III
Bangley’s house, a hundred yards north, the one with his gunsmith shop in the sunken living room and the photo of the blonde family skiing—it was standing, but the windows were shot out and there were scorch marks around the second floor dormer which was splintered, and next to it was a gaping hole in the roof. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
Pops was straight up and alert on his pack, I glanced back, he knew it was all wrong, and Cima squeezed my thigh and couldn’t keep herself away from the window, from pressing her face to it like a kid at the shark tank.
Before I landed I came in low and took a pass over the garden. It was still there, undisturbed. The water was still running across the head of the marks at the top of the plot, and there was water running in half the furrows.
But. Even from two hundred feet I could see the weeds. They filled the unwatered marks and climbed and crowned the ridges of banked earth.
I jammed the throttle and pulled up and came around again higher. Banked left and aimed for midfield and landed long and taxied straight to Bangley’s house. Mixture, mags, master switch. Off. Shut down. The Beast had barely stopped rolling when I shoved open the sticky door and jumped out and ran to the house.
The front door was open, swinging slightly in the light wind.
Bangley! Bangley! Hey! You in here! BANGLEY!
I was surprised by the force of my shout. Sounded like a stranger.
Bounded down into the workshop. Oddly the big plate window looking to the mountains was intact but there was a string of bullet holes running diagonally up the wall over the hearth. The picture of the skiing family sat unmolested on the side table. Bangley’s tools lay where he left them, the barrel and receiver of a Sig Sauer .308, one of his favorite guns, suspended over the worktable in two vises.
Jesus.
Pops behind me.
Your buddy, he said. I knew from our first interview that he would be a badass, else how could a guy like you—
Stopped himself.
Never imagined this.
Bangley!
Desperate. For the first time I felt it claw over me, the desperation like a bad odor. Weird. Never know how you feel about someone until their house is torn open.
Flinched. Pops’s hand on my shoulder.
They caught him in here. He was working. It was during the day. Never expected a daytime assault like that. They came in from the front and he survived the first burst and he fought them off. He fought them to a retreat, then went upstairs where he could get a better view, better angle, and fought them from there. Probably only a couple of them had guns.
I bounded up the stairs. Heart gripped. What would I see? Had never been up there, never. The hallway lined with photos of the blonde family. Skiing, sailing, in a bamboo bungalow, palm trees, a yellow lab in a flowerfilled field. Saw all that at speed, taking the hall in running bounds on thick carpet, stopping once to orient myself toward the front of the house where the dormer would be. This room here. Shove open the partially closed door.
A child’s room, the boy’s. Poster of Linu Linu in a bikini over the bed, the bed covered in a quilt patterned with cowboys on bucking broncos. Butterflies pinned in frames on the wall and an electric guitar in the corner. Also slalom skis. Surfboard, a shortboard mounted on the angled ceiling, bright green graphic of the serpent in the apple tree and a naked Eve standing half turned away, her breast barely covered by the curls of her hair: SIN SURFBOARDS. A signed NASCAR poster. Car number 13.
Two hunting arrows, real ones, were stuck in the poster and the wall above it was torn with bullet holes.
Two tubs of Copenhagen and a Folgers coffee can spittoon on the floor by the bed. Night vision binocs and two Glocks hanging in their holsters from a hat stand. Jesus. It was the son’s room and it was Bangley’s. This is where he lived. Fucking A. Preserved like a room in one of those historic museums. I flashed on Bangley’s father, the one he had hated—and I thought, He never had a room like this I bet. He was healing himself or following some instinct of compensation or maybe something more weird, who knew, living in this museum, this play set of a room. And there was sunlight coming through the roof. A hole two feet across. No sign of an explosion, how did it get there? Oh. Almost stepped through an equal sized hole in the floor. The questions racing through my head and colliding in a NASCAR pileup. And the window burned. And sandbags stacked to the sill and up the sides. And no sign of Bangley which was at this point a good thing.
I stood in the middle of the room gulping air, catching my breath. Went to the windowless window and looked down at our encampment, our airport, and couldn’t help burping up a bubble of stricken laughter.
He could see just about everything: over the low berm across the runway where I slept with Jasper, right to the dumpster we had dragged away from my house, my house that was a decoy. He could see the porch and front door of that house, down along the line of rusted plane hulks, two sides of the FBO building, the doorway to my hangar. Not much he could not cover from here, which is of course why he had chosen it. Had never occurred to me, don’t know why. Or that when I beeped him in the night with an intruder alarm that he could scope the whole scene from here. He would have known how many were stacked behind the dumpster, what they were carrying, how many more were maybe hanging back, knew it all before he sauntered up to our berm in the dark, had probably already planned who he would shoot first and how. Why he never seemed surprised, always seemed way too relaxed to me. Fuck. And the sandbags. He could have probably made the shots with one of his sniper rifles right from here. Fucking Bangley. How far was it? Three hundred yards, maybe. Easy. For him. And I felt standing there rising up in me the revulsion and admiration and I have to say—what? Love, maybe, that I had grown to feel for that certain fucked up individual.
He was good at one thing, really good at it, and the rest he muddled through with unyielding orneriness. One strategy, I guess. And he backed me up. Unfailingly, unhesitant. And, what? Generously. I mean above and beyond, right? Never even let me know just how in hand he had the whole operation. And so when I left, he knew exactly the increase in threat, in danger. Could probably calibrate it to an exact and lethal degree, the way he would calibrate windage and elevation for one of his long shots from the tower, knew with chilling precision just how in danger he would be living here alone without me and Jasper, then just me, as a warning system. I mean the symbiosis, the extent to which I hadn’t even been aware. And that somehow made the surly and ultimately brief resistance to me leaving even more touching. The basket of grenades. Telling me I was family. Telling me in my own way to have a good one, to be safe, not for him, but for me.
And those other trips. The fishing and hunting which he knew were recreational more than anything, or psychological, understood R&R, and which put him at deadly risk. His never once objecting.
This was his room. Kinda touching. Kinda peculiar.
I turned. Pops in the doorway his gray eyes moving over the child’s objects, the guns.
That’s Bangley in a nutshell, I said.
Well.
Pops’s eyes traveling to the sandbagged window.
He didn’t die here.
Pops stepped across to the singed hole that used to be the dormer window. Scanned downward, across.
He was wounded here. Pops touched a shredded curtain.
Knew he couldn’t stay here, they would burn him out. Knew he had to move, hurt as he was. Had to move and attack. He was a good soldier.
Was?
Pops shrugged.
We both stood there. I couldn’t move. I felt frozen.
And then we heard the double shot and the scream.
And then we were running down the hall, down the stairs, through the selectively trashed ground floor, out into the painful sunlight.
