The Ranger (5 page)

“Maybe never,” Quinn said. “I either jump into the regular Army or become a Ranger instructor.”

“While your boys storm the castle.”

“Yep.”

“You gettin’ old, Quinn.”

“Old man at twenty-nine.”

“Does your dick still work?”

“Last time I checked.”

“Well, you got that goin’ for you.”

Boom nodded and smiled as Quinn downshifted and slowed into the gravel drive of the old farmhouse, looming white and ramrod straight, with the tin roof shining. They both crawled out of the truck, Boom tossing the wadded-up foil of his biscuit into a massive pile of junk and garbage by the old house’s front steps. “Whew.”

“Got bad after my aunt died. My mom says Hamp stopped caring.”

“This is just plain nasty.”

“Inside it’s even better,” Quinn said.

“Why am I here again?”

“’Cause I said I’d pay you if you’d help.”

“You did?”

Quinn pushed open the door to find that same sickly scent as last night, the same smell that had driven Lillie and him out into the yard, locking the door behind them. They decided to take one room at a time. The parlor was loaded with rat-eaten furniture and boxes of old clothes and rags, absolutely nothing of value. Musty clothes and ragged suits decades out of style. Leisure suits of denim, white dress shirts yellowed with nicotine. There were stacks of newspapers and scrap wood, piles of drapes and rolled carpets without any purpose. He and Boom made a pile in the back field, and Boom walked to one of the old barns to hunt up some kerosene or diesel to start burning the whole mess of it.

Quinn found a suitcase filled with old family photographs and placed it on the kitchen table. And then there were the guns, damn guns, all over the house. Hampton had squirreled away pistols in the folds of his sofa, behind doors, high on bookshelves, and even a .38 on the lid of his toilet. More boxes of ammunition, souvenirs and medals from Korea, and tarnished awards from decades in law enforcement.

Boom had the bonfire in the back field stoked, and twisting gray snakes of smoke rose far up into the reddened twilight. Quinn had already found twenty-four guns, a pocket watch that had belonged to his great-grandfather, broken crystal and broken china, mountains of old books, tools that would be useful to get the property up to speed, and record albums he’d sort out later. There was gospel and plenty of George Jones and Charley Pride. Charley Pride always made Quinn think about his uncle, the music always playing when they’d come over for supper.

He also found two bottles of aged bourbon that Hampton had kept for much better days or perhaps just misplaced in the piles of shit. One of them had a tag reading MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE STAGG FAMILY.

Quinn uncorked the bottle with his teeth and reached for a tobacco brown ranch coat he’d found in his uncle’s closet, the same coat Hamp had worn the day he’d found Quinn lost in the woods. Boom was a hulking shadow by the fire, holding a shovel in his one hand and watching the decades of memories and clutter crumble to ashes. Quinn handed the bottle to Boom, and Boom examined the label in the firelight, nodding his approval.

“You know, my parole officer says this stuff is the root of all my problems.”

“You got the shakes.”

“Appreciate you not judging me.”

“Long as you reciprocate.”

A biting wind separated them and whistled in Quinn’s ears as Boom took a long swallow and passed the bottle back. They drank for a while as the night came onto the farm. The temperature dropped hard and fast, and Quinn was grateful for the coat and the fire his uncle had provided. A tattered piece of an old flowered dress that he clearly remembered his aunt wearing to one of his birthday parties caught and sputtered, bursting into a blue-and-orange flame, and then it was gone.

A large truck rambled down the gravel road an hour later, and the beams of the headlights swung onto the house and the back field. Two men got out, and Quinn and Boom exchanged glances. Quinn handed the half-empty bottle back to Boom and walked toward the headlights.

As the two figures stood there in the glow, a familiar feeling of being exposed out in the open and naked and vulnerable passed through Quinn—he wished he had a weapon, preferably his M4, but was then embarrassed by the thought. One of the figures stepped forward, and even in the distance, and through all the years he’d been gone, he recognized the craggy, comical face of Johnny T. Stagg.

“Good to see you, boy,” he said, stepping forward and offering his small hand. “I guess we need to talk about this situation here.”

Johnny Stagg came
from a family of hill people, moons-hiners and dirt farmers who were unfit for society. They all possessed that same bright red skin, even in the winter, and crooked teeth stained brown from muddy well water. Stagg was a slight man, not even coming up to Quinn’s shoulders, and kept a permanent smile on his face like a man who enjoyed every second of living or found the world a humorous place. Quinn shook his offered hand out of manners, waiting for Stagg to drop the bomb on what he really wanted. His hair was oiled back, as had been the fashion in his day, and he smelled of cheap aftershave and cigarettes. His suit was ill fitting and dark, and he wore an American flag pin on his lapel. He introduced the older man with him as Brother Davis, the pastor at his church.

“Brother Davis was at Hamp’s funeral but didn’t have a chance to speak,” Stagg said. “He thought he’d have a moment with both of us now. Maybe a short prayer.”

Brother Davis had wrinkled skin and a gold tooth. His eyes looked confused behind the dirty lenses of his glasses.

“Y’all want a swig?” Boom asked, holding up the bottle.

Stagg bit into his cheek, the smile fading and then returning. “Naw, I don’t touch that stuff anymore.”

“What are you serving out at the truck stop?” Quinn asked. “Kool-Aid?”

“I don’t have nothin’ to do with that place anymore,” Stagg said. “I sold it two years back.”

Stagg smiled some more. Brother Davis smiled, too.

“God love you,” Quinn said, walking to another junk pile in the front yard and tossing more into the bed of his truck. Stagg followed him, continuing to talk, as if he didn’t find any insult in Quinn turning his back. This pile was mostly Hamp’s old worn-out shoes and coveralls, issues of
Field & Stream,
and torn pieces of flannel he’d been using to plug holes in the walls.

“I didn’t want you hearing this from a lawyer,” Stagg said, still grinning. Quinn tossed more tattered rags into the pickup and waited a beat to hear him. “Your uncle owed a mess of money up against this old house. I helped him out awhile back with some work, but he never did repay me. I’m sorry, but I can’t go broke on this here deal.”

“Did he sign over the land?”

Stagg looked over at Brother Davis, and the country pastor smiled, showing off a couple of gold teeth.

“I got papers with me,” Stagg said, handing them to Quinn, Quinn holding the papers into the glow of the headlights and scanning a legal document that looked as if it had been typed out by a monkey. Maybe three paragraphs, and Hampton’s scrawl at the bottom.

“This loan here,” Quinn said. “You’re going to have to prove that it wasn’t paid.”

“I’d hoped we could settle it without all that mess,” Stagg said. “Lawyers ain’t gonna do nothin’ but leach off what’s left. Can I have them papers back?”

“Nope,” Quinn said, folding them and tucking them into his coat pocket. “I’ll take this to my attorney in the morning.”

Stagg’s face lit up like a jack-o’-lantern with a crooked-tooth grin. “Just the same, please hand those back.”

“You come out to my uncle’s place the day after he’s buried with some two-bit preacher to steal land that’s been in my family for generations, and you expect me to sit here with my thumb up my ass and pray? Get the hell out of here.”

“This was a business affair between us,” Stagg said. “And this man here is a reverend.”

“I know who he is,” Quinn said. “He used to drain our septic tank when I was a kid.”

Brother Davis scowled and sucked at a tooth.

Boom walked up beside Quinn, standing a good head taller than everyone, and didn’t say a word, just loomed there over all the garbage and refuse in the headlamps and faded light. “C’mon, Quinn.”

“You can handle this deal any way you like,” Stagg said. “Paper or no paper, your uncle owes me a lot of money for use of them machines and personal loans. You don’t believe me, you just call up my competition. That Cat 320 alone goes for two grand a week.”

Quinn nodded and went back to work. Stagg shuffled back to his car, the preacher followed wearing a cocky grin, and Quinn went back to the cab to start up the truck and load more onto the fire. Boom didn’t even look up until that pile was gone.

“We gonna be here all night?” Boom asked.

“Looks that way.”

“Your uncle got another bottle?”

“We haven’t finished this one yet.”

“Just thinking ahead. Don’t you Rangers lead the way?”

Must’ve been
way past midnight by the time the bottle was gone, most of it going into Boom, who’d stretched out by the heat of the fire, lying on his back in the dead cold and looking skyward. They hadn’t talked in a long while, Quinn being used to long periods of silence and waiting, just getting used to the difference in the sounds, the familiarity and quietness. The last few years had played hell with his hearing, and when it got very quiet, he could hear a piercing electric pitch, his ears waiting for more gunfire and explosions, the big revving hum from a Chinook or Black Hawk right before it would lift off the sandy ground and drop them up in the mountains or the edge of a village made of rocks.

He tossed the empty bottle into the fire, squatting down and poking at the embers with a stick. Boom spoke; Quinn was surprised to hear his voice.

“You want to tell me about it?”

“You asking?” Quinn asked.

“I’ll just say I never expected you to step foot back in this town again.”

“Unless someone died.”

“Even then.”

“What do you want to know?”

“What’s been souring you?”

“I’m not soured.”

“Okay. You want to play it like that.”

“I’m not playing,” Quinn said.

“I see you got that Purple Heart, too.”

“I got hurt. Wasn’t a big deal. My problems with the Army don’t have a thing to do with that. My wounds were nothing, man.”

“What was it?”

“The Regiment thinks I’m too old to be storming the castle.”

“You don’t have to be a Ranger.”

“It’s the only thing I ever wanted to be. I could give a shit for regular Army.”

The last few sticks on the fire toppled over in the mound of ash, and Quinn found some more fallen branches and cedar logs to add to the pile. He warmed his hands and sat back on his haunches.

“How’d you get hurt?” Boom stretched out his legs.

“Hand-to-hand with the devout, hiding in some rocks near our LZ. He was on my back, yelling about Allah, me reaching for my M4 to neutralize the bastard when he yelled, ‘Bomb!’ ”

“In English.”

“Plain English.”

“Funny how we use the word
neutralize
. Sounds kinda nice.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you?”

“What?”

“Neutralize his ass.”

Quinn poked at the fire and shook his head. “Yep, but he shot me, too, while we scrambled for that bomb. And you?”

“My world got rocked on a convoy outside Fallujah.”

“That’s it?”

“All there is to tell. Hell of a thing when you see your goddamn arm lying down the road from you. Puts you in a different frame of mind.”

Boom started to laugh.

“Damn, Boom. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “You know what I miss most?”

Quinn waited.

“Neutralizing all those motherfuckers,” he said. “I was pretty good at it. Riding convoy with that big-ass machine gun, protecting my boys. I liked that.”

“Performing what you’d been trained to do.”

The men didn’t talk for a while. You could hear coyotes up in the northern hills, and the sky was bright and clear. Quinn sat down and fell asleep watching the fire, a hot, even glow of red ashes. When he awoke sometime later, Boom had passed out on the ground. Quinn tried to wake him. But Boom wouldn’t stir, Quinn stepping down and lifting his friend’s massive weight up with his legs.

He tossed his friend over his shoulder, the weight crushing, and carried him up the hill just as first light burned weak and gray over the dead trees. Down the gravel road, a rangy cattle dog padded its way up to the front porch and waited for Quinn to open the door.

The dog cocked its head, studying him with two eyes of different colors.

“Howdy there, Hondo.”

5

Judge Blanton lived toward the northeast corner
of Tibbehah County, right around the hamlet of Carthage, about five miles or so from the Rebel Truck Stop. This part of the county had once been far removed from Jericho and the highway traffic, but now the county road toward his house was clogged with trailer homes filled with Mexican laborers and poor blacks and poorer whites. Junk cars and garbage littered the road Quinn had remembered as pristine when he’d come to ride horses as a kid. He’d once felt like he’d entered a secret part of the county, miles and miles of virgin woods that belonged to the judge stretching far out into the northern hills where he’d been lost during that time as a boy, separated from the hunt camp and left to wander into what had felt like endless forest and backtracked trails and black nights filled with coyotes and copperheads. But then accepting the situation, owning it, and killing off any fears he’d had.

You used to could drive into the judge’s land straight from the road, but now Quinn had to stop at a locked cattle gate and unlatch a chain, closing the gate behind him, knowing the old man must lock up at night with his pistols and shotguns. As he drove closer to the simple one-story home, noting two trucks and a car in the drive, two pit bulls ran out to greet him, circling Quinn as he stepped out, growling and bristling until the old man emerged from the horse barn and whistled.