T. Parker - Full Measure

“Really? It’s right?”

“I think it is.”

“You and me then? Pat?”

The sirens screamed and the cars barreled down Oak Street, their flashing lights cutting through the open door.

Patrick grabbed Ted’s wavering gun hand. He pressed his finger alongside his brother’s, through the trigger guard. The barrel of the weapon dug into Ted’s heart. For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes and Patrick saw the damage and confusion in someone whom life had mostly cursed. He knew there was some goodness among the darker things. He wrapped his free hand around Ted’s head and clutched him close. “I love you.”

“I’m not afraid anymore,” said Ted.

For a moment they were one, cheek to cheek, heart to heart, and hand to hand. Together they pulled. The explosion cracked through the lobby and out the open door into Fallbrook.

The storm lumbered in from the southwest early Monday morning, heavy with blessing and menace. At sunrise the sky was black over the Norris Brothers groves and the wind blew warm and strong. Patrick and his parents stood on the front porch in rain gear, the steam from their coffee cups rising, the dogs alert beside them. Patrick noted the porch thermometer at seventy-two degrees and the barometer was the lowest he’d ever seen it.

He glanced at his mother and father, then up at the black clouds, which covered every inch of sky in every direction as far as Patrick could see. Numbness had descended on Patrick and he couldn’t free his mind from what had happened. He felt weighted and sinking, a brute mammal caught in tar. He was exhausted by deputies, reporters, sympathizers, and mostly by grief itself. He had lied to them all, even to his mother and father and Iris, about his part in Ted’s death.

“I’ll die before I let this storm take the last of what I have,” said Archie. “Pat, do you think we should stage from the Big Gorge or the upper roads?”

“It’s up to you.”

“I’m asking your advice.”

“The high ground then. Is the tractor ready?”

“Gassed and ready in the shed below the gorge.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Patrick. He knew that his father’s vow to die trying was not made lightly. The Norris Brothers Growers had lost a man, Frank Webster, in the winter of 1957. A saturated west-facing hillside had broken away and buried him and his tractor under ten feet of mud. The spot was marked by a concrete cross, now fully exposed and blackened by fire. The tragedy was recalled only occasionally and briefly, as if there was shame on the family for letting it happen, Patrick had always thought — something in which they were complicit and maybe an accessory to. Like Ted.

“And we ought to lock the dogs in the barn,” said Patrick. “They can’t help and they might get hurt.”

“I’ll get them food and water,” said Caroline.

The wind lifted ash and straw from the grove and the air around them grew dark with soot. It looked like a dust bowl windstorm coming. From the kitchen Caroline brought steel containers of coffee and a cooler filled with food and drinks. Down at the barn they loaded shovels, a hundred empty sandbags, scores of four-foot lengths of reinforcement bar, and three sledgehammers into Archie’s truck. They jailed the dogs, who howled in frustration as Patrick climbed back into his truck.

He took the lead, the defroster on and coffee jostling over his fingers. The Norris groves were nearly all slopes, some gentle and others steep. He climbed the narrow road in long switchbacks, Ted hugely present in the seat next to him. Ted’s voice and some of the words from his letter to Lucinda Smith coursed through Patrick’s brain: I am attracted to you like my dogs are attracted to birds, because of nature... Now that I know your secret you make sense to me... Too bad it had to happen to you... I never felt like I was part of my own family, but they mostly tried to make me feel like I was, except maybe Dad... It wasn’t the first fire either, I set others but none of them did what this one did... I didn’t have any talent for fires... I want to be famous for a few hours so I’m going to confess like you did... Don’t want Ibrahim to sit in prison either... He never did nothing to me... I’ll make sure Patrick sees this letter and he will make everything right as he always does.

As he always does. They parked the trucks side by side on the high peak near the center of the property. As boys, Ted and Patrick had nicknamed this hillock “Everest,” and climbed it using unnecessary ropes. They’d planted an American flag here. Now the eighty Norris acres flowed down from them in blackened corrugations spiked with scorched trees, their branches bare and sharp. When Patrick looked to the south he could see Lew Boardman’s adjacent acres, green and verdant and untouched.

He idly wondered if God had saved the Norris home. Wasn’t that Godlike? Roughly a year ago Patrick had wondered something similar, on his seventh patrol in Sangin, when Dahl had brushed up against an IED and been blown so high into a tree it took them a while to spot his body. Yet Sloan, Fortner, and Graff, all right there with him, were spared. Hand of God at the expense of Dahl? Things like that happened again and again, and Patrick came to believe that God decided everything by deciding nothing, that the specifics of your life and death on Earth were no reflection of you or God at all. You could call God luck, and though it might be a good approximation, it didn’t explain much. The most important truth he’d learned was the simplest too and it applied anywhere you went — get through the fucking day alive.

The rain started, blown in one direction and then another by the strong tropical wind. Patrick trotted to his father’s truck and squeezed in beside his mother. Archie set the wipers on low. They refilled their cups and listened to the rap of the rain on the roof and the hiss of the wind in the leafless trees. The rain had already turned the ground to gray-black slush, and the smell was strong.

They watched and waited a long while and the rain came faster. Beyond the bare and bloody facts of Ted they hadn’t talked about what had happened. Words were feeble and raw. Patrick still smelled the blood on himself. But now the silence was intolerable, made somehow obsolete by the coming storm. Patrick was about to speak but his father spoke first.

“I feel that he is here with us.”

“He was in my truck on the way here,” said Patrick.

“I keep waiting to wake up,” said Caroline. “And none of it is going to be true.”

“It’s the worst truth I’ve known, Caroline. To date.”

“And we’ll all be... like before. Right?” She wiped under each eye with a different fingertip. She sat bolt upright as always, shoulders back and chin up. “There was so much pain I didn’t see.”

“Me neither, Mom.”

“None of us saw,” said Archie.

Caroline stared straight ahead. “I still don’t know how I raised a boy tormented enough to destroy so much of the world around him. Then himself. There’s blood on my hands.”

“There most definitely is not,” said Archie.

“I didn’t see, but I knew,” she said. “They gathered up some moms on TV after one of the school massacres. From across the country. They all had boys who were wrong, they said. They were afraid their whole lives. Really afraid that their sons would hurt themselves or worse. They watched them and loved them and helped them. Talked to doctors, sometimes cops even. The boys didn’t commit crimes or serious violence that they ever knew of. The boys just kept plodding along, barely keeping in their lanes. And the mothers kept waiting for that terrible thing to happen, for their sons to make hell on earth for innocents. And that show hit me like an atom bomb because those moms were me.”