himself and Ron. But he knew there was no way he could escape if Ron’s rage suddenly focused on him. Ron hovered over Eli for a few seconds and then spat in the dirt beside him. “Fucking losers,” he mumbled, and then stomped back to his truck, climbed in, and drove away.
Eli was balancing on his hands and knees when Eddie got to him. He was spitting blood into the sand, having taken a kick to the face in the midst of Ron’s fury. Eddie wasn’t sure what to do, so he just stood there, watching Eli struggle up to his feet. When he was finally standing, Eli touched his mouth with the pad of his hand, pulled it away, and glanced down at the blood, already drying in the heat.
“I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch,” was all he could think of to say.
XIII
If you asked most people in Nickelback, they would tell you Mickey O’Reilly was “about fifty” and they would be wrong. He was closer to sixty. But he was active and fit and rarely talked about himself—thereby giving nothing away about his background—all of which made him seem younger than he was. But as he slouched back into his office through the long evening shadows, he didn’t feel young. He reclined in the high-backed chair, threw his feet up on his desk, and rubbed his forehead. Since they found the body he’d been thinking about it. Images kept rising up from his past and Mickey couldn’t shake them no matter what he did.
There were other things to focus on, other things to do. They’d found the young man’s wallet in the backpack, which meant several things. First, it was easy to figure out the dead kid’s name: Sam Cannon. Second, it made it very unlikely that it was a robbery. Who would rob a guy and leave his wallet? Who would leave the backpack for that matter? The answers were obvious. It wasn’t robbery; it was murder. And that left the hardest questions of all: Who did it, and why?
But Mickey kept drifting away from those questions. Even as he called the sheriff’s department in Aurora, Colorado to inform them that he’d found one of the town’s residents beaten to death in the California desert, he was thinking of Vietnam, 1970, and an event he’d spent his entire life trying to forget. But the more he tried to shake it, the more he felt surrounded by it.
What was left of the sun threw black lines from the mini-blinds across the room like the bars of a cage and Mickey ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his chin, eyes darting at the file cabinet in the corner of the room. He knew he would look, so why not get it over with? Mickey got up, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the framed certificate and the flat blue box that went with it.
His mother had the certificate framed and sent to him after she found it in the bottom drawer of a dresser in the basement of the old house in Oxnard. He remembered her calling, I can’t believe you left this here. Why wouldn’t you want this? But she was remembering World War II, and her own childhood, and times when talk of war and honor and country and God were taken more seriously, seemed to have more meaning, were spoken without cynicism. They’d gotten in an argument about it and he hung up on her. Then he felt bad about hanging up on his mother, who was only trying to be nice, but who would never understand the way he felt about what had happened. The way a few long days, years before, had ruined him.
The next Christmas the certificate came in the mail, newly framed. That had been nearly twenty years ago and Mickey still wasn’t able to hang it up; he doubted he ever would. But some nights, when the scotch or the memories ran too thick in his blood, he would take it out and set it on his desk and read it through.
He hadn’t been drinking any scotch, but the memories were there. Mickey settled back in his chair with a sigh, set the citation on his lap, and opened the little box. He ran his fingers over the eagle perched atop the word “valor” and rubbed his thumb across the five-point star. The blue ribbon with the thirteen white stars on it was folded haphazardly, left untouched