The Sleeper (25 page)

 

A big storm was moving in from the northwest, and the air was real heavy at sundown. The bedroom was almost completely dark when I started to pay attention to the flickering in the vacant lot behind our house. “Lightning bugs,” I said out loud. They floated like sparks over an invisible fire, cool and magic. “Look at that, Sugar,” I said to the empty room. “Lightning bugs.”

A second later the storm broke with a huge flash and a loud low rumble of thunder. I went to the window listening for the rain and smelling it on the wind. It came on fast and hard, beating the insects into the grass and stealing their glow. The jagged lightning cut across the sky. The white fire shot down into the fields, searching out trees and fence posts, and a sound like God's own war echoed across the land.

“Kurt.”

I turned around and Betsy was standing just behind me. “Ah, Darlin',” I said.

Her clothes and hair and face were wet from the rain. I pulled her toward me. “Careful,” she said. “The bandage.” As I hugged her I could feel the chill leave her body and the warm begin.

“I've got to go back to Miriam in a little while,” she whispered. “But I didn't want you to be all alone tonight.”

 

The parade was due to start at ten in the morning. Most folks were out milling around in the parking lot of Westfield High a little after nine. The marching band tuned up a ragged version of “Over There.” The majorettes threw batons in the air and caught them, or not. There were six or seven floats, one of them with a big papier-mâché face of Bin Laden peering out of a cave while a huge American eagle looked down at him. Another celebrated the cowboy heritage with a pretty collection of cowgirls from the class of 2003. There were kids all over the place on tricycles and bicycles with red, white, and blue crepe paper threaded through the spokes and streamers on the handlebars. And this year there was also something I'd never seen before: a roller blade routine put together by some of the regulars at the Genesis Health Club. One of the skaters was Ruth, decked out in red satin shorts, a red-white-and-
blue shirt, and a gold glittery bicycle helmet.

“I'll be damned,” I said as she rolled up to me.

“You look grand,” she said, a little winded already. “If I'd have known you looked like that in a uniform, oh boy—”

“I never saw this side of you, Ruth.”

“Oh there's lots of sides you ain't seen. Didn't Betsy tell you about all this?” She struck a pose.

“No.”

“That girl. Only thing she ever thinks about is you, like you was going to break or something. You, the toughest bravest man—and just about the handsomest—that little ol' Westfield ever saw.”

“Is she here? Did she bring Miriam?”

“They're waiting up at the Veterans' Memorial. Gotta go,” Ruth said, and rolled away.

The VFW contingent was the biggest single group, some of them in dress blues like mine, but most in their old BDUs, or at least the jackets. There were maybe fifty who served in Vietnam, and almost as many who'd been in the Gulf War, one way or another. A couple dozen of the marchers were from World War II and Korea. I looked around to see if there might be one or two real old men left from World War I, but the ones I remembered from the parade when I was a kid were all gone now. At ten o'clock exactly they formed up in loose ranks. I took the cover off the flag and walked to the front. Winfield's little fife and drum corps struck up the march and we set off down Main Street.

 

There was a story that folks used to tell when I was a little kid, whenever there was a parade in town. I always thought it was just kind of an urban legend until one year somebody wrote a long letter to the
Westfield Dispatch
that gave a lot of the details. It happened in 1903. People said it was on July 4, but really it was in August. There was a town band then that used to give concerts on summer nights in the park across from the courthouse, where the Veterans' Memorial is now. It must have been the most peaceful kind of scene, like something out of Main Street in Disneyland. But there was a young man named Welbourne who'd been away in the wars, in Cuba and in the Philippines, and who came back changed. Everybody liked him. He was a good worker at the mill, and a kind of a hero just for having gone to war. And nobody saw how much he distrusted this place he called home, how much danger he saw around him. And nobody thought anything about it when Welbourne bought himself a twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun at the hardware store, and eight boxes of buckshot.

The main thing I remembered from the article when I read it, when I was about fourteen I guess, was the description of Welbourne firing from Ninth Street, just off Main. He went down on one knee and let off both barrels, blasting through the man selling popcorn and the ladies in their big white bonnets and the band members who were suddenly desperately out of tune. And then he fell back a few steps like he was trained to do, reloading, and going down on one knee and firing again, and falling back, reloading, and firing again, until finally he pulled a six-shooter out of his belt and killed himself. And I remembered thinking that nobody in America knew that story except folks here in Westfield, and wondering if other towns in America had a Welbourne to forget.

I hadn't thought about the 1903 massacre for a long time, but as I led the parade up Main toward the corner of Ninth Street, I tightened my grip on the flag staff. There were just a bunch of little boys there waving little flags, and shouting and cheering. Then I heard an explosion. And another. A staccato like automatic weapons fire. I kept marching. The boys laughed and ran away from the string of firecrackers.

At Tenth Street I stopped, marking time, and the parade stopped behind me. The fifes and drums beat out a solemn march. I faced left, then walked past the low bleachers to the base of the granite column with the names of Westfield's war dead on it. I put the flag in its place. I stepped back and saluted. The fifes and drums stopped. A loudspeaker scratched and popped, and then a woman's voice sang out, “Oh say can you see—” Eyes straight. Head high. “—O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

“Daddy!” Miriam was running toward me across the grass, with Betsy walking fast behind her. “Daddy! You're back!”

I picked her up. The parade was over for me.

“Where were you, Daddy?” It was like she'd forgotten the gas, the suffocation, the terror. Buried it. Erased it. At least for now.

“I went off to fight the Old Man of the Mountain,” I said.

“Oh, Daddy, Aunt Ruth says that story's not true. Do you believe it?”

“Sure I do, Sugar,” I said.

But the truth is, I've about given up on believing. It's enough just to be.

The writing of this book relied, in ways that may not always be obvious, on the inspiration of two great friends. One was the novelist and essayist John Gregory Dunne, whose passion for American life and whose sure sense of patriotism impressed me and moved me for as long as I knew him. The other was Sadruddin Aga Khan, a tremendous fighter for the cause of humanity, sanity, and moderation in a brutal and disordered world. Sadly, both of them passed away in 2003. Neither of them ever had a chance to read this book, and I wish they had.

Most of
The Sleeper
was written in the months immediately after the tragedy that struck New York, Washington, and the world on September 11, 2001. Although the characters are fictitious, as are the precise circumstances in which they find themselves, the story was informed by ongoing developments and the facts that surrounded them. As I had done with
Innocent Blood
in the mid-1990s, I used fiction to game out the possibilities inherent in horrific events, based on my reporting about terrorist organizations, guerrilla wars, and government conspiracies since 1980. So, without implicating them in any way in this work of the imagination, I'd like to thank the editors of
Newsweek
for all their support in my pursuit of the truth, and among those editors, I'd like to single out my old friend Jeffrey Bartholet, whose critical eye for political and social nuance, along with his ear for good writing, have made the magazine's foreign news coverage consistently distinctive and distinguished.

I'd also like to thank both my editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, and my agent, Kathy Robbins, for their great and enthusiastic support through difficult and dangerous times. Without them, this book might never have been finished.

The larger story, as we know, goes on.

C
HRISTOPHER
D
ICKEY
,
Newsweek
's award-winning Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor, reports regularly from Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, and writes the weekly “Shadowland” column—an inside look at the world of spies and soldiers, guerrillas and suicide bombers—for
Newsweek
Online. He is the author of
Summer of Deliverance, Expats, With the Contras,
and the novel
Innocent Blood.
He lives in Paris.