Keeping Promise Rock (14 page)

He hadn’t asked for that, but it sure had saved his life.

“I hear you,” he said blankly, not seeing the gentle spring evening or Jon’s concerned face. He was lost instead in another day, hot and sunny, with honey-thick sunshine dripping through the skylights and Crick’s off-key adolescent voice cracking enough to startle the horses.

Jon sighed, knowing he hadn’t made so much as a dent in Deacon’s determined self-sufficiency. “Dammit… just… just promise me you’ll ask, would you?”

Deacon sighed, because he probably wouldn’t and they both knew it, and then tried a grin, but something about it only seemed to make Jon sad.

“Here,” he said at last, standing up and stretching. “Let’s go inside before Crick burns the whole thing and spends the rest of the evening apologizing.”

Dinner was a success of sorts—Crick claimed he was happy with the outcome, everybody wished him well, and Amy even shed a couple of tears. In the car as they were dropping off the girls, Benny told him to fuck off and die, and then she hugged him fiercely and told him that he’d better fucking come back, and neither of them had the heart to chide her for swearing. Crick watched the girls walk down the broken walkway to their home and looked at Deacon with a sudden horror.

“Christ, Deacon—I think they need me.”

Deacon hadn’t been able to look at him as they’d pulled away.

Fucking dumbshit. Of course they did.

After that, the next two days were spent in a horrible normalcy. In the end, as it turned out, goodbye was only a matter of walking away from each other like it didn’t matter, like they would see each other again in hours, like they hadn’t spent the last two weeks making love like honeymooners and the last eleven years in each other’s lives like family.

Just that simple, really.

They kissed, long and hard and heartbreakingly, in front of the car as they were loading it with the single duffle that comprised what Crick was allowed to bring with him, and that was the end. They were hetero-Keeping Promise Rock

brothers, casual friends, as Deacon dropped him off in front of the recruiters’ in the warming chill of a May morning.

“Let me know when your leave starts,” Deacon said roughly from the car window.

“I won’t have time to come back and visit…,” Crick started softly. It wouldn’t do to get too upset, not here when the front walk was all military.

Deacon knew his own face was a rather passive mask of neutral concern, but all of Crick’s love was staring out at him from his expressive brown eyes. Deacon was pretty sure that, for both their sakes, he had to get the hell away from him before they fucked Crick large by their eyes alone.

“I’ll be there,” Deacon said firmly. “Just give me the dates when you got ’em.” And then, because he saw the bus coming, “Take care of yourself, boy. I’ll write.”

Crick nodded and wiped at the side of his nose with a shaking finger.

“You’d better.” He mouthed, “Love you, Deacon,” and Deacon mouthed,

“Love you back.” Then Deacon pulled away.

He drove to The Pulpit
and fed the horses, then went inside and cleaned up after breakfast. It was Tuesday, so he went into the study to gather the bills and fucked up and glanced inside their newly refurbished bedroom. The green, ivory, and lavender pillows all lay heaped at the top of the bed, and the comforter was bunched up at the foot. The sheets smelled like their sex the night before.

Deacon wasn’t sure how long he stood there, fighting the impulse to just lay on that bed and smell Crick on the sheets, but when he finally made it to the study to do bills, he had a hell of a time seeing the figures through the blur in his eyes.

cart III

Letters Through the

Looking Glass

An Abrupt Change of Plans

CRICK hadn’t been thinking too clearly when he signed up at the recruiters’ office. The fact was, he had some very specialized skills that the Army would be
very
interested in acquiring, and he hadn’t tried to capitalize on them at all.

Four weeks into boot camp at Fort Benning, he was called into his CO’s office, honestly wondering what in the hell he’d done now.

It wasn’t that he got into trouble. Deacon was right. Once he got his hair cut and put on fatigues, he was like every other grunt—a little taller, a little ganglier, and his hands and feet tended to get in the way more often than not, but there was no pink T-shirt, there was no big banner, and since nobody asked him to decorate, his “gayness” or lack thereof never came into question.

But he was never going to be soldier of the year.

Crick was pretty fit going in—he worked the horses every day, flung hay, fixed machinery, helped maintain the property, and, in general, kept up with a very physical job. That, and Deacon pretty much pushed his ass out the door three times a week to go running with him in the cool of the morning along the levee road. The physical conditioning was intense, but it wasn’t going to kill him, and it was pretty much what he expected, so he could deal.

He could even keep his mouth shut—which surprised the hell out of him.

The problem seemed to be guns. Crick and guns were not friends, and he couldn’t really say why. He and Parish’s shotgun had formed a working relationship based on a mutual hatred of rattlesnakes, and although Deacon had the bright idea of buying a couple of potbelly pigs to keep the fuckers off the land, Crick had wasted his share of them before Porky and Petunia had come to live at The Pulpit
.
Crick had learned to clean it and to disassemble it and basically how the damned thing worked, and playing with M-16s had not been on his list of fears when he’d arrived on the base to have the drill sergeant scream in his face.

But the first time he’d disassembled the gun and put it back together, he had stared blankly at the table.

“What
is
your
problem
, Private!” Crick had been ignoring mean people most of his life. Listening for the meat of what the drill sergeant wanted and ignoring the acidic sauce meant to break down his sense of self was a lot easier than his last two years of high school, that was for damned sure.

“There’s a piece left over,” he said, puzzled.

“What?” The drill sergeant had been truly at a loss and suddenly human—a man in his forties, a career soldier who was proud that the boys in his charge left Fort Benning able to defend themselves as well as six weeks of intensive training could prepare them to do. A gun with a piece missing was a bad thing in terms of survival.

“What the hell is that?” The drill sergeant almost mumbled to himself. “I’ve never seen that piece of metal before in my life….” Crick and the drill sergeant had missed lunch, still stuck in weapons practice, trying to figure out where the little bit of metal fit into the now re-disassembled M-16. They never did figure it out—Crick’s weapon had to be replaced because they were too afraid of firing it. This time, the sergeant breathed like a dragon down Crick’s neck to make sure he didn’t break something or take something apart that didn’t need to be taken apart, and this time the M-16 seemed to go together just fine.

But it shot three feet to the left.

They hadn’t believed Crick at first. He’d sat behind the hay bale and fired the damned thing at the way-off target, same as everyone else, but his target remained as pure as a virgin’s dreams. (Well, maybe that was a bad analogy, Crick reflected as the drill sergeant spat it into his face—his Keeping Promise Rock

own dreams as a virgin had been just as filthy as his dreams now, only a wee bit more desperate.)

“I’m firing into the target!” Crick had protested, and the private next to him said, “The hell you are; my target’s shredded!” The drill sergeant had looked at Crick with narrowed eyes, as though maybe this was all his fault. “Let me see your weapon, Soldier!” Crick handed it over, and target practice stalled as the drill sergeant aimed that fucker and pulled the trigger… and the remains of Private Compton’s target shredded under the onslaught.

The drill sergeant grunted, put the safety on, commandeered Private Compton’s gun, and asked Crick to shoot at the target. Finally—
finally—

Crick’s target got some penetration, and Crick, for one, was relieved for the poor thing. He knew how it felt.

The drill sergeant looked at Crick’s gun and then looked at Crick, a sort of reluctant sense of attachment in his pewter gray eyes. “Son,” he said like he was mulling something over, “do you have any particular skills that might be of use to this Army?”

“Skills?” Crick asked, feeling dumb.

“Skills, son. What did you do before you joined up?” Crick smiled. This was easy. “I was an EMT, Sergeant, when I wasn’t working the horse ranch.”

Crick managed to surprise the guy twice in six weeks—someone told him later it was a record. “Anything else you can do?” he asked faintly.

“Draw, Sergeant.”

“Draw?”

“Portraits—that sort of thing. I was going off to art school before I”—he grimaced—“before I lost my fucking mind and ended up here.” Wasn’t that an old joke? The guy got his heart broke and joined the Foreign Legion?

“Portraits.” The drill sergeant shook his head. “Christ all-fucking-mighty. Boy, you need to report to the CO tomorrow after breakfast, hear me? Skip weapons training….” The man shook his head and looked at the gun as though it might just jump out and bite him. “By all means, you’re relieved of weapons training, you hear?”

Crick shrugged. The guy barked orders with a voice made strong and gruff with twenty years of practice. Yeah, sure—he heard.

The next day he marched as crisply as he could (although he heard drill sergeant’s voice in his head screaming something about

“meandering”) through to the CO of new recruits and confronted the man behind his military-neat but over-stacked desk.

“Sir!” He saluted smartly—in his effort to look as un-gay as possible, he’d elected to do as many things “smartly” as possible. Saluting was fairly easy, as far as that went.

Captain Roberts (as the little plaque on his desk said) was a thirty-ish man with blond hair, brown skin, and pale eyes—and right now those pale eyes were fixed on Crick with the same sort of pained exasperation his drill sergeant had.

“Son, am I to understand you signed up for the Army and neglected to mention your EMT training or your horsemanship experience?” Crick shrugged and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

The captain took a deep breath. “Did you not know these things would maybe, I don’t know, benefit you when we’re fighting a war where camels are a form of transportation?”

Crick wrinkled his nose. Parish and Deacon had actually taken him to a circus once, because hot
damn
,
had they done his birthdays up right, and he’d gotten a close-up view of a camel. “About the only thing camels and horses have in common, sir, is that people ride them.” Because it sure as shit wasn’t the smell, the attitude, or the fact that the fuckers spit worse than a redneck with chaw.

“What about the EMT experience?” The captain drawled, his lips quirking up in reluctant appreciation.

Crick flushed. “No, sir, it did not.”

The captain’s eyebrows raised to the roots of his beige-ish hair. “Not even a little?”

Crick blushed harder. “Sir, I had three art schools throwing money at me for two years. Let’s just say joining the Army was not the clearest bit of thinking I’ve ever done.”

That was met by a scowl. “Don’t tell me you were drunk—if your recruiter signed you up drunk, you’ll have the option of a discharge, free and clear.”

“No.” Crick shook his head and sighed. How to word this, how to word this…. “I was actually offered the thing I wanted most in the world, by the person I most wanted it with, and because I am a retarded asshole, sir, I thought I was being kicked to the curb.” The captain was looking at him now as though he had confessed to being a space alien, and he felt a sudden pressure to scream
I’m gay,
dammit, let me the fuck out of here!
But he didn’t.

“And so you signed up for the Army?” said his puzzled CO.

“And so I signed up for the Army, sir,” Crick replied.

The CO blew out a breath. “Well, son, the fact is, you have enough training as either a medic or in animal husbandry to rate a promotion to second lieutenant when you’re through with training. We could hold it over your head and say you didn’t sign up for it, so you’re stuck being a grunt until you work for it, but we need both of them too damned badly.

The question is, which one do you want to be?”

“A medic or a… a….” What was the word for it?

“Camel jockey?”

“Isn’t that a racial slur?”

“Not when we need them so damned bad. In fact, you should know that a few of the boys from your hometown signed up for that gig, if that helps make the decision any easier.”

Crick wasn’t sure if the bolt of abject horror that shot through him was apparent on his face. He had
come out
to his entire hometown. The
last
thing he wanted was to face any of those assholes again. A sudden memory trickled into his brain like sweat down the crack of his ass. His squad had been double-timing it through the barracks when they’d passed another squad doing jump-ups, and a familiar face had startled as he passed.
Eddy? Eddy Fitzpatrick?
He’d dismissed it at the time, but now he had no doubts that one of the people who would be there to greet him at the animal husbandry barracks in Iraq would be the guy who helped beat the shit out of him in the ninth grade.