The Boys from Santa Cruz

4

“He lives, he wakes,” says a voice somewhere above and behind Ellis Brobauer. “’Tis Death is dead, not he.”

Brobauer takes stock: he is lying on his back on a grassy, gently sloping hillside, his arms outstretched. Ache in his neck, wrenching pain in his shoulders, fingers numb. Eyelids glued together, crusty with gunk; lips dry and cracked with deep, painful fissures. The North African sun beating down-somehow Rommel must have flanked the column, cut off his unit. Brobauer can’t remember his tank being captured; he wonders how badly he was injured, and how his crew had fared.

“Water,” he croaks. His throat is raw, as though he’s been screaming for hours. When there’s no response, he tries again, in his rudimentary, phrase-book German. “Wasser, bitte.”

Glug-glug-glug. Waves of warm water cascade down, pounding against Brobauer’s upturned face as he spits and sputters and gasps for air, tossing his head from side to side, trying to evade the deluge.

Then it’s over. Brobauer licks his lips, then opens his eyes a slit, squinting against the glaring sky. Suddenly it all comes back to him: the solo morning round, the stranger who shot Willis Jones, the jouncing, stiflingly hot ride in the trunk of the stranger’s BMW. “Who are you? What do you want? If it’s money, I assure you I can- What are you doing? Wait, stop!”

The denim-clad man pauses with the wooden mallet raised. In his other hand he holds a metal tent stake with a sharp, serrated tip poised above and between the third and fourth metacarpals of Ellis Brobauer’s outstretched right hand. His eyes are oddly out of focus, as if he were seeing things that weren’t there, or not seeing things that were. “What?”

His mind momentarily blank, Judge Brobauer blurts out the first thing that pops into his head-anything to keep that mallet from beginning its downward arc. “Why-why are you doing this?”

The other man lowers the mallet and closes his eyes; while he speaks, in an uninflected monotone, his eyeballs shuttle back and forth behind the closed lids, as if he were reading a teleprompter. “I’m only twenty-five years old, but I’ve already been lied to and betrayed by everyone I’ve ever trusted, robbed of my freedom and robbed of my mind, then locked up for life in this shithole they call Meadows Road.”

Brobauer’s abductor opens his eyes again; the unfocused look returns. “Wish me luck, Pocket Pal,” he adds, raising the mallet, and with a series of forceful taps he drives the leading edge of the stake through Ellis’s palm, neatly parting the metacarpals without breaking them, and pinning the back of the old man’s hand against the grassy hillside.