If We Survive

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Forty-five minutes later we were sitting inside a little chamber at the top of the temple. We found enough dry wood in the surrounding trees to get a fire going. Palmer set it up just at the chamber door so that the smoke blew outside but there was enough room for us all to sit around the flames and catch some of their warmth. It was so expertly done, I got the feeling he had done all this before.

It was full dark now in the jungle. Over the crackling of the fire, I could hear the noises of life out there. Kind of like the noise you’d hear in any forest or swamp, only on amplifiers, you know, with the crickets and frogs and whatever else so loud and busy, it was just incredible. Now and then too, there’d be something else. Like a big boom of some kind, or a rough grunt or a growl—I had no clue what any of it was and to tell you the truth, I didn’t really want to find out. Better not to think about it. Suspend the imagination. For now at least I was feeling pretty good, pretty safe in here in this temple with the fire going and my friends around me and the darkness way out there beyond the fire.

Better yet, I wasn’t thirsty anymore. I had drunk so much from that freshwater spring, I could still feel the water sloshing around in my stomach. And even better still, after we got the fire going, Palmer revealed that he had some food with him. He opened the backpack he’d given Jim and took out a plastic bag—and there were sandwiches inside! There were only two of them—Palmer had brought them along for himself—but they were big old submarines and we broke them into sections and shared them around. It was enough to kill the hunger that had been gnawing at me so painfully during our march.

After we’d eaten, we all just sat there awhile, staring into the fire, trying to get warm, trying to get our clothes dry. I stole glances at my friends, their faces lit in the orange glow. They stared into the flames, expressionless. They all looked as exhausted as I felt.

I stared into the flames too. So much had happened in so short a time that I could hardly think about it. Was it only hours ago we had been gathered in the cantina ready to go home? Only hours ago I had faced the rifles of a firing squad, trying to come to terms with death? Only hours ago I had shot a man as he tried to hurl a grenade at us? And was it only hours ago… ?

“I keep thinking about Pastor Ron,” said Nicki quietly.

“So do I,” said Meredith.

“Me too,” said Jim.

“Me too,” I said.

We were quiet then, thinking about him.

“He was going to get married soon,” I said after a minute.

“He was,” said Meredith. “I met his fiancée at coffee hour once. She’s studying psychology. In Nevada somewhere, I think.”

Frowning deeply, Jim picked up a twig and threw it into the flames. “Stinks.” His voice sounded heavy and dead.

I remembered how I’d shouted at him back in the hotel after the soldiers had dragged Pastor Ron away.

“You did this! You told him to go!”

“Hey, Jim,” I said now. “Back in the hotel… back in Santiago… I didn’t mean that stuff I said. Wasn’t your fault what happened, dude.”

Meredith put her hand on Jim’s shoulder. “It really wasn’t, Jim.”

He nodded, staring into the fire, frowning into the fire. “I just keep thinking… if we could get word to Fernandez Cobar in Santa Maria… You know? I read his book…”

Soldier of Justice, I thought. Whoopee.

“He’s not like Mendoza and these others,” Jim went on. “He’s a man of… of culture, an intellectual… He only wants justice—justice for his people. If we could just explain our situation to him…” His voice trailed off.

I remembered what Palmer had said about Cobar, that he was a “soulless psycho killer.” So far, Palmer’s assessments of human nature tended to be a lot more accurate than Jim’s. Frankly, I was hoping that if we had to explain our situation to “Soldier of Justice” Cobar, we would do it by e-mail, from far, far away…

“What are we going to do?” I asked Palmer. “No plane. No van. How are we going to get out of here? Where are we headed?”

Palmer was leaning back on one hand, relaxed, one knee raised, his other arm resting on it. He watched the flames like the rest of us, but I could see he wasn’t just staring, exhausted. He was thinking.

“We’re going to make a run for Santa Maria,” he said after a moment. “I know an airfield just outside the city. Plenty of planes. I figure we’ll borrow one, so to speak. Fly to the border. We could reach Belize from there in no time.”

“Santa Maria,” said Jim. “That’s over a hundred miles away. And we’d have to cross the mountains…”

Palmer gave one of those ironic smiles of his, lifting one corner of his mouth. “Well, I know a place where we might be able to get ourselves a lift, but I wouldn’t worry about that yet.”

“Why not?” asked Jim.

“Because the jungle’ll probably kill us before we get there.”

I laughed. Meredith smiled. Even Nicki smiled. After having some food and water—the warmth of the fire, a place to sleep above the jungle—I guess we were all feeling a lot better. More hopeful, more brave. Funny how little it takes to turn your emotions around.

I glanced over at Palmer—and a thought occurred to me—something I hadn’t remembered to say before. I said it now: “Hey, Palmer. Thanks, you know? For coming back. Thanks for coming back to get us. You didn’t have to do that. You had your van—you were outta there. You coulda kept driving, but you came back and saved our lives.”

“Yeah,” Jim added quickly, nodding.

“That’s right,” Nicki said. “They’d have killed us for sure.”

“Yes,” said Meredith. “Thank you.” She was sitting across the fire from him, looking through the wavering light at him. She had washed herself down by the spring, as we all had, and she had untangled her hair, and her eyes were clear and full of warmth in her pale, cool features. I have to admit: it sent a pang through me to see her looking at Palmer that way.

But Palmer didn’t seem to care. He didn’t answer any of us. In fact, he acted like he hadn’t heard us at all.

“We better get some sleep,” he said. And with that, he stood up and moved away from the fire into the darker shadows of the chamber, muttering, “We’re going to need it. We’ve got a long way ahead of us.”

So we all left the fire to die on its own and moved off into our own corners of the chamber. I took my machine gun with me and lay down next to it on the floor in the dark. It was a small room and I could feel the others close by and even see the shapes of them by the fading firelight. I closed my eyes and listened to them breathing. It was a comforting sound.

“Oh,” Nicki groaned. “I am so exhausted…”

A few seconds later I could tell by the way her breathing deepened that she had fallen asleep. Jim too—I could hear him snoring.

As for me—well, tired as I was, you would think I’d have fallen asleep too, just like that. But in fact I lay awake, my mind racing. After a while, I opened my eyes and stared into the flame-lit darkness.

I was still thinking about everything that had happened. Pastor Ron getting killed. And me shooting that guy who was going to throw the hand grenade. And that firing squad… I was remembering that feeling I had when I thought I was about to die myself—that feeling that life was incredibly beautiful, and that people were incredibly beautiful, or that they were meant to be beautiful, anyway, but that they did wrong things and messed themselves up somehow. I remembered how, in what I thought was going to be my last moments, I wished I’d enjoyed every minute of life more, even the hard parts, and I wished I’d been nicer to everyone, even people who got on my nerves. In those few seconds in front of the firing squad, I actually could understand for the first time how you might be able to do stuff like love your enemies or forgive people even when they’d really treated you badly.

But now—now that the immediate threat of death was past—those feelings were gone. Lying there in the dark, I tried to bring them back, but I couldn’t. I could remember feeling them, but I couldn’t actually feel them anymore, you know. I mean, for instance, I don’t think I was enjoying this particular moment of life very much. My clothes were still damp and I was scared about tomorrow and I wished I were home instead of out here in the middle of this snakeinfested nowhere—back home where—guess what?—my parents were probably still fighting with each other all the time, probably about to get a divorce. What was so enjoyable about that?

And as for loving my enemies—let me be honest here— no way. I didn’t love Mendoza and his rebels. I hated them. I hated them for their cruelty and violence, for what they’d done to Pastor Ron and for how they’d tried to kill us and for chasing us into this awful jungle. As long as I’m being really truthful here, I should add that I didn’t even love the people I was here with that much. I mean, I still knew that Nicki had a sweet heart and that Jim had a good soul, but… well, her sobbing and crying all the time kind of annoyed me… and Jim talking about what a great guy this Fernandez Cobar was… It just seemed stupid, that’s all. And Meredith… the way she looked at Palmer across the fire…

It’s too bad you can’t always live as if it were the last moment of your life. Because, you know, it might be—it might really be. And if we could really see it that way, really live like that, I think we’d all feel a lot differently about everything; I think we’d all feel a lot more the way God wants us to feel.

I closed my eyes again and tried to sleep.

But then I heard something… a low whisper in the dark, very soft.

“Palmer.”

It was Meredith. Even with her speaking so quietly, I recognized the calm, steady tone of her voice.

And Palmer answered her with a low noise: “Hm?”

“Why did you?” she whispered.

“Why did I what?”

“You know what I mean. Why did you come back for us? I thought you said you were going to get in your van and drive off. You said you’d have a better chance of getting away on your own…”

“Yeah, well… I would’ve.”

“You would have. That’s right, I know. But you came back for us.”

“Actually, I just happened to be driving by.”

Meredith laughed softly in the dark. They were both speaking in the quietest whispers, almost inaudible. I knew they thought all the rest of us were asleep.

“I knew you were going to, you know,” she told him. “I didn’t believe for a second you would leave us.”

“Don’t gloat, Lady Liberty,” Palmer said. “It’s an ugly habit.”

“Was it because of me?” she asked him—and there was something in her voice I’d never heard before. Something—I don’t know what you’d call it—girlish, I guess. All I know is the sound of it sent another pang through me. “Was it because of what I said to you?”

“You said something? I wasn’t listening.”

She laughed again—and it was a kind of laugh I’d never heard from her either, a sort of giggle, almost like one of Nicki’s. The two of them were silent after that for a couple of seconds.

Then Meredith said: “What happened to you? Would you tell me?”

“Go to sleep, Liberty. We’ve got a long trek in the morning.”

“What happened to make you so angry?”

He didn’t answer.

“Was it the Marines? Was it something that happened in the war?”

And still, Palmer said nothing.

“Because when Mendoza mentioned your fellow Marines, you said, ‘They’re not my fellow Marines,’” Meredith went on. “My uncle was in the Marines. He told me that once you’re a Marine, you’re a Marine forever.”

“That’s true,” Palmer said. “Unless they toss you out.”

“Is that what happened?”

He was silent so long I thought he wasn’t ever going to answer her. But then I heard him move. I stole a glance at him through my half-closed eyes and saw he had rolled over on his side to face her so that she could hear him more clearly. In that same low voice, nearly inaudible beneath Jim’s snoring, he said, “We were outside the wire, up in Nuristan, deep in Bad Guy country. We were stationed at a local police base—just a bunch of tin shacks on a hillside. I got word that one of the local cops had arranged to lead us into a Taliban ambush. I asked him about it. I guess I wasn’t very polite. It’s possible I even stuck a pistol under his chin by way of a conversation starter.”

It was a moment or two before Meredith responded. Then she said, “And did he tell you what you wanted to know—about the ambush?”

“Well, he did, in fact,” said Palmer. “So we were ready for it when it came. Turned out to be kind of a disappointing ambush from the bad guys’ point of view. We took out a couple dozen of them, chased the rest back into the hills.”

“But you got in trouble for interrogating the policeman.”

“Somehow a reporter back home got word of it, started asking questions. The brass were afraid of being embarrassed by some headline like ‘Marine Tortures Sad-Eyed Shepherd.’ You know how the headlines work. So they gave me a choice: leave the service quietly or face court-martial, maybe even prison…” There was a pause and then he added, “I don’t think I would have liked prison.”

Palmer lay down again and they were both quiet. I lay where I was with my eyes fully closed now. It was a strange feeling, eavesdropping on the two of them like that. Not a good feeling. I mean, I was sixteen—not all that much younger than Meredith and Palmer. But just then, I felt so much younger than they were that it was almost embarrassing. I mean, I felt like I was about four years old, lying upstairs in bed listening to the grown-ups talking at a dinner party downstairs. I felt like a child, while Meredith and Palmer were adults.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Meredith whispered.

“You’re not going to say something inspirational, are you?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not gonna say something like: ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ or ‘When God closes a door, he opens a window.’”

“No,” said Meredith. “I wasn’t going to say anything like that.”

“Good. I didn’t want to have to shoot you.”

She laughed. “Well, I do want to say something,” she told him.

“Hold on, let me get my gun.”

“I want to tell you I’ve changed my mind about you. I said I thought you were in danger of losing the man you were meant to be. I don’t think that anymore.”

“Well, Liberty, that is a great relief to me,” said Palmer. “I was seriously planning to lose sleep over it.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Meredith gently.

I heard Palmer shifting on the floor in the dark. “So what about you?” he asked. “What happened to you?”

“Me? What do you mean?”

“I mean: What made you the way you are?”

“I don’t know. What way am I?”

Palmer paused only a second. Then he answered her with a single word: “Fearless.”

She gave a little huff. “That’s silly. Nobody’s fearless. That snake almost made me scream like Nicki.”

“Yeah. But the way you spit in Mendoza’s eye. The way you looked when they put you up against the wall. I saw your face as I came driving down the alley. I’ve known a lot of really tough guys in my life. I’ve never seen anything like it. I want to know what happened that made you that way.”

In the silence that followed, Nicki whimpered softly in her sleep. Jim snored loudly. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I strained to listen—to listen in—because I wanted to hear Meredith’s answer.

But all she said was, “Go to sleep, Mr. Dunn. We have a long trip in the morning.”

Palmer chuckled softly. Then neither of them spoke again. After a while, I heard Meredith’s breathing grow deeper and more steady. Palmer’s too.

But I lay awake for a long time in the darkness.