Via Dolorosa Read online

  “Put the gun down, Mr. Granger.” And it suddenly occurred to him that he did not know the old man’s first name. “Please…”

  “I’m tired of seeing him,” Granger confided. The gun was still to his head, his eyes still focused on nothing across the room. “I’m tired of seeing him sitting at a table or walking up the beach or standing just behind me in a mirror. I can’t keep seeing him.”

  These words touched Nick’s spine with an icy finger.

  “I’m tired of seeing him,” Granger went on, “and I’m tired of thinking I hear him and I’m tired of dreaming about him every single night.” The bell captain’s wet, rheumy eyes slid in Nick’s direction. His flesh looked nearly translucent. “Do you know what it’s like to be haunted by the dead?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

  “Why won’t the dead rest?”

  “They do,” he told the bell captain. “Maybe it just seems like they don’t to people like you and me.”

  “Why?”

  “Guilt,” he said.

  “Yes,” Granger said. “Oh, yes. Guilt. Because my boy is dead. Because my boy is dead and there isn’t a goddamn thing I can do about any of it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They rest; we don’t.”

  Granger, pressing his eyes shut, cocked the hammer of the handgun.

  “I killed your son,” Nick said.

  And suddenly he was back there. There was the sound of a deep-belly roar. It did not strike suddenly and all at once but, rather, it appeared to create itself—birth itself—rising up from the earth and gaining momentum as it climbed. It defined the word “force,” as it was a force, as it was a thing, a noun. Then it burst. The sound was a storm showering down. It was a mortar, and it was very close. It had gone off directly outside the building they were holed-up in. Aftershock resonated in their bones; dust and powdered concrete roiled into the open doorway, the glassless window holes in a single, hot exhalation. Smoke came with it, heavy and black. No one breathed. Outside, perhaps directly over their heads, the sound of rocks and shale sliding off the roof and smashing to the ground was audible through their cotton-plugged ears…

  Nick’s words seemed to hang forever in the air. Standing in the doorway of the hotel room, he merely stared at the bell captain’s hunched form perched on the edge of the bed. After some time, Granger’s eyes peeled open; Nick could hear the sick, sticking sound of his wet lids coming apart.

  “I killed your son,” he repeated. “I killed them all.”

  And it was only the second time he had spoken the words aloud. The first time, he had been back home, injured and beaten and hollowed, and he had managed to arrest himself before a hallway mirror in his father’s house when no one else was around, and he had looked at himself—had looked at the deep-set eyes, the rough and stubbly neck and chin, the haunting pallor of his skin, the old man face—and he had said those very words for what was the first time and for what, he could only hope, would be the last: I killed them all. He’d said, Coward. He’d said, I killed them all.

  Granger brought the gun away from his temple. “What are you talking about, boy? Why say such a horrible thing to me?”

  “Because it’s the truth,” he said solemnly. “And if you’re going to shoot yourself in the head, you might as well shoot me dead first, and we can end this thing together.”

  A second shell exploded. The brunt of it reverberated all through his body. Pushing himself against the far wall, hugging the wall with his back, he gripped his rifle and kept his eyelids pressed shut. He tried not to breathe. He couldn’t breathe; there was no breathing. The smoke pried at him and poked him and attempted to gain access to the inside of his body any way it could. Like osmosis…as if it could simply seep in through the pores of his skin. And while the smoke itself did not last long, it seemed an eternity not to breathe…

  Nick said, “Two days before your son died, our squad was attacked going into Fallujah. We crossed through the village square and were setting up camp inside one of the gutted huts along the street. Everything was quiet. But we didn’t trust the quiet. You never trust the quiet.”

  They must have thought him dead. He heard Oris Hidenfelter order the men up against the crumbling wall. Through the smoke, Nick could see them scrambling to their feet and nosing their rifles through the shattered meshwork of the building’s degenerating façade. The smoke burned his eyes and seared his throat. They began firing.

  “A group of Muslim insurgents were hidden in a mosque across the street. They had remained silent when the Marines came through, waiting and watching and hiding. They saw us and saw that we were few, and that’s when the explosion hit, and that’s when it all started.”

  One by one, the men rose. They hustled to the doorway. Some filed out. Nick watched them disappear through the smoke. A million tiny diodes of debris floated, swirled in the light.

  “It wasn’t until the smoke cleared and daylight carved a path through the doorway that I realized I was still in the building, and my men were out fighting in the street. I could see them all crouched down and pressed flat to the earth. I watched their rifles buck and fire at the mosque. I could see smoke streaming from windows. I could see your son, too, low in the dirt beside another soldier, Victor Karuptka, and Karuptka had his fingers looped in the belt around your son’s waist, keeping him flat to the ground. I could see that, could see all of it. And I couldn’t move. I was frozen. The men outside, they needed me, needed my direction, counted on me, entrusted me with their lives without question or hesitation—and I couldn’t move.”

  Granger watched him from the edge of the bed, his eyes unblinking, the handgun very obvious resting against one meaty thigh.

  “Then something clicked inside me and I could move. It was like I felt my brain snap back into place. But I didn’t get up and I didn’t rush out into the street with my men. I was scared. I could feel the explosions reverberating through my chest, vibrating all my organs…and it occurred to me that if I just lay down close to the floor, no one would see me. And if they did see me, they would probably think I was dead. And so that’s what I did.”

  And he could see them all through the doorway from where he lay on the floor. His cheek smashed against the stone floor, he watched the exchange of gunfire out in the streets. And he saw Oris Hidenfelter go down. He was the first of his men to get hit. Nick saw something soar by Hidenfelter trailing a flag of smoke, and he saw it bite into Hidenfelter’s hip and rip a piece out of him. He watched Hidenfelter crumble to the ground and die. He saw an explosion shake Angelino and Bowerman off their feet. He saw Bowerman go down, heavy, and not get up again. He saw a grenade explode near Victor Karuptka and Myles Granger…and he saw how the force of the grenade tore through Granger’s legs, blowing the bottom half of his uniform off and flagging the shreds of fabric in the wind. Suddenly, there was blood everywhere. Karuptka attempted to roll Granger over and drag him to safety down a nearby alley. But Karuptka was shot in the chest, in the face.

  “I don’t know how long it lasted,” he told the bell captain…and it was the same thing—the truth—that he had told his superiors as well as the medical review board, “it could have been under a minute or it could have been two hours. I don’t know. But I watched them all die and I pretended to be dead, too. A rocket hit too close to the building I was in and the wall and part of the roof finally surrendered and rained down all around me. A section of the wall fell on my hand, crushing it…”

  And it was like something in him blinked and shorted out. His mind summoned the image of a television just as it is turned off, and the way the screen flares to darkness leaving only that residual speck of blue fading light at its center.

  Still standing in the doorway, Nick said, “I was knocked unconscious. Either by the concussion of the explosion or by sheer pain, I passed out. And when I awoke again, everything was silent. For a long while I thought I was dead. I couldn’t fully recall what had happened and I couldn’t feel any more pain, even though I cou
ld see the way the wall had fallen on my hand and knew it had been destroyed.”

  “What happened?” Granger said, and that was good.

  “I managed to get the pieces of wall off my hand. That’s when the pain struck me and I knew I was still alive—still alive or now in hell, because the pain was so severe. I think I passed out twice while trying to free my hand because of the pain. I remember throwing up once, too. And I remember looking at the sections of wall as I removed them—really looking at them, as if just seeing them for the first time, with all the pores in the cement and the cracks and whiteness of dust—and I thought about the man who must have made that wall, and how he probably never thought the wall would fall on the hand of an American soldier who would come in to decimate his city. That my blood was on his wall. And then I wondered where that man was. Had he fled the city? Had he been killed? Was he an innocent or had he been plotting to destroy the United States since the days of his adolescence? Anyway, that’s what I thought…”

  “And my son?” Granger said.

  “I finally managed to free my hand. I wrapped a strip of cloth from my shirtsleeve into a makeshift sling then bound it against my chest. Then I waited. I didn’t know what I was waiting for at the time but, in hindsight, I suppose I was just hoping I’d pass out again, maybe this time permanently, and that I wouldn’t have to go outside into the streets to see all those dead boys. But that never happened. And maybe that was the cruelest part—or perhaps the most just thing in the world.”

  He had stood in the doorway of the burnt-out building, much like he stood in the doorway of his hotel room now, praying for something, anything, even if it was just to have time freeze for all eternity so no further decisions would have to be made…

  “Finally, I went outside. I had my rifle up. I didn’t know how long I’d been out and I didn’t know if the insurgents were still in the mosque across the street. I passed out the door and walked against the remaining wall until I was able to duck into an alley and survey the battleground. They were dead, all of them. I could see the way they had been broken and ruined, much like my hand, and how none of them even remotely resembled the people they had been in life. And that was at least comforting, because it allowed me to believe that perhaps their souls—the essence of who they’d been—had someone managed to escape unscathed just prior to their deaths, and that somewhere, anywhere, they were at least okay.”

  “Myles was still alive,” the bell captain said, his voice just barely above a whisper. “My son was still alive.”

  “He was,” Nick admitted. “The only one. I saw movement across the street and saw it was one of Myles’s hands, sliding through the dirt. I felt something heave in my chest and staggered to my feet. I felt nauseous and unsteady, almost drunk. My pack and rifle suddenly gained a hundred pounds. I dropped them both to the ground and stumbled out of the alley toward the street. A part of me prayed to be gunned down, but I never heard a single shot. So I kept walking, and when I reached Myles, I could see that he had managed to turn himself over and that he was staring up at me.”

  He did not see the benefit of describing to the bell captain what he actually saw, and how he had stumbled around the bodies of the others on his way to Myles—how he had tried not to look at any of them and, although the blood and ruination of their bodies had been bad, the worst had been the barbed-wire tattoo exposed on Angelino’s upper arm, now that his uniform sleeve had been shorn away, and how it suddenly looked like the most cruel and unnecessary thing in the world, the tattoo’s permanence mocking the brevity of the young boy’s life. He did not see the point of describing to Granger, either, the way his son’s body was broken and the way his face had been twisted and bloodless and pale. He also did not tell the bell captain how Myles’s first word, or attempt at a first word, had been the abbreviated, “Lieuten—” and how, after a hesitation and a dry-swallow of saliva, the young boy had simply begged for Nick to shoot him in the head because it hurt, it hurt, it hurt.

  And Nick considered shooting him.

  Shoot me. Shoot me in the head.

  Hang on, he’d told him.

  Shoot me in the head. It hurts. Please, Lieutenant. Kill me.

  You’ll be okay, he’d promised the boy. No, he couldn’t shoot him. The reality of the world was rushing back to him, with all its instincts of survival.

  My legs, groaned Myles Granger, his voice hitching and sounding extremely small, extremely far away. I don’t want to lose my legs, Lieutenant.

  You’re not going to lose your legs, Myles.

  I don’t want to die, Lieutenant.

  You’re not—we’re not—you’re not—

  “I don’t know how I did it,” Nick told the bell captain, “with my hand ruined and feeling as sick and as weak as I did, but I managed to loosen and remove Myles’s pack and all the things that made him heavy, then hoisted him up over my shoulder.”

  “He was young and skinny, skin and bones,” Granger said. “He weighed next to nothing, soaking wet.”

  “I carried him back across the street and back into the alley. He was sobbing against my back. I set him down in the alley and that’s when I really had a look at his legs.” He stopped himself there, not wanting to tell Myles Granger’s father about the state of his son’s legs. “After a while, we made contact with the rest of the platoon. Your son died two days later in triage.”

  Granger looked at him as if he wanted the story to continue—as if, by some chance, Nick’s retelling could alter the reality of what had happened if only he’d change the ending.

  “I can’t change the ending,” Nick heard himself say, not caring if Granger understood him or not. “You and I both live with guilt, Mr. Granger. So if you’re going to shoot yourself in the head, please shoot me first. Because I’m tired of thinking about it all, and I’m tired of seeing and hearing your son, too.”

  The irony wasn’t lost to him—that he, Nick, was now asking a Granger to shoot him in the head and put him out of his misery. And as had happened the first time when the roles were reversed, it seemed as though the bell captain was actually considering it. Surely it would have been simple, and it would have ended it all permanently. Nick promised himself that when the bell captain finally leveled the gun at him, he would not look away and would not even close his eyes. He would take death on and watch it come and he would be better for it.

  “Do it,” Nick said.

  “I…can’t,” said Granger. He looked at the gun in his hand, resting on his plump thigh. “Can I?”

  “It’s yes or no,” said Nick. “But whatever the decision, we have to live with it.”

  “Or die with it,” said Granger.

  “Yes,” Nick agreed. “Or die with it.”

  Granger remained staring at the gun. Nick, too, stared at it from across the room. Then he stared at Granger. Even from this distance, he could see the large pocks in Granger’s skin, running along his cheek and up to his hairline; he could see the redness of the flesh; he could see the squint-lines around the old, old eyes.

  Granger set the gun down on the bed and folded his hands in his lap. He seemed to slump forward the slightest bit.

  So then, Nick told himself, the decision has been made.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, finally entering the room. He stood before the fetal curl of the bell captain at the foot of the bed, looking down. Handwritten letters on loose-leaf paper, strewn about like confetti, littered the bedspread.

  “Yes,” said the bell captain.

  “And we’ve decided now, haven’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you let me walk you downstairs?”

  “All right,” Granger said passively, not meeting Nick’s eyes. Suddenly, he had become a small child. “I know it’s done with but, just for the ride down the elevator—just for those six floors—could I call you ‘son’?”

  “If it’s just for those six floors,” Nick said.

  “Just the six.”

  “Then all right.”
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  “I know you’re not Myles. I know you’re not my son and I’m not your father. I mean, I know that perfectly. It’s just…well, I want to pretend one last time.”

  “For six floors,” Nick said.

  “Six floors,” agreed the bell captain.

  “And you should leave your gun here,” Nick added as an afterthought.

  “This isn’t my gun.”

  “No?”

  “It’s your gun.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was here in the room when I brought the letters in,” Granger said. “It was sitting right in the center of the bed.”

  “Was it?” A cold dread overtook him.

  “Isn’t it yours?”

  “I don’t have a gun,” Nick said. His eyes went to the little black handgun. And he recalled something Isabella had said—something about having a gun in the glove compartment of her car, and wouldn’t he, Nick, want to use it on those three men that had sailed to the island in their cabin cruiser?

  Reaching out, Nick picked up the gun, hefted it, looked at it. He could see it was loaded. He slipped it into the waistband of his pants and, with that same hand, assisted Granger in removing himself from the bed.

  In the hallway, Granger said, “Those are some bugs outside.”

  “Yes.”

  In the elevator, as if testing the feel of a new pair of shoes, Granger said, “Son.”

  —Chapter XXII—

  Again, the lobby was eerily silent. Nick walked Granger to the front doors, his one good hand at the small of the bell captain’s back. Outside, a light drizzle began to fall. Nick paused just inside the lobby doors, looking out. The upper portion of the windows was laden with cicadas, now having some difficulty adhering to the glass in the rain. Granger gathered his coat and keys from his workstation, gave Nick a quick hug, then examined him at arms’ length.

  “I wish I could think of something profound to say,” Granger managed.

  “You did that back in the elevator.”

  Something akin to a smile surfaced on Granger’s thin, tired lips. “Yes,” he said eventually. “All right.”