John Brice didn’t know his own father.
“That’s for some movie star in Santa Fe.”
Ben was standing in the door.
“I’m going into town to pick up supplies,” he said. “There’s food inside if you get hungry. We’ll load up and hit the road as soon as I get back.” He held out an open hand. “Since you traded in my POS Jeep, I need to borrow your vehicle.”
John tossed the keys to Ben. “It’s yours.”
After the Land Rover had disappeared down the hill, John went inside the cabin. He was starving; all he had eaten that day was his normal breakfast of a dozen Oreos crushed in a glass of milk and the black coffee on the flight.
He walked over to the kitchen at one end of the main room and got a potent whiff of whiskey. Five empty whiskey bottles were sitting upside down in the sink. Looking at the bottles, John felt sure he was following a drunk on a wild goose chase; but there was no running home to Elizabeth now. He took the bottles outside to the recycling bin.
When he returned, he searched the cabinets for something decent to eat, but all he found were organic granola bars, organic oatmeal, organic pasta, organic peanut butter, vitamins, and health supplements. A drunk who takes care of himself? He opened the refrigerator: grapefruit juice, orange juice, yogurt, fruit, cheese, and a bag of bean tamales. Nothing worth eating. Which was just as well, because when he shut the door and saw Gracie’s photos stuck there with magnets, he lost his appetite.
He wandered around the main room and found a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings about BriceWare. com and its genius founder on a desk in the corner. On a table next to an old leather recliner by the fireplace was the Fortune magazine with John’s picture on the cover, opened to the Brice family photo and Gracie’s bright smile. Ben had kept up with his son all this time. But his son had never returned his calls or come to visit, convinced that at his age he no longer needed a father.
He was wrong.
The cabin had two small bedrooms, each with a tiny bathroom. One was Gracie’s bedroom: her clothes in the closet, her stuff around the room, an Indian headdress on the bed, a colorful totem pole in the corner, and a wooden headboard with Gracie carved in a neat script. He walked around the room and touched her things.
The other bedroom was Spartan, only a bed, a wooden chest in the corner, and a nightstand. The bed was neatly made; the ends of the blanket were tucked in tightly. It was an Army bed just like the bed John had slept in until the day he had left for MIT. He had never made his bed again.
Hanging in the small closet were jeans, corduroy and flannel shirts, a winter coat, and in a clear bag, the dress uniform of a full colonel in the United States Army. On the floor were jogging shoes and boots. On the shelf above were several hats and caps and a green beret wrapped in plastic.
On the nightstand were an old rotary dial telephone, a gooseneck lamp, a small framed photo of Mom, and a stack of letters from Gracie. An old phone, snail-mail letters, no computer in the cabin: his father was living in the past in every way possible. John picked up the top envelope; Gracie had drawn little happy faces around the edges. John sat on the bed and stared at the happy faces; he saw Gracie’s happy face. Could she really be alive?
So everyone back home thought she was dead.
Gracie wondered if they would have a funeral Mass for her like the one for the little boy two blocks over who had died a year ago from some disease he had been born with. The altar would be decorated with pretty flowers, Father Randy would be wearing his fancy vestments, and the choir would be singing “Amazing Grace.” Mom would look beautiful in a black dress and Dad would look… Did he even own a black suit?
Picturing the two of them together at her funeral, the beauty and the geek, Gracie found herself wondering again how they had ever gotten together… and if they loved each other. Dad loved Mom, that was like, obvious. He was a puppy dog around her, always licking her shoes. But did she love him? Gracie didn’t think so. She had asked Nanna one time, but Nanna said, “Of course she does, but sometimes grownups have issues that keep them apart.” She asked Nanna what issues were keeping her and Ben apart, but Nanna started crying so she never asked again.
But back to the funeral. Everyone would file into the church, old ladies would be crying, kids would be messing with each other, and their parents would be telling them to hush; Mass would start and Father Randy and the altar girls would walk up the center aisle to where her empty white casket-yeah, she wanted a white casket-would be sitting just in front of the altar and on top would be a picture of her in her soccer uniform because everyone wanted to remember her that way.
Gosh, it would be a great funeral. Everyone in town would be there, Mom and Dad, Nanna and Sam, Sylvia and Hilda, her teammates, Coach Wally, kids from school-they’d probably let school out that day-her teachers, and the principal; everyone would be crying and praying for the little dead girl. It sounded so neat, she almost wished she could be there. But she wouldn’t be there, and neither would Ben.
Because she wasn’t dead, and he was coming to save her.
Colonel, you saved my life. Lying in that cell at San Bie, I knew I would never see my wife or children again, but you gave my wife her husband back and my children their father. I owe you my life. God bless you.
John had found the boxes in the wooden chest; in the first box he had found dozens more letters, but these letters weren’t from Gracie. These letters were from military pilots pledging their lives to John’s father.
He did not know his own father.
He returned the letters to the first box. Then he opened the second box. He removed Ben’s framed West Point diploma, Army certificates, and a display case containing a hero’s medals: eight Purple Hearts; five Silver Stars with an empty spot for a sixth one; four Bronze Stars; two Soldier’s Medals; a Distinguished Service Cross; the Legion of Merit; and in a special case, the Medal of Honor, a round gold medal with an eagle over the word valor and a gold star with a Roman Centurion engraved in the center. John touched the medal with a reverence he had never before felt. He had never looked upon Ben as a hero. John R. Brice’s heroes were Tim Paterson, who invented DOS, Ray Tomlinson, who invented e-mail, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the HTML, HTTP, and URL conventions that powered the World Wide Web, brilliant men who made Internet shopping possible, not men who fought a war forty years ago that nobody cared about.
What was Ben like back then, when he was young and robust? What were his dreams? What life had he and Mom hoped for? Were they ever happy? What made him a drunk?
John found the answers in the third box. Inside were photos: Ben’s formal West Point graduation portrait in his high-necked dress uniform above the Academy motto- Duty, Honor, Country; Ben and Kate, him in a white uniform and Mom in a wedding dress, outside a church, ducking under an arch of sabers held out by other soldiers in white uniforms; and other wedding photos with a best man and maid of honor whose images struck John. The woman, with her curly black hair and a certain frailty about her, seemed oddly familiar to John. In another photo, the same man was standing next to the same woman in a hospital bed holding a baby; Kate and Ben were leaning in from behind. Everyone was smiling like their IPO had just hit the street.
John dug deeper and found more photos: Ben and the other man just arrived in Vietnam, looking young and eager in crisp uniforms; a team photo, both of them with other soldiers and handwritten along the bottom the words SOG team Viper, 2 Dec 68; Ben sitting in a stirrup and dangling from a rope under a helicopter flying above a dense jungle; Ben lying on the ground, his pants ripped open and an Army medic wrapping his bloody leg; Ben in a hospital bed, a pretty nurse in a white uniform on one side, and on the other side, a general pinning a Purple Heart to Ben’s pillow; Ben, in the jungle, holding a long black rifle with a scope, his boot on a dead Asian soldier wearing black pajamas, 1000 meters written along the bottom; Ben, his smile gone now, replaced by a hardness John had never seen on his father’s face, camouflage greasepaint, his uniform no longer crisp but instead dirty and worn with the sleeves cut off, revealing his muscular arms and that tattoo. He was standing among Indians.