“Mandy.” He nodded at her. “You looking for your hired hand by any chance?”
“You found Rocco? Is he okay?” Why had the sheriff come out to tell her about him? Visions of Rocco having one of his fits in front of the whole town blasted into her mind.
“Hard to know. He’s on First Street in some kind of a daze. He’s just standin’ there. Fred, at the general store, said he’s been there since dawn.”
Mandy gasped. “Is he hurt?”
“Nope. But he won’t talk to anyone and he won’t move along. He’s scaring the natives. Can you get down there and see what you can do before Jerry Tasers him?”
Mandy shut her eyes. How had he gotten to town? Had he run the ten miles? “I’m on my way.” She hurried to her SUV and followed the sheriff to town. Rocco stood on the corner of First Street and Elm, staring east down the two short blocks of Wolf Creek Bend’s main corridor. Intersecting his line of sight was a state highway, railroad tracks, and then an abandoned grain elevator.
There was absolutely nothing of interest to look at, but he watched the far distance with an intense and unblinking stare. Mandy parked, then got out and stood beside her SUV, wondering what was going on with him, what he was thinking. Twice she looked where he watched, but could not see what held his attention.
A couple of pedestrians stopped to talk to him. News had gotten around town that a war hero had come back from Afghanistan and was working at her ranch. As Mandy watched, Rocco ignored the people, one of whom held out a hand as if to shake hands with him. He acted as if he didn’t see them, didn’t hear them. They frowned and walked away. Several people had gathered a little ways down the street and were standing about in small groups, surreptitiously watching him.
Sheriff Tate parked on Elm Street. He, too, got out and leaned against his car, his arms folded. The look he gave her made it clear that if she didn’t resolve the situation in short order, he would.
“Hey, Rocco,” she said in as calm a voice as she could muster when she came even with him. “What are you doing?” He didn’t respond. She looked him over, checking to see if he’d hurt himself. Maybe he’d fallen on his run, hit his head.
“Are you okay?” she asked, touching his arm gently. No response.
She stood in front of him. He was taller than she was, so her position did not break his line of vision. He just kept staring out over her head. “Rocco, you can’t do this.” The sides of his jaw tensed, the only sign he was aware of her presence. “Please. You’re scaring people. You’re scaring me.” His gaze dropped from the distant granary to her eyes.
Mandy couldn’t stop a sigh of relief at the break in his concentration. “Hi.” She smiled at him, uncertain how much of what she’d said he’d heard. “What are you doing?”
“I’m standing here.”
“I see that. But you can’t. You can’t do this.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You’ve been here for hours.”
“So?”
“There are laws about loitering. How did you get to town?”
“Ran.”
“You ran ten miles? While it was still dark?” she asked.
“I had to get here before dawn.”
“Rocco,” she sighed, “we have to go. We can’t stay here.”
“You go. I’m staying.”
Before she could ask him why, another man walked up to them. He clapped Rocco on the back, then offered his hand and a friendly, “Welcome home. Thank you for your service.”
Rocco turned and looked at the man with such animosity that the man dropped his hand and backed a step away before quickly moving along. Mandy sent him an apologetic look, but he never saw it. “You can’t make trouble like this.”
“Like what? I’m minding my own business. They should do the same.”
She could see he was getting irritated, but he was watching her more and the granary less. “You ran down here in the middle of the night. You’ve stood here all morning. What you’re doing makes no sense. You have to be hot and tired and hungry-”
His frown made furrows between his brows. The hard planes of his face became rigid. Something flashed in the back of his dark eyes. Pain. Memories she would never know, could never understand. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about me.”
“Hey, now. There’s no call to talk to a lady like that,” another good Samaritan said as he paused next to them.
Rocco flashed an angry look at him and snapped, “Fuck off.”
Mandy sent the man a look and gave him a slight nod. He moved away to stand with Officer Jerry. “I don’t understand why you’re here like this,” she replied to Rocco.
He spun her around, gripping her with an arm across her body, using his other hand to hold her jaw and point her face toward the old steel walls of the grain silo. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Officer Jerry straighten and Sheriff Tate wave him back.
“What do you see?” Rocco asked her.
Mandy tried to draw a breath, but his grip was too tight to allow much air. She could feel the tension in his body. “I see buildings. People. A road. A highway. A railroad. The old elevator.”
As close as he was holding her, she felt the long draw of air he pulled into his lungs, felt him press his face to the crown of her head. She wondered if he was aware that he was touching her. Maybe he only had issues when someone else was doing the touching.
“What are those things?” he asked.
“What things?”
“What you see. The buildings. The road. The people? What do they make?”
Mandy felt close to tears. In some elemental way, she knew her answer was pivotal, but she didn’t know what the right answer was. “I don’t know, Rocco.”
“What do they make?” He shook her. “Look, Mandy. What are they?”
“It is my town.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
A small sob broke from her. He was more lost than she ever knew. “What is it that you see?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“I’m not looking at the things.”
She shut her eyes, praying for strength. Did he even know he was standing here with her, on the corner, in the heat of the midday sun? “Then what are you looking at?”
“The light.”
He let her go. For a minute, he said nothing as he stood silent and still, seeing something she couldn’t. “There was an explosion in the village where I was working undercover. Taliban fighters captured me. They put me in a pit with wooden planks overhead. I had blood on me, debris from the explosion, all kinds of grisly shit. They didn’t let me clean up. They didn’t feed me. I got a cup of water a day. Five days I was in that hellhole.
“The last day, I stood as tall as possible. I was dying. I knew it. Facing east, I watched the light move over what was left of the village. I told myself I wasn’t in that pit, hidden from anyone who might be looking for me, starving to death. I imagined being home, standing on Main Street in my town.” He stopped speaking for a moment, his jaw pressed tightly shut as emotion threatened to overwhelm him.
“I promised myself that I would do this very thing. I would stand one entire day and watch the light move over my hometown, which looks so very much like this one.”
Mandy dashed tears from her face. She straightened her shoulders and faced east as he did. “Then we will stand here, Rocco. You will watch the light, and I will keep people from bothering you.” She said nothing else and looked neither to the right nor to the left.
A minute passed. Another. The silence thickened about them like foggy air. “Am I losing my mind, Em?” Rocco
