Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Only a month or so before 9/11, during the trip to Glacier, his dad showed them Full Metal Jacket . His mother said it was too violent; his father, who was a Vietnam vet, said it was right on the money in a lot of ways. Like that Marine mantra: a rifle was only as good as its master, and a person who hadn’t mastered himself could not master a weapon.

His father allowed that he was good, but his brother, Darron, was on a whole different level. Dare was the kind of man the Army wanted in a Ranger: a patient man who could live by himself in the jungle, who knew how to be invisible. A man who knew his way around a sniper rifle and never lost his nerve.

No one could say, precisely, what Dare had done or how many VCs he killed. All anyone knew was that Dare was so good he survived, on his own, in the jungle after being cut off from his team for almost six months and, really, until the very end. In fact, the legend was that Dare was waiting for a clutch of VC to clear out the same day he happened to catch some radio chatter that the U.S. was throwing in the towel. Dare was at least two days away from an exfil site. With the VC in his way, that trip might take him even longer. Dare decided, heck with it; trying to sneak around these guys was going to be too hard. So, he pulled out a sawed-off M79, which fired big old grenades, and started blasting: whomp, whomp, whomp! Obliterated five guys right off the bat. By the time the remaining VCs recovered, Dare had already come blistering through their line and just kept on.

There never was a better hunter of men than Dare. He was like smoke. Kill a gook or a couple of gooks or a whole squad then let the darkness swallow him again. Your uncle was ice, his father said. Your uncle was stone.

The cabin Dare built was seven miles south of town and on the banks of Abby Lake near Medina Lake. Unlike Medina, a manmade reservoir on the river of the same name, Abby was natural. Medina’s water levels could drop, sometimes by as much as thirty or forty feet, but Abby Lake, fed by an underground aquifer and nestled between limestone cliffs, never did. Deep and cool, the lake was known to ice up enough in winter for a man to drill out a hole and drop a line. Everyone in town said Abby was good for largemouth bass and catfish. Even so, anglers stayed away from Dare’s side of the lake. Just...better all the way around.

Churning the pedals, he reached the cutoff for his uncle’s cabin in record time, dumped the bike, then stagger-stumbled the remaining half mile on a narrow path threaded with the exposed roots of live oak. Branches whipped at his arms and stung his cheeks, the woods’ greedy fingers stretching to grab and nip and tear and then, all of a sudden, the woods let go, and the forest pulled apart?—

And then there was Dare’s cabin, sheltered beneath the shade of a grove of mixed live oak and a few maples which had escaped the confines of the Sabinal and their Bigtooth cousins off yonder west at Lost Maples Park. The boy he had been pounded up the steps to the front porch and hammered on his uncle’s front door so hard, it was a miracle every single little bone in that hand didn’t shatter.

When his uncle opened up, he blurted, heedless of the tears streaking his cheeks, Teach me to shoot! Teach me to be a man to be like you!

Then he waited, his mouth tasting of dust and the sweat wicking away from his neck and face and back. This close to the lake and shaded by both trees and the cliffs, the air was cooler. A breeze set the hair on his arms to prickling, and he shivered.

His uncle was a tall, dark-eyed man, his body all angles and sinew and hard bone. He stared down at the boy for a long moment as a line of piano music, something soft and mournful, floated from somewhere deeper in the cabin. Then Dare said, Come on in, son.

The cabin’s front room smelled of wood smoke, wood sap, fried meat, fresh coffee, and worn leather. A pot-bellied stove squatted in a corner next to a hand-pump sink.

Make yourself at home. Just perked up a fresh pot . Dare wrapped a cloth around the handle of an old-fashioned percolator, the kind with a glass knob on the top . You want a cup?

He hated coffee. He drank coke. (Which didn’t have to be Coca-Cola. “Coke” was the word they used in Texas just as he later discovered that people in Wisconsin called any fizzy drink pop .) Real men didn’t drink coke. Men sat around on logs or barrels or crates or in front of campfires and jawed and cleaned their weapons and guzzled coffee from enameled mugs so hot you could scorch your fingers on the handle.

Anyway, he said, Yes, please, coffee.

While his uncle puttered, he plunked himself down in a worn leather chair, the kind a person could sink into and near about get lost. The music coming out of the record player was slow, low, a little sad. The jacket was an off-beige with an older black woman with an old-fashioned flip-do at a piano.

Mary Lou Williams. His uncle handed him an enameled blue mug with white speckles. Criminal the way no one knows about her. What that woman could do with just a bass and drums can make you cry. Now, then, his uncle said, settling himself into an old hand-carved rocker. He took a noisy slurp from his mug. Tell me what’s on your mind .

He tried a sip and near about boiled his tongue. The coffee was charry and so hot that when he finally swallowed, he felt the burn all the way down the center of his chest. I told you.

I heard what you said. Dare sucked in another swallow. But tell me again. Don’t leave anything out. Tell me everything.

So, he did. He talked about his dad, so angry all the time, especially after the trip to Glacier, and now so much worse. His brother. The two of them together, his brother and his father, stalking the house. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that his father loved his brother more. Saw his brother as almost a man and not like him at all.

That’s why I need to learn, he said. I need you to teach me how to be like you.

Dare said nothing. The recording had ended, and the speakers only hissed.

Pushing up from his rocker, Dare crossed to the record player. Son, he said, carefully plucking the vinyl disc from the turntable and slotting the record back into its cardboard sleeve, I can teach you to shoot. Any human alive can shoot. That’s the easy part. But learning to be me so that this—he bunched a fist over his heart— this is ice and stone, that’ll be different.

I don’t care . Teach me to be ice , he said, and for some crazy reason, he thought of Luke and old Obi-Wan Kenobi . Teach me to be stone.

He drank his coffee down then. The taste was of scorched earth. He didn’t care.

His one regret: not telling Dare what his parents had said late one night as he huddled on the stairs. What they talked about when they thought no one was listening

What they worried was happening to their son, even before 9/11.