Hailey's War

serviceman, I’d already had a significant edge on the other candidates. Sons and daughters of personnel who died while in active duty are given special consideration.

But there was no point in embarrassing her. I played along.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”

“Lot of good it did, in the end,” she said.

Ah, there it was, the sharpened-dagger point to that little story.

She walked out of the bathroom and placed the makeup tote into her packed suitcase, zipped it up, and looked at me. “Why do you even think Porter and Angeline are going to open their house to me on such short notice?” she asked.

“Because they’re Mooneys,” I said.

She gave me a sharp look, but this time there was more than pique in it. If there was one legitimate grievance Julianne had with me, it was that in my younger years, I’d made no secret of how much I’d envied CJ and his siblings their settled home life, a jealousy that had clearly implied that Angeline had been a better mother than her sister.

“Oh, of course,” Julianne said. “You’ve never forgiven me for making you move out of the paradise of your aunt and uncle’s house. If you’d had your way, you’d have been there until the day you left for West Point.” She paused then, chambering her next thought like a shooter chambers a round. “Probably in bed with your cousin Cletus, too.”

It was unfortunate that Julianne had such contempt for the Army. She would have excelled at planning missions: She always knew where the weak point lay.

“That’s a sick thing to say,” I told her tiredly.

forty-one

The next few weeks were uneventful. That was almost a problem in itself. Serena and Payaso did not take well to mountain life, finding the blackness and the silence at night unnerving, and the days boring. Julianne’s little home would have been spacious for two, but not for four. There always seemed to be someone in the single bathroom. The TV got only a small selection of channels, and there was no sound system to speak of, just a clock radio that would also play a CD.

Relief came in the form of Bravo and Deacon, who drove up from L.A. to put in some bodyguarding time. A grateful Serena and Payaso jumped in the GTO and headed south for a fix of tacos mariscos and city light, as well as to check in with their respective lieutenants, Trippy and Iceman.

They came back in five days like a supply dogsled from Nome, laden with DVDs, magazines, a deck of playing cards, a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, groceries from a Mexican tienda, and several ounces of marijuana. I had to put my foot down about that.

“We’re guarding Nidia, and everyone who’s here needs to be clearheaded, which means no drinking and no drugs,” I reminded them. “I know it seems like Skouras’s men have no idea where she is, and they’re never coming for her, but that’s what the two guys in Gualala thought, right before Payaso and I walked through their front door and took Nidia away from them.”

That didn’t have the desired effect. “Motherfucking Trece style!” exulted Trippy, who’d come with them, throwing Trece’s sign. Deacon and Bravo threw it back, all of them focusing on the last part of what I’d said and ignoring the first.

It turned out that nearly everyone wanted to come up and do guard duty. While I’d have liked to believe it was esprit de corps, there was an ulterior motive, and not one I’d ever have thought of.

“Snow,” Serena told me. “Most of them have never seen it. They all want to be here when the first fall comes.”

Soon there was a regular rotation. Not only did Payaso’s homeboys come up to be security, but the sucias came, too, providing company both for their guys and for Nidia. Despite the glaring surface differences between the sucias and Nidia, Serena’s girls were natural and easy with her, playing cards and chatting, brushing and braiding her red hair. The guys, meanwhile, followed Payaso’s example, showing Nidia an excess of courtesy, cleaning up their language when she was around, holding doors for her.

Of all of us, I was the only one to stay with Nidia day in, day out. I dealt with mountain life by reaching back and tapping a little of my old West Point discipline, deciding to get my body back into its pre-coma shape. I got up early and ran for miles on the fire roads, coming back to do push-ups and Russian twists on Julianne’s little porch. In the evenings, I played more kinds of poker with Serena and the guys than I’d known existed. One afternoon, Serena and I took our guns out into the hills and shot at soda cans, sharpening our skills. Nidia and I went into town to get cold-weather clothing. Everyone else had a chance to get things from home, but I’d come to Truckee with only the clothes on my back, as had Nidia. Skouras’s guys had bought her a few things in Gualala, but in her haste to get out of there, naturally, she hadn’t thought to grab anything before leaving.

The snow came in mid-November, turning everyone into giddy children except two of us. Me because it reminded me, soberingly, of the pristine fields and quads of West Point, and Nidia because she was Nidia, with the weight of the future in her belly. So she watched from the steps as her friends pelted one another with handfuls of snow, put it down collars, and tasted it cautiously. Meanwhile, I put snow chains on our cars, laboriously, with reddening fingers and a little cursing.

December came, and Truckee put on its Christmas finery, white lights glittering along every storefront in the town’s Old West-style retail district. Skiers and snowboarders overran the town, the streets full of muddy SUVs with loaded roof racks. Had she wanted, Serena could have had her pick of the college boys who appraised her from the windows of their Tahoes and Denalis. Winter clothing suited her, the gunmetal-colored trench coat and boots and the long hand-knit scarf I’d bought for her at a downtown boutique.

After the initial adjustment period, Nidia’s confinement proved an oddly peaceful, settled time for all of us.

One day, though, I overheard Payaso and Deacon in a discussion of whether an icicle would make a good impromptu weapon in a fight.

Innocence never lasts.

forty-two

One chilly night I found Serena outside, looking up at the night sky.

“What a trip,” she said, breath clouding in the air. “Look at all those stars. That’s too many, man. That’s just wrong.”

I looked, too, seeing the dusty backbone of small stars that formed the Milky Way. I said, “You know, when the Northridge Quake hit and the lights were out all over Los Angeles, people called the media, saying that they could see a river of dust kicked up by the quake. They said the dust was hanging in the sky, glowing white from city lights elsewhere. What they were seeing was the Milky Way, for the first time in their lives.”

“I bet they were scared.”

“Scared?” I said. “Why? It’s beautiful.”

“You really like it out here?” she said.

“Sure. It’s not so different from where we used to live. It used to get pretty dark and quiet out there.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And you grew up and hauled ass for the city, L.A. and then San Francisco. But you get up into the mountains and you go all white on me: ‘Isn’t nature beautiful?’”

“That’s not a white thing,” I said.

“Maybe not, but-” She shrugged. “I keep thinking of this girl I knew, she was from Lennox but she never got ganged-up. She stayed in school, became an inner-city schoolteacher, that whole trip. So she takes these girls from