I imagined big, confident, above-it-all Dalton Strait proned out behind the big concrete barriers most people call K-rails. He’d gotten Harris out of the burning vehicle but no farther. Then barreled perilously through the sniper fire to safety. Did that make him half a hero and half a coward?
“We got air support and the snipers were blown to dust,” said Broadman. “The convoy circled us, got Dalton and me into one of the transport trucks and away we went. The pain was out of this world. It changed my life. I remember the corpsman giving me a shot of morphine and he couldn’t figure out why I was still awake and wailing. He hit me with another pen and the next thing I knew I was in Germany.”
When he reached for his water, I saw Broadman’s cabled face and neck caught in a faint slat of sunlight.
“How did the pain change your life?”
“It made me realize you can crave your life and hate it at the same time. It was the beginning of my idea that character is not fate. The proof of that idea came later, when Dalton received the Silver Star for saving my life.”
“Did you oppose it?”
“I wanted him to get it. I was learning to embrace the life he’d given me while detesting the man I’d been changed into. This…” He set the water bottle on the coffee table and opened his empty hands as if presenting himself to me for inspection.
I realized in that moment that Dalton hated himself.
“Dalton could have been anyone,” said Harris. “The least of my problems was who pulled me from the fire, and if he could have done better. Could I do better? I doubt it. A burning man under fire cannot always defeat a military-grade body restraint that’s been soldered shut by an explosion.”
“So your fate was not your character? And Dalton’s fate was not his?”
“Far from it. That is the brutal truth of life. Clearly exposed by war.”
I thought of Dalton’s eventual fate in Fallujah, the IED that blew his leg off just days after his act of “heroism.” I recalled Jim Young’s assessment of Dalton’s later patrol behavior “went all the way to risky.” I wondered if that was purposefuclass="underline" atonement. What was Dalton’s true character? Was it pulling Broadman from the Humvee, or abandoning Broadman in order to preserve his own life, or recklessly leading himself into the hidden bomb that took half his leg?
“What do you know about the missing wife?” Broadman asked.
“They were high school sweethearts,” I said. “Married after graduation. Two sons. She’s been gone since last Tuesday.”
I told him about Natalie Strait’s breakdown fourteen months ago, her gambling and spending enthusiasms, and I suggested that the Strait finances were possibly under strain. He used the remote on the blinds again, this time to close them tighter. I wondered at the agony of living with burned eyes in a bright desert. And more to the point, why Broadman had settled here.
“Do you suspect another psychological break?” he asked.
“I suspect abduction.”
“Quite different from a runaway wife on a bender.”
“Quite different.”
“I’ve donated to Dalton’s campaigns over the years,” he said. “Modestly. He doesn’t stand for my politics, but he’s a brother and he saved some of my life.”
“But no contact with him, since Fallujah?”
“None. Some memories you don’t want to see, face-to-face.” Again, his dry chuckle.
“What are your politics, Mr. Broadman?”
“I have none,” said Harris. “It’s liberating. It frees one up to begin at the beginning.”
“The beginning of what?”
“All things.”
Another moment of air-conditioned quiet. Broadman sat still, hands on his knees, a white apparition with a voice.
Then he slowly reached up and took the sunglasses off. Dark brown eyes in a face that looked like a heated thing, still melting.
“What did you bring home from the war, Mr. Ford?”
“I left as much as I could over there.”
“But something always follows you back. It doesn’t have to be a ruined face or a blown-off leg.”
I nodded. And remembered the Jolan. Close and hot and just beginning to boil with hate. Door-to-door searches. All of us eager to find the Blackwater killers, and all of Fallujah turning against us, like a tide rising by the hour. Outside a small home, one of thousands, the smell of lamb and coriander and cumin. Interior dark, always dark. Sudden movement, face-close fire, muzzle flash, air thick with lead and gunpowder and screams. Brennan down. Avalos down in the doorway. By the time I got back to him, Avalos was still where he had fallen, floating in blood. It seemed to take us forever to shoot those insurgents. Forever to drag Avalos back inside, out of sniper sight. Forever to get his helmet off and pack the hole in his face with a roll of QuikClot, twelve feet of medicated gauze and even that couldn’t fill the gushing space. He was staring at me with his one good eye when that eye fogged over and his body went still.
“I lost Avalos,” I said. “A good man. We entered a dwelling and we met heavy fire.”
“You lost him?”
“He was lost,” I said. “And I was there. I replay those minutes sometimes. Fairly often.”
“You replay it, looking for what you did wrong,” said Broadman.
“Correct.”
“If you don’t find anything at first, you keep trying until you do. And when you find it, you play it again and again and again. The smallest thing. Something new, or something invented?”
“That’s the method,” I said.
“You torture yourself with a changeable truth.”
I took a deep breath, shifted in my chair. “I would like there to be an answer. As to whether or not I am at fault.”
“And to why it took you so long to do things.”
“Yes,” I said. I could feel my heart beating against my shirt. “Was I slowed down by fear? Was I afraid of what I would find? I heard that round hit him. It’s an unmistakable sound. As you know. Even in all that chaos I heard it and in the periphery of my vision I saw him fall. I was that close to him.”
I listened to the air conditioner hum in the half-light. Saw through the blinds the fractured images of children jumping into the swimming pool.
“Which leads you to the curse of the living,” said Broadman.
“Why him and not me?”
“It should be embossed on our motto, right beside Semper Fi.”
“Sometimes I thank Avalos,” I said. “Sometimes, he won’t accept.”
“In the dreams and nightmares.”
“Sure. Less now.”
“We’re the lucky ones,” said Broadman. “We have managed to move forward. Of course, we can’t call ourselves lucky. That leads us back to the curse.”
I offered him a somewhat formal nod.
“Please give my best wishes to Dalton,” he said. “Tell him I bear no grudge for what he did. Or didn’t do.”
I sat in a bar called the Quetzal, just off of Christmas Circle in town. Ordered a double bourbon and knew there could easily be more. Drink up, get a room, fly home in the morning. I looked at that drink for a good long while before taking the first sip. When I took it, the bourbon was all there for me: strength, confidence, luck. There was a mirror behind the bar that aimed my face back. I raised the glass and sipped again. The TV volume was off as the news stars crowed from their red, white, and blue sets. I was glad for the silence.
Especially glad when Dalton’s smiling image appeared beside that of head-scarfed Ammna Safar, then video of Dalton waving a fistful of papers at a group of supporters in what looked like a pizza parlor. The caption strip: “Campaigning California Assemblyman Dalton Strait of San Diego says his opponent Ammna Safar ‘almost certainly’ has blood relatives among Islamic State fighters in Syria, and is unfit to represent his 82nd district… Safar, who was born in the United States, denies the claim and has promised to file suit against Strait for defamation and slander…”