T. Parker - Full Measure

Later back on the patio they drank and talked more. “This would be heaven for me, to live in this house in this place,” said Salimony. His restless leg bounced up and down beneath his blanket. “I don’t mean with Iris, Pat, don’t think that. I’m not saying with her . I’m just saying this is where I’d like to start over.”

“Patrick’s saying with her, don’t worry about that,” said Messina. “And I get Natalie, so cross her off your list too, Sal.”

“She’s twice as tall as you,” said Salimony.

“You wanna fucking fight?”

“No. I’m in a good mood.”

“If Iris ever talks to me again it’s thanks to you guys,” said Patrick.

“But we’re the ones who broke her place all up in the first place,” said Salimony.

Patrick thought about that for a long moment. “Naw. It was those dumbass jarheads from Pendleton.” They laughed. “Men? I love you all but we gotta get past this shit. Past Sangin. Past all of it. Into the future.”

“I’m going to end up some place just like this.”

“I’m going to end up some place like Natalie.”

“I’m getting a job with county paramedics,” said Taibo. “Soon as I get my certs.”

“How many blown-up men you treat in Sangin?” asked Patrick. “Dodging IEDs and getting shot at?”

“Can’t even count.”

“And that isn’t good enough for the county?”

“Nope.”

It was cold for them on the concrete in their clothes and blankets and lightweight sleeping bags, but not as cold as Sangin, not even close. Patrick dreamed of a gleaming white ocean liner leaving the dock, honking and steaming like in the movies, with Iris and Ted and everyone in his platoon, living and dead, waving goodbye to him. So he just climbed into Fatta the Lan’ and keyed the engine alive to catch up with them but real life barged into his dream and reminded him that the boat was no longer his. Fatta the Lan’ vanished, Patrick tread in the cold water, and the ocean liner kept on going.

He woke with first light, stood and kicked Salimony awake. Minutes later he and his friends were standing side by side, looking through the open French doors and into Iris’s living room. Patrick reached in and hit the lights. Even in the man-made incandescence, Iris’s hardwood floors were magnificent. Patrick let his gaze wander the rich planks, saw the warm illumination that came from within. He laughed quietly: mission accomplished. Salimony, Messina, and Taibo laughed, too.

Later, in stocking feet, they reinstalled the china cabinet in the dining room. To Patrick’s eye it looked perfect. Brushing a fingertip over the birdseye maple and nodding, even Taibo seemed to approve his own work. They picked up after themselves then shuffled — shoes and plastic trash bags in hand — across the dining room to the living room to the foyer and out.

By late morning Patrick and the rest of the Norris clan were in the grove filling sandbags. The special NOAA forecast was calling for a two-part storm — a large Alaskan front heading down from the northwest, aimed to collide with an unusually strong late-season hurricane coming up from Baja. The meeting point looked to be offshore San Diego. Too early to tell, said the TV forecasters, but it could be substantial. They promised to track this thing by the hour.

Patrick was always amused how San Diego citizens treated rain as an insult, while the farmers treated it as a birthright. But the forecasts aside, Archie had had a dream two nights ago about a deluge hitting his groves and sweeping them all the way down the San Luis Rey River Valley to the sea. Thus, preventive sandbagging and lots of it.

The morning was damp and the reeking ash and earth clotted their boots and weighed them down. Patrick labored and brooded about Iris and what he had done and failed to do. He willed his phone to ring but it did not. The dogs dug up a gopher hole, dirt and ash and straw flying between their back legs, faces caked with dirt.

“Sorry,” said Ted, dropping his shovel into the bed of his truck. “I can’t work anymore. The stabs.”

“I told you to have them checked again,” said his father.

“Hurts.”

“Of course it does, son. You don’t have to be out here right now.”

“Rest the wounds, Ted,” said Caroline. “Maybe you’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“Yeah, almost for sure, Mom. I’m sorry I can’t do more work.” Ted slowly rounded his truck and climbed in. He looked forlorn. Patrick watched the truck roll over the rise and disappear.

Caroline came over for more sandbags. “I’ve been worried about him,” she said.

“Let’s stand by him,” said Patrick.

“We always have,” said Archie.

“He needs us,” said Caroline.

By afternoon they had begun building sandbag walls along the contours of the slopes. Next they would fortify the downhill roadsides, and finally, build up both sides of the gorge that drained the groves when enough rain fell. It was backbreaking work, worse than stacking the Hesco blocks for security at Inkerman. The blocks over which the sniper still hit Pendejo, Patrick thought. He saw that it would take at least two more days to pile the sandbags high enough to do real good.

He had trouble paying full attention. He figured Iris was getting into San Diego just about now. He tried to put himself in her shoes and guess how she’d feel when she walked into her house. Dazzled by the improvement, or even more pissed off at what he’d done?

He looked up to see Lew Boardman on a distant hill, watching them. Boardman held his palms up and out, wondering what all their labor could be about. Patrick slung the bags with a vengeance. The hardest part was dropping forty pound bags accurately enough to not have to stoop and wrestle them around by hand. His father was strong and apparently tireless in his faith that this much-needed rain would come. Archie kept looking skeptically north and south, as if to daring it not to.

Hours later darkness closed in. On the drive home Patrick looked out at the dark skeletons of the trees but in his mind’s eye he pictured Iris stepping into her refurbished home, her face in a wondrous smile that told him everything he needed to know. The image was very much like the memory of her face that he’d carried overseas, but now it was more detailed and more real, and far more valuable. But what if she didn’t like what she found at home? What if she had been traumatized by his violence? What if she’d experienced violence before, making his unforgettable and unforgivable? Certainly she had been humiliated in front of her friends. What if she was ashamed of him and of her own misjudgment of him? What if she just disliked the floor? Or Free Spirits? What if Taibo’s china cabinet wasn’t masterful in her eyes at all? And the giclée of the Kenton farm? Why should she treasure something that had come out of a copier? How could she possibly be drawn to an electric shiatsu massage pad? Why did he feel like a fool?

Patrick set out for the bunkhouse with the dogs panting alongside him. Ted was at his usual place in the big darkened space, at the picnic table, face thrust into the computer monitor. He didn’t turn when Patrick came in but he dropped a hand onto Jack’s thick Labrador head when the dog came up.

“You okay, Ted?”

Ted finally swiveled around and looked at Patrick. “My feet are killing me, and so are my back, my hands, and my knife holes. I checked them today and they weren’t leaking. But they’re still swelled up.”

“Well, you tried to help. You showed good courage and conviction, Ted.”

“You sound like Dad now except that you might mean it. He doesn’t ever mean it.”