Wynne's War (34 page)

I'll be making plans to do this thing, or thinking I'm going to do that thing, and then I'm thinking of you. Wondering if you're all right. Actually praying for you. And I don't even know if I believe in God, for christsakes!

So what do I expect? I have no idea. I guess if you decided not to answer this I'd totally understand, since both my family AND the army think I'm crazy and I'm sure, by this point, you agree. I have these fantasies of us going out on an actual date (do people go on those anymore?), and I have fantasies of us owning a dog together (yeah: I have no idea). I have other fantasies, but I think I've embarrassed myself enough for now, so suffice to say, I really, really hope you get in touch. (Really.) Please write me back soon. If you get this, that is.

Love,

Sara

 

PS: Tell your buddy I said hi. (Is it terrible that I can't remember his name?)

 

Russell finished the message and then he read it again very slowly. He hit the reply button, hunted and pecked on the keyboard with the index fingers of both hands, told her he'd received the message, told her he'd thought about her a lot, told her he'd been injured but was fine and would be back in the states in a week. He sat there reading over what he'd written. Then he asked for a phone number where he could reach her and hit “send.”

A message came up in his inbox immediately. It looked like it was from Sara's address but “Delivery Error” was in the heading, and Russell glanced over at the guard behind the desk and asked if he could help.

The man rose, walked up, and leaned over Russell's shoulder. He had a slight German accent.

“What is the problem?” he said.

“I just sent this e-mail to a friend and then I got this back,” Russell said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.

“It's a delivery error,” said the man.

“What's that mean?”

“You just hit ‘reply'?”

“Yeah,” said Russell.

“And then this came immediately back?”

“Exactly.”

“The address is no good.”

Russell stared at the screen. He turned and stared at the man.

“No good?”

“It has likely expired,” the man said.

Russell nodded. He thanked the guard and fetched his cane, stood, and started walking. The man asked if he wanted to log out, but Russell told him he never should have logged in.

 

He touched down at JFK a week later. An hour layover and then a connecting flight to Raleigh. He wore a brand-new uniform with his Airborne and Ranger tabs on his left shoulder, the 3rd Ranger Battalion Scroll on his right. A man in first class tried to give up his seat and swap with him, but Russell told him that was all right, then shuffled past him down the aisle.

In Raleigh, a staff sergeant named Kirby was waiting to take him to Fayetteville, about an hour's drive, and they barely spoke the entire way. The radio was tuned to a country station, and at one point Sergeant Kirby asked if he'd like to listen to something else. Russell told him the music was fine, and that was their last exchange until they pulled through the gates and into the motor pool at Fort Bragg.

He filled out some forms in the office, spoke for a while to a lieutenant who brought up his file on a computer and informed Russell he was past due on his contract. Russell told him he was supposed to head up to Fort Campbell for reassignment, and the lieutenant told him he could take care of all of this up there.

Then he asked Russell what things were like in Afghanistan. He was just out of Ranger School, getting ready to deploy that summer with his own platoon. He asked Russell if he had any advice.

Russell sat for a moment. His back was tightening, and he reached into his ruck, pulled out his bottle of hydrocodone, and took one with the cup of coffee he'd been sipping.

“Listen to your platoon sergeant,” he finally said. “And don't take off your helmet.”

He spent the night off base with a friend who'd been in the 3rd Rangers before transferring to the 82nd Airborne here at Bragg. He was now a sergeant major, and Russell had left his pickup parked in the man's garage, stored several cardboard boxes in his attic. Two boxes of clothes. Another box of CDs and tools and a coffeemaker his aunt had sent him as a present. He and Travis stayed up most the night on the back porch talking, Travis drinking bourbon, Russell pretending to drink.

“They want me up at Fort Campbell,” said Russell.

“When?”

“Yesterday,” Russell said.

Travis cocked an eyebrow and stared at him over his glass. “You aren't AWOL, are you?”

“No,” said Russell. “Contract expired. I'll renew when I get there.”

“So, as of right this minute, you're basically a civilian?”

“Basically,” Russell said.

“Fort fucking Campbell.”

Russell nodded.

“What—you joining Fifth Group?”

“They want me training horses.”

“Horses?”

“Yeah,” Russell said.

Travis finished his drink and poured himself another.

“Greenies,” he snorted. “What a bunch of psychos.”

Russell told him he had no idea.

 

Russell was on the road before nine the next morning. He reached I-85, then traveled up until he came to the I-40 junction and turned and headed west. The day was clear and a little cool, and Russell drove with the windows down and the wind wings cracked to funnel the breeze. It was a seven-hour drive to Nashville, and he started the climb up into the Smoky Mountains a little after noon, the blue Carolina sky against the evergreen ridges, his pickup laboring around the bends. It was an old Ford F-150, a '74 model—his grandfather had bought it off the showroom in Cleveland, Oklahoma, in the fall of '73. It was Russell's first and only vehicle, and over the years he'd rebuilt the engine and installed a new transmission, replaced the shocks twice and brake pads three times. In high school, he'd sanded down the entire body by hand, repainted the truck, and had the bumpers rechromed. The interior, however, looked how it'd always looked: rubber dash, cracked plastic steering wheel, steel glove box and doors, and a bench seat over which Russell had thrown a saddle blanket much like the one he'd used on Fella. He couldn't think about the horse without getting emotional. You spend so many hours on an animal's back, and with every bump and bounce you are jarring some part of yourself into the horse and the horse into you, a transfer of the spirit through violent osmosis, convection by impact, collision.

He reached Nashville early that evening. Here I-40 met up with 24, and you could take 24 all the way to Fort Campbell. Traffic was beginning to clog the interstate, but he made good time, and soon a sign told him that the exit for I-24 was coming up in a mile and a half. Then he passed another sign that said he'd turn off in three-quarters of a mile. When he topped a hill and saw the actual fork in the interstate, he put on his blinker, slowed the truck and pulled onto the shoulder. He sat there several moments with the truck idling and the traffic hurdling past, semis passing in a roar that rocked the pickup on its springs and shook the cab. He scooted across the bench seat, opened the passenger door, and got out. There was a guardrail and a grassy hill on the other side that descended to an access road, and Russell left his cane behind, stepped over the rail, and started down the slope. He stopped halfway and sat with his elbows on his knees, looking toward the lights shining from the buildings downtown. Chet Atkins. Merle Travis. Patsy Cline. All these names from records his grandfather kept in his office: they'd sung and played and died in this town. He sat there thinking about his grandfather, what the man had told him when he'd visited the hospital room. That was either a trance or narcotic hallucination, but it was his grandfather's voice and his grandfather's smell, and the words his grandfather had for him were the words his grandfather might have used. Which meant it was both real and it wasn't. It was his grandfather and it was a dream.

When he stood and started back up the hill, the air was cold on his cheeks, and truckers passing, seeing this lone American soldier, tugged at their horns, but Russell was done with soldiering. He reached his truck, opened the passenger door, unzipped and removed his jacket, bent down and pulled a flannel-lined Carhartt coat from one of the cardboard boxes, threaded his arms through it, then climbed up into the cab.

 

Russell stood in line at the restaurant during the lunchtime rush. Men seated around the dining area in business suits. Women in skirts and blouses, hose and high heels. Russell turned and saw his reflection in the tinted window alongside the front doors. He wore a new pair of Tony Lamas he'd picked out at a western store in Amarillo. A new pair of Levi's and a dark denim shirt with pearlized snaps. His brown leather belt was also new, but he'd fastened it to his grandfather's old buckle and replaced the silver dollar in its center. He'd cut off his beard at the hotel that morning, then shaved for the first time in months. He stood in the mirror examining that smooth alien face, the skin pale on his cheeks and chin, dark on his forehead and temples. Then he dressed and hobbled along the streets until he found a barbershop. The man cut it short, smeared it with gel, then parted and combed it to the side. In his reflection, it still looked a little wet.

The Nevada sun came slanting through the blinds, terrain out the windows like what he imagined he'd left behind. Low mountains in the distance, blue in the noon light. The line moved and he took a step forward. Two women in front of him, clicking the buttons on their phones. A large man in front of them doing the same. Another man at the counter, staring up at the menu on the wall, and behind the register, Sara. She wore a black visor on her head with the store's logo embroidered on the front, a black polo with the logo above her left breast. She'd yet to notice him. She looked flustered, and her green eyes went from the customer standing in front of her, down to the register, back to the customer again. There was another woman working the register at her right and another to her far right on the other side of a glass case of pastries. She handed the customer what looked like a plastic coaster with red flashing lights, handed him a clear plastic cup and a receipt. The next man in line moved up, and Russell took another step forward behind the two women.

She wore a bit more makeup than she had at the outpost, a bit more eye shadow and rouge. She was more slender than he remembered. A little more slight. She'd let her hair grow longer, and it was gathered in a ponytail behind her head. He could just read her name tag from where he was, and he saw that whomever had made it had added an
H
to the end. He imagined a manager giving her the tag and Sara standing there a moment, a smirk playing across her lips. Perhaps she liked the idea that she wasn't exactly herself.

She passed the man his cup and coaster, and he walked toward the soda machine set up in a nook against the far wall. She said she could help whomever was next. She still hadn't seen him. The two women moved up together and began to give their orders. Russell was maybe six feet from her now. His heart began to race and he felt his throat tighten. A sweat broke out on the back of his neck. And of all things he thought of Captain Wynne, their conversation in the predawn before they'd assaulted the tower, sitting there sipping coffee, only time they'd ever been alone. No, that wasn't right: they'd been alone at the corral that first time they'd met. So they'd been alone exactly twice, and that second time the captain had questioned him about his father and mother, about his decision to join the Rangers, and after listening to Russell, he'd sat there a moment. And it wasn't what the captain said that stayed with him. It was the look on his face, his entire demeanor, as if what had happened to Russell's parents clarified a number of things. And Russell had sensed something strange. He could tell that the captain pitied him. He could tell Wynne thought he'd been broken, as roughly and thoroughly as any horse. Russell hadn't liked it, and now he liked it even less.

Because, what if he had been broken? What if he still was? The phrase Wynne had used was
children of adversity,
but what he was really saying was that Russell had ended up in his particular set of circumstances because he'd been abandoned. Or damaged. Or wrecked. And maybe what bothered him most was that he suspected the captain was right. He'd thought of Sara in that way. It was one of the things that drew him. You see someone like that—a woman like that—and something inside you reaches out. At least it did in him. And standing there, just feet away from her, it occurred to Russell she might feel exactly the same.

One of the women reached into her purse and handed over her credit card. Sara swiped it and handed it back. Russell tried to calm his thoughts, and he had a strong urge to turn around and bolt. She still hadn't seen him. She wouldn't even know. He had a life waiting at Fort Campbell if he wanted it. Something he knew about. Something he could do. A place and a purpose and a people he understood. The girl in front of him was unknown territory. She was what he'd never actually tried. And she could be what actually destroyed him, worse than any bullet or bomb. He thought about all of that. He could still turn away and walk. A few thousand miles on his truck, several nights of hotel bills, a dozen or so tanks of gas. Call it a detour, an early summer break. The women got their cups and coasters. Sara was staring down at her register. He still had a few final seconds.

The women moved off toward the soda fountain, and Russell stepped forward, put his hands on the counter to steady himself, drew a deep breath inside his lungs, and with it, her perfume. His mind went instantly quiet and the fear seemed to subside. He exhaled the turmoil and panic.

Sara's eyes were on the register. She pressed a button and it made a beeping sound, then it made another. Her face relaxed, and she put a hand to her mouth and cleared her throat.