The man in the corner is moving now. He is on his feet and coming toward us. I can’t remember seeing him stand up.
Dexter says, “This is Wilton.”
“Wilton?” I say.
Dexter smiles. “Him a yardie, у’know.”
“What?” Kelly says.
“He’s Jamaican,” I say.
Wilton looks at Dexter. “That accent’s a little Harry Belafonte.”
Dexter says, “So are you.”
Wilton is wearing gray wool slacks and a black ribbed turtleneck sweater.
Dexter says, “These are the boys I told you about.”
Wilton nods. He does not move to shake out hands.
I say, “Dexter tells me you used to work for Mike Tyson.”
He shrugs.
“You know what we’re working on?”
He shrugs again.
“We’re trying to reach the next stage in our development.”
Wilton stares at me.
Kelly says, “For most mammals, grooming is a sign of affection. That’s why I cut my own hair.”
Wilton is saying, “You’d be amazed how long it takes some guys to die.”
I say, “Doesn’t it depend on where they get hit?”
“Not always.”
We are at an outdoor shooting range, lying on our stomachs beside green T-shaped shooting benches, facing white-and-black silhouette targets set up in front of a stone wall. I am leaning on my elbows on the concrete apron, sighting down the barrel of a rifle that looks like it is made out of Legos.
I say, “I wish these things still looked like they used to.”
“Why?”
“It would make me feel more real.”
Wilton says, “Draw down center body mass on everybody. No head shots.”
“What about bulletproof vests?”
“That’s just movie shit.”
“Someone must wear them.”
“Sure. But they’ll still be incapacitated if they take one in the chest, provided you have enough stopping power. Even with body armor, a heavy load can break ribs and collapse lungs.”
I squint through the aperture and place my crosshairs on the center of the target.
“Raise your aim four inches at two hundred yards, ten inches at three hundred.”
“Why?” I turn my head to look at him.
“Gravity,” he says.
“What do I do past three hundred?”
“You miss.”
I nod.
Wilton says, “How you know Dexter?”
“We went to high school together.”
“You play ball with him?”
“Sure.”
He frowns. “I thought he was from Cleveland.”
“So?”
“So, you don’t look too Cleveland to me.”
I shrug, gently so as not to lose my target picture. “Near Cleveland.”
“Shaker Heights?”
“Something like that.”
He smiles. “Always knew that motherfucker was wannabe hard.”
“Don’t need to be from the ghetto to be hard.”
“It helps.” He looks at Kelly, who is on his stomach fifty feet to my right, sighting down the barrel of his Lego rifle. “What about the ofay?”
“Why is he an ofay and I’m not?”
He shrugs. “Ain’t just about skin color.”
“Mmm,” I say. “We lived together in college.”
Wilton nods. “He’s a fuckin’ fruit loop.”
Sometimes, particularly when you can anticipate the precise location of your target, it is preferable to snipe at a near-flat trajectory. For countersniping, because you cannot predict your target’s whereabouts and because the target will likely be concealing himself from anyone on the ground, it is vital to occupy the highest position possible.
In close quarters, the pistol is ideal because of its concealability and case of use. However, its effectiveness drops sharply as range increases. It is very difficult to be accurate with a pistol at distances greater than fifty feet. Past a hundred, it is almost impossible.
My boss is riding in the cart in front of us with a man from Goldman who has skin like tapioca. We all wear green sweaters and brown-and-white spikes.
Kelly is driving our cart, bouncing over ruts in the dirt path. The air tastes like the dirt thrown up by the other cart. Kelly is saying, “Why doesn’t he have an accent?”
“He told me he lost it.”
“He talks like a goddamn Yalie.”
“He’s self-educated.”
Kelly snorts. “You must know what that means.”
“What?”
“Anytime a Nubian says he’s self-educated, ten to one he was reading with his ass to the wall.”
“Prison?”
He nods. “Probably has one of those correspondence diplomas.”
“That’s not fair.”
He glances at me. “You two have been getting awful close lately.”
“He’s been teaching me.”
“I hope you’re not losing perspective.”
“Perspective on what?” I say.
“Just make sure you keep in mind what it is we’re doing.”
The cart in front of us stops dustily. Kelly pulls in behind it.
We sit off to the side on a wooden bench while the man from Goldman sets himself over the tee.
Kelly says, “In gorilla societies, each adult male has his own position in the hierarchy. You don’t look directly at anyone higher than you. Eye contact indicates provocation for all primates. No one looks at the alpha male, unless they are ready to challenge for his position. If you look him in the eye before you’re ready for him, he will tear your limbs off.”
I am sitting in the back seat, between Heather and her father. We are on the way to the opening of an art gallery called Cave Paintings. Heather is gazing out the window.
Her father is my size with big hands. He has a thin white scar under his right eye. I am trying not to look at him.
He is saying, “Sometimes we would wait all night and not see anyone. Some nights we would all see movement on the road and we would blow the claymores and launch flares and pour fire into the tree line and when we walked down, we wouldn’t find anything except the craters we’d made.”
I say, “How’d they get away?”
“Who?”
“Whoever was on the road.”
He looks at me. “There wasn’t anybody on the road. We imagined it.”
“You all imagined the same thing?”
“The visions are contagious. One guy points at what he sees and you make yourself see it, too.”
“So, after a while, why didn’t you stop believing something was there?”
“Because sometimes something was there.”
“What were those nights like?”
He shakes his head. “You don’t want to hear about those nights.”
“Sure I do.”
He says, “Later on, I was with Recon and we did less search-and-destroy, but we still had visions.”
“Does it give you nightmares?”
“Nightmares?”
“Because you hated it so much.”
He frowns. “Did I say that?”
“I just assumed. I thought everybody hated it.”
He says, “It was the happiest time of my life.”
We are sitting in a rented van at the curb across the street from Heather’s father’s office building and Kelly says, “What about knives?”
Wilton looks at him. “This ain’t West Side Story.”
“It’s just that I thought we were supposed to learn these things in stages.”
“You niggers want to learn knives, you can do it on your own time.”
Wilton is shielding his eyes from the sun and staring up at the building, which looks like a giant milk carton. He says, “Next time we’re doing reconnaissance, you ought to bring a jacket.”
Kelly says, “Why not just keep the heat on?”
Wilton says, “Three guys silting by the curb all day in a car with the motor running might as well hang out a sign that says STAKE-OUT.”
“Why are we here at all? We already know his schedule.”
“You already know it. I want to see it for myself.”