“Hell, he’s not letting a goddamn thing settle. He needs things to be quiet. Why else would you turn somebody loose you had by the short hairs? He wants to make sure nobody is paying attention. That’s what every fascist that ever came down the pike needed. Invisibility. For a little while, at least.”
“I wouldn’t call putting up a Nazi flag invisibility.”
“That’s nothing. That’s lawn decor. He figured there wouldn’t be any problems about that because of how far back he decided to settle in. Hell, what are the chances he’d run into an enlightened soul like myself way back there in the way back. Bad luck for him is all. Now he’s got to find a way to play the peacenik. He’s meaning to install himself somehow. Him forgiving me. Shit. Only forgiveness I need is from Almighty Cthulhu.”
Kyle had heard him go on these atheistic tears before. Shouting about Baptists being the modern-day equivalent of superstitious Neanderthal clans howling and beating their breasts at the sky wizard whenever their crops failed. Gerald had preferred to locate his faith in H.P. Lovecraft’s horrific mythology of the ancients, he said, because at least those stories were interesting, not mere object lessons in dullness.
Kyle told him he was headed up to wash before he ran down to the vets meeting and asked if he needed him to pick anything up while he was out. He said that he was fine, that he could do well enough with nothing here just as well as he could at his own place, then went just outside the greenhouse to take a leak. Kyle shook his head and went on.
In town Kyle stopped off at a couple of places that kept an order of his plants in their garden shops, took notes for restocking, and chatted with the proprietors. He grocery-shopped at the Food City, picked up a bottle of wine because he knew Gerald fashioned himself as a kind of misunderstood backwoods connoisseur and would appreciate the chance to indulge. Perhaps it would be enough to soften his crankiness, though he doubted it.
When he got to the library he recognized several of the vehicles that were already in the parking lot. Trey Buckner was smoking a cigarette with his car door open talking on the phone with someone. He glanced up and cast a brief wave, mouthed “In five,” while he nodded to whatever was being said into his ear. Trey was one of the earliest members of the veterans group and had been to nearly every meeting for the past six years. He ran a car repair place down around Jonesborough and had a couple of foster kids with his wife. He had been an artilleryman in the Army, which explained why he was always leaning in tight with his head dropped during a conversation, his small hearing aid pointed as close as he could get it to the speaker’s mouth.
Once inside, he saw a couple of the other guys getting coffee from the alcove and taking it back to the community room. He went on to the back office where Laura was.
“Right on time,” she said and smiled. After a quick peek to see that no one could see them, she kissed his cheek and held onto his shoulders for a few beats. Once she let him go, they went back to her desk where they could sit and talk without it seeming out of place to anyone. They’d been seeing each other like this for the past six months, and as far as they could tell they had held up innocent appearances. Still, the sneaking around had started to wear on Kyle. It had never been just a matter of fun for either one of them, but he also understood splitting up a marriage wasn’t as simple as a piece of paperwork.
“You need to make some time for me,” he told her.
She balanced her chin on her small fist, studied him through those blue Tennessee eyes. Every bit of her was something he would have loved to eat whole. When she was alone with him like this, he couldn’t help but imagine her as a fairytale damsel and him the wolf.
“You have a way of talking to me that makes me think it’s half love and half hate,” she said.
“I suspect that’s sort of how you like it.”
By her smile, he felt confident he was right.
“You go on in there and talk to the boys. Once you’re done you come back here and we’ll see what there is to see.”
By the time he got his coffee and went back to where the others had already circled up their chairs, he was just about the last one to get in. Only guy he saw missing was Turner Whist.
“Where’s Turner?”
The other men shrugged, said he’d been out of touch for the last couple of weeks as far as they knew. Turner was one of the newest members of the group. An Army Spec who had been riding in the loader’s position of an M1A2 while they were patrolling some outer suburbs of Baghdad less than a week after it had been taken in the first blitz. They’d cleared block after block and were about to head in to the assembly area when they spotted combatants on the rooftops. What appeared to be an RPG team moving in to take a shot from the corner of a near building. His tank commander had pointed the turret hard left and was about to engage with the target, but he had missed the second team getting a fix on the bottlenecked tank from the opposite building. There was the hiss and slight pop as the RPG struck the top of the turret, a munition that failed to detonate. But when Turner had turned to see if his tank commander was all right he saw that the grenade head had bounced and docked the man’s head clean from his shoulders. He did all he knew to do, slammed his hatch shut and pulled the headless body inside while screaming at the driver to reverse.
“Hell, I guess somebody better check on him,” Buckner said. “It’s not too far out of the way for me.”
“No,” Kyle said. “He’s a grown man. If we don’t hear anything between now and the planting day, I’ll go bug him just a little. Now, let’s all figure out a time when we can get these trees put in the ground.”
SHE WAS was helping a patron check out a stack of books on the Civil War when they got done with the meeting. He lingered for a while with some books under his arm, poked through the magazines until she was done and the other woman had come on for the rest of the afternoon. He didn’t need to be told to hang around outside after that.
He cranked the engine when she came out and got in her Nissan, followed her the few miles out to their regular meeting place along the road back to Dennis Cove and pulled up beside her under the shadow of the big oak at the edge of a turnaround. He wished he’d thought to bring a bottle opener so he could have opened the wine, but all he had that could be gotten into was a lukewarm six-pack of beer. He tugged out a couple of bottles from the paper sack and cracked them each open with the hard edge of his house keys by the time she had come around and slid into the passenger’s seat.
“Well,” she said, took one of the beers. “Is this as romantic as you’d hoped?”
He kissed her, arm hooked around her strong shoulders and back.
“Look at you, getting mean with me.”
“Is that what this is? Funny way of acting mean, you ask me.”
They didn’t talk for a while after that. Just tried to swim down into each other. Afterward, they sat looking at the woods, drawing breath until it seemed like it belonged in their throats. They talked of things which held little consequence for a while, worked their way by degrees toward what was always the matter between them.
“I’m guessing you still haven’t said anything to him,” Kyle said.
“No, not yet I haven’t.”
“You wouldn’t be privy to a time line on that subject, by chance?”
Kyle knew the situation well enough to explain all the minute concerns and causes, but that didn’t keep him from wanting to hear it said that she was serious, that she would leave her husband and make an effort toward something permanent with him. He knew too that it was all a case of rehearsal and idle desire on his part. She would have to do certain things on her own, and though he was dissatisfied with standing on the boundaries of her life, there was nothing else he could imagine her allowing.
“I can just go home now if that’s what you’d rather me do,” she told him.
He took a sip of his beer and told her that was the last thing