Page 20 of Lone Wolf

The tang of sweat intensified. Their nostrils were flaring. She could see their pulses beating in the sides of their necks. She waited and then waited some more.

The white dude cleared his throat. “I am an American soldier,” he said. “I am a warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States and live the army values.”

His friend cocked his head at her, lips peeling back from clenched teeth. “That’s right,” he said. “What the hell do you think we are?”

Karissa set the steel spikes back in the Pelican case, snapped it shut, and rose to leave. “I think,” she said, “you’re not what I’m looking for.”

11

A Stolid Kind of Wisdom

Poured over the supporting yoga blocks, Evan’s body finally released. There was no tension and no engagement, just himself and gravity. On the next exhalation, his intercostals let go, his shoulders fanning wide like wings, and his chest cracked open. He felt the vertebrae popping one by one, and the end of his breath came ragged and edged with a divine kind of aching.

Eyes closed, he lay there in an endorphin haze, at last primed for meditation.

From the darkness, a forest resolves—the Virginia oaks of his youth surrounding Jack’s farmhouse. Evan is in a clearing, ankles deep in Halloween leaves. The tree trunks are gnarled, anthropomorphic, mutely observing with a stolid kind of wisdom. The sun shoots down in great columns of light stirred by living dust, and squirrels scrabble invisibly in the branches above.

He takes a full rotation, and when he comes back to where he’d started, Jack is standing before him. Preternaturally observant eyes, crow’s-feet baked into his temples, that square bulldog face.

At this point for Evan, talking to Jack feels like playing chess against himself. Though Evan has bits and pieces from their shared time, their meditative engagements have become a blur of real memories and what Evan anticipates and fills in. Maybe that’s what the memory of a person is once grief fades to a softer hue. The last trickle of immortality.

Jack spreads his hands. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“You’re the one who dragged me outta the grave to be here.” That familiar single-barrel voice, gravelly and smooth all at once.

Evan chews his lip, notices he is doing it, and stops. He feels like he is twelve years old again. “I screwed up my approach to the apartment building.”

Jack just looks at him. In moments like this he doesn’t seem to need to blink.

“The First Commandment,” Evan says. “Assume nothing.”

“Like that an old bird could hand you your ass?”

“And the Third. Master your surroundings. I let that slip, too.”

“I seem to recall one in between,” Jack says. “Funny you left that one out.”

Evan looks down at his boots sank into the autumnal carpet. The Second Commandment: How you do anything is how you do everything.

“You’re lucky you learned your lesson at the end of a ninety-year-old broad’s folding cane instead of from the muzzle of a .45.”

Evan feels an uncharacteristic need to explain himself. “When I was in Texas,” he said, “I met…” He can’t figure out the right noun.

Jack says, “I know.”

Evan is at a loss for what to say. In the brief time he’d known his mother, he’d created nothing more than a few tenuous strands of connection. With Jack dead and what he’d faced in Blessing, there is no longer even the possibility of someone else out there to represent provenance, righteousness, a last frontier.

“What’d you see in that double-wide?” Jack asks.

The breeze stirs the leaves between them, and in the boughs above, Evan hears birdsong and the whispery flitting of wings.

When he speaks, his throat feels dry. “It wasn’t what I saw,” he says. “It’s what I didn’t see.”

Jack gives a faint nod. There is some warmth in it. Understanding, too.

Evan clears his throat. “It’s not about my father or where I came from. I was fine not knowing. Not knowing meant at least that there might be something, some kind of human covenant for … I don’t know. I don’t know.” He felt infuriatingly inarticulate. He waved a hand listlessly at the trees, the woods, the world beyond. “And without that? Without the possibility of that?”