Hell Bent (6 page)

“Alex?”

He nodded. “Came all the way down from Maine with her suitcase and her good intentions. I told her not to come, and she came anyway.”

“It’s a nice place,” I said. “Kinda small for two people, though.”

“I had no idea she expected to actually stay here with me,” he said.

I took a sip of Coke.

“I told her I was fine,” he continued, “said she should go back to Maine. Persistent woman. Said she was staying. I said, ‘Not here, you’re not.’” He sat down in one of the empty chairs. “So now you want me to tell you my life story, huh?”

“I’m your lawyer,” I said, “not your confessor. This is about your divorce. The main thing is, you can’t lie to me.”

He nodded. “I just need to know one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You won’t do anything I don’t want you to do.”

“My job,” I said, “is to make it work out the way you want. That probably won’t happen, of course. There’s always give-and-take. It’s all about compromising within the boundaries of the law. But given that, no, I won’t do anything you don’t want. I may try to change your mind about something if I think it’s not in your interest.”

He nodded. “Fair enough, I guess. So what can I tell you?”

“I don’t know you,” I said. “I don’t want to be blindsided by your wife’s lawyer. There can’t be any surprises. So you tell me. What do I need to know?”

He leaned his head against the back of his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “I’ve got PTSD. That pretty much defines me these days.”

I nodded. “You’re getting help for it?”

“I’ve got meds and I’ve got a support group. I’m not sure how supportive they actually are. They try. They’re keeping me going, I guess.” He held up the stump on the end of his right arm. “I had it before this happened. The traumatic stress. Had it the moment my plane touched down in that godforsaken place. That’s what nobody wants to understand.”

“And what happened between you and your wife …?”

Gus shook his head. “Sometimes I don’t recognize myself. It’s like I’m floating around in the sky watching myself, and I wonder who the hell that whacked-out one-handed evil-tempered guy is down there, doing things I don’t understand, things I’d never do.”

“What did that guy do?” I said.

He gave me a wry smile. “The one-handed guy? He lost it. He accused his wife of cheating on him. He made his kids cry. He made his wife cry. And he made himself cry, and he got the
hell out of there. See? That’s not me. Ask my sister. That’s the opposite of me. Except, now I guess it is me. The one-handed part, anyway. I gotta accept that. It’s me now. It’s the new me. I’m that one-handed guy.”

“Was she?”

He turned his head and looked at me. “Huh?”

“Your wife,” I said. “Was she cheating on you?”

“I don’t know,” said Gus. “Wouldn’t blame her, huh?” He paused. “I can’t prove it, but I think she was. Is. Does it matter?”

“For the divorce?” I shook my head. “Not really. For your, um, frame of mind? You tell me.”

He shrugged but said nothing.

“Did you hurt anybody?” I said.

“Jesus,” he said. “Of course not. I didn’t touch her. Or the kids. I never …” He stood up and went over to the window. He looked outside into the darkness. “Do we have to do this?”

“I need to know everything,” I said.

“There’s nothing else to know.”

“Okay,” I said. “Another time. We don’t need to talk about it now.”

Gus came back to his chair and sat down. “It’s about all I think about,” he said. “This man who lost it in front of his family. This stranger I’ve turned into. Not a nice man. Nobody I know. But, yeah. Good. Let’s not talk about it.”

“You’re not taking pictures anymore?”

“Can’t,” he said. “Can’t do it one-handed. My sister keeps saying I could, but she’s wrong. Drives me crazy with her fucking optimism. I’m trying to get used to the new me, and she keeps insisting that nothing’s changed. You know how irritating that can be?” He shook his head. “So I’ve got this job at the camera shop in Concord. Minuteman Camera. Everything in Concord is named Minuteman-this or Patriot-that. They’re doing me
a favor, I know, giving me this job. They don’t need me. Charity, is what it amounts to, not that I’m making much money. I sell cameras, picture frames, shit like that. I think they hired me because I’m—I was, I mean, I used to be—a fairly well known photojournalist, published in the
Times, Newsweek,
the
Geographic,
won some prizes. The lady who owns the shop, Jemma, nice lady—she hired me, I’m positive, because she feels sorry for me—she’s trying to get me to teach some classes. It’d be good for business, she says. I tell her, I wouldn’t know what to say. The only thing I know about taking pictures is, be in the right place at the right time, always have your camera with you, and hope the light’s good.” He smiled. “It’d be a very short course. Get through the whole curriculum in about two minutes.” He leaned forward and fixed me with his eyes. “You remember the photos that came out of Vietnam?”

“Sure,” I said. “There were some absolutely indelible images.”

“Buddhist monk immolating himself,” Gus said. “Viet Cong soldier, looked about twelve years old, mowing down people with a gun bigger than him. VC officer getting shot in the head. You see the horror on his face at the precise instant the bullet exits his temple. Kids with no arms. Caskets being off-loaded from airplanes. Straw huts up in flames. Old peasant ladies, terror on their faces, watching their homes being torched. Crazy stuff, stuff nobody would believe if they didn’t see it. Iconic photos. Better than a thousand words. That’s what I was after over there. Images that would tell a story, that would stick in your head, that would make a difference. How much of that do you see coming out of Iraq?”

I shrugged. “Not much, I guess.”

“Embedded journalists,” he said. “They take the pictures they’re supposed to take. They don’t get to see the caskets, the body bags, the blood and brains splattered against the sides of
buildings, the dead American kids half hanging out of blown-up Hummers, the mutilated Iraqi children …”

Gus blew out a sigh, then turned and looked at me with his eyebrows arched, as if he’d asked me a question.

I smiled and nodded but said nothing.

“See, Brady,” he said after a minute, “the thing is, it was those images that made all the difference in Vietnam. People wouldn’t put up with that. Embedded journalists are controlled. They’re good, dedicated reporters, most of ‘em, don’t get me wrong. They work hard and they encounter plenty of danger. A lot of ‘em have been killed. Way over a hundred, last I heard. But still, they go where they’re told. They only see and hear what the military and the pols approve. Everybody knows that. They get the stories the brass want them to have, and the brass take their orders from Washington. They want to put their spin on everything. They use the media to promote their own agendas. You ever see a photo of body bags coming out of Iraq?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“That’s because they’re off-limits to the media. So all the American kids who’ve been killed over there? Numbers, that’s all. Abstractions.” He blew out a breath. “Look, don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of good journalists over there, doing their best to get the stories and the images. But if they’re not allowed to be in the right place at the right time, it doesn’t matter how good the light is, you know what I’m saying?”

I nodded. “So what about you, Gus? Were you in the right place at the right time?”

“I’ve always been independent,” he said. “On my own. Not embedded. I owed nobody nothing. There were a bunch of us freelancers. They hated us.”

“Who did?”

“The brass. They couldn’t control us. Couldn’t censor us, couldn’t tell us where to go, what to shoot. They knew we were after the stories they didn’t want told. The senselessness of it. The failure of it. The friendly fire fatalities. The crappy equipment. The wrongheaded decisions. The dead children. They were all about covering up. Getting their own version of the story out there. Not the truth.” He looked at me. “You probably think I’m paranoid. The PTSD, huh?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I am. Paranoid. They tell me I am. Paranoid and depressed and unpredictable. That’s why I went nuts on Claudia. It’s why I don’t trust you or Alex. But what it was like over there? That’s not paranoia.”

I touched my right hand, indicating his missing one. “Are you saying …?”

“Huh?” He frowned. “Oh.” He patted the stump of his right arm. “This was an accident. One of the things that happens over there all the time. Nothing special. Ordinary, actually. Just another random little thing that changes somebody’s life. You might say it happened because I was in the right place at the right time.” He smiled. “I had my camera with me, too. But the light was all wrong, and when I woke up, my camera was gone, and so was my hand.” He shook his head. “Look. I went over there to take pictures. To do what I’m meant to do, like your dog with birds. I thought I could make a difference. Get the truth. Then this happened, and I had to come home, and I can’t do it anymore.”

“So you didn’t get any photos?”

“When I woke up in the hospital after the explosion,” he said, “my camera was gone. I assume it suffered the same fate as my hand.”

“All your photos were in your camera?”

He narrowed his eyes at me for a minute, then said, “Let’s change the damn subject. Okay?”

“If you’ve got some photos, some iconic images—”

“I don’t want to talk about photography right now.”

I shrugged. “Up to you.”

“Another time, maybe.”

I nodded.

“I can really tell you anything,” he said, “and you’ve got to respect my privacy. Right?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

He looked at me. “Because sometimes …” He waved his hand in the air.

“Sometimes what?” I said.

He shook his head. “Not now.”

“You shouldn’t do anything without talking to me,” I said. “You understand what I’m saying?”

He smiled. “Don’t worry about me.”

“That’s easier said than done,” I said.

I left a few minutes later. He walked out to my car with me. The north wind was whipping the tops of the trees and skittering the clouds across the moonlit sky. I half-expected to see a wedge of honking geese up there. It was the season of migration.

Through the screen of hemlocks, orange light glowed from the old colonial where Herb and Beth Croyden lived. I pointed over there. “Do you see much of your landlords?”

“They leave me alone,” he said. “I think I could ask them for anything, they’d give it to me. Nice folks.” He shook his head. “I don’t ask for anything, though. I see them now and then when they take their dog out for a walk. They got a golden retriever, I think it is. They take him on the leash down to the
river.” He gestured off toward the back of the property. “The Concord River’s right over the hill there. They let the dog off the leash, throw sticks for him.” He gazed off through the woods in the direction of the river for a moment. Then he sort of shivered and turned back to me. “I’m thinking of getting a dog.”

“You can’t beat dogs for companionship,” I said.

He shrugged. “I’m not quite ready for it. I’m afraid I’d get mad at a dog. It’s kind of a goal of mine. To feel confident enough, or secure, or safe, or whatever it is—to feel like I could take care of a dog.”

“Sounds like a worthwhile goal,” I said.

We talked idly for a few minutes, and then I reached into the back seat of my car and came up with a manila envelope with some forms that I’d brought with me for Gus to fill out. He said there was a fax machine at the camera store. He’d do the forms and fax them back to me.

He asked me how it worked. Divorce, he meant.

I told him that Claudia’s lawyer and I would hammer out a separation agreement, make sure the two parties agreed to it, and bring it to the court. Division of property, insurance, custody, child support, alimony. If the judge signed off on it, there would be a 120-day waiting period during which he and Claudia would be legally separated. During those ninety days they could change their minds about the terms of the agreement, or even about whether they wanted to go through with it. If they didn’t, the divorce would automatically become final.

I reminded him to tell his wife to have her lawyer contact me. He promised he would. I told him he could call me anytime—if he had questions about what I wanted on the forms, or anything else.

We agreed to get together again after I’d had a chance to talk
to Claudia’s lawyer. Then, no doubt, we’d have some new things to talk about.

He recited two phone numbers—one at the camera shop where he worked, the other for his apartment over the garage—and I scribbled them on the back of one of my business cards.

I held out my hand to him.

He looked at it, then smiled and gripped it with his left hand. “Most people won’t shake hands with me,” he said. “I guess they think I’ll stick my stump at them. Freaks them out.”

“Don’t forget,” I said. “Anything you need to talk about …”

He nodded. “I won’t forget.”

I left my car in the Residents Only space in front of my townhouse on Mt. Vernon Street. Henry was waiting inside the front door. His whole hind end was wagging. I squatted down so he could lick my face, then let him out the back door. I stood there on the deck and waited for him to finish snuffling the bushes and locating the places where he needed to mark.

I still hadn’t gotten used to the vacuum left by Evie. As long as I’d lived in this place Evie and Henry had been there, too.

She’d been gone since June. Almost four months. Sometimes I couldn’t even conjure up the image of her face or the sound of her voice. At other times, though, the feel of her skin and the scent of her hair when I nuzzled the back of her neck were so vivid and palpable that I’d have to blink to remind myself that the smells and textures and sounds existed only in my memory, and that I was alone.

After a while Henry came padding up onto the deck, and we went inside. I gave him a Milk-Bone, then checked my phone for messages. There was one.

I hesitated before listening to it. It might’ve been Evie. She’d called maybe half a dozen times since she’d been in California. Not once had I been there to answer the phone, so all I got was her messages. I was pretty sure that she made a point of calling when she figured I wouldn’t be there. Leaving messages was easier than talking to me.