The Traiteur's Ring (22 page)

Christy and Ben both laughed, and the driver relaxed a little.

“Thanks,” Ben shook his hand again.

A few minutes later they were in the largest hotel room Ben had ever seen (two rooms in fact – a bedroom with a little living room and kitchen). The balcony looked right out onto the ocean, and on the small table sat a huge basket of cheese, cookies, crackers, nuts – all kinds of things. Beside it sat another bottle of champagne with two long-stem glasses on which “The Morvants” had been etched, a vase full of yellow roses, and a card. Ben picked up the card. Christy went for the champagne and started to wrestle out the cork. It popped loudly and smacked into the ceiling as she giggled. Ben flipped open the card.

For a long and happy life together.

Best of luck.

SEAL Team Two

“From the unit,” he said.

Christy wrapped her arms around his neck and stood on her tip toes to kiss his chin.

“They’re such nice boys,” she nibbled his neck. Ben looked down at her. “Take me to bed, Ben,” she said with closed eyes.

He kissed her and fumbled his way into the back of her dress which came off with great difficulty. She stayed in his arms, her mouth locked on his, naked as he helped her tear off his service dress uniform.

They made love for over an hour, all of it slow and gentle. Soft words of love muttered between moans and sighs. Their eyes stayed locked on each other the whole time, no matter how many times they rolled around to new positions. They ended with her on top of him, straddling him with her hands on his chest, his hands on her hips as she finally lost all control and bucked her way into an orgasm that left her crying out, tears running down her cheeks. As she tightened around him in the throes of her own finale, Ben stopped trying to wait and exploded with her, his own cries joining hers.

She collapsed on him, spent and sweaty, her face nuzzled into his neck.

“God, I love you so much, Ben.”

“I know,” he said and realized tears had run down his cheeks, as well. “I love you, too. Maybe more than you can ever know.”

They lay that way for a long time as his hardness wilted inside her. She finally slipped off of him and cuddled into the crook of his arm, her own arm and leg draped across his still tingling body.

*   *   *

Ben dozed. The nap felt deeper and more refreshing than any sleep he had enjoyed in years – a gentle, dreamless sleep. He woke to a knock on the door and opened his eyes to see Christy lying with her head on his chest, her eyes open and bright. Her hand stroked his shoulder.

“Room service,” she said to explain the knock. She let her hand drift downward. “I figured you would need your strength.”

Ben smiled, kissed her, and then slipped out of bed to get the door. He looked around for something to cover himself with, and Christy tossed him a heavy terry cloth robe just as he noticed she had one on, too.

“Found them in the closet,” she explained. “Rich people must have a truck load of robes at home from these suites.”

Ben laughed and pulled the robe around him as he headed for the door in the other room.

“How long was I asleep?” he asked. “What time is it?”

“Time to watch the sunset, that’s all I know,” Christy called after him.

Ben looked out past the balcony and saw the sky had just begun to turn a soft pink as the sun slipped gently into the Atlantic Ocean. His mind considered a moment his deep – and more luxurious dreamless – sleep. It didn’t feel like he had returned to normal to have good sleep. He hadn’t slept well with any regularity in his entire adult life. But it still felt like a step toward normalcy. If he could have a few bad dreams about Gammy without any demons from Africa intruding, he thought he might feel fully recovered. Strange that familiar bad dreams should define normal for him.  He flung open the door and greeted the young lady who stood beside a push cart.

My wife must be hungry.

The cart held five different covered plates and a bottle of red wine.

“Congratulations, sir,” the woman said. “Where would you like this?”

“On the balcony,” Christy answered for him as she joined him at the door. “Oooh, yummy,” she said and rubbed her hands together.

“You sure, baby?” he asked. “Might be a little chilly for you.”

“Nah, you’ll keep me warm.”

The woman rolled the cart onto the balcony. He signed his name on the ticket she handed him, and she left.

“Jeez, what did you get?” he asked.

“Everything,” she answered and plopped into one of the two chairs, kicked her feet up onto the balcony rail, and grabbed the wine bottle and a corkscrew.

Ben sat in the other chair and started to pull the silver lids off the oversized plates on the huge cart. Then, he took the glass of wine she offered him and popped a shrimp into his mouth. He suddenly felt half-starved now that he saw the unbelievable collection of hot appetizers Christy had ordered for them. He began to wade with her through the collection of seafood, meats, and cheeses. He took a swallow of the wine his wife handed him which tasted heavier than the others he had tried. He liked it better, he decided.

“That’s good, what is that?” He kicked his feet up on the rail like Christy and chuckled at the show they would be giving if they had not been on the eighteenth floor.

“I bumped you up a level,” his beaming wife said as she popped a piece of bread covered with tomatoes and feta cheese into her mouth. “You have graduated to Cabernet. Congratulations.”

Ben held it up to the setting sun. Darker than the others – just like it tasted.

They chatted and fed, grazing on the food he doubted they would finish but felt no surprise when they nearly did. Ben heard the mumbling voices, a blend of soft sounds like whispers through thin walls. He thought of them as voices, but really they were just soft sounds. They didn’t really bother him anymore. He realized they had been there nearly constantly since he got home; now that he let them fade into the background of his life, they didn’t distress him at all.

He even began to imagine that perhaps they had been there all along and the events in Africa had somehow just made him more aware of them. Either way, he decided, they weren’t worth thinking about anymore. In fact, the less he thought about them the more that proved true. Now and again a sound would stand out above the mumbling whispers as a clear word and grab his attention, but with a little work he managed to ignore those, as well.

“Ben?”

He looked over at Christy who touched his hand and furrowed her brow.

Maybe he had a bad dream before.

That voice was clear as a bell and belonged to his wife.

“What are you thinking about, baby? Did you have a bad dream before?”

Ben took her hand and squeezed it. He gave her his best everything-is-cool smile (easier than ever because everything really was cool for once).

“No bad dreams,” he said. “In fact,” he took another sip of the wine which seemed to stimulate taste in his whole mouth, “I was actually thinking about the fact that I didn’t have a bad dream. That cat nap was the most relaxed sleep I’ve had in my life, I think.” He kissed her chin. “Apparently being married works great for me.”

Christy smiled at that. He had found the perfect words, apparently, because her forehead smoothed.

“You are a lucky, lucky man,” she sipped her own wine. “Very lucky.”

“Very lucky,” he agreed. Then he ran a hand up the inside of her robe. “You wanna get lucky again?”

“Maybe,” she answered coyly over the rim of her glass and let her legs fall open.

They made love again. This time they started on the balcony and ended up on the floor next to the couch in the sitting room. When Christy’s panting slowed to soft sighs, her head on his chest, he shifted around awkwardly to pick her up and carried her to the huge bed. She threw both arms around his neck and nuzzled against his chest, now only half asleep.

I’m the lucky one,
her voice said in his head, and she hugged him tightly.

He tucked her gently in and slipped under the covers beside her.  He set the alarm on his watch to allow them time to get ready and get to the airport for their flight. Then, he reset it for an hour and a half earlier – they might want time for a little something more before getting out of bed, he decided with a smile. Besides, his watch showed it was barely after nine p.m.. He felt either completely exhausted or completely relaxed despite the early hour and closed his eyes, his arms around his wife.

As he drifted off, he felt a strong sense of someone waiting for him, just on the other side of closing his eyes and felt anxious. But whoever it was must have decided to let him alone on the night of his wedding, because he had his second deep and dreamless sleep of the day. 

Chapter 20

The voices first started to get bad on the flight to New Orleans. Ben sat in the aisle seat, Christy’s hand soft in his as she spoke excitedly about the things she wanted to do over the coming week.  He found the sounds impossible to ignore. Overnight he had gone from a vague awareness of soft mumbles a few rooms away to suddenly sitting in the dead center of a crowded room at a party. The specifics of the speaker’s words were no clearer than before. But the volume had been turned painfully up, and the frequency of recognizable words had also increased. This didn’t make the voices any more understandable, of course, just way more distracting and for some reason a little more frightening.

Ben also realized he could now identify individual voices that repeated themselves in the din of competing inner dialogues he eavesdropped on. He heard a young woman, excited about something, perhaps someone she would be meeting in New Orleans. There was one old man (at least he thought of him as old) who seemed terrified, and Ben wondered if he might be sick with something bad, like cancer. Another man, much younger he thought, was just annoyed and angry, though Ben got no sense at all about what had him so pissed off.

He wondered if the close proximity of all the people packed into the confines of their steel tube hurtling above the Earth explained the change. He had noticed a little bit in the airport (which was also quite crowded, of course) but nothing like this. He also wondered if his fear that he might actually meet the old Cajun from his dream in New Orleans could be a factor (assuming the voices really were all in his head  – figuratively not literally). Perhaps his paranoid worry that the man from his dream could be real and waiting for them was worsening his admittedly baseline paranoid musings.

Thanks for all of this, Gammy. Just another crazy Cajun from the swamp.

For a moment, Ben had a short burst of clarity that maybe he didn’t really have Gammy to blame. Maybe all of the insane “memories” from his childhood were products of the same chemical imbalance that had created the nightmare fantasy he currently plowed through. Maybe poor Gammy just died from the stress of raising a kid with a serious mental disorder who had now somehow found a way to control his psychosis just enough to barely function.

Ben felt a chill at the thought.

He closed his eyes and with all of his might demanded the voices shut the hell up, at least for a few moments, so he could collect himself. Amazingly the voices did fade a bit into the background.

“Tired?”

He looked over at Christy and felt relief she didn’t have her I’m-so-worried-about-you forehead furrow.

“I shouldn’t be,” he kissed her cheek. “I guess the last few weeks are catching up.”

Christy nodded and smiled. “Yeah, you had a hell of a homecoming the last two weeks, huh? Probably got more rest on your deployment, I bet.” She patted his arm. “I’m tired, too.”

“Best two weeks of my whole life,” he told her, and she gave him the grin that melted his heart. “We’ll catch up on our rest this week.”

Christy laughed. “Yeah, most people think of New Orleans when they think quiet and restful vacation.”

“Good point,” he conceded. “But we’ll only be in New Orleans for two days, right? Then, we head east to the beach?”

“Destin,” she said. “It looked great on the Website. I got us a nice quiet place like you wanted.”

“Perfect,” he said.

As usual Christy had done the lion’s share of work planning their trip. Ben had done little more than nod his approval and tell her how great it all looked. He felt like the two days in Louisiana would be more than enough to tell his haunted past goodbye, and then they could start their new life together with a few days lounging on the white sandy beaches of Florida’s panhandle. Even Virginia had started to warm up to early spring weather, so he figured the Fort Walton Beach/Destin area of northern Florida would be tropical by now. It really did sound great.

As long as I don’t find some big, black bunny hole waiting for me in the woods – Goddamn dreams.

The voices stayed softer but present the rest of the flight, and Ben felt great relief when they left the airplane and the din of cocktail chatter behind. A whispering background of mumbles remained, but the volume returned to a manageable level he again found easy to ignore. He felt his mood brighten immediately as they strolled up the jetway hand-in-hand, backpacks slung over shoulders.

I should kill them both. That fuckin’ bitch. And Tony – Goddammit he was supposed to be my friend. I should kill them together while they’re fucking in his bed.

“Excuse me,” the voice in his head said out loud, and he startled at the sound moving from his head to his ears. The man pushed past them without making eye contact, his briefcase and overcoat knocking into Christy hard enough to make her stumble.

“Hey, watch out, dude,” Ben snapped at the man and pushed the black leather briefcase aside.

The man spun on a heel and faced them.

“I said excuse me, asshole,” the man said with hot anger, his free hand balling up into a fist. Something in Ben’s eyes must have warned the survival center in the man’s brain because the fire faded immediately once they were face-to-face. The man looked down. “Sorry,” he mumbled and then shot back up the jetway.