Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
September 11 was a Tuesday.
School let out a half hour after the first plane hit. Jumping on their bikes, he and his brother blistered home, chugging up steep hills and whizzing so fast on the downslope side past farms and pastures nestled between limestone bluffs that all those horses and longhorns were a blur of rust-red, the color of dried blood. As they went along, he got a very bad feeling. Other than cars picking kids up from school and blocky yellow school buses stuffed with students lumbering down dusty yellow ranch roads lined with gnarly live oak, there was no one around: no other cars, no sixteen-wheelers on their way to San Antonio, no farmers on tractors or balers. Not even old Mr. Pembury, who always took a morning turn round his dude ranch on Chester, his silver-dapple quarter horse. The only activity at all was a couple of high-up planes, sketching white contrails on blue sky.
He and his brother missed the South Tower collapse by five minutes. Although KTSA out of San Antonio was still yammering from the kitchen radio, both his parents had tuned to CNN in the family room. He and his brother stepped in just in time to hear Aaron Brown say, Good Lord , as the North Tower imploded.
That was a day that seemed on permanent rewind. CNN must’ve shown both towers folding like horizontal accordions, falling in on themselves floor by floor in a sort of reverse mushroom cloud of debris and dust, at least a dozen times in three hours. Each time, he felt a mingled thrill of awe and terror. The collapses were like something out of a movie. Like when the Mother Ship rose above Devil’s Tower: that kind of oh-my-God moment. Except, of course, this was reality, Greg.
By noon, there was talk of an invasion. Terrorists , everyone said. Damn ragheads . Every man who owned a weapon lit out for the public range or berms on public land or the more remote reaches of the Hill Country with no one to care but the rattlers and scorpions and the coyotes. Over at the high school, where his brother was a senior, the coaches for both the boys’ and girls’ rifle clubs broke out weapons for the teams. There was a run on the ammo shops on the stretch of highway south between town and San Antonio. By nightfall, those shelves were empty of everything, even cleaned out of those pissant .22 ball breech caps farmers used on crows.
Good thing I make my own ammo, his dad said that night after reeling back from Milt’s Rifle Ranch. He’d reeked of burnt gunpowder, hot brass, and God knew how many cans of Lone Star. I want to see anyone try something here. Just gimme an excuse.
His father wasn’t the only one itching for a fight. By Friday of that week, people started calling the day 9/11 . Like what you dialed for an honest-to-God, hair-on-fire emergency, and you needed an ambulance yesterday.
For these men and his dad—and for his brother—if there ever was a time to wake up and get into the fight, 9/11 was it.