Steel Breeze (25 page)

Drelick
fell forward, squeezing off another shot reflexively as her fingers curled
inward. The bullet missed Lucas, burrowing in beside the first round in the
young man’s kneeling body. Then she was face down in the cloddy mud, the old
man’s foot already in the small of her back, giving him the leverage to yank
his embedded blade from between her shoulders. There was a sickening sound of
suction as it came free. The samurai stepped over the body, bent down, and
twisted the gun from her clawed hand, then cast it high over the corn.

Lucas
crashed into the back of Desmond’s knees as he had so many times in the days
when life seemed long and sweet, days when getting bowled over by a hyper
toddler had tested his patience. Now the collision felt like a bittersweet gift
from heaven because he knew that they would be going there together soon. They
were in a dead end, surrounded by corn that the younger swordsman had failed to
cut through to an adjacent path. All that mattered to Desmond now was that
death came quick and that he not be spared, God help him. He wanted to go
first. It was selfish and wrong, he knew, but he wanted the old man to take him
first so he didn’t have to live with a dead son for even a minute.

But
the old man rushed right past him and bent beside the fallen young man whose
breath was coming in lurching, ragged gulps. The old samurai knelt and laid his
sword down on the ground beside him in a way that seemed ceremonial. Then,
laying his left hand on the ground first, followed by his right he bowed low to
the young man, touching his forehead to the ground. “My son,” he said.

The samurai
would take up his sword again in a moment to finish them, but for now Desmond
and Lucas were insignificant. Both swords were within the old man’s reach in
the wreckage of fallen stalks, and although the helicopter was getting closer
now, the sound of its beating blades inspired no urgency in him. He would
strike when he was ready; he would pay his respects and not be rushed. The
child and his father posed no threat.

Desmond
held his hand over Lucas’s mouth lightly, but firmly enough to communicate the
message:
Don’t make a sound, don’t wake the dragon.
He put his mouth to Lucas’s
ear, felt the fine hair brushing against his nose and lips, and whispered,
“Close your eyes, Lucas. Just close your eyes and keep them closed.” He kissed
his son’s temple.

Lucas
turned and stared at him, eyes wide and white. Then he shut them, squeezing
tears from the corners.

Desmond
looked down at Drelick’s body. Her hair was turning darker in the rain, her
blood thinning in the water. Her ankle holster was still concealed by her black
rayon slacks, but there was no way to reach it through the narrow channel of
corn without crawling over the body and even then, no fast way, no silent way.
She was close to him, but the old man was even closer.

And
which leg had he seen it on?

He
thought it had been on the left, but he wasn’t sure. He stretched across her
body, her blood soaking through his shirt, and clawed at the black fabric of
her pants but couldn’t expose her calf.

Greg
Harwood’s hollow voice echoed in Desmond’s mind. He could see the haggard patsy
in his prison smock, clutching the phone receiver, mumbling something about “
Reapers….
Death
angels in black skirts. Two of them.”
These two men had approached Harwood
with the bloody sword that night, the night Sandy was murdered. And the younger
one, the one dying in the corn, the one Desmond was already thinking of as The
Apprentice, was wearing an indigo hoodie. This was the one who had tried to
warn him of what was coming: The Dragon, The Master, the one who had cut Sandy
down in the dark, just as he had cut Erin Drelick down right before Desmond’s
eyes.

A
hot spark of vengeance flared like a magnesium torch in Desmond’s solar plexus.
He came up on his knees and slid his hand into his pocket, withdrew the
fountain pen with rain-slicked fingers, and folded it tight in his palm. He
cocked his arm back, got his feet under him and lunged forward, bringing his
fist down like a hammer, plunging the silver nib into the side of the old man’s
neck at an angle to avoid the spinal vertebrae and increase his chances of
hitting the carotid artery. The pen speared through flesh with shockingly
little resistance, and he felt his fist connect with the man’s neck in a flash,
the force of the blow knocking the aged body sideways.

Desmond
leaned forward and whispered, “Mightier than the sword, motherfucker.”

At
first there was no blood: the barrel of the fountain pen plugged the hole. The samurai
lurched forward and let out a guttural howl that morphed into a cry of rage. Tendons
sprang into taut ropes along the man’s neck as his right hand shot out and
seized the sword hilt.

Desmond
pivoted on one knee, swept Lucas up in his arms, and tossed the boy over
Drelick’s body, sending him crashing into the corn. Lucas shrieked in midair,
landed roughly, and rolled. Desmond yelled, “Run, Lucas!
Run!
”

Lucas
looked back in horror, must have seen the old man staggering forward with the
pen poking out of his neck, but Desmond guessed it was the hideous sounds the
man was making more than the sight of him that spurred Lucas to flee.

Desmond
staggered backward over Drelick’s body. He almost tripped but then used the
momentum of what could have become a sideways tumble to launch himself into the
wider path that the younger swordsman had been trying to cut his way out of. The
old man’s eyes were losing vitality, losing even the bright spark of rage, and
his breath now made a labored whistling like a cheap wooden flute. He looked as
if he wanted to say something to Desmond before cutting him down but could no
longer make his voice work.

The
samurai raised the blade. Desmond’s trembling hands had found the holster on
Drelick’s left calf, and he scrambled to work the gun free. Too slow. It was
snapped in. His fingers, dumb and numb, cold and clumsy, were going to cost him
his life, cost Lucas another parent after all.

Then
a mechanical beating sound that had previously been absorbed and attenuated by
the corn suddenly rose to deafening volume, and the angle of the falling rain
shifted. The stalks were blown flat, and Desmond hit the ground with them. The
helicopter thundered overhead, bullets whistling along the trajectory of the
raindrops. It was gone as fast as it had come, and the old samurai fell back
into the corn stalks beside his apprentice, his sword still clenched in his
dying hand.

Desmond
turned and ran, screaming Lucas’s name over the wind and the rain and the
receding roar of the chopper, now circling to land.

NINE YEARS LATER

Epilogue

Lucas wakes to
the smell of bacon and eggs. It prompts him to roll out of bed a little earlier
than he otherwise would. At thirteen, he isn’t an early riser, and a brisk jog
to the bus is a regular part of his day, but today is his birthday, and the
smell of his father’s cooking arouses anticipation in his belly that affects
him like caffeine. Maybe Kirsten will remember his birthday, too, and shoot him
a card on his phone. He wonders if she’ll sign it with the L-word.

Twenty
minutes later he is showered, dressed, and lumbering down the stairs in his
sneakers, jeans, and t-shirt; the device on his hip is already hitting the
third song on his playlist. He takes the hardwood stairs two at a time, past
his Mom’s framed photos on the mustard-colored walls that always look more
yellow in the morning when the light floods in through the high cathedral
windows. When he reaches the landing, he glances through the sliding glass
doors out of habit. The deck chair where his father usually spends his mornings
this time of year, banging out the daily word quota on his laptop, is vacant
today.

In
the kitchen he finds his old man in chef mode, complete with ridiculous apron. Lucas
taps the pause button, pulls the headphones down around his neck and leans on
the marble-topped island where cracked eggshells lay scattered on a folded
paper towel. In the dining room, a cluster of blue and white helium balloons
strain toward the ceiling on strings tied to the back of a chair.

“Smells
good,” Lucas says.

His
dad lifts a pot lid from a steaming plate of eggs and bacon and passes it to
him. “Toast already popped, but you might want to warm it up.”

“Thanks,”
Lucas says, taking his plate to the table and sitting down beside a rectangular
package, clumsily wrapped in colorful paper. Whatever it is, it looks too big
to be the video game he asked for. He shakes some salt onto his eggs and begins
shoveling them in, eyeing the package with disappointment and deciding it must
be a shirt.

“No
mad dash for the bus today?” his dad asks, sitting across from him with his own
plate. “I figured I’d drive you to school, anyway. Give you time to eat a
proper breakfast for a change.”

 “My
nose woke up before the rest of me. This’s good,” he says around a mouthful of
scrambled eggs.

His
dad smiles in that goofy way of his, like he always does when watching Lucas
enjoy something. “You can open your present, you know. You don’t have to wait.”

Lucas
takes another bite, then sets the fork down, picks up the box, and gives it a
slow shake. It is heavier than he expected. He tears the paper off and opens
the box to find a hardcover book nestled in a bed of tissue paper. Gold letters
stamped on the spine read:

ORPHEUS

DESMOND
CARMICHAEL

“Wow,
one of your books. You pull it off the shelf this morning and wrap it before I
woke up?”

“Have
you ever seen this one on our shelves?”

Lucas
turns it over and looks at the spine again. He shrugs his shoulders.

“Don’t
worry, I have something else for you later, when we have cake with Nana.”

“If
you want me to read one of your books, you can send it to my handheld, you
know. Easier to carry around.”

“This
one was never published. And it’s not a fantasy, like the others.”

“No?
Isn’t the name from one of the myths?”

“That’s
right. Who was Orpheus?”

“Um…a
musician who visited Hades to rescue his dead wife?” Lucas hears the lightness
evaporating from his voice as the sense of this recited trivia sinks in.

Desmond
nods. “This book is sort of a memoir, and it’s about your mother.”

Lucas
lays the book down on top of the shredded paper in a way that reminds him of
his dad placing a dead bird in a shoebox last summer after it hit one of the
tall windows. Now there are butterfly stickers on those windows.

“The
year after she died, around the time when the bad men came back, I was writing
a book with that title, and it
was
a fantasy—a hero’s quest with a
dragon and a maiden and everything. A real piece of crap, but I was trying to
write her into it, trying to save her in my imagination because I couldn’t save
her in real life.” He sighs and takes off his glasses. Lucas has noticed that
sometimes his dad takes them off not to see something nearby better but to
remove a layer of separation between his eyes and those of the person he’s
talking to.

“She
took a lot of photos, you know,” he says with a vague wave of his hand at the
walls around them. “And you can think of this book as my photos of
her
,
and of us, from a time you were too young to remember.” Desmond looks down at
the glossy tabletop, picks up a napkin and wipes a teardrop from the surface. After
a deep breath, his voice grows stronger. “I’ve waited until now to share it with
you because it’s honest. It shows my faults and hers. Which isn’t to say that
it’s not biased—of course it is, in the way that anyone’s memory would be. But
if there are places where it
seems
like fantasy, remember that it’s not.
That’s just love, as best I can recall and describe it. As true as I can tell
it.”

“Thanks,
Dad.”

Desmond
rolls the napkin into a ball in his fist, and nods. “Happy birthday, son,” he
says. He smiles his weary smile, and gazes beyond the butterfly stickers at the
sky.

Acknowledgements

First and
foremost I’d like to thank my wife Jen for supporting my writing in countless
ways. She was the first reader of this book, and her enthusiasm for it gave me
the confidence to see it through. Considering what I did to her fictional
counterpart, I think that’s true love. Thanks also to my crack team of beta
readers for improving the story with insightful critiques: Jeff Aach, Chuck
Killorin, Jeff Miller, Jill Sweeney-Bosa, and again, Jen Salt. You guys rock.

Brian
and Cathy Cuffe, Esq. were very helpful in answering my questions about the
legal details of guardianship cases in Massachusetts. Any errors or liberties
in that area fall squarely on me. I’m also indebted to Howard and Diana Salt
for being the kind of in-laws who make life better in every way.
Domo
arigato
to Sensei Alex Markauskas, Sensei John Dore, and Jamey Proctor. Anything
I got right about
Iaido
is thanks to them, and any misrepresentations
are my own. Thanks to Christopher C. Payne, Dr. Michael R. Collings, and
everyone at JournalStone for working hard to make good books, and to Jeff
Miller for another amazing cover.

Credit
where it’s due goes to a couple of non-fiction books that were instrumental in
my research:
Farewell to Manzanar
by Jeanne Wakatsuki and James
D. Houston, and
Flyboys
by James Bradley. The former breathes life into
a chapter of American history that we are in danger of forgetting, and the
latter depicts the horrors of the war in the Pacific with a depth and
complexity that my novel can only hint at.