Invasion: Alaska (13 page)

“Has he been drinking?” Stan asked with a sickening feeling in his gut. Not the aliens again—he’d carefully explained to his dad why space aliens couldn’t hurt the Earth. It had been more convincing to his dad giving him bogus reasons than trying to tell him that space aliens didn’t exist. At least, Stan had thought so at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure.

“I know it ain’t my place,” Jose said, “but you need to get him into a clinic or something. The cops have it out for your dad.”

No, not the cops
, Stan thought,
but Sergeant Jackson
.

“What street?” Stan asked.

“Ah…Fifth and Michael,” Jose said. “I think you’d better hurry. From the sounds of it, he’s been at it for a while.”

The sinking feeling in Stan grew. He wasn’t aware of it, but his shoulders slumped, and suddenly he felt the long school day. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep.

“Thanks, Jose,” Stan said. “I appreciate the call.”

“Hey, Professor, we’re the Guard. We stick together no matter what.”

It was silly, but the words steadied Stan. It felt as if someone had his back, because someone actually did.

He had two different worlds of friends. There were his intellectual buddies from school and those from the Guard, usually working class guys who drank beer and liked to hunt. Both worlds had good people, but there was no doubt they were different. Stan had theorized to his wife about the two. The first world talked about ideas. The second seemed to live them. Stan liked to think of himself as an ancient Greek or an ancient Athenian from before the Peloponnesian War. The great playwright Aeschylus had fought in the world-changing Battle of Marathon. Socrates, the philosopher, had fought at the Battles of Potidaea, Amphipolis and Delium and he’d been lauded for his heroism. In that time, even exceptionally brilliant men had lived whole lives, not the fractured existence that seemed to be people’s lot in post-industrial America.

Stan pocketed the cell phone, told Nicky that they were stopping early today and urged him to use the reader he’d loaned him. One of the tricks to teaching boys to read was helping them find material they were genuinely interested in. Too often, the school-selected reading material was too dated or too tame for a young man. Too many boys were bored sick with school, especially because of the stress the schools placed upon keeping things non-competitive. In Stan’s opinion, boys thrived under competition, and they wanted action in a story, the more the better. Why did people think Hulk comics still sold so well?

After saying goodbye to Nicky, who pressed his music-plugs into his ears and slouched away, Stan locked his room. He hurried to the faculty parking lot. There was snow on the sidewalks, dark clouds above and gloom all around. Stan wore a faded Alaskan National Guard hat, a heavy coat and boots. A little under six-foot tall, Stan fought a constant battle against a protruding gut, although he wasn’t fat like most of his friends. He’d been 165 as a high-school senior and a hard-tackling safety on the football squad. Now at forty-three he kept under 200 pounds. He lifted weights three times a week and played basketball against Bill Harris, the pastor of the Rock Church.

Stan had a feeling that he wasn’t going to get to lift today. It was a legs day, or evening. He only did legs once a week. He was exhausted the next day after a good legs workout.

It was cold in the old Land Rover, and after turning on the ignition, he waited for the vehicle to warm up. Soon thereafter, he pulled out onto Pacifica Avenue and headed toward Jose’s shop. There was an occasional knock in the engine. It definitely needed work again. It had over one hundred thousand miles and could maybe last another twenty thousand before an overhaul.

Most people these days drove crappy little box-cars and ancient pickups from the 2000s. They repaired them repeatedly. America only had a handful of car factories compared to the old days of glory.

While tapping the steering wheel with his thumbs, Stan thought about buying a rebuilt engine. It might be a good experience for him to install it. He needed more mechanical know how. It would certainly make him a better tank commander afterward.

As he passed Oscar’s Donuts, Stan shook his head. When would that ever matter? Why did they even have tanks in Alaska, especially outdated relics like the Abrams M1A2? In the old days before the Sovereign Debt Depression, America used to deploy National Guard units in their ongoing foreign wars. But that had been over twenty years ago. Except for the Grain Union, America was hard-core isolationist these days.

Pulling to a stop before a red light on Ninth Street, Stan rubbed his eyes. He needed to take out his contacts. Were there glasses in the rover?

Leaning over, Stan opened the glove compartment. His mouth dropped open as he saw his .44 Magnum sitting there in its holster. His heart tightened in his chest. There were severe laws against having a gun on school grounds, which included the parking lot. How could he have forgotten to take it out? Did he want to lose his job and go to jail?

Behind him, a car honked.

Stan jerked up, looked back and saw a woman giving him the finger behind her windshield. Blushing, Stan glanced at the green light. He gave the rover gas and it lurched like a jumping salmon. The big magnum fell out of the glove compartment and thumped heavily onto the floor.

Now his eyes really hurt. Stan pulled to a curb, stopping beside a Burger Palace. A girl was leaning out of the drive-up window, handing a bag and a soft drink to a young guy in a pickup. Blinking too much, Stan extracted his contacts and put them into his solution bottle. Then he dug out a pair of glasses and put them on. One of these days, he was going to get laser eye-surgery, but it wasn’t today. He picked up the .44 and shoved it back into the glove compartment, shutting it hard.

As he pulled back onto the street, his cell phone vibrated. He dug it out of his pant’s pocket, and said, “Hello?”

“Honey, are you almost done?”

It was his wife, Susan. Glancing at the rover’s clock, showed Stan it was 4:21. Oh, right, it was Wednesday. It was a growth group meeting at the Boone’s tonight. He and his family went to church at the Rock. The growth group meetings discussed Bill’s latest sermon. Normally, Stan appreciated the Wednesday evening meetings. Not only did they study the Bible there, but they also got to know the other people at the church better. It was one thing looking at the back of a person’s head during the service and maybe shaking the person’s hand afterward and quite another sitting in a home drinking coffee and arguing about what the pastor’s sermon had really meant. Stan liked the discussions and he liked the deeper connections with others. People were far too divided these days, lonely islands with too little glue holding them together as a society. Stan had vowed more than once after watching too many football games and sitcoms in a day to quit vegging on the couch.

“Stan?” his wife asked over the cell phone.

“Ah…” he said, wondering if he should mention his dad. His wife had cooked the meal tonight. It was their turn to bring supper to the Boone’s home. The meeting started at six-thirty and it was all the way across town. Stan lived on the outskirts of Anchorage, and the Boone’s house was on the other side. The crisscrossing back and forth would add maybe an hour, if he were lucky. How long would his dad take?

“Is something wrong, honey?” his wife asked.

“Dad’s been drinking again,” Stan blurted. “He’s been acting up.”

Susan got quiet, which was a bad sign. “…you missed last week’s growth group meeting,” she finally said.

“I want to come,” he said. “You know that.”

“What’s your dad done this time?” she asked tiredly.

“I’ll be quick, honey. I just need to talk to him, get him settled down.”

“You know I hate going to the Boone’s alone.”

“I know,” said Stan, with the ache in his eyes a light throb.

“It’s an interesting topic tonight,” she said. “You told me so yourself after the sermon.”

“Honey, I want to go. But I need to help my dad first. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, but in a quiet tone that indicated it was anything but.

Susan was the greatest. Stan loved his wife, and she had been longsuffering with his dad. The old man used to stay at their house. That’s where the real trouble had started. They had two girls, ten and seven, and his father’s explosive cursing and occasional nudity had been too much. It had caused the biggest fight of their marriage and a week with Stan sleeping on the couch. Susan’s tears had finally convinced Stan he had to tell his dad to move out. It had been in the middle of winter, and his dad had been allowed at the Homeless Center for three weeks until they kicked him out there. Jail time had seen him through the coldest part of the year. Unfortunately, his dad had never done well with the police. Stan had never gotten the story straight from his dad, but he knew his father had smeared his own crap on Sergeant Jackson. There had been a beating afterward, and Stan had sunk fifteen thousand on lawyer’s fees against the Police Department for brutality.

No one had been happy with him for that, not the police, his wife or his dad, who said he could fight his own battles. The police had finally made a bargain with his lawyer. Stan had dropped the police brutality charge and his father had been released from jail. For two months, his father either had remained sober or had only taken a few drinks a day.

Those ‘good days’ were over. His dad had started drinking heavily again, and now his weird side was shining through even stronger than before. In their way of thinking, the police had given his dad several breaks. Those breaks might soon be ending, especially if Sergeant Jackson had anything to say about it.

“I’ll make it home in time to go to the Boone’s,” Stan said.

“You promise?” Susan asked.

“I promise to try my hardest.”

“Okay,” she said, even quieter than before. “Bye honey.”

“I love you,” he said.

She hung up before saying, ‘I love you,’ back. That let Stan know she was hurt and probably what his daughters called ‘boiling inside.’ He couldn’t blame Susan, and he didn’t, but it was his dad. He had to help him. The Third Commandment said to honor your parents, and it was the first of the Ten Commandments with a promise. It said that it would go well with a man who honored his parents. It also said that he would live a long life.

Thinking about his wife and her expectations, Stan pushed his foot on the accelerator. It was probably wiser risking a traffic ticket so he could get to his dad first. It wouldn’t help his insurance rates if he got a ticket and Susan might possibly complain about the cost of it, but this was his dad and he was the old man’s only son.

***

Stan parked beside a curb. He turned off the engine, jumped out of the rover and hurried after his dad.

Mack Higgins was big, and even at sixty-seven he was imposing. He had wild white hair jutting every which way. Worse, he was shirtless, with his ancient denim jacket tied around his waist. Stan’s dad was like a polar bear, with bulky arms, a barrel-like torso and seldom affected by the cold. Also like a polar bear, Mack had thick white hair on his chest, belly and much of his back. He wore a gold chain around his neck and had fought a long time ago in Afghanistan, being a colonel in a light infantry battalion. Mack had led from the front, and Stan had heard many stories where his dad drew his sidearm. Colonel Higgins had empted his share of magazines, as his dad put it, into “no-good Allah-loving Taliban terrorists.”

Afghanistan had done something to his dad. Colonel Mack Higgins’s hard drinking had begun there. After his retirement, the drinking had definitely become full-blown alcoholism. Watching his dad’s mental decline had convinced Stan of several things. Firstly, killing men did something to you. Or maybe it was seeing your friends die, blown apart by a roadside bomb. Secondly, too much alcohol over long periods pickled a man’s brain. Hadn’t it changed Alexander the Great? Stan had read a book called
Alexander the Great: the Invisible Enemy
. It had chronicled the Macedonian’s decline in health and his growing inability to control his temper through increasingly hard drinking. Finally, hard knocks to the head were very bad. Once it had occurred in a bar fight. The second time, Sergeant Jackson had struck his dad over the head with his baton. Mack Higgins had a visible dent in his skull now, about three inches above his left eye.

“Dad!” called Stan.

Mack Higgins lumbered down the cracked and uneven sidewalk. Large pine trees shadowed the snowy yards and the street, and their roots had caused, over time, what looked like quake damage to the sidewalk.

This was an older area of Anchorage. Here, the two-story homes were built so the sides almost touched. Each had a garage and most had twenty-year old or older shrubbery and trees.

Stan glanced over his shoulder. He saw several sets of people either standing in their yard or on their porch, watching his dad. Some grinned at one another, laughing. Others scowled. Odds were someone had called the police. The best thing was to get his dad out of here fast.

“Dad, hold up,” Stan called.

Mack Higgins never even paused. His hearing wasn’t what it used to be, but it was still good. His dad was probably ignoring him again.

“Colonel Higgins, sir,” Stan called.

The big old man with the hairy torso stopped then and slowly shuffled around. The bleary, unfocused eyes told their own story, and the alcoholic reek only added to the tale. Mack Higgins swayed. He had to be really drunk to do that.