Blind Fall (13 page)

“We can’t sleep in the same place,” John said. “That’s not going to work.”

Eddie’s fixed expression suggested that he had moved past the place in his life where he could be surprised by anything other than death. “You and your friend, you mean? She didn’t tell me his name. She hasn’t told me much at all, so you don’t have to either if you don’t want to.” When John didn’t thank him for his offer of coffee, Eddie nodded slightly at his own cup as if he were prepared to face the fact that solicitous remarks weren’t going to get him back in John’s good graces.

John felt foolish for having let the comment slip from him, but the truth was he hadn’t known what else to say, such was the shock of seeing Eddie, whose departure Patsy had celebrated as much as John had. But clearly he had cloaked himself once again in what he had once referred to as the “the language of recovery,” a phrase that had seemed absurd the first time John heard it come out of the mouth of a big-rig driver from just outside Dallas, Texas. The truth was, it wasn’t smart for him and Alex to be sleeping under the same roof, not if John was going to achieve any status as an instructor, but he could have asked Patsy to buy them a tent to pitch out in the woods.

In the silence that followed, Eddie lifted his gaze to John’s, and the two men just stared at each other. Eddie wore the resigned look of a lifelong inmate whose execution day had finally arrived. In a flat, emotionless voice he said, “I did wrong by you and I did wrong by your sister. I hit your sister because she told me what I was and it wasn’t who I wanted to be. I hit her because I couldn’t accept the truth and I left you without saying good-bye. If there’s anything I can do to make up for it, please let me know.”

“You rehearsed that one, didn’t you?”

“Yours wasn’t the only home I left in the middle of the night, John Houck.”

“How many of them did you go back to with that little speech?”

“All of them. Including yours. But you were gone by then. Iraq, I hear.”

John nodded, braced himself for some smart-ass remark about the ongoing war on terror, but Eddie apparently thought better than to deliver one. But his slow nod gave the impression that he was equating his own recent struggles with the ones John had been through over there, and that made John’s blood boil.

After the silence between them grew uncomfortable, John said, “So, what is this place? Some kind of AA church?”

“AA doesn’t have churches. This is my own deal. A recovery home for men like myself. Usually I’ve got a full house, but right now attendance is low. I’ve got four up in the main house, so you guys have got down here all to yourself…which your sister said was how you would want it. I’ve also got land. Your sister said you would want that, too. There’s a couple acres of it over there that I haven’t touched yet. Maybe I’ll sell it off someday. I don’t know. About twenty miles up the road, land prices jump sky high.”

John nodded, wondering how a big-rig driver, and a drunk, could come by this much land this close to one of the nicest parts of Arizona. Eddie must have sensed he had a question he didn’t feel comfortable asking because he cleared his throat and said, “When you go through the kind of things you went through, when you see that kind of stuff, I mean—”

“War,” John said clearly and forcefully so that Eddie would have a chance to be very confident of the statement he was about to make.

“Yeah, war. I guess it can make things in the past seem like they’re further away than they actually are.” He studied John, who did his best to give no reaction. “I’m just saying—you and me and your sister. It wasn’t that long ago.”

John knew what he was trying to say, but he decided to let Eddie twist a little bit more by playing dumb. “Guess it’s a good thing you apologized, then.”

“Apologies are for pussies,” he said quietly, but his choice of language betrayed his anger. “I asked if there was anything I could do to make up for it. But it looks like I’m already doing it, given that I haven’t asked you who you’re with or just why you need to hide out here with a bunch of recovering drunks and speed freaks like myself.”

John tried to freeze the man off with a glare, but it did nothing to deter him. Maybe his most recent benders had not forced him to suffer the way a wounded Marine might, but it was clear they had showed him far greater horrors than the pissed-off brother of a woman he had punched.

Eddie had shuffled off in the direction of the ranch house just up the creek by the time John realized that he hadn’t thanked the man. It didn’t matter, he guessed, given that Eddie hadn’t waited around for a thank-you.

When he got back to the outer cabin, John found Patsy and Alex standing together in the tiny kitchenette, unloading several bags of groceries that Eddie had apparently purchased for them prior to their arrival. Once again, the sight of them behaving with the relaxed air of tourists on a weekend getaway made his fists clench, and he stood in the doorway like an angry father waiting to be noticed.

“These are just some basics,” Patsy said. “Make me up a list later and I’ll make a run.” In the car the night before, he had already made up a list of the essentials he would need. It would land him on some kind of watch list if it fell into the wrong hands.

“Where are you staying?” John asked.

Patsy studied the list he had just handed her. Alex busied himself loading bottled water into the fridge, as if he were about to be caught in the middle of a marital squabble. “Up at the house,” Patsy said casually, but she had stopped unloading bags and was giving John a level stare, both hands open against the counter in front of her.

“Add a tent because we can’t both sleep in here,” John said.

Alex pulled his head from the fridge, gave John a shocked stare. Patsy glared at him as if he had just shoved Alex off his feet. He should have known they would interpret it as a homophobic comment and found some way to head it off at the pass.

“I’m going to be doing my best to simulate a training environment here, and during no part of my training as a Marine did I ever sleep under the same roof as my instructors.” The surprise went out of Alex’s expression, and he returned to the task of loading the fridge. Patsy didn’t look like she would be so easily deterred.

“We’re here because you want to help Alex. How’s that going to be possible if you’re too freaked out to sleep under the same roof with a gay guy?”

“Can I talk to you outside?”

“I’m not sure,” she answered.

But she followed him out the door and toward the edge of the creek. Once they were face-to-face, she brushed strands of hair back from her forehead, folded her arms over her chest and cocked one eyebrow, as if she were about to get a lecture from a five-year-old.

“Eddie Fucking Shane?” he asked when the silence became unbearable.

“You all had a nice chat?” John didn’t respond. She continued, “I’m sorry. You have a problem here?”

“I have a problem with the fact that he broke your nose. Yeah.”

“I did, too. That’s why I didn’t marry him.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“Aren’t you a little
busy
to be this concerned with my private life?”

“Aren’t you a little too old to be dicking me around like this?”

She dropped her arms from her chest, sucked in a deep breath, and stared at the creek next to them for a few minutes. “Eddie asked me if he should write you a letter when he came to see me. To apologize. I told him you probably didn’t want to hear from him. He said if that was the case, then he shouldn’t contact you because the way they do things in AA, they’re not supposed to unburden themselves at someone’s else expense.”

“That’s nice of him. How could he afford this place?”

“He couldn’t. I gave him most of the money. Efrem left me enough to live off for the next ten years, and between that and what the bar rakes in, I had it on hand.”

“Eddie’s apologies sound pretty profitable if you ask me.”

“I
didn’t
ask you. And given the help I’ve been doling out recently, I’d take those AA meetings up the creek over what you’re about to do out here any day.” She pulled the list out of her pocket and grimaced at it. “Jesus Christ, John. Since when do
I
know how to pick out ammunition clips?”

“You’re going to stay with him? Up in the main house?”

“Yes, John. You want to know why? Because he’s the only man I’ve ever met who will go down on me for three hours.”

His cheeks on fire, John brushed past her and started for the cabin. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, John. We sleep together every now and then, out here in Arizona. Where I don’t even live.” When she saw that this had stopped him, she continued. “I give second chances, John. I don’t do third or fourth chances, but Eddie’s only on number two. And guess what? So are you.”

“If he hurts you again, I’ll kill him.”

“Or you could just stick around.”

Before he could only fumble for a response to this, Patsy started for the main house, John’s grocery list held out in one hand beside her as if it gave off a sour odor.

Inside the cabin, in one of the nightstand drawers, John found a pad and paper, which he removed quickly, before Alex could emerge from the shower. John carried the pad, paper, and a pen into the woods, and followed the creek in the direction Eddie had pointed earlier that day when he had said there was additional land.

The trees thickened a little along the creek’s bank as he walked up the gradual slope. He came to a large clearing that looked like it had once held a storage shed, or possibly another house, that had burned to the ground. The large boulders lying in various locations throughout the clearing suggested they had been placed there by human hands, adornments to whatever structure had once occupied the dusty expanse between short, dry pine trees.

He sat against one of the boulders and proceeded to draw an outline of a male figure. He didn’t bother to add any facial features. The number-one rule of hand-to-hand combat was that your opponent did not have a face. He had a head with two soft spots on either side called temples that could only effectively be struck with pinpoint accuracy. He had two highly vulnerable areas in the middle of his head that had only the softest layer of tissue for protection; these were called eyes, and targeting them was the perfect way to bring him to his knees. John had been trained to the degree that he could ward off any attacker’s blow with a quick series of defensive movements that could end in the attacker’s death, but he had no intention of teaching all of these to Alex.

Many of these moves were about striking a sensitive part of the assailant’s anatomy so that their instinctive physical reaction would override their conscious thoughts. But for Alex, John would have to streamline this, teach him only the best places to strike, leaving out the blows everyone learned from the movies. Uppercuts to the jaw were out. They had to be delivered too forcefully, and the risk of injury to himself was too great. Punching a guy in the nose looked great on TV, but a skilled assailant could train himself to endure the watering eyes and bleeding that might follow.

On the figure he had just drawn, he drew a line out from the area where the figure’s eyes should be. Then he drew two lines down the center of the figure’s throat, both about an inch from where his trachea would be. These were the vagus nerves. Strike them hard enough and you could stop a guy’s heartbeat, one of the primary causes of accidental death during martial arts competitions. Then it was time for the arteries, which he marked with crosshatched lines. There were the jugular and carotid arteries in the neck, and the subclavian artery above the collarbone. All of these were susceptible only to knife strikes, and considering they hadn’t even attempted unarmed fighting yet, John thought it might be too ambitious to include them. But when you sit down to draw a map of how to kill a man with one strike, you can’t do things halfway. He got to his feet, tore the diagram from the notepad, and folded the diagram in half.

Back inside the cabin John found Alex passed out on one of the beds, a copy of the big blue AA bible he had brandished earlier open on the covers next to his chest.

On the diagram he had just put together, John wrote the words
STUDY THIS
above the figure’s empty head and left the paper on the nightstand.

John and Alex ran down the bank of the creek, past the clearing and into the woods, along the path John had staked for them in the hours before dawn, when Alex was still fast asleep. They followed a trail of red flags over fallen logs and through low-hanging branches, a cruel parody of the race both had run on the night they first met; only this time John was in the lead, and Alex was hot on his trail, running with a red-faced determination that suggested he believed this was only the first of many physical challenges he would be forced to endure that day.

Once they completed five miles, John stopped and, without allowing Alex a chance to catch his breath, started for the clearing. The night before, he had asked Patsy to purchase him something he could wear around his neck, and she had come back with a long necklace of puka shells that made him look like a surfer. But he was able to tape a photograph of Mike Bowers to it, which meant it would serve its purpose nonetheless. In the cardboard box of Mike’s belongings that still sat in the cargo bay of Patsy’s Jeep, John had found a leather photo book that contained three-by-five versions of the photographs he had first seen hanging on the wall inside Mike and Alex’s home. It was a shot of Mike leaning on the balcony rail of what looked like a motel room. He looked handsome and serene and without a care in the world.

“Your opponent doesn’t have a face,” John told Alex, who had furrowed his brow and wiped sweat from his eyes to get a better look at the photo of his dead boyfriend. “Every time we practice, this is where you look.” He tapped the photo, saw Alex fight the urge to lift his eyes from it. “Never into my eyes unless I tell you otherwise. Got it?”

“Does that mean you’re my opponent?” Alex asked.

John ignored him, as he had vowed to ignore every smart-ass comment Alex might make during the course of his training. He was confident the kind of verbal discipline that had been used on him in boot camp was out the window—Alex would probably just try to bitch-slap him. Instead, John began to explain to him how to assume what was referred to as the basic warrior stance: feet shoulder-width apart, a slight bend in the knees, elbows bent at a forty-five-degree angle, arms held high enough to defend the face without blocking vision. Alex speedily executed each instructed movement, making it clear he was eager to rush through this prelude to more exciting things. So, John told him to stand straight and then gave him all the physical instructions again, this time in a different order than Alex was expecting, which threw Alex for a loop, made him curse under his breath.

“Relax,” John said quietly. “We have all day.”

“All day on
this
? You’re kidding, right?”

John gave him a thin smile and repeated the directions, in a different order yet again. And the day wore on, the sun arcing high overhead and Alex biting down on his frustration. John didn’t bother to tell him that someone with no fight experience had to ingrain the basic stance on his muscles, had to train to assume the stance from any given position under an assault from any direction. John didn’t bother to tell him that this was how it was done—through drill, the repetition of physical movements until they become reflexive.

But there was another facet to this process, one that made John feel as if he was getting away with something: even though he wasn’t breaking Alex, he was training him to be obedient—hypnotizing him through the repetition of simple and seemingly meaningless commands.

After two hours of this, John added another layer to the exercise: Alex had to assume the basic warrior stance from three different positions: flat on his back, down on all fours, or sitting cross-legged. John would announce the position, then clap his hands, and Alex would have a split second to assume the stance. If he got it wrong, they had to start from the same position again before moving on to another one. A few times, Alex landed flat on his ass, and John turned his back, which instantly silenced Alex’s curses. Then they would resume: the steady cadence of John’s instructions and the shuffle of Alex’s feet as he leaped into position forming a hypnotic rhythm.

John knew from his own training that he and Alex were being slowly and inextricably bound together in a subtle way. It was not that he was gaining control of Alex’s mind, it was that both men, in concert, were gaining control over Alex’s muscle memory. Would this process give John the power to demand that Alex go to the authorities? Probably not, but it would make the other movements Alex needed to learn easier to teach.

As Alex’s resistance faded, as he became more comfortable with assuming the basic stance from all three starting positions, John was finally able to note how willing Alex was. Small movements such as these, repeated for hours on end, were enough to drive most new recruits to the brink, but Alex’s face had gone lax, his eyes had glazed in a way that suggested he was envisioning the movements before he executed them. For a while John assumed Alex’s willingness was simply evidence that he was eager to show John he was up to it. But then another possibility occurred to John, and it stole some of the fire from his voice: maybe Alex was just showing him how willing he was to kill.

Patsy brought their lunches on a plastic tray. She walked right into the middle of the clearing without giving them a word of warning and set the tray down next to one of the boulders. Her eyes lingered on Alex, and seeing no cuts or bruises, she left them to themselves. They ate separately and silently, and when John set his plate aside and walked back into the middle of the clearing, Alex followed.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent on moving without leaving the basic stance. Alex was ordered to follow John’s every move, eyes focused on the picture of Mike that hung around his neck, without ever leaving the basic stance. Half of the clearing was in shade now, so John had the two of them start in the sunlight and made shade the goal; the minute Alex left the stance or faltered by even a step, they walked back into the hot sun.

Again and again they crossed the clearing like dancers, until the sun started its final plummet toward the western horizon and shade began to spread across the entire clearing. John clapped his hands loudly to signal that they were done, then took off into the woods, onto the same circuit they had run that morning. Alex followed without protest.

After five miles, they both turned toward the creek. John fell to his knees and doused his face. Alex pulled his sweat-soaked shirt from his body, dipped the shirt in the creek, then squeezed it out over his head. When he saw John looking at him, Alex gave him an easy smile. At first John thought it was the smile of a student who knew he had aced a test, but then he felt the familiarity of it. Even though he felt that on some level this was what he had been shooting for, the simple smile frightened him, and he found himself looking down at the creek water. He could feel the pained expression on his face.

“Was I not supposed to look you in the eye yet?” Alex asked.

The photo of Bowers was still hanging from John’s neck, like a badge of honor, or, at the very least, a memorial of some sort. What had seemed like a simple psychological training technique earlier that day now had a weight to it his neck couldn’t support. Quickly John pulled the string of puka shells from around his neck and extended it toward Alex in one hand. Alex just stared at this offering with a look John could only describe as wounded, all evidence of the smile having left his face.

John tried to force a casual tone and said, “Why don’t you hold on to it when we’re not training?”

Alex gently pulled the badge from John’s grip, collecting the length of the necklace in both hands. Now that he had handed over the badge, John was able to take in the scene he had unwittingly fallen into: he and Alex, half naked, at the edge of a creek, water running down the softly defined muscles of Alex’s alabaster torso. He wanted to make a break for it, but he saw this as a childish urge; at best, a pathetically inadequate response to a deeper fear within him, a response that wouldn’t do anything to alleviate the fear he felt. And it was fear—fear, plain and simple—that men like Alex spoke a language that sounded like English but looked like Latin when written on the page, a language that John could fool himself into thinking he was fluent in, right up until he might ask for a drink of water and get a kiss on the mouth instead.

For a while, Alex stared down at his hands, as if what he held inside his fists was evidence of some great disappointment. Then he got up and walked off toward the cabin without so much as a good-bye.

Someone was shouting in the woods. John awoke with a start, grabbed the gun resting underneath the cot Patsy had bought for him. He unzipped the flap of the tent and stepped out into the darkness, now silent save for the insistent flow of the nearby creek. Another volley of shouts—pained, agonized even. Male. But nothing about the man’s voice sounded remotely familiar.

Gun raised, he followed the direction the shouts had come from, through the low, spidery branches, and stopped when he saw Alex several yards ahead, sitting cross-legged in the dense foliage a few yards from the bank of the creek.

On the back porch of the main house, a tall, gangly figure in a baseball cap and a T-shirt that hung from his emaciated frame paced the back porch as if he were looking for something. He paused every few seconds to peer through the back door into the main house. “
Fuckin’ quit this!
” he shouted. “
Just fuckin’ quit this, all right?
” He jumped up and down like a spoiled child. Then he picked up a wicker chair and hurled it across the porch, knocking over a table, shattering what sounded like an ashtray.

In a low voice, Alex said, “I think someone had a few cocktails.” Now that his presence had been recognized, John lowered the Sig, pointed it at the ground with one hand. Just then Eddie burst from the back door, holding a double-barreled shotgun, speaking in a low but determined voice, too quietly for John to hear him. John stepped past Alex, out of the cover of branches, and onto the open dirt.

Eddie saw him, stopped talking, took a minute to register the gun in John’s hand, then continued. Every few words John could make out phrases such as “conditions set forth” and “rules you agreed to” and “three strikes.” He held his ground, not sure if he had made his presence known to support Eddie or threaten him, or just make it clear that he was willing and able to do either one if the situation called for it.

From behind him, Alex said, “Don’t you have enough on your plate, John?”

“I didn’t ask you.”

Eddie must have found the right combination of words, because the gangly lunatic erupted with pathetic sobs, and gestured wildly as if he were about to make some grand point that was suddenly stolen from him by the intensity of his remorse. Eddie held his ground, then shifted the shotgun to one hand, pressed the other between his failed pupil’s shoulder blades, and led him around the side of the house.

Once they were gone, Alex said, “He wasn’t going to go to Iraq. The invasion. Mike wasn’t going to go. I talked him out of it.”

This information was too huge, bigger in some ways, than the revelation that Mike had lived with another man. For some reason, John couldn’t accept it while standing, exposed, on the bank of the creek, so he stepped back into the foliage, moving past Alex, who must have thought he was trying to make a quick escape because he raised his voice and said, “I threatened to leave him if he went. I forced him to make a choice, and for a while, it looked like he was going to choose me. But he was just afraid to, and he was lying. One night he came over to my apartment, and he was all tense and shut down. I knew something was up, so I looked in his rucksack while he was in the shower and I found a flight itinerary. They were flying him to Germany the next day with some other men from his unit, and that’s when I knew—I knew they were just repositioning him.

“I confronted him about it, so he told me. He said he had come to tell me that night because he didn’t want me to suffer through knowing about it. I threw him out of my apartment and told him I never wanted to see him again. He begged me not to let him go and I threw him out. I threw him out because I knew there would be no honor guard at my door and I knew if he died over there, I would have to find out from CNN and that if I went to his funeral nobody there would know who I was.

“But then I spent the whole night staring out the window and I realized I couldn’t let him go. I had memorized his flight number and I knew he had two connections; the last one was in Atlanta. I didn’t get to Lindbergh Field in time, so I booked myself a flight to Atlanta that would get me there half an hour before he left, but it was delayed, and by the time I got to his gate, they were already boarding. I saw him and I started running and I called his name, and suddenly the two guys next to him—guys from his unit—they turned and stared at him and I saw the happiness on Mike’s face turn into fear in a second, and I just froze where I stood because I knew if I went any farther, Mike would have to find some way to explain me to those men.

“He was always giving me a thumbs-up if I did something right, so it was the only thing I could think of…. I could only hope that he knew what it meant. That he would know I would wait for him until he came back.”

John saw Mike being wheeled across the tarmac at Balad, bandaged and injured almost beyond repair, and remembered Mike giving him a thumbs-up in the moment before the C-17’s enormous belly swallowed him.

Alex said, “Funny how you finally make a decision and everything gets so simple that it feels like you’ve never made a decision before in your entire life. That’s how my life was after that moment. Simple. True.”

Alex paused and stared at the flowing water in front of them, as if he thought John needed a moment to digest this juxtaposition of Mike’s Marine life and his personal life. What John needed was an answer to the question of why Mike hadn’t been able to invite him up to the house if their lives had been oh, so very
true
.

“He gave me a thumbs-up right back,” Alex said. “I guess it was like our wedding day. But that’s all it was. Two thumbs-up in a crowded airport terminal. That’s all it could be. You two got to have a better good-bye even after you almost got him killed.”