The Library at Mount Char (12 page)

Once, just for an instant, out of the corner of her eye, she caught David looking at the fire in a particular way. David did not notice her noticing him, nor did Margaret, standing next to him now. Carolyn did not say “
uzan-iya
” out loud, or even think it very clearly—she was learning—but for the rest of the night the phrase was never far from the surface of her thoughts. She recognized the look in David's eyes immediately. She had seen it many times, reflected in the black pools of her own heart.

The child who went into the bull had been aggressive, and sometimes casually cruel to the rest of them. But David had truly loved Father. But Carolyn knew for an absolute certainty that that was no longer true.
Uzan-iya
, they called it on the Himalayan steppe six thousand years ago.
Uzan-iya
—the moment when the heart turned first to murder.

One day David would move to kill Father. She could not guess when that day would be. She knew only that it would come.

For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder whether David might be of some use.

She pondered on this for many months.

E
rwin Charles Leffington was an unusual guy. He knew that about himself. For one thing, he insisted that people call him Erwin. He wouldn't accept Charles or E.C., and never, ever Chuck. Erwin. As a little kid he had gone by Chuck for the first seven years or so. Then he started taking classes two years ahead of his age group on account of because he was so
smart
and the teacher let his legal name slip. So, it was “Errrrr​rrrrrr​rrrrwi​iiiiii​iiiiii​iiiiin” that the McClusky twins screeched when they ambushed him after class, “Erwiii​iiiiii​nnnnnn​nnnn!” when they pushed his wadded-up A+ in algebra through his pinched lips and into his mouth, “Errrrr​rrrrrr​rwinnn​nnnnnn​nnnn!!​!!!!!” as they worked his jaw, “ERRRRR​RRRRRR​RWIIII​IIIIII​IIIINN​NNNNNN​NNNNNN!” as they made him swallow, “Erwin” in a casual, almost friendly, tone while they beat him until he smiled and said thank you. After he grew up into a badass it crossed his mind to go back and pay the McClusky twins a visit, but in the end he decided against it. They had taught him a valuable life lesson at a young age, and on balance he was grateful.

Erwin had fight in him and, as luck would have it, he grew up to be a big motherfucker.
Erwin
was what the crowd chanted when he ground his way through the defensive line and scored the winning touchdown at the homecoming game in his junior year. Erwin was what they called him at Fort Bragg from the day he enlisted—well, almost—right up to the day
he retired. Part of it was that “Sergeant Major” or “Command Sergeant Major” was a fucking mouthful and he didn't want to inflict that on his men. But mostly it was because he liked telling officers to call him Erwin, liked the way some of them got a little flicker in their eyes when he said it, but they did it anyway.

Erwin wasn't in the Army anymore. Thirteen years in—just after his third tour in Afghanistan—he'd decided he'd killed enough people. He wasn't post-traumatic or anything. He still loved his men. He still thought the enemy were a bunch of assholes. He was just done with it. It was a Tuesday and he'd seen an Apache gunship basically disintegrate a sixteen-year-old knucklehead. It was the right thing to do, he was grateful to the guy flying the Apache for doing it—the kid was toting a Dragunov sniper rifle, a little banged up but perfectly serviceable, and he probably wasn't going into the hills to hunt goats. Given the same circumstances he'd cheerfully have massacred the little bastard himself. He just didn't want to be in those circumstances anymore.

So a little while later he took a discharge and went out into the world. There he ended up teaching middle school art. That was some soothing shit right there. Not exactly what he was expecting to do, but it turned out he had nothing against tempera paint. He actually kind of liked making clay pots. What's more, he was surprised to discover that he was good at it. And the kids loved him. They respected him too. Not once did he ever have to raise a hand to even a single one of the little bastards. Truth to tell, most of them seemed a little scared of him. Teachers too, for that matter. And the school board, once or twice. Did they see smoldering bodies piled ten deep when they looked in his eyes? Was he flanked by ghosts when he walked down the hall? He didn't know. But once they realized he wasn't going to stab them in the face or blow them up, they relaxed.
Well, they relaxed a little bit. Most of them
.

After a while he relaxed too. He loved the kids—he
allowed
himself to love them—in a way he hadn't thought he was capable of anymore. When he got back from the war, his ability to love was in serious doubt—all you had to do was take one look at the smoking ruin of his marriage or maybe ask his half-forgotten family. In the civilian world,
the volume was a lot lower, but he was still shouting. He knew that, he just couldn't seem to do anything about it. It crossed his mind to eat a shotgun. But after he thought about it he decided to take a chance. Really, what did he have to lose? So one time when he caught this little dude named Dashaen Morning Flower Menendez—he would never forget that name, why the fuck would you do that to a kid?—when he caught little Dashaen eyeing the little plastic dish of mac-and-cheese on his desk the same way the skinnies in Somalia had looked at his MREs, he took the kid aside thinking maybe he was poor or his mom was a junkie or some sad shit like that. Who the fuck couldn't come up with the money for a goddamn sandwich? This was America, for chrissakes.

But it turned out little Dashaen's mom had plenty of money. She was a phlebotomist or some shit. Money wasn't the problem. The problem was that the kid's dad was in some kind of hippie religion and he'd taught little Dashaen about nonviolence and talking through your problems and all that other crap. Erwin had pointed out what a dumb idea this was at the parent-teacher conference and the crazy fuck brought up Gandhi. Clearly the man was insane, and little Dashaen was suffering for it. Erwin, himself no stranger to the problems of insane parents, took pity on him. It turned out he wasn't a nerd or anything like that, he'd just been handicapped by poor upbringing. All he needed was a clue. Once Erwin figured that out, he muttered a prayer of thanks to a God he didn't really believe in and set about
providing
said clue. He taught Dashaen how to kick the other little bastards in the balls, bloody their noses, sneak up behind them and clap both hands over their ears—all the basics. Actually, he might have gone a bit far with that last one; Dashaen overdid it and one of the other mini dudes ended up with a little bit of permanent hearing loss. But after that everybody liked Dashaen and no one stole his lunch money, so basically it was a happy ending. Little Dashaen moved on to high school the following year. Erwin figured he'd seen the last of him. But then one rainy day in December he headed out to the mailbox in front of the duplex where he was staying. He remembered it perfectly. It was the eighteenth, a Saturday. School was out on winter break. The people next door, the Michaelsens, had two little kids, and they were all
decorating their tree. It was two in the afternoon. He was on his eighth scotch. He could hear Christmas carols through the wall, that one about Good King Wenceslas, Jingle Bells, Gramma Got Run Over by a Fucking Reindeer. That shit didn't bother him. He wasn't jealous of the Michaelsens. He was happy for them. He didn't feel like he'd fucked up in life. Getting apocalyptically drunk by yourself was just the sort of thing bachelors did around Christmas. Also, he wasn't thinking of the shotgun in the corner of his closet. At all. Then he opened the mailbox and,
mirabile visu
, little Dashaen had sent him a Christmas card. He took that card out of the mailbox with trembling hands, opened the envelope, and read it standing right there at the mailbox. It said

Dear Erwin,

Merry Christmas! I know it's not “cool” but I wanted to send you this card so you'd know all is good wit me. High scool sucks but it's also pretty cool, if you know what I mean. Probly it wouldn't of been if I hadn't met you. Wanted you to know I knew that. Wanted to say thanks. I'd invite you over for X-Mas dinner but I think my Dad is still mad.

Dashaen

p.s. - I got me a girlfriend. That's her in the picture. Hawt ain't she?

When he was done reading it, Erwin went back into his half of the duplex and wept, the only time in his adult life he would ever do so. He wept for a good solid hour, then poured the rest of the scotch down the drain and turned on the TV and watched Charlie Brown. Before he went to bed he folded the card up and put it in his wallet. It would be there until the day he died.

Not long after that he felt better, more like himself, more able to do the sort of work he was good at. He resigned his teaching job at the end of the school year. Most everyone was relieved, though they were too polite to say anything. Or nervous.

Whatever.

N
ow, on a sunny October morning with the last breath of Virginia summer hanging in the air, Erwin aimed his rental—a shitty little Ford Taurus—at an empty spot in the parking lot and slid to a stop with a spray of gravel. This drew glares from a couple of cops smoking and swapping lies around the corner of the jail. Erwin grinned at them and waved. He didn't give a fuck.

He got out of the car and looked around, then spat in the general direction of the sign reading
COUNTY JAIL
. He called out to the two guys sucking on their Marlboros, “That shit'll kill ya, y'know,” then tipped his hat and grinned at them. “Just sayin'.”

The younger cop peered over the top of his sunglasses at Erwin like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. The older one laughed. “I'll keep it in mind,” he said. Actually, Erwin was wrong. The cops had less than two hours to live, but smoking would not be a factor.

The lobby of the jail was about like every other government building built in the past twenty years: cinder-block walls painted light-tan or dark-pale or something like that, linoleum floors—cheap but damn shiny—and a gray water fountain that dispensed lukewarm water that tasted like piss. Erwin drank it anyway. He was thirsty, and he'd had worse.

Looking around the lobby he counted at least half a dozen meth heads in various stages of strung-out, two drunks, and a redheaded kid who, in Erwin's opinion, was fucking schizophrenic.

He walked up to the window under the sign that said
VISITORS REGISTER HERE
and took out his badge. “Yeah, I'm Erwin,” he began. “I'm with Homeland S'curity. I'm here to see—”

The attendant, a pudgy man in a green uniform that said
VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
on one pocket and
ROGERS
on the other, didn't look up. “Fill this out,” he said, pushing a clipboard through a slot in the glass.

“Can I get—”

“Fill it out,” said the deputy. “Then we'll talk.”

Erwin sighed. The form ran three pages long, back and front. By the
time he got done, a goodish line had formed ahead of him. He took his place behind a fat lady with dirty feet and a skinny girl of about sixteen with a bad Lynyrd Skynyrd tattoo on her back. Erwin was a little surprised to see that tattoo. Ronnie Van Zant had to have been in his grave ten years or more when the kid was born.
But
, he reflected,
for a certain demographic Skynyrd is gonna be timeless. Like Elvis or the Virgin Mary
. To whatever degree such a demographic existed, these two were definitely part of it. The fat lady had a kid named Billy who got caught with a truckload of stolen cheese.

Cheese?

It emerged that this was Billy's third time receiving stolen goods, so he was looking at a good long stretch. Momma wept steadily and noisily, saying things like “I raised them boys raht!” every so often. The skinny girl doled out Kleenex. Every so often she'd say something like “I just don't know what he was thinking,” and pat her belly protectively. Erwin guessed that there would be another doomed idiot to take Billy's place in the trailer park in six months or so.

Fifteen sniffly minutes later he was back at the window. He didn't bother trying to talk, just passed the form in and waited for the verdict. As a thirteen-year veteran of Army bureaucracy he was pretty sure he'd filled it out properly, but with a certain species of asshole you could never really be sure.

The pudgy cop scanned the form carefully, all three pages, back and front. After a moment he nodded. “Looks good,” he said, clearly disappointed. “I'll need to see two forms of identification, Officer”—he broke off and squinted at the form—“Leffington?
Erwin
Leffington?” He looked up for the first time.

“That's me,” Erwin said. He held his badge up.

“Are you…you're not
the
Erwin Leffington, are you?”

Ah, fuck
, he thought.
Here we go
. If he had one regret in life—which he did—it was letting that fucker write the book about him. It seemed harmless at the time, but the book was what led to the movie. When the movie came out, that was basically all she wrote. “Prolly not.”

“
Command Sergeant
Major Erwin Leffington? B Company, Second Battalion?”

Erwin just looked at him. For the first time in a good long while the taste of dust and cordite came back to him. He tried to cling to the image of little Dashaen, to the Christmas card, but all of a sudden he was drowning.

“Second Battalion of the
Fifteenth
?”

“Not for a while,” Erwin said. He spoke very softly. “If we could just—”

“My brother is Jim Rogers,” the fat guy said.

Erwin looked up at that, no longer drowning. “How is Sergeant Rogers?”

“He's better, sir. It was rough going for a while, but he's doing well now. He just had a son, born last May.”

“Don't call me sir.” Then, after a moment, “How's his leg?”

“He gets around OK. Now, anyway. Took the VA a while to get it adjusted right.”

The news that Rogers was doing well helped, a little. “Your brother is a good man,” he said. “You tell him I asked after him. Now, if we could—”

“Sir, he told us about you,” the fat deputy said. “He told us what you done.”

Erwin shuffled his feet. Shit like this always made him uncomfortable. The silence stretched out. “Your brother is a good man,” he repeated.

“My brother says the same about you. No, that ain't true. He says you're a
great
man. He says you're about the best soldier who ever wore a uniform, and a certified badass to boot.” The fat deputy was looking at him with worship in his eyes. His voice trembled as he spoke. “He says you saved his life, his and everybody—”

“Thanks,”
Erwin growled. Then, calmer, “All that, yeah, that was overhyped.”