The sun did not rise on Bonas Defeat. Before daylight could climb over the ridgeline, clouds swept across the fracture of sky over the gorge and brought an early-morning drizzle that could be more heard in the trees than felt on the ground. Ashen-gray clouds pushed against one another and built into a greater darkness, and by noon the rain was upon him.
Thad was climbing a craggy path along the edge of the spillway at the head of the gorge when the storm came. The spillway crumbled into stones at the bottom, but the concrete slope up top was slicked with green algae where a thin veil of water always flowed. The concrete quickly darkened from white to a leathery brown under the rain. What first streaked by in heavy sheets soon became one solid torrent. By the time he made it to the top of the dam, Thad’s clothes were soaked through.
The lake was low with a wide rim of clay-caked stone and sand outlining dark water that seemed to steam as the rain fell. A murder of crows strutted about like black chickens on the bank and picked through litter discarded by fishermen: beer cans and pale blue containers that had held night crawlers, balled-up wads of fishing line, and an Igloo cooler busted to pieces against the rocks. Thad figured the lake was lowered so that men could work on the dam, but there was no one around, just a CAT bulldozer and trackhoe, their yellow paint chipping around scabs of rust, their tracks muddied with clay. He headed through the rain up a road above the spillway and did not see the fork until he was upon it. To the left the old logging road wound into the valley and came out at the metal bridge where he’d begun, and to the right the road led past Slickens Creek to where Highway 281 cut south toward Rock Bridge and Round Mountain and north around Tanasee Lake and Wolf. He kept right at the fork, his footsteps stamping brief impressions in the muddy gravel but soon washed away and gone.
Only the men who had been there knew how it rained in Afghanistan. Until he was there to feel it pelt his helmet and see it with his own two eyes, everything Thad had ever been taught as a kid made him believe that there was nothing but desert. That wasn’t true at all. In Afghanistan, the rain had its own season.
Late October or early November a daylong sandstorm would blow in from the west to signal the start of rain. The temperatures would drop and then the rains would come, sometimes so much water that they would spend entire days filling sandbags and building retaining walls to divert what otherwise would have washed them away. All the year’s rain and snow was contained in the months between November and April, and there were times that the men were hammered by storms. The wet season ran right into fighting season. Nothing ever eased up one bit.
It was the February before Thad came home for good when a blizzard struck and left sections of the mountains in six feet of snow. There were standing temps twenty below and drifts so deep that even the Humvees became useless. When all of that weather hit so suddenly, the entire division out of FOB Rushmore added aid missions to their patrols. Thad’s squad worked to get supplies—clothing and blankets, food and fuel—into mountain villages where barefoot children were frostbitten so badly by the time the soldiers reached them that there was no choice but to amputate. Thad remembered walking through draws where tribes of goats and sheep had huddled together to weather the storm only to freeze with open eyes and iced fur that cracked like bottle glass when he nudged at their bodies with the steel toes of his boots.
He remembered one time he dipped snowballs in water so they were hard as rocks and hid them behind a bank near the latrine. That evening he waited for Darnell Johnson to finish shitting out his MRE. When Darnell came out, Thad clobbered him in the side of the head with a snowball and had another one into his neck before Darnell realized what was happening. Darnell was a monster who’d played on the line at some all-black college in South Carolina before he joined, and the minute he caught sight of Thad, he barreled full speed and tackled him into the snow. They wrestled for a second or two, both of them laughing their asses off, before Darnell took control and shoved a fistful of snow down Thad’s throat. When it was over, Darnell stood up and kicked powder onto him, and Thad just lay there in hysterics with his nose bloodied as he flapped the outline of an angel into the ground.
Thad laughed and turned around to say something, but there was no one there, just empty road and mountains. He was alone and this was not the place where his mind had wandered. Even through the gray haze of rain, this place was too green. He was in Little Canada, humping down Highway 281 with a shotgun in his hands.
Somewhere up the road, tires hissed across the wetted pavement and the car was nearly there before he heard it. A patrol car running the highway to the county line veered around the curve ahead, and Thad barely had time to jump the guardrail into the laurels before the headlights swept across him. He lay on his stomach in the wet leaves and ferns until the car had passed and then for some time after until he was certain they were gone.
Just before the bridge where Tanasee Creek emptied into the lake, a trail cut by pickup trucks and four-wheel-drives sloped away from the highway toward the creek. The grass between the tire marks was high and fanned out over the gravel so that he could hardly make out where the tires had been. By the creek, a rusted burn barrel dented and ragged with holes stood between two metal folding chairs. One of the chairs had bent legs and leaned toward a fire pit circled by stones, the coals now old and weathered into nothing more than blackened earth. Thad looked upstream. The creek wrapped around a sharp bend before a final plunge pool that slowed to slack water in the space between him and there. If he followed the stream far enough north, he would wind up on Charleys Creek, then home.
As he hiked upstream, Thad could tell by the way his bones ached that he was coming down. The dope always made his back hurt worse and he wished that he had some alcohol to numb the pain, but he didn’t. So he trudged forward over the rocky back of a serpentine streambed that meandered between mountains for miles. Only when his knees felt like they would burst if he took another step did he stop to find shelter.
High water from weeks when the rain did not cease had cut a bank beneath the roots of two scarlet oaks that seeded so closely together in the beginning that time welded their trunks into a single tree. Pebbles made a bed that transitioned to a wall of dark soil, water dripping from the veined root ceiling above. Thad tucked himself inside the cut bank and watched as a crawdad backed away from him toward the stream with its claws raised and pincers opened. When its tail found water, the crawdad slipped into the stream and vanished. Thad scrounged for leaves and twigs to start a fire, and his body trembled from a day spent drenched with rain. His cigarettes were soaked through and the flint of his lighter would not spark at first. Midges and crane flies swooped down and lifted to light, their bodies hopping Us against gravity, until Thad finally made a fire and smoked them out of the cut.
The fire was small, but still it seemed to help him reclaim some of the heat he’d lost. He lay there and rolled a soaked cigarette back and forth in front of the flames, and when the paper and tobacco were finally dry enough to light, he tried to ease his mind, though it did no good at all.
The water in his clothes sank back into the ground as he lay there and remembered. Pulling guard was always the worst because one man was responsible for keeping everyone else alive while they slept. It wasn’t all that much different from running point in that sense, but at least when everyone was on their feet, every man had a gun in his hands and a finger over the trigger; they could all keep an eye out for one another. Night watch was different because the trust was in one man when the others shut their eyes, even though they all knew that he was just as tired as they were.
What Thad remembered was a night when the Red Bull and the snuff couldn’t keep him awake. He fell asleep on watch with a dip of Skoal wintergreen in his lip, and woke up to metal clanking and then the bawling of sheep. By the time he saw the small herd, he could also see the man who pushed the animals through the canyon. Thad barely had time to raise his gun before the first sheep was there. He screamed for the shepherd to stop and the others in the squad woke from their dreams and joined him with guns aimed until the ANA interpreter figured out the man was nothing more than a farmer who’d spent an entire day tracking down sheep that had run off and was now just trying to get home. The shepherd led his flock on through the canyon and the other soldiers cracked jokes before trying to get a few more hours’ sleep, but all Thad could think about was how he’d failed them, how he’d fallen asleep on watch, and how if that shepherd had been anything other than a shepherd they all would have been goners.
It had been five or six days since he’d last slept and he was just as tired right that second as the night he pulled guard. With the shotgun hugged against his chest in the cut bank, he lay with his body shivering, the fire all but gone and nothing left dry enough to burn. His body was exhausted. The dope had taken him into a foggy space between waking and dream where his mind couldn’t separate past from present. He couldn’t make sense of where he was or how he’d gotten there. Everything seemed some strange vision, and he could no longer remember where he had been just an hour before.
Memories seemed as if they happened right that second, and in those flashes when he snapped back out of his mind, he was scared to death. He drifted into this sort of lucid dreaming where he was on patrol, always at some low vantage, trying to keep eyes on the hillside when the first crack of gunfire sounded, that crack snapping him awake. Thad stabbed at the coals to try and stoke any heat left in them, and then curled into a trembling ball and stared out into the rain. He let his mind wander back into that place that felt real, and he told himself that someone else was on watch. Someone else was looking over him, guarding him, and would keep him safe while he slept. And when his mind was there, he closed his eyes and fell back into that dream that washed him around and shook him awake with eyes wide and wild. He drifted in and out of his mind, in and out of this place, and only after a very long while did what he feared most find him.