Chavistas backed away from the brawl as the cops moved further into the crowd, batons flying. A few of the young men knelt and covered their heads for protection, and received hard hits to their backs before being kicked and cuffed. One guy fought back furiously, repeatedly bashing his fist into a cop’s helmet visor and kicking at his shins. He got a baton cracked across his jaw in response, and a long rope of blood and spittle splattered against the plaza’s black marble. The cop’s buddies joined in and they all laid into him.
A few policemen seemed interested in Brodie and Taylor, and Taylor pulled Brodie away from the brutal scene into a building on the square. It wasn’t until his eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight that he realized she’d brought him into a church.
It was a tall Romanesque cathedral with a large central nave containing rows of wooden pews and lined with arched colonnades on either side. A few people were sitting in the pews closest to the altar.
Taylor led him toward a side chapel. Behind a metal railing was a statue of the Virgin Mary on a gold-painted throne, with Baby Jesus sitting on her lap. There was a vase of yellow flowers on a table at her feet, and a rack of votive candles stood near the railing. About half of them were lit. Taylor approached the candles and looked for a tinder stick on the rack, but since this was a country with a shortage of everything, there were none, though a resourceful parishioner or priest had made a stack of tiny twigs that had probably been sourced from the plaza. Taylor lit one of them from an existing flame and lit another candle. She offered the burning twig to Brodie.
Brodie had been raised with no formal religious instruction, though he did recall many summer nights lying in the grass stargazing with his parents while Mom and Dad shared a funny-smelling cigarette and debated the existence of God. His grandparents on his father’s side were strict Lutherans, though they were also cruel and miserable, so religion didn’t seem to be doing much for them. And one time in college he’d gotten serious with a religious Jewish girl and openly entertained converting, but he had no religion to convert from, and he’d dropped the idea and the girl.
“Brodie?”
He took the burning twig and lit a candle, then joined Taylor at the railing. He closed his eyes and tried to quiet his mind, but the muffled sounds of violence outside found their way in.
Whom did he light the candle for? He wasn’t sure. Maybe for those people outside—the young guys venting their rage at the fate of their country. Or for the cops springing into action to preserve their dollar-a-day jobs. Maybe even for the people draped in red for their dead idol who, by all indications, was a charismatic con artist who’d promised heaven on earth and delivered hell.
Maybe he lit it for Andy Rucker, a squad-mate from his time in Iraq. Andy had been a reservist from a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. He was doing reserve duty as a part-time gig to help support his family, but he got called to active duty—like so many reservists and guardsmen at that time—as the war that was supposed to be over in six months stretched into years.
Andy wasn’t a warrior. He wasn’t there for a cause, or a thrill, or to take out his anger issues on some hadjis. He was as brave as he could possibly be, but at the end of the day he was a sensitive soul in the middle of a meat grinder. When they were in the thick of it and a mortar round landed near them, it shook Andy a little extra. And when their unit lost a guy, it took a little more out of him too.
Andy Rucker survived the war, but he brought it home with him. Brodie did too—they all did—but Brodie liked to think he’d left at least some of it behind in the desert. Andy did not.
Andy drank. Andy gambled. Andy called Brodie and other old Army buddies at all hours of the night from bars and bus stops and train stations along the eastern corridor, sometimes asking for money, sometimes for a ride. Sometimes he just needed someone to listen to him. They all tried to help, but Andy didn’t want help. Andy wanted to die.