road, finding comfort in the way the fields, forest, farms, and small towns stayed frozen in time.
He rolled down the window and felt summer heat crowd in the new foliage along the tree lines and smelled it trickle in damp waves across the new-plowed fields. He’d always had too much imagination and that complicated a cop’s instinctive aversion to hot summer nights and full moons. He glanced over at Nina, who had finally yielded to fatigue and yesterday’s whiskey and had fallen asleep in the warm sunlight. No, it started before he was a cop. It was his experience that murderous folly flocked in the tropical heat.
The red Georgia dirt was ninety-eight degrees in the shade on the day that Broker went to visit Nina Pryce, in July 1975, on officer’s row at Fort Benning. Vietnam was finally done and the flags sagged on the lanyards across the base in the heavy doldrums of defeat.
They were bleak, the houses where the army boards its majors, especially when all the furniture has been removed and the family of a man who will not return from war stands in the empty rooms for the last time.
And the empty rooms were worse when the army moved you out with the cold, efficient energy of censure.
She was nine years old, carrot-topped, with big knees and big gray eyes and braces on her teeth. Her mother’s face conveyed a look of absent practicality that wondered: How can I afford the braces now? Her brother sat outside in the car, his head buried in a comic book. Nina stood fiercely at her mother’s side.
Marian Pryce was alone. No neighbors had come with casseroles and no children played in the street. The moving van sat in the driveway like the bogeyman.
The officer who faced Marian and her daughter was not a chaplain, but was instead a sassy second lieutenant from the base coordinator’s office turned out in glossy leather, starched fatigues, and a laminated helmet liner. Instead of solace, he held a clipboard in his hand. He toured the quarters entering checkmarks on his clipboard, making sure Marian and her two children had not “stolen” anything from the federal government.
The investigation was over and now Ray Pryce’s family was being escorted off the base and out of the army.
The little girl had stood up to the starched martinet and stated in a steady, precocious voice: “If my dad is dead in the war he should have a flag even if you can’t find his body.”
The second lieutenant was a real prick who did not do her the courtesy of meeting her eyes. His pencil scratched on the clipboard and his voice was another cruel dismissal in official language: “Your father is not authorized a flag because his service wasn’t honorable.”
Perhaps Nina’s personality was formed at that moment. She kicked the lieutenant in the shin, carefully hitting him above his boot leather so it’d hurt.
And 1st Lt. Phillip Broker, twenty-three years old, a lean, scorched splinter thrown off from the recent catastrophe in Southeast Asia, who was almost senseless from a week of testifying and being questioned by army lawyers, and whose angry confused attempts to defend Nina’s absent father only stacked the evidence against him, Phillip Broker said good-bye to the army.
The method he chose was to take the lieutenant and throw him bodily through the front door and send him sprawling on the sidewalk. Then he stomped his Corcoran jump boot down on the clipboard and smashed it to smithereens. The lieutenant opted for a retrograde maneuver, ass backward through the nearest shrubbery.
Marian Pryce, sensing that Broker was necessary to her daughter at this moment, signaled with her dry eyes and took a last cardboard box from the kitchen counter and carried it out the door. The moving van pulled away. Marian waited in her car.
Nina stood her ground, defiantly alone in the empty house. Broker, knowing nothing of children, knelt and said to her, “I want you to walk out of here like you own the place.”
To underscore the point, Broker had escorted her down the rows of houses to a playground. They sat in the swings and their heels made swirls in the hot, chalky-red dust. Nina said nothing. Her large eyes roved the base, vacuuming in detail.
And then Broker had said the words that he’d come to regret: “If you ever need anything, you know, help, come find me.”
She’d nodded solemnly. Down the block, her mother blew the horn. Nina’s eyes were fixed in a stare across an empty parade field, on a limp American flag hanging in the dripping heat.
13
Like the doctor said, Broker’s hand did not throb so badly when he put it on top of his head. It was awkward driving this way and for the moment, with Nina asleep, he didn’t feel so foolish, but the posture suggested the gesture of a slow-witted man pondering an enormous dilemma.
Which wasn’t that far off, the dilemma part. Easiest thing would be to reject her story wholesale. Just not think about it.
Drawing strength from the premise of leaving the past undisturbed, he sketched out what he would do: first off,
Problem being, what
She was like him. Therapy was for other people, people who worked in offices. Got a personal problem? Tell it to the chaplain. In other words: tough shit. His eyes darted to the rearview mirror. He had seen the Saturn yesterday. Damn if he hadn’t caught some of her contagious paranoia.
He was well beyond the city traffic now and the limboland where tract houses chewed into tree lines. He smelled fresh manure and the contours of freshly plowed fields eased his eyes. A tiny green John Deere tractor dragged a mustard sail across the horizon.
Gripping the wheel with his knees, he used his good hand to adjust the rearview mirror, glanced at Nina, and shook his head. Gingerly he poured some more coffee.
She just had to learn.
That was easy for him to say. She’d watched her mother struggle raising her and her brother, working as a legal secretary in the Detroit suburbs. Before her looks went, Marian Pryce married a lawyer in the office. A practical marriage. So her kids could live in a better neighborhood and attend college. Nina had hated the work- obsessed man, who drank too much and was never home. Her mother pretended not to notice the drinking and started to lose her grip thread by thread. Nina blamed the army lynch mob for that too.
Broker had met the guy at Nina’s graduation party and couldn’t remember his name. He’d done his family the courtesy of making full partner at the firm before he dropped dead of a massive coronary on the ninth hole of the Bloomfield Hills Country Club.
Broker had played at every kind of jive imaginable in his line of work, but underneath, he’d inherited an eccentric, but rock-solid, conservative foundation. He’d been an only kid raised strict on the hardscrabble glory of the Superior Shore.
Growing up he’d learned that some problems didn’t come with answers. No amount of talk would fix the hurt. It just hurt and you lived with the hurt and after a while it became part of you, like a line in your face. When her dad had left him hanging, at first, he refused to believe it. And finally, when there seemed to be no other explanation, he had to stick it in that black hole where there were no answers.
Being in law enforcement, he should have learned. People were capable of anything.
The main trick was not to do anything dumb to make it worse. He repeated this last thought for his own benefit because she had stirred him up. Got him thinking about that mess so long ago. So, fix her with straight talk. Finding her a shrink was just a cop-out. Just have it out with her and bang some sense into her head. He’d had that talk with her years ago when she’d run away from home. It was time for another one.
But Broker couldn’t resist reaching over and plucking the
Sonofabitch. What if LaPorte
