Off the Grid (7 page)

11

C
laude fed more birch logs into the fire that had mellowed to orange embers in the cabin’s hearth. It had been a very fine day, the finest day in his recent memory, spent drinking, laughing, reminiscing, and shooting cans in preparation for tomorrow’s big hunt.

Their exertions had taken a toll on everybody, especially Joey, and he hadn’t lasted much past sundown before begging off to bed—no surprise, given the boy’s sorry condition. Now it was just a couple of old warhorses left standing, on one last mission: to finish what was left of a bottle of fine scotch whiskey before their heads hit the pillows, too.

Claude settled down onto the fieldstone hearth and coaxed the fire with a poker while Chief looked on from a leather lounge chair, his big hands laced over the shelf of his belly.

“You can still shoot, you know that, Chimook?” Chief chuckled, his amusement reverberating like faraway thunder. “Not half as good as Joey or me, but still pretty damn good for an old cowboy who fucks dogs. I was impressed today.”

“Do the math, Chief—I killed around fifteen more cans than you.”

“You always cheat. Like when we play golf.”

“I don’t cheat in golf.”

“Yeah, actually, you do.”

Claude cocked a shaggy, graying brow at his friend. “You can cheat in golf, but you can’t cheat with a gun. Dead is dead, every time, whether it’s a can or a man.”

“I suppose you’re right about that.” Chief poured the remaining scotch in equal proportion into their watered-down lowballs. “I think Joey had a good day.”

“Yep. We all did.” Claude lifted his glass for a drink, relishing the oaky heat of new liquor on the back of his throat. “Way I see it, up here with us, he’s not a sick man, he’s just a man. That’s good for him. No sense letting reality overshadow our time together.”

Chief nodded, his eyes tracking down the hallway that had swallowed up Joe a few hours ago. Claude followed his gaze. “A sorrowful thing, that. No sound reasoning behind a couple old swamp rats like us who stewed in Agent Orange for two years to outlive such a fine young man.”

“This shouldn’t be his road to the High Place. A warrior should die on the battlefield. It’s the greatest honor.”

Claude regarded him shrewdly. “We didn’t. And if I recall proper, you saved both our asses that night in Khe Sahn, instead of letting us have our ‘greatest honor.’”

“It wasn’t our time. Besides, I didn’t save our asses, Mukwa did.”

“Don’t you go getting all Indian-mystical on me. You know I don’t have any tolerance for that kind of nonsense.”

Chief smiled and pushed himself out of his chair. “We should think about getting some shut-eye, old man. Bear’s on the agenda tomorrow, and that’s a thinking man’s quarry. We need to be sharp.”

Claude suddenly gave him a puzzled frown. “You know, Chief, never occurred to me to ask before, but aren’t there some sort of rules that say you shouldn’t shoot your spirit guide? Seems like it’d be bad luck or something.”

“No. Indians can shoot whatever the hell they want.” They both laughed.

Claude climbed into his bed and felt the dull ache of muscles put to good use—a feeling that didn’t irk him one bit. At the age of five, his daddy had deemed him fit to help the ranch hands with the animals, and the chores had only gotten harder with each passing year. He was no stranger to an ache or a pain.

He remembered the one and only time he’d complained about the work. His daddy hadn’t said much after hearing his only child’s grievances, had just proceeded to drag him to a dusty pickup truck and toss him in the passenger seat. They’d driven for miles and miles that afternoon, his daddy constantly pointing out huge pastures filled with cattle, and endless expanses of steel oil rigs with pumping arms that reminded him of the dinosaurs in his favorite picture book.

Your granddaddy built all this up, boy, from nothin’ but hunger, sweat, and a strong back. And I built it up bigger. You want this to be all yours one day, you’re gonna have to put some skin in the game, you hear? Anything free ain’t worth havin’, you remember that.

That entire night, Claude had tossed and turned and fretted in his little race-car-shaped bed, not because he cared one spit about any cows or dumb metal dinosaurs, but because Mrs. Carmichael at the general store always gave him a free peppermint stick whenever he visited, and his five-year-old brain couldn’t fathom a reason why a free peppermint stick wasn’t worth having, even if his daddy had told him as such.

Claude smiled at the ancient memory that had become so warm and comforting after all these years, and reached over to turn off the bedside table light. That’s when he noticed the box that hadn’t been there earlier, when he’d settled into the room this morning and unpacked.

The box was something very familiar to him, because he had a few of his own—a ceremonial box that held military medals. He sat up in bed and carefully placed it on his lap. He knew what was in there. And he knew where it had come from.

Time passed—Claude wasn’t sure how much—before he slowly lifted the cover. Nestled in plush velvet in the bottom of the box was a bronze cross with an eagle in the center, the scroll below the eagle inscribed:
FOR VALOR
. It was a Distinguished Service Cross, one of the highest honors the military awarded, given to individuals who displayed extraordinary heroism at great risk to their own life—the one Joey had earned trying to save Claude’s son, Grover. This was a parting gift, from a brave and honorable man who was distributing a part of his legacy to a place he wanted it to go, while he still had time.

Claude finally picked up the medal and cradled it in his palm. The bronze felt warm to the touch, as if somebody had recently pressed it to their flesh and had held it there.

Claude closed his eyes, leaned back against his pillow, and moved the medal up to rest against his heart.

12

M
ukwa visited Chief for only the second time in his life that night—but on this visit, Mukwa didn’t tell him about the many roads to the High Place, or lead him to a sniper’s nest in a Vietnam jungle. He didn’t even ask for clemency during the bear hunt tomorrow. He simply showed him a single loon, floating on a lake in the moonlight. Suddenly, the loon took flight on great wings, disappearing into darkness, the lunar radiance lighting the edges of its feathers. At some point during its flight, it changed into an owl—an omen of death.

Chief lurched up in bed, breathing hard, tangled in sheets that were soaked with his sweat. He turned on the bedside light and sat up for a few minutes, trying to calm his heart and gather his wits.

As much as he loved to taunt Claude with a little Indian mysticism now and again, he didn’t really believe in spirit guides the way some of his people did. He knew the messages were purely human instincts the ancients had attributed to a higher power, and the explanation had gotten passed down in lore.

That night in Khe Sahn, the first time Mukwa had come to him, he’d probably subconsciously noted the clicking and chirping of Vietcong snipers communicating with each other as they moved closer to their encampment. He’d picked up on it and, in his dream, had manifested those signals into a message from his spirit guide, because those were his tools of interpretation.

And this time, he knew Mukwa’s visit was the same—Joe was dying, and he was the owl. That was obvious. But the loon who’d taken flight in the first part of his dream was a message he didn’t quite understand.

Chief disentangled himself from his damp sheets and crept out of his bedroom and into the dark hallway. He could hear Claude snoring like a goddamned chain saw across the hall, but there was no sound coming from Joey’s bedroom and the door was partially ajar. He pushed the door open a little wider and peered in—the bed was made, but his suitcase and rifle cases were still there, neatly stacked on the luggage rack at the foot of the bed, like nicer versions of the military footlockers they’d all kept in barracks during their service.

He walked out into the kitchen, but there wasn’t coffee brewing and there was no sign of Joe; no sign that he’d ever been here, except for his belongings back in the bedroom. And it was no surprise to Chief that his car was missing from the driveway. He could have taken an early-morning drive around Elbow Lake, sure; but in his heart of hearts, he knew that Joe was gone, for whatever reason. Joe had been the owl, but he’d also been the loon, flying away into the night.

13

I
n the wee hours of Monday morning, Joe parked in the Riverside hospital ramp, like he always did. The hospital is where everyone would think he would go to die quietly, painlessly, carrying a full load of morphine and ready to accept his end. Only Claude and Chief would understand that he couldn’t leave that way.

The pain had been bad during the five-hour drive from the reservation, but now, as he walked down Riverside, it was excruciating. He was oblivious to silhouettes of passing people whose features he couldn’t make out as they exited the tall, shabby apartment buildings that were as much a cancer on this urban landscape as the one that was eating his insides, bite by bite. The tiny houses that cuddled up to the behemoth brick buildings on the narrow side street were as run-down as he remembered, dark at this time of night, one of them holding evil within its walls like a scalding crucifix in the hand of a true believer.

He was not aware of holding his side, as if the pain could be pushed inside and somehow negated. He was not aware of the tears streaming down his cheeks as he shuffled along, boots dragging and scraping against concrete sidewalks because his feet were now far too heavy to lift. This was a familiar place, and he felt like he was moving through his own history. It seemed appropriate tonight.

The hospital had been the first marker, where his father had died by his own hand, unable to live with the memories of Vietnam and what he had done there. And yet that wasn’t what Joey remembered of that terrible night when he was eight years old and sat with his weeping mother in that dreadful white room with its beeping monitor, ticking off the remaining seconds of his father’s life. He didn’t know about Vietnam, or what his father had experienced there; he was only eight, after all, and he knew only one thing that had fractured his father’s life.

In the Munich Olympics, 1972, the Soviets won gold in basketball. The U.S. team lost by one point, winning silver, and refused the medal because the Soviets had won by the bad call of a bad referee, and the U.S. team refused to accept false accolades for second place when they should have had first. That’s who the U.S. team was in those days.

We are not now who we were then.

It was weird, how he kept thinking of that, all these years later. He hadn’t even been born when it happened. But he’d watched the newsreels over and over, because his dad had played basketball in college, and kept the films in the basement to play when he needed a beer and alone time to remember who he might have been. Little Joey had crouched on the basement steps while light from the old projector danced across his face and his Superman pajamas, watching what his father watched, taking it in, waiting for the years to pass that would tell him what it really meant.

Funny, he thought, shuffling along the broken sidewalk like the desperately ill man he was. That was one of the memories that had shaped his life. America had refused to accept a false defeat back in Munich, refused to shrug off a wrong without standing up for what was right. Joe vowed he would always do the same.
I am who we were then.

He had to sit down on the curb in front of the dark little crooked house, because he couldn’t breathe very well anymore. And that was silly. You didn’t breathe through your pancreas, and that was what was really killing him. Still, he sat there for a moment, trying to suck in air, fighting the pain, his feet planted in the puddles of sand next to the curb left by the last pass of the street sweeper, thinking through the details for the hundredth time, because this had to be done exactly right, whether he could breathe or not.

Lately, he’d been remembering those days in a foreign desert, when his good strong legs had propelled him from sand dune to sand dune to find cover from flying bullets. Now, when his lungs could barely find enough oxygen to keep his heart pumping, the simple act of walking sucked the soul right out of him.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t done this before. But most of the other times he’d had brothers at his side. The last time, and this time, he was on his own. He was close to wipeout anyway, no reason for other good men to take the risk of keeping up the fight. Trouble was, it didn’t seem to matter how many they took down—it was like squashing roaches. You killed one and another hundred swarmed in to take its place. The damn list just kept getting longer and longer.

He’d never really gotten the logic of the war machine. For six years, he’d put his life on the line every goddamned day because his leaders had told him to go overseas and kill the bad guys. Then all of a sudden, when his service was over, those same leaders had said, okay, go home now and blend in, and for God’s sake, don’t kill the bad guys that are now in your country, in your neighborhoods. We’ll take care of that.

But they weren’t taking care of that. They couldn’t find them all, and when they did find some who seemed to be up to no good, they couldn’t do anything about it without jumping through a zillion legal hoops that one day were going to take too long.

He couldn’t imagine what the blowback would be when the Feds finally sorted all this out. He’d probably be the first serviceman in history to get a posthumous dishonorable discharge. But none of that bothered him. The people who mattered would understand that all he was doing was the job he’d been trained to do. He just didn’t stop when they told him to.

It didn’t happen precisely as he’d planned. The men came out of the house when he was still sitting on the curb, his back to them. He saw the light from the doorway shining down the crumbling sidewalk and illuminating the scraggly grass next to him, and all he could think of was oh my God, what if they had come out unarmed? Nothing would work then. Everything would be lost. He’d have to abandon all his grand plans and come back another night, and the big problem there was he wasn’t sure he had another night left.

He heard one of them call out to him, and understood just enough of the language to translate “who the fuck are you and what are you doing here?” which is precisely what he would have asked if he’d had what they had in the house behind them.

He had no real idea what to reply to redeem the situation, and then suddenly he felt like Grover was sitting on his shoulder, whispering in his ear, telling him what to say. He took a deep breath, and without turning around, yelled back in their own language, “FBI. You’re under arrest. Lie facedown, hands behind your head.”

Whoop. Big threat. Beware the dying cancer patient. And thank God for the Internet language program he’d been practicing for weeks, because it worked. Oh, how it worked. He knew that the minute he felt the first slug pierce his back.

Stupid Joe. What if they’d killed you with the first shot? Didn’t think of that, did you? Then again, you didn’t notice the streetlight when you cased the place over and over, which is what happens when chemo slaughters your brain cells and you never notice in daylight what will be evident in dark. Happily, the idiots were poor shots, and the first slug pierced his right lung and ignored the more important organs.

Lieutenant Joe Hardy was a great shot. Funny, the way cancer and chemo had crippled him. He couldn’t take a decent shit, he couldn’t fuck or eat spice or do any of the things a man was supposed to do. But he could turn his upper body in an instant and shoot like the eighteen-year-old kid who’d scored nothing but tens on the sniper range.

He killed them both, but not before one of them had fired the fatal shot, blowing apart his heart, the only organ he had left that worked.

This was really good, he thought as his upper body fell to the crinkly, dried October grass. Perfect, actually. Poor, pathetic, dying man, shot dead trying to stumble his way to the hospital. Jesus Christ that was sad, and the cops were going to tear that house apart now.