Rockets exploded around Sam Peterson. Amid the screams of the wounded, officers barked directions as mortar shells screamed toward them. Over the rocky landscape hung the acrid smell of ammo and war and the coppery stench of blood. Gunfire rained down on them from the surrounding hills.
He wished the Taliban didn’t love hanging out in obscure caves.
“Incoming,” Gunny shouted.
“Gunny, we need suppressive fire.” Sam pointed west. “Where the hell is the second squad?”
Reacting with the instinct of long training and months in Afghanistan, Sam lifted his M4 to answer the barrage. As the suppressive fire began, he shouted to his radio operator, “We need close air support now and—”
Before he could finish the sentence, a second mortar impacted, driving Sam’s face into the dirt. A blast of pain punched him, burning through flesh and bones and nerves.
He reached for his leg. It wasn’t there.
His leg had been blown off and he lay alone and bleeding out on the hard surface made slick with his blood. He shouted to his best friend Morty for help, but Morty stretched out next to him, motionless, blood pooling around his head and his eyes staring into the darkness as the battle continued to rage.
“Medic!” Sam yelled, but no one came. Despite pain that nearly knocked him out, he reached for his first-aid kit and grabbed a tourniquet. Fighting against the throbbing and a darkness that threatened to envelop him, he wrapped the nylon strip around his thigh and tightened it with clumsy fingers slick with blood, turning the plastic grip until the flow stopped.
That finished, he clenched his fists and forced himself to breathe, to pull air in and out of gasping lungs. He lay alone in the dark and the throbbing anguish, waiting for death in a foreign country. With the last bit of strength he possessed, he reached out and put his hand on Morty’s shoulder.
When the din grew louder, his eyes flew open. For a moment, he floated, caught between the pandemonium of war and the pounding noise of wherever he’d awakened. Above him, Sam saw not a black sky pierced with the flashes and trails of rockets and mortar fire but a ceiling covered with that ugly white popcorn stuff. He took a deep breath. Fresh, clean air. He’d had that nightmare again and hoped Morty didn’t die at the end. He always did. It destroyed Sam every time.
He wasn’t in Afghanistan. He’d been airlifted out six or seven months earlier. Now he lay in his aunt Effie’s bed in Butternut Creek, Texas, in the house he’d inherited from her when she died. Even here, he was alone and in pain and isolated.
Butternut Creek. A stupid place for a marine. He should be in battle at the head of his division, leading his platoons instead of lying in a pale pink room in a cottage. What kind of marine ended up in a place called Butternut Creek?
This one, obviously.
Finally awake, he shook his head to clear it. A mistake. The motion made his head throb.
He shouldn’t drink so much. But it had felt so good at the time.
After nearly a minute, he realized the uproar that awakened him came not from a battle in Afghanistan but from the backyard. Sounded like a couple of platoons fighting off insurgents out there. Either that or a bunch of very loud kids. He assumed the latter only because he couldn’t figure out how that many marines could fit in his yard or why they’d be there.
He didn’t need the noise, not when he’d drunk a fifth of whiskey last night in an attempt to overcome pain and insomnia and memories. He glanced at the clock. Nine thirty on Wednesday, no Tuesday, morning. Maybe Monday.
Who cared? For a moment, Sam considered the pros of getting up. Deciding to try for a few more hours of sleep, he put a pillow over his head. At the same time, a loud crack came from inside the house. As much as he’d like to ignore what sounded like a broken window, he couldn’t. Someone could be robbing Aunt Effie’s house.
No, it was his house now, his responsibility.
After a few seconds of silence, he heard a knock on the slider. Very polite burglars.
With a struggle, he sat up and slipped on the bottom of a sweat suit but didn’t bother to cover the T-shirt he slept in. Then he turned in the bed, put his left foot on the floor and into a slipper, grabbed the crutches, and shoved them under his arms.
The knock came again.
Once the crutches were in position, he struggled to swing what remained of his right leg around, then stood and steadied himself before he hobbled across the thick shag carpet. If he decided to stay in the house for longer than a few more months, the fiend of a rug that grabbed his crutches with every step would be the first thing to go.
Then came still another knock on the slider. “Hold your pants on,” he shouted, then cursed. He’d hoped they’d left by now and he could go back to bed.
He avoided the pile of trash on the floor, bottles and old newspapers and boxes from microwave dinners. He should pick those up someday. Noxious fumes made up of the odor of trash and spilled booze, mixed with the smell of an old house left shut up for all the months after his aunt died, filled the room.
When he reached the slider in the dining room, he pulled the lacy curtains back to see a large hole in the middle of the right panel. He tried to open the door, but with the broken glass, it stopped after only a few inches. Two boys stood in front of him with expressions of fear and remorse on their freckled faces.
“We’re sorry, sir,” said the taller kid. Then he gulped.
Two pairs of round, green, guileless eyes stared at him. He’d heard someone, probably them, fooling around in the backyard for several days, but this was the first time he’d seen the perpetrators. Amazing only two boys made so much racket.
But he didn’t fall for those eyes. He knew how easy innocence was to assume, although the apology had sounded fairly sincere. In his youth, he’d had to apologize plenty of times and knew exactly how to seem earnest and repentant. He’d fooled everyone but his father the general.
“Don’t know how that happened, sir.” The younger boy pointed toward the broken slider. “One moment it was fine and the next, it wasn’t.”
The older kid scowled at him.
They were cute kids with spiked red hair and burnt orange University of Texas T-shirts worn with jeans and athletic shoes. They had to be brothers. But at that moment, Sam didn’t care if they were good guys or gangbangers. His missing foot had started to throb again, something the VA medical staff called phantom limb pain but felt excruciatingly genuine to him. The raw agony made him want to scream, except he was a marine. Marines didn’t scream.
On top of everything, he was here and his troops were…how many thousands of miles away? The fact he wasn’t with them tore at him so badly he hurt inside almost as much as in the missing limb.
And Morty was dead. He died every night.
Gritting his teeth, Sam turned, balanced himself on the right crutch, and leaned over to pick up a fist-size rock. Shards of glass covered the floor and stuck to the curtain. By the time he’d struggled to stand back up, he saw the boys squeezing through the narrow opening and inside.
“Don’t suppose this”—he tossed the rock into the air several times and looked through the broken pane—“had anything to do with the broken window.”
The eyes of the shorter boy grew even rounder. “No, sir,” he said.
The older brother shushed him and said, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
The kid was either very polite or he knew Sam was military. Probably because of his camo sleeveless T-shirt.
“Names.”
“I’m Leo.” The older boy straightened his thin shoulders and stood at attention. “He’s Nick. Thomas. Our last name is Thomas.”
If anything could, the sight of Leo’s posture would have made Sam laugh. “How old are you?”
“I’m ten.” Leo pointed at himself. “My brother’s eight.”
“When does school start?” The pain began to move up from the missing foot through his absent shin and settled in his shattered knee. He didn’t feel like chatting but couldn’t figure out how to get the two to leave. He could shout at them, curse at them, but even he had his limits. He couldn’t do that to kids.
“In August,” Leo said.
“Where’s your mother?”
“She works, sir.” Leo pulled his hands out of his pockets and held them straight and flat against his side.
“At the hospital, sir.” Nick squared his shoulders, mimicking his brother.
Aha. If he didn’t hurt so much, he’d have figured out much earlier that these two redheads must belong to the luscious PT he’d met at the hospital. He grinned, inside.
“And your father?” Might as well collect all the information he could.
He hadn’t thought the boys’ eyes could look any sadder, but they did.
Leo lowered his gaze. “Back in Chicago.”
“With his stupid new wife Tiffany,” the younger kid muttered.
Leo gave Nick an elbow to his ribs.
“When my folks split up, we came back here.” Leo grimaced. “Is Butternut Creek the stupidest name you’ve ever heard of for a town, sir? All my friends back home—” He swallowed hard. “All the guys laughed at me when I told them we were moving to Butternut Creek, Texas.” His voice dripped with disgust.
“Yeah, mine, too,” Nick added.
“Shut up,” Leo said. “Your friends didn’t even—”
“Yeah, they did. And I have as many friends as you.”
“Do not.” Leo turned toward his younger brother and glared at him.
“Stop.” The sound of squabbling made Sam’s head pound harder, in time with the throbbing of his leg. “Let’s get back to basics. One of you broke my window, but you both were playing in my yard where you shouldn’t be. Stop arguing and man up.”
“Wow. He said man up.” Nick’s voice filled with wonder.
“Okay, man up, squirt,” Leo said to his brother, then turned to Sam. “Nick broke the window.”
“Did not.”
“He was pretending to toss a grenade into the guardhouse to save me. He didn’t mean to hit the glass, but he did throw the rock.”
“It was an accident,” Nick whispered. “It sort of slipped out of my hand.”
Sam glared at the boys for a few seconds and wondered what he was getting into by talking to them, by allowing them to enter the silence he surrounded himself with. Nothing good. Nothing he wanted to get involved in. “What are you going to do about it?” he demanded because he couldn’t think of any other way to respond and he guessed it would kill their self-esteem if he mocked them or sent them away. Not that he had reason to care about their self-esteem.
Why was he acting like such a nice guy when he did not care about people and pain throbbed through his missing leg? The brothers looked at him then at each other. They shrugged.
“Don’t know,” Leo said.
The tendrils of the headache had started to move down Sam’s neck. He had to get the boys outside so he could close the drapes, settle on the sofa, and do his exercises. He needed darkness, not sunshine. For a moment, he tried to gather his thoughts and consider how he could get them out of there. He turned away from the slider and leaned against the table.
“Look,” the younger one whispered. “He’s got tattoos.”
“Tats, idiot,” the older brother said. “He’s got barbed wire on his right arm.”
“And something marine-y on the other,” the younger one said. “Look at those muscles.” A note of awe filled the whispered comment. Sam would have laughed but that would hurt his head. Instead he glared at them and said, “Have your mom call me.”
“Oh, no, sir. Please don’t make us tell her.” Leo’s voice quivered. He cleared his throat. “We’ll do anything if you won’t tell my mother.”
“She gets sad and really disappointed in us.” Nick’s lips trembled.
“Have her call me,” Sam said in his command voice. “Seven-one-four-four.” In Butternut Creek, everyone shared the same prefix so he didn’t bother with it.
“Seven-one-four-four,” they repeated simultaneously.
“If you don’t tell her, I’ll call her. You won’t like what happens after that.” With those words, he pointed toward the slider. “Now. Go!” As they dashed out, Sam slid the door shut as far as he could and closed the curtain. Then he steadied himself on the crutches as he stumbled toward the sofa in the living room with glass crunching beneath his shoe. Once there, he fell on the cushions and took a bottle of pills from the end table. He popped three in his mouth and swallowed them dry, in too much pain to stand and get water.
He leaned his head against the back of the sofa, closed his eyes to relax, and began to imagine himself going down in an elevator while he read the floors. “Ten,” he said. “Nine, eight…” The pain lessened with each number.
As the muscles of his neck loosened, the phone rang. The jangle made his shoulders tense up and increased the pounding of his headache. Hadn’t thought it could hurt more.
Probably the general or a wrong number. No one else knew where he was. He’d let it ring, because he didn’t want to talk to the general. Actually, he didn’t want to talk to anyone but most of all, not to the general.
As much as he liked the solitude, Sam hadn’t planned to be alone here. The general had meant to be here when Sam arrived in town, but he’d had a mild heart attack. At the time, Sam had felt relief not to have the general close. Not that he could imagine the old warhorse fussing as he took care of his only and deeply disappointing son, but he hadn’t wanted him there at all. Ever. His presence would have intruded on Sam’s privacy.
The general had improved greatly, but the cardiologist refused to release him from his care for another month. Good old Dad always followed rules and commands, usually at the expense of his family.
Sam knew he should have outgrown that bitterness years ago.
He closed his eyes and started counting down again. “Ten… nine…”
When he felt better, he’d call the insurance agent about replacing the glass in the slider. The number should be somewhere, maybe in the box of stuff his aunt’s lawyer had left.
Then he’d call the liquor store and arrange for another delivery.
“Preacher?”
Adam looked up from his Bible, attempting to bring himself back to the present from the time of David. Maggie stood at the door. “Yes?”
“I need the hymns for Sunday.”
He picked a piece of paper from the printer tray, glanced at it, then grabbed the list of Miss Birdie–approved hymns and a pen. With that, he crossed out his choices and changed every hymn to one of Miss Birdie’s choosing.
That should make her believe she’d broken him in, which should make his life easier. His plan was, little by little, to slip in some of the newer hymns and drop most of the Fanny Crosby hymns and several of the old favorites she enjoyed. “Jesus Is Tenderly Calling Me Home” had always made him feel as if he were at a funeral. However, allowing Miss Birdie to win the first skirmish seemed like an excellent strategy.
Finished, he handed the list to Maggie and headed out to call on Sam Peterson. Easily finding the right house, Adam picked up all the papers—two weeks’ worth—and placed them on the porch next to the front door, then rang the bell.
He didn’t hear the sound of the chime inside, so he knocked. And knocked again. No one came, and it seemed as if no one would. If Captain Peterson didn’t want visitors, Adam had to respect that. Besides, even a minister could hardly force himself on the man. Adam backed away from the door and turned to step off the porch.
He’d keep trying. He wanted to meet this man and he knew Miss Birdie wouldn’t let him forget his duty.