Ahead of us, several cars darted from alleyways and stopped in the intersection, blocking our way. Men jumped out of them and trained weapons in our direction. Mike wasted no time suppressing them with fire from the SAW while dad gunned the accelerator.
Something snapped in my head, and just as quickly as my wits had left me, my mind cleared again. I took up my father’s rifle, loaded it with a grenade, leaned out the window, and fired at a small sedan in the middle of the road. The explosion killed one of the gunmen ahead of us and sent the rest running. Dad swerved to the far side of the roadblock, clipped a car on its front fender, revved the engine, and pushed through. Once past, he sped up and did not slow down until the low buildings of Boise City were a speck in the distance. I kept my eyes on our back trail, grenade loaded and ready to fire, but no one followed us. When we were somewhere close to twenty miles out of town, Dad brought the Humvee to a halt.
“Mike,” he said. “I need you to take over.”
The big Marine climbed down from the turret and looked to his old friend. “Why? What’s the matter?”
I leaned forward in my seat to get a better look. That was when I noticed the blood.
*****
During our time with the convoy, Mike had traded a Kimber .45 automatic and fifty rounds of ammo to a medic in exchange for five vials of morphine. We had retained a significant supply of pain meds, but nothing beats morphine, and Mike wanted a little on hand just in case.
For whatever reason, the Army had a surplus of the stuff, and in those days, it could be had on the cheap. I administered a shot to my father as Mike drove us north away from Boise City. After a few moments, the pain on his face faded and his eyes drooped. I had taken off his vest and cut way his shirt so he was bare-chested, then bandaged and packed his wounds as best I could. There was one bullet hole in his left shoulder that had missed the bone and gone straight through the thick muscle. If that had been his only injury, I would not have been worried. The old man had survived worse.
It was the three bullet holes in his abdomen that made me panic.
Dad wanted water, so I gave it to him. He drained both my canteens, then complained he was still thirsty. I had Sophia pull another canteen from Mike’s belt and gave it to him. He drained that one too. The morphine made him drowsy, but I shook him to keep him awake, worried if he fell asleep he would not wake up. I kept him talking, listened to him tell me he had seen the man who shot Blake but was too slow to stop him. Tears ran down his cheeks as his eyes fluttered and rolled back in his head. I shook him harder.
“Dad, stay awake. Do you hear me? Stay awake.”
I heard Mike turn in his seat and glanced up to see him looking over his shoulder at us. It was the first time I ever saw tears in the big man’s eyes.
That was when I realized my father was dying.
We cut left and right through a maze of back roads, farm trails, and off-road two-tracks. I couldn’t see anyone following us, but Mike didn’t take any chances. When it got to the point that no amount of jostling kept my father’s eyes open, I screamed at Mike to stop the goddamn car.
He pulled into the driveway of a farmhouse, abandoned by the look of it, the yard overgrown, weeds tall among dead crops, no vehicles in sight. When the Humvee stopped, I grabbed my father by the shoulders and began dragging him out the door. His dense musculature from a lifetime of hard training made him heavy, forcing me to strain hard to move him.
“Mike, help me!”
He got out of the car, took Dad’s legs, and helped me lower him to the ground. There was blood everywhere, all over him, me, the back seat, and now pouring out on the ground through the bandages. In the back of my mind, I knew at least one of the bullets must have struck an artery. Dad’s jaw was slack as I lifted him up and held him, trying to shake him awake.
“Dad. Dad! Wake up! You have to wake up!”
For just a moment, he came to, lifted his head, and looked me in the eye. A calloused hand touched my cheek, his dark eyes smiling one last time.
“It’s okay, Caleb. You’re gonna be all right.”
Then he went limp.
I shook him. No reaction. His eyes were open, pupils beginning to dilate despite the bright sun overhead. I laid him flat on the ground and shouted for Mike to help me start CPR. He exchanged a glance with Sophia, pushed her back a step with a gentle hand, and we went to work.
A minute passed. I worked the chest compressions while Mike breathed into Dad’s lungs. “Come on, come on, come on,” I repeated over and over again.
Sweat poured down my face, soaked my shirt, crimson droplets fell onto my father’s bloody torso. Five minutes went by. I felt Dad’s ribs crack, but kept working anyway. My breathing became labored, heart pounding in my chest. Several times Mike became light-headed and had to put his head between his knees to recover.
Several more minutes went by. The grinding in my father’s chest sounded like sticks rattling under a rubber mat. Finally, strong hands gripped me by the arms and pulled me away.
“Stop, Caleb,” Mike said, his voice hitching. “It’s over, son. He’s gone.”
I struggled against him for a moment, but it was no use. He was more than twice as strong as I was. He sat on the ground and held me in a bear hug until the kicking and screaming subsided into choking, racking sobs.
When he finally let me go, I pulled my father’s head to my chest and cried for him under the harsh, impartial glare of the Oklahoma sun.
FORTY-TWO
After an indeterminate period of wailing and cursing God for taking Lauren, Dad, and Blake away from me, when I finally gathered myself enough to assess our situation, I kissed my father on his cooling forehead and asked Mike to help me search the property for a shovel. He told me I needed to sit down and let him look me over.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
He took me to the driver’s side of the Humvee and turned the mirror so I could see my face. The left side was a bloody mess, the eye swollen, my cheek and forehead lacerated in dozens of places, several pieces of shrapnel embedded in the skin. I touched one of them and felt it grind against my upper gum line. It was a miracle I had not lost an eye. Oddly, there was no pain.
“Now look here,” Mike said, pointing at my torso and left arm. They hadn’t fared much better than my face. My shirt was soaked with so much blood I couldn’t tell its original color had been desert tan.
I sat on the front porch and let Mike and Sophia cut away my clothes and tend to my wounds. They extracted the shrapnel with tweezers, and in the case of one big shard stuck in my hip, a pair of needle-nose pliers. The pain gradually began to penetrate the haze of grief and adrenaline, but I simply gritted my teeth and took it. An hour later, the metal was out of me, the wounds were cleaned, stitched, and irrigated, and I had fifteen milligrams of OxyContin in my system. The multitude of bandages on the left side of my body reminded me of a confetti-covered street after a parade. I put on fresh clothes and the three of us searched the house.
The inside was ransacked, as though whoever once lived there had packed up and left in a hurry. There were three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a wide, spacious kitchen. The pantry was empty except for a few cans of vegetables on the floor and a burst-open sack of ant-ridden sugar. Most of the pots and pans were gone, and there were color-mismatched squares on the walls where pictures had been taken down. Others, mostly old-fashioned artist’s prints, remained. I could only assume the missing frames had contained family photos.
Funny, the things people take when they evacuate.
There was a gun cabinet in the master bedroom, but it was empty. The three beds still had sheets on them, clean except for a little dust. One of the bedrooms looked as if it belonged to a teenage boy, while the third was clearly the domain of a pre-teen girl. Lots of pink, and unicorns, and rainbows, and racks of stuffed animals.