Phoenix Island (7 page)

“Uh, yes, Drill Sergeant, will the team be receiving any cheerleaders? Some of the girls we rode in with looked pretty hot—”

“Lock it up, wise guy,” Rivera said, but he smiled. “Give me twenty for thinking like an individual.”

Some of the guys laughed. Ross started pushing.

Carl noticed the muscular redneck, Decker, whispering to one of his buddies and looking at Ross like he’d like to kill him. Decker had been giving Ross a hard time lately, but nothing too serious, and so far Ross had been able to joke his way out of it. Carl wondered how long the jokes would work.

Rivera said, “You do push-ups like those, Ross, maybe
you
ought to be the cheerleader.” Everybody laughed. Rivera was
definitely
way cooler than the other drill sergeants. “Now, orphans, you’re going to have some hard days here, hooah?”

“Hooah!” the platoon responded. The only guy who didn’t join in was Medicaid. He sat in the back, staring at the floor and mumbling to himself. The kid had more issues than
Sports Illustrated.

“Well, you tough those days out, and you will be amazed at the changes in you. You’ll go from being boys to being men. You’ll go from being individuals to being team players. Hooah?”

“Hooah!”

Rivera nodded. “Now you sound like soldiers. All right, orphans, commence personal time. Lights out at twenty-two hundred. Campbell, you need anything, I’ll be down at CQ.”

Personal time,
Carl thought.
We’re actually getting personal time tonight.
It was always on the schedule but never quite materialized. He glanced at the clock. It wasn’t even 2100 yet.

“Book Man,” Rivera said, “come with me. We have to run over a couple of things.”

Carl followed him out of the bay. The guys started horsing around back there, making too much noise, fired up by their first bit of freedom in many days.

“How you doing on the duty roster, Freeman?”

“Not bad, Drill Sergeant. The guys don’t like it, but it’s working.”

“Outstanding, Freeman.” Reaching the end of the hall, Rivera unlocked the door on which the whiteboard hung and swung it open to reveal a dim closet. “Your office. You got your desk there, paper, pencils. File cabinet. We need you to file stuff, we’ll unlock it. You even get a chair.” He handed Carl a key. “That opens the closet. Do not lose it. You read me, Freeman?”

“Lima Charlie, Drill Sergeant.”

“That’s the way a soldier talks. I’m off to CQ for the next hour or so. You need anything, tell Campbell, and he can come tell me. After that, Drill Sergeant Parker relieves me, and I’d recommend you just hold any subsequent questions till tomorrow. Hooah?”

“Hooah.”

Rivera handed him the next day’s schedule and left, pausing just outside the door to smoke a couple of kids running down the hall.

Carl copied the schedule on the whiteboard, shut himself inside the closet, and went to work setting up guard duty. He planned to square this away, hit the showers, give his boots another polish, reroll his socks, and maybe even socialize a bit before lights out.

He got to work. People showed up, trying to get out of duty, but he shut them down. He went by alphabetical order, since if he followed that it was impossible to say he was playing favorites, but, as usual, some people got pissed anyway. So be it. Let them go to Campbell.

Decker and his toadies came by, all smiles, offering Carl protection from Davis’s gang in exchange for Carl “forgetting” to put them on the roster. When Carl said thanks but no thanks, Decker stared at him for a few long seconds. The guy had these weird pale blue eyes that shone, cold and thoughtful, and didn’t match the otherwise brutal face, which looked like it had been carved from scarred stone. Decker looked interested, amused, and angry, all at the same time . . . but mostly interested. Then he and his thugs left.

A while later, Ross showed up and got Carl laughing with an imitation of Rivera, tilting his head back and squinting a little. “Ross, give me twenty for thinking like an individual.”

Carl laughed. It was perfect. “You’re awesome at impersonations.”

Ross shrugged. “When you’re my size, good ones are a survival skill. Comedy as self-defense. How much work do you have left?”

“I’m almost finished.”

“Awesome. Hurry up. We’re playing Ninja in the back bay.”

Ninja was, without a doubt, the stupidest game in the entire universe. Suddenly, Carl wanted to play very much.

“All right. I’ll be down.”

Ross left.

Five minutes later, Carl locked the closet and headed toward the back bay. Voices floated into the hall. “One, two, three . . . Ninja!”

Grinning, Carl detoured into his bay, worked his lock, secured his new key, started to close the locker, and paused, staring at the pictures hanging inside.

There was his mother, smiling at the Phillies game.

His eyes moved to the other picture. Mom again, Carl as a little kid, Dad.

He missed them terribly.

He looked at his mom’s smiling face and had to swallow hard to get rid of the lump in his throat. How could somebody so full of life die so young?

Cancer. That was how. Bad luck on a cosmic scale.

Dad looked bulletproof in his uniform.
Not hardly,
Carl thought.
Not hardly.

The man who’d shot him was a schizophrenic with the ridiculous name of Wilson W. Wilson. Wilson and his wife had fought and separated, and he’d moved out on the street. For a while, he tried to get together again, but she refused. Then one summer night, Wilson W. Wilson forced his way into the apartment with a .38 Special handgun.

Neighbors heard shouting and called the police. Carl’s dad, who’d been just down the block when the call came through, was first to arrive. Wilson shot him four times as soon as he came through the door, reloaded his empty chambers, and proceeded to kill all three of his children and two neighbor boys, who’d only been in the apartment to play video games. Wilson explained to his wife that he wanted her to experience
the loneliness she had forced upon him. Then he stuck the barrel in his own mouth and pulled the trigger, and that was that.

Somehow, Carl’s dad survived, but Carl knew he was never going to be the same. Even at eight, Carl understood that. He loved his dad. Almost worshipped him. Before the shooting, he was a loud, good-natured man, well-known and well-loved around Devil’s Pocket. He’d grown up in the Pocket, a comically wild Irish boy who’d made good in the end and upon whom they could always count on for help, whether that meant dealing with a kite stuck in a tree, or the sound of broken glass at midnight, or a murderous schizophrenic who’d decided to turn a broken marriage into a community bloodbath.

After the shooting, Carl’s dad couldn’t even help himself. Weather permitting, he spent his days on the front porch. His blank eyes stared from his swollen face. Scar tissue bunched the flesh where the second bullet had passed through his head, lifting one corner of his mouth in a humorless perma-smile.

Carl took care of him. He wanted to. Every moment he wasn’t in school, he sat with his father. He never resented this time, and he never bought into his mother’s concern that he was taking on too much, that he needed to step back a little, just be a boy. He helped care for his father in nearly every way, from feeding him to administering medication to helping him bathe. It wasn’t gross or funny or weird. It just was.

It broke his mother’s heart, but she couldn’t afford a nurse, not on the paltry disability check they got and what little she made waitressing at the diner. So Carl did much of the work, and when he wasn’t working, he sat with his father in case he needed anything.

The day the laughter started, Carl was on his way home from school with his friend Tommy, just coming onto their block. He heard laughter up ahead—mean laughter—and saw this big fifth-grader, Liam Reilly, and a couple of other kids, standing on the sidewalk, cracking up. Then he heard Liam say, “Check out the Spook.”

At first, Carl thought the older boy was using some stupid racial slur, which were about as common in the Pocket as songbirds were in the suburbs. But then he saw Liam laughing and making a face and looking up at Carl’s house. Up at the porch. Up at Carl’s dad.

The Spook
.

Liam made his face look all goofy, even doing a poor imitation of the perma-smile before bursting into laughter.

The Spook
. Carl’s dad.

It took Carl, who had never witnessed cruelty like this, half a block to really understand. He was vaguely aware of Tommy pulling on his arm, saying those guys were dumb, they didn’t mean anything by it . . . and then Carl was at the end of the block, and Liam’s friends were punching and kicking him and calling him crazy, and Liam—despite being older and bigger than Carl—was on the ground, covered in blood and moaning, half-conscious. The older boys knocked Carl down several times, but he pulled himself off the sidewalk every time and waded back in swinging, until Tommy’s dad broke up the fight. The older kids were all too willing to get Liam onto his feet and peel out of there; even in his rage, Carl could see the look of fear in their eyes.

“What is it?” Tommy’s dad asked, but Carl was too angry to do anything but struggle and yell after the fleeing boys.

When Tommy told the story, his dad, whose hands were rough from tree work and weather, hugged Carl hard, saying with his lingering brogue, “Oh, Jaysus, Carl boy, Jaysus. It’ll be all right. I’ll just have a talk with their fathers, and they won’t ever say nothing like that again. You mark my words, Carl boy.”

He’d been right about that. The boys never had. But the damage was done.

Carl’s innocence was lost.

The fight with Liam had filled him with fury. Before Liam, Carl couldn’t have imagined such cruelty; after Liam, he couldn’t forget it. If someone could joke that way right in front of the house, how many people were calling Carl’s dad the Spook behind closed doors? His old assumptions—that his dad was universally hailed as a hero and that most people were good, law-abiding citizens—came crumbling down, and into the vacuum of their absence raced burning rage.

Carl grew quiet. He spent all his free time on the porch, his father’s tireless, silent defender. His grades dropped. It was hard to practice long division when he had the need to look up every time someone passed the
front porch, had to watch and listen for the slightest clue that someone thought his dad was a joke. When people stopped by—something that happened less and less frequently as the months passed—Carl grunted in response to questions, refused to smile, and made most people so uncomfortable that they soon left.

For his mother’s sake, anytime someone came by and laughed, or looked up and stared, Carl squeezed his fists and waited. Once they crossed into the next block, he tore off the porch after them, out of her sight. No matter how old they were, how big they were, or how many of them there were, he attacked without warning, without mercy, and without the slightest hesitation. Sometimes he won, and sometimes he lost, but he always fought his hardest, and nobody could keep him down. By the time he was ten years old, he had a reputation as a fearless, heavy-handed nut.

Then he got in real trouble.

His first court date was a rainy Tuesday. His mother pulled him out of school. She wore her church clothes and cried the whole ride over. She’d missed a lunch shift at the diner, but that wasn’t why she was crying. She cried over the shooting and Carl’s life as a caregiver and his trouble with fighting. Thinking back now, remembering how her hands had shaken as she unscrewed the cap of the aspirin bottle she carried at all times by this point, Carl realized she’d been crying about something else, too. The headaches had already started. Had she known, even then, that she had only months to live?

The previous night, waking from a nightmare, Carl had risen and gone to the kitchen, where he sweated and shook and sipped water, listening to the clock tick and staring at the closed door to the living room they’d converted into a space for his father. He went to the door and cracked it open so a little slice of illumination fell over the face of his father, who slept with his eyes slightly open, his mouth wide, that one corner still upturned. He looked pale, old. Carl saw the short gray hair, which always flaked with dandruff no matter what kind of shampoo they used on it, and the disfiguring lump from the bullet that had damaged his brain.

His mother slept sitting up in a chair beside the bed, still dressed in
her work uniform. Her head hung forward like she was praying, and one hand rested on the shoulder of Carl’s dad. Standing there, Carl felt something like shame, as if he’d intruded on a personal moment, and suddenly real to him was the idea of his parents
before
him: their childhoods and teen romance, their courtship and marriage, the dreams and plans they had shared. What did they do to deserve any of this? And what would Carl’s mother do if the judge sent Carl away?

But the judge did not send him away. Not that first time. He talked about Carl’s father and made Carl answer questions and gave him a lecture and finally sentenced him to twenty-five hours of community service and six months of professional counseling. The judge also ordered Carl to take boxing lessons, saying the sport would provide an outlet for his aggression.

Which was how he met Arthur Marcellus James, who had trained trotter horses and fighting dogs prior to establishing himself as a world-class boxing trainer. A stick-thin old man with dark skin, hooded eyes, and a thin mustache, Arthur wasn’t much on warmth—he barely spoke to Carl, except to point out he was dropping his hands or raising his chin or telegraphing punches—but the man knew
everything
about boxing.

Carl missed him. He missed boxing. But most of all, he missed his parents.

Now he stood in this strange place—these
barracks
, a million miles from home—and stared up at the beaming faces of his parents. Gone, all gone. His eyes burned. His hands were cold and damp with sweat. He took a deep breath, held it for a second, and let it shudder out.