Heart of a Shepherd (10 page)

They got back to town a week ago. Paco and Rosita took the whole week off from school to be with them. Tonight's the first time I'll see them as a real family again.

Bald truth is, I felt a lot better about the Ugartes being home before I found out that Dad's tour in Iraq will be extended. It's stupid. I know it's stupid. It's probably even a sin, but ever since I heard a week ago, I've been thinking, It's not fair. They've got somebody home with them. Every other kid in the battalion's got one civilian parent. It's just me who's doing this alone.

But now that I see the local veterans rolling in,
with the shoulder-slapping and the way they look at each other, like they're better than brothers, it's not so bad. It loosens me up to hear the rumble of their talk.

The hall's nearly full when Mr. and Mrs. Ugarte step into the room. Conversations drop off, and one after another, the veterans stand up and clap. There isn't any shouting or cheering. I don't even see smiles. In fact, it's the saddest applause I've ever heard in my life. And then, one by one, with plenty of space in between, the old vets come up and shake Mr. and Mrs. Ugarte's hand and say, “Welcome home, soldier.”

I head to the chow line to help serve up. Rosita is already in the kitchen, in a pink summer dress, hustling plates back and forth. I'm ready to give her the “good to see you again” slug on the shoulder or maybe flick a chunk of potato at her, but she's deep in the flock of her aunties, and it wouldn't be worth my life to do her a kindness now. I stand beside Grandpa, who is cutting up pies, and serve warm squares of corn bread.

Most of the veterans are already in line for the chow, and the little kids are cutting in. Father Ziegler is standing off to the side of the room with Mrs. Ugarte, his head leaning close to listen to her. Mr. Ugarte is getting ready to sit down when he unbuckles something
from his belt and his whole leg drops out of his pants and clunks on the floor.

I feel that clunk deep in the pit of my stomach. Knowing someone has lost a leg is not nearly the same as seeing a fake leg come off of a real person's body.

Mr. Ugarte slides his leg onto the table, slaps a stirrup down beside it, and sits down. In minutes, he's hard at it with Nathan, the saddlemaker out of Pendle-ton, and McTigue, the bronzesmith from Wallowa Lake. I hear “fitting” and “torque” and “safety release” in their talk, and they fiddle with the wires and rods on the leg like it's some wayward tractor part. Grandma is in the thick of that conversation, sketching out ideas on a paper napkin. They must be figuring out how to get Mr. Ugarte up on a horse.

I keep scooping up pieces of corn bread and plopping them on plates, but I can't stop looking at Mr. Ugarte's empty pants leg dangling under the table. I know whose fault it is that he's crippled. My dad gave those orders. He looked at that map and approved the route and assigned the driver. I see that swinging pants leg shaking a finger at me: Your fault, your fault, your fault.

What does Paco think? I didn't see him come in
with Rosita, and he hasn't come through the food line, either. It's not like him to hold back on eating. The last time I saw him was the day he left school early to get his folks from the airport. That last recess he pushed me down, said a Basque swear, and kicked me. Then he just walked away. I don't even know what to say about that. We've been friends since before kindergarten and we fight all the time, but kicking and cussing aren't the same as fighting. Maybe he just didn't want to come tonight. Can't say I blame him. I don't think I could force food down at gunpoint now

I slide away from the serving table and head out the back door. I sit down on the steps and stare at the gravel parking lot, which isn't much of a view. But then I see Paco's mom.

She's smoking. Paco's mom does not smoke.

She's pacing at the edge of the parking lot and talking to herself. She has her sleeve pulled all the way down to her fingers to cover up the bumpy part of her burn scar, and I can see that her arm doesn't go all the way straight.

I wonder if my dad smokes. I try to picture him lighting a cigarette with his hand cupped around the match like in the old cowboy movies. It doesn't fit the dad I remember from eleven months ago. He always
had something else in his hands—the reins, or the steering wheel, or a tool and something that needed fixing. In the morning it was coffee in the blue mug, and at night the newspaper or a book.

I don't even know what he does all day now. His e-mails are full of nothing—a sandstorm one day, kids playing street soccer the next. What if he comes back different and I don't recognize him? What if he doesn't know me and … I turn those thoughts right around, because it's bad luck to think scary things.

I lean my elbows back on the step behind me and take in the sky. It's only just getting dark, but maybe I'll stay and look for my stars. I almost don't hear Mrs. Ugarte walk up.

“Hey, Brother,” she says. She snuffs out her cigarette on the bottom step, examines the remaining two inches, and puts it in her shirt pocket. I don't know what to say to her, so I smile and try to ignore the cigarette smell.

“Can I sit?” she says. I nod and she looks under the stairs and up at the roof and down the road. I scoot to one side of the step and she joins me. I want to ask about how my dad is—not the news, but what is really happening to him. I'm trying to think how to start when she says, “It's pretty here.”

I just nod, because there's nothing to see but a gravel parking lot and empty level sagebrush. You can't even see the mountains.

“It smells good too.”

“I like to watch bats sometimes,” I say, and I point to the live oak at the edge of the parking lot. The bats have woken up in the last few minutes, and now they are swooping out of the branches and tumbling and twirling around the parking lot light. “They must be so strong to fly like that, but they're tiny.”

“They never crash into each other,” Mrs. Ugarte says, “even when there are hundreds of them. That's pretty great.”

“Were there bats in Iraq?”

Mrs. Ugarte shakes her head. “I never saw one, but maybe they live out in the country. Most of the places we drove to were close to Baghdad.” She reaches into her pocket and takes out the cigarette. She rolls it in her fingers for a minute and puts it away. “Where we stayed, there were bright lights all night long and the sound of engines and the smell of diesel.” She wrinkles her nose at the memory of it.

I remember that smell on Dad's uniform when he used to come home from field exercises.

“I love that smell,” I say. “But I guess I'd get tired of it if there was nothing else.”

“You remind me of your mother,” Mrs. Ugarte says. “She was easy to talk to. I miss her.”

I only have little-kid memories of Mom.

“You are like her, you know. She saw beauty in things other people missed. She didn't just make art, she looked for it, you know? She made it part of her life.”

I turn and look at her. “I can't draw or paint like Mom. I can barely color in the lines.”

Mrs. Ugarte takes out the cigarette again and lights it. She takes a long pull and blows a smoke ring.

“Whoa, how did you do that?” I say, and then right away I regret approving of smoking.

She says a word that I'm pretty sure is a Basque swear, on account of I hear it all the time at branding when someone drops one of the hot irons or when some calf kicks a person in the head. Not that I've heard a direct translation or anything.

“The thing about war,” she says, “is that most of the time it's just brain-killing boredom. The terrifying parts only last a few seconds. Smoking is what they invented to fill up the boring parts.”

I have to smile, because this is what I've always liked about Mrs. Ugarte. She has a reason for things, and she's not afraid to tell you about them. On my first day of first grade, when she brought Rosita to kindergarten, she said, “Don't you slug my Rosie, now, because she's going to slug you straight back.”

I tested it out anyway. She was telling the truth. You can count on her for that.

“Your mother wasn't much of a gal for coloring inside the lines either, as I recall. I don't claim to know all of your mom's business, but I'm dead sure she'd tell you not to worry about the lines. ‘Make your own lines, son.’ That's what she would say.”

I don't really like to talk about my mom, since she up and moved to New York to sell her paintings when I was five. And then she moved all the way to Rome. That's practically Babylon, to hear folks in town tell it.

Mrs. Ugarte puts her hand on my sleeve, but only for a second. “She's good at being an artist, like your dad's good at being a commanding officer. When you have a gift like that, it kills your soul not to use it.”

“He's good at being a rancher. He's good at being my dad. Why isn't it enough for him to stay home and be my dad?”

Mrs. Ugarte leans forward, resting her elbows on
her knees. The smoke from her cigarette rises in a thin curl. I can see her burn scar up close. It looks like dragon skin.

“Don't confuse the right thing with the easy thing, Brother. Sometimes choosing what's right for you breaks your heart.” She crushes out her cigarette on the step. Her hand retreats back up her sleeve and she gives a little shrug. “A person can live a little bit broken,” she says. “Most of us do, I guess.”

I throw bits of gravel from the step back into the parking lot. I can't say as I know what's right for me. Being Paco's friend is all I can think of. Maybe he needs to punch me a few more times before we are friends again. I guess I won't die of it. I hop up and head inside to look for him. If Paco is here, he'll be in the kitchen with the rest of the guys on KP I grab a stack of dirty plates and head in there.

Paco's already got the cool job of blasting the goop off the plates with the sink hose, so I take the sweaty job of pulling steamy dishes out of the washer and stacking them in the cupboards. It's too noisy to talk, so we work side by side while the long-haired Nam vets with the scary tattoos wash pots. Frank and some of the other high school kids wipe tables and clear the hall. Once the dishes are put away, I break out the last of the
home-brewed root beer I've been hiding in Grandpa's cooler. I get one for Paco and we lean on the kitchen counter, looking out into the dining hall.

“Look, Paco,” I say, staring down at the hand-drawn root beer label. “I'm sorry about your dad's leg. I'm really sorry. My dad should have checked the map better, or chosen a different route, or gone himself.”

I'm searching for other should-haves when Paco cuts me off by setting up our bottles to be goalposts and shooting the root beer cap through.

“S'okay,” Paco says, concentrating on his shot. “Now I know how it's all going to come out.” He flicks the cap and it slides through the goal, ringing against a bottle as it passes.

“You know how you wonder, What if they die or what if they get captured or what if they just never come home?”

He slides me the cap so I can take a few shots, and I'm glad I don't have to answer, because I know exactly what he's talking about.

“Well, now I know,” Paco goes on. “Dad turned into a gimp with a hot temper, and Mom turned into a person who smokes. It's not great, but the bad things I imagined happening to them—they were a lot worse.”

I focus on shooting the cap between the root beer bottles.

“So Grandpa says we're butchering a pig next week. You want to come over and help?”

Paco waits until I've taken a sip from my root beer and says, “Is that a seventh-grade pig or an eighth-grade pig?”

I laugh so hard, brown foam comes gushing out my nose.

Fortunately, the grown-ups are too busy tuning up instruments to bug us about foaming boogers. Old Benz has a fiddle, Father Ziegler sets up a washtub bass, Mr. Ugarte unpacks his accordion, and McTigue has one of those Irish drums with the short double-ended drumstick. Mr. Ugarte squeezes out a few measures of something kind of familiar and calls out, “Rosita, Paco, dance for me.”

Paco groans, but only loud enough for me to hear.

“Don't worry,” I whisper. “I won't tell a soul at school. Promise.”

Paco takes Rosita's hand and they do a silly bow and curtsy to each other, and then I see Rosita make him wait and count out a measure so they start on the right step. I don't remember what the dance is called,
but it's got a lot of hops in it, and Paco gets to swing Rosita in a circle really fast. Pretty soon people are clapping, and the aunties are singing along, and Paco gets Rosita laughing, and Mr. Ugarte is playing with gusto while big tears roll down his face. Paco and Rosita go faster and faster, but they've still got all the steps perfect. If he weren't my best friend, I'd accuse him of practicing.

A
UGUST

“Almost ready,” I say to Grandpa, stretching a new piece of barbed wire across a metal fence post and clamping it in place. I look up at him and nod. It's blistering hot in the back pasture, and we've got more than a mile of fence to replace today. I have a sweat stripe down my back, and the sun reflecting off the new wire makes my eyes water.

“Hands free?” he says.

I hold my hands up so they won't get pinched when he pulls the wire tight. “Hands free.”