Keene Brian: A Gathering of Crows

When Bobby began to playfully howl along with the dogs, she almost screamed.

Donny Osborne put the last box—marked on the side with black Magic Marker as PHOTO ALBUMS—in the back of his blue Ford pickup truck, grunting with the effort. Sighing, he slammed the tailgate shut. Both sounds, the sigh and the slam, had the tone of finality. He glanced down and noticed that one of his bootlaces was untied. Resting his foot on the rear bumper, he tied it again. The lace was damp from the dew on the grass. Despite the coolness in the air, Donny was sweating. After tying the lace and wiping his brow with the bottom of his T-shirt, Donny leaned back against the truck and sighed again. He tried not to look at the house because doing so filled him with sadness, but he couldn’t help himself. As he stood there, catching his breath, his eyes were drawn back to it once more.

The house seemed smaller somehow. Maybe that was because he was an adult now. Everything seemed smaller these days. His childhood home. This street. Brinkley Springs. The mountains. Hell, even the whole damned state of West Virginia seemed to have shrunk. As he stood there, Donny wondered why this was so. Was it just a matter of perspective, that he remembered these things through a child’s eyes but was looking at them now as a man? Or was it because he’d seen the rest of the world and understood now just how big it was, and how small this little section of the planet was? Was it because unlike percent of his classmates and childhood friends, he’d gone beyond the state borders and discovered that there was a whole wide world out there, a world full of different cultures and people and outlooks and beliefs that were nothing like what they’d grown up knowing? That there were towns other than Brinkley Springs, populated with people totally unlike themselves—and yet sharing similar hopes and dreams and wants and needs?

Places like Iraq, for instance.

Donny snickered. It was a humorless, spiteful sound.

Maybe Iraq wasn’t such a good example, although he had to admit, his second tour of duty in that godforsaken place had been much better than his first. By his second tour of duty, the much-maligned troop surge had worked, and as a result, he and the rest of his platoon spent more time interacting with the civilians or watching movies and playing video games back at Camp Basra than they did out on patrol. That first tour had been hell—going from house to house, searching for insurgents, never knowing when you were going to get shot. And it was hard to tell the insurgents from everyone else. They blended with the populace. In Iraq, everyone looked like a civilian, and all of them—friendly or otherwise— had weapons. Just because a family had an old Kalashnikov tucked away inside their cupboard, it didn’t mean they were the enemy. That would have been like rounding up and arresting every hunter in Brinkley Springs who owned a deer rifle. But even the house-to-house searches weren’t as bad as dealing with the suicide bombers and the IEDs. Many of Donny’s friends had lost their legs, arms or eyes to roadside bombs. One minute, they’d been sitting in a transport, and the next…

Well, what could you say about a country where you could get your legs blown off while just driving down the fucking road?

The thing that most amazed Donny now was how much he actually missed the place sometimes. Oh, not Iraq itself. Iraq was a cesspool. Iran could move in overnight and nuke Iraq, reducing it to a radioactive crater, and Donny would be just fine with that. But he missed his friends. His fellow soldiers. His brothers. It was funny. Donny had spent six years in the military just marking the days on his shorttimer’s calendar, counting the minutes until he was a civilian again. But now that he was out and back in the world, all he could think about was the time he’d served and the guys he’d served it with. Some of them had never made it back home, like Tyler Henry from York, Pennsylvania, killed when their convoy hit an IED while crossing through the desert; Will McCann from central Ohio, killed by a sniper inside the Green Zone; or Don Bloom from Trenton, New Jersey, who’d been captured by the renegade remnants of Saddam Hussein’s fedayeen, tortured and then, after being rescued, had gone AWOL somewhere inside the country. Nobody was sure why, or where he’d gone, or what had happened to him. The rumors ran the gamut, each one wilder than the previous. Bloom had fallen in love with an Iraqi girl and was hiding with her family. Bloom had crossed the border into Jordan and became a smuggler. Bloom had crossed the border into Syria or Iran and was selling them military secrets. Bloom was working for a private security contractor. Bloom had joined up with Black Lodge, the paranormal paramilitary group that didn’t even exist but was the wet dream of conspiracy theorists all across the Internet. All kinds of crazy theories, and Donny was pretty sure that none of them were true.

Donny thought of Henry and McCann and Bloom often, but he thought even more frequently about his friends who had made it home—and the few who were still there, counting the days on their own short-timer calendars. He missed them terribly and wondered if he’d ever see any of them again. They’d promised to stay in touch. So had he. But somehow, those promises had fallen by the wayside when, one by one, they returned home to the real world—a world of family and wives and kids and taxes and jobs and college and mortgage payments. Donny’s real world was Brinkley Springs, and in some ways, he hated the town more than he’d ever hated Iraq.

Donny Osborne was twenty-four going on eighty-four.

He glanced back at the house again, and his gaze lingered on the for-sale sign in the yard. The sign was new—less than a week old—but already looked weather-beaten and worn, just like the house itself. The realtor (a red-headed woman named Mallory Lau who, despite being twice his age, had mercilessly hit on Donny even though he kept declining her advances) had promised him she’d do her best, but Donny wasn’t holding his breath. Brinkley Springs was full of similar signs, many of them from her real-estate office. With the economy still down, it was a buyer’s market right now—except that there were no buyers. Each morning, new realtor signs seemed to have sprung up overnight. The houses weren’t selling. New construction was nonexistent. In short, the town was old and sick and weary. The town was dying. No, not dying. Maybe the town didn’t know it yet, but Brinkley Springs was dead.

Just like his mother.

Donny could have stayed in the military after his second tour of duty. He’d certainly wanted to stay in. He was decorated—including a Bronze Star— and he’d already made E-. He’d been the type of soldier they needed more of, and the brass hadn’t been shy about letting him know that the army offered him big bonuses and all sorts of extra benefits if he’d re-up again. He’d planned on doing it. It wasn’t that he desired to make a career out of the army. He could do without combat, and the endless hours of monotony in between firefights—the “hurry up and wait” mentality so prevalent in the military.

But he really didn’t have any other options that appealed to him. He could have taken advantage of the G.I. Bill, of course, and let the government pay for his college education, but there was nothing in particular that Donny had wanted to study. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. All that he knew was that he didn’t want to spend that life trapped in Brinkley Springs. The army provided him with a way to do that, a way to escape. Unfortunately, in the end, Brinkley Springs had sucked him back. A line of dialogue from the third Godfather movie ran through his head.