Upstairs, five minutes earlier, the troops were in revolt.
“Maybe I don’t own this house,” Ralph insisted, “but I have a right to know what’s going on.”
“Fuck yeah,” Suzie said, bobbing up and down on her feet like she expected a fistfight to break out any second. Julia thought the woman probably wanted one.
“Look,” Julia said, “Top specifically said—”
“Top ain’t here,” Ralph pointed out. “He and Dolores wanted to go see a movie.”
Which explained why things had gotten so tense right now, Julia thought. Clearly the others had waited until the king and queen of the house were out of the way before they pushed for answers.
Julia was sympathetic. The three of them — Chapel, Angel, and herself — had burst in here before dawn the day before and disrupted everyone’s lives. They were obviously in trouble and Top was clearly protecting them. But the others in the house — Top’s boys — had no reason to feel loyalty to Chapel, and they were scared of what was going to happen to them. It wasn’t an unreasonable fear. If the cops came storming in, the lot of them could be taken in as accomplices in harboring the fugitives.
“Look, I’ll explain, but—”
“No need,” Ralph said, pushing toward the door to the basement. “I’ll just have a quick look for myself.”
It was Rudy who came to Julia’s defense, then. “Now you just hold it, fella!” he said, putting his back up against the basement door. “I know this fine lady. If she says there’s a reason to stay out of the basement, then I figure it’s got to be a goodly one.”
“Seriously?” Suzie asked. “You pathetic old drunk.” And then she picked Rudy up like a sack of potatoes and threw him onto the couch.
Before Julia could stop him, Ralph had the door open and was pounding down the stairs in his heavy boots.
“There’s a sick man down there!” Julia shouted, chasing after him.
But she couldn’t catch him in time. He had already reached the bottom of the stairs. Suzie pushed past Julia to join him. The rest of the boys, including Rudy, stood up at the top looking down, as if they wanted to know what was down there but they were afraid and wanted Ralph and Suzie to go first.
She half expected them to run over and attack Chapel on the spot. But when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw Suzie leaning up against the basement wall, arms folded across her chest. She refused to meet Julia’s eyes.
Meanwhile Ralph stood in the middle of the basement, rubbing his mouth with his good hand. He was staring at Chapel.
No. He was staring at Chapel’s left shoulder. What remained of his missing arm.
“He’s been hurt,” Julia said. “He has a surgical wound. I don’t think I need to tell you how serious an infection could be.”
“Don’t worry,” Ralph said. “I’m not going to sneeze on him.” The one-armed vet walked toward the camp bed — then changed course and went to the bookshelf nearby. With his good hand and his claw he picked up Chapel’s robotic arm.
And then he just stood there, staring at it. For a very long time.
“You could have just fucking told us,” Suzie said, still not looking at anyone.
“I’m seriously confused,” Julia said. “A second ago you were ready to tear this basement apart.”
“Yeah, a second ago,” Suzie said. She sighed dramatically and then leaned out over the stairs. “You bunch can come down now,” she said, and soon all the boys had tromped down into the basement, gathering in a respectful semicircle around the camp bed.
Julia shook her head, but there was nothing she could do.
Ralph grabbed a chair and sat down next to Chapel. He cradled the robotic arm in his lap like something precious. She supposed to a man with a claw replacing his lost hand and a piece of beige plastic for an arm, Chapel’s prosthetic would be worth more than rubies and pearls.
“You’re a vet. You were in the war and you lost an arm,” Ralph said.
“Yep,” Chapel replied. “That’s how I became one of Top’s boys.”
“You want to talk about it?” Ralph asked.
“He doesn’t have to!” Suzie said, almost shouting.
“It’s all right,” Chapel said. “I don’t mind.”
“I actually didn’t see much of my war,” Chapel said. Most of the boys had pulled up chairs around his camp bed or were just sitting on the floor where they could hear him. Suzie still leaned up against the wall, scowling, but she wasn’t the one who interrupted.
“Chapel,” Angel said, “this story’s classified.”
“I guess we’re past that now,” Chapel said, with a weak smile. “Anyway, these people are soldiers, marines—”
“Sailors, too,” said a guy who had burn scars over half his face.
Chapel nodded gravely. “These people can be trusted,” Chapel said.
Angel stared at him with huge eyes. Then she just nodded.
Chapel launched into his story, then. “I’m older than most of you,” he said, nodding quickly at Rudy, who was the obvious exception. “I was in Afghanistan in the real early days. Just after September eleventh. I’d been trained by the Rangers and I thought I was the toughest, meanest son of a bitch ever created by the toughest, most morally upright country the world had ever seen. At the time we figured three months tops and we’d have Bin Laden in custody, we’d have knocked over the Taliban and taught everybody over there a lesson.”
Julia barely recognized the Chapel telling this story. He’d fallen into a whole different speech pattern, much rougher and more expansive than usual. She realized this must be how he talked around other soldiers, and she wondered if this was how he thought in his own head.
“A whole bunch of us got sent in to Khost Province where we thought we still had some friends. My unit had all been crash trained in the local dialect. We’d been taught which hand to eat with and how to show respect to village elders. We even had special dispensation from the regs to grow beards, to help us gain respect from the locals. My job was to meet up with a bunch of mujahideen — guys we used to call freedom fighters — and get them on the team. These were guys we used to pay to fight the Soviets, in the old days. They were already our best friends, right? It was going to be a cakewalk. There were Taliban everywhere, but our friends were supposed to protect me, keep me out of sight.”
“The Taliban were onto you, though?” Ralph asked. “I remember, they always seemed to know our business, sometimes even before we got our actual orders. They had spies everywhere.”
“This time they didn’t need them. The main guy I was meeting with, he arranged transport for me; he was going to take me up to a cave complex where I was going to meet with a bunch of our kind of people. He showed up in an open jeep at the house where I was staying. No armor on it, no MG, just basically a beat-up old car, except a car might have blended in, but this jeep was obviously military. I didn’t like it much, but I figured they had their own ways of doing things and you had to go along to get along. My contact drove me about fifty clicks out into open country, a wide valley between two mountain ridges. I kept my eyes open, scanning the high ground, but I didn’t see anything. At one point my guy brakes hard and stops the jeep because there’s a flock of sheep crossing in front of us. Taking their time. Their shepherd kept making nasty gestures at us, calling us all kinds of names. My guy tells me this kind of thing happens, it’s nothing, and if I give him a hundred dollars, he can get the sheep moving and we can be on our way. I give him the money and he jumps out of the jeep. He and the shepherd go wandering off to talk and work things out.”