boy who’d been a man at seventeen and made all the other boys seem like children.
Malachi Tackett looked their way, saw them, but clearly didn’t recognize them. He appeared to see Merrie, though, because he called out, “Get her to the church with the rest of the kids. We’ll set up a perimeter, hold them off as long as we can.”
Charlie carefully shoved Merrie behind her, held her out of sight there. When Sam started toward Malachi, she grabbed Sam’s arm but Sam shook her off and kept going,
“Chai, what are you doing here?” Sam called out as she rushed across the parking lot toward him. “Where did you—”
“Hit the dirt,” he yelled at her. “Down … now!”
Charlie took three steps, grabbed Sam’s arm and
whispered fiercely as she yanked Sam down into a crouch. “Get down! He’s not dragging a full string of fish — can’t you see that? He’s—”
“Around the other side,” he called out to nobody they could see. “They’re trying to cut us off.” He looked frantically from right to left and when he saw Sam start to rise, he cried, “Stay down. You trying to get your head blown off?”
He seemed to make some kind of decision, straightened and took a deep breath.
“I’m going to draw their fire. On my signal, you—”
The voice of the old man surprised them all. “You’ll want to put that rifle away now, son,” he said and all their eyes yanked to him. Nobody’d noticed his slow approach, leaning heavily on a cane as he made his way across the Dollar General Store parking lot, a mutt that looked to be about as old as he was at the end of a leash beside him. The man had a shaggy beard, bushy mustache and gentle eyes that radiated a thoughtful calm beneath his overgrown eyebrows, and that calm in the tension was as soothing as a cup of hot chocolate on a cold morning.
Malachi Tackett had the drop on everybody over an expanse of vacant concrete without so much as an ant hill for cover. And if the look in his eye was any indication, right now Malachi was crazier than a nuclear waste dump rat.
She noticed Malachi’s nose was bleeding when he pivoted and pointed the rifle at the old man still approaching, leveled and sighted down it.
“Stop right there,” Malachi said. But the tone of his voice was all wrong. It wasn’t an order. He was pleading with the man not to get any closer.
“It’s hard when you see them things, ain’t it — I know,” the old man said and never stopped moving, slowly, inexorably toward where Malachi sheltered on the back side of the vandalized plexiglass. “Hard to know what’s real and what ain’t. Been there, done that, wore the tee shirt plum out, but I still use it as a dust cloth or to polish my boots.”
Malachi said nothing, looked suddenly unsure, which quickly downshifted into disoriented, confused. He was mad, frightened and … he grimaced and Charlie could actually see the reflexive movements of his diaphragm, as if waves of nausea were battering it. He was fighting it, but you could almost feel the explosive need to vomit … she could, anyway. Not half an hour ago she’d felt the same thing.
He somehow managed to kept his mouth resolutely shut, though, remained crouched on one knee up against the vandalized plexiglass of the bus shelter wall.
“Can you listen up to what I’m telling you?” the old man asked, and had moved to within twenty feet of Malachi. “You look here in my eyes, boy.”
Malachi eyes were a frightened rabbit’s, darting back and forth, clearly seeing something nobody else in that parking lot was looking at.
“Boy, you hear me!” There was authority in the old man’s words. “I said … Look. At. Me.” He said each of the words individually, like dropping stones one at a time into a still pond.
Malachi looked at him.
“I don’t know exactly where you been, but you need to come on back now. Come on back here—” Malachi looked away and the old man grabbed his attention again — “Look at me!” — and held on. “Don’t look out there at them other things because they ain’t really there. Look at me. I’m real. I’m here. We in this world together right here, you and me, right now and nothing else you’s seeing is.”
Malachi’s eyes shifted.
Focused.
Saw.
Then he looked around like he’d just opened his eyes after a bad dream and discovered he’d been sleepwalking, wasn’t in his bedroom anymore, maybe wasn’t even in his house. Recognition lit his features and he must have realized where he was. Or maybe where he wasn’t. He carefully set the rifle down on the concrete, turned away from it and threw up.
Chapter Ten
Pete Rutherford was almost sure the young man havin’ a flashback beside the bus shelter in front of the Dollar General Store was Viola Tackett’s youngest — either Obadiah or Malachi. All them boys had Bible names and all he knew for sure was the oldest was Nebuchadnezzar. Seems like he’d heard in the barber shop that one of her boys come home wounded from some war or another he shouldn’t have been fightin’ in the first place.
When Pete came home from the South Pacific years ago, thin as a rail and covered in jungle rot, he’d thought he and his buddies would be the last American soldiers who’d ever have to pack up weapons and go fight somebody somewhere.
So he’d stayed in the military. And they sent him to Korea.
He got out then, way before they could pack him off to Vietnam.
And ‘parently, this young man had been somewhere — he thought he’d heard Rwanda — and he was sure there was more wars lined up behind that one.
Pete was able to hang the right last name on the boy who was now dry heaving while Sam Sheridan held his head. You could deduce that much — them Tacketts and their black hair. But what was he doing in the Dollar General Store parking lot … well, technically in the bus shelter out front, at ten o’clock in the morning on a June Saturday, packing a .22 and clearly having an episode of PTSD? That wasn’t as easy a thing to riddle out.
And the woman with the little girl wearing a head bandage like a princess crown looked like a Ryan, maybe Sylvia’s youngest. Had she come with Sam? Had the Tackett boy come with Sam, too? They’d all three got here somehow, and wasn’t but one car in the lot.
Didn’t seem real likely they’d come together in that old Ford Taurus, but wasn’t no other way they could have got here unless somebody dropped them off. What for? Wasn’t like that shelter was a tour bus destination. Pete had just walked, of course, being as he was the lone resident of the unincorporated township known as the Middle of Nowhere, Kentucky. The little house he’d built with his bare hands … and the bare hands of lots of people he hired to come do the work he didn’t know how to do … sat in the woods across County Road 278 East from the Dollar Store lot.
He was just out walking the stray mutt he’d named Dog after it adopted him, taking his obligatory morning “stroll” — like all them years he walked his route every day hadn’t banked him enough miles so he’d never have to take another step. But Sam’d assigned him the walk as one of a half dozen daily tasks he had to perform “if you want to live ‘til Christmas.”
You ask Pete, him living ‘til Christmas was about as likely as finding an honest politician. Though he was in remission and would stay that way for a right smart while long as he kept taking his treatments. Still … seventy-two years old and the big C. That was a bullet with his name on it. And it was time. He was ready to go. Just one last thing. He needed to say goodbye. So … not today, please Lord. Not today.
Oh, how he wished they hadn’t told Jolene about it. Them medical people had asked him at some point for his next of kin and he’d put down Jo, his only daughter — didn’t have no idea giving them her name meant they’d send her his medical reports! He put a stop to it soon’s he found out, but he was just about sure she’d got the only one that mattered. What she might choose to do about that …
He shaded his eyes with his hand, squinting into the bright morning sunshine, and surveyed the whole empty area. Here was “the crossroads,” the intersection of Route 17 that ran north/south and County Road 278, that ran east/west. Locals called County Road 278 East “Lexington Road” because it did eventually lead to the parkway and Lexington, and that’s where most folks going down it were likely headed. The same road going west was called Danville Pike because Danville in Beaufort County was the next town of any size. He supposed the name switch happened at the crossroads. Route 17 was just “Seventeen.”
The woods came all the way down to the road except for the expanse of parking lot where he now stood. There’d been some attempt at building a strip mall, he supposed, and seemed like it was E.J.’s daddy. The Dollar General Store had set up shop in a building of its own on the west end — with a drive-through on the side that had a machine you could use to vacuum out your car, an air pu
mp to inflate your tires and a water hose.
The animal hospital was the only functioning business, taking up two or three slots in the otherwise empty strip mall next to the Dollar General Store building.
When there had been a bus line running into Nower County, the bus company’d put up a right nice shelter — a long metal bench that sat beneath a wide roof held aloft by four-feet-wide panels of plexiglass on each end, with a lone streetlight hanging from a pole over it. Somebody’d been replacing that bulb because he could see the light from his front porch of a night. Lit up the sign “The Middle of Nowhere” right nice, he thought.
There was four stop signs, though he couldn’t rightly recall ever seeing anybody actually come to a full dead stop at any one of them. You could see two hundred yards in both directions when you pulled up to the intersection and wasn’t like you was gonna be blindsided if you gave it a quick left-right-left and drove on through. He still recalled being warned, as a young and exceedingly naive soldier in London right after the war, that cars in that fair city drove down the left side of the road and he would get his “arse run over by a bloody bus” if he didn’t amend his customary left-right-left to right-left-right.
He watched a solitary pickup truck slow down as it passed through on Seventeen. Buford Haywood, who got his hair cut at the Barber Pole on Main Street in the Ridge same’s Pete did. Though Pete still had a right smart hair for an old fart, Buford had so few lonely sprigs left in his chrome dome he’d said once he’d named every one of them.