Lacking any better ideas he took the young man’s hand. In contrast to his forehead, it was clammy, cold, lifeless. The skin was rough, and his fingernails were dirty and cracked, the hand of a mechanic. He saw what he thought was a badly bruised fingernail, then realized to his surprise that it had been painted black with nail polish.
“Where are you from, sailor?” He urgently wanted to keep the conversation going, feeling that any loss of consciousness would be the end.
“Boise,” he gasped.
“Is that your hometown? Or your boat?”
The young man’s eyes focused on him for a moment, and after a thirty-year career that began as a medic in a war zone, Cote recognized a man who was ready to die.
“Boat,” he sighed.
It was the last word he ever spoke.
Near Morristown, Tennessee
Danny Jabo and his young cousin were walking slowly through the cornfield, crunchy with snow, their shotguns held loosely at their sides. Little Mike wouldn’t shut up. He was from the talkative cohort of the Jabo clan, and Danny thought the boy’s chatter would be a suitable replacement for the noise normally generated by a team of good dogs.
“Over there?” he asked, pointing.
Danny nodded, as they walked toward a fence line that the farmer, yet another distant relative, had indicated was thick with cottontails.
“How close do we need to get?” he asked.
Danny put his finger to his lips, shushing him.
“Closer?”
Danny was finishing up three weeks of leave, his all-too-brief shore tour at the Purdue University ROTC unit complete. He’d spent every minute he could on that shore tour with Angi, his wife, even declining to get an MBA on the Navy’s dime while he was there. His fellow officers thought he was crazy to decline, but to Danny the thought of life in a corporate office building was horrifying even if it was, they all told him, inevitable and financially worth the misery. So instead of finance classes and group PowerPoint projects, he savored twenty-four months of coming home at night and sleeping in the same bed with his wife, home-cooked meals, and especially being present for their daughter’s birth: such was certainly not a guarantee to anyone in the nuclear navy. To him that was the biggest gift of his shore tour, not a degree in business. But with the shore tour drawing to a close, and orders to the USS Louisville in Pearl Harbor in hand, they’d headed back to Tennessee to visit the relatives a last time. Danny felt a familial obligation to teach his young cousin how to hunt, even if the kid did seem incapable of shutting up long enough to aim.
Danny stopped, about thirty feet short of the fence row.
“Did you see one?”
Danny shook his head. “Not yet,” he whispered. “When you see one, don’t aim for the white of the tail, even though you’ll want to — you’ll shoot behind him and miss.”
Little Mike nodded his head, his eyes alive with excitement. “Should we get closer?”
“We’ll take a few more steps and stop again,” said Danny.
“Will they bolt if we get closer?”
“If they’re in there, they already see us.” And hear us he thought. “Sometimes they bolt when you’re moving, but sometimes they move when you stop, because they think they’ve been spotted. It scares’m out of hiding. You ready?”
Little Mike nodded.
They took three steps forward and stopped again. Mike raised his gun as Danny did. They waited, held their breath for two seconds, and then a group of rabbits broke free from the undergrowth, running crazily in all directions.
Danny let Mike shoot the one that ran right toward them. Mike fired, snow flew up, and the lifeless rabbit popped backwards. Danny swung around to follow the rest of them.
“I got him!” said Mike. “Holy shit, I got him!”
“Watch your mouth,” said Danny, as he lowered himself to one knee, the Remington 870 shotgun on his shoulder. The boy’s cursing was a recent problem, and the whole family was working to cure him.
“There’s four of them!” said Mike. “Four!”
Danny shut out the boy’s voice as he focused, he knew he had maybe a second to make a decision, less if he wanted to get off two shots. He quickly pulled the trigger, cleanly hitting one that was speeding by from right to left, dead before it stopped cart-wheeling in a snowy clump. The boy shouted something in excitement but Danny didn’t hear a word. He pumped the gun, the spent yellow shell flying as a fresh one replaced it in the chamber.
There were three left, and their terrified zigzags were not as random as they appeared: all three were moving rapidly away. Danny saw that one was running almost straight away, while another angled away, falling in behind it. The third rabbit was the lucky one, as it departed his view and his mind at a right angle, just like the excited chatter of his cousin.
He waited until the two remaining rabbits pulled into line, one in front of the other, about two feet separating them. He followed them for a millisecond, then pulled the trigger.
They seemed to be struck at the same instant, both of them flying into the air and landing lifelessly next to each other.
“Great shot! You got two in one shot! Jesus Christ!”
Danny stood up and looked down at his beaming cousin. With his left hand he lightly slapped him on the back of his head, knocking his hunting cap off.
“I told you to watch your mouth, boy.”
He picked up his hat, grinning from ear to ear. “Will you show me how to dress them?”
Danny smiled now. “Got a knife?”
The boy proudly pulled a hunting knife from his boot, its blade shining in the winter sun.
They tromped up the stairs to the farmhouse and Little Mike burst through the door, two rabbits in each hand, as Danny made sure both guns were safe and propped them on the porch. Mike was regaling his aunts and uncles with tales of the hunt already by the time he got in, talking so fast and excitedly that Danny wasn’t sure the older folks could follow it all. He was suddenly very glad he’d taken the kid, as he absorbed some of his thrill and the place swelled with the voices of talkative Jabos, while the quiet half of the family just nodded and smiled. The house was toasty warm and filled with the combined smells of a roaring blaze in the fireplace and something sweet in the oven.
“You kill some bunnies?” Angi walked toward him from the kitchen, their baby girl tucked in her arm. She still took his breath away, always the prettiest person in the room, whether they were in a farmhouse or a black tie Navy Ball.
“Yeah, me and the youngster took four.” Danny took the baby from her, looking down at her head. He longed for her hair to be red like her mother’s. It didn’t show signs of redness yet, but Danny had heard that could change in infants, and he hopefully inspected her noggin every day.
“Did he cuss at all?”
“Shit yes he did,” said Danny. Angi slapped him in the back of the head.
“Not in front of the baby. I’d rather that not be her first word.”
“My bad.”
“You should check your phone,” she said. “I heard it ringing a few times while you were out playing.”
Danny walked over to the coat hooks by the door still holding the baby. He fished his phone out of his jacket pocket with his free hand.
Three missed calls and a voice mail. Caller ID: COMSUBPAC.
Danny sighed. They rarely called three times with good news.
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Danny stood at the foot of the brow for a minute, looking the Louisville over. Angi had gone back to Indiana to supervise their move while he got on the next flight to Hawaii. He’d spent the flight wondering about his wife and baby, this being the first time the three of them had been apart — he knew it wouldn’t be the last. He’d also speculated about what was going on with his boat, what required him to get out there so quickly. Speculating was all he could do: on the phone they would tell him nothing. He landed in Honolulu, took a cab to the sub base, and now here he was staring at the boat that would be his home for three years. It would be the last time, he knew, that he could look at it with no sense of ownership, no sense of responsibility, no long list or anxiety about what needed to be done. All that, for a few moments more, was a mystery. For now, he could just look at her: SSN 724.