“And then he curves his arm around your back and starts walking you away from your car, and just the feel of his arm around your back—well, it’s like your destiny has finally reached out to you and told you which way to go.”
John felt something whip through the air in front of his face, followed by a crash that lashed the hood with broken glass and enough beer to soak clean through it until he tasted Budweiser on his lips. Alex had clearly smashed the beer bottle against some hard surface, probably a pot or a pan he was holding right next to John’s head.
“The pain’s too great at first for you to feel it, and for a second, you think the bottle just came down from the sky and hit you in the head. And then—”
John was rocked backward, then pitched forward, crying out in pain as his arm was jostled and the chair was dragged along the dirt floor with John canted forward at a forty-five-degree angle. “Then, suddenly, the guy’s dragging you into an alley and you see other guys waiting for you. And you know instantly what it means. You know you’re being punished by God, by your parents, by everyone you have ever met, everyone who ever knew your secret. Because all you wanted was to feel less alone. All you wanted was to have them smile at who you actually were.”
The chair stopped but it was still pitched forward, and John had no choice but to throw his good arm out and brace it against the dirt.
Something exploded just over John’s head. Alex was striking a hard surface several feet above the chair, probably the wall of the cave. Again and again Alex struck the stone wall until John felt chips of rock lacing his exposed neck. The worst of the sound was centered in the pipe and not the rock, a resounding clang each time it made contact with the wall.
“Is this you, John?’ Alex cried. “Could you have done this?”
The banging stopped, leaving John’s ears ringing. Then beer splashed down John’s back as Alex emptied one bottle over the back of his head, then another. It poured under the hood and into his mouth, soaking through the sock stuffed in his mouth and into the back of his throat.
“Only it’s not beer, John. See, the pipe isn’t enough for them. The beating—well, that was just meant to bring you to your knees. Now, they need to show you how they really feel about you.”
John coughed despite himself, and the beer-soaked sock came halfway out of his mouth. Alex finished emptying the last beer bottle over the back of John’s hood; then John heard the sound of the empty bottle hitting the cave floor and rolling. He coughed again, and the sock came out enough for him to spit it out all the way.
“No!” he managed between coughs. “I never would have done that to you or to any man.”
Alex lowered the chair down onto all four legs and turned it. When he ripped John’s hood off, John blinked, allowing beer to get in his eyes. When Alex started using the empty hood to wipe his face clean, John grimaced and turned away, then relented. Once his vision had returned, he saw they were indeed inside a small cave and there was an electric lantern sitting right next to the opening, turning Alex into a backlit silhouette.
“I never would have done that to you,” he said.
“Not me,” Alex said. “Mike. They did it to Mike.”
He tried to take in this new information at the same time he tried to catch his breath, but he couldn’t swallow it: the thought of Captain Mike Bowers being beaten and pissed on in an alleyway at age eighteen. How could the Mike he had known have emerged from that experience to be a man of impeccable skill and laserlike focus? Sure, John could see someone surviving that kind of beating and going on to become a Marine but the kind of deranged, suicidal Marine who plows his Humvee right into enemy fire while shouting a dirty version of his favorite country song at the top of his lungs. He couldn’t see that person becoming Lightning Mike Bowers.
“You don’t believe me?” Alex finally said.
“What does it matter?” John whispered. “What does it matter what I say to you or do for you? You think I live to hate you, and nothing’s going to change your mind, so fuck it.”
“Oh, please, John. Don’t act like you’re out to prove something to me. Don’t act like you’re trying to accept me, to accept who I am. That’s a load of bullshit. The reason you think you’re so damn heroic is that you hate my guts and you’re doing all this anyway.”
“Maybe so. But who says that has anything to do with the fact that you’re gay?”
Alex barked with laughter for a few seconds; then he stopped himself just as his laughs started to sound crazed and desperate. “The question is, can I accept you, John? Can I accept the fact that you need to pretend to be a hero because something bad happened to your little brother? Something that might have made you turn your back on the man who saved your life, if he’d lived long enough for you to find out who he really was?” John didn’t have the energy to deny this, probably because he knew it to be the truth, so he allowed Alex to continue. “What did you call yourself last night? My whipping boy? Maybe. But what am I to you, John?”
When John didn’t answer, Alex closed the distance between them, bent down until their faces were almost level. “I think the only reason you signed on for this is because as long as you have me to hate, you don’t have to really accept the fact that Mike chose me to live with him, to love him, and to fuck him. It’s Mike you’re angry at, isn’t it?”
“What does it matter? Next to yours, my anger looks like a light fucking rain.”
Alex smiled, but it was more like a grimace. Then, quickly, as if it were meant to be a sneak attack, he said, “What happened to your brother, John?”
“The reason you can’t understand why I would agree to help you is because you are too cynical and too…indulged to even begin to understand the principles, the values, that I lived by. That Mike lived by. We were—”
“What happened to your brother, John?”
“I don’t do things because of how they’ll make me feel. Because of how they’ll—”
“What happened to your brother?” Alex roared, face cherry red, veins pulsing in his temple. Maybe it was a device, because something about the seeming insanity of Alex’s sudden anger made John relax, as if nothing he might say could make things any worse.
“He was raped,” John said quietly. “By a man who lived in our street. A friend of his. Danny Oster. Oster went to Mexico for a while after I almost beat him to death. But now he’s back and he’s changed his name to Charles Keaton and he’s living in beautiful Redlands, California, where I guess he’s about to find some other confused, emotional kid just like my brother and try to get him alone, when his parents, or his brother, or whoever’s supposed to be watching him is somewhere else.”
Alex withdrew, his brow furrowed and his breaths slowing. “How do you know he raped your brother?”
“I saw it. With my own two eyes. I walked into the bedroom, and he had Dean flat on his back and he was ramming himself into him and Dean was making sounds like he had been speared in the gut!”
Alex averted his eyes from John’s, as if these details were too much for him to absorb. “On his back,” Alex finally whispered, and then John realized Alex was asking for clarification on this detail, so he nodded.
“I had a choice,” John said. “The day I decided to track you guys down I had all the information I needed to do some real harm to that man. But that morning I got a phone call from this guy—a few months before I had gone to him to get a present for Mike, a Spartan sword, just like out of Gates of Fire. When he called to tell me it had arrived, I knew, deep in my gut, that I could get that sword and do whatever it took to find out where Mike was. Or I could sit in my trailer all day, staring at Danny Oster’s new address and wondering what I could do that would hurt him the most until I got sick of wondering and decided to take some action.
“The reason it wasn’t an easy choice is because if I sat down with Mike, I knew I would have to tell him the truth about what happened that day in Ramadi. I would have to tell him that the reason he had to save my life is because
I had just gotten an e-mail from Patsy telling me that Dean had killed himself, and I didn’t tell Mike about it. I didn’t come clean about my mental state when we’re going into a hostile area and Mike lost an eye because of it. He needed to hear that. I owed him that. The sword was nothing. What I wanted to give him was the truth.”
“Instead you got me,” Alex said.
“Yes. And I haven’t turned my back on you for one moment.”
At first John didn’t know how to read the wide-eyed expression on Alex’s face, because it seemed like the first time Alex had looked at him in such a manner. He looked concerned and afraid at the same time, and even though John was staring him right in the eye, Alex’s expression didn’t change.
When he crossed the cave again, John felt a surge of triumph, but he tried to keep it hidden as Alex untied the ropes that bound John to the chair. Even when he was free, John didn’t get to his feet.
Before he stepped out of the entrance to the cave, Alex looked back at him over one shoulder and said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”
This simple statement, delivered without any of the anger or sarcasm John was used to hearing out of Alex, kept John glued to the chair. The tension in his chest threatened to give rise to a small seizure, and when he started to blink back tears, he told himself they were just a result of having beer poured in his face.
13
When he was within sight of the main house, Patsy shot up out of the chair on the back porch where she had clearly been waiting for him. Behind her, the house was lit up like a fishbowl, and he could see the men inside crowding the kitchen, where one of them had just finished cooking something and was passing out servings to his excited patrons. It was too dark for Patsy to see the condition he was in, but when she smelled the beer on him, she cursed under her breath. “Shouldn’t be drinking on the stuff I gave you last night,” she muttered. Then she curved an arm around him, felt his soaked shirt against her skin, and fell silent.
She steered him through the back door of the house, then through another door and into what was clearly the master bedroom, where her suitcase sat at the foot of the bed and there was real furniture and something besides prayers hanging on the walls. She sat him on top of the toilet, took time pulling his shirt off him and around his cast. She dabbed at the cast with her fingers to make sure it wasn’t beer-soaked.
“Y’all fought?” she asked softly.
She saw a response in his eyes, and it seemed to take the wind out of her. She pursed her lips, indicating that she was biting her tongue, hard. Then she turned her back to him and turned on the bath and for a while they sat there in silence, she watching the water fill up and he hearing the sound of the lead pipe striking the wall of the cave over and over again.
She turned off the faucet. Then she set a short stack of bath towels between the toilet and the tub, told him he could use them to rest his cast on, and left him alone with his next mission: a hot bath.
He was halfway between nightmares and being awake when Patsy shouted his name a while later. When he didn’t respond right away, she threw open the bathroom door, without regard for his nudity or the fact that she had roused him from a doze. His cast had been sliding off the stack of towels, was about to go under when he sat up as straight as he could. He asked her what was wrong, and she opened a towel for him to step into. “Is it Alex?”
Without answering, she wrapped the towel around him, kept her eyes on the floor as she steered him into the bedroom. Mike’s face filled the television screen above a banner that read GAY MARINE SLAYING. In voice-over, the Headline News anchor was detailing the stellar service record of former Marine Corps captain Mike Bowers. Then John found himself staring at Ray Duncan, in full uniform, including a wide-brimmed khaki hat, standing before a phalanx of microphones. His backdrop was the brown brick sheriff’s station and the rolling hills that cradled his town.
Eyes locked on the sheet of paper he held in one hand, Duncan said, “This Sunday, the body of Michael Bowers, twenty-nine, was discovered in a wooded area ten miles east of the Owensville town line. The body was badly mutilated. Exact time of death has not been established.” Badly mutilated. John dreaded the thought of what other injuries Duncan had added to the body to cover up the fact that he had buried one of Mike’s hands in the desert.
The reporter took over for Duncan, and suddenly John was staring at himself. His last official Marine Corps photograph swelled to fill the screen. He wore his dress blues and cover, and the flash had flattened out his face. Then, right after him came Alex, a candid party shot. His cheeks had the blush of a few drinks, and he had a Glo-stick around his neck. The reporter spelled out that both men were believed to be on the run. Both men were wanted for questioning.
“They’re not saying you’re on the run together,” Patsy said quietly.
“They don’t need to. Duncan’s saying exactly what he wants to.”
“Which is?’
“Both men are wanted for questioning. That means they think we’re both alive and well—and together. In each other’s arms.” He turned to see if she was getting his meaning. “Duncan’s trying to make this thing out like it’s some big gay love triangle.”
“You tried to report this murder,” Patsy said. “He accused you of having PTSD. He showed you the door.”
“Exactly. It’s not me he’s trying to frame. He’s just trying to get me out of the picture. Then he can claim Alex had an accomplice who moved the body while I was chasing him into the woods. In the meantime, he thinks I’ll cut the guy loose if the entire country starts to think we’re slipping it to each other.”
On television, news crews pursued an impeccably dressed woman up the front walk of a sprawling pink mansion surrounded by a high stone wall. Her platinum blond bob looked like it would hold its form in a monsoon, and her cream-colored pantsuit had a flared collar. Her enormous sunglasses made it impossible to tell whether she was ignoring the reporters with stone-faced dignity or outright contempt. Charlotte Martin, Alex’s mother, had her son’s long, full-lipped mouth and delicate chin. She had only one statement for the media, and apparently she had released it in writing earlier that day: “I am saddened by the circumstances in which my only son has found himself. But given that he left my life several years ago, I cannot be held responsible for what he has invited into it since.”
“Jesus,” Patsy whispered as the words hovered on the screen for a few seconds. “Woman can’t even say Alex’s name.”
But John was too taken by the phrases left my life and my only son. Odd choices for a woman looking to distance herself from the situation, and further proof that Alex hadn’t told John the entire story of his departure from Cathedral Beach.
The report ended, and Patsy used the remote to kill the volume. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. “The cash I gave Eddie for this place,” she finally said. “It was under the table. I’m just saying—this place can’t be traced to me. If you need to stay here, we probably can.”
She had taken a seat at the foot of the bed. When she lifted her eyes to his, he thought she was going to defend herself. Instead she said, “Should we tell Alex?”
Dressed in a pair of Eddie’s too-short blue jeans and a T-shirt for something called an AA roundup, John led Patsy down the creek toward the outer house, where the clerestory windows revealed a glow coming from several bedside lamps inside. When he saw that the front door was shut, he expected it to be locked, but it wasn’t, and when he swung it open, he saw that Alex’s bag was missing, and the bed he had been sleeping in was perfectly made, as if he had never been there at all.
Patsy brushed past him through the front door, gave the entire house a once-over, and seemed to come to the same conclusion as John. “Shit,” she whispered, and then she seemed struck by a thought and ran past him. He turned and watched her jog in the direction of where she had parked her SUV when they had first arrived.
He felt blindsided and shamed by the panic that filled him. Given the events o
f the evening and the day prior, he didn’t think there was room for another emotion inside him, but this was pure panic, plain and simple. Being branded a fugitive was something he had anticipated days earlier, and it had come as almost no shock to him, but this empty room—there was terror in it, the terror that he had failed utterly and allowed Alex to slip through his fingers and into a blind fall.
Patsy burst through the front door a few seconds after John found the note lying on the kitchen counter. “He took the Jeep,” she said through gasping breaths. John showed her the note, which said, I hope you will hear from me soon, Alex. Patsy backed away from the note as if she thought it were about to self-destruct, and her hands went to her mouth. “Oh, no, John. He had a cell phone. What if someone called and told him—”
“I had the ammunition clips you bought me out in the tent earlier, but he took them when he started shooting. Check the cabinets for them.”
“Where are you going?”
Instead of answering, he stopped in the doorway and said,
“And there’s something else. It’s a diagram. Got a man’s torso and head and shoulders on it. See if it’s in any of the drawers or if he took it with him.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a diagram on how to kill a man, that’s why.”
In almost no time at all John covered the distance between the house and the cave where Alex had held him captive. The electric lantern was still there, and when he turned it on he saw the empty chair, missing its seat, and the coil of rope that had been used to tie him to it. No Ka-bar knife. No Sig. Not even the lead pipe had been left behind.