Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(86)
This is not how Patrick imagined his time in the Republic.
He imagined himself in a Humvee, in the machine-gun turret, rolling through trash-strewn streets and lighting up anything that moved. He imagined himself at a battle outpost, hurling a grenade and ducking down to jam his hands against his ears. He imagined himself cracking the butt of his rifle against the face of a bearded man and flex-cuffing his hands behind his back and dragging him to base to reveal, in a shrieking confession, the whereabouts of his father. And he imagined, finally, kicking down the door to a compound and surprising people in bed or watching television who would lift their arms in surprise when he made their bodies dance with bullets, and in a back room he would find his father, blindfolded, his wrists and ankles duct-taped, starved and beaten, but alive. He imagined it would be more like a video game, more like the movies. And he imagined, too, that he might find a saner, more stable version of the community he felt with the Americans.
Instead he found himself in a country of frightened people who only wanted to be left alone, their way of life threatened by the extremist rebels who called them cowards and the U.S. military rapists, raiders.
Patrick’s first night at the base, his staff sergeant joked that he couldn’t be killed and put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger, the chamber empty, the bunkhouse full of ugly laughter. This was Dave Decker, the E-6 in charge of his platoon. His head was shaped like an egg on its side and he wore thick, square glasses that made his eyes swim. He was muscular but had large buttocks that seemed all the more prominent due to the way he stood, bent forward at the waist. He walked around with his mouth open, like a shark. He holstered his pistol and clapped Patrick painfully on the back and said he was just joking of course but that the boy ought not to expect any special treatment.
The first few weeks, Patrick tried to ask about his father, but the base had gone through a major rotation that summer, the twelve-month deployments turning over. Few knew Keith Gamble besides the brass, who considered the Guard units the shit-sucking bottom-feeders of the military and couldn’t understand why a pretty-boy media-f*cking darling like Patrick was here at all and what he wanted to prove and how he had a target on his back and why in the hell he, a green bitch * motherf*cker fresh off the plane, thought it was okay to talk to an officer like an officer was a friend. Every now and then somebody would talk to him, but what they said didn’t tell him anything: “He was a good man,” and “Sorry for your loss,” and “He made a hell of a beer, I’ll give you that.”
Patrick soon learned the mandatory distance between the ranks and nonranks. They were different animals. The CO and gunnery and lieutenants and captains did not go out on the wire. They did not often leave their quarters. They dealt with intelligence and set up missions that the grunts on the ground then carried out. “Do you understand what you are now?” Decker told the platoon one day during a drill. “You are part of the death machine.”
The death machine. He isn’t sure what Decker meant by that. The Marines or the military. The base or the Republic. Or maybe life. Maybe life was the death machine, a big nightmare with jacked-up wheels and chainsaw mandibles that never stopped mowing down bodies, never stopped eating.
That certainly seems possible now, as he stands in this basin, its sloping walls and charred debris and smoky exhalation making him feel like he has never been closer to the underworld, the trapdoor to Hades beneath his feet. He curses himself and his situation, disgusted by his powerlessness, and gives his barrel another stir, too rough this time, knocking it over, the burning sludge oozing across the ground. He curses again and hurls his rebar like a spear. It lands a few feet away and coughs up a divot of black earth and emits a strange crunch.
He looks over to see if anyone noticed his little tantrum. But Trevor has the ear of another private, the two of them stirring their barrels like cauldrons while debating who would be a better lay, Angelina Jolie or Cameron Diaz.
Patrick approaches the rebar and pulls it from the ground and in doing so uncovers a jumble of bones. He crouches down and sweeps away with his gloves what could be the skull of a dog or a wolf. He withdraws it and it sheds big chunks of earth and he blows the black dust from the eye sockets and then notices all around him, poking out of the dirt and patches of snow like some dead garden, bones, dozens of them.
Chapter 36
CHASE WILLIAMS is in the green room. Which is actually the basketball coach’s office in the boys’ locker room at Redmond Senior High School. He sips a Monster Energy Drink and sits in a swivel chair at a desk cluttered with team rosters and handouts on offensive strategies. He wears a suit coat and pressed Wrangler jeans and Justin boots polished to a glow. All around him hang 4-H calendars, team photos, banners and pennants for the Panthers.
He used to be one of them. Class of ’85. Long time ago, but he can still remember color-saturated images: driving that white Dodge pickup to school during the week and during the weekends into the pasture, tossing an M-80 into a garbage can and watching the belly of it jarringly distend, snapping his arm and spiraling the football perfectly from his fingers and losing it momentarily in the haze of the stadium lights, branding and castrating and feeding and deworming and vaccinating cattle, taking the boat out on the reservoir and skinny-dipping with girls whose bellies were tanned as brown as beans.
A knock at the door makes him swivel around in his chair. Before he can respond with a “Come in,” Buffalo is already in the room, moving toward him, the knock like somebody clearing his throat, telling you to look his way and be ready. He smiles widely and his cheeks dimple like the thumbprint cookies his mother used to make. Buffalo always does that, Chase has noticed, when he first walks into a room. He begins by smiling, showing off all his teeth, and then his smile fades and his mouth tightens and his eyes grow fixed, as though he is very hungry and debating his next meal. “You ready?”