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.
10
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 ne
ck, 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.”
Before John’s anger could find his voice, Eddie called his name from across the creek. Now Eddie was standing by himself.
“Everything all right over there?” Eddie asked.
“I could ask you the same question.”
Eddie seemed to consider his response. “That wasn’t his first slip. I’m not about only giving one chance.”
“Fine. I don’t need to know.”
“Yes, you do. Otherwise you would have gone back to bed.” Eddie started for the back door before John could respond.
When he turned around, he saw that Alex hadn’t moved an inch, and he figured he was waiting for a response. John said, “How much are you going to get to blame on me? You think I’m supposed to stand here and be your whipping boy for everyone who ever called you a name? You knew exactly what you were signing on for the minute you found out Mike was a Marine and you went after it full-throttle. But then when you go
t afraid, you tried to have it both ways. That’s why you had to have your wedding in that airport terminal. Because you gave him a choice he couldn’t make.”
“The Marines wouldn’t allow him to be my boyfriend and be a Marine. You know that.”
“That was not the choice you forced him to make. You asked him not to fight. You told him he would lose you if he did. If you really knew who he was, if you really knew the type of Marine he was, then you knew what you were doing to him was blackmail. And that doesn’t have anything to do with you, him, or anyone else in the world being gay.”
John had started to move past Alex through the low branches and said, “Besides, why would I care about a wedding I never would have been invited to?”
“Would you have come?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t believe you. And Mike wouldn’t have believed you, either.”
“See, I doubt that, Alex.” He spun, didn’t silence himself even though he knew his anger was about to get the best of him. “I think you were the reason I was never invited up to that house, because you were the one who didn’t want me there.”
Alex’s silence told John that he had scored a point, so he headed back to his tent before the game could begin again.
The next morning, after their five-mile run, John led Alex to a spot he had found that morning where the creek widened by several feet as it made a sharp turn around a high ledge of water-polished sandstone. The depth of the creek at this spot was a good five feet, just enough to be able to make out the six bright red bricks John had bound together with duct tape and dropped to the creek’s bottom. Alex spotted them right away, held them in his stare as John gave him the instructions: retrieve the bricks from the bottom of the creek and drop them at John’s feet in sixty seconds’ time.