Full Measure

Chapter seventeen

The next day Patrick spent ten hours pitching straw and four hours delivering pizza. Driving home from the pizza place someone slammed a car door. Patrick cranked the wheel sharply right, jumped a curb and slammed on the brakes, the grille of his truck stopping inches from the Gulliver’s Travels storefront window. He was breathing heavily, sweating hard. Myers and Zane were up the sidewalk under the theater marquee, looking at him. How the fuck did they get to Fallbrook? They merged with shocked pedestrians, whose drop-jawed stares brought Patrick back. It was terrifying to lose control of his mind and memories and even body. He unlocked his hands from wheel, repositioned them, and backed onto the street, thanking God he hadn’t hit anyone.

By the time he began pulling apart the Mercury outboard it was ten at night. The light in the barn was good and Patrick was pleased to find the motor in decent condition. The artillery on Pendleton commenced and Patrick flinched and went to one knee. Steady, he thought. Steady. The ghosts in his heart roiled and wavered and he was back in Sangin — Myers and Zane lying shredded against the rocks, Pendejo’s brains on the wall, Sheffield’s boots lying yards from the rest of him — all knots in the outstretched line of his memory from Sangin to Fallbrook, from Fallbrook to Sangin. He pictured hauling that line back, across continents and oceans, hand over hand, dropping the slack into the hold of his waking mind. When he was done he closed the lid. His breath was short and his body washed in sweat. He took a deep breath and felt the flutter of his heart.

He cleaned the points and injectors and hooked up the new battery. The carburetor needed cleaning so he disassembled it at one of the workbenches and let the parts soak in solvent. He ate another piece of the pizza that Firooz and Simone had pressed upon him, as they did after every one of Patrick’s shifts. The smell of the solvent reminded him of cleaning the SAW and the 240 and his mind went AWOL again and he couldn’t pull it back this time.

By the third day in theater you get your preview vision. Which is when you see something happen that really didn’t happen, and then it does happen, exactly how you saw it. So you’re seeing an event ahead of time. The problem is sometimes you’re think you’re having a preview vision and you’re not. So that turns every single thing that you imagine into something real, and if your imagination is filled with death and mutilation and agony, which in combat it will be, then you see ugliness and mayhem everywhere you look. So these things become your starting lineup; you can’t make substitutions. On patrol you see Sheffield trip an IED about fifty feet in front of you. And when you open your eyes Sheffield is still walking and there was no explosion. And then five seconds later an IED goes off and Sheffield crumples over, smoking and screaming. Lots of us grunts had those preview visions. Our theory was that you’re aware of more than you think you are, so things register on your senses without you knowing. I don’t know how I could have seen that IED, though. It was buried in the rocks and rocks were everywhere you looked. The skinnies made the IEDs out of wood and plastic so our mine detectors couldn’t pick them up, and they covered them with their own shit so if the bomb didn’t kill you whatever was left of you got infected. Preview visions were common for machine gunners like me, because we usually patrolled to the rear, to put down the fire when the contact came. Later on the tour I saw Lavinder shot by a sniper and I hit the ground. Bostik was behind me and next I know he’s looking down at me, laughing his ass off. There was no shot and Lavinder was fine. Thirty seconds later Lavinder gets shot dead by a sniper up in the rocks just about exactly how I saw it happen. We put some heavy fifty on the rocks and for once the air strike came fast. When the Blackhawks cleared out we climbed up there and went rock to rock, killing Talibs whether they needed it or not. I felt like taking scalps but didn’t. I put fire into a corpse just because. You just get pissed and lose it sometimes. Later I felt shame. Lavinder was one of those guys you hated to lose because he was happy so much. A happy guy was hard to find. It could be contagious but annoying, too. Once I asked Lavinder why he was always happy and he said it was because he knew he was going to die over there. And once he’d accepted that fact, the pressure was gone and every minute he wasn’t dead yet was another minute to be happy.

Patrick swirled the coffee cans of solvent to get the carburetor parts clean and ate another piece of pizza. He heard a truck park outside and thought, Where’s my weapon? A moment later Archie was standing in the doorway with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and two glasses in the other. The dogs barged past him, all tongues and tails. “Mind if the asshole comes in?”

“Not one bit.”

Archie nodded and walked in. He was a purposeful man, always on task, but tonight he seemed uncertain. “Ted gone to bed?”

“Think so. We tired him out the last couple of days.”

“Just as well. I wanted to talk to you first. Splash?” At the workbench he poured two bourbons neat. Patrick came over and took a glass and they leaned against the bench facing the Mako. The dogs patrolled the barn, sniffing things. “That’s a nice craft, Pat. Eleven grand. Well done. How’s the engine?”

“Low hours and clean.”

“Don’t overload the oil mix on those two-strokes.”

“Never. I learned that from my old man. What’s up?”

“I feel rather shitty about what happened out in the grove yesterday. I’m going to try to apologize. I think you understand my anger, but how could Ted? Sometimes I’m not even sure I do. When I saw those big chunks of tree bark all over the ground...”

“He’s always had a blind spot in his common sense.”

His father nodded and sipped the bourbon. “That’s a good way to put it. You know, right from the get-go Ted wasn’t fortunate.”

“The seizures and fever.”

“Your mother and I thought we might lose him.” Archie looked at Patrick then back at the boat. “I had very high hopes for him. I wanted him to not just survive, but to flourish and fly someday. I wanted to make it happen. I saw in Ted a chance to be a hero.”

“A hero to your own son?”

Archie was staring at the boat but Patrick could tell he wasn’t seeing it. Over the years Patrick had noticed the thousand-yard stare in his father and but only since the war did he recognize it for what it was. He’d seen it on Bostik and Salimony and Messina, on every man he’d known in the Three-Five. It was a strange thing: distant and focused, aware and oblivious, outer and inner, present and absent.

“Did I ever tell you about meeting your mother?”

“Sure, Dad. It was in a restaurant and love at first sight.”

Archie gathered his attention on Patrick and smiled. “Well, that was the party line. There was a bit more going on. Some of which may be pertinent. May I speak frankly?”

“You should.”

“It wasn’t a restaurant. It was a biker bar in Oceanside. Kind of a dump. I’d gone there with a buddy. I was forty years old, ten years widowed. The farm was making me some good money. I had plenty of energy and girlfriends. I was steering solo and happy with that. I’d loved my first wife perfectly, I thought. Or as close to perfect as I could manage. She died young. Cancer, as you know. And because our love was young, she was ideal. Even in death and after, she remained ideal. So who could compete with that memory? Well, when Caroline walked into the biker bar she was beautiful, troubled, drunk, and about half my age. But she had an indefinable thing that was absolutely unmistakable in spite of the ideal love I’d once had. My heart registered it immediately. My first wife welcomed her. I felt things I hadn’t felt in years. Helpless, for one. I berated myself for foolishness, but it did no good. Does it ever? Caroline’s boyfriend was with her, a biker, a big guy who seemed to think he was in charge. When she took off her sunglasses I saw the smudges of bruises near her eyes. I’ll confess to being unimpressed by the boyfriend and saying so. The short version is we took it outside and I gave him a terrible whipping. Caroline called two days later with a story to tell. We made a date for the telling. Among others things it involved mental and physical cruelty, and pronounced recreational drug abuse.” Archie drank and looked at his son. “But she was something, Patrick. Sobered up, she had the looks and brains and appetites I’d intuited. Her heart was good and hungry. What a match for mine. And she was about to have something I had resigned myself to not having. She delivered him into the world approximately seven months later.”

“Ted.”

“None other.”

“I suspected.”

“As did many others. We were married before she showed. We delighted in our wicked little mystery. No confessions but nothing hidden, either. No explanations, nothing revealed, then the arrival of our little Ted. I pledged to save him from his own... unfortunate nativity. Ted’s father was a charming, brutal pig. Like Caroline’s father, he humiliated and hurt her. Her father was from money and of money. Layers of privilege and recklessness. Staggering unaccountability. The biker was intended as an antidote. Imagine. But you can’t satisfy swine of either type because they only want more. It takes a lot to fill a tiny heart. So she broke, Pat — right here in the house, right in front of my eyes. She broke, utterly and completely. And then she started over. Began to make herself again. To make herself herself for the first time. The baby was my project, my contribution to turning Caroline’s life around. It was my job to make that baby right. She chose me to accompany her on that journey. I have been honored. She’s become the strongest person I’ve ever known. She still frightens me in every good way and I would still lay down my life for hers in an instant.”

Patrick felt history falling into place behind him, followed by a strange liberating pleasure, like looking down from a cliff but feeling fully capable of flight. “Not sure what to say, Dad.”

“The upshot is I couldn’t do anything for Ted. His seizures or fevers, or his feet, or his odd inabilities. And over the years I went from hope to forbearance to disappointment to annoyance to resentment to hostility. The headshrinkers assigned him different mental maladies, some of which seemed accurate. Others not. No consensus. Your mother has always worried that he’d do something bad to himself or someone else. There’s an anger in him he rarely lets show. I don’t think he’s a bad person. I don’t think he’s severely retarded. I did love him and I will learn to love him again. And I’ve punished him enough for disappointing me. I know that, and I intend to stop.”

Patrick let all this rattle around his brain. He took another slug of the bourbon and felt the good warm passage of it. “You’ve never told Ted?”

“He asked me when he was eleven years old if I was his father. Once. I lied once and that was that.”

“You should tell him the truth. And forgive him for disappointing you.”

“I will. I hope he can forgive me for being such a pure and unalloyed son of a bitch for so many years.”

Patrick nodded and Archie poured more bourbon into their glasses and they touched them. “He’s got a good heart,” said Patrick.

Archie nodded and stared out past the things around him. Patrick knew what his father was going to say before Archie said it — like he’d seen what would happen to Sheffield and Lavinder. “I hope I don’t have to sell all this,” said Archie. “Your mother and I would walk away with almost nothing. Nothing for us and nothing for our sons. Sixty years of Norris blood, sweat and tears come to nada.”

“We’re doing what we can. It’s up to the rain and the trees now.”

“Farm Credit bank in El Centro turned me down today. We’ve got enough money in savings to pay the bills for four months. That’ll take us through February. No more. If we get a good survival rate, the earliest we could start selling would be two whole years from then, but we would be able to borrow against the surviving trees. Even the Farm Credit banks can’t say no to living avocados. We’ll see signs of life by February, on any trees with life left in them, and we’ll know where we stand in the eyes of God. If His curse continues and all the trees are dead, your mother and I will sell off our modest investments with Anders Wealth to buy replacement trees. That would make real a forty percent loss in the current market. Or, of course, we just sell the whole damned place and walk away.”

“I didn’t know it was this bad.”

Archie sipped. “Time is running out. This makes me fearful and angry. So I take it out on the people I love. I’ve never felt this way before, Pat. Never this low for this long. I never thought that I would prove to be a miserable failure, and turn into a furious little man. I detest my reflection in the mirror. I despise my God. I often have dreams now where Caroline has simply vanished.”

“What’s it take to stay afloat for a month, Dad?”

“Six grand or so for the basics.”

Patrick looked at his skiff and saw almost two months of living expenses for his family. He figured his pickup truck was worth maybe seven, given the low mileage. Another month plus change. So he could contribute three months. And what, ride his bike to Domino’s and deliver pizzas on it? Although, he thought, there was the old red Honda 90 over in the corner, a beloved Norris family relic. Not much more than a scooter, but it was street legal and he could rebuild the engine in a few hours, rig some sort of pizza rack to the back. He wondered how Iris would like being a passenger on it. “I’ll sell the boat and kick in eleven grand. That would give you two more months.”

“I note you don’t say give us two more months.”

“I don’t want to farm, Dad. I never did and never will.”

The silence was abrupt and complex. “No. Then don’t sell your dream to float the dreams of your mother and father. That would be ass-backwards.”

“I’ll do it if it makes a difference.”

“I pray every night it won’t be necessary. To a god that I—” Archie refilled Patrick’s glass then carried his own and the bottle to the big open door of the barn. “I see light in the bunkhouse. Maybe I’ll have my talk with Ted. I’m on a roll tonight, aren’t I?”

“We’re fishing Glorietta Bay tomorrow. You’ll have to do without us for a day.”

“That’s a good thing.”

Patrick fished out the carburetor parts and let them dry on the bench. He poured the solvent into a bucket so labeled, snapped the lid, and set it back with those for motor oil, two-stroke oil, gasoline, and diesel. He hoisted himself up on the bench and sat for a while, drinking the liquor and pondering things. He wondered how Myers, following so meticulously in his own footprints that night on patrol, December 10, 2200 hours, had tripped the IED but he, Patrick, did not? Then again the flash and for the thousandth time Patrick saw Myers come apart in all directions and Zane flayed in the light. He hoisted the memories into the hatch in his brain and tried again to close the lid forever.

After getting the carburetor back in place and their fishing gear together, Patrick stood at the workbench with a pencil in hand and his new pad of graph paper. His “business plan,” lacking college finesse, was a series of short sentences pertaining to how he’d like his guiding career to evolve. He read through some of them: By age thirty you will have three boats, and by forty, four, and by fifty, five boats and that will be enough... Remember as a guide you must be optimistic but predatory and never lose track of your purpose, which is to make sure your clients have a good time on the water... Be generous with casting tips and instruction but don’t micromanage... Remember that the fishing can be good even when the catching is bad... Invest 30 percent of your profit to build your business, and save 30 percent for when you can’t work.

This all seemed well and good but Patrick was too tired to add anything now, so he took two blankets from one of the rough-hewn storage cabinets built fifty years ago by his grandfather, folded one lengthwise twice, and laid it on the deck of the skiff. He turned off most of the barn lights but left the door open, then set a wide sheet of plywood from the low point of the boat to the floor. He climbed in and laid down and covered himself with the second blanket. The dogs came up the ramp and curled up beside him for short while, then clambered back down the plywood and trotted off. He thought of Zane and how he had loved him purely, how the war had demanded that pure love, then refused to let him take that love home. Another good reason to hate the war. And he thought again of Myers and Pendejo and Sheffield and the others, how his heart was heavier for Zane than for any of them. This was one of his several shames, and one for which he judged himself harshly. He heard the coo of a pigeon high in the beams, a flutter of wings, then nothing.