Then She Vanished

Twenty-Four

The parking lot of the Bighorn Motel wasn’t as busy as before. The bungalows around the pool sat patiently in the mounting May heat. According to the Bighorn website, the wildflower bloom was all but over.

Standing at the locked front door, I pressed the intercom button and waited.

“Good morning,” a young woman said, her voice familiar.

I told her we were here to see Mr. Broadman.

“I can see if he’s available.”

“Open the damned door, honey,” said Dalton. “It’s hot out here.”

We stepped inside to the same cramped, poorly lit, slightly dusty office I remembered. The counter with the bowl of mints and the things-to-do pamphlets organized and upright in the rack.

And Cassy, the pale girl with the thinning hair and the mini-mic clipped to her plain smock dress. Today’s was baby blue. Behind her was the taxidermy cabinet and the closed door to her room.

I introduced myself and Dalton. Dalton shook her hand and said he was running for reelection in the 82nd California Assembly District.

Cassy’s soft gaze drifted to me. “I remember you, Mr. Ford.”

“It’s nice to see you again.”

“It’s nice of you to say so.”

I heard a hint of Texas in her voice that I hadn’t heard before. She stepped back into the shadow of the preserved desert animals and let the shoulder mic pick up her voice. Told an invisible someone that Misters Ford and Strait were here.

A moment later, Harris’s soft, calm voice came through the wall speaker. “Bring them around to nineteen, Cass.”

“Yes, Mr. Broadman.”

Cassy led us from the cool lobby and back into the midday heat. Along the covered walkway, past bungalow six where Broadman and I had first talked. Past the clean, empty swimming pool then left down the second leg of the horseshoe, and left again to bungalow nineteen, the last unit of the third wing. Cass had led us the long way around but kept us, and her own delicate skin, out of the ferocious desert sun.

As before, the door was cracked and Broadman told us to come in.

Broadman had given up his all-white wardrobe for conventional jeans and desert camo boots, a tan San Diego Veterans Writers Group T-shirt, and what looked like his everyday service cap from Fallujah, faded and frayed by the war. Like we were, I thought.

He unbent from the couch, slowly crossed the room and gave Dalton a brief hug. Shook my hand. It was the first time I’d touched him and I was surprised by his grip, cold and strong.

The living room was much different from the sparse, mid-century modern look of bungalow six. I wondered why Broadman occupied two units in the same motel. This unit was warmer in spirit, homier. Better light. It reminded me of the Midwest — with knockoff colonial rockers and a wood-framed sofa that could have come from a Sears catalogue in 1965, a braided oval rug, a dated entertainment cabinet anchored by a portly TV and shelves of vinyl record albums. I remembered that he was born and raised in Kenton, Ohio. Broadman was roughly my age, just old enough to have grown up with things like these around him. If these furnishings weren’t Broadman’s from boyhood, some effort had gone into re-creating that time. The walls were lined with wooden bookshelves and cabinets brimming with framed family photographs, award ribbons, trophies, and war memorabilia.

Broadman took up the center of the couch again, and Dalton and I sat facing him across a low maple-finished coffee table with scalloped edges and cloth doilies. A bottle of Rebel Yell bourbon sat unopened on an American Rifleman magazine from 1989 and the three glasses sat perfectly centered on their doilies.

“You still drink that shit?” asked Dalton, smiling.

“Not anymore,” said Broadman. “It’s for you guys.”

“God knows we put some of that away,” said Dalton.

I remembered that quality spirits were hard to come by in Iraq. One of our sergeants had a stateside supply line of budget vodka and that was as good as it got. Beer was better anyway, if you could keep it cold. Sleep was best of all, if and when you could get it.

Dalton considered the fresh bottle for a short beat. Opened it and poured himself a shot. Broadman and I declined his offer.

I sat quietly as they caught up on family and careers, knowing that the pull of their combat is what had brought them here. Though I had fought the same war, my battleground was different and they could have been talking about a world apart. My world was the Jolan, in the oldest part of the city, thought by the Iraqis to be insurmountable by U.S. troops. Dalton and Harris met their fates in East Manhattan, insurgent-heavy, difficult to get in and out of, often not even patrolled by the Fallujah police.

So they fell into their war stories, first an informal roll call of their combat brethren living and dead, then on to specific patrols and firefights that, like most war stories, they delivered in one-two punches of the gruesome and the comic.

I lapsed into a semiprivate reverie of my own, peopled by men I’d fought with and laughed at and overheard talking loudly into their phones to loved ones back home. Jason and the guitar his pet rat lived in. Amin, the terp nobody fully trusted. And of course I thought of the ones who had died. They still occupy my dreams.

As do my memories of the Five. My unfortunate Five, whom I’ve never mentioned to any civilian, even Justine.

I thought of the door-to-door searches that had me juiced with adrenaline, trained to kill and amped on the idea I was about to die. We entered a home or a business in what they called a three-stack: first the corporal, then a sergeant or sergeant-major, then a private. The corporal was me — too big to be ideal for the job, but fast and good enough with a gun. And good to hide behind, as we liked to joke.

“So, Roland, how many hajis did you kill?” asked Dalton.

I eyed him through the gun smoke of a living room reeling with bullets and bodies.

“Five.”

“Come on. Five confirmed? You never told me that. Really, Ford? Five?”

I nodded through the smoke. Saw a boy run screaming down a hallway into the back of the house. Or was he a small man? Someone behind me shot him. I don’t know who and I didn’t ask.

“No wonder you’re so fucked up. Here, have a drink.” He poured into my empty glass.

“I’m good for now, Dalton.”

“I only got one. Harris, two,” said Dalton.

“And you’re the only one who still swills the booze,” said Broadman. “I see those ads of yours on TV and I think, that old jarhead drinks too much. It’s the bags under your eyes.”

“They’re known as character bags at the Capitol.”

Broadman smiled, teeth white, eyes brown in the surly red flesh.

“Yet I carry the weight of an entire assembly district on my broad shoulders,” said Strait.

A beat of silence, uneasy and eager to be broken.

Dalton took another drink, then set his empty glass back on the doily.

“When that bomb went off I thought we were all dead,” he said quietly. “The world went red and I was eating road dirt. Thought it was the first place you had to wait to get into heaven.”

Broadman nodded slowly, set his hands on his knees but said nothing.

I thought they might want some privacy for this. I went to one of the wall cabinets, pretending polite interest, but my ears were tuned to the conversation behind me.

Family pictures. The Broadmans. A midwestern interior circa 1985, not unlike the room in which I stood. Two boys and two girls. Mrs. Broadman looking pleasant; Dad in a Levi’s jacket, a trucker’s cap, plenty of hair.

“And I just couldn’t get that knife through the nylon, Harris. I’d hack until the flames got too hot, then I’d fall outside into the rifle fire. Then I’d climb back in and hack away again. It just would not cooperate. The harness. The fire. Good Christ, it was hot in that Humvee. I could smell us burning.”

“You could smell me burning,” said Broadman.

“Yes, that’s what I… meant to say.”

“I saw you take cover behind the K-rails. Leaving me for the snipers or the fire.”

I heard Dalton pour and drink. Went to a bookshelf. Mostly nonfiction on fat subjects — science, nature, history, and biography. Darwin to Durant, Carl Sagan to Jared Diamond. Some obscure books, too, whose titles I didn’t recognize. A few I did know, such as the Complete Works of Malatesta, Volume IV. I remembered Malatesta from nineteenth-century European history class at SDSU, Professor Nicolas Falbo presiding. Malatesta being an Italian political prisoner and activist who wrote voluminously.

“I was coming for you. Then the gun truck arrived and the Spookie blew the Wollies away. I helped the corpsmen get you into the truck, Harris. I was there. I took fire for you.”

“You left me in the road to die.”

“I needed thirty seconds to rest.”

“Fire can eat a pound of flesh in thirty seconds.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“There’s no other way to see it.”

I turned to see Dalton leaning forward in the chair. Back hunched, his elbows on his knees, a shot glass in one hand and his head down.

“I won’t apologize,” he said. “I tried to get you out, and I failed. But I can’t carry that around the rest of my life. I’m not strong enough.”

“I expected more from you.”

“Then or now?”

“Both,” said Broadman.

He walked slowly to a window and turned the shutter wand. I wondered why he didn’t have a remote, as in bungalow six. The sunlight laddered through and caught his molten face and the clear dark brown of his eyes. Looked out for a moment, then cut off the light again. Turned to Dalton.

“I didn’t ask you here for an apology. The opposite. I want to apologize to you. I’ve been silent and bitter for all of the sixteen years I’ve been forced to live since that day. I’m not strong enough to carry that any longer, either. I’ve unburdened myself of much, Dalton — love, joy, nature’s pleasures. Even art and music and other human escapes. Surrendered my belief in our nation and my faith in our gods. Now I surrender my resentment of you. I apologize for hating you so long.”

A long silence as the invisible weights of blame and forgiveness shifted on their invisible pulleys.

I wondered if Harris Broadman had furnished this — his second home — to resemble a time when his world was comfortable and good. The world of the child he had once been. So that he could recline into a beautiful past while he surrendered his tormented present.

Dalton was still hunched in his chair, elbows out and head down.

“Well, of course you know I’m going to accept, Harris.”

“Good. We are now square. And can proceed in our lives.”

“I’d like that.”

Broadman creaked over to the couch and sat back down. “PFC Strait, I’m concerned for Natasha. Are you any closer to finding her?”

Dalton straightened, put his glass back on the coffee table. “Natalie.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“But no. I don’t think we’re closer. Are we, Roland?”

Well, I thought, maybe, but not in ways I could discuss right now. In just the last few hours, I’d heard police suspicion of a mismatch between Dalton’s words and his abduction-day airline flight. And now Dalton’s new best friend, Harris Broadman — after despising Dalton for sixteen bitter years — was expressing concern for Natalie’s well-being. Those two interesting details, plus my boxing scar, which was now itching vibrantly on my forehead.

“We’re closer,” I said.

An affirmative nod from Harris, fire-battered lips pursed and his eyes luminous brown — nearly copper colored — in a slat of light. “If I can be of any help.”

“Thanks,” said Dalton. “That means something to me.”

“What can I give you, Dalton? What on earth do you want?”

“Natalie back.”

“Something I can give. Something I can do.”

Dalton squeezed his knee thoughtfully. “Lemme think on that, Sarge.”

Broadman walked us the long way around to where we had parked outside the Bighorn lobby. He stood in the shade, listening to Dalton’s loud campaign pitch, so I rang myself inside the office to pick up some brochures.

Cassy came from the back. I got a brief glimpse of her quarters again, the IV drip station in the far corner facing the chair and the TV.

“I wanted some maps and brochures,” I said.

“Take what you want.”

“One of each, maybe?”

“There’s plenty.”

“How do you like working for a war hero?”

“He doesn’t pay much, but I trust him.”

“Trust him to what?” I asked breezily.

“Not try anything aggressive.”

“That’s important,” I said, removing the pamphlets one at a time and setting them on the dusty countertop.

“And I enjoy being valuable,” said Cassy. “There are some things Mr. Broadman can’t do because of his health. I understand that. I have cancer and I’m fighting it, but sometimes I can hardly get out of bed. Same with Harris, but it’s not cancer.”

“So you help each other out.”

“All the time. Little things to keep this place running. Run to the big box in La Quinta to pick up lightbulbs. More floor cleaner. The market. The bank. There’s three of us women so Mr. Broadman can concentrate on his studies and writing.”

“What’s he study and write?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen some of the books he reads. Old historical books. European mostly.”

I took pamphlets for the metal sculptures tour, the Borrego night sky tours, and the poisonous dwellers of the desert program.

“It’s good to care about other people,” I said. “The way you care for Mr. Broadman.”

“Do you think I’m a simpleton?”

“No, why?”

“A statement like that sounds like you’re talking to a child.”

“I’m just making small talk while I clean up on the brochures.”

“It’s too hot out here by now to do most of that stuff anyway,” she said. “I’ll get you a bag.”

She handed me a brown paper grocery bag from somewhere below the counter, and I swept the brochures in. Then began selecting more, scanning the graphics for promising topics.

“Do you have any favorites?” I asked. “Of these desert things to do.”

She gave me a pale appraisal, pushed a lank length of hair back behind one ear. “I like the wildflowers but they’re gone. Pictograph Trail is a nice hike. Especially if you like native culture, which I do. It’s on the cover.”

She tapped a brochure. I saw the venous catheter port high on her arm, an always ready portal for chemotherapy. A surgically implanted port implies a long haul and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad one.

“I enjoy Harris’s company,” I said. “He’s got that subtle sense of humor.”

“Not much of one, though,” Cassy said.

“Kind of a homebody, is he?”

She gave me another doubtful look. “He gets out. Almost every day.”

“That his silver Tahoe out front?” I nodded toward the window.

“Yeah. And don’t ask me where he goes. He tells me that we all own the rights to our secrets. I think his are from the war. Obviously.”

“And yours?”

“Oh, no special secrets. I’m all about world peace. My little world, anyway.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Weisberg. Harris told me the politician hired you to find his wife.”

“I’m looking.”

“Abduction terrifies me. I dream about it even though it’s never happened to me. In the dreams, I’m claustrophobic. I’m enclosed by immovable dark things. Oh, don’t miss Hellhole Canyon. A good hike. I don’t see why they gave it such a terrible name.”

She leaned over the pamphlet rack to find one, set it on the new pile. I slipped the Hellhole Canyon brochure under the others and scooped them all into the paper bag.

Held up my best picture of Brock Weld and his consort on my phone. Fishing.

She studied it.

“I’ve never seen either of them.”

“Thanks for looking,” I said. “Peace, Cassy Weisberg.”

“You too.”