The band played “Is This Love” by Bob Marley and the Wailers and she was tan and twenty and the air throbbed with reggae and freedom and youth. When he asked her to dance, she’d said yes. When he’d suggested they go in the water after that, when the band was done and the night was still and the stars were out, she’d agreed.
It was spring break. I was stupid that time in Holiday Isle and maybe Henry would have forgiven me and maybe he would have forgiven Bart but then things changed and the truth would have been undermined by the lies we had to tell ourselves. Next thing I knew, I was head over heels and Henry was falling for me and it was real and if I’d said anything, he would have lost his best friend and I’d have lost him. And that’s the truth. I loved Henry, and I didn’t want to lose him. I didn’t want to wound him and I loved him and I still do and he’s not really dead.
Mary howled from one room away, unabashed and echoing from the tiled floors in the dark house in Key West, an accusatory orgasm. Your man is dead and mine is right here, bitch! Mary quit moaning then, and there were a few punctuating gunshots in the distance, and Suzanne forced herself to smile.
“I’d give that a 9.5,” Suzanne said. Loud enough to be heard, but in a way that might have been to herself, even though everyone knew otherwise.
“That was a ten,” old Bobby crowed from the couch. “And everybody shut the hell up so I can get some sleep.”
Mary giggled. A college girl hanging out in the Keys. “You wish you knew what ten was!”
“Now we can all get some rest,” Suzanne said, feeling the edge in her voice which was tension and guilt mixed with resentment, and not liking herself much for sounding that way.
Suzanne patrolled her house for the next two hours, padding from room to room in bare feet and aware of the senses of the night, lost in part in her own mind, yet connected by history and sensation and love to those around her. The shotgun was cool and heavy and reassuring in her hands. The tile floors beneath her toes were cool, too, hard and quiet and with cracks in them, an uneven surface because Suzanne had insisted upon that particular porous flooring. Henry hadn’t cared one way or the other. Without ceiling fans or air conditioning, the air was close and tinged with death and smoke and garbage and corruption that overwhelmed the salty breezes. Gunshots spattered the night and Bobby snored on the couch like a hibernating bear with nightmares.
The sensations were off. The wrongness was pervasive and almost a thing in and of itself, a separate sense the body and soul seem to recognize without being able to explain to the mind. There was the lack of boat traffic along the canal, a song Suzanne had come to regard as comforting as the rain in the way people who live next to trains, airports, or sirens do. Without the background noise, there was an inescapable thrum no amount of laughter could deny.
She wanted to go to sleep and wake up and have things be normal again, face a world she could understand, and even better, wake up when she was younger and hadn’t made the mistakes she had.
Suzanne yearned to breathe a morning with promise and light and hope without the scent of disdain and destruction on her lungs and the feeling of an anvil crushing her chest. She wanted to make things right, and knowing she could not, wished to go back in time and undo everything gone wrong. The night was dark and oily and shimmering with the lingering wrath of bad decisions; the promise of a rising sun was broken. It would not cleanse her or banish the past. She mourned at that dying of the light, the spark in her that was extinguished before but which was apparent because of the void. She raged against it, helpless and hating her helplessness.
She saw herself from a sober distance and she flinched at what she beheld. She’d imagined herself to be the hero of her own life, strong and virtuous. Selfless. She recognized now the arrogance in that delusion. The characters in her novels, the real heroines, would despise her if they knew her. And even her writing, something which she had clung to and wrapped her soul around until it had become an essential part of her, accused her. While she’d built her life and dreams around words and books, she’d been losing the things which were deeply important, and in the end, her literary career was a fraud, a success engineered by her father and whoever he did favors for.
When Beowulf growled, a deep, vibrating rumble Suzanne could feel in her toes even though the sound was subtle and not loud, and the dog would never bark unless he was confronted with another dog, there was menace and danger in it and Suzanne was almost glad.
“Stay,” she whispered to the dog. She went to go wake the others.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Scream of Battle
COLORADO
The fire spread and things exploded inside the hardware store while Henry crawled outside surrounded by billowing black smoke. The heavy machine guns on the helicopters pounded the rear of the building.
He targeted the nearest gunner and fired. He expended one magazine and switched, lying on his back. The bird was moving and he knew it was hopeless. One of his rounds must have come close, though, because the gunner started walking tracers his way. Henry felt the hum in his chest as the bright orange rain approached him. He kept firing.
He felt anger and fear and regret. There was nowhere to hide.
He was screaming at the helicopters when they burst into flames. A missile from an aircraft punched through one of them without detonating; a second later, another missile followed, and that one did the job.
As flaming debris rained down upon the street, the attacking Chinooks spiraled around each other until they disappeared beyond below the row of stores. Henry heard the crash and watched the columns of smoke.
He fought the urge to laugh.
He rolled over and crawled further down the sidewalk, and a pair of F-35 jets swept overhead like avenging angels.
A four-man squad, some of those who had descended from the attacking helicopters, darted from one building to another directly across the road. Henry lobbed a frag through a blown-out window.
The whump from inside sent glass and wood shards needling through the air, and two men staggered out onto the road screaming and clawing at their eyes.
Henry peppered them with rounds and they spun to the ground.
He jogged to the alley and cut around to see how his friends had fared in the fight. The rear of the building was on fire, and several of the National Guard troops were bleeding out. Carlos and Sergeant Martinez were huddled over a man, trying to save his life.
Small arms fire continued from the rubble of the church around the corner. Apparently there were more commandos headed toward the hardware store.
“Sergeant,” Henry said. “We gotta go. The longer we stay here, the more people will get killed.”
“I know, damn it!”
Carlos looked up at Henry and shook his head slightly. The guy on the ground was burned on his face and hands, the skin bubbled and charred. He was crying for his mother.
Martinez stuck the wounded warrior with morphine, a heavy dose, and the man went still.
“Fuck,” Martinez said, standing with his hands on his hips and shaking his head in disgust.
The small arms fire continued, some of it closer now.
“On me,” Martinez said. “The church.”
Henry took up the rear, moving sideways so he could watch for enemies trying to come from behind. Henry was aware of the smell of burned flesh and hair, some of it his own. He decided he’d had enough of fire to last a lifetime.
They entered the church from what had been the rear; there was no easy way to tell the difference now, for the ceiling had collapsed and the front and back were open. Henry stepped past the pulpit, where a large cross had been blown onto the floor. The pews in the sanctuary were askew and torn.