Lauren headed down the hall back to the elevator, the heavy clacking of her low heeled shoes hitting the concrete floor telegraphing her mood. She had every intention of finding out what happened to Felicia Rodriguez’s body and she knew where to start asking questions.
THIRTY-SIX
Steam rose up through the small hole in the coffee lid as Joe Lonetree raised his cup to his lips. He slurped at the hot liquid, savoring the bitterness of the dark roast. There was a time when he wouldn’t have allowed himself this caffeine fix, but that was also a time when he wouldn’t have needed the pick-me-up either. He’d only slept eight hours in the last forty. That much sleep would have once seemed a luxury, but he felt the fatigue wearing on him. Now, sitting in the Ford Bronco across from Dr. Scott Moran’s office, he fought against the urge to nod off. When this was all over, he planned to sleep for a week. Some place warm with white beaches and fruity drinks.
The last year was a blur to him, a series of bizarre revelations that let him to this sleepy mountain town from half way around the world. He’d come a long way in a little time. And the change in geography was nothing compared to the other changes he had endured. In the last twelve months his belief system had been stripped bare and then rebuilt with the old stories he thought he’d abandoned long ago. The old beliefs, for years sealed away in a remote corner of his mind, had escaped their banishment and lived once again. His father would have been proud to know his wayward son had finally returned to him, finally believed in his life’s work after so many years of doubt.
Too bad the old man wasn’t around anymore.
A quick look through the parking lot confirmed that Jack Tremont was still in the shrink’s office. Lonetree leaned his head back and allowed his eyes to close. They burned at first, but the darkness soothed his tired eyes and the burning faded into a comfortable inkiness.
He allowed his mind to wander through the flashes of childhood memory that had been dredged up since returning to America. Small flashes of his father’s face, snatches of conversation, images from a past he had worked hard to forget. There was the living room back in Arizona. Not in the nice house they lived in before his mother died, but the other place. The place his father took them to hide. A couch that slumped in the middle from broken springs. Fake wood panels that peeled off the trailer walls. Bright orange carpet that didn’t reach all the way across the floor. A few landscape watercolors that hung on the wall, each one hanging at a crooked angle, the frames covered with thick dust. And brown bottles everywhere. Old Milwaukee. Empty, but with enough left in them to fill the air with the reek of stale beer. His mother would never have allowed the house to look like that. When she was alive they had dignity as a family. After her death, they were poor. Worse, they were reservation poor. Two boys, six and ten, with a father who seemed intent on living out every Native American stereotype he could.
There, in that living room, his father sat him down and explained his mother’s death to him. His father was a big man, wide enough to have to turn sideways to fit through the trailer’s small doorways. Tall so that he had to bow his head to walk in his own house. That day he bowed his head even though he was sitting on the couch, his face dark and brooding, his breath stinking from alcohol and cigarettes. Lonetree still remembered every second of the encounter. It was the first time he had been scared of his father. And ashamed of him.
After explaining how cancer had taken his mother away, his father made him kneel to the floor and pray with him. He asked forgiveness for being away from home so much during her illness. He prayed that she understood the importance of his work. Then, slurring his words and swaying unsteadily, he made his case to his son why he ought to be forgiven. He explained his life’s work in a disjointed, rambling lecture. The story that came out that day was a bizarre tale, so strange and bewildering that young Joe Lonetree could do nothing but stare open mouthed through it all. Even with his ten year old imagination, he could not bring himself to believe what his father told him. It wasn’t like his other stories, of chiefs and tribes and mountain gods which his father used to tell with a grin. His father told this story with a shaking voice and darting eye paranoia. This wasn’t just mythology or legend to him. He thought it was real.
At the end of the story the big man grabbed his son and held him close, promising not to let the bad things hurt him or his brother. The little boy in the dirty trailer hung limp in his father’s embrace, crying into his shoulder. Not from fear, but from understanding that he had not only lost his mother, but now his father as well. One to a disease he did not understand; the other to booze and a story he refused to believe.
Before she died, his father was a college professor, an author, a stable figure in his life. All that remained of that man was a delusional drunk, a paranoid fool who had lost his mind. Little Joe Lonetree wept in the trailer with his father. It was the last time they shared an embrace.
Lonetree opened his eyes with a grunt. He looked around to orient himself, blinking back against the dull winter sun. He glanced at the dashboard clock. Ten minutes had flashed by. He checked the parking lot. Tremont’s car was still there.
With a sigh, he took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. He felt sick to his stomach from his daydream. At least he woke up before what had happened next. Before he called his father a drunk and a liar. Before he blamed him for his mother’s death. An accusation he never recanted to the old man while he was alive. It amazed him how far from that living room he had to travel before he understood his own father. The world he’d inhabited since his eighteenth birthday was different than anything he’d ever imagined, and in some ways as terrible as the fantasy world described to him that day.
The atrocities he’d seen in service to his country were as bad as any dream, especially now surrounded by the picture perfect Americana of Prescott City. He glanced around him. Store fronts with neatly painted wooden signs. Wrought iron lamp posts that, at night, lit clean sidewalks filled with clean people. Nicely trimmed grass in the open areas. Nothing out of place. Everything just so.
This was what the military told him he was protecting. But he doubted the happy residents of Prescott City would sleep well if they knew the things that he had seen and done on their behalf. The mangled embrace of corpses heaped together in the mass graves of Bosnia. The back walls of caves in Afghanistan covered with a red slime punctuated by the occasional white tooth, the residue of Taliban soldiers smashed against rock by thermobaric shock waves. An encampment of Abu Sayyef militants in the Philippines reduced to bubbling flesh by hemorrhagic fever. All images witnessed, and sometimes caused, by Lt. Joseph Lonetree, United States Navy SEAL Lonetree felt out of place in Prescott City, like a Hell’s Angel who wandered onto the Andy Griffith show. Then again, he knew all he had to do was sleep and the images from his past were just a nightmare away.
At least the war zones where he’d lived for the past fifteen years had looked the part. Bombed out rubble, deep cave bunkers, hot jungles. They all fit his idea of enemy territory. But in this place everything seemed normal. The enemy blended in perfectly and, in his mind, that made everyone a suspect. Lonetree started to feel the entire town was somehow unnatural. Too clean. Too perfect. Walking down the street felt like watching a living history demonstration, as if everyone were in on a collective agreement to create an image of normalcy.
He wondered what the shrink Jack Tremont was talking to would think of this particular paranoia. The thought brought a smile to his lips. He knew he would make an interesting case for a team of psychiatrists. The Navy had offered him counseling a dozen or more times, a product of a kinder, gentler military. But it was common knowledge in the ranks that the offer wasn’t serious. To accept was to be done with fieldwork, a sign you couldn’t hack it. Paranoia was an asset in the field. It had kept him and the men who followed him alive through impossible situations, even though his reputation pointed to something more than simple paranoia as the key to his mission effectiveness. The rumor was that Lonetree had ‘special gifts’ that kept his men alive.