The General and the Horse-Lord (12 page)

John looked at him in surprise. “Huh. Who knew?”

“The guys thought it was kind of cool you were an egghead, but still really kick-ass.”

John suspected when Gabriel was talking about the guys, he really meant himself. But that was pretty cool too.

“If you want, I can do some tutoring with Juan. It might not be a bad idea for him to have some one-on-one time with the teacher, but she’s already not been successful teaching him, you know? Maybe another way of presenting the same material will be more successful that just one person going over the same thing again. But I don’t know if it would make Martha feel uncomfortable.”

“She was better last night. Didn’t seem to hate me quite so much.”

“That’s good.”

Gabriel stood up and slung an arm around John’s shoulder. “It’s good to be with you. I like your company. Have I told you that?”

“Yes. I like your company too. I like having your tools in my shed.” John reached down, tugged Gabriel closer with his fingers tucked inside the waistband of his jeans. “I most definitely like having you in my bed at night.”

“I couldn’t sleep with my arm around a metal toolbox last night. The pillow smelled like grease and rust. Not like you.” He nuzzled a little under John’s ear. “Let me talk to Martha. I feel like I’m willing to do whatever she wants, just to keep any small peace, but I’ll tell her you offered. Juan thinks you’re cool.”

“Juan likes me to tell him stories about his father.”

W
HEN
the steaks and salad had been eaten, and John was clearing the table, Gabriel got his briefcase and opened it. “We need to consider some options,” he said, and his grin looked particularly wolfish. “I wonder what the endgame is. Do you want to take these pricks to their knees, or would you like to get the job done quietly? And where do you see yourself at the end?”

“And I wonder if you are going to start charging me for your legal services?”

Gabriel nodded yes. “From the first trip into the president’s office. Before that I was just being Kim’s Uncle Horse-Lord. I can give you the family rate.”

“That sounds good.” John studied the smooth surface of the table. “Actually, I think I want to meet the dickhead’s father. If he’s manipulating the functioning of the university for personal reasons, up to and including protecting an abusive son, then he needs to be off the board of supervisors. I still don’t know what Kim’s planning.”

“So we have two issues of concern. The first is an abusive professor on the university faculty. The other is the apparent unwillingness of leadership at the university to address this behavior appropriately. A corollary to the second is the possibility that this inappropriate protection goes up to the board of supervisors.”

“Do we know who Wainright gave a copy of the report to on the board of sups?”

Gabriel shook his head. “Not for sure, but I would assume Brian Walker’s father. Plus Cecilia mentioned ‘she’ had received a copy of the report, and there are only two women on the board. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t go to the board. You go over their head. Dr. Charles Lathrop recruited you into academia when you retired?”

“He did.” John studied Gabriel’s handsome face. “And now he’s Governor Martinez’s cabinet minister for education.”

“If I was the head of education in New Mexico, I would rather not hear about this from the newspaper.”

“He’s a political appointee, though. The board has the power, control of the money. He does have a role in hiring and firing the senior executives if he wants to use that power, but it’s rarely done.” John sighed. “I don’t know, Gabriel. I don’t really have much interest in going back into the classroom. I’m not accomplishing anything there. Maybe I need to take my resignation off the table and let’s just get this job done, get Brian Walker out of the university.”

“You don’t want to go back? What do you want to do?”

John looked up. “I don’t know. I’ve been used to doing work that mattered. Now I’m just….”

“You’re feeling like Ulysses. ‘It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.’ If you want to go up to Santa Fe and see Lathrop, I can take you in my chopper.”

“Like old times.” John smiled to see the eagerness in Gabriel’s face. “What’s this one called?”

“Torii Motoada. He died a beautiful death in service to his shogun. It’s my last warhorse.”

“Why’s it the last?”

“I’m going to have to sell it, John. Too expensive to keep up with the maintenance and insurance. I need to make sure the family has everything they need. They’ll keep the house. I’m thinking about giving Martha my retirement.”

“The whole thing? Seems like a lot, your equity in the house and your entire military pension.”

“It won’t be enough, not with the kids. I don’t want them to have to change anything else. I mean, that way should be easiest on them, right? Life goes on, and they just see me a bit less often, like I was deployed.”

“I’m sorry, Gabriel.”

He shook his head. “It’s going to be worth it in the end. But come out with me one more time before I have to sell the pony, okay?”

“I’ll always ride with you.”

J
OHN
was already in bed when Gabriel found the book and brought it in. “I knew you’d have Tennyson on your shelf. I’ve been thinking about Ulysses. I always thought it was about a warrior after the war, but it’s more than that. It’s about what it feels like to get old. I think that’s how you’re feeling, stuck doing work you don’t believe in. Listen to this: ‘How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use!’”

“Yep. That about covers it.”

“This is the line I love: ‘Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world, whose margins fade for ever and for ever when I move.’
I’ve always loved the moving. I could see it just ahead, the next place, mountains with new crags, little hidden lakes blue as mirrors, and the stars, new stars scattered across the sky, different stars from the ones at home. The new things I could see in my warhorse, when we took to the sky. I feel like a poet.” Gabriel moved his hand up to his throat. “I don’t have the words of the poets, but I have the feelings. Maybe everyone does.”

“I loved the moving too. But for me it was the challenge of the work. Learning how to get things done. The new cultures, the new religions, the new languages. Like learning the steps of a beautiful and complicated dance.”

Gabriel put the book next to the bed and climbed in between the sheets. He reached out, touched John’s face, moved his fingers down across his forehead, traced the line of his nose. “You don’t even realize it, do you, how good-looking you are? You have one of those faces that keeps getting better looking with age.”

“I have a boring, ordinary face. Nothing you say can change that. It’s been helpful, actually, in my work. I’m frequently overlooked by men who are taller and more physically powerful.”

“That’s a mistake.”

“Yes, it is. You’re the handsome one in this bed. Tall, dark, and dangerous.” Gabriel grinned at him. “I know, I’m not a poet either. But I have the feelings of a poet. Half the squadron used to watch you walking into the hanger, looking at your bird, rolling on your feet like your balls were titanium steel. I’ve seen men drool when you bent over to look in the cockpit.”

“If I was walking around with titanium balls, then I’d just had a briefing and been told I was going to take General Mitchel into a war zone, and don’t fuck it up and get him killed, please.”

“You happy with the law? Do you like what you’re doing?”

“Fair. I thought I would hate the paperwork, but I’m slowing down. I don’t mind so much the time at a desk. I really like the strategy. It’s a war game. Not like the real thing, but close enough for my retirement years. I’m shooting money instead of real weapons. That’s okay, I guess, for an arthritic old pilot.”

“Are you getting arthritis?”

“My left knee hurts like a bitch when I run,” Gabriel said. “I’ve been walking on the treadmill, if you can believe that shit.”

“Maybe we can go hiking in the foothills.” Gabriel was grinning at the ceiling again. “What?”

“This. You and me, talking things over before we go to sleep.”

“You’re probably used to having somebody to talk to before you fall asleep,” John said.

“Lately, there’s been this wide, deep space between us, and neither one of us wanted to bring up anything to start a fight. So we’d just lay in the same bed, both of us trying to think of something to say, something that would reach across this open space and keep us together. Keep us a family. So we usually said nothing, and neither of us was sleeping very well. But you’re something different. I used to wonder if you wanted to talk, and then I was afraid you were thinking really deep, important thoughts and I didn’t want to disturb your concentration while you were trying to save some tribe from genocide or something.”

“And now you know I was just thinking about your ass in a flight suit.”

I
T
WAS
nearly morning when the sounds of weeping came through the wall from the garage. John sat up, threw his legs over the side of the bed, and Gabriel sat up with him. “John, is that Kim? It doesn’t sound like him.”

“Let’s find out.” He pulled on his sweats, and Gabriel slipped on a pair of pajama bottoms and a tee shirt. John knocked quietly on the kitchen door to the garage, then pushed the door open. Kim was sitting on the side of the bed with another boy. There was a strong smell of beer and cigarette smoke in the air, and the bed was covered with the pieces of Kim’s big cameras, the professional models. The boy was weeping, his face turned to Kim’s shoulder, and Kim had an arm wrapped around him, was talking in a soft little singsong voice, like he’d use to soothe a scared child. The boy looked up when John and Gabriel walked in. “It’s okay,” Kim said, and it sounded like he’d said it a thousand times already. “You’re safe here. This is my Uncle John and my Uncle Gabriel. They won’t hurt you, I promise.”

The boy was small and frail, and looked impossibly young. He had a little blue streak in his fair hair. John had seen him walking into Effex with Brain Walker the night they had gone with Kim. The boy’s pretty young face was purple and bleeding. Someone had pounded him viciously with their fists. His mouth was cut and swollen, and the left eye was purple and closed shut, with a laceration through the eyebrow that had three neat stitches. Blood was spattered down the front of his white shirt. “You’ve been to the ER?”

“Urgent Care,” Kim said. “The ER’s too expensive. Billy only has the university’s health insurance.”

John reached behind him and pulled up a chair. Gabriel had disappeared back into the kitchen, came back with a glass of water. “You have any pain medicine? Tylenol?”

“I think I’ve got some in the bathroom,” Kim said.

“I’ll go look.” Gabriel handed the boy the water, and he took a thirsty sip. He came back with a bottle, shook a couple of capsules out into Billy’s hand.

John studied them. “Kim, you have a clean tee shirt Billy can sleep in?”

Kim looked around the room like he’d never seen it before. John could see the strain on Kim’s face. Both of the boys looked close to breaking down. Billy had just started to wail first.

“Okay, hang tight.” John went into his bedroom, pulled out an army tee shirt and exercise shorts, and brought them back to Kim’s room. He handed them over, went into the bathroom, and looked for a clean towel in the linen closet. “Okay, Billy, you get in the shower and get cleaned up, then lay down on Kim’s bed. I’m going to bring you a little ice pack when you’re asleep for your face, to keep the swelling down.”

“Kim, can you stay?” Billy was shaking when he tried to stand, like his legs wouldn’t hold him, and he reached out and clutched Kim’s arm for a moment.

“I’ll stay.” Kim waited until Billy was steadier on his feet, then went to his outside door, checked the lock, and checked the windows. “Okay, everything’s secure. I’ll just be in the kitchen with my uncles while you’re in the shower. I’ll leave the door open, Billy. You’ll be able to see us. Okay?”

Billy nodded, went into the bathroom, but left the door half-open. Kim followed John into the kitchen, propped his bedroom door open with a kitchen chair. “Billy, I’m right here.”

Kim sat down at the table. John studied his shattered face, pulled out the folder from the PI about Brian Walker from his briefcase. He opened it to the photos, pushed them across the table to Kim. “These are the boys who had to get medical care after dating your professor. The PI I hired got access to their records. These photos were taken at the hospitals. You see the dates, Kim? The first was taken four years ago. A long time before you were ever on his radar. A long time before I was. This isn’t about you or me. This is what he does.”

“I’m having a hard time accepting that right now—that what happened with me didn’t lead in some way to this. Violence leads to more violence, everybody knows that.”

“Kim, that’s such a simplistic way of looking at things, too simplistic. You don’t understand, son. Motivations and the conflicts that arise between people are so much more complicated than it seems on the surface. You can’t explain the mysteries of human behavior with a phrase you can print on a tee shirt.”

Kim gave a hiccup of a laugh that turned into a cry, and he covered his face with his hands. Gabriel picked him up, sat down in the chair, and cradled him in his lap. Kim curled into Gabriel’s chest, cried like his heart was breaking. Maybe it was. “Kim, you’ve got to trust us. Trust your Uncle John. I’ve seen him pull off miracles. I’ve seen him negotiate peace between tribes that were armed with enough old Russian artillery to wipe out a couple of mountains, with a hundred years of violence between them. It’s about trust, okay? He didn’t explain what he was doing then. He didn’t need to. We trusted him, trusted he had a plan. And in over twenty-five years, Kim, he never betrayed his code. He never behaved unethically to get a job done. Once you take the high road, you don’t change your mind and decide halfway up the road’s too hard, too rocky, or too steep. You don’t turn around and take the easy way. We’re taking the high road because it’s the right thing to do. We didn’t call in the black ops guys to take care of this bastard. We’re doing this the right way, working through the system. You have to stand tall and trust us to see this through.”