Precinct 11 - 01 - The Brotherhood (9 page)

“And this funeral thing?”

“My advice would be to simply say it’s all right to, as Commander Jones said, let us work with your people. You handle the arrangements however you wish, and we will come alongside to add to the program. You may rest assured that it will be dignified, appropriate, and if I may put it this way, impressive. You will be glad you allowed us to be part of it. May I record that you are open to this?”

“I guess; sure.”

7

The Wilderness

Boone owed a
LOT
to his parents, Ambrose and Lucy Drake. Whatever he was, whatever he had become, they had helped shape him. Problem was, his father was a know-it-all who pretty much did know it all, and his mother overspiritualized everything and tended toward the dramatic.

Well, that was an understatement. By the time Boone got out of his meeting with Bonnie Wells, he was well aware his parents had arrived. Jack Keller was in the commander’s office with them, and Boone could tell from Heathcliff Jones’s look that he was doing all he could to tolerate the intrusion. Even before entering, Boone could hear his mother going on about “proud of him,” “devastated,” “don’t know how he’s going to cope,” “says such wonderful things about his job,” and “loves the dickens out of you.”

She wasn’t beyond embellishing. Boone could not remember having ever mentioned the commander to his parents. He certainly had spoken highly of Jack Keller, so maybe she was confusing the two.

While Boone appreciated his parents to a degree, he believed he had made parenting easy and had said as much to friends and to Nikki. He knew how that sounded, but it was true. When he got to his teen years and his friends were rebelling and doing whatever they could to make life miserable for their parents, he saw no future in that and became essentially a model son.

It wasn’t that he idolized them or put them on a pedestal; they were flawed human beings like everyone else. And while there was much to admire about both of them—his father’s discipline and consistency and his mother’s devotion to God (or at least to the church)—Boone could have easily become a pain to them.

He saw himself as smarter than they, and there were times when he would have loved to poke holes in their assumed logic. He’d had the typical separation issues, wanting early to abandon them and their rules and their antiquated ideas, become a rebel, strike out on his own. But the truth was, he
was
smarter than that. He had the ability to look farther down the road and see that he would only delay his hopes and dreams if he made stupid, regrettable decisions.

And so he had humored them. Besides, they didn’t deserve rebellion and opposition. His younger brothers gave them all of that they could handle. To their credit, his brothers seemed to be finally turning out all right too, but for years they’d had to deal with the inevitable comparisons to their straight-arrow older brother. Boone’s motives might not have been pure, but he was a hard act to follow.

Nikki had wisely postulated that Boone’s form of separation and rebellion had come late and in the form of passive-aggressive behavior. Once he was out of the house, he was really gone. He was the son who rarely called, never wrote, and visited only when he couldn’t get out of it. He’d simply had enough of his father’s smug wisdom and his mother’s assumption that any son of hers would share her enthusiasm over spending every minute of every day “serving and glorifying the Lord.” Pastor Sosa would love her.

Ambrose had a dignified, if severely dated, look. Tall, gray, and willowy, he sat in Commander Jones’s office looking every bit the almost-retired small-town city manager. It would surprise no one that his daily uniform was suit and tie, never anything less. But now, on a sad day off, he wore tan slacks, a seventies-style turtleneck, and a sport coat with a faint checked pattern and a pocket hankie.

Lucy appeared already dressed for the funeral in a black dress with black purse and accessories—everything, Boone thought, but a mourning veil. She had become matronly with age but retained vestiges of her pretty youth.

When Boone tapped lightly on the commander’s open door, his mother leaped to her feet. “Oh! Here he is now, bless his heart! Oh, Boone!”

He surrendered to her exuberant embrace, and both Commander Jones and Jack Keller immediately rose and excused themselves. “Let me give you a few moments here,” Jones said. “Feel free to take all the time you need.”

Boone wanted to leave the commander’s office to him and use the conference room, but he never got a chance to say so over his mother’s squalling. With her head pressed on his shoulder, she immediately burst into tears. “We’ve been praying for you every second. How awful. How horrible. We’ve lost a precious daughter-in-love—you know that’s what I’ve always called her. And we’ve lost our only grandbaby. But you—oh, Boone. God will have to help you get through this somehow. We’ll be at your side the whole way.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Standing with you, Son,” his dad said, finally getting a chance to embrace Boone—something he hadn’t done since Boone was a small child.

The entire morning, from the time he had risen and showered and eaten and ridden to headquarters, Boone had been aware of a strange thing. Something deep in him was working to somehow protect him. He was shutting down emotionally. He no longer felt weepy. The gruesomeness of the deaths was being pushed back, tucked away somewhere he could not access it every moment. Boone would not have been able to survive if those images were ever at the forefront of his consciousness.

But they had been elbowed aside by a resolute coldness that somehow took the rage that had made him want to kill someone—maybe even himself—or to destroy something, and planted in him some seed of deep resentment. That was not a strong enough word for it, he knew. But he was also aware that this was going to manifest itself in a frigid, largely silent persona. No more games. No more cordiality. Unless someone could somehow say something that made sense of any of this, he was not going to even pretend to be comforted.

And it started now. He didn’t want to be mean to his parents. Again, there was no question that they, like everyone else, meant well. And they had suffered losses too. Not like his, but losses nonetheless. They would have to be inhuman to not feel deeply for him. But they couldn’t help him. No one could. Boone could not imagine anyone saying or doing anything that would change an iota of what had become of his life in one horrible instant.

One moment he had been enjoying the life and marriage and family and career he had always dreamed of and striven for, and the next he had lost everything that mattered to him except his job. And even that, at least for now, held no appeal.

Boone was reminded of a movie that was already old when he had seen it years before—
Catch-22
. He remembered little of the plot, but one scene played out in his mind. A character was standing on some sort of floating dock when a low-flying military aircraft flew into him and tore him in half. He was sure that the way the special effects artists for the picture portrayed it was not likely true to life. The character’s body, from the torso down, was left standing on the dock a few seconds before collapsing.

No doubt if someone had been hit by an airplane like that, his entire body would have been obliterated or thrown hundreds of feet. But there was something poignant to Boone now about that ugly scene. It represented how he felt. Standing tall one second, chopped in half the next.

All this rumbling inside Boone’s head protected him in some weird way from the awfulness that had plagued him the day before. He could not have gone on living that way, with such sensory overload that he could barely function. It was not lost on him that this new mind-set was poisonous, that he was internalizing the rage, the confusion, the anger at God, and that it would turn him into someone he could not have imagined being.

But, he realized, it was this or suicide. He would work at not hurting anyone. There was nothing to be gained by taking his rage out on someone else, especially Jack or his parents or his pastor. But neither was he going to exhibit any pretense. People would want to hear that he was doing okay under the circumstances, that he was numb, that he knew time was a healer. Well, he wasn’t going to say or even pretend that was true. His plan of action, if he could call it that, was to retreat inside himself. He would tell the truth as dispassionately as he could, and while he would not be intentionally unkind, he would engage in no role-playing.

“I’m sorry for your loss too,” he told his parents, and his mother cocked her head and scowled. Clearly she had not expected him to sound so detached and formal. Too bad. He
was
sorry for their loss. “Now let’s not take advantage of the commander’s kindness and let him have his office back. He’s one of the busiest men I’ve ever known, and we can talk in the conference room.”

“Yes, we can pray in there too,” Mrs. Drake said.

“Well, you can,” Boone said.

She took his arm as they vacated the office and headed down the hall. “Whatever do you mean, honey? You must be praying every minute.”

“No, I’m not. I figure if God has something he wants to tell me, like that he’s sorry for letting this happen, he can say so. I have nothing to say to him.”

“Oh, Boone! You have to know God has some purpose in this! We don’t know what it is, and we’re in the valley of the shadow of death right now, but—”

“Please, Mom. There is no
shadow
here. It’s death plain and simple, and the worst kind you can imagine. I’m not going to tell you not to pray if that gives you some comfort. But it gives me nothing, so spare me.”

“This is just a stage,” Mr. Drake said as they sat in the conference room. “Perfectly understandable. Be grateful we have a God who can take it when we shake our fists at him and tell him what we really think. He lost a Son too, you know—”

“Dad! Don’t start with that. Not now. I don’t have the power to raise my son from the dead, okay? And my son didn’t die for the sins of the whole world as part of some eternal cosmic plan.”

Ambrose held up a hand. “All right, Son. I understand. Let’s concentrate on details and logistics. This is all too fresh and painful for all of us.”

Lucy sat weeping, and Boone suspected her abject grief had been replaced with horror over her son’s blasphemy. As was her wont, she broke into prayer. “Lord, please forgive us and help us and show us your grand design here.”

Boone snorted and shook his head.

“Do you have my legal pad, dear?” Ambrose said, and the teary Lucy pulled it from her oversize handbag.

“Boone,” his father began, pulling out a pen, “there may be some value in our just getting through some practical things here. Have you settled on a funeral home?”

“No, but I was going to talk to my pastor. There’s at least one funeral guy in our church, and I figure Pastor’s worked with him before.”

“Good. You’ll want to get on that today so the bodies can be moved and prepared—”

“There’ll be no preparation, Dad. As you can imagine, this will be a closed-casket funeral.”

His father nodded, looking grim. And his mother interrupted. “Before we go too far down this road, Ambrose, let’s tell Boone what we’ve arranged at the hotel.”

“Oh yes. We understand it will be some time before you could move back home, so—”

“I’m not moving back home. No way I could live there.”

“Now, Son, let me caution you not to make any hard decisions while you’re, you know, in the earliest throes of—”

“Dad, it’s just not going to happen. There may be a few more things I’ll want to haul out of there, but moving back in is not an option.”

“You know, Boone, widows and widowers often make this mistake. They abandon—”

“End of story, Dad. Now, please, this is my decision, and I’ve made it.”

“They abandon their homes to their eventual regret. It’s not financially wise, and in fact, they often too late realize that they have squandered their most valuable asset.”

“How many times do I have to say it?”

“If you could just put off any final decision for a month or two. I can certainly understand why you would not want to move back in right away. . . .”

Boone pressed his lips together and stared at his father, shaking his head.

“You’re not open to
any
counsel, Boone?”

“You figure that out all by yourself?”

“Boone!” his mother said.

“I can’t be clearer. Now let’s move on.”

“Well, your mother wants you to join us at the hotel. We rented a suite with a separate room and facilities for you, and we plan to be here a full week. You shouldn’t be alone, and—”

“I’m not alone; you know that. I’m staying with Jack.”

Lucy made a face. “Isn’t he the one you told us was thrice divorced and enjoys the ladies?”

“I knew that would come back to haunt me. Fact is, putting me up will cramp his style, but he’s offered and I’ve accepted. I’m going to get my own place in a month or so, as soon as I’m ready to get back to work.”