The Unit (13 page)

I wake up without a hangover for the first time since Ookie died. I get up before it’s completely light, but I let the men sleep. There’s only me and one other man, George Washington. George still has an hour of guard duty left to stand, but he sees me and I wave him in from our little sandbagged bunker on the highway. He slings his rifle and walks over on his skinny legs. He’s carrying a book. It’s an old paperback copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
from the high school. I don’t like my men to read when they’re standing guard, but I let it pass.

“You’re relieved from duty, George,” I say. “Go ahead and take your turn with the girl.”

“Thanks, Bill,” he says.

He has a deep voice, and I like how our conversation makes us sound like professional soldiers—salty fuckers who know exactly what we’re doing. George nods and walks across the parking lot, whistling. He disappears into the junkyard shack, and I hear the girl’s voice say, “No, no, no,” and then rise into a long scream.

She quiets down after a few minutes. I stoke the fire and make a pot of coffee and watch the sun come up, what’s left of it, behind the shit-brown clouds. I don’t much like the feeling of being alone. I sit in front of the fire and watch the world take shape in the light of morning. A breeze blows down from Shasta. It’s cold and it smells like pine and black lava rocks and the snow that fell when all of us were locked up in juvie.

I look over at the junkyard shack. For some reason, I don’t like the idea that another man is with the girl. When George comes back out, I have to fight the urge to pay her a visit of my own.

When everyone is up and out of their motel rooms, I pass word that we’ll be having us a Hunt Club adventure. I watch the word spread and some of the men think that maybe
they’ll
be the animal we’ll hunt, but Luscious tells them the girl’s family isn’t exactly room temperature yet. Looks of understanding come onto their morning faces. Normally, the men get happy when we have a hunt ahead of us, but now they get all shifty-eyed and mumbling and then they do a really bad job of pretending to be happy.

“Okay. What the hell’s the matter? Somebody speak up.”

They hem and haw and then one of the Kellys stands up.

“I do love me a good hunt, boss. You know that, right? It’s not that I don’t want to take care of business. It’s just that if I go out hunting, I’ll miss my turn with the girl.”

The other men nod. Just about all of them. It doesn’t make any sense because sixteen men are taking turns with the girl. I’ve done the math. Each man gets a turn every four hours, so it’s sixty-four hours between turns.

“Well, shit.”

I don’t know what else to say. I could order them to go hunting, but they’d be really pissed off at me. I could ask for volunteers, but what if none of them stood up?

A wind blows over us, and it’s so nose-hurt cold that it makes my eyes water. The fire flares and then almost goes out. We turn our backs so the dust won’t blind us. The gust picks up even more, and it gets ahold of the Golden Eagle Motel sign and lifts it into the sky and takes it away into the sky, spinning. The sign crashes into a tree and comes apart, its plastic bits of red, white, and blue spread out on the highway. Things settle down for a second, but it seems like it’s ten degrees colder.

“Well, that just cooks it. Okay. You men want some R&R? You got it.”

They smile, but some of them look at me like maybe they’re coming to understand they weren’t thinking straight, back when they feared me. I walk away. I start to wonder what the girl is doing to them. What the hell could a little hundred-pound girl do to cast a spell over my pirates?

We walked about five miles south last night and came to an airfield. The ground was in shadow, but I could see low structures against the sky. A cyclone deer fence lined the perimeter, but the gate was open. We headed for the nearest building, a steel hangar for light aircraft.

A dog barked. I heard the sound of an animal trotting on dry grass. We waited, but there wasn’t any more sound. We crossed the tiny flightline and I opened the sliding door and peered into the first hangar. I couldn’t see anything, but I was tired and as fatalistic as I’ve ever been in my life. I walked straight inside. I held still for ten long seconds but I didn’t draw any fire, so I lit my butane lighter, hoping that the Big Guy was still on my side. Apparently, He was. The place didn’t hold any airplanes. It was stacked half full with hay bales. At least we’d be comfortable.

I pulled off my poncho and dropped my pack and put my poncho back on again. Susan’s face was stone pale, and I cut open three of the bales and made straw beds on the steps of the other bales. I vowed to myself that soon we’d be making beds for four. That, or we’d be in a better place.

I grabbed a handful of hay and put it to my face and inhaled the smell of old rye grass. In spite of the fact that I was once addicted to Western movies, I’d never been this close to so much hay. The most I ever saw was in the elephant exhibit at the zoo, but there were more than a hundred bales in the hangar. It didn’t smell sweet, but that might only be because it was old. There was something like the smell of fermentation in the air.

“It might be a little rotten, but it should make for a nice place to sleep,” I said.

“Why shouldn’t it be rotten?” Scotty said. “Everything else is.”

Susan gave him a quick hug, her arm splinted and in a sling between them. Her head barely reached his chin, and their size difference surprised me. Scott’s been taller than his mother since he was fourteen, but once I got used to the idea, I guess I stopped paying attention. Now the height difference is enormous, even though he’s more dependent upon us now than he was when he was fourteen. I said a silent prayer for him, but I couldn’t keep the accusatory tone out of it, as my opinion of God’s mysterious ways isn’t what it used to be.

We got situated. Hay isn’t as soft as you might think, but we were insulated from the ground and protected from the wind and it felt very good. And our relative comfort made me feel guilty because one of us wasn’t here, so I stood the first watch. I stood all the watches, in fact, and let them sleep. But they didn’t sleep, and I didn’t, because it was simply impossible.

At first light I leave them and walk back to the north. A gust of wind comes out of nowhere and alters my course. But I keep walking. I find a small rise and I put my binoculars on the place we left. Right away, I see that the kids have the market surrounded. One of them goes inside. He comes out, holding his arms up, a booze bottle in each hand, and the others stand and shoot into the air. Melanie isn’t with them. I scope the motel and the wrecking yard and the Mexican restaurant, but there’s no sign of her. One of the boys seems to look directly at me. He’s well out of rifle range. It has to be Bill Junior, but he doesn’t lead the boys to the attack. Maybe I imagine it, but I’m sure he’s smiling at me. He enters the store with the others, and they cart off as many supplies as they can carry, a line of dangerous ants carrying away their plunder. I watch the figures from a thousand yards away and they aren’t human, but enemy, and I feel no guilt for what I’m about to do.

Rocking on my heels and holding it all in. Holding my head in my hands, greasy hair and skin, my long fingernails biting into my scalp. I squeeze until I feel blood oozing into my shirt. The gash in my face from where the kid clubbed me opens up, too, and I have myself a good, cleansing bleed. Rocking and bleeding and praying for guidance and wisdom and a temporary transfer of vengeance from God to me.

I return to the airfield. Susan heard the celebratory gunshots and she comes out of the hangar and stands close to me. She leaves and comes back holding a shirt we took from the market. It’s a “Get High in Weed, California” T-shirt and she also has the bottle of Jim Beam I took from the dead kid. She tears the shirt into strips and cleans my wounds. She offers me the bottle, but I find enough strength to wave it away. She kneels with me and holds me, but she isn’t crying. She feels hard to me, inside and out. Her hug feels like a goodbye hug, and maybe it is.

I don’t know how much time passes. I know I can’t go after Melanie until after sunset. The wind is blowing from the west, so I’ll make my approach from the east. But not yet. Not just yet. It’s going to be a long day.

*     *     *

Scotty is as listless as I’ve ever seen him. The lines in Susan’s face have deepened. Scotty bled in the night and the bandages around his head are stained dark. We unwrap him. Before the last wrap is removed I get an impossible image of him, healed, smiling at me with his bright, young intensity. His clear blue eyes both sending and receiving.

But no. His face is cut to ribbons. Jagged cuts line his cheeks and jaws, welded into a sort of jigsaw puzzle by clotted blood. His eyes are swollen and red. I spark up my lighter a foot from his face.

“Anything?”

“I can see shapes okay, but I can’t really get them in focus.”

“Well, it’s up to God.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Don’t give up on Him. He hasn’t given up on us.”

“How can you tell?”

“We’re still breathing.”

“Whatever.”

Susan cleans his cuts with whiskey and tears the last of the tourist T-shirt into strips. She wraps his head. I give his shoulder a squeeze and he flinches.

“I know it’s not fair,” I say.

“Just leave me alone, please.”

“I’ll be leaving soon enough. How’s your hearing?”

“It’s getting better. Why?”

“You’ll need to take care of your mother.”

He’s quiet for a while. I know he wants to go with me, but it’s impossible.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll stay with Mom.”

I pick up his carbine and press it into his hands. He runs his fingers over the selector switch to make sure it’s on safe.

“Okay, then.

“Good hunting,” he says. “Good luck.”

There’s a lot more of him behind his words now. He’s growing to fill the position he’s been forced into. He hasn’t completely accepted his wounds yet, but he’s not out of the fight.

“Thanks.”

It’s all I manage to say, even though I want to say more.

I drift away from him and stand close to Susan. We try to come up with a plan, but we keep coming back to the old standby—fight or die. I walk away before the tears can begin—hers, mine, I don’t know the difference anymore. I walk to the other hangar. I go through the door, holding the Beretta close to my belly. There’s a Cessna 182 inside. The engine compartment is open, but the tires are fully inflated. I look at the engine and everything seems to be in working condition. I open the pilot-side door and turn the wheel and push on the rudder pedals, and everything moves smoothly.

Scotty was about to get his instrument rating, just before the bombs. He was flying VFR all over California and taking lessons for his instrument rating and talking about getting his multi-engine rating. At night he screwed around with flight sims on the computer. He swore he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, but it was no mystery what he loved.

But yeah, Scotty’s not up to flying right now. So it’s too bad I never learned how to fly myself. I very much wanted to get my license when I was younger but something always came up. And then I got too old, too cautious and comfort-seeking, to want to crank and bank, even though it would’ve been a cool thing if I could’ve learned to fly with Scotty. But I can’t afford to open that box of regrets just now.

One wall of the hangar is lined with pegboard and neatly arranged tools. The place smells of bare metal and solvents and scrubbed concrete. It’s the kind of place that always made my own father happy. Metal and order and work. There’s a tiny office area. The only chair in the office is empty. Yes, it’s all clear. I look at the shop area and then I get an idea.

I go back to get Scotty’s .22 rifle. He’s still holding his newly acquired carbine and he says something about how it might not be such a good idea to give Stevie Wonder an automatic rifle. It makes me smile, but then I stop and I give a little laugh that sounds pathetic even to my own ears. He shrugs, but he keeps the smile and it makes me proud.

I return to the shop area and I prop the .22 in a corner. I find a scrap of two-inch-diameter aluminum tubing. I lock it in a vise and use a hacksaw to cut an eight-inch piece, the sound of my work filling the shop and making me feel useful and vulnerable all at the same time. A nudie calendar hangs above the workbench. I ignore it for as long as I can, and I have other things on my mind, but I’m a man so I have no choice but to admire God’s creation. The model is wearing nothing but a big smile. Her breasts are magnificent, and I have to lean in close to see if they’re real. It takes me a few seconds to realize that some of the days of the calendar are crossed out with black felt pen. I try to remember what day it is today. If I have it right, the last day crossed out on the calendar was yesterday.

I hear a nightmare sound. The sound of a single-action revolver being pulled to full cock. Someone is behind me. Stupid me, stupid day, stupid life cut short by stupid haste. And my family, too? Will they pay for my idiocy?

“Whatcha doing, boy?” A phlegmy voice. “Put down the hacksaw. Let’s see your hands. Move away from that little rifle. This ain’t television and I ain’t fixin’ to shoot warning shots.”