The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (65 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Missoula, Montana

October was more of the same back inside the exclusive domain of the Wall, Burnette
training intensively, ingesting forty-unit bottles of Motrin by the week, rehearsing
with a four-man assault team, fast-roping out of choppers or kicking in doors. There
were multiple Lone Ranger and Tonto sessions with his long rifle and spotter, the
arduous calculations of wind and elevation, dialing the scope and acquiring aim, yogic
breathing and visualization, squeezing off hundreds of rounds. There was the daily
language instruction, a class in fear management that made him feel bored, a continuing
class in biometric data collection and, almost like recess, a Schoolhouse course in
the history of Islamic fundamentalism, Burnette avidly consuming the assigned texts
with a microwaved dinner back in his apartment at night. The notion of any ingrained,
innate conflict between civilizations, between the Orient and the West, one of the
authors argued, was a specious myth. What should we call it then, Burnette asked himself,
when we turn on the TV and see Muslim wankers chanting,
Death to America,
and,
We hate your guts
?
What was the proper response, the inborn response.
We love you?

Reading accounts of the Gulf War brought to mind a diatribe of Steven Chambers, one
of the more adamant voices from State who had lobbied against regime change in Baghdad.
What in God’s name were we doing in Iraq? Saddam killed a million Iranians for us.
He should have kept going, right through Kuwait to the peninsula. Muslims killing
Muslims, my God, that was the beauty of Afghanistan after the Soviets left. All those
weapons we gave the
mujos,
they turned on themselves. Abdul Hatfield and Abdul McCoy.
The last items on his reading list were a pair of manuscripts commissioned by the
US Marine Corps, the first a collection of interviews with the Russian generals who
had been humiliated in Afghanistan, the second a similar collection of parallel interviews
with the victorious holy warriors who had handed the Soviets their ass.

Then in November he disappeared for three days, partnered with a lanky thatch-haired
D-boy from Kansas everyone called Scarecrow, the two of them flying to Dulles and
driving over to an office building in Tysons Corner where the Agency had established
a working group on the fifth floor called Alec Station, a subsection of the counterterrorist
center down the road at Langley. Alec Station’s specialty was unearthing financial
links between guys with banks and charities and guys with guns and bombs but it seemed
to be giving all its love to just one person, a messianic war-declaring sheik hunkered
down in Afghanistan. There was an odd duck posted at the station, a lone Bureau agent
from New York sent to Virginia to check out the intelligence the Agency had collected
on this obscure network of Islamic radicals. The Bureau agent and two US attorneys
had just returned from Germany, where for two weeks they had interrogated an Islamic
turncoat, an informer from Sudan with close ties to the Saudi financier and mastermind.

Division heads and subs were more inclined to pass around their wives than share their
databases, but the command at Delta wasn’t going to stand out in the cold while other
people masticated the information that might one day get a D-boy his horse-drawn caisson
and cortege at Arlington. And so Burnette and Scarecrow were directed to pay Alec
Station a quiet visit and find out what they could to keep trigger pullers in the
loop. Burnette had not been quite clear on the nature of the mission, but when he
finally put it all together, he told himself, Okay, the colonel and FOG, the Cassandras
of Western civilization, were way out in front on this.

In Germany, photographs had been presented, identities confirmed, organizational charts
sketched. A few days into the benign interrogation, the Sudanese informer mentioned
the name of a network none of the Americans had ever heard of—an Arab-centric group
of extremists called the Base, with training camps, lines of finance, recruiting protocols,
annual budgets, sleeper cells, and even a health care plan. On their quick mission
to Tysons Corner, Burnette and Scarecrow became the first American servicemen to ever
speak its Arabic name, eight years after the Base’s formation. They listened and took
notes and returned to Bragg having glimpsed the real enemy at Alec Station, the most
powerful opponent of all and the ally of all others: the status quo. The looming war
that Burnette and Scarecrow saw coming down the pike was what insurance companies
called a pre-existing condition and nobody wanted to underwrite it in any way that
might hold them to account.

Ding-a-derry, said Scarecrow, his trademark critique of screwups. Life would be so
merry, if I only had a brain.

In December, without fanfare, Sergeant First Class Burnette was informed he had successfully
completed his training and, as required, would now enter a six-month probation period
as a D-boy. Colonel Hicks stopped by his deputy’s office long enough to open the door
and shout Eville’s way,
Outstanding!
He was issued a pager, reminded of his twenty-four-hour on-call status and his mandate
to carry a sidearm at all times, then furloughed home for Christmas, flying out of
chilly Fayetteville on a sun-teased morning and landing in Missoula in a gap between
late afternoon squalls, the granular snow pelting down like rice at a Viking’s wedding
by the time he had retrieved his gear from the baggage area and walked out into the
polar bite of winter to Joaquin Zertuche’s late-model Dodge Ram, the manager of his
parents’ ranch treating himself to a new truck every spring, the only self-indulgence
Burnette knew him to have. The truck was a perquisite for running the outfit—six hundred
acres, two hundred head of cattle, a cadre of seasonal employees. That, a rent-free
cottage, and four weeks annual leave, two in September for his family’s huge Basque
jamboree in northern New Mexico, when the sheepherders would drive the flocks down
out of the high country, and two midwinter weeks, when Joaquin would take his wife
Deolinda to the Florida Keys. His mother could survive without her husband and three
sons, but she couldn’t make it all these years of abandonment without the man she
addressed as Mr. Joe.

The twenty-mile drive northeast to the Potomac Valley took forty minutes on slippery
roads and then he was home again on Camas Creek, the timbered ridgelines above the
hay ground and pastures scrimshaw outlines in the falling snow, the summits of the
Garnet mountains whited-out by the storm. The arthritic Sweetpea, Dawson’s last living
English setter, greeted him at the door, burying her old snout into his crotch. His
mother had a pot of hot brandied cider on the stove when they arrived, stamping the
snow off their boots in the mudroom and sitting with her at the kitchen table with
their hands wrapped around the steaming mugs, Bing Crosby crooning on the radio. She
couldn’t keep herself from sneaking sideways glances at him until he said,
Okay, what?
and she asked, Where’s the spit and polish, Scout? He told her without telling her
much that he’d been upgraded to a unit with relaxed grooming standards, but she knew
the military too well to find this answer anything but disingenuous, and she picked
at it until she got him to say more—
Mom, all I can tell you is counterterrorism
.

Omerta,
she stage-whispered. Isn’t that right, Mr. Joe?

Mom, come on.

You’re right, she said. I’m better off not knowing, a chatterbox like me.

She stared at him with maternal regard, searching his face for deeper truths, her
flat mouth offering the hint of a forlorn smile, before she said, My God, Ev, it takes
my breath away sometimes, you look so much like your father. Then she seemed to buck
up, swat the emotion back to its hole, coming at him again with her sly formidability.
During Vietnam, you know, Dawson was in that Phoenix program, she said, a laconic
reminder to her eldest son that she wasn’t born yesterday, and he told her he hadn’t
thought about it but yeah,
something like that.
Who’s the enemy this time? she asked, her voice crab-apple-tart and facetious. I
swear, I didn’t know we had any enemies left. That’ll be the day, he told her and
she sighed and said, Have I not been paying attention? He said he detected an undertone
of pacifism in her voice and she said she had always been a pacifist.

You? The hell you say. Now that’s a whopper.

Half a whopper, she said, pushing her chair back from the table to come stand behind
him and wrap him in her slender arms. Put your coat back on, she said, her unpainted
lips pecking the top of his head, shaggy by her exacting standards of masculinity.
I want to show you my new mare before the sun goes down. She gave him her hand, ungloved,
as they walked to the barn.

The holidays with his mother were a balm massaged into his soul, a rejuvenating quietude
of snow-hushed walks up into the foothills, horse-love and dog-love, the holiday scents
of fir wreathes on the stone mantel and blazing piñon (the New Mexico connection)
in the fireplace, the four of them—Paige and Ev and Joaquin and Deolinda—playing canasta,
then Ev reading himself to sleep each night in his boyhood feather bed, the range
outside bluish with freeze and pierced by coyote lullabies, a banshee music he found
more soothing than any other. For the first time since he had left to go thirty miles
down the road for college, returning home was not a chore marred by restlessness or
boredom or tragedy or guilt but a restoration of place and belonging, a prescription
for a deeper sense of serenity than any he could remember since he had walked off
into the world, exchanging one hard center of gravity for another, equally hard, but
here was the pull again of the first, renewed and not unwanted, emerging from his
memory. He loved Montana’s mountains, as plentiful as prayers inside the mind of a
preacher. But it was possible for a life to be bigger than the mountains, and for
Eville the possibility channeled into the tighter outbound path walked by his father,
who showed him that the things and places and people you never wanted to leave you
left anyway. And then managed the regret, if you found yourself with any.

After a gluttonous ranch hand’s breakfast on Christmas Eve, he followed the shadow
of his longing for his father into the den, where he unlocked Dawson’s antique cherrywood
gun case and spent the day on the lumpy brown corduroy couch cleaning his father’s
collection of shotguns and hunting rifles, taking a sweet luxury of time to do it
right, his mother coming to the door at lunchtime, bringing him a brisket sandwich
and a bottle of beer but standing there for a moment watching him with a reluctance
of sorrow, finally saying in a terse whisper,
I was wondering when you were going to do that,
then bucking up again to give him his lunch and leave him be. Telepathically, she
probably experienced the same blow as Eville when she turned her back, her son suddenly
bent in half, gut-shot with the pain of his God-stolen father, and she paused perhaps
to steady herself to come back to him. With the sun going down he asked her about
church and she said she loved the singing but it was an ordeal for her to stay up
so late these days and so they remained behind while Joaquin and Deolinda risked the
ice-slick roads to drive to St. Francis Xavier’s for midnight mass, his mother standing
a moment before the crèche on the mantel, blessing herself with the sign of the cross,
saying a silent prayer before she slipped off to bed.

The idyll with his mother endured a predictable but only temporary disruption on Christmas
Day when his brothers and their people turned up for dinner, his mother waking at
dawn to begin slow-roasting two wild turkeys she had shot in the fall, Joaquin’s wife
joining her soon after the birds were stuffed and in the oven, the willowy pair of
cowgirl housewives shoulder to shoulder at the chopping board and stove, like two
laughing sisters encamped in the kitchen throughout the morning, their shoulder-length
gray hair pinned back in wispy buns. His middle brother Wayne arrived at noon with
wife and kids; Ross, Ev’s youngest brother, made a chaotic entrance just as dinner
was about to be served, blasted on schnapps and meth. Since Ev had last seen him he
had adopted a skinhead look, wearing a hooded camouflage parka and black jeans and
motorcycle boots, towing along his latest female acquisition, a wan stringy-haired
retro-hippie in a calico granny’s dress draped over red longjohns, sporting a nose
ring. Eville, bloated with cheer, surrounded by family and friends, found it impossible
to stop smiling, even as the day’s tidings of comfort and joy began to dissemble with
the unaccustomed challenge of being all together.

That night after his brothers had left, Wayne for his in-laws in Missoula and Ross
for an all-night rocket flight back to his hidey-hole in the Yaak, his mother came
to his room in her terrycloth nightgown with her hair let down to sit on the corner
of his bed and talk, the starting point of the conversation a present she had not
wanted him to open in front of his brothers.

It was my dad’s pistol in World War Two, she said, opening an old wooden cigar box
and he took the weapon, kept in an oiled rag, in his hand with reverence. I never
knew you had this, he told her—spoils of war, a German Luger. They’re antiques now.
You sure you want to give it to me?

I do, she said, sighing with a tired wistfulness. All my life I’ve lived with men
who thought too much about something that does not matter to me, Eville. Glory. I
think it was an instinct in them. They were always humble men, and you’re just like
them. They found glory I guess, and maybe you will too, but I never knew them to find
a use for it. But anyway, your granddad’s sidearm—he carried it during the Battle
of the Bulge—should go to you. I was thinking the other day, when you were a boy and
I yelled at you, you listened, thought about it, sometimes you experimented with sassing
back but mostly you just looked horrified and nodded like a half-pint stoic and went
away and thought about what you had done wrong, or were accused of doing wrong, and
then you’d come find me and apologize, even if you had decided I was wrong and you
were right. Your brothers only seemed to know how to yell right back at me, and Dawson
would chase them all over the ranch to catch and spank them. Remember?