Wynne's War (3 page)

“Which agency?”

“CIA.”

“How's he get away with that?”

“He gets away with it,” said the colonel, “the way anyone gets away with it: he gets himself a different idea than the spooks and then he convinces the head-shed that it's right.”

“Where do I fit in to all this?” Russell asked.

“Hard to say,” the colonel told him. “My guess would be that our captain got a look at your highlight reel and figured out a way to make use of it. Has himself some slick friends in higher.” The man shook his head. “Can't say I envy your position.”

“No, sir,” said Russell. “I'm not all that envious myself.”

“Your grandfather was Second Rangers?”

“Yessir.”

“Normandy?”

“Yessir.”

The colonel nodded.

“And he trained horses for a living?”

“Yessir, he did.”

“That's where you learned it?”

“That's where I learned everything,” Russell said.

The colonel watched him a moment. Then he said, “I've been able to get your battle-buddy attached.”

“Sir?”

“Corporal Grimes. He'll be coming with.”

“Wheels?”

The colonel nodded. “I got them to agree to that much. Kind of solves two problems at once.” The man cast Russell a knowing look, but whatever he'd meant to convey was lost on Russell entirely.

“You'll have about a week to rest up,” said the colonel. “I assume you'd like some downtime.”

“Yessir. I'd appreciate it.”

The colonel looked down at his papers a moment and then back up at Russell. The smile creased the left side of his mouth again, but he didn't bother to wipe it away.

“Can I ask
you
something?” he said.

“Of course.”

“Why in the name of God did you take your Kevlar off?”

“Sir?”

“In the video. You aren't wearing your helmet. What possessed you to remove it?”

Russell took a moment to think about this. He said, “I guess I was afraid it'd scare the horse.”

The colonel's eyes widened momentarily and then they narrowed. “Scare the horse.”

“Yessir,” Russell said.

 

Russell would say that his grandfather had taught him to ride, but his grandfather always said he hadn't taught the boy a thing. At stock shows and county fairs, at rodeos and clinics, men would tell Leroy Crider how well he'd instructed his grandson.

“I didn't instruct nothing,” Crider would say. “Just the way he was born.”

The men would nod and smile and sip from their Styrofoam cups of coffee, small cups, six ounces. They thought the old man was being modest, but Crider never numbered modesty among his sins. Stubbornness, yes. Ignorance. He'd admit, at times, to outright lunacy. But he was not a modest man, and he'd taught his grandson nothing about horses he didn't already know.

Elijah, for his part, had no sense of when he'd learned what he knew, and he couldn't even recall the first time he sat a horse. They seemed to inhabit his memories in much the same way as sunlight or wind or his grandmother's voice: they were inexplicably and undeniably there.

His first word was the name of his Welsh Mountain pony, a palomino named Cream. He had the white face and stockings, and he was only thirteen hands—a very gentle little horse. His grandfather would saddle him and lead him around the corral with Elijah on his back and still in diapers, Elijah's grandmother standing in one corner of the pen with her arms cradled against her and her elbows in her palms.

“You get that baby off him,” she'd say.

“He ain't hurting nothing,” Crider would tell her, and she'd respond it wasn't the pony she was worried about.

“That thing could buck,” she'd say. “You don't know what it could do.”

Crider ignored her. He led the pony very slowly by a leather halter, Elijah seated against the pommel with both hands on the horn, his toddler's legs bouncing.

By the age of five he could ride this animal unsupervised to the barbed-wire fence at the end of the south pasture. By seven, he could saddle and cinch and push the horse to a canter. He was performing in children's rodeos before his tenth birthday, and when he was thirteen he was employed by Lee Brothers Horse and Cattle Auction outside Skiatook, riding show ponies through the cast-iron chute and then down a short concrete tunnel, emerging into the half-acre expanse of loose powdered dirt skirted on four sides by an eight-foot wall, atop which bleachers ascended toward the fluorescent lights hanging high above. From the arena's floor he could only see the first few rows of horse and cattle buyers, their stone faces and cowboy hats, many in ball caps advertising feed stores, barbeque joints and rib shacks, farm-equipment suppliers, and Tinker Air Force Base, where more and more would commute as the farms went bankrupt and the ranches sold to oil companies. He'd walk the animals in a slow circle while the auctioneer's voice boomed from the speakers in its sharp, staccato twang and men in the audience lifted a hand or gestured their bids with the touch of a hat brim.

“Going four, four, four. Who'll give me four? Got four. Now four and a quarter, four and a quarter, now five, five, five. Got five. Five and a half, five and a half, five and a half. Thank you, sir. Now six, six, six.”

He'd circle the arena floor at a slow trot, with the auctioneer singing in his ears and the smell of horse and dust and manure and the clean scent of straw still in his nostrils, turning the pony with a squeeze of his thighs and just the slightest pull of the reins, bringing the animal to a halt, turning it once more and then again at the auctioneer's command—“Got seven, got seven, got seven, now eight, now eight, who'll give me eight?”—gestures now from all over the stands, and the price is pushed to nine, nine-fifty, a thousand, sold for a thousand dollars to the man in the silver Stetson. And Elijah turns and rides back down the concrete tunnel past the owners and handlers, dismounts the horse, and quickly mounts the next, a nervous bay he must lean and speak to, and he feels her gentle and soften between his legs—“Now that's a good girl, that is very good.”

Afterward, lying in bed with hair damp from his shower, Elijah would stare at the ceiling with his heart pounding high in his chest, still feeling their pulse in his legs and the articulated working of their spines, and he is in absolute love, this boy of thirteen years, father dead, abandoned by his mother, you'd certainly never know. His grandfather is a war hero and his grandmother devoted and doting, and the horse beneath him is every horse that ever was, eyes like stars and a coat like shining brass, galloping up, up, up, out onto the pastures of the night.

 

He went up the short flight of steps, past the guards, and into the aluminum-sided building that rested off the ground on concrete slabs. He'd grown up in a double-wide of similar manufacture, but this prefab had been built to military specifications and its roof was rigged with a satellite antenna and radar and electronic senders and receivers for which he knew neither the names nor purpose. The temperature outside was 107 degrees when he'd checked it after lunch, but this building was kept a consistent 63. All of the soldiers wore jackets, and a few of the women had stocking caps pulled over their headsets. He dug his ID out of his pants pocket, showed it to a sergeant seated behind the sign-in desk, and was directed to a row of what looked like the carrels in his high school library. There were four of them, and each was equipped with a computer and telephone. He went to the first nook, pulled out the chair, and sat. He spent a few moments collecting himself and then reached for the phone.

He heard the metallic click of the satellite hookup and then the sound of the digital ring. When she picked up and said hello, her voice was surprisingly crisp and he had to steady himself all over again.

“Teresa,” he said.

“Hello?”

“Aunt Teresa? Can you hear me?”

“Elijah?” she said. “Hello?”

“It's me,” he told her.

She said, “Hold on a second, hon,” and he could hear static. “Let me get to this other phone.”

He brushed a hand across his face and leaned against the desktop, propping himself on his elbows. There was another click, and he heard her ask her husband to hang up the extension.

“Elijah?” she said. “You there?”

“Yes, ma'am. You hear me all right?”

“I hear you good. Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

She laughed nervously. “We're building a room onto the south end of the house, and that phone in the den—you can't hear anything on it. Are you home? Did they send you back home?”

“No, no. I'm still over here. I—”

“Oh, Lord Jesus. Are you hurt? You're hurt, aren't you?”

“No,” said Russell, “I'm fine.”

“No, you're not, either. I can hear it in your voice. You better tell me what happened.”

“It's nothing,” he said. “I yanked out my shoulder a little. That's not even why I called.”

“You're not hurt?”

“No, ma'am.”

“You wouldn't story to me?”

“No, ma'am. You know I wouldn't. They're just assigning me to another post.”

“Did you get the shirts we sent?”

“I did.”

“Do they fit?”

“They fit real good.”

“I was worried they wouldn't fit.”

“No,” he told her. “They're perfect.”

“And you promise you're not hurt?”

“I'm absolutely fine,” he said. “I just got a chance to call you, is all.”

“You said they were moving you?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Don't suppose you could tell me where?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Better or worse?” she asked.

He moved the receiver away from his mouth and coughed into his shoulder. “Reckon it'll be about the same.”

“Well,” she said.

“How's everyone? How's Buddy?”

“He's fine,” she said. “We're all fine. I had a cold all summer. I keep thinking I'll get over it, but I don't.”

“And Duncan,” he asked, bracing himself. “He doing all right?”

“What's that, hon?”

“Duncan,” he said, more forcefully than he intended.

“
Duncan,
” she said. “He's fine. We fed him this morning, and Buddy rode him night before last.”

“His leg about healed?”

“It's healed real good. Dr. Keppel, when he looked at the x-rays, said he hadn't seen anything like it. Especially not in a ten-year-old.”

“Is he favoring it?”

“A little. You've been on him a while, you'll notice on the way back up to the barn. But not like it was. We rub all down the fetlock with that liniment. Buddy took the dressing off three weeks ago.”

“He put on weight?”

“Duncan or Buddy?”

“Duncan.”

“Oh, I think he maybe could've. Not bad, though.”

The two of them went quiet several moments. Then she asked when they'd let him come home.

“I don't know,” Russell said. He tried to lean back in the office chair, but it wasn't the kind that leaned. “I just got the new assignment. And I still got half a year left.”

“Can they keep you after that? I mean for longer?”

“They can if they get a mind to,” he told her, and was sorry as soon as he said it. He tried to think of something to soften it, but she was already talking.

“When do you leave on your new deal? Can you tell me?”

“I can say soon.”

“Soon?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well,” she said.

Then there was silence and Russell knew she'd pressed her palm against the receiver and started crying.

“Teresa?” he said.

He heard her clear her throat.

“Sweetie?” he said, and he felt as he often felt when he called home—that he was toxic somehow. He could infect.

“I'm sorry,” she told him, and there was a snuffling sound. “I promised I wouldn't do you this way.”

“It's okay,” he said.

“I don't know what my problem is,” she said brokenly. “You're the one over there fighting.” He heard her blow her nose. “I'd swap places with you if I could. Don't think that I wouldn't.”

“I know you would,” he said. “And then I'd be the one blubbering.”

She released a short, tearful laugh.

“Yeah,” she said. “I s'pose there's no getting round it.”

“No, ma'am,” he told her.

There wasn't.

 

They turned in their rifles to the armory and were issued carbines with the shorter 11.5-inch barrel—commercial rifles from Bushmaster Arms. Wheels eyed his carbine from stock to muzzle and then lifted it off the foam-pillared lining of its case, racked the charging handle, and checked the chamber. He shouldered the weapon and drew a bead on an imaginary target against the cinder-block wall, sighting through the red dot with great intensity. He puffed his cheeks, pouted his lips, and made a short, plosive sound.

He glanced over at Russell, smiling crazily, and then his face quickly clouded and he looked back to the specialist working behind the armory's plywood counter. The specialist was a fat, balding man whose pale eyes pointed in slightly different directions. Russell had been in here several times and he was never sure which eye to look at.

“These are ours?” Wheels asked him. “Just to take?”

The specialist gave a noncommittal shrug and pointed to a yellow sheet of paper where something had been itemized. He reached below the counter, hefted a cardboard box, sat it on the plywood surface, and pushed it toward the Rangers.

Two pairs of Merrell hiking boots were inside, one sized for Russell, the other for Wheels. Four pairs of North Face pants in a color the tags called “dune beige.” North Face fleece in gray and black. North Face thermal jackets. Long-sleeved T-shirts from REI. Nylon duty belts from a company that made equipment for firefighters and police. Cotton watch caps with the Nike logo in army green. Under Armour boxers and compression shirts and pairs of stay-dry socks.