The Twelve

carry.

“I saw you, you know,” April said. “Your leg. The scars on your back. You were in the war, weren’t you?”

“What makes you think that?”

She made a face of disbelief. “Gosh, I don’t know, just everything? Because you’re the only one who seems to know what to do? Because you’re all, like, super-competent with guns and shit?”

“I told you. I’m a salesman. Camping gear.”

“I don’t believe that for a second.”

Her directness was so disarming that for a moment Kitteridge said nothing. But she had him dead to rights. “You’re sure you want to hear it? It isn’t very nice.”

“If you want to tell me.”

He instinctively turned his face to the window. “Well, you’re right, I was. Enlisted straight out of high school. Not Army, Marines. I ended up as a staff sergeant in the MPs. You know what that is?”

“You were a cop?”

“Sort of. Mostly we provided security at American installations, air-bases, sensitive infrastructure, that kind of thing. They moved us around a lot. Iran, Iraq, Saudi. Chechnya for a little while. My last duty was at Bagram Airfield, in Afghanistan. Usually it was pretty routine, verifying equipment manifests and checking foreign workers in and out. But once in a while something would happen. The coup hadn’t happened yet, so it was still American- controlled territory, but there were Taliban all over the place, plus Al Qaeda and about twenty different local warlords duking it out.”

He paused, collecting himself. The next part was always the hardest. “So one day we see this car, the usual beat-up piece of junk, coming down the road. The checkpoints are all well marked, everybody knows to stop, but the guy doesn’t. He’s barreling straight for us. Two people in the car that we can see, a man and a woman. Everybody opens fire. The car swerves away, rolls a couple of times, comes to rest on its wheels. We’re thinking it’s going to blow for sure, but it doesn’t. I’m the senior NCO, so I’m the one who goes to look. The woman’s dead, but the man is still alive. He’s slumped over the steering wheel, blood all over. In the backseat is a kid, a boy. He couldn’t have been older than four. They’ve got him strapped into a seat packed with explosives. I see the wires running to the front of the vehicle, where the dad is holding the detonator. He’s muttering to himself. Anta al-mas’ul, he’s saying. Anta al-mas’ul. The kid’s wailing, reaching out for me. This little hand. I’ll never forget it. He’s only four, but it’s like he knows what’s about to happen.”

“Jesus.” April’s face was horrified. “What did you do?”

“The only thing I could think of. I got the hell out of there. I don’t really remember the blast. I woke up in the hospital in Saudi. Two men in my unit were killed, another took a piece of shrapnel in the spine.” April was staring at him. “I told you it wasn’t very nice.”

“He blew up his own kid?”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“But what kind of people would do that?”

“You’ve got me there. I never could figure that out.”

April said nothing more; Kittridge wondered, as he always did, if he’d told too much. But it felt good to unburden himself, and if April had gotten more than she’d bargained for, she had a way of hiding it. In the abstract, Kittridge knew, the story was inconsequential, one of hundreds, even thousands like it. Such pointless cruelty was simply the way of the world. But understanding this fact was a far cry from accepting it, when you’d lived it yourself.

“So what happened then?” April asked.

Kittridge shrugged. “Nothing. End of story. Off to dance with the virgins in eternity.”

“I was talking about you.” Her eyes did not move from his face. “I think I’d be pretty screwed up by something like that.”

Here was something new, he thought—the part of the tale that no one ever asked about. Typically, once the basic facts were laid bare, the listener couldn’t get away fast enough. But not this girl, this April.

“Well, I wasn’t. At least I didn’t think I was. I spent about half a year in the VA, learning to walk and dress and feed myself, and then they kicked me loose. War’s over, my friend, at least for you. I wasn’t all bitter, like a lot of guys get. I didn’t dive under the bed when a car backfired or anything like that. What’s done is done, I figured. Then about six months after I got settled, I took a trip back home to Wyoming. My parents were gone, my sister had moved up to British Columbia with her husband and basically dropped off the map, but I still knew some people, kids I’d gone to school with, though nobody was a kid anymore. One of them wants to throw a party for me, the big welcome-home thing. They all had families of their own by now, kids and wives and jobs, but this was a pretty hard-drinking crowd back in the day. The whole thing was just an excuse to get lit, but I didn’t see the harm. Sure, I said, knock yourself out, and he actually did. There were at least a hundred people there, a big banner with my name on it hung over the porch, even a band. The whole thing knocked me flat. I’m in the backyard listening to the music and the friend says to me, Come on, there are some women who want to meet you. Don’t be standing there like a big idiot. So he takes me inside and there are three of them, all nice enough. I knew one of them a little from way back when. They’re talking away, some show on TV, gossip, the usual things. Normal, everyday things. I’m nursing a beer and listening to them when all of a sudden I realize I have no idea what they’re saying. Not the words themselves. What any of it meant. None of it seemed connected to anything else, like there were two worlds, an inside world and an outside world, and neither had anything to do with the other. I’m sure a shrink would have a name for it. All I know is, I woke up on the floor, everybody standing over me. After that, it took me about four months in the woods just to be around people again.” He paused, a little surprised at himself. “To tell you the truth, I’ve never told anybody that part. You would be the first.”

“Sounds like a day in high school.”

Kittridge had to laugh. “Touche.”

Their gazes met and held. How strange it was, he thought. One minute you were all alone with your thoughts, the next somebody came along who seemed to know the deepest part of you, who could open you like a book. He couldn’t have said how long they’d been looking at each other. It seemed to go on and on and on, neither possessing the will, or the courage, or even the desire, to look away. How old was she? Seventeen? And yet she didn’t seem seventeen. She didn’t seem like any age at all. An old soul: Kittridge had heard the term but never quite understood what it meant. That’s what April had. An old soul.

To seal the deal between them, Kittridge removed one of the Glocks from his shoulder holster and held it out to her. “Know how to use one of these?”

April looked at it uncertainly. “Let me guess. It’s not like it is on TV.”

Kittridge dropped the magazine and racked the slide to eject the cartridge from the pipe. He placed the gun it in her hand, wrapping her fingers with his own.

“Don’t pull the trigger with your knuckle, the shot will go low. Just use the pad of your fingertip and squeeze, like so.” He released her hand and tapped his breastbone. “One shot, through here. That’s all it takes, but you can’t miss. Don’t rush—aim and fire.” He reloaded the gun and handed it back. “Go on, you can have it. Keep a round chambered, like I showed you.”

She smiled wryly. “Gee, thanks. And here I don’t have anything for you.”

Kitteridge returned the smile. “Maybe next time.”

A moment passed. April was turning the weapon around in her hand, examining it as if it were some unaccountable artifact. “What the father said. Anta-something.”

“Anta al-mas’ul.”

“Did you ever figure out what it meant?”

Kittridge nodded. “ ‘You did this.’ ”

Another silence fell, though different from the others. Not a barrier between them but a shared awareness of their lives, like the walls of a room in which only the two of them existed. How strange, thought Kittridge, to say those words. Anta al-mas’ul. Anta al-mas’ul.

“It was the right thing, you know,” April said. “You would have been killed, too.”

“There’s always a choice,” Kittridge said.

“What else could you have done?”