The Abduction (32 page)

What was Ben like back then, when he was young and robust? What were his dreams? What life had he and Mom hoped for? Were they ever happy? What made him a drunk?

John found the answers in the third box. Inside were photos: Ben’s formal West Point graduation portrait in his high-necked dress uniform above the Academy motto—
Duty, Honor, Country;
Ben and Kate, him in a white uniform and Mom in a wedding dress, outside a church, ducking under an arch of sabers held out by other soldiers in white uniforms; and other wedding photos with a best man and maid of honor whose images struck John. The woman, with her curly black hair and a certain frailty about her, seemed oddly familiar to John. In another photo, the same man was standing next to the same woman in a hospital bed holding a baby; Kate and Ben were leaning in from behind. Everyone was smiling like their IPO had just hit the street.

John dug deeper and found more photos: Ben and the other man just arrived in Vietnam, looking young and eager in crisp uniforms; a team photo, both of them with other soldiers and handwritten along the bottom the words
SOG team Viper, 2 Dec 68;
Ben sitting in a stirrup and dangling from a rope under a helicopter flying above a dense jungle; Ben lying on the ground, his pants ripped open and an Army medic wrapping his bloody leg; Ben in a hospital bed, a pretty nurse in a white uniform on one side, and on the other side, a general pinning a Purple Heart to Ben’s pillow; Ben, in the jungle, holding a long black rifle with a scope, his boot on a dead Asian soldier wearing black pajamas,
1000 meters
written along the bottom; Ben, his smile gone now, replaced by a hardness John had never seen on his father’s face, camouflage greasepaint, his uniform no longer crisp but instead dirty and worn with the sleeves cut off, revealing his muscular arms and that tattoo. He was standing among Indians.

He was not the same man.

John realized he knew next to nothing about his father. Ben Brice had been a hero, he knew that, but Ben had never talked about the war and John had never asked. His father was a loser. A drunk. That was all he had ever really known about Ben Brice.

John returned the photos to the box, one by one, but his eyes lingered on the hospital photo of the man and woman with the baby. This same man was in the early photos with Ben but in none of the later ones. Looking at this man and this woman, something strange stirred inside John, like one of those
déjà vu
moments. He touched the image of the woman gently. John didn’t know how long he had been staring at the photo when he looked up to see Ben standing over him. John held up the photo.

“Who are these people?” he asked.

Ben was quiet for a time. He ran his hands over his face and through his hair. Then he said, “Your mother and father.”

“My dad says life is random,” Gracie said.

“What?” Jacko said without turning his head back.

“Random. You know, things happen for no particular reason. He says life doesn’t make sense and isn’t supposed to. My mom says life is fucked up, but she has some issues.”

“The hell you talking about?”

His words and smoke came out of his mouth at the same time. She sighed. “What I’m talking about is, you two lamebrains kidnap me not even knowing Ben is my grandpa, and a long time ago during Ben’s war you did something bad and Ben told on you and you got in trouble.”

“How do you know we did something bad?”

“Because I know Ben didn’t. And now Ben’s coming after me and he’s going to find out you took me, the same guy he told on. I mean, what are the odds of that? Now my dad—he’s a math genius—he’d say that’s just random, what normal people call coincidence or luck. But I don’t think so. I think it’s meant to be.”

“Destiny?”

“God’s plan. See, Nanna—she’s my grandmother—she goes to Mass like, almost every day. She’s always saying, ‘God has a plan for you, Gracie Ann Brice. God has a plan for all of us.’ She says there’s no such thing as coincidence or luck, that everything that happens in our lives is supposed to happen because it’s all part of God’s plan. So you kidnapping me and Ben coming to get me, that’s not a coincidence. That’s part of God’s plan.”

Jacko exhaled smoke through both nostrils.

“Well, sweet cheeks, I don’t know about God’s plan, but my plan is to gut your grandpa.”

“Roger Dalton was the brother I never had,” Ben said. “We went through West Point together, then to Vietnam together.” He paused. “Academy instructors, they told us it would be our great adventure. It wasn’t.”

John’s eyes remained on the photo of his mother and father; his mother was holding him and his father looked so strong and manly. There was manly somewhere in John Brice’s genes.

“You were born a week before we deployed. On our flight to Saigon, Roger said, ‘Anything happens to me, you be my son’s father.’ He was killed two weeks later.”

“How’d he die?”

“A soldier’s death.”

Ben’s voice cracked. John wanted to know more, but he decided that now wasn’t the time.

“What happened to my mother?”

“Mary, she was smart just like you. But when Roger died, it’s like her mind couldn’t handle it. She was just too fragile to fit in this world.”

“Like me.”

“She died when you were six months old. We adopted you.”

“John Roger Brice.” Ben nodded. “Where are they buried?”

“Iowa. Where they were from.”

“When this is over, I think I’ll go to Iowa. Is his name on the Wall in Washington?”

“I suppose. I’ve never been able to go.”

“Maybe I’ll go to Iowa and then to the Wall. Maybe you’ll come with me.”

“Maybe.”

John looked at the photo again. “I always thought Gracie got her eyes and hair from you.”

Would she look for her daughter in every blonde blue-eyed girl she saw on the street, in the mall, and at restaurants? Would she wonder what her daughter looked like with each passing year, like those age-progression images she had seen of children missing for five or ten or fifteen years on the missingkids.com website? Would she always hold out hope that her daughter was still alive, somewhere? Would she become one of those pitiful mothers of lost children she had seen on TV, keeping Grace’s room exactly as it was now, always believing that one day she would return to this room?

The doorbell rang.

Elizabeth was still in her bathrobe and in her daughter’s room, so many thoughts running through her mind, trying to imagine life without Grace.

The doorbell rang again.

Her heart froze. Then it began to beat rapidly; her breathing came faster. She stood. She knew.

It’s her! It’s Grace! She’s come home!

Elizabeth bolted out of the bedroom and ran down the long hall and to the stairs and down to the first floor and through the foyer and to the front door and pulled the door open, ready to embrace her daughter and to hold her and to cry with her and to never let her go.

But you’re not Grace.

Standing on the porch was a young woman in a black dress; her anguished face seemed vaguely familiar. It took Elizabeth a moment to place it. Gary Jennings’s wife.

Elizabeth slumped against the doorjamb. She had been so sure it was Grace. Now, for the first time since the abduction, she thought she might be drifting toward insanity, floating on a raft down a slow-moving river, steadily and inexorably toward rapids where she would crack up on the rocks, finally to be thrown over the edge of a steep fall, driven down deep into the darkness below, never to resurface. The thought was inviting.

“Mrs. Brice, I’m so sorry about Gracie. But my husband didn’t take her. Gary would never do something like that.”

She started to leave, but she stopped when Elizabeth said, “Your baby.”

She turned back and said, “The doctors say she’ll be okay.”

She walked down to a waiting car, got in, and drove off. The street was silent and vacant; a few pink ribbons tied to mailboxes fluttered in the breeze and several scattered missing-child fliers skipped along the ground like children playing hopscotch. The TV trucks and police cars and cameras and reporters and gawkers were gone, back to their lives as if the world had not been irrevocably altered seven days ago; fathers and career mothers had gone back to their offices, stay-at-home moms to exercise classes and shopping malls, children to school, reporters to new stories, and the networks to New York. The circus had moved on.

Elizabeth turned and shut the door on her life.

John watched as Ben opened a door to a vault under the floor of the workshop and then knelt down and shone a flashlight into the dark space below.

“I hate rats,” he said.

Satisfied, he hopped down into the hole. His head was below floor level. He handed up three long metal containers. Then he hoisted himself out.

Ben dusted off one container with a cloth. He unlatched the locks and lifted the top. Inside, set into a molded form, were a black rifle, boxes of ammunition,
two telescopes, one normal size, the other oversized, a black tube, what John knew was a silencer, a leather shoulder sling, two ammunition magazines, and a crude brass bracelet.

Ben slipped the bracelet onto his left wrist, then he removed the rifle and mounted the smaller scope and the silencer. He loaded a magazine and snapped it into the underside of the rifle and attached the sling at both ends. He stood and walked outside. John followed.

Facing the vast open space, Ben knelt, raised the rifle to his shoulder, gripped the underside of the stock with his left hand, extended his right elbow from his body, and sighted in with his right eye. The sound of the rifle’s discharge was muffled. Ben grunted, adjusted the scope, sighted, and fired again. Another adjustment and another shot.

“What are you shooting at?”

“Cholla cactus, five hundred meters out.”

John slanted his glasses to obtain sharper vision but without success. “Dang, I can’t even see it.”

“Inside, in one of the other boxes—a spotting scope.”

John returned to the workshop and opened the other containers. Inside one were a knife with
Viper
etched into the shiny blade, two sets of dog tags, one for
Brice, Ben
, and the other for
Dalton, Roger
,
a small machine gun with a shoulder strap, and the spotting telescope. John took his father’s dog tags and put them around his neck. He then removed the scope and ran back out.

Ben said, “Straight down the barrel, rock formation.”

John looked into the scope, adjusted the focus, and spotted the rock formation.

“Got it.”

“Beyond that, a cactus.”

“With the yellow flower?”

“Yep.”

Standing behind Ben, John figured the theoretical probability of hitting that flower from five hundred meters—1,640 feet—had to be one in a million, even in the perfectly still conditions, and particularly by a sixty-year-old …
the thought crept into John’s mind
… drunk. The rifle discharged; the yellow flower split off whole from the cactus.

“Dang, Ben, that’s awesome! You must’ve been a dead shot!”

From Ben’s expression, John knew he had said exactly the wrong thing. Ben stood and walked over to a big rock and sat; he stared at the dirt for a time. Finally he spoke.

“NVA officers didn’t wear insignia. You couldn’t tell a grunt from a general, so you’d sit outside their camp, maybe a thousand meters out, watching them through the binoculars until you picked out the ranking officer, sometimes just because he had more cigarettes in his pocket. Then you’d wait until he was sitting down, eating, and you’d put the scope on him. And when you did, you played God. You decided he’d never see his wife or kids again, or even the next day, that because he was born in Hanoi instead of Houston he deserved a bullet in his head. You observed the last moments of his life, the last smile on his face, the last drag on his cigarette, and you squeezed the trigger. And his life was over.”

He looked up at John.

“I didn’t kill for God or country, or for those medals, or even to defeat Communism. Well, at first I did, but at the end, when I knew the war was lost, I killed so fewer American boys would come home in a body bag. Like your father did. That’s why I stayed over there, John. That’s why I wasn’t here for you.”

John looked out on New Mexico and felt his eyes water. “I should’ve been there for Gracie. I should’ve hung up on Lou and gone to the concession stand with her. I should have protected her.” He shook his head slowly. “Ben, I just let her go.”

“No, son, you didn’t let her go. They took her.” Ben stood and was the colonel in the photos again. “And we’re fixing to take her back.”

After graduating from high school, boys in Henryetta, Oklahoma, either go to college on football scholarships, take up farming like their fathers before them, or join the Army. Jack Odell Smith was big and strong and played football for Henryetta High, but he got ejected from most games for unsportsmanlike conduct. And he never took to the plow. So, barely a month after graduating at the bottom of his class, Jack O. Smith had joined the United States Army.