Via Dolorosa (41 page)

—Chapter XXI—

He crashed the Impala into the base of a palm just outside the hotel. By this time, the entire windshield was covered in the remains of cicadas; the Molotov cocktail bursts of their tiny bodies dinging off the frame of the car were unrelenting. Shoving open the door, he stumbled out of the vehicle and, with his bandaged hand held up over his eyes, staggered back into the hotel.

The hallways and corridors stood on a tilt.

Riding the elevator to the sixth floor, he was conscious only of his heartbeat and the raspy squeal of his breath wheezing in and out of his lungs. On the sixth floor, it seemed many of the bulbs, designed in imitation of flickering candle flames, had gone dead in the candelabras. In fact, stepping off the elevator, Nick could see only a single light halfway down the length of the hallway. A soft yellow rectangle of light, spilling out onto the hallway floor, onto the opposite wall. The light was coming from Nick’s room; the door was open.

Emma,
he thought.

He walked down the hall. He seemed to be the only living soul on the floor. As he drew closer to the open door, however, his ears picked up the slight sigh of shuffling papers—and, in his mind, he summoned the visage of his wife seated at the writing desk, working through reams of poetry, nearly possessed, nearly in obsession. Nearly in madness.

Emma…

It was not Emma.

He passed in front of the open door and stopped. He did not bother saying anything for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, the bell captain, who was sitting on the edge of the bed surrounded by an autumn flutter of loose-leaf paper, spoke.

“It’s funny,” Granger said.

“What is?”

“How you can sum up a person in letters and keep them in an old shoebox. A shoebox like a coffin.”

Indeed, there was an old cardboard shoebox on the floor by Granger’s feet. The unfolding wings of old letters lay around the old man on the mattress, in his lap. A few of Myles Granger’s letters were scattered around the floor, too.

Granger said, “A person, whether they know it or not, truly defines himself in his writing.”

“Mr. Granger…”

The bell captain was crying—softly, silently, only the wash of tears tracing down the swell of his reddened, patchy face. He suddenly looked twice his age, or like someone who had died and had been resurrected by a god with designs on forcing the brain of his undead corpse into madness.

Again—madness…

“He was a good boy,” Granger said flatly.

Standing in the doorway beside Nick, Myles Granger whispered, “Shoot me in the head.”

“A good boy,” Granger continued. “He thought so highly of you, Nick. Over and over he talks about you in his letters.”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s how you wound up here.”

“Yes,” Nick said, not knowing what else he should say. “Thank you.”

“A good boy,” marveled Granger, his eyes scanning letter after letter. He had them balled in his fists, damp with his tears, the writing smeared and smudged in places. Nick thought of Emma, and how she had said something about the smell and feel of a letter doused in tears. When had that been? He couldn’t remember. Suddenly, he found he could not remember a single thing.

Cicadas slammed against the glass doors.

We’re under attack,
he thought with little emotion.
We’ve been ambushed
and we’re under attack.

“Eleven months,” Granger went on. He set one of the letters aside and brought his eyes up, unfocused, and looked out across the room and at nothing in particular. “Eleven months of handwriting, and that’s all I have left of him. Summed up and kept in a shoebox, and that’s all I have of him.”

“I’m sorry,” he told the bell captain.

“Not you,” Granger said. “Never you. Don’t be sorry. Everyone else, Nick—everyone else can be sorry. All of them, they can all be sorry. But not you, Nick. Never you.”

“Mr. Granger—”

Granger raised a handgun and pressed it to his temple.

“Mr. Granger!”

Shoot me in the head, Lieutenant,
his mind yammered.

“You can’t save everyone, Nick.”

“Put the gun down, Mr. Granger.” And it suddenly occurred to him that he did not know the old man’s first name. “Please…”

“I’m tired of seeing him,” Granger confided. The gun was still to his head, his eyes still focused on nothing across the room. “I’m tired of seeing him sitting at a table or walking up the beach or standing just behind me in a mirror. I can’t keep seeing him.”

These words touched Nick’s spine with an icy finger.

“I’m tired of seeing him,” Granger went on, “and I’m tired of thinking I hear him and I’m tired of dreaming about him every single night.” The bell captain’s wet, rheumy eyes slid in Nick’s direction. His flesh looked nearly translucent. “Do you know what it’s like to be haunted by the dead?”

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

“Why won’t the dead rest?”

“They do,” he told the bell captain. “Maybe it just seems like they don’t to people like you and me.”

“Why?”

“Guilt,” he said.

“Yes,” Granger said. “Oh, yes. Guilt. Because my boy is dead. Because my boy is dead and there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do about any of it.”

“Yes,” he said. “They rest; we don’t.”

Granger, pressing his eyes shut, cocked the hammer of the handgun.

 
“I killed your son,” Nick said.

And suddenly he was back there. There was the sound of a deep-belly roar. It did not strike suddenly and all at once but, rather, it appeared to create itself—birth itself—rising up from the earth and gaining momentum as it climbed. It defined the word “force,” as it was a force, as it was a thing, a noun. Then it burst. The sound was a storm showering down. It was a mortar, and it was very close. It had gone off directly outside the building they were holed-up in. Aftershock resonated in their bones; dust and powdered concrete roiled into the open doorway, the glassless window holes in a single, hot exhalation. Smoke came with it, heavy and black. No one breathed. Outside, perhaps directly over their heads, the sound of rocks and shale sliding off the roof and smashing to the ground was audible through their cotton-plugged ears…

Nick’s words seemed to hang forever in the air. Standing in the doorway of the hotel room, he merely stared at the bell captain’s hunched form perched on the edge of the bed. After some time, Granger’s eyes peeled open; Nick could hear the sick, sticking sound of his wet lids coming apart.

“I killed your son,” he repeated. “I killed them all.”

And it was only the second time he had spoken the words aloud. The first time, he had been back home, injured and beaten and hollowed, and he had managed to arrest himself before a hallway mirror in his father’s house when no one else was around, and he had looked at himself—had looked at the deep-set eyes, the rough and stubbly neck and chin, the haunting pallor of his skin, the old man face—and he had said those very words for what was the first time and for what, he could only hope, would be the last:
I killed them all.
He’d said,
Coward.
He’d said,
I killed them all.

Granger brought the gun away from his temple. “What are you talking about, boy? Why say such a horrible thing to me?”

“Because it’s the truth,” he said solemnly. “And if you’re going to shoot yourself in the head, you might as well shoot me dead first, and we can end this thing together.”

A second shell exploded. The brunt of it reverberated all through his body. Pushing himself against the far wall, hugging the wall with his back, he gripped his rifle and kept his eyelids pressed shut. He tried not to breathe. He couldn’t breathe; there was no breathing. The smoke pried at him and poked him and attempted to gain access to the inside of his body any way it could. Like osmosis…as if it could simply seep in through the pores of his skin. And while the smoke itself did not last long, it seemed an eternity not to breathe…

Nick said, “Two days before your son died, our squad was attacked going into Fallujah. We crossed through the village square and were setting up camp inside one of the gutted huts along the street. Everything was quiet. But we didn’t trust the quiet. You never trust the quiet.”

They must have thought him dead. He heard
Oris
Hidenfelter
order the men up against the crumbling wall. Through the smoke, Nick could see them scrambling to their feet and nosing their rifles through the shattered meshwork of the building’s degenerating façade. The smoke burned his eyes and seared his throat. They began firing.

“A group of Muslim insurgents were hidden in a mosque across the street. They had remained silent when the Marines came through, waiting and watching and hiding. They saw us and saw that we were few, and that’s when the explosion hit, and that’s when it all started.”

One by one, the men rose. They hustled to the doorway. Some filed out. Nick watched them disappear through the smoke. A million tiny diodes of debris floated, swirled in the light.

“It wasn’t until the smoke cleared and daylight carved a path through the doorway that I realized I was still in the building, and my men were out fighting in the street. I could see them all crouched down and pressed flat to the earth. I watched their rifles buck and fire at the mosque. I could see smoke streaming from windows. I could see your son, too, low in the dirt beside another soldier, Victor
Karuptka
, and
Karuptka
had his fingers looped in the belt around your son’s waist, keeping him flat to the ground. I could see that, could see all of it. And I couldn’t move. I was frozen. The men outside, they needed me, needed my direction, counted on me, entrusted me with their lives without question or hesitation—and I couldn’t move.”

Granger watched him from the edge of the bed, his eyes unblinking, the handgun very obvious resting against one meaty thigh.

“Then something clicked inside me and I
could
move. It was like I felt my brain snap back into place. But I didn’t get up and I didn’t rush out into the street with my men. I was scared. I could feel the explosions reverberating through my chest, vibrating all my organs…and it occurred to me that if I just lay down close to the floor, no one would see me. And if they did see me, they would probably think I was dead. And so that’s what I did.”

And he could see them all through the doorway from where he lay on the floor. His cheek smashed against the stone floor, he watched the exchange of gunfire out in the streets. And he saw
Oris
Hidenfelter
go down. He was the first of his men to get hit. Nick saw something soar by
Hidenfelter
trailing a flag of smoke, and he saw it bite into
Hidenfelter’s
hip and rip a piece out of him. He watched
Hidenfelter
crumble to the ground and die. He saw an explosion shake Angelino and
Bowerman
off their feet. He saw
Bowerman
go down, heavy, and not get up again. He saw a grenade explode near Victor
Karuptka
and Myles Granger…and he saw how the force of the grenade tore through Granger’s legs, blowing the bottom half of his uniform off and flagging the shreds of fabric in the wind. Suddenly, there was blood everywhere.
Karuptka
attempted to roll Granger over and drag him to safety down a nearby alley. But
Karuptka
was shot in the chest, in the face.