The General and the Horse-Lord (2 page)

G
ENERAL
J
OHN
M
ITCHEL
was not a happy man. He flipped through the pages of the essay and studied the nicely formatted footnotes at the end, then added the paper to the small pile on the corner of his desk. He was segregating the really good essays, the ones that were well-written and well thought out and researched. The ones that had been written and sold by hungry graduate students, in other words, because no way did any of the knucklehead freshmen in his Intro to American Political History write these small gems.

What to do, what to do. They were originals, that was the problem. He could run a poorly written plagiarism through any number of online databases like Turnitin, catch the lazy sons of bitches that way. But this latest batch of papers was too well done for that. He mentally reviewed the current crop of grad students in his reading seminar on international leadership and political theory. They weren’t a bad bunch, but he didn’t think any single one of them would quote W.E.B. Du Bois, the Inaugural Address of JFK, and the letters of Lord Byron to reference a single point on how a people lost their free will.

He pushed back from his desk and walked to the window of his office at the University of New Mexico. The grounds were spring green and cool, and the kids were lying about on the grassy knolls, earbuds in place and phones in their hands. He wondered if they were so distracted by their ever-present electronics that any deep thinking, the type of deep thinking that actually led to learning, was impossible. That was the problem, he thought, or, one of the problems, because he could make a list of problems without much effort at all. The kids could call up facts with scary quickness, but could they think about them long enough to understand what those facts meant? Was abstract thinking going the way of the dodo?

Good God. He sounded like an old man. He felt like one too, railing at the failures and posturing of the new generation, kids so young and so clueless, soft as a bunch of newly hatched baby birds, he sometimes wondered if they even had a language in common. It had been a bitch of a year. He looked at the calendar on his wall, another anachronism he wasn’t ready to give up, a calendar made out of paper, and onto which a person could write notes—and saw he was two days shy of the one-year mark since he’d retired from the army. Two days past his fifty-second birthday.

The first year out of the military was a tough adjustment for most people, but he’d never really thought it would be a problem for him. He’d been preparing for his retirement career for over five years, doing postdoctoral seminars in political history and educational theory, studying the new technologies that allowed professors to teach online. His field of study was leadership. He’d been as organized and efficient as anyone could be, but he’d not been prepared for the fact he didn’t like the little shits he was supposed to be teaching to lead the world for the next fifty years.

It alarmed him, this desire to slap some sense into the kids. His image of himself was mellow, Zen calm in the face of crisis, a deep and original thinker. He’d spent an entire career around young men and women. Maybe the kids who joined the military were different, a little more structured? Considerably more disciplined? Or maybe over the last years of his career, as he’d moved up the ladder, he’d been insulated from the kids by the senior enlisted and his officers. Maybe the majority of the screwups and boneheaded behavior had been dealt with at a lower level, and he’d never even known about it.

If he was being honest, though, he would also have to admit he’d been lonelier than he’d expected to be, now that he was retired. Once you’re out, you’re out, and he missed the company of the men he’d spent his life with. He had friends, but it wasn’t the same as serving together, wearing the same uniform, having a mission in common, and the feeling of yearning for something lost, of missing something vital, had been twisting his stomach for months. He’d gone to see a doctor, even, and been told to take Prilosec. They’d wanted to schedule him for an endoscopy, but he never went back. The Prilosec did nothing, which confirmed his belief that what was sitting in his stomach like a ball of lead was loneliness.

He stared at the small stack of essays on his desk. Enough. What was he going to do about this?

H
E
WAITED
until the majority of the kids had unplugged themselves from their various wires. The seminar was small, and they sat around tables to facilitate lively discussion and debate. The tables also allowed him to walk around behind them and see who was texting on their phones under the edge of the table, but that was just a perk. He handed back the essays. “Really very interesting work by many of you. So interesting, in fact, that I would like to know more about your topics and research. We’re going to do an oral defense of your papers, and the final grade will be a combination of both your written work and the oral defense.”

A couple of kids were so pale and sick they looked like they were going to throw up. He pointed to Seymour White, the alleged author of the W.E.B. Du Bois masterpiece. “Mr. White, we’ll start with you.”

T
HE
dean of students leaned back in his chair. “John, I have to say I’m impressed. Your documentation is flawless. I wouldn’t expect anything less. But just to brief me, how did you manage to fail 89% of your entire freshman class at the final exam?”

“I was expecting it to be worse, but some of them have the makings of world-class bullshit artists,” John said.

“You made them give oral defenses of their final essays, is that what I understand?”

“All they had to do was describe the topic of the essay, two major sources, and their conclusions. A single conclusion was all I asked for.”

“So am I to understand they not only bought their papers, they didn’t even bother to read them before they turned them in? Lazy little shits.” The dean grinned at him. “But still, we have a problem.”

The general narrowed his eyes at the dean, but otherwise was quite still.

“The complaint was made, and is, I’m afraid, a valid complaint, that the oral defense of the final essay was not described in the syllabus. You can’t change your scoring at the last minute and add a new requirement. But,” he sat up, a smile brightening his face, “I understand you scared a couple of them so badly they’re changing majors from political science to health care. God knows we need more nurses. You’re a legend, General. Brass balls and all that. But figure out what to do about your grades, okay? We need them by close of business today.”

“S
O
WHAT
did you do?”

John shook his head and reached for the black pepper. “I never assumed they would let me fail the entire class. I had backup grades ready.” He twisted the grinder, and the ripe sweet spice of fresh black pepper on a grilled sirloin filled his nose.

“Of course you did.”

He looked up at the laughter in Gabriel’s voice. Gabriel Sanchez, Chief Warrant Officer-5, retired, his oldest friend. They had served together as comrades and brothers-in-arms on five continents and through every American conflict for more than twenty-five years. They understood each other, because both had followed the warrior’s path since they’d been young men. Warriors put honor first, and service, and the safety of the tribe. Everyone called Gabriel the Horse-Lord, for the lethal Apache helicopters he’d flown. “So how are you? What’s happening in your house?”

He watched the line deepen between Gabriel’s eyebrows as he frowned. “All quiet on the Western front.” He hesitated, then, “Juan is having some trouble in school. Flunked algebra and he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t care. He’s acting weird. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

“He’s fourteen, right?”

“Yeah. Though he seems to be swinging wildly between eight and forty. Martha had to put a parental filter on the computers because he was looking at porn. It was cartoon porn, for Christ’s sake. I mean that literally—cartoon girls with big startled eyes and cartoon dicks thicker than my fist. Martha is pissed at me because I laughed about it, told her to blow it off. She went off on both of us about disrespecting women.”

“You ever look at porn when you were a kid?” John smiled across the table, picturing Gabriel at fourteen.

“I tried to, but all that was available was
National Geographic
, and I just wasn’t that interested in breasts. I did jerk off to a picture of an Apache attack helo when I was in high school.”

“I believe that. How’s Martie? I can’t believe she’s already eight.”

“She’s good.” Gabriel cut into his steak. “Very bossy and thinks she knows everything. She would have been the one kid in your class who wrote her own paper and leapt at the chance of an oral defense. You’d have had to give her a time limit, otherwise she’d have defended for an hour.”

“I had one of those kids. Her paper was only marginally interesting and adequately researched but she was very pleased with herself for actually having written it herself, as opposed to the rest of the class. She was so smug I was afraid one of the other kids might drag her into an alley and punch her in the mouth.” John did not ask about Martha, Gabriel’s wife. He felt a little constraint about Martha, as if that private part of his friend’s life was off-limits to him.

“So where’s Kim? I thought I’d see him a bit more since he’s staying in your garage.”

John shook his head. “Talk about swinging wildly between eight and forty. He’s dyed a bright blue streak in his hair. Said something about a person called Perry making ‘blue happen,’ and now he’s got a blue braid hanging down in his face while he eats. School is still too easy for him, so he’s not taking it seriously, and he’s got a job down at Ho Ho’s, cooking Chinese food. I see him working a wok when he should be in class. He’s in grad school, the MFA in photography.”

“Ho Ho’s? You mean that place on the corner of Yale and Central?”

John nodded. “He claims it’s the favorite restaurant of the homeless in Albuquerque.”

Gabriel studied him, then ate a forkful of baked potato. “Actually, I didn’t know homeless people had a favorite restaurant.”

“That’s what I said, too, and got a lecture about park benches not being equipped with microwaves, and what were they supposed to do? Apparently, Ho Ho’s is cheap and gives large portions with lots of rice and noodles, so they can share with each other. This makes the restaurant popular with both the homeless and the hungry student population. But he might have just been winding me up.”

“Kim’s Korean. That place is Chinese.”

“He claims all chinks are welcome at Ho Ho’s. It’s actually owned by a couple of Vietnamese sisters.”

 John pushed his empty plate away. “You want to have coffee at my place?”

He felt Gabriel watching him, but he kept his eyes on the table. Then he looked at his old friend, felt the warmth, and the welcome, in dark eyes brown as sandalwood.

Gabriel was smiling at him. “Yeah, I would. It’s been a while. Too long if you ask me.”

Just what John was thinking.

Gabriel followed him home from the restaurant, parked his pickup truck behind John’s car in the driveway. Inside, John pulled out the Kona Gold coffee beans from the cabinet and put a handful in the grinder, listened while Gabriel settled into the couch. He stretched his arms out along the top of the couch, laid his head back and sighed. His eyes were closed, his face relaxed. Not many people got to see Gabriel like this.

When the coffee finished brewing, John carried a couple of mugs into the living room and handed one to Gabriel. He set his cup down on the coffee table and settled down next to him on the couch. “So what’s been happening with you? You’ve been in practice about six months. Is the law what you were hoping it would be?”

Gabriel had his nose in the cup, smelling the rich coffee. “Yeah, it’s good. Fine. Not….”

Not like the army.
He didn’t need to say it. John felt it too. “You miss it still?” Gabriel nodded. “Yeah, me too. But it’s a young man’s game.”

Gabriel had finished law school the year before, deciding on a midlife career in public service. John also suspected he was doing it to make Martha happy. She’d been a good army wife, following him across the world, managing the family while he was deployed. John thought she would like being a lawyer’s wife. “I don’t like the young lawyers right out of school much. I sound like an old man, looking at them and thinking what a bunch of selfish, spoiled little pricks they are. Money, money, money. You could take the whole crowd of them right off a cliff following the sweet green scent of money. I don’t know, John. I look at them and think, who the fuck is left? Where are the leaders? Is there an ounce of fortitude in any of them? They get hysterical when they can’t remember the pocket where they stowed their phones.”

John picked up his cup and drank the coffee down. “Now you know why I had a shit fit and pretended to flunk my entire freshman class. Not that I think it did any good. I just wanted to see if any single one of them would stand up and admit they hadn’t a clue because they’d bought their papers.”

“Did they?”

John shook his head.

“I like the practice, though. It’s like the law firm of last resort. For the clueless and the desperate. And the broke. I don’t think I’ll ever have a pot to piss in. But I’m always happy to stick a thorn in the fat asses of the establishment.” Gabriel reached out and took his empty cup. “You want a refill?”

“No. I think I’m going to grab a quick shower. Finish what’s in the pot if you want.”

John stepped into the shower off his bedroom, gave himself a brisk scrub-down. He toweled off and wrapped the towel around his waist. Gabriel was waiting for him, sitting on the side of the bed. He’d undressed down to his boxers, clothes neatly folded over the back of a chair. He stood and reached out, pulled John closer by the towel around his waist. He leaned forward, moved his warm mouth across John’s shoulder, up his neck. “I love the smell of Dial soap on your skin.” He pulled the towel away and gathered John into his arms. “My old friend. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you.”