What felt like just a few minutes later, he awoke again to the sight of Patsy standing over the bed, checking his pulse on his good wrist. “What are you doing?” he heard himself ask her.
“Taking your pulse.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know what else to do.”
Fair enough, he thought, and then he drifted off, starting awake now and then, once as his sister was tying a splint to his cast.
There was no good-bye letter waiting for him when he woke again, this time with a finality that told him the blue pills were leaving his system. But the silence in the house told him that once again Eddie had taken his men off-base. He swung his legs to the floor and managed to get to his feet. He straightened, and for half a second it seemed like there wasn’t going to be any pain. Then it struck with such force he landed ass-first on the bed, as if he had been shoved into a seated position by a giant hand.
He was still trying to control his breathing when he heard the gunshot. This time he ignored the pain as he shot to his feet, went to the window, and looked out at the slanting orange sunlight of dusk. He heard footsteps racing down the hall toward him and turned. Sweat broke out all over him at once, and he recognized it as a sloppy misfire of his trained response. When his sister flew into the room, he gasped audibly, released the hundred visions of possible assailants that had strobed his mind’s eye in an instant.
“Did you bring a gun?” Patsy asked him.
“Where’s Alex?”
“I don’t know. Did you bring a gun?”
“It’s in my tent, and the shot came from there.”
“Eddie took the guys into town.”
“Get to a room with a phone and lock yourself in it. Give me your cell.”
“John, you dislocated your shoulder and broke your arm in two places. What the hell are you—”
“I’ll use the goddamn cast if I have to!”
She took her cell phone out and stuffed it in the pocket of his jeans. He left the room, suddenly finding himself in an unfamiliar hallway, given that he didn’t remember being carried inside the house. He was halfway across the back porch when he realized he was barefoot. Then came a second gunshot, definitely from the direction of the clearing. And the gunshot sounded familiar. If it wasn’t his Sig, it was one exactly like it. He splashed across the waters of the creek and into the dense foliage on the other side, made his way through the lower, shielding branches.
He was coming up on the clearing through good cover when he made out the lone figure standing in the middle of it: Alex. His nose had been sloppily bandaged, and he was walking away from one of the large boulders. From his position, John had a sideways view of Alex as he lifted John’s Sig in a two-handed grip. There was a classic mistake in his grip; he rested the butt on top of his free hand, but instead of balling his hand into a fist for better support, the hand was lax, fingers open, like he’d probably seen Jack Bauer do it on 24. He fired at the row of aluminum cans he had placed on top of the boulder—his shot was just a few inches too high.
John withdrew into the branches, pulled the cell phone from his jeans pocket with his left hand, and scrolled through the phone book until he found a listing for Eddie’s home number. He punched Send; Patsy answered in a hoarse whisper, as if she thought the house itself was surrounded by cannibals. “It’s Alex. He’s practicing a little shooting.”
Her breath went out of her. “When did you teach him how to shoot?”
“I didn’t. Looks like he’s trying to teach himself.”
And he’s not doing such a bad job of it, he thought. After a few more deep breaths she said, “Can you tell him to stop? If he’s still shooting when Eddie gets back, we just might lose our lease here. Eddie’s still pissed we didn’t take you to the hospital.”
He could hear the real questions she was asking him: Can you talk to him at all? Can you ask him to forgive you? To these questions as well John answered, “I’ll see what I can do.”
He moved back in the direction of the creek so he would come up on Alex from behind. He kept his steps slow and careful as he approached, and he saw Alex go rigid at the sound of them. But Alex didn’t acknowledge John’s presence in any real way; he just continued to focus on the row of aluminum cans twenty yards in the distance.
“You’re not so bad at that,” John said quietly.
Alex responded by firing another shot, too high again. Right behind him now, John reached out, brushed Alex’s left shoulder with his hand to give him a warning, then pushed down gently on his left bicep. “Lower,” he said softly. “And you do it with each breath. Breathe in, finger on the trigger, breathe out, and fire. The gun rises slightly above the target as you inhale, then back down to hit it as you exhale.”
After a few seconds, John felt Alex inhale, saw the gun barrel rise slightly, then descend. The bullet tore the middle can from the row. A perfect shot. John laughed despite himself, was about to pat Alex on the back when Alex spun.
He raised the barrel right in front of John’s eyes, aimed at the spot just above the bridge of John’s nose. John’s first instinct was to lash out with his right arm, which bucked against its cast, then against the broken bone inside it. The pain crippled him, so when Alex ordered him down onto his knees, he didn’t have a problem going along with the order.
He closed his eyes; then something brushed his face, and that’s when he realized that some sort of hood had been slipped over his head and the pressure against the back of his neck was being made by the barrel of his own gun, still hot enough to singe the hairs there. “You had your chance to train me. Now it’s my turn. Stand up.”
Branches clawed at him as Alex drove them into the woods.
“You’re going to pretend you’re somebody else, John Houck.” The controlled sound of his rage filled John’s stomach with a cold bath.
“How am I going to do that?” he asked. Alex held John’s left hand against the small of his back and moved the gun barrel to a spot between John’s shoulder blades as he steered him out of the clearing. He could hear the creek flowing off to his right, which meant they were headed in the direction of the property John hadn’t explored.
“You’re going to shut up and listen to every damn word I say,” Alex answered him. “Because you’re going to be this person. You’re going to walk in his shoes no matter how ugly it gets. Of course, imagination goes only so far. I’ve got some props to help you along the way.”
John would have preferred to hear madness in his voice, but instead Alex’s voice was cool and controlled, like someone in shell shock. “I’m sorry I broke your nose,” John said.
“I’m not, John. You want to know why? Because you showed me just who the fuck you are.”
“And who’s that?”
“A white-trash closet-case piece of shit, John,” Alex snarled.
“You wouldn’t have accepted Mike, because you wanted to fuck his pretty ass, and that just wasn’t okay with you. Because you were too busy trying to be a real man. A real man who fell down on the job and put his entire team in danger. A real man who walked out on his sister ten years ago—”
John tore his hand free of Alex’s grip and took off, making a hard left so it would be harder for Alex to aim at him. He didn’t run because the accusations were true; he ran because he knew full well that if Alex had managed to convince himself of these lies, then he might well be capable of any kind of violence he could dream up. Just as he reached up for the hood with his left hand, his right side impacted with a tree trunk, and his entire world caught fire. Maybe if he hadn’t been blinded, he wouldn’t have seen the stars that strobed his vision in such brilliant Technicolor. They were the only things to distract from the exquisite agony of the impact. He had no sense of up or down, just a vague sense that his knees had come to rest on broken twigs. He retched, thought he was going to vomit, then coughed up a phlegm ball, which smeared his lips.
For what felt like an eternity, he rocked back and forth, as if it would h
elp the pain to subside. Then, when he had managed to steady his breathing, he felt the gun barrel brush against the back of his head, and in a clear and controlled voice Alex said, “Did you ever stop to ask yourself why I never suspected you, John? Did you ever wonder why I didn’t think you killed him? After all, you were the only one who ever got to be alone with him after he was dead. Maybe chasing me out into the woods the way you did was some big cover.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“How? How do I know that, John?”
“Because when I caught up with you, I would have killed you.”
“No, John. I don’t know anything about you anymore. Up until yesterday I thought you were just a sad sack of shit trying to do right by me. But you showed what you really wanted.”
“What’s that?”
Alex’s voice blasted right into his ear. “You wanted to punish me, didn’t you, John? You wanted to show me what it takes to be a real man like you. Problem is, John, you’re not a real man. Maybe I’m not, either. But the least I can do is show you what it takes to be like me. And don’t try to fool me into thinking you’re tough enough for whatever I throw at you. I know you left the Marines before you went through SERE.”
SERE stood for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape,” an immersive, demoralizing training program Recon Marines went through to teach them how to survive in enemy captivity. In a simulated environment, trainees were given a false piece of intelligence they were required to keep secret; then they were taken hostage and subjected to days of psychological torture designed to toughen them to the degree that they could stand up to anything short of having their fingers cut off. John had never been able to get a single SERE graduate to tell him the extent of what they had been put through, not even Mike. Sure, he’d heard the same stories everyone had heard. Trainees being forced to piss in their waterproof boots and wear them for days on end. White captives being forced to wear Klansman hoods and drag their fellow black captives around on leashes. But these stories had the smell of urban legends, and the avowed secrecy of almost everyone who went through the program hinted at even darker experiences. Had Mike shared some of these with Alex? Was that why Alex was bringing it up, because he was about to use some of them?
Alex said, “You were supposed to, though. But you pussed out and left the Marine Corps because you almost got your captain killed.”
“You need to cut this out,” John heard himself say, and the tremor of genuine fear in his voice turned his stomach. “You need to cut this shit out right now.”
Instead, Alex drove the gun barrel up under John’s chin, and the sound that came out of John was mostly a roar, but there was a word in it: his sister’s first name. As if on cue, John felt the hood get ripped up over his mouth, and suddenly he was chewing some kind of fabric. From the shape it took once Alex shoved it inside his mouth, John assumed it was a sock.
Alex lifted him to his feet by the back of his neck and said, “Listen to every word I say to you. See what I tell you to see.”
Alex shoved him forward. The temperature dropped suddenly, and even though he was hooded, he thought he could feel a deep darkness on his skin.
12
They were standing on a dirt floor, and there were loose rocks underfoot. John was willing to bet it was some kind of cave. A small one, though, because when Alex started to speak again, his voice didn’t echo.
“Eighteen, John. You remember eighteen?” To avoid choking on his gag, he nodded in response. “You were eighteen when you joined the Marine Corps, right? Ran away from home because you wanted to be some big hero?”
Again he nodded. Alex’s instructions had been to visualize every word he said to him, so John did. Saw himself standing outside the Marine Corps recruiting depot in San Diego, felt the shaking in his legs as he and his buddy Clyde Travis paused for the first time in several hours to absorb the full impact of what they were about to do. They had hitched a ride down from Yucca Valley with a tattooed, cigarette-swallowing former gunnery sergeant who had been more than happy to ferry two willing new recruits to their new home. Only when they reached the threshold to their new life did John wonder if they were making a mistake. He said so to Clyde, who had called him a pussy, which was funny now, considering that Clyde had washed out in the second week of boot camp and ended up managing an AutoZone.
“Imagine you’ve had a secret your entire life, but you know that if you drive to this little bar all the way across town, you’ll find someone you can tell it to. You’ll be able to get it off your chest once and for all, and chances are they won’t judge you or call you names…” Alex trailed off, as if the power of the memory he was referring to in the most general of terms had overtaken him.
“You’re eighteen,” he said, then swallowed before he continued. “You’re eighteen and you’ve just gone away to school. You’re finally free from your parents, who would probably slam the door in your face and keep it shut for the rest of your life if they knew this little secret you had.”
Alex turned him around, pressed down on his good shoulder, and John felt his ass come to rest on a wooden chair. Alex retreated slightly; then John felt strands of rope being wrapped around his stomach, the same rope he had asked Patsy to buy for one of their upcoming endurance challenges.
All of his plans to train Alex seemed absurd and haphazard now, and he had to fight the urge to laugh at his own stupidity, his arrogance. Although, if either quality could get him out of this fucker of a situation, he would have welcomed them both back with open arms. It was clear to him now that all he had managed to do to Alex so far was blow the top off the well of grief and anger inside him.
“You’re gay, John. Even though you’ve never laid a hand on another man in your life, you know damn well you’re a full-on cock-sucking fairy. Are you working with me here? Are you seeing this?” When John didn’t answer Alex asked, “Are you feeling this?”
He felt the final tugs as Alex tied the knots that secured John to the chair and nodded as deeply as he could. “I’m telling a story, John. That’s all. I’m telling you a story so you can understand. Isn’t that what you want, John? To understand your good buddy Mike? To understand the things men like him go through?”
Liar, he thought. This was a story about Alex, eighteen and visiting his first gay bar, and he was pretty sure it was a story that ended in violence, which John had stupidly brought to the surface the minute he broke Alex’s nose.
“You’re eighteen, John. You’ve barely been at college a few weeks, barely have any real friends, so it’s easy for you to slip out every night and drive clear across town to this little gay bar in the middle of nowhere. See, you’ve checked out the bigger clubs, but they’re too much. Your fake ID worked but there’s too much of everything there—too much sex, too much music, too many drugs. You need a quiet place where you can find someone who will listen, someone who will make you feel less like a mistake in a universe intended for assholes and Marines.”
Footsteps. The sound of something metal clinking on a table. John fought images of knives and pliers, realized he had heard nothing more dangerous than the pop of a bottle cap. An open beer bottle was passed under his nose, and it amazed him how a smell that had previously made his mouth water could be turned into a stench by cold darkness and a coil of rope.
“So, you park across the street and you watch the men who go inside and you’re kind of amazed because not all of them look like the pathetic faggots you’ve seen in movies or on TV. They’re not dressed up like women and they’re not wearing tube tops and feather boas and all kinds of sissy shit.” In recounting the story, Alex’s voice had taken on a clipped masculine tone, as if he were speaking in the voice of his former self, the young man he had been before the story he was telling came to an end.
“And you wait, and you wait, and you wait for the courage to go inside that bar, but it doesn’t come. Not the first night. Even though you sit there downing a bunch of beers you bought with your fake ID. So yo
u go back to your dorm, lie to your roommate about where you’ve been, and lay up all night planning what you’re going to do when you go back. It takes you two weeks. Two weeks of sitting in your car drinking beer before you finally step out and cross that street, flash your fake ID to the guy with the mustache who’s working the front door. Then you’re inside and you see some pool tables and a long bar. No sex club. No guys in assless chaps. Nothing like you’ve been told. Nothing like you’ve been taught to fear.
“And the men inside. They look like men, and some of them are smiling at you. Sure, the rest are looking at you in a way you’re not used to having other men look at you. But a couple of guys, they come over and say hi, but they can see how drunk you are and mostly they’re just welcoming you to the place, because they were you once and they know how many beers it took you to come inside, and this isn’t like those big dance clubs. This is one of those bars where people try to take care of their own.”
From the sound of his voice, John could tell that Alex was retreating, walking back over to the table where he had opened the beer bottle. He could see where this was headed and he dreaded what props Alex had selected to help him imagine the ending of this tale. He tried to speak, but nothing came out. He swallowed and found his mouth was dry.
“A few of them offer to give you a ride home because they can see how drunk you are, but you refuse because you’re not ready for them to know your last name or where you go to school. You try to walk as straight a line as you can out the door. And then you see him. He’s waiting for you right next to your truck. Handsome. Tall. Blond hair, blue eyes, and a smile that lights up the street. Later, when you look back, you’ll remember that he was standing in the shadows, just outside the halo of the streetlight, and you’ll realize the cowboy hat wasn’t just a prop—it was supposed to hide his face. But for now he’s the most beautiful thing you have ever seen, and when he asks you if you want to take a ride in his truck, you know there isn’t really a choice for you. That you’ve turned down too many opportunities, ignored too many promising looks—there’s no way you can dismiss this man, and you’re just drunk enough to think he might be the last one you’ll ever need to meet.