The Price of Blood

12

Broker called his folks and told them he was coming up, and that he had Nina Pryce with him. Then he loaded a quick travel bag and slapped his cell phone into the Jeep glove compartment. As they pulled out of the drive he glowered at Nina as she warily swiveled her head, scouting the street. “You have your gun, right?” she said.

“Don’t start. Not yet,” said Broker.

He drove downtown to the business district, pulled in back of a row of brick storefronts and took his Thermos into a coffee shop and had it filled with strong French roast. Nina stayed at his side. Getting back into the car, she lightened up a tad. She laughed when she saw a riverboat churn through the old railroad lift bridge that crossed the St. Croix, and the tourists wandering the waterfront pavilions of an art fair and the church steeples that dotted the bluff. “Jeez, Broker, you wound up in a Grandma Moses painting. This isn’t you. Uh-uh.”

He wanted to strangle her. He wanted his quiet underground life back.

She poured coffee in the Thermos cup and held it for him so he could drive one-and-a-half-handed. He hot-footed it up Highway 95 through the river valley and turned east twenty minutes later, crossing the St. Croix River at Osceola, Wisconsin. Now he took less traveled State 35 up the Wisconsin side. He liked driving this particular road, finding comfort in the way the fields, forest, farms, and small towns stayed frozen in time.

He rolled down the window and felt summer heat crowd in the new foliage along the tree lines and smelled it trickle in damp waves across the new-plowed fields. He’d always had too much imagination and that complicated a cop’s instinctive aversion to hot summer nights and full moons. He glanced over at Nina, who had finally yielded to fatigue and yesterday’s whiskey and had fallen asleep in the warm sunlight. No, it started before he was a cop. It was his experience that murderous folly flocked in the tropical heat.

The red Georgia dirt was ninety-eight degrees in the shade on the day that Broker went to visit Nina Pryce, in July 1975, on officer’s row at Fort Benning. Vietnam was finally done and the flags sagged on the lanyards across the base in the heavy doldrums of defeat.

They were bleak, the houses where the army boards its majors, especially when all the furniture has been removed and the family of a man who will not return from war stands in the empty rooms for the last time.

And the empty rooms were worse when the army moved you out with the cold, efficient energy of censure.

She was nine years old, carrot-topped, with big knees and big gray eyes and braces on her teeth. Her mother’s face conveyed a look of absent practicality that wondered: How can I afford the braces now? Her brother sat outside in the car, his head buried in a comic book. Nina stood fiercely at her mother’s side.

Marian Pryce was alone. No neighbors had come with casseroles and no children played in the street. The moving van sat in the driveway like the bogeyman.

The officer who faced Marian and her daughter was not a chaplain, but was instead a sassy second lieutenant from the base coordinator’s office turned out in glossy leather, starched fatigues, and a laminated helmet liner. Instead of solace, he held a clipboard in his hand. He toured the quarters entering checkmarks on his clipboard, making sure Marian and her two children had not “stolen” anything from the federal government.

The investigation was over and now Ray Pryce’s family was being escorted off the base and out of the army.

The little girl had stood up to the starched martinet and stated in a steady, precocious voice: “If my dad is dead in the war he should have a flag even if you can’t find his body.”

The second lieutenant was a real prick who did not do her the courtesy of meeting her eyes. His pencil scratched on the clipboard and his voice was another cruel dismissal in official language: “Your father is not authorized a flag because his service wasn’t honorable.”

Perhaps Nina’s personality was formed at that moment. She kicked the lieutenant in the shin, carefully hitting him above his boot leather so it’d hurt.

And 1st Lt. Phillip Broker, twenty-three years old, a lean, scorched splinter thrown off from the recent catastrophe in Southeast Asia, who was almost senseless from a week of testifying and being questioned by army lawyers, and whose angry confused attempts to defend Nina’s absent father only stacked the evidence against him, Phillip Broker said good-bye to the army.

The method he chose was to take the lieutenant and throw him bodily through the front door and send him sprawling on the sidewalk. Then he stomped his Corcoran jump boot down on the clipboard and smashed it to smithereens. The lieutenant opted for a retrograde maneuver, ass backward through the nearest shrubbery.

Marian Pryce, sensing that Broker was necessary to her daughter at this moment, signaled with her dry eyes and took a last cardboard box from the kitchen counter and carried it out the door. The moving van pulled away. Marian waited in her car.

Nina stood her ground, defiantly alone in the empty house. Broker, knowing nothing of children, knelt and said to her, “I want you to walk out of here like you own the place.”

To underscore the point, Broker had escorted her down the rows of houses to a playground. They sat in the swings and their heels made swirls in the hot, chalky-red dust. Nina said nothing. Her large eyes roved the base, vacuuming in detail.

And then Broker had said the words that he’d come to regret: “If you ever need anything, you know, help, come find me.”

She’d nodded solemnly. Down the block, her mother blew the horn. Nina’s eyes were fixed in a stare across an empty parade field, on a limp American flag hanging in the dripping heat.