I cling to the belief that most people are good, and that the majority of us thirst for honor and integrity. While we are selfish and capable of astounding evil, there is also in us this quest for virtue, which is an essential part of what makes us human. My wife disagrees, and this differing perspective has led to more than one great tumultuous uproar in our home, and sometimes she has been right in her assessment of men, and sometimes she has been wrong.
Before Grace was born, a road weary and tattered peddler from Medicine Hat, Jimbo Wilson, he said his name was, had me completely snowed. The boxes on top of his cart were full of water filters, iodine pills, and other treasures from the Old World. He was earnest and convincing and showed us pictures of smiling children he was in a hurry to get back to before the coming snows, and I was about to hand him the keys to a working truck with a tank full of gasoline in exchange for a couple of beaten horses, a rusty trailer, and boxes full of rocks. Crystal insisted we unload and inspect the goods, much to my chagrin. The sad man stared at his feet while Crystal gave him a brutal verbal lashing, and he kept mumbling apologies, looking miserable and resigned to death.
I gave him the keys to the truck and told him to come back with more supplies in the spring, and he got on his knees and wept with gratitude, promising to come back with a truck bursting with supplies to repay his debt. Some interesting discussions with my wife ensued.
My need to see and believe the good in people has caused strife, but I would rather fix my eyes on that which is good than dwell on the evil, rather than by searching, find the evil I sought. I have found that if I look for evil, I will surely find it, and if I seek what is good, I will be rewarded. There is good and evil in us all, yet I will always believe there are more of us with light than darkness, and that while we are all predisposed to weakness, the darkness does not prevail. I have found that light is more powerful than the dark. Cast a light and the darkness disappears. Darkness wins only by extinguishing the light, a power and strength that is negative. Not power, perhaps, but absence, wherein darkness merely fills the void.
“You are naive,” Crystal said after the peddler left.
“Maybe.”
“People are mean and nasty,” she said, her voice rising. “They are capable of anything, and they'll do it if they think they can get away with it.”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“You are infuriating! That man was trying to steal from us, and you let him get away with it. Sometimes, William, I just don't get you. I just wanna shake you till you see.”
“We didn't really need that truck.”
“Ugh! That's not the point. It's like we're not living in the same world.”
“What happened to my kind-hearted wife? Where did you put her?”
“It's not about the truck,” she exclaimed. “It's about 'the great William' being a fool.”
I laughed and pinched her, trying to disarm her with levity. “I've got a tool,” I said.
She put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips, then turned and stormed away muttering to herself.
We each saw the world differently, the lens of her past forever a darker filter than the one I viewed the world through. After the bombs fell and the world began to die, I had been surrounded by people who loved me and were able to defend our tiny oasis of civilization with helicopters and machine guns, while her innocence and childhood had been torn from her in ways I could hear but not understand. She had seen her mother raped to death, then been passed from man to grimy man herself. I was riding horses, cutting wood, and eating steak while she and her family were starving and running from cannibals and living in ditches. Her parents were scientists, while my father was a Marine, my grandfather a Special Forces commander. I'd been lucky, while she had experienced the worst in the world.
I have seen more than my share of depravity, and I have felt it assault me as I tried to keep it at bay, and sometimes the 'rose colored glasses' that Crystal insists I wear have been that color because of the blood upon them, and I believe I have earned the right to wear them.
That old peddler Jimbo Wilson, did not make it the next spring, nor did he appear that summer, and as winter fell the next year, I heard about it.
*
With the hope that Marshal Bender and General MacDougal had more light than darkness in them, I bounced along a two-lane blacktop road on the deck of a Stryker toward a schoolhouse in North Salt Lake City, hoping to end the bloodshed. Chewy and MacDougal rode with me on top of the vehicle, while Gonzo and the rest of the men were inside the rear compartment.
Sniper teams and artillery spotters had been deployed to the hills and rooftops overlooking the school.
“You want to do what?” Colonel Dan had shouted over the radio prior to our departure.
“It'll save lives if it works.”
“Theirs.”
“Lives, sir. Theirs and ours. We can start evacuating our wounded.” Precious fuel was being conserved because of the invasion, and vehicles that would be used to move troops forward could be utilized to move casualties back to Jackson.
“I don't give a damn about the enemy. I intend to finish what they started.”
“Sir, if you order me not to go, I won't.”
There was a long static-filled pause. “More likely than not it's a trap and you'll get yourself killed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And it'll be for nothing. Max is good with this?”
“Yes sir.” I knew Max had already spoken to him. Another long wait followed. I pictured Colonel Dan shaking his head and looking at his pipe as if the answer might appear in a whisper of smoke.
“All right then,” he said.
“So I can negotiate a truce on behalf of the Alliance?”
“Affirmative.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Be safe. Good luck. Out.”
I had wanted to say things I didn't have the time to say to convince him, to convey the importance of finding a peace quickly even though it meant risk, but he knew, I think, what I would have said. We had spent many hours together in times of peace discussing Tolstoy and Lincoln and Roosevelt, and he knew my heart enough to know I would have most likely disobeyed a direct order. He knew I hated war, although I was good at it, and that I would gladly risk my own life for the sake of peace. He was a warrior, and he understood me. He would have done the same thing in my shoes.
*
“So, what are you?” Chewy said to MacDougal. The sun was warm on my face as the Stryker lumbered forward. “I mean, are you a Mormon, a Christian, or a Gideonite?”
Chewy's long hair was pulled back in a ponytail, his weathered and bearded face grinning with mischievous intent. He held on to the metal scaffolding mounted around the front of the armored vehicle with one great paw, while his other hand held his SAW lightly perched over his knees.
MacDougal looked startled. His black uniform had attracted dust, and he looked out of place, a noble among peasants.
“Jus' curious,” Chewy said, a hint of smile still around the eyes.
“I'm all three, maybe,” MacDougal replied. His eyes were clear and his back was stiff somehow, despite the fact that he rode between me and Chewy on a vehicle that lurched and swerved. There was a sense of quiet assurance and dignity that radiated from him which seemed at odds with the defeat also in him. Like he knew he had lost the battle, but not himself.
“I'm just a bit confused by that,” Chewy said.
“Truly, why does it matter?” MacDougal asked.
“Ain't that why we're dying?” Chewy said. “I'd say it matters, yes sir. You look at this man right here, look him in the eye,” Chewy pointed at me, “and then you tell him why his baby got killed and how that don't matter. Cause, Gideon did that, and if you say you're a Giddie after that, then we got a problem.”
“Stand down, Chewy,” I said. “He says he didn't have any part in that, and I believe him.”
Chewy huffed and leaned back against the metal rails, petting his SAW as though the weapon was a favorite pet.
MacDougal surprised me then. He reached his arms out and clenched my shoulder with one hand, and with the other he grasped Chewy's smock.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I did not know the truth. I'm trying to make things right.” He looked me in the eye and I saw real hurt there.
We were on an asphalt road, mostly straight and clear, bordered with the leftovers of civilization. Strip malls and gas stations went past, already long scavenged for metal and gutted for firewood and anything useful. Sometimes the guns on the Stryker would swivel behind us, training on an area that presented an obvious potential threat. We were getting close to the school. “I think God touched Gideon, gave him power,” MacDougal said. “I thought, at one time he was a prophet, the real thing. So I guess that makes me an ex-Gideonite.”
Chewy snorted.
“Young man, how is it you know your beliefs are correct? What makes you right and me wrong? And don't spout some theological nonsense about faith. Your faith is not superior to mine just because you think it is.”
“Well, then, there's facts,” Chewy said.
“What I mean is, faith transcends—”
“Go worship the sun. Better yet, go bow down to a guy who has tortured innocents and who is bent on killing what little life the world has left in it. That's a fact.”
“You mean well,” MacDougal said, “but you are a self-important fool, no offense. What is more radical? Believing that a man died on a cross two thousand years ago to save you from your sins, or believing in the sun, the moon or a mountain?”
I feared Chewy would shoot him then.
“So we just believe in anything that comes along?”
“Chewy!” I said. “Give us all a break.”
“Fair enough,” MacDougal said. “Your large friend makes a point. I think that God still speaks to people, and that's not any crazier than being a Baptist or whatever you think you are.”
Chewy was about to rejoin the argument, evidenced by his reddening face and the large breath he took.
“Enough!” I said. I put up a palm in protest.
“You think me at least a simpleton, maybe a heretic,” MacDougal said.
“Yep,” Chewy shot back immediately.
“Yet I have seen with my own eyes things that defy explanation, things that Gideon did. His heart was pure. Perhaps he lost his way, and—”
“Lost his way?” Chew exclaimed.
“We have all lost our way, have we not?” MacDougal said. “I believe in hope. Do you?”
“I hope you both shut up,” I said. I cut my eyes at Chewy, and he looked down at his knees. “I want to get out of this alive, so let's be on task. We can sort out how many angels can dance on the tip of a pin later.”
MacDougal smiled, and his eyes warmed as the North Sea in them retreated for a moment, a brief sunburst in the midst of a storm on seas frothy with anger and regret.
“It's all the same God,” he said.
I leaned forward, with some small unimportant truth on my lips, and I felt death pass over my head, the round so close that it lifted the short hair on my head, and then I heard the wet, heavy smack of a heavy round tearing through flesh, a sickening sound I knew too well. The report followed, and as I was shouting and crawling over to the other side of the vehicle, another round cracked into the deck and the ricochet was a whine.
The machine gunner behind me was swiveling to face the threat while I followed Chewy over his side of the vehicle, and the two of us dragged MacDougal, his eyes wide with surprise, to the ground. The round had punched him onto his back.
Screams then, my own joining the cacophony of hatred and pain and survival. I could not move fast enough, as though I was moving at a slower speed than the rest of the world, and there was sound of the machine guns and the vibration of the metal plating on the Stryker; the smell of gunpowder, acrid and at once victory and death; it was all a wheeling chaos.
I propped the general up against one of the oversized tires and examined his wound, tearing open his dress shirt and placing my hand over his shoulder, pressing down on the hole while blood poured around my fingers. MacDougal moaned, his face gray and drawn tight.
I was aware of Gonzo and the rest of our unit deploying from the rear compartment of the vehicle and running for cover, but my focus was on MacDougal.
“I need a med-kit!”
Someone had anticipated me and a man crouched down with a small white box with a red cross on it.
“I've got to keep pressure on,” I said. “Get me a compress and a morphine stick.” The soldier opened the kit without delay and handed me some gauze, which I pressed onto the hole in MacDougal's shoulder. I leaned him forward and pulled his shirt open in the back and saw that the large exit wound was in the center of his shoulder blade.
Gonzo crouched down next to me. “Are we taking fire?” I asked.
“No. I think we got the sniper. Might be more of 'em though.”
The mortar tubes mounted to the vehicle pumped rounds rapidly at an unseen foe.
I jammed the small needle into MacDougal's leg, and his face relaxed as the fast acting drug spread through him.
“Help me move him,” I said. Gonzo took the man's feet while I held him by his armpits, and the general moaned again as we carried him into the rear compartment of the armored vehicle.
“Let's move out,” I said.
“We still going to head for the parley?”
“We came this far. What's the range?”
“We're almost there. Half mile, maybe.”
Gonzo shouted orders and our infantrymen returned and jammed into the Stryker. The driver put the Stryker in gear and we lurched forward. I held MacDougal's head in my lap and continued to put pressure on the gunshot wound.
He was losing copious amounts of blood, and his eyes looked through me, beyond me, and I wondered what he saw.
“Martha,” he muttered, “have you seen my car keys?” He coughed. “Tell 'em,” he whispered.
I leaned my head close.
“The caldera,” he said. He opened his mouth, gasping, and he coughed again, a crimson bubble forming over his mouth. It burst as he fought for breath with lungs filling with blood. “Mama!” he cried. “It's cold.” His eyes rolled up into his head and his body twitched and convulsed.
“Hang in there,” I said. “We're going to get you help soon.”
I knew he had no chance.
He opened his eyes again, and it seemed that he saw me. “Volcano…” he said, his voice trailing off with a trickle of blood running down his chin. He sighed then, the sound of a weary traveler cresting the final hill and seeing home again, peaceful and welcoming in the valley below, awaiting his return as if he had never left.