The Drifter (2 page)

Peter had to agree.

It wasn’t a pit bull, actually. Those dogs bred for fighting were beautiful, in their own way. Like cruise missiles were beautiful, or a combat knife, if you didn’t stop to consider what they were made to do.

This dog, on the other hand, was a mix of so many breeds you’d have to go back to the caveman era to sort it out.

The result was an animal of unsurpassed hideousness.

It had the bullet-shaped head of a pit bull, but the lean muscled body and long legs of an animal built for chasing down its prey over long distances. Tall upright ears, a long wolfish muzzle. Its matted fur was mostly a kind of deep orange, with brown polka dots.

And the animal was enormous.

Like a timber wolf run through the wash with a pit bull, a Great Dane, and a fuzzy orange sweatshirt.

Seen out in the open like that, even at a hundred and fifty–plus pounds with murderous teeth, it was hard to take the animal too seriously.

What would you name a dog like that?

Maybe Daisy. Or Cupcake.

The thought made him smile.

He got out his water bottle and walked the growling dog down to the end of its rope. Taking hold of the stick, he poured a little water into that deadly mouth. The dog glared at him, the intelligence vivid in those pale blue eyes. But after a moment, its throat began to work as it swallowed. Peter poured until the bottle was empty.

“Sir, what the heck are you doing?” asked Charlie.

Peter shrugged. “Dog’s thirsty.”

Charlie just looked at him. It was a good look. It said the kid had thought he’d seen all the crazy there was in the world until that very moment, but he had been very, very wrong.

All he said was, “I got to go, sir. I miss first period, Father Lehane says I’m on the bench on Friday.” Then he left.

And with the dog growling behind him, Peter went to the truck to unpack his tools and get to work.

T
he porch was sinking into the ground. The bottoms of the original pine posts were turning to mush, and there were no concrete pilings underneath, just a few bricks stacked in the dirt. Fairly typical back in the day. But now the only thing holding up the structure was habit. The porch was used to being there, so it hadn’t collapsed.

It wasn’t the kind of work Peter had imagined while he was studying econ at Northwestern. Or when he turned down Goldman Sachs for the Marines’ Officer Candidates School. It had seemed like a higher calling then, and it still did. Everything else was entirely too theoretical.

But he liked fixing old houses. He’d done it with his dad in northern Wisconsin since he was eight. The job today was simple, a battle he could win using only his mind, his muscles, and a few basic tools. Nobody was likely to die. He could get lost in the challenge and let the war years fade. And at the end of the day, he could see what he’d accomplished, in wood and concrete, right there in front of him.

He braced up the main beam with some two-by-fours he’d brought, removed the rotted posts, and set about digging holes for
new footings. The holes had to be at least forty-two inches deep to get below the frost line, so they wouldn’t move every winter. In that hard Milwaukee clay, forty-two inches seemed deeper than it ought to be. But Peter’s shoulders didn’t mind the effort. He liked the fight, how the wood-handled shovel became an extension of his hands. And the white static faded back to a pale hush.

After cutting the rebar and placing it in the bottom of the hole, Peter mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow and poured it into the forms. The dog sat watching, ears up and alert, looking ridiculous with the stick tied into its mouth. When Peter walked past, it fled to the end of its leash and growled at him, that tank engine rumbling as strong as ever. When Peter returned to work, the dog sat down to watch again.

It was like a foreman who didn’t make small talk.

But uglier than any foreman Peter had ever met.

Not as ugly as some sergeants, though. Sergeants had the ugly all over that dog.

Lunch was last night’s beef stew, reheated on the little backpacking stove and eaten with crusty wheat bread and cold coffee left over from breakfast. Peter sat in his camp chair on the sidewalk, knee bobbing unconsciously to that ceaseless interior metronome, wondering how he’d feed the dog without offering up a piece of himself. No way he was going to take out that stick.

But the animal had to be hungry. Peter left some of the thick stew broth in the pan to cool. He’d pour it past those teeth in another hour.

After lunch, with the concrete hardened but not yet cured, he started cutting out the rotten sections of the deck. When he was done, there was almost nothing left. The supporting joists were sagging, half of them rotted or cracked, and all of them undersized to begin with. It would be easier to replace everything. The only
wood worth saving was the main beam and the porch roof overhead. And he might as well replace the beam with something rot-proof, anyway.

It was never simple.

But wasn’t that part of the fun?

When it was time for a trip to the lumberyard, Peter put his tools back in the truck. Valuable stuff had a way of walking away when you weren’t around, in a working-class neighborhood and every other kind.

He considered the dog for a minute, and decided to leave it where it was.

Who’d want to steal a dog that ugly?

Maybe he’d get lucky and it would escape while he was gone.

But when Peter pulled up in his truck an hour later, there was the dog, as ugly as ever, and smelling just as bad. He chased the growling animal to the end of its rope to check the knots, and found that the rope had frayed a little on one side. He found the spot on the tree where faint blue strands showed on the bark, and smiled.

“Good luck, dog,” he said. “That’s climbing rope. Kevlar core.”

When he reached out to pat the dog’s head, the dog shied away. Peter shrugged and went back to work.

He supported the porch roof with long two-by-sixes braced against the ground, then cut out the rest of the deck frame with a Sawzall and hauled the pieces to the street. The dog had taken to rubbing its rope-wrapped chin on the front walk. A pretty good strategy, actually. It kept its eyes on Peter the whole time. He could feel the weight of its stare, a hundred and fifty pounds of dog planning to tear his throat out.

It was better than all those Iraqi freedom fighters. Hell, this was just one dog.

What Peter didn’t want to admit was that he almost liked the feeling.

It kept him on his toes. Like old times.

Like the white static was there for a reason.

—

He unloaded the lumber and stacked it on sawhorses. But before he started putting things together again, he had to clear out all the crap that had accumulated under the porch. He stuffed disintegrating cardboard boxes and trash into construction-grade garbage bags. Broken bricks and scrap lumber he carried to the street. At the very back, tucked against the house, behind a stinking dog bed, was an old black hard-sided suitcase. It was heavier than it looked.

There was a little white mold growing on the side, but it didn’t look too bad. There might be some use left in it. Peter didn’t believe in throwing stuff away just because it had a little wear.

He set the suitcase by the side door and turned away to finish cleaning up. The stoop was cracked, and the suitcase fell over, then bounced down the four steps to the concrete walk. When it hit bottom, it popped open.

And money fell out.

Crisp hundred-dollar bills. In plain banded ten-thousand-dollar packets. Forty packets, each about a half-inch tall.

Four hundred thousand dollars.

Under Jimmy’s broken-down porch.

—

Peter went back to the suitcase.

It was a smaller Samsonite, about the size of a modern airline carry-on, probably expensive when it was new. But it definitely wasn’t new. They didn’t make suitcases like this anymore.

Despite its time under that porch, it was in decent shape. Hard to tell if it had been there for thirty years or was bought at Goodwill the month before. Peter picked up one of the stacks of hundreds he’d found inside and flipped through the bills. Mostly newer, with the big Ben Franklin head.

So the suitcase hadn’t been there too long.

There were no identifying marks on the Samsonite’s outside shell, nothing inside to tell where it had come from. But there were four little elastic pockets on the interior.

Inside each pocket was a small brown paper bag, wrinkled and worn with handling. Peter opened one bag and shook the contents out into his hand. A pale rectangular slab stared up at him. A bit smaller than a paperback book, soft and pliable like modeling clay, smelling slightly of chemicals, with clear plastic sheeting adhered to its faces.

Interesting.

He was pretty sure it wasn’t modeling clay.

P
eter sat on Dinah Johnson’s back stoop, waiting for her to come home from work. The suitcase stood closed in the shadow of the steps. On his leg, his restless fingertips kept time to that endless interior metronome. Charlie and his little brother, Miles, were inside, doing whatever boys did in the odd, lonely freedom before their mothers came home from work.

The wind blew hard, another big autumn storm system moving across the continent. No rain, not yet. Early November in Wisconsin, Veterans Day next week. It was dark before suppertime, and getting colder. Frost on the windshield at night. Charlie had already offered Peter hot chocolate twice. He was a good kid. Both concerned and maybe a little relieved that Lieutenant Ash the crazy dog tamer wouldn’t come inside.

Peter preferred the outdoors.

After mustering out at Pendleton sixteen months before, he drove north to Washington, where Manny Martinez, another of his former sergeants, was roofing houses outside of Seattle. He left his truck in Manny’s driveway, dropped the keys and a note into his mailbox, then hitched a ride northeast, past Marblemount, into the North Cascades. Shouldered the heavy pack and headed
uphill alone into the open. Staying off the main trails, above the tree line, away from people, away from everything. He planned to be out for twelve months.

It was an experiment.

—

He was fine overseas. No, not fine. The war sucked, especially for the infantry. A lot of people were trying to kill him and most of his friends. But it was also exhilarating, a series of challenges to overcome, and Peter was very good at it. Did his job, did it well, took care of his people. Even if it cost. And it did.

Leaving aside the dead, the injured. There were plenty of those. Peter’s friends among them.

But the guys still walking around, the guys still in the fight—it wasn’t easy for them, either. Some of them had trouble falling asleep, or had nightmares when they did. Overwhelming emotion, fits of tears or fury. A few guys really went off their nut, wanted to kill everyone. Peter had his ups and downs, but stayed pretty steady. His captain called him a natural war fighter. He spent eight years at it, two tours with very little time between deployments. The unit had essential skills, that’s what the brass had said.

So, the war aside, he was fine until he got off the plane at Camp Pendleton for the last time.

Approaching the officers’ quarters, that was when he first felt it. A fine-grained fizzing sensation as he jogged up the barracks steps. A vague feeling of unease somewhere in the bottom of his brain.

As he walked down the hall, opened the door to his quarters, and stepped inside, it flared into a jittery feeling, a quadruple espresso on an empty stomach. Unpacking his ruck, he felt the muscles in his shoulders and back begin to cramp up. He thought he might be getting the flu.

He showered and changed his clothes, sat at the little desk to do paperwork, but the sparks in his head were rising with a panicky feeling that was impossible to ignore. He couldn’t stay in the chair, and he couldn’t focus on the pages in front of him. His shirt felt too close at the neck.

Then his chest began to tighten. He had trouble catching his breath. The walls got closer, the ceiling lower. His heart a sledgehammer in his chest.

He didn’t even bother to put on his socks and boots, just carried them down the hall and out the main door into the open air, where he could begin to breathe. He told himself he needed some exercise, and walked around the base for a few hours. It helped.

When he went to the mess for supper, it happened again. The mess hall was too loud, too crowded, and the fluorescent lights flickered like those in a horror movie. He cut in line, grabbed a burger, and fled. He ate outside, walking around, wondering what was wrong with him.

When he went back to his quarters, the pressure in his head grew faster than ever. He knew after five minutes he’d never manage to sleep in there. So he pulled a blanket from the bed and found an empty hilltop out in the scrubland that made up most of the base.

How he survived through the final days of mustering out he didn’t know. Drinking helped, but it wasn’t a long-term solution.

He called it the white static. His very own war souvenir.

Which was why he came up with the experiment.

The hypothesis was simple. If the white static came when he went inside a building or in a crowd of people, Peter would spend a year outside, alone. Living out of a backpack, up above the tree line when possible, with only the mountains for company.

Maybe give the static a chance to get used to civilian life and fade out completely.

The first days were fine, hiking steeply up through the ancient evergreen forest. As he got tired of listening to nothing but his own thoughts, it got harder. He had no phone, no music player. But after two weeks, his head felt transparent to the world, his thoughts blown from his mind. The static was replaced by the sound of the wind. It occurred to him that he might never go down to the so-called civilized world.

After what he’d seen, he wasn’t that impressed with humanity, anyway.

Up in the high country, he lived mostly on lentils and rice, wild greens, and trout caught with his fly rod. Gourmet living. Coffee and hot chocolate were his luxuries. He started with several big caches of food hung from trees in bear-proof cans. He thrived up in the granite and heather for four months without needing to resupply. He walked a vast loop through the North Cascades, keeping off the marked trails. Usually off any trail at all. It made him feel wild and pure and clean. He thought it might cure him.

He made those first supplies last as long as he could before going back to the populated world. Roads and houses. Commerce and government. He hitched a ride on the tailgate of a logger’s pickup and, at the outskirts of town, found a small grocery store.

It was the first test of his hypothesis.

But walking through the parking lot, he already knew. The closer he got to the door, the louder the static sounded in his head. He still needed supplies, so he clenched his teeth in the narrow, crowded aisles under the fluorescent lights, trying to get what he needed and into the open air before the white static turned to sparks and began to rise up inside him.

He climbed up into the empty mountains again, where the wind washed him clean. South for the winter, north for the summer. Every time he came down for supplies, the static was still
there. After a year, he extended the experiment. Give it another four months. Or forever.

Then Jimmy killed himself.

Peter was deep in the backcountry of the Klamath Mountains in northern California when Manny Martinez heard about Jimmy’s suicide and got on the horn. The informal sergeants’ network had a long reach. Four days later, an off-duty fireman from Klamath Falls walked up to Peter’s campsite with a sorrowful look on his face, and that was the end of that.

—

From his perch on Dinah’s back steps, he saw headlights in the alley, then heard her garage door rolling up. So he was prepared when he saw her. He stood as she walked the cracked concrete path from the garage. The motion light came on, brightening the yard only a little.

“Oh,” she said, slowing. She looked him up and down, seeing a lean, rangy man in worn carpenter’s jeans and combat boots. The big restless hands at the end of long bony wrists that stuck out past the sleeves of his brown canvas work coat. Her eyes lingered on his angular face, wolfish and unshaven.

Her expression was neutral. It occurred to Peter that maybe he wasn’t quite what she expected in a Marine officer.

She said, “You must be Lieutenant Ash.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I appreciate your letting me get started without meeting in person. You said that the front porch was your most pressing repair, and you were correct.” He tried a smile. He wasn’t used to people yet. “Please,” he said. “Call me Peter. Jimmy talked about you so much I feel like I know you.”

She didn’t answer. She was tall, almost as tall as Peter, and wrapped in a long wool coat that went past her knees. She carried
her keys spiked out from her fist, something Jimmy would have taught her for self-defense. It looked natural.

She measured him with cool eyes, reserving judgment. But polite.

“Please, come in,” she said. “You must be hungry. I’m making supper, if you’d care to stay.”

“I’ll wait outside,” he said. “It’s a nice night.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s cold. Please, come in.”

Peter pointed at the back door, the bottom panel covered with a piece of bare plywood. “Something happen here?” he asked. It looked like a quick repair after someone had kicked in the door.

“We had a break-in,” she said. “Not long after James.” She blinked. “Died.”

“I’m sorry,” said Peter. “I can replace that when I’m done with your porch.”

She turned her key in the lock. “Come inside,” she said. “Get out of the cold.”

He hesitated, but picked up the suitcase and followed her inside.

He had questions.