Full Measure: A Novel (8 page)

They replaced the burned valve and walked to the truck for water. Patrick saw his father down in a swale two hundred meters away, painting a tree trunk with the sprayer. Something about it was amusing and sad at the same time: an aging man in a burnt grove, painting tree trunks white. White for Archie; black for Bostic. “Anyway,” he said. “My mind wanders to Iris Cash a lot.”

“She’s very attractive,” said Ted.

“Yeah. And she’s a fighter. She thinks her stories are weapons. But for good, you know, to help people. She’s trying to get lighted crosswalks downtown, even though her own city council said no.”

Ted glugged down some water and wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I heard about that. Evelyn Anders is behind it.”

Patrick cut his brother a sharp look. “Don’t.”

“I won’t. I’m not. I’ve got my orders.” Ted nodded and pursed his lips but Patrick could tell that he wasn’t going to be able to silence himself. “You know, Pat—Evelyn Anders is Mom’s and Dad’s financial advisor. Isn’t it weird that with her, our parents have lost so much money?”

“Everybody has, Ted. It’s a bad recession. Not everything is personal. Not everything is a conspiracy. Not everything can be blamed on a small-town mayor.”

“Government
is
the problem, Pat. I’m sure of it.”

“Work, Ted. Work.”

*   *   *

At cocktails Patrick stood on the Norris patio and watched the sun setting over the distant hills. He was tired from the grove work but pleased with their progress. He thought about the fishing boat he’d seen for sale on the Web last night. It was an older but very neat seventeen-foot Mako Pro Skiff, set up well for fly casters, trailered and allegedly pampered. Thirteen grand.

Ted sat shoeless in a rocking chair, rubbing his foot through a blackened sock, a large tumbler of iced tea sweating on the deck beside him. He had brought a computer out to the porch to watch the San Diego news. “I’ve decided to drive the taxi on weekends and some evenings,” he said. “It pays and I need the money.”

Archie and Caroline both looked from the monitor to Ted, and the swinging love seat they shared swayed to a gradual stop. “If you have the energy for two jobs, like Pat does, then more power to you,” said Archie. “I think all of you should know that I’ll be talking to the farm bankers down in Escondido tomorrow. I’m hoping we can get a loan to order replacement trees.”

“It’s like a government conspiracy to wreck our family,” said Ted.

“In what way?” asked Archie. “I’m just talking to the bank, Ted.”

“But it’s funny how she bailed them out but not us.”

“She?” asked Caroline.

“The nanny state, Mom. Bailing out the banks.”

“Look,” said Archie. “I don’t love the government either, son. But leave the whining back in the bunkhouse before work tomorrow. And wear some boots with better support.”

“Do you still have the good orthotics?” asked Caroline.

“I’ll find them. In the closet somewhere.”

“I think this calls for a toast,” said Caroline. They lifted their glasses and waited. “To the Norrises—back from one war and into another.”

They clinked glasses and Patrick felt emotion in it, the simple act of touching. Then a TV story about the disastrous Fallbrook fire came on the news and he saw Fire Chief Bruck, Sheriff Hazzard, and Mayor Anders on the dais at City Hall. The Fallbrook city seal was visible behind them. With the two men standing slab-faced on either side of her, Evelyn Anders announced that the fire was conclusively arson and that the current damages were three human lives and approximately two billion dollars in damaged property. She said that anyone who had information leading to the arrest and conviction of the arsonist would get a reward of $50,000 from San Diego Gas & Electric.

“That’s big government in bed with big business,” said Ted. “Fifty thousand is nothing to them. She’ll draw a fat pension and they’ll raise the rates whenever they want. No wonder we the people can’t win.”

Patrick watched the next story, about an Al-Qaeda magazine calling for American jihadists to start forest fires in America in the summer and fall. Apparently “detailed instructions” were published online. Patrick looked at the pictures of the bearded, turbaned, smiling men who published the magazine and they looked pretty much like the skinnies he’d spent thirteen months in Sangin trying to kill.

“You missed a couple,” said Ted.

*   *   *

It was a relief to get away from all of them, to walk into the Domino’s kitchen, get his blue, black, and red work shirt on, pack the deliveries into soft-sided warmers and insulated pizza sleeves while he talked to Firooz. Firooz and his wife Simone were Iranian refugees who had come here decades ago, after the fall of the shah. He had been a veterinarian and she a schoolteacher. They were humble people, willing to be of service, and now they owned the franchise. Firooz kept touching Patrick—on the arm, the shoulder, patting his hand. He and Simone helped Patrick carry out the warmers and set them securely in the cab of his truck. Patrick attached the Domino’s sign to the roof of the polished black Ford F-150—used but low mileage, a graduation gift from his mother and father—then climbed in. He hit Mission and gunned it for Stage Coach. He’d never known, before deployment, what a pleasure it was to drive a good vehicle on wide safe streets and feel those V8 horses stretching out with no IEDs to blow him to smithereens.

Three short hours later his work was done and Patrick sat outside in folding chairs with Firooz and Simone. The night air was damp and in the spray of the parking-lot lights Patrick could see mist and ash settling. They talked about town and business and the big election coming up and the several federal and state agents, not to mention local sheriff deputies, who had come around to talk with Firooz and his wife lately. Something about an online terrorist site they’d never heard of. Inspire.

“We can live through these suspicions,” said Simone. “They are unfounded and ridiculous. And nothing, compared to what we have been through. This is our country.”

Patrick counted his tips—eighteen dollars—and a few minutes later, Simone and Firooz sent him home with a large, three-item pizza.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Three days later, after ten hours of field labor, Patrick took the night off from delivery work. He showered and shaved and tried on clothes he’d left at home before deployment, which were too large for him after thirteen months of combat and meager rations. Zero hot meals a day. One cold shower a week. Some of his older high school clothes fit.

He met Iris Cash at Salerno’s. The dining room and bar had few customers on this weeknight, even with several Fallbrook restaurants having recently folded. Iris took a bar stool facing Patrick across a small round table. She launched straight into the arson evidence and the reward and who would do such a thing to this peaceful little town? Then she was off on Cruzela Storm and Georgie’s brave friends and lighted crosswalks, and how she’d already gotten the school district to lock in a date for Warrior Stadium, and a pledge of deeply discounted food and drinks from Major Market; and she’d been promised page one, an above-the-fold placement for an article and pictures in
The Village View
next Thursday, which would trigger the
North County News
and the
San Diego Union-Tribune
and the networks to follow and
kiss my exhaust!
Iris wore a frayed and faded denim jacket over a lacy blouse, and jeans tucked into boots. She had a quirky smile and smelled floral. Patrick earnestly faced this blizzard of words and expressions and sensations, easily the most pleasant minutes of his life for well over a year.

The waitress brought their drinks and Patrick told Iris about the irrigation and painting and how it took a long outdoor shower just to get the soot off him before showering inside. He tried to match her emotional energy, but since coming home, he was having trouble staying interested in himself. It was hard to stay focused on things that couldn’t kill you. Even when they were good and important things. He found himself arranging the salt and pepper shakers and the bottle of hot sauce in the same relative positions as Myers and Zane and himself at 2200 hours on December 10 on the night patrol up to Outpost Three, wondering for the thousandth time, at least, how it was that Myers—touching down in Patrick’s footprints while Patrick followed those of three other men ahead of him, and all of them behind Bostic with the Minehound and Zane with his splendid nose and instincts—had tripped the IED. How was that even possible? How had Zane failed to detect it? Bostic?

“So, are you going to stay in Fallbrook and work the ranch?” asked Iris.

“For now. I’m delivering pizza, too.”

This seemed not to faze Iris. “Do you like growing things?”

“Not really. I don’t seem to have farming blood. I want to guide anglers on the bay in a boat. But now, I’m trying to do what’s right.”

“I heard you lost almost all the trees.”

“Just a few left for sure, out of eighty acres.”

“You don’t have to talk.”

“I want to talk.”

“If you say so.”

Patrick returned from some far place. “Want to get a table and have dinner?”

“I’d like that. Can I ask you something?”

Patrick nodded and drank. He felt the strength of the liquor. After a year of almost no drinking, even a small amount hit him hard.

“Can you tell me three words that will help me understand you?”

Patrick thought for a moment. “I miss it.”

Her expression went from concern to astonishment, which she quickly dropped. “That’s … three words, all right. You
do
want to talk. Let’s get that table. The osso buco here is terrific. Oh, can I just say one thing to you?”

“Please don’t say thank you.”

“Welcome home.”

*   *   *

After dinner Patrick drove them out to Oceanside and they walked the pier to the end and watched the fishermen bring in mackerel and bonito from the flood-lighted sea. The landed fish spasmed wildly against their plastic buckets. Patrick nodded at some of the Marines in and out of uniform, and some of them acknowledged him. In town he took Iris to the Galleon, a bar popular with his fellow Pendleton Marines. They got two stools at the bar and Patrick bought a round for them and for the four Marines who were already there. The jukebox played a country song, then some metal, then “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the opening notes of which brought shouts of “I can’t get no!” and raised glasses all up and down the bar. Patrick knocked back the bourbon and signaled for another round. Iris gamely drained her lemon drop, sat up straight, and took a deep breath. “Don’t let me get too stupid tonight. I have work in the morning.”

“I’ve got your back.”

She smiled at him and Patrick saw the doubt in it. The bourbons seemed strong to him. He ordered beer backs with the next round and Iris declined. The alcohol kicked in and Patrick felt calm and alert. He knew he was drinking for all the good things he missed, and he wondered what it said about him that what should have been the worst thirteen months of his life were in fact months of excitement, purpose, and selfless loyalty. Good things. Two rounds of drinks later the young Marine next to him asked where’d he’d been and Patrick told him Helmand, the Three-Five, and the boy nodded respectfully. Patrick’s Third Battalion, Fifth Regiment had suffered more casualties than any Marine battalion in the war. They were known through history as the Dark Horse Battalion, and their motto was “Get Some.”

“I wondered if that low fade made you a Dark Horse,” said the young Marine.

“Yes,” said Patrick, the low fade referring to his haircut—long for a Marine, and permitted only to grunts who had seen action. The low fade was not to be worn by new Marines, who were relegated to shaves or the traditional high and tight worn by most officers.

“You guys kicked serious ass,” said the Marine. “Too bad we’ll give it back to the terrorists and dope growers.”

“It’s their home,” said Patrick. “And it’s hell anyway. Let them have it.”

“How many did you lose?”

“Twenty-five very good men. Two hundred wounded.”

“How many’d you kill?”

“Four hundred seventy confirmed but a lot more in reality.”

Someone on the other side of Iris said something but Patrick couldn’t make it out. Whoever said it, said it again. Patrick leaned forward and looked past Iris at the red-faced boy who was drinking Patrick’s generosity. A high and tight cherry if Patrick had ever seen one. “I’d go and kill another four hundred if they’d let me,” he said.

“You’re a POG, so you don’t have to worry.”

“How do you know I’m a POG?”

“What’s a POG?” Iris interjected.

“Personnel Other Than Grunt,” said Patrick. “And I can tell by looking at you.”

“I’m a Marine air mechanic and proud of it. Jason Falk.”

“Lance Corporal Patrick Norris. You guys wouldn’t land for our wounded in Sangin if there was fire. The Brits did it all the time, but not you.”

“Watch your words. The pilots I know would fly down the barrel of a gun. All I said was I’d go over and—”

“Don’t waste your time,” said Patrick.

Jason considered this, then chugged the last half of his beer. “Twenty-five is a lot of Americans.”

“It’s a lot of Americans to waste.”

“I don’t agree it was a waste. Freedom is worth dying for.”

“But Afghanistan isn’t. That’s what I’m trying to get through your thick fuckin’ skull.”

“Lance Corporal Norris, there’s a lady present,” said Jason Falk. “That’s in case you didn’t notice. I told you once to watch your words. I’m Marine air and I don’t back down.”

“Tell your pilots to grow some.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Boots like you,” said Patrick. He drank and stared straight ahead.

“Time to clear out,” said Iris, sliding off the stool.

Patrick turned to where she had been, and the blow landed blind. After that, pure reaction. As Jason chambered another punch Patrick crashed a fist hard into his face, then an even harder elbow. The sound whap-cracked through the music and Jason’s face exploded with blood. Patrick heard Iris scream at him to stop, but he hit Jason twice more on the way down. Then he felt the weight of someone on top of him, went to one knee, and threw the first Marine over his shoulder. Iris pulled him up and Patrick took her arm and guided her to the door, but hustled back and put the half-risen man back down with a short hook to his middle. Outside they ran down Sundowner to Pacific Coast Highway for the truck. The cuffs of Patrick’s too-large pants flopped down past his ankles and almost tripped him. At the truck he opened the doors with the key fob and they clambered up and in. Patrick made the U-turn too fast and the tires chirped and the headlights of a police cruiser parked across the street came on.