PART TEN
There was smoke and the sound of the ocean. The choking gray veil consumed the landscape in all directions. He could barely see the dirt and the trampled brush beyond the tops of his boots, never mind the ghostly appearances of the soldiers nearby, an arm’s reach away at most. At the same time, the disconnected wash of a swiftly flowing tide over sand and crushed bits of coral echoed strangely in his ears. Gabriel Audaz blinked, a small, subtle effort to figure out if he was alive or dead.
He turned his head, letting it list slightly, wearily to his right. He breathed a startled gasp of the sultry smoke. There should have been a soldier there, an American peer in dirt-stained fatigues braced against the scorched and scarred remains of an old car. Instead, for the span of a haunting and heart-stopping second, Gabriel beheld the glowing, smiling face of his best friend Isabella.
Gabriel shifted backward with a start, trying to catch his breath. He was trying to keep himself from calling out her name. In the blink of an eye, she was gone. And then, Gabriel was reminded he was not dead, not yet. If he had been asleep, he wasn’t anymore. The ear-splitting crack of a bullet against the blackened metal skin of the useless automobile made Gabriel’s heart skip a beat. The lightning fast shell had struck the lifeless car, pummeling through the thick door where his chest had been less than a moment before.
The soldier closest to him turned around, feeling the vibrations traveling through the frame of the car. Another shot grazed past the back of his helmet, missing his head by a hair. There was a wordless exchange between the two young men. It was a look lasting only a second, a silent expression only soldiers can understand.
“They’re trying to outflank us,” the soldier yelled, overcoming the moment of terror that had brought his life within millimeters of its end. Without another word, the soldier raised his rifle, pumping the wind-stirred streams of thick smoke with a fresh round of quick, deafening bursts of white-hot gunfire. His shots were joined by a few others who pivoted around against their cover.
Gabriel watched motionlessly as a fierce, semi-blind storm of bullets was unleashed into the choking, gray curtain. He suddenly felt the warm metal of a rifle barrel under his sweaty, dirty fingertips. Gabriel turned his head sharply, looking down between himself and the slouched, barely-conscious form of the sergeant he had carried through the valley. He saw the older man’s hand subtly nudging the dust-covered weapon closer and away from himself. His tired eyes, unable to stay locked on Gabriel’s for more than a dizzy moment, told the young corporal to pick it up.
Gabriel nodded. The harsh, nerve-splitting rattle of the powerful rifle filled Gabriel’s senses before he even realized the gun was firmly in his hands and his finger was on the trigger. He was sitting upright, focusing past the sensation of the rifle’s butt recoiling mercilessly against his shoulder. His eyes stared down the scratched and scathed barrel, past the instant flashes of the muzzle flare. His aim was accurate but hardly precise. It was too difficult to pick a specific target. They were laying down a blanket, deterring the opportunity for their lives to be taken by those scurrying along the rising bluffs of the valley wall.
Gabriel could see, first, one and the another figure stagger and collapse beyond the distance and smoke. But where one fell or had turned and started retreating out of range, the corporal spotted another head pop up out of the sandy, bullet-riddled cover. One blurry, distant face stayed visible too long, their moment of reconnaissance costing their life. It was a long moment before Gabriel realized it was from his gun that fatal shot had sprung.
The next squeeze of the trigger brought nothing. The empty chamber clicked loudly. Only a thin, silver trail of smoke emerged from the searing mouth of the rifle. Out of instinct, Gabriel patted the pockets on the front of his uniform, searching for a fresh clip of ammunition. It only tool a second for him to remember he had none. His own spare magazines had been lost somewhere in the sandy brush and blood the previous night. Gabriel looked down at the semi-conscious sergeant. It took all of the wounded man’s strength to rotate his cold, heavy hand.
A new bevy of bullets sprayed through the air from behind the scorched car. The tortured metal rang out fiercely under the bloodthirsty maelstrom. Gabriel ducked down closer to the sergeant while he felt the soldier to his right drop fearfully back against the car door. A few of their peers grunted in pain, nearly not making it out of the changing fire line in time.
“This is crazy,” the soldier braced against the car and Gabriel’s shoulder shouted. “We’re not going to make it here! There’s just too many of them! We don’t have the ammo!”
A young private stumbled out of the smoke, only to fall face first into the dirt a few dozen yards away. Blood stains swelled on his flattened back. Gabriel and the other soldier stared in numbed shock. “Or the manpower,” the solider said gravely.
Gabriel felt a small tug on the cuff of his dirty sleeve. He turned his head, looking down toward the bloodstained fingers trying to tighten their grip about the dry and dusty hem of cloth. The sergeant was trying to pull his arm, trying to bring Gabriel closer. Gabriel leaned down. He felt the hot air of the older man’s strained and raspy voice against his ear. Gabriel couldn’t help that his skin felt like it was crawling around the sound of his scratchy, gravel-like words. It wasn’t the sergeant’s fault. He wasn’t trying to die. It was just happening.
Gabriel nodded his head when it seemed the words had stopped coming. He straightened his torso upright again before leaning toward his right and the soldier at his side. “Where’s the air support? Has anyone called it in?”
The soldier shook his head, “We cant’! The com links are down! Been that way since we jumped, I think! There was a guy with a radio...a corporal, I think. But, he went in with the first two squads!”
“Went in where?”
The soldier pointed to the left past Gabriel and the sergeant. “Into the village, before the bombers showed up and cut our lines!”
Gabriel’s eyes stared past the soldier’s stiff and outstretched arm. He gazed uneasily at the evidence of the earlier fighting, the source of the noise and echoes that had rolled down the valley. He imagined the scene of the brutal skirmish, spotting the bullet-dug holes in the village wall, sections of which were blackened or blown out altogether. “Any chance he’s still in there?”
The soldier shifted his gaze, peering at Gabriel for a moment as he considered the question. “There’s always a chance for anything! There’s a chance Santa Clause is in there, too! But, that doesn’t mean he is, or that he’s alive even if he were!”
Gabriel felt the sergeant tugging at his sleeve again. Gabriel leaned down and listened carefully, patiently, to the slow and whispered voice that dragged itself out of the wounded man’s parched throat. When the words stopped coming, Gabriel waited a moment to respond. He understood what the older man was saying, not just the words used but the context, the meaning suggested and implied.
Gabriel took a deep breath, finally nodding his head. “Even if the operator is alive or dead, the radio is still in there!”
“If it hasn’t been blasted into wall fragments or new bomb parts!” The soldier at Gabriel’s side shook his head. “That’s a big gamble, man!”
“The biggest,” Gabriel said flatly, looking only at the ground in front of him.
“Exactly! And one I haven’t been willing to roll the dice on. Not to risk what’s left of us out here making a mad dash for that gate!”
“I’ll do it.” The words were out of his mouth before he had fully thought it through, before Gabriel was even aware that he wanted to say it at all. Not that it mattered. What he wanted was of no consequence to what needed to be done.
“What,” the soldier asked, surprised. “You?”
“Yeah,” Gabriel said, looking up at the young man for the first time in several minutes. “Someone has to. So I’ll do it. I’ll go. I’ll find the operator...or his radio. And if our side’s is busted...well...they must have a way to communicate,” Gabriel said, gesturing toward the distant figures in the smoke and on the cliffs surrounding them beyond the car.
“Do you even know how to work a radio?”
Gabriel swallowed, staring into the dry and reddened eyes of the soldier next to him. “Vaguely,” Gabriel answered. “Enough to call for help, I think.”
The soldier shook his head in disbelief. “You’re crazy, man. Bat-snot crazy!”
Gabriel glanced down to his left. The sergeant nodded his head once, subtly. There was an air of approval, of respect about the dying man. It was like that of a father, quietly proud of his son. Gabriel smiled slightly, nodding his head in acknowledgement.
“I may be crazy, but it’s time to try something other than sit here and wait to die!”
Gabriel collected the last few clips of ammunition for the sergeant’s rifle out of the older man’s gear. The soldier watched, realizing there was no changing Gabriel’s mind. Suddenly, he didn’t want to change the corporal’s mind. The young soldier was feeling something wash through him as he gazed at Gabriel, preparing to march off into the face of death. It was a feeling that had been absent too long, missing for such a time he couldn’t know if he had ever truly felt it. It was such a simple and pure sensation. The soldier felt awake and alive again, rather than condemned to waiting for his turn to die. The soldier was feeling hope. He smiled, just a little and just for an instant.
“We’ll provide covering fire while you make your sprint to the wall,” the soldier said to Gabriel.
Gabriel nodded. “Don’t waste too much ammo. I can’t promise this will work. I can only promise I will try.”
The soldier nodded. “I know.”
Gabriel smiled warmly at him. He glanced down at the sergeant while the soldier began to spread the word to their peers taking cover nearby. The older man was nearly lost, his eyes no longer able to open past a thin sliver. His breathing was quick and pained, each breath more shallow than the last. Still, he was able to smile proudly, thankfully, at the corporal who had carried him over the rough terrain, who had never once given up on him.
“Okay, friend,” the soldier said, tapping on Gabriel’s shoulder. “We’ll fire when you’re ready.”
Gabriel took a deep breath, his eyes lifting from the sergeant to fix in on the blasted wall. He waited for only a moment. Then, without any more hesitation, he said, “Ready.”
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
II. "The Glorious Cause"
PART NINE
Carlos Columbus Audaz sighed into the thick glass of the passenger window. He was absently watching the cityscape of Los Angeles stretch past the luxury sedan as it made its way through the half-crowded streets. The endless rows of parked cars lining the curbsides of the cracked, neglected sidewalks were painted in the same unique colors of twilight as the concrete and glass buildings looming over the the wandering pedestrians. Carlos wasn’t that interested in the pastel bands of fading sunlight bouncing off the thin clouds and faint layer of haze casting subtle pink and mauve shadows up and down the city streets.
His mind was lost in the chaos of conflicting thoughts and emotions. The day had become far longer and frustrating than he had first realized. His body was drained of any real emotional energy. Now, Carlos just wanted to go home and sleep. Tomorrow would be a new day and this one would finally be over.
The din of the helicopter still rang in Carlos’ ears almost as loudly as anything else. The gusts of hot wind spraying the stinging dust stirred by the rotors spinning in a blur above the black and blue-painted aircraft had hit Carlos like an invisible wall. He had squinted into the mild, bitter smelling air. There were others gathered at a decidedly safe distance form the vehicle, forming a crescent of curious onlookers. They all stood stiffly, bracing against the torrent of air expelled away from the helicopter coming to rest in the freshly manicured grass. Mr. Simon was already there. Douglass Stoll stood closely in tow, never far from the face of his political bosses.
The rotors slowed closer to a stop, each blade becoming perceptible, when the passenger doors swung swiftly open. A man inside, tall and lean like a spry athlete in his prime was smiling jovially at another man sitting opposite him. The star of the film patted his smaller, stockier traveling companion merrily on the shoulder. Carlos watched every movement without breaking his gaze. He took a sharp breath, inaudible under the gradually quieting whine of the idling engine. He was hardly alone in the gesture.
It was the way the leading man carried himself, his poise and effortless grace when he stepped out of the helicopter’s cabin. It was the sharp lines of his broad shoulders and trim torso. It was the way he wore his clothes, as if every stitch was naturally made to compliment his frame and the motion carrying him forward. Most of all, it was his remarkable likeness to the President of the United States.
“I’m only here for a few days,” Markus L. Tay said a short time later. His eyes took in the other men at the wide, circular table at the back of the overpriced cafe. “There are some things we’re finishing up. And then, I’ll be back and we can really get this movie going!”
Carlos would swear he felt his jaw crack against the table. He blinked, trying to hide the gawking stare of shocked awe he knew riddled his face. He quickly peered sidelong at Alex who only rolled his eyes.
Doulgass Stoll cleared his throat, simultaneously trying to sit up on his side of the semi-circular, crimson, leather booth. He, too, was trying to hide the surprise and flicker of frustration that appeared in his own features. The studio chief was not being as subtle as he assumed he was. “Umm...well...”
“This is Presidential business, I’m guessing,” asked Mr. Simon before Douglass Stoll could finish his stuttering thought.
Marcus L. Tay nodded his head and smiled brightly. “Yes, it is. He invited me back personally.”
“Of course he did,” Mr. Simon said with a pleased and knowing smile.
The whole exchange was making no sense to Carlos. He felt far on the outside of a play he’d just sat down to watch but was already halfway through.
“It shouldn’t be a problem. Right, Mr. Stoll,” Mr. Simon asked, his calm voice rising above the table. There was a relaxed brightness in his voice, a kind of polite merriment. At the same time, there was no denying the subtly of the threatening undertone that rang faintly but clearly in his words.
Douglass Stoll barely regarded Carlos before he spoke. He mostly looked down at the table and his nearly empty glass on the polished surface. “No! It, umm....shouldn’t be a problem at all. I think it will work out.” Douglass Stoll lifted his gaze toward the others at the table. He was a little taken aback by the way Mr. Simon was quietly staring at him, the man’s eery grin unflinching between his smooth cheeks.
“In fact,” Douglass continued, “I’m absolutely sure it will.”
Mr. Simon nodded his head excitedly. “Excellent!”
“The President knows there’s work to be done here,” Markus said, jumping back into the conversation.
“The President doesn’t know the meaning of the word work,” mumbled Alex, staring off into space. His eyes were locked on the table, yet he could still sense the hot glares now focused on him like police searchlights.
Mr. Simon waited to speak until Alex had lifted his gaze away from the varnished grains of the rich wood of the table. “I’m sorry, my friend. I don’t think I heard you quite right. What was it you just said about our President?”
Douglass Stoll was still glaring at him. Alex spotted the beads of sweat on his expansive forehead glistening like grains of find sand on a deserted beach somewhere. “Mr. Vale is obviously frustrated and just in the wrong frame of mind today. I’m sure he didn’t mean that,” said Mr. Stoll encouragingly.
Alex furrowed his brow. He was hoping Carlos might jump to his defense by proffering his own frustrations at the announced delay, this one coming on the heels of so many before it. The entire movie was now a full month behind schedule because of one man. Alex’s eyes shifted for a moment to peer at Markus L. Tay. Well, Alex thought to himself, two men really.
“Mr. Vale’s frame of mind is just fine,” Alex said evenly, though his words were sharp. “I am simply finding this entire discourse, not only confusing, but alarming. And I think it sucks that between the studio chief overseeing this project and the director in charge of it, I’m the only one raising the obvious concern!”
Markus shifted in his seat, trying to sit up straighter. He turned his body slightly in an effort to address Alex directly. Alex noticed how the actor was trying to wear the look of a role and a figure he had no real grasp on. The charm in his college-boy face and eyes that couldn’t seem to stay centered on one thing for more than an instant was lost on the dispirited writer. Here was the professor’s pet repeating the words and phrases read to him like a parent reading slowly to a young child.
“The President cares very much for this project. He understands your concerns. That’s part of the reason I’m here,” said the Presidential performer, smiling warmly. To him, Alex knew, this was all true. This script was holy. Whatever honesty in the President’s words may or may not exist, Alex could see the glimmer of genuine earnestness shining from Markus’ heart through his eyes.
“I have to go back and tell him what everyone is thinking. He wants to know how he can better help the project,” Marcus continued. “Everyone there does.”
Mr. Simon sipped casually on his cold iced-tea. He was savoring the taste, the flavor of each drop rolling over his tongue and smoothly down his wet throat. Good tea, real tea, was already so expensive. The rich smell of the leaves that had been soaking someplace out of sight was worth hesitating to admire and remember. Mr. Simon liked the restaurant they had chosen to dine in. He was going to have to remember it. He swallowed another sip, then quickly added, “Not to mention your research.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. That’s taking up a lot of time as well. And the President knows the production is taking a bit of a shellacking because of my being in Washington.
Alex narrowed his eyes. “A shellacking?”
Markus looked at Alex again, confused. The term seemed so natural to his ears and mind. Everyone at the White House seemed so used to the word, Markus assumed everyone else was using it as well. “Yeah. Look, Mr. Vale, the majority of the movie’s budget is coming from the government. Everyone involved-the crew, the other actors, even yourself-is getting paid no matter what.”
“How is that a valid argument?” Alex turned his head suddenly to his right. His look was piercing and fiery as it took in the silent form of his friend and boss. “And why aren’t you saying anything?”
Carlos gestured dumbfoundedly. He had no idea what to say or what to do. Internally, he was lost in the mire of a fierce war of conscience. There was no denying the logic, artistic passion, and integrity of Alex Vale. Simultaneously, Carlos knew what they were facing. He understood the power staring them down from across the appetizer-laden table.
“Alex, maybe we could enjoy the rest of our lunch and finish this discussion back at the office,” Douglass Stoll said calmly, though it wasn’t as much of a request as it was a superior giving an employee an order.
“No, Mr. Stoll. That won’t be necessary. I’ll excuse myself now so you gentlemen can continue having your pleasant lunch and bilking of the American public.” Alex stood up with anger in each motion of his body. “Besides, there is nothing different I would say or feel later that is different from this moment.”
Markus looked hurt the most out of the four men still seated in the crescent-shaped booth. “No, hey...”
Alex held up his hand. “Sorry, man. I’ve lost my stomach for any more of this.”
Carlos watched his best friend walk with fiery haste toward the front of the quiet restaurant. When he was out of sight, his eyes drifted back to the table to meet the varying gazes waiting for him. Markus L. Tay seemed concerned. His light, hazel eyes angled slightly down as he sat disappointed at the turn of events. Douglass Stoll was slightly slouched, a figure of conflicting fear and embarrassed frustration whose chest was rising and sinking with quickened, shallowing breaths. Mr. Simon seemed unmoved. Perhaps he had been waiting for one of them to break all along.
Carlos remained silent. His thoughts were tangled and spinning madly. He had no idea what to say. He feared he would only make things worse. A part of him wanted to do just that. A part of him wanted to join Alex, to completely disrupt the growing travesty before the wretched tentacles of faraway bureaucrats completely strangled the life out of the film. Yet, he hadn’t moved. Carlos was still sitting in the posh, maroon, leather booth.
Mr. Simon had noticed this very fact. “Is this going to be a problem?”
Douglass Stoll and Carlos Columbus Audaz exchanged uneasy stares. They were both conflicted, but one had already long ago sold out his soul. His principles were hollow words he kept in a frame in a room somewhere in his house. The other felt the slope getting slick under his feet. He could feel the gravity at the table and considered how long it would take before he could no longer pull himself free.
Douglass Stoll answered Mr. Simon’s question. “No. It won’t be a problem. Everything is good.”
Mr. Simon smiled. “Excellent,” he said then took another small, savoring sip of his iced tea. He absolutely loved the flavor of it. Life was so good right then, he couldn’t help but smile a little more.
Carlos Columbus Audaz sighed into the thick glass of the passenger window. He was absently watching the cityscape of Los Angeles stretch past the luxury sedan as it made its way through the half-crowded streets. The endless rows of parked cars lining the curbsides of the cracked, neglected sidewalks were painted in the same unique colors of twilight as the concrete and glass buildings looming over the the wandering pedestrians. Carlos wasn’t that interested in the pastel bands of fading sunlight bouncing off the thin clouds and faint layer of haze casting subtle pink and mauve shadows up and down the city streets.
His mind was lost in the chaos of conflicting thoughts and emotions. The day had become far longer and frustrating than he had first realized. His body was drained of any real emotional energy. Now, Carlos just wanted to go home and sleep. Tomorrow would be a new day and this one would finally be over.
The din of the helicopter still rang in Carlos’ ears almost as loudly as anything else. The gusts of hot wind spraying the stinging dust stirred by the rotors spinning in a blur above the black and blue-painted aircraft had hit Carlos like an invisible wall. He had squinted into the mild, bitter smelling air. There were others gathered at a decidedly safe distance form the vehicle, forming a crescent of curious onlookers. They all stood stiffly, bracing against the torrent of air expelled away from the helicopter coming to rest in the freshly manicured grass. Mr. Simon was already there. Douglass Stoll stood closely in tow, never far from the face of his political bosses.
The rotors slowed closer to a stop, each blade becoming perceptible, when the passenger doors swung swiftly open. A man inside, tall and lean like a spry athlete in his prime was smiling jovially at another man sitting opposite him. The star of the film patted his smaller, stockier traveling companion merrily on the shoulder. Carlos watched every movement without breaking his gaze. He took a sharp breath, inaudible under the gradually quieting whine of the idling engine. He was hardly alone in the gesture.
It was the way the leading man carried himself, his poise and effortless grace when he stepped out of the helicopter’s cabin. It was the sharp lines of his broad shoulders and trim torso. It was the way he wore his clothes, as if every stitch was naturally made to compliment his frame and the motion carrying him forward. Most of all, it was his remarkable likeness to the President of the United States.
“I’m only here for a few days,” Markus L. Tay said a short time later. His eyes took in the other men at the wide, circular table at the back of the overpriced cafe. “There are some things we’re finishing up. And then, I’ll be back and we can really get this movie going!”
Carlos would swear he felt his jaw crack against the table. He blinked, trying to hide the gawking stare of shocked awe he knew riddled his face. He quickly peered sidelong at Alex who only rolled his eyes.
Doulgass Stoll cleared his throat, simultaneously trying to sit up on his side of the semi-circular, crimson, leather booth. He, too, was trying to hide the surprise and flicker of frustration that appeared in his own features. The studio chief was not being as subtle as he assumed he was. “Umm...well...”
“This is Presidential business, I’m guessing,” asked Mr. Simon before Douglass Stoll could finish his stuttering thought.
Marcus L. Tay nodded his head and smiled brightly. “Yes, it is. He invited me back personally.”
“Of course he did,” Mr. Simon said with a pleased and knowing smile.
The whole exchange was making no sense to Carlos. He felt far on the outside of a play he’d just sat down to watch but was already halfway through.
“It shouldn’t be a problem. Right, Mr. Stoll,” Mr. Simon asked, his calm voice rising above the table. There was a relaxed brightness in his voice, a kind of polite merriment. At the same time, there was no denying the subtly of the threatening undertone that rang faintly but clearly in his words.
Douglass Stoll barely regarded Carlos before he spoke. He mostly looked down at the table and his nearly empty glass on the polished surface. “No! It, umm....shouldn’t be a problem at all. I think it will work out.” Douglass Stoll lifted his gaze toward the others at the table. He was a little taken aback by the way Mr. Simon was quietly staring at him, the man’s eery grin unflinching between his smooth cheeks.
“In fact,” Douglass continued, “I’m absolutely sure it will.”
Mr. Simon nodded his head excitedly. “Excellent!”
“The President knows there’s work to be done here,” Markus said, jumping back into the conversation.
“The President doesn’t know the meaning of the word work,” mumbled Alex, staring off into space. His eyes were locked on the table, yet he could still sense the hot glares now focused on him like police searchlights.
Mr. Simon waited to speak until Alex had lifted his gaze away from the varnished grains of the rich wood of the table. “I’m sorry, my friend. I don’t think I heard you quite right. What was it you just said about our President?”
Douglass Stoll was still glaring at him. Alex spotted the beads of sweat on his expansive forehead glistening like grains of find sand on a deserted beach somewhere. “Mr. Vale is obviously frustrated and just in the wrong frame of mind today. I’m sure he didn’t mean that,” said Mr. Stoll encouragingly.
Alex furrowed his brow. He was hoping Carlos might jump to his defense by proffering his own frustrations at the announced delay, this one coming on the heels of so many before it. The entire movie was now a full month behind schedule because of one man. Alex’s eyes shifted for a moment to peer at Markus L. Tay. Well, Alex thought to himself, two men really.
“Mr. Vale’s frame of mind is just fine,” Alex said evenly, though his words were sharp. “I am simply finding this entire discourse, not only confusing, but alarming. And I think it sucks that between the studio chief overseeing this project and the director in charge of it, I’m the only one raising the obvious concern!”
Markus shifted in his seat, trying to sit up straighter. He turned his body slightly in an effort to address Alex directly. Alex noticed how the actor was trying to wear the look of a role and a figure he had no real grasp on. The charm in his college-boy face and eyes that couldn’t seem to stay centered on one thing for more than an instant was lost on the dispirited writer. Here was the professor’s pet repeating the words and phrases read to him like a parent reading slowly to a young child.
“The President cares very much for this project. He understands your concerns. That’s part of the reason I’m here,” said the Presidential performer, smiling warmly. To him, Alex knew, this was all true. This script was holy. Whatever honesty in the President’s words may or may not exist, Alex could see the glimmer of genuine earnestness shining from Markus’ heart through his eyes.
“I have to go back and tell him what everyone is thinking. He wants to know how he can better help the project,” Marcus continued. “Everyone there does.”
Mr. Simon sipped casually on his cold iced-tea. He was savoring the taste, the flavor of each drop rolling over his tongue and smoothly down his wet throat. Good tea, real tea, was already so expensive. The rich smell of the leaves that had been soaking someplace out of sight was worth hesitating to admire and remember. Mr. Simon liked the restaurant they had chosen to dine in. He was going to have to remember it. He swallowed another sip, then quickly added, “Not to mention your research.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. That’s taking up a lot of time as well. And the President knows the production is taking a bit of a shellacking because of my being in Washington.
Alex narrowed his eyes. “A shellacking?”
Markus looked at Alex again, confused. The term seemed so natural to his ears and mind. Everyone at the White House seemed so used to the word, Markus assumed everyone else was using it as well. “Yeah. Look, Mr. Vale, the majority of the movie’s budget is coming from the government. Everyone involved-the crew, the other actors, even yourself-is getting paid no matter what.”
“How is that a valid argument?” Alex turned his head suddenly to his right. His look was piercing and fiery as it took in the silent form of his friend and boss. “And why aren’t you saying anything?”
Carlos gestured dumbfoundedly. He had no idea what to say or what to do. Internally, he was lost in the mire of a fierce war of conscience. There was no denying the logic, artistic passion, and integrity of Alex Vale. Simultaneously, Carlos knew what they were facing. He understood the power staring them down from across the appetizer-laden table.
“Alex, maybe we could enjoy the rest of our lunch and finish this discussion back at the office,” Douglass Stoll said calmly, though it wasn’t as much of a request as it was a superior giving an employee an order.
“No, Mr. Stoll. That won’t be necessary. I’ll excuse myself now so you gentlemen can continue having your pleasant lunch and bilking of the American public.” Alex stood up with anger in each motion of his body. “Besides, there is nothing different I would say or feel later that is different from this moment.”
Markus looked hurt the most out of the four men still seated in the crescent-shaped booth. “No, hey...”
Alex held up his hand. “Sorry, man. I’ve lost my stomach for any more of this.”
Carlos watched his best friend walk with fiery haste toward the front of the quiet restaurant. When he was out of sight, his eyes drifted back to the table to meet the varying gazes waiting for him. Markus L. Tay seemed concerned. His light, hazel eyes angled slightly down as he sat disappointed at the turn of events. Douglass Stoll was slightly slouched, a figure of conflicting fear and embarrassed frustration whose chest was rising and sinking with quickened, shallowing breaths. Mr. Simon seemed unmoved. Perhaps he had been waiting for one of them to break all along.
Carlos remained silent. His thoughts were tangled and spinning madly. He had no idea what to say. He feared he would only make things worse. A part of him wanted to do just that. A part of him wanted to join Alex, to completely disrupt the growing travesty before the wretched tentacles of faraway bureaucrats completely strangled the life out of the film. Yet, he hadn’t moved. Carlos was still sitting in the posh, maroon, leather booth.
Mr. Simon had noticed this very fact. “Is this going to be a problem?”
Douglass Stoll and Carlos Columbus Audaz exchanged uneasy stares. They were both conflicted, but one had already long ago sold out his soul. His principles were hollow words he kept in a frame in a room somewhere in his house. The other felt the slope getting slick under his feet. He could feel the gravity at the table and considered how long it would take before he could no longer pull himself free.
Douglass Stoll answered Mr. Simon’s question. “No. It won’t be a problem. Everything is good.”
Mr. Simon smiled. “Excellent,” he said then took another small, savoring sip of his iced tea. He absolutely loved the flavor of it. Life was so good right then, he couldn’t help but smile a little more.
Monday, July 4, 2011
II. "The Glorious Cause"
PART EIGHT
Gabriel Audaz winced as more sweat fell into his eyes. It was a fierce and bitter sensation he could not stop. The salty perspiration dripped off the loose strands of his black hair and down his face in endless rivulets. He couldn’t wipe it away. The half-limp body of the wounded sergeant was tightly encircled by Gabriel’s left arm, urging him along the uneven terrain. Gabriel’s right arm was trying to keep the man from slouching forward, his had pressed tightly against the older man’s wounded side.
The morning was already warming up, hinting without subtlety at the blistering day that was making its arrival. The valley walls bounced with the echoes of a battle somewhere ahead. They could hear the rattle of machine guns, muffled by the rocks and dirt consuming the distance between themselves and the source of the violence. There wasn’t much of that distance left. The stench of smoke was drifting down the valley. It was all Gabriel could smell.
He brought their lumbering pace to a stop. The bedrock under his tired feet trembled with the boom of a heavy blast that was more like fading thunder by the time he could hear it. His ears perked at the sound of shifting pebbles, dislodged by the traveling vibrations. Gabriel’s eyes shifted and scanned in every direction he could turn his head. He spotted the smoke, thick and gray, as it climbed over a rise less than a mile away.
“Tread carefully, Corporal,” mumbled the sergeant in Gabriel’s arms.
Gabriel regarded him briefly. He nodded once, “Yes, sir.”
They didn’t speak anymore as Gabriel carried them up the valley. Gabriel blinked away more sweat as his eyes searched left and right, watching for anything out of the ordinary. He had to smirk at that thought. I should be looking for anything, he told himself. We’re the one’s out of the ordinary. What really is ordinary in this place, anyway?
Gabriel suddenly stopped. Gray tendrils of hazy smoke curling and snaking in faint breezes began to lazily stretch around them. His gaze was transfixed on a sight beyond the bitter fog. It took a long moment for the sergeant to realize they had stopped. He shifted, dragging his mind out of the semi-conscious state he kept falling into. “What is it?”
Gabriel gestured with his chin in the direction of a nearby slope. Several tattered parachutes were strewn across the dry mountainside, their fabric frayed by the nighttime gunfire and stained red by the blood of their owners. A few bodies remained amongst tangled canopies and the brush. Gabriel looked away, breathing heavier.
“Oh,” the sergeant said, wearily taking in the scene. “Pray for them if you like, Corporal. But do it in your head and let’s keep moving. If we stand here too long, we’ll end up next to them.”
Gabriel blinked. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said distantly.
Gabriel quickly readjusted the sergeant’s weight against his body, then started forward on the littered trail. The tide of of battle had violently swept through the area. Bullet shells glistened in the sunlight between the sinewy shadows cast by the thickening haze. Blood, still damp in places, dotted the dirt under their feet. The small trees and spiny bushes bore the brunt of the upheaval. Snapped twigs and fiercely broken branches with ends in jagged splinters stretched across the valley. The light of a fire caught Gabriel’s attention, visible at first in the corner of his eye. Within a few paces, he was able to look down a shallow gulch leading off to the left from the rough trail they journied along. One of the Ospreys lay in a smoldering heap of charred, smoldering wreckage, its parts strewn along the blackened, scarred walls.
A torrent of gun fire echoed down the valley. Gabriel’s breath caught in his throat. He had glanced away from the sight of the crashed plane for just an instant, distracted by the crack and rattle of dueling rifles. When he finally looked back toward the wreckage, Gabriel’s eyes locked onto the silhouetted figures scurrying past the glowing debris. He squinted, spying signs of weapons in their hands. He noted their direction, aware it was the same as his. Gabriel stared ahead at the column of smoke climbing into the sunlit sky. With each lumbering step, the choking mass crew thicker and disconcertingly closer.
“Do you want to pray with me,” a distant voice asked, echoing in Gabriel’s mind.
With few exceptions, everything seemed to happen all at once in Gabriel’s life. He understood that his sexuality was something that had always existed within him, and its development was something naturally incremental. But his realization of it seemed to have come on suddenly in his memory. The ongoing conflict that ensued within himself he remembered being just as sudden and dramatic in its appearance. His fixation on becoming a soldier and a leader seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. He had found a picture of his grandfather one day. At the same time, he had begun reading about George Washington. Gabriel recalled an instant desire to follow in the footsteps of the two inspiring men. His mother had not spoken of the near-stranger in the wrinkled, faded photograph. It wasn’t until she realized her son would not be shaken from his decision that she opened up about the army captain his father had named him after.
And now, all at once, those skills he had read about and imagined emulating, then began to learn and comprehend as something tangible in basic training, were being put to the test. Gabriel, with the wounded sergeant on his arms, had just rounded another bend in the cold, dry valley where more burned and broken plane parts littered the dusty landscape when the hell he knew was coming opened up. The hazy streamers of smoke had begun to swell into lung-rasping patches that rolled above the ground. It partially obscured the dispiriting field of lifeless bodies sparsely strewn over the blood and bullet-riddled sand.
Gabriel was trying not to focus on them. He was trying not to spot the American flag patches on the shoulders, or the haunting gazes of their open eyes. He had to lead himself and the sergeant around more than a few laying in their path. Gabriel knew his mind had to stay sharp. He had to keep himself aware, his senses up and alert in the bitter smoke polluting his field of vision.
“I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life,” Gabriel heard his own voice echoing back to him from the recent past. “...with you, with everyone...with God especially. Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die-”
NO, Gabriel shouted to himself. He was losing his focus, his grip on the present slipping again. He felt his heart racing in his chest. A shot rang out somewhere. It was close, the quick blast of firepower a single, deafening pop in the smokey air. Gabriel stumbled over something. He wanted it to be a rock, but he knew that it wasn’t. He couldn’t stop himself from yelping in surprise and fear.
“I’m so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am.”
At the same moment his thoughts began slinking back into that memory on the beach, another shot tore through the gray veil of smoke. Dirt was erupting into the air before the crack of hot noise had filled the valley. The bullet had missed the two soldiers struggling across the terrain by less than half a dozen feet.
Gabriel turned his head in the direction he thought the shell had been fired from. Through the thinning curtain of smoke, he spotted the handful of figures gathering hurriedly together. One already had his rifle raised and sighted. The others flanking him were following suit. Dark muzzles at the end of paint-chipped barrels exploded with light and noise. Bullets buzzed with white-hot speed as they hit the dirt at Gabriel’s heels. There was nothing he could do but run. With the sergeant braced against him, there was no way Gabriel could return fire, even blindly. He tried to zigzag unpredictably, sidestepping the close shots getting closer and simultaneously avoiding tripping over the mounds under the smoke, the bodies of his fellow soldiers already fallen.
More shots broke through the wafting pockets of smoke, tearing through the air across the valley. The noisy barrage of deadly shells angrily peppered the sandy floor in every direction around the fleeing, breathless corporal carrying the half-awake sergeant. Gabriel didn’t know how long he could last. The rifle fire was coming on without stop, a rapid hail storm of lethal and furious tenacity. Words he didn’t understand were shouted somewhere close through the smoke and over the gun fire. Gabriel’s ears perked at the sound of the wind changing slightly for just an instant. It was like the smokey air was wrapping around and then bouncing off of something in the same instant. He caught a glimpse of what was unmistakably a grenade. It spit out of a rolling waft of smoke, sailing over his head but not far enough to make him feel better.
The palm-sized bomb shaped slightly like an egg exploded in the dirt behind and to Gabriel’s right. Tiny pebbles became molten shards that sprayed across his back and neck. Gabriel gritted his teeth. He felt the bloody sting of the shrapnel digging into his calves. He was luck and knew it. With a deep breath of the choking air, Gabriel pushed himself, with the weight of the sergeant against him, forward. The wind shifted once again. It was the sound of more grenades tossed without aim into the sultry mist. A deafening fissure of smoke, dirt and debris exploded loudly to Gabriel’s left and then ahead and to his right. One more grenade detonated behind him, the valley floor tearing open in Gabriel’s wake by mere seconds.
His ears were ringing like mad, the earth-shuddering thuds of each little bomb burst causing his ear drums to send a shrill cry reverberating deep into his skull. Gabriel wanted to scream but didn’t want to waste the breath. He could barely hear the heavy pounding of his racing heart. There should have been no way he heard the figure suddenly come forward out of the smoke, closing the distance that had separated them in the valley. Even with his heart furiously pumping fresh blood into his straining, bleeding legs, there should have been no way Gabriel had the strength or agility left to get away. The odds were stacked against him. And yet, Gabriel’s path through the valley stayed true.
In the thickening, burning haze he saw the shadow move across the drifting veil a mere second before the figure appeared. He had seen the old Russian assault rifle raise in a hurried instant before the nameless shape of the enemy squeezed the the dinged and paintless trigger. The warm, late morning air brushed against Gabriel’s face as he surged forward a single, panicked step. It wasn’t much. But, it was just enough. The bullet already leaping out of the aged barrel skimmed the smokey air where Gabriel and the sergeant should have been. Instead, it sliced like a razor through fabric alone instead of flesh. Gabriel still felt the blistering heat radiating off the slender, little body as it sailed millimeters above his skin.
His hurried push out of the bullet’s path made his next step unbalanced. Gabriel stumbled unstoppably, his body, along with the sergeant’s, falling forward into the sloping landscape. A fireworks display of gunfire illuminated the gray vapor around them. Gabriel squinted at the maddening din consuming the mountain air. The enemy soldier behind them stiffened, his heart stopping as a steady shot ripped into his chest and then through his back.
Gabriel didn’t watch the bearded man fall backwards into the dirt. There was no time to lay low and watch the scene play out around them. Gabriel peered ahead, spotting a handful of soldiers in uniforms matching his own. He spotted the raging fires of exploded vehicles expelling the thick columns of smoke into the hauntingly colored sky, partially lost somewhere above him. They had finally arrived at the heart of the bloody battle that had developed across the length of the valley.
“...I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am...” Gabriel heard his memory echoing in his mind once more as he rose carefully to his knees. The flesh on the backs of his legs burned in that simple movement. He wanted to cry out from the pain that doubled in intensity as he began to drag the sergeant closer to their fellow infantry men. “...Before I can finally put my demons to rest.”
As Gabriel used all of his strength to pull the wounded sergeant across the stirred sands coated with a mire of muddy crimson and ash and pitted by the rock-jarring explosions, he couldn’t help but recall Isabella that night on the beach. Even as violent gun fire was exchanged in noisy streams racing past him, Gabriel remembered the feeling of being in the warm embrace of his best friend on that late, windy evening. It gave him something else to focus on as he closed the painful distance toward the infantry. The bursts of their rifles were like beacons home in the raging storm of death in the darkening valley.
“Do you want to pray with me,” Isabella had asked.
Gabriel nodded, “Yes.”
Gabriel Audaz winced as more sweat fell into his eyes. It was a fierce and bitter sensation he could not stop. The salty perspiration dripped off the loose strands of his black hair and down his face in endless rivulets. He couldn’t wipe it away. The half-limp body of the wounded sergeant was tightly encircled by Gabriel’s left arm, urging him along the uneven terrain. Gabriel’s right arm was trying to keep the man from slouching forward, his had pressed tightly against the older man’s wounded side.
The morning was already warming up, hinting without subtlety at the blistering day that was making its arrival. The valley walls bounced with the echoes of a battle somewhere ahead. They could hear the rattle of machine guns, muffled by the rocks and dirt consuming the distance between themselves and the source of the violence. There wasn’t much of that distance left. The stench of smoke was drifting down the valley. It was all Gabriel could smell.
He brought their lumbering pace to a stop. The bedrock under his tired feet trembled with the boom of a heavy blast that was more like fading thunder by the time he could hear it. His ears perked at the sound of shifting pebbles, dislodged by the traveling vibrations. Gabriel’s eyes shifted and scanned in every direction he could turn his head. He spotted the smoke, thick and gray, as it climbed over a rise less than a mile away.
“Tread carefully, Corporal,” mumbled the sergeant in Gabriel’s arms.
Gabriel regarded him briefly. He nodded once, “Yes, sir.”
They didn’t speak anymore as Gabriel carried them up the valley. Gabriel blinked away more sweat as his eyes searched left and right, watching for anything out of the ordinary. He had to smirk at that thought. I should be looking for anything, he told himself. We’re the one’s out of the ordinary. What really is ordinary in this place, anyway?
Gabriel suddenly stopped. Gray tendrils of hazy smoke curling and snaking in faint breezes began to lazily stretch around them. His gaze was transfixed on a sight beyond the bitter fog. It took a long moment for the sergeant to realize they had stopped. He shifted, dragging his mind out of the semi-conscious state he kept falling into. “What is it?”
Gabriel gestured with his chin in the direction of a nearby slope. Several tattered parachutes were strewn across the dry mountainside, their fabric frayed by the nighttime gunfire and stained red by the blood of their owners. A few bodies remained amongst tangled canopies and the brush. Gabriel looked away, breathing heavier.
“Oh,” the sergeant said, wearily taking in the scene. “Pray for them if you like, Corporal. But do it in your head and let’s keep moving. If we stand here too long, we’ll end up next to them.”
Gabriel blinked. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said distantly.
Gabriel quickly readjusted the sergeant’s weight against his body, then started forward on the littered trail. The tide of of battle had violently swept through the area. Bullet shells glistened in the sunlight between the sinewy shadows cast by the thickening haze. Blood, still damp in places, dotted the dirt under their feet. The small trees and spiny bushes bore the brunt of the upheaval. Snapped twigs and fiercely broken branches with ends in jagged splinters stretched across the valley. The light of a fire caught Gabriel’s attention, visible at first in the corner of his eye. Within a few paces, he was able to look down a shallow gulch leading off to the left from the rough trail they journied along. One of the Ospreys lay in a smoldering heap of charred, smoldering wreckage, its parts strewn along the blackened, scarred walls.
A torrent of gun fire echoed down the valley. Gabriel’s breath caught in his throat. He had glanced away from the sight of the crashed plane for just an instant, distracted by the crack and rattle of dueling rifles. When he finally looked back toward the wreckage, Gabriel’s eyes locked onto the silhouetted figures scurrying past the glowing debris. He squinted, spying signs of weapons in their hands. He noted their direction, aware it was the same as his. Gabriel stared ahead at the column of smoke climbing into the sunlit sky. With each lumbering step, the choking mass crew thicker and disconcertingly closer.
“Do you want to pray with me,” a distant voice asked, echoing in Gabriel’s mind.
With few exceptions, everything seemed to happen all at once in Gabriel’s life. He understood that his sexuality was something that had always existed within him, and its development was something naturally incremental. But his realization of it seemed to have come on suddenly in his memory. The ongoing conflict that ensued within himself he remembered being just as sudden and dramatic in its appearance. His fixation on becoming a soldier and a leader seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. He had found a picture of his grandfather one day. At the same time, he had begun reading about George Washington. Gabriel recalled an instant desire to follow in the footsteps of the two inspiring men. His mother had not spoken of the near-stranger in the wrinkled, faded photograph. It wasn’t until she realized her son would not be shaken from his decision that she opened up about the army captain his father had named him after.
And now, all at once, those skills he had read about and imagined emulating, then began to learn and comprehend as something tangible in basic training, were being put to the test. Gabriel, with the wounded sergeant on his arms, had just rounded another bend in the cold, dry valley where more burned and broken plane parts littered the dusty landscape when the hell he knew was coming opened up. The hazy streamers of smoke had begun to swell into lung-rasping patches that rolled above the ground. It partially obscured the dispiriting field of lifeless bodies sparsely strewn over the blood and bullet-riddled sand.
Gabriel was trying not to focus on them. He was trying not to spot the American flag patches on the shoulders, or the haunting gazes of their open eyes. He had to lead himself and the sergeant around more than a few laying in their path. Gabriel knew his mind had to stay sharp. He had to keep himself aware, his senses up and alert in the bitter smoke polluting his field of vision.
“I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life,” Gabriel heard his own voice echoing back to him from the recent past. “...with you, with everyone...with God especially. Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die-”
NO, Gabriel shouted to himself. He was losing his focus, his grip on the present slipping again. He felt his heart racing in his chest. A shot rang out somewhere. It was close, the quick blast of firepower a single, deafening pop in the smokey air. Gabriel stumbled over something. He wanted it to be a rock, but he knew that it wasn’t. He couldn’t stop himself from yelping in surprise and fear.
“I’m so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am.”
At the same moment his thoughts began slinking back into that memory on the beach, another shot tore through the gray veil of smoke. Dirt was erupting into the air before the crack of hot noise had filled the valley. The bullet had missed the two soldiers struggling across the terrain by less than half a dozen feet.
Gabriel turned his head in the direction he thought the shell had been fired from. Through the thinning curtain of smoke, he spotted the handful of figures gathering hurriedly together. One already had his rifle raised and sighted. The others flanking him were following suit. Dark muzzles at the end of paint-chipped barrels exploded with light and noise. Bullets buzzed with white-hot speed as they hit the dirt at Gabriel’s heels. There was nothing he could do but run. With the sergeant braced against him, there was no way Gabriel could return fire, even blindly. He tried to zigzag unpredictably, sidestepping the close shots getting closer and simultaneously avoiding tripping over the mounds under the smoke, the bodies of his fellow soldiers already fallen.
More shots broke through the wafting pockets of smoke, tearing through the air across the valley. The noisy barrage of deadly shells angrily peppered the sandy floor in every direction around the fleeing, breathless corporal carrying the half-awake sergeant. Gabriel didn’t know how long he could last. The rifle fire was coming on without stop, a rapid hail storm of lethal and furious tenacity. Words he didn’t understand were shouted somewhere close through the smoke and over the gun fire. Gabriel’s ears perked at the sound of the wind changing slightly for just an instant. It was like the smokey air was wrapping around and then bouncing off of something in the same instant. He caught a glimpse of what was unmistakably a grenade. It spit out of a rolling waft of smoke, sailing over his head but not far enough to make him feel better.
The palm-sized bomb shaped slightly like an egg exploded in the dirt behind and to Gabriel’s right. Tiny pebbles became molten shards that sprayed across his back and neck. Gabriel gritted his teeth. He felt the bloody sting of the shrapnel digging into his calves. He was luck and knew it. With a deep breath of the choking air, Gabriel pushed himself, with the weight of the sergeant against him, forward. The wind shifted once again. It was the sound of more grenades tossed without aim into the sultry mist. A deafening fissure of smoke, dirt and debris exploded loudly to Gabriel’s left and then ahead and to his right. One more grenade detonated behind him, the valley floor tearing open in Gabriel’s wake by mere seconds.
His ears were ringing like mad, the earth-shuddering thuds of each little bomb burst causing his ear drums to send a shrill cry reverberating deep into his skull. Gabriel wanted to scream but didn’t want to waste the breath. He could barely hear the heavy pounding of his racing heart. There should have been no way he heard the figure suddenly come forward out of the smoke, closing the distance that had separated them in the valley. Even with his heart furiously pumping fresh blood into his straining, bleeding legs, there should have been no way Gabriel had the strength or agility left to get away. The odds were stacked against him. And yet, Gabriel’s path through the valley stayed true.
In the thickening, burning haze he saw the shadow move across the drifting veil a mere second before the figure appeared. He had seen the old Russian assault rifle raise in a hurried instant before the nameless shape of the enemy squeezed the the dinged and paintless trigger. The warm, late morning air brushed against Gabriel’s face as he surged forward a single, panicked step. It wasn’t much. But, it was just enough. The bullet already leaping out of the aged barrel skimmed the smokey air where Gabriel and the sergeant should have been. Instead, it sliced like a razor through fabric alone instead of flesh. Gabriel still felt the blistering heat radiating off the slender, little body as it sailed millimeters above his skin.
His hurried push out of the bullet’s path made his next step unbalanced. Gabriel stumbled unstoppably, his body, along with the sergeant’s, falling forward into the sloping landscape. A fireworks display of gunfire illuminated the gray vapor around them. Gabriel squinted at the maddening din consuming the mountain air. The enemy soldier behind them stiffened, his heart stopping as a steady shot ripped into his chest and then through his back.
Gabriel didn’t watch the bearded man fall backwards into the dirt. There was no time to lay low and watch the scene play out around them. Gabriel peered ahead, spotting a handful of soldiers in uniforms matching his own. He spotted the raging fires of exploded vehicles expelling the thick columns of smoke into the hauntingly colored sky, partially lost somewhere above him. They had finally arrived at the heart of the bloody battle that had developed across the length of the valley.
“...I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am...” Gabriel heard his memory echoing in his mind once more as he rose carefully to his knees. The flesh on the backs of his legs burned in that simple movement. He wanted to cry out from the pain that doubled in intensity as he began to drag the sergeant closer to their fellow infantry men. “...Before I can finally put my demons to rest.”
As Gabriel used all of his strength to pull the wounded sergeant across the stirred sands coated with a mire of muddy crimson and ash and pitted by the rock-jarring explosions, he couldn’t help but recall Isabella that night on the beach. Even as violent gun fire was exchanged in noisy streams racing past him, Gabriel remembered the feeling of being in the warm embrace of his best friend on that late, windy evening. It gave him something else to focus on as he closed the painful distance toward the infantry. The bursts of their rifles were like beacons home in the raging storm of death in the darkening valley.
“Do you want to pray with me,” Isabella had asked.
Gabriel nodded, “Yes.”
Friday, July 1, 2011
II. "The Glorious Cause"
PART SEVEN
Fifteen minutes after Carlos had left his mother alone in the kitchen, he was closing the front door of his childhood home. A black car, exactly like the one that had dropped him off the previous afternoon, was idling quietly beside the curb. He spotted his best friend and long time assistant, Alex Vale, in the predawn light. Alex was already at the car, standing in front of the passenger-side doors. Carlos was halfway down the front walk when he noticed the expression on the younger man’s face.
Neither spoke as Carlos closed the distance between them. Carlos stopped at the curb, glancing back and forth at the doors on the car and the look on Alex’s face. It was a look that didn’t take Carlos long to decipher. There was annoyance, painted with unease and even a little fear. For Carlos, it was turning his awkward moment into a frustrating one. As he mouthed the name “Simon”, and as Alex nodded in the affirmative, the passenger door near Alex’s right hip popped open. A tanned, moisturized hand pushed the door open enough for Carlos to reach for it.
“Good morning, Carlos,” smiled the bright-eyed, young bureaucrat when Carlos peered slowly down into the backseat of the car. “Come on! We’d better hurry if you’re going to get to the set on time.”
Carlos stood up straight. He rolled his eyes in front of Alex who shrugged his shoulders. Both knew they had no choice. Alex opened the front passenger door as Carlos sat down in the back. The driver was accelerating away from the curb before the two doors were pulled closed.
“How are you this morning,” Mr. Simon asked Carlos with enough enthusiasm and friendliness to white-wash a bloodstain.
Carlos watched him out of the corner of his eye for a moment before directing his gaze out the window beside him. “I’m fine, Mr. Simon. How are you?”
“Me, CC? I’m great. I hope you don’t mind me tagging along for the drive this morning?”
Carlos swallowed most of his anger and disgust for the blonde-headed stranger sitting beside him, invading what little space he could call his own. Still, his displeasure at the situation and the presence of Mr. Simon shone through his expression as Carlos turned in his seat to finally regard him. His anger emerged as a sharp annoyance in his words as Carlos replied, “Well, it is unexpected, Mr. Simon. I would have preferred you waiting until I arrived at the set. And please...don’t call me that. Only those I deem to be close friends call me CC.”
Mr. Simon blinked, looking disappointed for a moment. That moment passed quickly, however, and seemed as forgotten as if it had never occurred. “My sincerest apologies, Carlos. But, you did say you might be able to spare a few minutes this morning. I just wanted to keep you honest, eh!” The man laughed loudly at his own humor.
Carlos rolled his eyes again. “What was it you wanted to discuss, Mr. Simon?”
“Oh! Umm, the script.”
“What about the script? Mr. Vale and myself have worked very diligently on all the material in the story.” Carlos glanced up at Alex who nodded his head from the front seat.
“Oh, yes. I can tell. It’s very good. Very good. I truly enjoyed it.” Mr. Simon smiled at Carlos and Alex, who had turned in his seat. “However, there are a few points...some things here and there that...well...need to be addressed.”
“Sorry,” Alex questioned sharply. It was the first time he had spoken all morning.
Mr. Simon smiled. It was hard to read that smile. His thin, red lips were pointed in the corners. His smooth, pale cheeks barely seemed to wrinkle. His eyes twinkled, maybe with a maddening glee. Either way, the joviality on his narrow, unblemished face was off-putting to the two men watching him.
“I’m not trying to say you’ve gotten in wrong, per se,” continued Mr. Simon. He used his fingers to make air quotes as he spoke. “I’m just saying that the sources you used are not necessarily the correct ones. They are not the ones we would have preferred.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said, his voice almost at a whisper. He had spent months doing research, checking and then double checking his facts.
“We love the effort put in so far,” Mr. Simon added. “That’s part of why I’m here, to keep you guys pumped and excited.”
“Fired up,” Alex asked, sinking with a defeated feeling into the front seat. His question had been mocking in nature.
Mr. Simon didn’t seem to notice. To him, it was a genuine statement. “Exactly!”
Carlos narrowed his eyes, his brow furrowed again. “Why else are you here?”
“Hmm? Oh,” said Mr. Simon, turning his head to stare at Carlos. “Well, to make sure the story stays true to history.”
“But it does,” Carlos said sternly.
“Well, a perspective of history, yes. But not the correct one. Not the history the people need to have.” Mr. Simon reached down into a black, leather satchel between his feet. Carlos spotted a copy of their script appear from the bag’s interior. There were other things in there as well, a plethora of files for which Carlos was trying not to imagine the contents.
“History, Carlos,” Mr. Simon said brightly as he sat upright again, “is always determined by the winners; by the victors of a struggle; by the strong emerging over the weak. The progressive cause has come out as the victor over those more conservative, less civilized and intellectual that for so long strangled the evolution of a just and equal society.
“The dream is being achieved boys! It’s here and we’re a part of it! This...your scipt, The Glorious Cause...” Mr. Simon tapped the bundle of pages he held like holy scripture as he spoke with honest passion in his voice pouring out from his soul. “This is the story of how it has all come to be. You have been asked-chosen-to tell it! But you have to have the correct history. We must show the people what they need to see.”
Carlos and Alex exchanged uneasy glances. There was more trepidation in Alex’s gaze than in Carlos’. Carlos simply felt...curious. “We must,” he asked.
“Yes! The Glorious Cause must be the final nudge to forever closing the door on our dark and narrow past.” Mr. Simon held the script in front of Carlos. “The right history must be used, my friends. This is too important.”
Mr. Simon smiled again as he watched Carlos take the edited draft from his own manicured hands. Alex was watching as well, unnerved by the cold shiver that traveled down his back.
Carlos Columbus Audaz sat silently under the wide bank of windows in is quiet, spacious office. His gaze was fixed on the bands of unfiltered sunlight pouring into the room, stretching over the hardwood floor and across his desk to the other side of the room. Somewhere beyond his barren, mono-colored walls a door was suddenly and loudly slammed shut. Carlos looked up from the patterns of light and shadow keeping him transfixed. He should have been better occupied. There were schedules and designs to approve. There were meetings to be preparing for. There were script notes to be going over. Carlos rolled his eyes. The script, he thought with a level of disdain he had been struggling with all that morning.
Whomever had slammed the door was marching fiercely and urgently toward his office. Carlos had a hunch who it would be. He made no effort to sit up in the black, polished leather executive chair. The head of the studio, Douglass Stoll, had proffered it to Carlos-along with the swanky, spacious office-as a gift for signing onto the studio’s monumental project.
The office door opened with a frenzied whoosh. His long time friend and lieutenant, Alex Vale, stomped over the threshold in the wake of air thrust through the mostly empty room. Alex slammed the door behind him in the same motion, approaching Carlos’ desk before the clattering impact had reverberated all the way around the cavernous office space.
Carlos didn’t flinch, even when the copy of the script he had spotted in Alex’s white-knuckled had was suddenly thrown down onto the cluttered surface of his desk. Pens rolled onto the floor. Cold, stale coffee swished over the stained rim of a nearby mug. He lifted his green eyes slowly toward Alex’s face. Carlos didn’t seem impressed by the passionate display being put on before him.
Alex didn’t wait for Carlos to regard him. He was already yelling by the time their eyes locked. “This is outrageous! Absolutely and unequivocally infuriating and insulting!”
Carlos furrowed his brow. “What?”
Alex staggered backward half a step. “What do you mean, ‘what’? The script! That’s what!”
“Oh.”
Alex’s jaw dropped, stunned by the lack of anything reciprocated from the person he had for so long found himself admiring the most. “What do you mean, ‘oh’? You’ve got to give me more than ‘oh’. Have you read what they...what he has done to our script?!”
Carlos closed his eyes as he nodded his head.
“And all you can say is, ‘oh’?!”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Something! Anything!” Alex leaned closer toward Carlos, bracing his hands flat on the thinnest layer of papers strewn over the top of the desk. “Seven months, CC. Seven months of hard work, of traveling around the country doing more research than I know I’ve ever done before. We watched...didn’t we watch resources-museums and libraries being closed around us?”
Alex paused for a only a moment, waiting for Carlos to answer him, wanting Carlos to answer. “Didn’t we?!”
“Yes! I know. I remember,” Carlos replied defensively.
“And you can sit there so calmly? So quiet and passive? They have closed the door on everything we did! The script is completely gutted. It’s soul has been torn out and replaced with...with...” Alex gestured angrily toward the mound of bound papers that was their edited screenplay, “...this garbage!”
Carlos finally sat up. “Do you think I’m happy about this? That little weasel persuaded Mr. Stoll to cancel the shoot this morning. All for the sake of the actors and crew to become acquainted with the changes to the script!”
Alex shook his head. “This is about more than just the script, CC. Look at what they’ve done...at what they’re doing.”
Carlos nodded emphatically. “I know, I know. They are turning an already frustrating and complicated project into a structural and creative nightmare.”
Alex slammed both of his fists against the top of the desk. “NO!” A blob of the cold, stale coffee bounced over the lip of the nearby mug under the force of Alex’s outburst. “Damn it, Carlos! It’s about more than the stupid movie! They are changing history. You sat in those libraries, in those archives with me. You saw the documents, the books, the memos that I saw. We were learning the facts.”
Alex picked up the script again. “What this man, this Mr. Simon-and whoever he works for or with-has done is make irrelevant, just with the stroke of a pen and the seal of the government, everything we found. Everything we know to be true!”
Carlos stood up angrily, his chair rolling backwards into the wall behind him. “What are you suggesting, Alex? What would you have me do?”
Alex’s face twisted with confusion. A flicker of sadness passed over his eyes. He stared at his best friend for a long moment. “It’s not just about you, Carlos. We made this project into something real. Now, it’s being turned into...into propaganda by nameless and faceless bureaucrats.”
Carlos took a slow, deep breath. “Fine. What would you have us do?”
“Let’s confront him,” Alex said quickly. “Let’s find out where Mr. Simon found his ‘facts’ and check them against our sources.”
“Alex-”
“We can go to Mr. Stoll, argue our case. He’ll have to see our side of things! Right now we’re the only ones who can show our sources. We can hold up what is being denied to exist!”
“Alex, he won’t listen,” Carlos shouted, his voice booming off the empty walls of the office. “Look around you. Where do you think we are? What do you think this place is?”
Alex narrowed his eyes. “So what do you suggest?”
Carlos didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t sure how to answer. Alex didn’t wait very long for a response. “Carlos, what are you going to do?”
Carlos’ shoulders sagged. “I don’t know,” he finally answered. He lifted his head to meet Alex’s intense gaze. “I don’t know what to do.”
There was a small noise behind him. Carlos heard it, but only just barely. It was the sound of the glass in the window bouncing minutely under a change in the air. Carlos’ mind was aware of it yet gave the sound no immediate priority. It was simply a noise behind him, nothing more.
Alex’s voice dropped to a somber, uneasy tone. “We’re being used, CC. We are being put as pawns on a board to be in a game being played by much more powerful people. I’m scared, CC.” Alex didn’t look away from his older friend as he spoke. His dark blue eyes bore holes through Carlos, as he if he were no longer simply looking at a man, but instead were looking past the flesh and bone to the part that mattered most. “I’m scared we’re being used for something very dark.”
Carlos blinked uncomfortably. He considered the younger man’s words for a moment. “Alex...I can’t fathom the thought that-”
Carlos suddenly paused. The noise from behind him had returned. The vibration in the window was louder and more sustained. Beyond the trembling glass, the air outside was becoming alive with the whirring din of rotor blades buffeting against the wind. Carlos turned around. His eyes scanned the crystal blue sky, spotting the point in the cloudless view were the dynamic sounds were emanating. A helicopter was descending toward the studio.
“Why do I have a feeling...” Carlos muttered, mostly to himself. It was the size of the helicopter, becoming more discernible with each new second he watched it, that gave Carlos reason to suspect the primary occupant of the aircraft.
“What is it,” Alex asked from behind Carlos. He was still standing on the other side of the desk.
Carlos turned around. “I think the star of our movie is finally showing up for work.”
Alex watched without an utterance as his older friend and boss quickly shuffled and scattered the clutter on his desk in a desperate search for something. A small, black notebook revealed itself in the scurrying movement. Carlos smiled excitedly at the find. He picked it up, circling around the desk in excited haste. “Now we finally might be able to do something significant.”
Carlos was at the doorway, a step into the corridor beyond his office before he stopped to look back at Alex. The younger man was still standing in the same spot in front of his desk. Carlos looked at his friend for a long moment. Above them, the helicopter soared low over the rooftop, the whine of its engine loud under the drumming whir of the long, sleek rotors chopping through the California air.
Alex didn’t look up at the reverberations in the ceiling. He still hadn’t even turned around. Carlos knew he needed to say something. He knew he needed to encourage his friend, to reassure him that he wasn’t going to let their project be pulled out from under them. Maybe he could say those things later. He wanted more time to make the message count. Tonight, Carlos thought to himself. Once everything else is arranged and we’re back on track. Alex has to understand that, at least. He knows we’ll talk.
“Alex...” Carlos started to speak.
“I’ll be along in a second.” Alex turned around. There was less than a dozen paces between them. Yet, for the first time the two friends felt like they were seeing each other across a wide and bottomless chasm. Alex nodded his head once, gesturing toward the corridor beyond Carlos. “Go ahead.”
“You have to come too,” Carlos said, watching his friend strangely. He didn’t like the tone in Alex’s voice or the feeling in the air between them. It was dark and awkward.
“I am,” Alex said simply.
Carlos stood in place for only another moment. He nodded in acknowledgement, then started up the quiet hallway. Alex watched him then turned his head slowly back toward the desk and the altered screenplay. Alex had known Carlos Columbus Audaz for a long, long time. Longer, in fact, than anyone other than his family. The other kids in the neighborhood had each made their way through the rotation of friendships, to acquaintances, then peers, and finally strangers to Carlos. Somehow, Alex Vale had persevered through the social gauntlet of the reserved man who had grown up across the street. Their bond had become something that seemed wholly unbreakable.
Alex hesitantly picked up the accursed script. He sighed, the paper feeling like an anchor in his grip. The type set seemed more like unholy branding in the recycled, egg-white, rectangular space. Unbreakable, Alex said in his mind, continuing his brief reflection on his friendship with Carlos, until now.
Fifteen minutes after Carlos had left his mother alone in the kitchen, he was closing the front door of his childhood home. A black car, exactly like the one that had dropped him off the previous afternoon, was idling quietly beside the curb. He spotted his best friend and long time assistant, Alex Vale, in the predawn light. Alex was already at the car, standing in front of the passenger-side doors. Carlos was halfway down the front walk when he noticed the expression on the younger man’s face.
Neither spoke as Carlos closed the distance between them. Carlos stopped at the curb, glancing back and forth at the doors on the car and the look on Alex’s face. It was a look that didn’t take Carlos long to decipher. There was annoyance, painted with unease and even a little fear. For Carlos, it was turning his awkward moment into a frustrating one. As he mouthed the name “Simon”, and as Alex nodded in the affirmative, the passenger door near Alex’s right hip popped open. A tanned, moisturized hand pushed the door open enough for Carlos to reach for it.
“Good morning, Carlos,” smiled the bright-eyed, young bureaucrat when Carlos peered slowly down into the backseat of the car. “Come on! We’d better hurry if you’re going to get to the set on time.”
Carlos stood up straight. He rolled his eyes in front of Alex who shrugged his shoulders. Both knew they had no choice. Alex opened the front passenger door as Carlos sat down in the back. The driver was accelerating away from the curb before the two doors were pulled closed.
“How are you this morning,” Mr. Simon asked Carlos with enough enthusiasm and friendliness to white-wash a bloodstain.
Carlos watched him out of the corner of his eye for a moment before directing his gaze out the window beside him. “I’m fine, Mr. Simon. How are you?”
“Me, CC? I’m great. I hope you don’t mind me tagging along for the drive this morning?”
Carlos swallowed most of his anger and disgust for the blonde-headed stranger sitting beside him, invading what little space he could call his own. Still, his displeasure at the situation and the presence of Mr. Simon shone through his expression as Carlos turned in his seat to finally regard him. His anger emerged as a sharp annoyance in his words as Carlos replied, “Well, it is unexpected, Mr. Simon. I would have preferred you waiting until I arrived at the set. And please...don’t call me that. Only those I deem to be close friends call me CC.”
Mr. Simon blinked, looking disappointed for a moment. That moment passed quickly, however, and seemed as forgotten as if it had never occurred. “My sincerest apologies, Carlos. But, you did say you might be able to spare a few minutes this morning. I just wanted to keep you honest, eh!” The man laughed loudly at his own humor.
Carlos rolled his eyes again. “What was it you wanted to discuss, Mr. Simon?”
“Oh! Umm, the script.”
“What about the script? Mr. Vale and myself have worked very diligently on all the material in the story.” Carlos glanced up at Alex who nodded his head from the front seat.
“Oh, yes. I can tell. It’s very good. Very good. I truly enjoyed it.” Mr. Simon smiled at Carlos and Alex, who had turned in his seat. “However, there are a few points...some things here and there that...well...need to be addressed.”
“Sorry,” Alex questioned sharply. It was the first time he had spoken all morning.
Mr. Simon smiled. It was hard to read that smile. His thin, red lips were pointed in the corners. His smooth, pale cheeks barely seemed to wrinkle. His eyes twinkled, maybe with a maddening glee. Either way, the joviality on his narrow, unblemished face was off-putting to the two men watching him.
“I’m not trying to say you’ve gotten in wrong, per se,” continued Mr. Simon. He used his fingers to make air quotes as he spoke. “I’m just saying that the sources you used are not necessarily the correct ones. They are not the ones we would have preferred.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said, his voice almost at a whisper. He had spent months doing research, checking and then double checking his facts.
“We love the effort put in so far,” Mr. Simon added. “That’s part of why I’m here, to keep you guys pumped and excited.”
“Fired up,” Alex asked, sinking with a defeated feeling into the front seat. His question had been mocking in nature.
Mr. Simon didn’t seem to notice. To him, it was a genuine statement. “Exactly!”
Carlos narrowed his eyes, his brow furrowed again. “Why else are you here?”
“Hmm? Oh,” said Mr. Simon, turning his head to stare at Carlos. “Well, to make sure the story stays true to history.”
“But it does,” Carlos said sternly.
“Well, a perspective of history, yes. But not the correct one. Not the history the people need to have.” Mr. Simon reached down into a black, leather satchel between his feet. Carlos spotted a copy of their script appear from the bag’s interior. There were other things in there as well, a plethora of files for which Carlos was trying not to imagine the contents.
“History, Carlos,” Mr. Simon said brightly as he sat upright again, “is always determined by the winners; by the victors of a struggle; by the strong emerging over the weak. The progressive cause has come out as the victor over those more conservative, less civilized and intellectual that for so long strangled the evolution of a just and equal society.
“The dream is being achieved boys! It’s here and we’re a part of it! This...your scipt, The Glorious Cause...” Mr. Simon tapped the bundle of pages he held like holy scripture as he spoke with honest passion in his voice pouring out from his soul. “This is the story of how it has all come to be. You have been asked-chosen-to tell it! But you have to have the correct history. We must show the people what they need to see.”
Carlos and Alex exchanged uneasy glances. There was more trepidation in Alex’s gaze than in Carlos’. Carlos simply felt...curious. “We must,” he asked.
“Yes! The Glorious Cause must be the final nudge to forever closing the door on our dark and narrow past.” Mr. Simon held the script in front of Carlos. “The right history must be used, my friends. This is too important.”
Mr. Simon smiled again as he watched Carlos take the edited draft from his own manicured hands. Alex was watching as well, unnerved by the cold shiver that traveled down his back.
* * * *
Carlos Columbus Audaz sat silently under the wide bank of windows in is quiet, spacious office. His gaze was fixed on the bands of unfiltered sunlight pouring into the room, stretching over the hardwood floor and across his desk to the other side of the room. Somewhere beyond his barren, mono-colored walls a door was suddenly and loudly slammed shut. Carlos looked up from the patterns of light and shadow keeping him transfixed. He should have been better occupied. There were schedules and designs to approve. There were meetings to be preparing for. There were script notes to be going over. Carlos rolled his eyes. The script, he thought with a level of disdain he had been struggling with all that morning.
Whomever had slammed the door was marching fiercely and urgently toward his office. Carlos had a hunch who it would be. He made no effort to sit up in the black, polished leather executive chair. The head of the studio, Douglass Stoll, had proffered it to Carlos-along with the swanky, spacious office-as a gift for signing onto the studio’s monumental project.
The office door opened with a frenzied whoosh. His long time friend and lieutenant, Alex Vale, stomped over the threshold in the wake of air thrust through the mostly empty room. Alex slammed the door behind him in the same motion, approaching Carlos’ desk before the clattering impact had reverberated all the way around the cavernous office space.
Carlos didn’t flinch, even when the copy of the script he had spotted in Alex’s white-knuckled had was suddenly thrown down onto the cluttered surface of his desk. Pens rolled onto the floor. Cold, stale coffee swished over the stained rim of a nearby mug. He lifted his green eyes slowly toward Alex’s face. Carlos didn’t seem impressed by the passionate display being put on before him.
Alex didn’t wait for Carlos to regard him. He was already yelling by the time their eyes locked. “This is outrageous! Absolutely and unequivocally infuriating and insulting!”
Carlos furrowed his brow. “What?”
Alex staggered backward half a step. “What do you mean, ‘what’? The script! That’s what!”
“Oh.”
Alex’s jaw dropped, stunned by the lack of anything reciprocated from the person he had for so long found himself admiring the most. “What do you mean, ‘oh’? You’ve got to give me more than ‘oh’. Have you read what they...what he has done to our script?!”
Carlos closed his eyes as he nodded his head.
“And all you can say is, ‘oh’?!”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Something! Anything!” Alex leaned closer toward Carlos, bracing his hands flat on the thinnest layer of papers strewn over the top of the desk. “Seven months, CC. Seven months of hard work, of traveling around the country doing more research than I know I’ve ever done before. We watched...didn’t we watch resources-museums and libraries being closed around us?”
Alex paused for a only a moment, waiting for Carlos to answer him, wanting Carlos to answer. “Didn’t we?!”
“Yes! I know. I remember,” Carlos replied defensively.
“And you can sit there so calmly? So quiet and passive? They have closed the door on everything we did! The script is completely gutted. It’s soul has been torn out and replaced with...with...” Alex gestured angrily toward the mound of bound papers that was their edited screenplay, “...this garbage!”
Carlos finally sat up. “Do you think I’m happy about this? That little weasel persuaded Mr. Stoll to cancel the shoot this morning. All for the sake of the actors and crew to become acquainted with the changes to the script!”
Alex shook his head. “This is about more than just the script, CC. Look at what they’ve done...at what they’re doing.”
Carlos nodded emphatically. “I know, I know. They are turning an already frustrating and complicated project into a structural and creative nightmare.”
Alex slammed both of his fists against the top of the desk. “NO!” A blob of the cold, stale coffee bounced over the lip of the nearby mug under the force of Alex’s outburst. “Damn it, Carlos! It’s about more than the stupid movie! They are changing history. You sat in those libraries, in those archives with me. You saw the documents, the books, the memos that I saw. We were learning the facts.”
Alex picked up the script again. “What this man, this Mr. Simon-and whoever he works for or with-has done is make irrelevant, just with the stroke of a pen and the seal of the government, everything we found. Everything we know to be true!”
Carlos stood up angrily, his chair rolling backwards into the wall behind him. “What are you suggesting, Alex? What would you have me do?”
Alex’s face twisted with confusion. A flicker of sadness passed over his eyes. He stared at his best friend for a long moment. “It’s not just about you, Carlos. We made this project into something real. Now, it’s being turned into...into propaganda by nameless and faceless bureaucrats.”
Carlos took a slow, deep breath. “Fine. What would you have us do?”
“Let’s confront him,” Alex said quickly. “Let’s find out where Mr. Simon found his ‘facts’ and check them against our sources.”
“Alex-”
“We can go to Mr. Stoll, argue our case. He’ll have to see our side of things! Right now we’re the only ones who can show our sources. We can hold up what is being denied to exist!”
“Alex, he won’t listen,” Carlos shouted, his voice booming off the empty walls of the office. “Look around you. Where do you think we are? What do you think this place is?”
Alex narrowed his eyes. “So what do you suggest?”
Carlos didn’t answer right away. He wasn’t sure how to answer. Alex didn’t wait very long for a response. “Carlos, what are you going to do?”
Carlos’ shoulders sagged. “I don’t know,” he finally answered. He lifted his head to meet Alex’s intense gaze. “I don’t know what to do.”
There was a small noise behind him. Carlos heard it, but only just barely. It was the sound of the glass in the window bouncing minutely under a change in the air. Carlos’ mind was aware of it yet gave the sound no immediate priority. It was simply a noise behind him, nothing more.
Alex’s voice dropped to a somber, uneasy tone. “We’re being used, CC. We are being put as pawns on a board to be in a game being played by much more powerful people. I’m scared, CC.” Alex didn’t look away from his older friend as he spoke. His dark blue eyes bore holes through Carlos, as he if he were no longer simply looking at a man, but instead were looking past the flesh and bone to the part that mattered most. “I’m scared we’re being used for something very dark.”
Carlos blinked uncomfortably. He considered the younger man’s words for a moment. “Alex...I can’t fathom the thought that-”
Carlos suddenly paused. The noise from behind him had returned. The vibration in the window was louder and more sustained. Beyond the trembling glass, the air outside was becoming alive with the whirring din of rotor blades buffeting against the wind. Carlos turned around. His eyes scanned the crystal blue sky, spotting the point in the cloudless view were the dynamic sounds were emanating. A helicopter was descending toward the studio.
“Why do I have a feeling...” Carlos muttered, mostly to himself. It was the size of the helicopter, becoming more discernible with each new second he watched it, that gave Carlos reason to suspect the primary occupant of the aircraft.
“What is it,” Alex asked from behind Carlos. He was still standing on the other side of the desk.
Carlos turned around. “I think the star of our movie is finally showing up for work.”
Alex watched without an utterance as his older friend and boss quickly shuffled and scattered the clutter on his desk in a desperate search for something. A small, black notebook revealed itself in the scurrying movement. Carlos smiled excitedly at the find. He picked it up, circling around the desk in excited haste. “Now we finally might be able to do something significant.”
Carlos was at the doorway, a step into the corridor beyond his office before he stopped to look back at Alex. The younger man was still standing in the same spot in front of his desk. Carlos looked at his friend for a long moment. Above them, the helicopter soared low over the rooftop, the whine of its engine loud under the drumming whir of the long, sleek rotors chopping through the California air.
Alex didn’t look up at the reverberations in the ceiling. He still hadn’t even turned around. Carlos knew he needed to say something. He knew he needed to encourage his friend, to reassure him that he wasn’t going to let their project be pulled out from under them. Maybe he could say those things later. He wanted more time to make the message count. Tonight, Carlos thought to himself. Once everything else is arranged and we’re back on track. Alex has to understand that, at least. He knows we’ll talk.
“Alex...” Carlos started to speak.
“I’ll be along in a second.” Alex turned around. There was less than a dozen paces between them. Yet, for the first time the two friends felt like they were seeing each other across a wide and bottomless chasm. Alex nodded his head once, gesturing toward the corridor beyond Carlos. “Go ahead.”
“You have to come too,” Carlos said, watching his friend strangely. He didn’t like the tone in Alex’s voice or the feeling in the air between them. It was dark and awkward.
“I am,” Alex said simply.
Carlos stood in place for only another moment. He nodded in acknowledgement, then started up the quiet hallway. Alex watched him then turned his head slowly back toward the desk and the altered screenplay. Alex had known Carlos Columbus Audaz for a long, long time. Longer, in fact, than anyone other than his family. The other kids in the neighborhood had each made their way through the rotation of friendships, to acquaintances, then peers, and finally strangers to Carlos. Somehow, Alex Vale had persevered through the social gauntlet of the reserved man who had grown up across the street. Their bond had become something that seemed wholly unbreakable.
Alex hesitantly picked up the accursed script. He sighed, the paper feeling like an anchor in his grip. The type set seemed more like unholy branding in the recycled, egg-white, rectangular space. Unbreakable, Alex said in his mind, continuing his brief reflection on his friendship with Carlos, until now.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
II. "The Glorious Cause"
PART SIX
Gabriel Audaz blinked away the sting in his eyes. The harsh sand was making them tear up, obscuring his vision even more. He was back on the beach again. Isabella, his best friend in the world, was talking to him. She had asked him a question, the same question she always asked in this memory. He hadn’t answered her yet.
“Gabriel...”
He turned his head to look at her, studying the way her blonde hair stayed on her face no matter how much she pushed it off to the sides. A few of the sun-kissed, golden strands hung down almost to her nose. Gabriel looked past the wind-teased locks of her hair to her pale, piercing cobalt eyes. Looking into her eyes was like looking into lakes of solid, crystal blue. The kind of lakes found high in snow-capped mountain ranges. The kind of lakes full of enchantment and mystery.
“You can’t avoid the question,” she said, trying to look him in the eyes.
Gabriel had lowered his gaze to her lips as she spoke. He brushed the loose strands of his own soft, black hair off his brow. He remembered kissing those lips once, the way they felt like a rosy satin against his own. He thought of a flower petal in comparison, the way they are so smooth and delicate at the same time. And, in the next instant he also thought of how they are often better admired from even the smallest distance.
“I’m not,” Gabriel had finally said. “I’m just thinking...”
“About the answer?”
“I guess,” he said distantly. He let his gaze fall back to the sand in front of him. “...About...how to answer, too,” Gabriel continued, hesitantly.
“I’m not sure I understand.” Isabella had been leaning back, her hands buried in the sand behind her, bracing her slim body. She pushed herself upright, straightening her back. “I didn’t think it was that complicated a question.”
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. He could see the disappointed look on her face.
“Do you have an answer,” she had asked after a moment.
Gabriel could hear the concern in her voice and knew that was the reason for the expression on her glowing face. Her features were beautiful, the skin of her cheeks and brow unmarked by the slightest blemish. She was worried she wasn’t getting through to him, that she was failing in some way. She feared what it could mean. Their friendship had long-since healed from a single, previous fallout, but remained scarred.
Gabriel finally looked at her. “I do.”
She smiled warmly, laughing away her moment of frustration. “Then tell me.”
Gabriel bit his lip. He hesitated for a long moment, listening to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore line. “I’m...I’m afraid,” he began to say. “...I mean really afraid...of...failing to act.”
Isabella frowned. “Huh?”
Gabriel leaned forward, the sand spilling off of his hands as he brought them up, folding his arms on top of his knees he held pressed against his chest. “The things happening inside of me, the feelings I have that won’t go away-”
“Sweety, it’s okay,” Isabella said reassuringly. “They’re natural. It is just who you are-or will be-starting to come out.”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know who or what that is. I want to know but I also want to do the right thing. I’m joining the army, Izzy. And, I know this...stuff...doesn’t matter anymore. Not officially.”
Isabella watched her best friend carefully. “But?”
“But I’m not ready to give these feelings, these thoughts a voice or a name yet. I’m in complete conflict. I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life-with you, with everyone...with God especially. Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am. Before...before I can finally put my demons to rest.”
Isabella seemed to think for a long moment, considering everything Gabriel had just confessed to feeling. Finally, she grinned at him then scooted through the sand on her haunches, closing the arm’s length between them. She hugged her best friend tightly. “Do you want to pray with me?”
Gabriel nodded.
A noise pierced the fog of his mind. Gabriel was awake in a flash, lost in the space of the world he was occupying for a hazy instant. Sand and gravel shifted around him in the subtle vibration surging through the bedrock. The wind making the limbs of the dry trees and brush all around sway and hiss carried in it the smell of smoke and bitter sulfur. A mortar, Gabriel thought. He blinked away more of the sleep still mired in his eyes. Against the horizon, a thin column of smoke had begun to reach above the cliffs.
Gabriel wiped down his face with both hands, trying to awaken fully. It worked, but not the way he had intended. The deep breath he took in as he dragged his palms down his brow and cheeks drew the strong stench of iron and dirt deep into his nostrils. Gabriel quickly pulled his hands away from his face only to stare at the dried blood stained across the skin of each. It went up and down all ten fingers to each wrist, spiraling unevenly across the backs of each hand and over his shoulders.
He knew it wasn’t his blood. Gabriel remembered the bearded stranger who had tried to take his boots and their struggle that followed. Gabriel felt the weight of the rust and crimson-stained knife tucked into his belt and remembered the other figure in the night. His brain recalled the sound of the gunman’s flesh tearing open as Gabriel drove the serrated blade deep into his body. Then, with a start, Gabriel suddenly remembered the sergeant who had saved him.
“Sergeant,” he called out, his voice low and hoarse. There was only the sound of the wind rolling over the landscape that answered him. Gunfire echoed faintly down the wide valley, its source the same location as the smoke. “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, trying to keep his voice low. He didn’t know who else could be listening, waiting unseen in nearby places.
Gabriel tried to stand only to collapse onto his hands and knees. A muscle-wrenching pain, tremendous and unforgiving, seized his left side. Gabriel cursed his cracked ribs. Then, he cursed himself for having forgotten them in that moment, for trying to get up too quickly. He lightly pressed his hand over his fatigues above the epicenter of the pain. He could practically feel the bruise through the dirtied cloth.
Gabriel could have given up right there. A part of him wanted to. The left side of his torso definitely wanted him to throw in the towel, to lay back down and let time and fate roll over him. He was stuck on his hands and knees, fighting back tidal waves of pain barely starting to ebb. He was lost somewhere in a dry, cold corner of a small, war-torn country on the far side of the world.
A rattle of gun fire reverberated down the steep walls of the frozen valley. Gabriel opened his eyes when the diluted sound reached his ears. The first thing he saw was the dried blood on his hands. Gabriel stared at it. People are dying, a voice inside of him whispered. People are dead. Gabriel lifted his head. He spotted the droplets of blood clinging to the dried leaves of nearby brush. He saw how others had become red-brown blotches caked into a discernible train in the dirt. But maybe there’s still time.
“Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, risking an uptick in the volume of his voice.
With a slow, precise deep breath that brought with it a predicted-but far less intense-wave of pain, Gabriel grit his teeth. His even breath became a gasp as he pushed himself upright. He wanted to scream. He desperately wanted to scream. Somehow, he managed not to do so. His strength, like his courage, was holding. Breathing quick and shallow, Gabriel slowly managed to stand all the way up on his feet. He realized, as the pounding pulse of his heart stopped drumming against his eardrums, that he was humming. Gabriel chuckled at himself.
“Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, walking quietly through the brush. He was following the crimson trail laced across the brittle plant life and dusty floor. “Sergeant, this is Corporal Audaz. Can you hear me?”
There was a low groan from somewhere nearby. Gabriel listened, adjusting his course toward the sound. “Sergeant, can you hear me?”
A man on the ground stirred amongst the trampled brush a half dozen more paces away. Gabriel smiled with relief. There is still time, he thought. He quickened his pace, despite the pain that throbbed powerfully from his side at every other step. “Sergeant, just hang on.”
The older man groaned, “Hold onto what? I’m already on the ground.”
Gabriel’s smile broadened. “Yes sir, you are.”
“Corporal,” the man said unenthusiastically, trying to roll over onto his back. He was laying on his stomach where he had collapsed in the hours Gabriel had fallen asleep. “...You’re going to get us shot if you...keep...talking so loud like that.”
“Sorry, Sergeant,” Gabriel said, softening his voice. He stood over the wounded man, watching him trying to painfully reorient himself. The older man’s dark stubble peppered his sun-reddened, coarse cheeks. His fatigues were covered in dried dirt and blood. Gabriel blinked before saying, “But you’re already shot, sir.”
The half-dead man opened one eye. “Yeah, well...I don’t want to get shot again. I’m...I’m not trying to to start a collection, Corporal.”
Gabriel tried crouching. He winced as the pain in his side suddenly ratcheted sharply upward. It felt as if the blood and muscle around his left ribs were suddenly coming to a boil. The sensation was too much, forcing Gabriel to stand fully upright again. “You need some water, sir,” Gabriel said, nearly out of breath.
“I know. But you gave me almost all of your water a little while ago.” The sergeant exhaled sharply, groaning in pain as he finally rolled all the way over onto his back. He sighed and said with his dry voice getting raspy, “Getting shot sucks.”
Gabriel smiled. “Yes, sir.”
The man on the ground at Gabriel’s feet, struggling just to stay conscious, dizzily pointed a blood-stained finger up at him. “You should avoid it.”
“Yes, Sergeant.” Gabriel held his smile. He watched the sergeant drop his arm against the dirt. “Still, you need water.”
“I’m not taking the last of your water, Corporal!”
The echoing din of the distant battle swept slowly down the valley. Gabriel lifted his gaze to the smoke climbing into the dawn-lit sky. The few clouds there were stretched at canted angles from east to west. The rising sun was bathing them in brilliant light, coating their windswept, downy bodies in a breathtaking gold hue. The heavens beyond were changing from the velvet darkness of the early morning to the pink and blue of the approaching day.
Gabriel hadn’t realized until that moment how captivating the landscape in that corner of the world could be. He found himself distracted by the view provided by the low cliffside they had stumbled up during the late hours of the night. He smiled, despite himself. He was thankful for the opportunity he felt he had been blessed with. He had been given the chance to live to witness the birth of a new day and a new lease on life.
Gabriel thanked God for the opportunity received, then cast his eyes back down from the illuminated clouds to the column of smoke. “There might be some water that way, sir. Up the valley in that direction,” Gabriel said, pointing toward the cliffs and the smoke beyond them. “There could be more of our guys there, sir. Medics and the like.”
The sergeant did his best to nod. He hardly moved at all, but it was still a noticeable gesture. “Good, Corporal. Go. Get water and get your side looked at. Help the boys there win the day.”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
The sergeant coughed a chuckle. “I’m already dead, Corporal.”
Gabriel shook his head. There was an unshakable determination in his eyes. The sergeant could see it clearly, even in the haze of his semi-consciousness. “Not dead enough to stay here, sir.”
“Corporal-”
Gabriel took a deep breath. He knew what he was about to do was going to create a tremendous, body-shocking amount of pain for both of them. Action had to be taken. They may suffer the effects of their injuries and live, but Gabriel knew without doubt they would surely die if they remained in place, avoiding the challenges of their circumstances.
“Sorry, sir,” Gabriel interrupted, preparing to lift the wounded man off the ground. “It’s time to live. You’ll just have to die some other day.”
Gabriel Audaz blinked away the sting in his eyes. The harsh sand was making them tear up, obscuring his vision even more. He was back on the beach again. Isabella, his best friend in the world, was talking to him. She had asked him a question, the same question she always asked in this memory. He hadn’t answered her yet.
“Gabriel...”
He turned his head to look at her, studying the way her blonde hair stayed on her face no matter how much she pushed it off to the sides. A few of the sun-kissed, golden strands hung down almost to her nose. Gabriel looked past the wind-teased locks of her hair to her pale, piercing cobalt eyes. Looking into her eyes was like looking into lakes of solid, crystal blue. The kind of lakes found high in snow-capped mountain ranges. The kind of lakes full of enchantment and mystery.
“You can’t avoid the question,” she said, trying to look him in the eyes.
Gabriel had lowered his gaze to her lips as she spoke. He brushed the loose strands of his own soft, black hair off his brow. He remembered kissing those lips once, the way they felt like a rosy satin against his own. He thought of a flower petal in comparison, the way they are so smooth and delicate at the same time. And, in the next instant he also thought of how they are often better admired from even the smallest distance.
“I’m not,” Gabriel had finally said. “I’m just thinking...”
“About the answer?”
“I guess,” he said distantly. He let his gaze fall back to the sand in front of him. “...About...how to answer, too,” Gabriel continued, hesitantly.
“I’m not sure I understand.” Isabella had been leaning back, her hands buried in the sand behind her, bracing her slim body. She pushed herself upright, straightening her back. “I didn’t think it was that complicated a question.”
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. He could see the disappointed look on her face.
“Do you have an answer,” she had asked after a moment.
Gabriel could hear the concern in her voice and knew that was the reason for the expression on her glowing face. Her features were beautiful, the skin of her cheeks and brow unmarked by the slightest blemish. She was worried she wasn’t getting through to him, that she was failing in some way. She feared what it could mean. Their friendship had long-since healed from a single, previous fallout, but remained scarred.
Gabriel finally looked at her. “I do.”
She smiled warmly, laughing away her moment of frustration. “Then tell me.”
Gabriel bit his lip. He hesitated for a long moment, listening to the sound of the waves crashing against the shore line. “I’m...I’m afraid,” he began to say. “...I mean really afraid...of...failing to act.”
Isabella frowned. “Huh?”
Gabriel leaned forward, the sand spilling off of his hands as he brought them up, folding his arms on top of his knees he held pressed against his chest. “The things happening inside of me, the feelings I have that won’t go away-”
“Sweety, it’s okay,” Isabella said reassuringly. “They’re natural. It is just who you are-or will be-starting to come out.”
“That’s the thing. I don’t know who or what that is. I want to know but I also want to do the right thing. I’m joining the army, Izzy. And, I know this...stuff...doesn’t matter anymore. Not officially.”
Isabella watched her best friend carefully. “But?”
“But I’m not ready to give these feelings, these thoughts a voice or a name yet. I’m in complete conflict. I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life-with you, with everyone...with God especially. Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am. Before...before I can finally put my demons to rest.”
Isabella seemed to think for a long moment, considering everything Gabriel had just confessed to feeling. Finally, she grinned at him then scooted through the sand on her haunches, closing the arm’s length between them. She hugged her best friend tightly. “Do you want to pray with me?”
Gabriel nodded.
A noise pierced the fog of his mind. Gabriel was awake in a flash, lost in the space of the world he was occupying for a hazy instant. Sand and gravel shifted around him in the subtle vibration surging through the bedrock. The wind making the limbs of the dry trees and brush all around sway and hiss carried in it the smell of smoke and bitter sulfur. A mortar, Gabriel thought. He blinked away more of the sleep still mired in his eyes. Against the horizon, a thin column of smoke had begun to reach above the cliffs.
Gabriel wiped down his face with both hands, trying to awaken fully. It worked, but not the way he had intended. The deep breath he took in as he dragged his palms down his brow and cheeks drew the strong stench of iron and dirt deep into his nostrils. Gabriel quickly pulled his hands away from his face only to stare at the dried blood stained across the skin of each. It went up and down all ten fingers to each wrist, spiraling unevenly across the backs of each hand and over his shoulders.
He knew it wasn’t his blood. Gabriel remembered the bearded stranger who had tried to take his boots and their struggle that followed. Gabriel felt the weight of the rust and crimson-stained knife tucked into his belt and remembered the other figure in the night. His brain recalled the sound of the gunman’s flesh tearing open as Gabriel drove the serrated blade deep into his body. Then, with a start, Gabriel suddenly remembered the sergeant who had saved him.
“Sergeant,” he called out, his voice low and hoarse. There was only the sound of the wind rolling over the landscape that answered him. Gunfire echoed faintly down the wide valley, its source the same location as the smoke. “Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, trying to keep his voice low. He didn’t know who else could be listening, waiting unseen in nearby places.
Gabriel tried to stand only to collapse onto his hands and knees. A muscle-wrenching pain, tremendous and unforgiving, seized his left side. Gabriel cursed his cracked ribs. Then, he cursed himself for having forgotten them in that moment, for trying to get up too quickly. He lightly pressed his hand over his fatigues above the epicenter of the pain. He could practically feel the bruise through the dirtied cloth.
Gabriel could have given up right there. A part of him wanted to. The left side of his torso definitely wanted him to throw in the towel, to lay back down and let time and fate roll over him. He was stuck on his hands and knees, fighting back tidal waves of pain barely starting to ebb. He was lost somewhere in a dry, cold corner of a small, war-torn country on the far side of the world.
A rattle of gun fire reverberated down the steep walls of the frozen valley. Gabriel opened his eyes when the diluted sound reached his ears. The first thing he saw was the dried blood on his hands. Gabriel stared at it. People are dying, a voice inside of him whispered. People are dead. Gabriel lifted his head. He spotted the droplets of blood clinging to the dried leaves of nearby brush. He saw how others had become red-brown blotches caked into a discernible train in the dirt. But maybe there’s still time.
“Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, risking an uptick in the volume of his voice.
With a slow, precise deep breath that brought with it a predicted-but far less intense-wave of pain, Gabriel grit his teeth. His even breath became a gasp as he pushed himself upright. He wanted to scream. He desperately wanted to scream. Somehow, he managed not to do so. His strength, like his courage, was holding. Breathing quick and shallow, Gabriel slowly managed to stand all the way up on his feet. He realized, as the pounding pulse of his heart stopped drumming against his eardrums, that he was humming. Gabriel chuckled at himself.
“Sergeant,” Gabriel called out again, walking quietly through the brush. He was following the crimson trail laced across the brittle plant life and dusty floor. “Sergeant, this is Corporal Audaz. Can you hear me?”
There was a low groan from somewhere nearby. Gabriel listened, adjusting his course toward the sound. “Sergeant, can you hear me?”
A man on the ground stirred amongst the trampled brush a half dozen more paces away. Gabriel smiled with relief. There is still time, he thought. He quickened his pace, despite the pain that throbbed powerfully from his side at every other step. “Sergeant, just hang on.”
The older man groaned, “Hold onto what? I’m already on the ground.”
Gabriel’s smile broadened. “Yes sir, you are.”
“Corporal,” the man said unenthusiastically, trying to roll over onto his back. He was laying on his stomach where he had collapsed in the hours Gabriel had fallen asleep. “...You’re going to get us shot if you...keep...talking so loud like that.”
“Sorry, Sergeant,” Gabriel said, softening his voice. He stood over the wounded man, watching him trying to painfully reorient himself. The older man’s dark stubble peppered his sun-reddened, coarse cheeks. His fatigues were covered in dried dirt and blood. Gabriel blinked before saying, “But you’re already shot, sir.”
The half-dead man opened one eye. “Yeah, well...I don’t want to get shot again. I’m...I’m not trying to to start a collection, Corporal.”
Gabriel tried crouching. He winced as the pain in his side suddenly ratcheted sharply upward. It felt as if the blood and muscle around his left ribs were suddenly coming to a boil. The sensation was too much, forcing Gabriel to stand fully upright again. “You need some water, sir,” Gabriel said, nearly out of breath.
“I know. But you gave me almost all of your water a little while ago.” The sergeant exhaled sharply, groaning in pain as he finally rolled all the way over onto his back. He sighed and said with his dry voice getting raspy, “Getting shot sucks.”
Gabriel smiled. “Yes, sir.”
The man on the ground at Gabriel’s feet, struggling just to stay conscious, dizzily pointed a blood-stained finger up at him. “You should avoid it.”
“Yes, Sergeant.” Gabriel held his smile. He watched the sergeant drop his arm against the dirt. “Still, you need water.”
“I’m not taking the last of your water, Corporal!”
The echoing din of the distant battle swept slowly down the valley. Gabriel lifted his gaze to the smoke climbing into the dawn-lit sky. The few clouds there were stretched at canted angles from east to west. The rising sun was bathing them in brilliant light, coating their windswept, downy bodies in a breathtaking gold hue. The heavens beyond were changing from the velvet darkness of the early morning to the pink and blue of the approaching day.
Gabriel hadn’t realized until that moment how captivating the landscape in that corner of the world could be. He found himself distracted by the view provided by the low cliffside they had stumbled up during the late hours of the night. He smiled, despite himself. He was thankful for the opportunity he felt he had been blessed with. He had been given the chance to live to witness the birth of a new day and a new lease on life.
Gabriel thanked God for the opportunity received, then cast his eyes back down from the illuminated clouds to the column of smoke. “There might be some water that way, sir. Up the valley in that direction,” Gabriel said, pointing toward the cliffs and the smoke beyond them. “There could be more of our guys there, sir. Medics and the like.”
The sergeant did his best to nod. He hardly moved at all, but it was still a noticeable gesture. “Good, Corporal. Go. Get water and get your side looked at. Help the boys there win the day.”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
The sergeant coughed a chuckle. “I’m already dead, Corporal.”
Gabriel shook his head. There was an unshakable determination in his eyes. The sergeant could see it clearly, even in the haze of his semi-consciousness. “Not dead enough to stay here, sir.”
“Corporal-”
Gabriel took a deep breath. He knew what he was about to do was going to create a tremendous, body-shocking amount of pain for both of them. Action had to be taken. They may suffer the effects of their injuries and live, but Gabriel knew without doubt they would surely die if they remained in place, avoiding the challenges of their circumstances.
“Sorry, sir,” Gabriel interrupted, preparing to lift the wounded man off the ground. “It’s time to live. You’ll just have to die some other day.”
Monday, June 20, 2011
II. "The Glorious Cause"
PART FIVE
For a long time there was only the night and the myriad of cricket songs. Then, all at once, power found its way into the silent house. Electricity was pushed down the idle lines swaying in the occasional breeze. After ten hours without any energy, the cold gadgets and essential appliances plugged into wall outlets throughout the quiet rooms came back to life. Digital clocks beeped and ignorantly flashed the wrong hour on their illuminated faces. The refrigerator rattled and popped as it reactivated. A small telephone chirped once then returned to silence.
Carlos Columbus Audaz was only half asleep when the air conditioner outside of his window suddenly snapped on, its heavy fan loudly whirring just beyond the thin pane of glass. It made enough noise, along with the vibration of the vents in the walls, to startle Carlos fully awake. Groggily, he yawned and stretched over his wrinkled quilt and sheets. The smell of paper was strong in his nose He’d fallen asleep with his cousin’s latest letter over his face. Gently pushing the wrinkled, college-ruled sheet of notebook paper aside, Carlos looked at the glowing face of his old watch. The lens was scratched. The wristband was stiff with years of dried sweat. Carlos sighed and shook his head. Barely an hour had gone by since he had last looked at the time.
He pushed himself upright onto his elbows. One leg was already hanging off the side of the bed, his foot almost touching the soft, thick carpet. Carlos shifted, putting both feet flat on the floor. He stood up slowly, the groggy sensation persisting mercilessly. He tried to remember the last time he had gotten any real sleep. After a minute, and then two, Carlos gave up. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever had a real, decent night’s sleep. It didn’t matter. He certainly wasn’t getting any sleep these days. Stepping into the bathroom, Carlos figured that over the last four nights he had managed to acquire only about a total of six or seven hours of sleep. Reading helped, but it was not a lasting antidote. That was one reason Carlos had dug the letter from Gabriel Audaz out of his cluttered belongings. The other reason had been the dinner with his family. Sitting so close to his uncle had been a grating test of Carlos’ patience and will.
Dinner was served and eaten on an old, round, glass table that had been on the cracked concrete porch since Carlos was twelve. It had been their first summer in California since his father had moved them to Los Angeles from St. Augustine, Florida. The table was bought used, the umbrella that would have gone at the table’s center declared missing long before Carlos’s father had purchased the aluminum-framed furniture piece at a flea market. Carlos remembered that besides birthday parties and the rare winter mornings when his parents felt it was cool enough to enjoy a cup of coffee on the patio, the table was hardly ever used.
“You know your father started spending more time out here,” his mother had said a few minutes into dinner. The conversation had been lagging. The older adults surrounding Carlos seemed so unsure of what to discuss; and, Carlos had nothing he felt like contributing.
He looked up from his food. “Really,” Carlos asked with little enthusiasm.
His mother nodded, “Oh, yes. He said he finally wanted to get some genuine use out of this thing before...” Her words trailed off.
Carlos looked up from his food to his mother again. He couldn’t explain why, but he suddenly felt confused by the heavy appearance of mourning in her eyes. His mother was supposed to be a firebrand, a tenacious and passionate woman quick with her wit and intelligence. She was supposed to be brave, a figure who couldn’t help but naturally demand your attention and respect just by walking into the room. Yet, there at the half-heartedly decorated table covered with plates and serving dishes that were old and discolored, Lucia Audaz appeared weak. The inability to say something so simple as the concept of death, to have lost her frankness and talent to be direct and out with it...Carlos found it tragic.
He quickly decided to finish her sentence. “Since he died?”
Carlos felt and then saw the sharp, pointed glares his older sister, aunt and uncle were shooting at him from their places across the table. He shrugged his shoulders, feigning ignorance.
“Yes,” his mother whispered. Lucia Audaz’s eyes were gazing in the direction of her son but she wasn’t looking at him. It was more like she was looking past Carlos, to another person, another time. “Since he died.”
It wasn’t long after the awkward silence that followed that Carlos’ uncle took the reigns of topics to discuss. Carlos quickly began to feel nagged by his uncle. It started off subtly. Broad questions about studio life and living and breathing a movie rolled without much pause over the glass table top. Maybe it was because Carlos felt defensive since the fiery looks his extended family members had given him. Maybe it was because he simply didn’t like the undertone in his uncle inquiries. It didn’t matter. The conversation was irrevocably heading in one direction. To Carlos’ surprise, his mother did not intervene until it seemed like both men were about to jump across the table at each other.
It had been when his pride was insulted, and then his work ethics and patriotism were questioned and mocked that Carlos could not take sitting at that table any longer. He stood up suddenly as voices had been steadily rising. His stance was aggresive, his chest heaving with hot anger. His shoulders were locked as his hands tightly pressed down on the wavy texture of the glass table top. His uncle took the posture as a signal of escalation. The older man was half way out of his chair when Lucia Audaz’s voice cut through the mild night. The heated argument was over, the noise echoing quickly away. Lucia, with a course and low, even voice, commanded her brother-in-law to sit down.
Mother and son stared at each other. Neither spoke for a second’s-long eternity. Finally, Carlos blinked. “Thank you, mother. Dinner tasted very good. If you’ll excuse me...” There had been the heavy sound of stunned silence behind him as Carlos walked back into the house. He could feel their eyes staring him down, watching him until he disappeared into the darker recesses through the open doorway.
In his room, Carlos stood with his back against the door. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened. A shiver of panic lapped up and down his body. He had shouted his uncle down over insensitive, but meaningless comments. He’d stared his mother down then turned his back to her. He was feeling like the defiant child suddenly and fearfully barricaded in his own room.
A noise in the kitchen shook Carlos back from his drowsy thoughts of the previous evening.
Lucia Audaz steadied herself against the cool granite counter. In her mind she was trying to stay focused, to keep her frustration down and away. It was nearly an overwhelming enough challenge to keep herself steady. It was taking her longer each day to get out of bed. The dizzy spells and pulsing, crippling ache that would twist its way around her head and then down her spine once went away as quickly as they had appeared. Now, it took minutes.
Lucia opened the cupboard above her head. Reaching for a can of coffee on the second shelf, she spied her fingers strangely quivering. No, she commanded herself, willing her nerves to stay steady. It wasn’t working as well as it once did. The coffee can felt heavy in her grip. It took two hands to lift and bring it down from the raised shelf. She still almost dropped it. The wide, aluminum can landed hard against the granite countertop, Lucia’s wrinkled fingers still clutching it. She knew the sound had shot through the house. She didn’t want everyone awake, not yet.
The scoop of aromatic grounds trembled disconcertingly in Lucia’s grip. Her weary eyes, holding back stinging tears, watched her whole hand bounce and twitch without control. Her will was strong, it had always been. But now, in the dim light of her kitchen in the waning years of her home and family, Lucia Audaz felt she had no power to stop the painful dissolve of her entire world.
“Mom?”
Lucia nearly dropped the entire scoop into the waiting filter. She took a deep, startled breath, gathering every ounce of strength to steady herself. “Yes, son?”
Carlos waited for her to turn around. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the trim that was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. Lucia didn’t turn to face her son. She kept her back to him, adding another scoop of coffee grounds into the bleached-white filter. “Why are you up so early,” Carlos finally asked. “It’s only 4:30.”
“I coulnd’t sleep. And, I thought you might be getting up. You never liked to sleep in.”
Carlos let himself smirk. It was true. He liked getting up with sun. Though, while he reveled in it in his youth, at thirty he no longer could muster the enthusiasm. Maybe it was the growing lack of sleep. Maybe it was just life in general.
“I’m making coffee,” Lucia said, a positive inflection revealing itself in her otherwise even tone. “Would you like to have a cup?”
“I can’t,” Carlos said. “Thank you, though. I have to get ready. I have to be on set soon.”
Lucia nodded. “Of course.”
Carlos’ brow furrowed. “It’s work, Mom. I have to go.”
Lucia finally turned around, facing her son for the first time that morning. She once thought he was going to grow up to look just like his father. More than that, there was a time when Lucia was convinced that her son would mature into the man that his father had been, that the character of Adrian Audaz would become the mold Carlos Columbus Audaz would not only shape his life around, but reshape and make better.
It was a different time and a different world when Lucia considered such things, when thoughts like those made her smile. Instead, the young man standing in the doorway of her kitchen had the physical features similar to her beloved and deceased husband. But the shadow of that man had faded over her son. This man was family but he was also a stranger to her. She looked at him as such. Who he was, Lucia did not know. Who he was becoming was a question she feared the answer to, the evidence of his path disparaging to her once bountiful hopes.
Lucia blinked once then nodded her head, almost diplomatically. “Yes, Carlos. I know.”
Carlos stopped leaning against the slightly warped doorframe, standing straighter as he put his hands on his waist. “Are you all right?”
Lucia took a deep, quiet breath as she turned her back to him, returning to her first morning task. “Yes, son. Don’t be late for work.”
Carlos’ hands dropped to his sides. His mother’s distant words struck him like a cannon shot. He blinked, stunned by her cold frankness. He opened his mouth, his lips beginning to form words that never came. There was nothing he could say. So he turned around, walking away to his room while his mother quietly finished making coffee. He never noticed the way the muscles in her arms were as tense as tree limbs. He didn’t seem to be aware of the fact she was struggling to keep her body still, to fend off the queasiness bubbling in her system, to simply keep from collapsing on the floor in front of him.
When the moment’s new dizziness had passed and she had finally swallowed back her nausea, Lucia Audaz filled a pitcher with water, pouring it with well rehearsed, calculated and precise movements into the reservoir of the coffee pot. She never wondered or feared if that would be the last time she would be able to do such a simple task herself. Lucia simply closed the lid over the filled container, making sure the plastic cover snapped into place. She pressed the ON button which glowed red under the pressure of her fingertip. Then, she turned around and walked casually out of the kitchen, remembering to lightly tap the light switch on the wall.
For a long time there was only the night and the myriad of cricket songs. Then, all at once, power found its way into the silent house. Electricity was pushed down the idle lines swaying in the occasional breeze. After ten hours without any energy, the cold gadgets and essential appliances plugged into wall outlets throughout the quiet rooms came back to life. Digital clocks beeped and ignorantly flashed the wrong hour on their illuminated faces. The refrigerator rattled and popped as it reactivated. A small telephone chirped once then returned to silence.
Carlos Columbus Audaz was only half asleep when the air conditioner outside of his window suddenly snapped on, its heavy fan loudly whirring just beyond the thin pane of glass. It made enough noise, along with the vibration of the vents in the walls, to startle Carlos fully awake. Groggily, he yawned and stretched over his wrinkled quilt and sheets. The smell of paper was strong in his nose He’d fallen asleep with his cousin’s latest letter over his face. Gently pushing the wrinkled, college-ruled sheet of notebook paper aside, Carlos looked at the glowing face of his old watch. The lens was scratched. The wristband was stiff with years of dried sweat. Carlos sighed and shook his head. Barely an hour had gone by since he had last looked at the time.
He pushed himself upright onto his elbows. One leg was already hanging off the side of the bed, his foot almost touching the soft, thick carpet. Carlos shifted, putting both feet flat on the floor. He stood up slowly, the groggy sensation persisting mercilessly. He tried to remember the last time he had gotten any real sleep. After a minute, and then two, Carlos gave up. He couldn’t recall if he’d ever had a real, decent night’s sleep. It didn’t matter. He certainly wasn’t getting any sleep these days. Stepping into the bathroom, Carlos figured that over the last four nights he had managed to acquire only about a total of six or seven hours of sleep. Reading helped, but it was not a lasting antidote. That was one reason Carlos had dug the letter from Gabriel Audaz out of his cluttered belongings. The other reason had been the dinner with his family. Sitting so close to his uncle had been a grating test of Carlos’ patience and will.
Dinner was served and eaten on an old, round, glass table that had been on the cracked concrete porch since Carlos was twelve. It had been their first summer in California since his father had moved them to Los Angeles from St. Augustine, Florida. The table was bought used, the umbrella that would have gone at the table’s center declared missing long before Carlos’s father had purchased the aluminum-framed furniture piece at a flea market. Carlos remembered that besides birthday parties and the rare winter mornings when his parents felt it was cool enough to enjoy a cup of coffee on the patio, the table was hardly ever used.
“You know your father started spending more time out here,” his mother had said a few minutes into dinner. The conversation had been lagging. The older adults surrounding Carlos seemed so unsure of what to discuss; and, Carlos had nothing he felt like contributing.
He looked up from his food. “Really,” Carlos asked with little enthusiasm.
His mother nodded, “Oh, yes. He said he finally wanted to get some genuine use out of this thing before...” Her words trailed off.
Carlos looked up from his food to his mother again. He couldn’t explain why, but he suddenly felt confused by the heavy appearance of mourning in her eyes. His mother was supposed to be a firebrand, a tenacious and passionate woman quick with her wit and intelligence. She was supposed to be brave, a figure who couldn’t help but naturally demand your attention and respect just by walking into the room. Yet, there at the half-heartedly decorated table covered with plates and serving dishes that were old and discolored, Lucia Audaz appeared weak. The inability to say something so simple as the concept of death, to have lost her frankness and talent to be direct and out with it...Carlos found it tragic.
He quickly decided to finish her sentence. “Since he died?”
Carlos felt and then saw the sharp, pointed glares his older sister, aunt and uncle were shooting at him from their places across the table. He shrugged his shoulders, feigning ignorance.
“Yes,” his mother whispered. Lucia Audaz’s eyes were gazing in the direction of her son but she wasn’t looking at him. It was more like she was looking past Carlos, to another person, another time. “Since he died.”
It wasn’t long after the awkward silence that followed that Carlos’ uncle took the reigns of topics to discuss. Carlos quickly began to feel nagged by his uncle. It started off subtly. Broad questions about studio life and living and breathing a movie rolled without much pause over the glass table top. Maybe it was because Carlos felt defensive since the fiery looks his extended family members had given him. Maybe it was because he simply didn’t like the undertone in his uncle inquiries. It didn’t matter. The conversation was irrevocably heading in one direction. To Carlos’ surprise, his mother did not intervene until it seemed like both men were about to jump across the table at each other.
It had been when his pride was insulted, and then his work ethics and patriotism were questioned and mocked that Carlos could not take sitting at that table any longer. He stood up suddenly as voices had been steadily rising. His stance was aggresive, his chest heaving with hot anger. His shoulders were locked as his hands tightly pressed down on the wavy texture of the glass table top. His uncle took the posture as a signal of escalation. The older man was half way out of his chair when Lucia Audaz’s voice cut through the mild night. The heated argument was over, the noise echoing quickly away. Lucia, with a course and low, even voice, commanded her brother-in-law to sit down.
Mother and son stared at each other. Neither spoke for a second’s-long eternity. Finally, Carlos blinked. “Thank you, mother. Dinner tasted very good. If you’ll excuse me...” There had been the heavy sound of stunned silence behind him as Carlos walked back into the house. He could feel their eyes staring him down, watching him until he disappeared into the darker recesses through the open doorway.
In his room, Carlos stood with his back against the door. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened. A shiver of panic lapped up and down his body. He had shouted his uncle down over insensitive, but meaningless comments. He’d stared his mother down then turned his back to her. He was feeling like the defiant child suddenly and fearfully barricaded in his own room.
A noise in the kitchen shook Carlos back from his drowsy thoughts of the previous evening.
* * * *
Lucia opened the cupboard above her head. Reaching for a can of coffee on the second shelf, she spied her fingers strangely quivering. No, she commanded herself, willing her nerves to stay steady. It wasn’t working as well as it once did. The coffee can felt heavy in her grip. It took two hands to lift and bring it down from the raised shelf. She still almost dropped it. The wide, aluminum can landed hard against the granite countertop, Lucia’s wrinkled fingers still clutching it. She knew the sound had shot through the house. She didn’t want everyone awake, not yet.
The scoop of aromatic grounds trembled disconcertingly in Lucia’s grip. Her weary eyes, holding back stinging tears, watched her whole hand bounce and twitch without control. Her will was strong, it had always been. But now, in the dim light of her kitchen in the waning years of her home and family, Lucia Audaz felt she had no power to stop the painful dissolve of her entire world.
“Mom?”
Lucia nearly dropped the entire scoop into the waiting filter. She took a deep, startled breath, gathering every ounce of strength to steady herself. “Yes, son?”
Carlos waited for her to turn around. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the trim that was in desperate need of a new coat of paint. Lucia didn’t turn to face her son. She kept her back to him, adding another scoop of coffee grounds into the bleached-white filter. “Why are you up so early,” Carlos finally asked. “It’s only 4:30.”
“I coulnd’t sleep. And, I thought you might be getting up. You never liked to sleep in.”
Carlos let himself smirk. It was true. He liked getting up with sun. Though, while he reveled in it in his youth, at thirty he no longer could muster the enthusiasm. Maybe it was the growing lack of sleep. Maybe it was just life in general.
“I’m making coffee,” Lucia said, a positive inflection revealing itself in her otherwise even tone. “Would you like to have a cup?”
“I can’t,” Carlos said. “Thank you, though. I have to get ready. I have to be on set soon.”
Lucia nodded. “Of course.”
Carlos’ brow furrowed. “It’s work, Mom. I have to go.”
Lucia finally turned around, facing her son for the first time that morning. She once thought he was going to grow up to look just like his father. More than that, there was a time when Lucia was convinced that her son would mature into the man that his father had been, that the character of Adrian Audaz would become the mold Carlos Columbus Audaz would not only shape his life around, but reshape and make better.
It was a different time and a different world when Lucia considered such things, when thoughts like those made her smile. Instead, the young man standing in the doorway of her kitchen had the physical features similar to her beloved and deceased husband. But the shadow of that man had faded over her son. This man was family but he was also a stranger to her. She looked at him as such. Who he was, Lucia did not know. Who he was becoming was a question she feared the answer to, the evidence of his path disparaging to her once bountiful hopes.
Lucia blinked once then nodded her head, almost diplomatically. “Yes, Carlos. I know.”
Carlos stopped leaning against the slightly warped doorframe, standing straighter as he put his hands on his waist. “Are you all right?”
Lucia took a deep, quiet breath as she turned her back to him, returning to her first morning task. “Yes, son. Don’t be late for work.”
Carlos’ hands dropped to his sides. His mother’s distant words struck him like a cannon shot. He blinked, stunned by her cold frankness. He opened his mouth, his lips beginning to form words that never came. There was nothing he could say. So he turned around, walking away to his room while his mother quietly finished making coffee. He never noticed the way the muscles in her arms were as tense as tree limbs. He didn’t seem to be aware of the fact she was struggling to keep her body still, to fend off the queasiness bubbling in her system, to simply keep from collapsing on the floor in front of him.
When the moment’s new dizziness had passed and she had finally swallowed back her nausea, Lucia Audaz filled a pitcher with water, pouring it with well rehearsed, calculated and precise movements into the reservoir of the coffee pot. She never wondered or feared if that would be the last time she would be able to do such a simple task herself. Lucia simply closed the lid over the filled container, making sure the plastic cover snapped into place. She pressed the ON button which glowed red under the pressure of her fingertip. Then, she turned around and walked casually out of the kitchen, remembering to lightly tap the light switch on the wall.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
II. "The Glorious Cause"
PART FOUR
A twig from the dried brush snapped loudly in the still, late hour. Gabriel Audaz opened his eyes in a startled instant. He didn’t breathe. That was probably for the best. The first breath he had taken had been more painful than he was ready for. A sharp, stinging ache clawed at his lungs and chest, making his breathing shallow and staggered.
A silver coil of rancid smoke from a thin cigarette snaked its way through the desert air near Gabriel. He tried to ignore it to not stare at the smoldering butt of paper and foul tobacco held between the dry lips of a man Gabriel could barely discern in the late night darkness. The battle in the air had ceased some time ago. The curtains and trails of smoke had faded to nearly transparent traces, leaving the twinkling stars in the freezing, pre-dawn sky.
Gabriel’s ears burned in the awful silence of the war weary landscape. Even the dying fires in the distance seemed to exist without any kind of noise. There was only the sound of the strange man breathing as he walked slowly through the dry brush. Gabriel’s heart pounded with a racing drumbeat in his chest. The man’s slow march was leading him away one gradual step at a time. He was scanning the dark around him, leery of any movement.
Where are the others, Gabriel thought, struggling not to panic. He didn’t want to tremble or flinch any more than he wanted to feel the reeling ache in his chest and side. Why is there no gun fire? Am I the only one left? Gabriel inhaled as slowly and gently as he could manage. The smell of the man’s cigarette was finally fading.
Wait, Gabriel thought as he quietly exhaled, wincing in the pain of what he was certain were broken ribs. He remembered the soldier from the sky. Suddenly, Gabriel realized he couldn’t completely feel the ground. His head, neck, and the top of his back were in the dirt. Cold sand had turned to matted mud in the sweat-damp hair extending past the rim of his helmet and down to his neck. The rest of Gabriel’s body was splayed across the unmoving torso and legs of someone else-the paratrooper who had fallen into Gabriel’s parachute.
Gabriel managed to move his hand, just slightly, before he froze once more. A near-silent gasp escaped his lips. A spray of dust brushed against his face. More twigs snapped in the dark. The loud movement was much closer than before. Gabriel’s heart beat was fast it was more like the vibrations of a jack hammer than a rhythmic pulse in his body. He thought at first the man from before had quickly circled back around. The figure that appeared out of the dense, cold night didn’t quite look the same. Gabriel could barely see him and he wasn’t about to strain himself to gain a better look. The stench of sweat unwashed for weeks or longer reached out like a malicious entity from the heavily garbed man. Gabriel could still hear the frozen plants breaking under the man’s feet. His gait was uneven, one leg limping behind the other.
The man stopped a step away from the spot where Gabriel was laying as still as the paratrooper half underneath him. Gabriel kept his eyes away from the hints of firelight stretching through the night from unknown places. He tried to hold his breath, inhaling and exhaling quickly when he thought the man had turned away. Over the raging stampede of his frightened heart, Gabriel thought he could hear the man mumbling. He felt the man brush against his boots as he took a few cautious steps into Gabriel’s field of view. With his eyes almost completely closed, Gabriel still saw the man’s lips moving hurriedly. They were barely visible within the wiry, greasy nest of facial hair twice as long as the hair on Gabriel’s head.
Is he praying or simply talking to himself? Gabriel couldn’t tell. He wasn’t sure if it mattered. Is he an enemy soldier or just some wandering tribesman? In the fleeting glimpses Gabriel managed, he could see no rifle or pistol in view on the man. His thick robe of hastily and inexpertly sewn fuzzy, matted patches or dirty, sweat-stiffened tunic showed no evidence of any kind of hidden firearm. So is this man checking closely for signs of life or is he looking for someone or something specific? Gabriel couldn’t answer these questions. All he could do was lay there, atop the corpse of his fellow soldier he wasn’t sure he even knew. All Gabriel could do was pray he would survive.
Still mumbling in a language far from English, the wandering stranger crouched down near Gabriel’s feet. He was out of Gabriel’s limited range of vision. Gabriel would have to move in order to see him. Moment’s later, Gabriel realized he didn’t have to move to know what was happening.
A calloused hand of thick, red fingers slapped against Gabriel’s left foot. It was a probing glance of skin against boot. Gabriel tried not to flinch. He felt his toes curl which made his heart leap into his throat. The man’s slurred mumbling continued unabated, Gabriel’s lack of lifelessness still apparently unnoticed. Gabriel wanted to swallow. He needed to swallow. His throat was on fire. Saliva was pooling in his mouth. He didn’t dare risk the movement of muscles he feared were too easily visible.
The thick fingers tapped along the top of his boot, searching for signs of life and the knotted laces keeping the heavy shoe on Gabriel’s foot. Gabriel could feel the dry, icy breezy teasing the beads of sweat collecting on his skin. How much longer, he wondered to himself. How much longer before he realizes I’m not dead?
The bearded stranger found what he was looking for. Gabriel could feel the fingers going to work undoing the loops and knots on the top of his left boot. Every nerve and muscle in Gabriel’s body was as tense and tight as a board. He knew things could get out of hand at any moment. He was going to need to be ready. Gabriel managed the will to move his fingers, bending and flexing them as subtly as he could. He felt the dead soldier’s belt under the cold tips of his fingers. Gabriel was looking for a weapon or anything he could quickly use as one.
The laces on his left boot were nearly untied. At the same time, Gabriel stretched his fingers out a few more centimeters. His eyes were looking around, scanning the edges of the cold, hellish landing spot. He spotted his dusty rucksack and rifle tangled in the nearby brush. The mumbling stranger tugged on Gabriel’s boot. On pure instinct, Gabriel tried to counter the motion, jerking his foot back toward himself.
In that same moment, the man stopped mumbling. Gabriel knew the game was up. He lifted his head, his eyes instantly drawn to the distant firelight glinting off a small, sharp knife the man had snatched with a hunter’s speed from his belt. Gabriel looked at the knife intensely, then up at the eyes of the man holding it. Their gaze was locked for only a moment, each of their hearts beating like mad. The stranger shouted something, a garbled warning perhaps. Gabriel could barely hear it through the thunderous thudding of his pulse against his eardrums.
The man raised his arm, the knife hanging for less than a second above Gabriel’s foot before the it was brought back down, the wool-covered arm moving in a blur. But Gabriel was already in motion. The padded tip of his boot connected with the man’s bearded chin with enough force to send him sprawling backwards. Gabriel felt the stained blade graze his leg, the fabric of his pants sheering under the razor edge. It missed carving into his flesh by the width of a hair.
The momentum of his defense had sent Gabriel rolling to one side and off his fallen peer. The old stranger was trying to recover in the dirt nearby. He was moaning loudly, crying out for help. Gabriel sat upright on his knees. He glanced at the man and then at the ground. He saw the knife at the same time as it’s owner, listing sideways where it had landed, tip-down, in the sand.
Together, the two men lunged at the same spot. Adrenaline was boiling in Gabriel’s veins as he collided with the older man. Neither reached the knife. They wrestled and fought feverishly, trying to pin or strangle the other before getting overpowered. The old man kept up his shouting, his groaning, rasping voice breaking through the silence around them.
Gabriel managed an advantage he thought he could hold. But a cloud of sand and pebbles peppered his eyes as he swung down with his fist. He slumped backward and off the flailing man, trying to wipe the stinging debris from his eyes. A rock cracked against his helmet with surprising force, sending Gabriel crashing to the ground. He tried to recover as quickly as he could, rolling onto his back before the man could attack again. It was too late. He was on his side when the bearded man leapt. The dirty blade glinted in his hand once more. His rasping voice bellowed noisily above him as he moved his arms in a swift, tight arch.
Suddenly, a sharp crack pierced the night. The older man straddling Gabriel’s body stiffened, his voice dropping off as he choked on a desperate breath he could not take. Gabriel felt a strange warmth on his face and neck. In the dark, he hadn’t been able to see the fine mist of blood that had erupted from the man’s chest. He had been shot, the bullet traveling fast and hot in the late night.
The dirty knife plopped against the dirt, the strength in the man’s fingers going slack. He was dead before he toppled over into the sand. Gabriel was stunned. He lay propped on one elbow in complete surprise and confusion. The sound of the brush beyond his small landing site grabbed Gabriel’s attention away from the dead stranger. Gabriel moved urgently, the hilt of the knife tucked tightly into his sweaty grip as he tried to sink into the shadows around the scene.
The man who had been smoking the cigarette appeared out of the darkness as if the night itself had given him shape. He stopped in the stirred sand between the two bodies, the dead paratrooper and the freshly shot stranger. Gabriel watched him carefully, trying to know when to move. Gabriel knew he would only have one opportunity to strike. The man had a rifle. Gabriel had a knife. He had to make his effort count.
The hunter crouched down, examining with surprise the body of the man in the long, wool tunics. Gabriel knew this was it. The rifleman’s back was turned, not all the way but maybe just enough. There was no counting to three like in the movies or books. Gathering his strength and courage, trying to ignore the racing, reverberating beat of his heart pounding in his chest and feeling another hot surge of adrenaline rush through his body like a tsunami, Gabriel leapt to his feet.
But he did not go farther than a step and half. He stopped and turned his head sharply. The fevered, mad cry of another man barreling out of the shadows made Gabriel nearly jump out of his skin. It was another soldier. Gabriel watched him with baffled amazement. The charging American had startled the rifleman who stumbled back to his feet while trying to turn around at the same time. Gabriel had managed a glimpse of the gun in the soldier’s hand. He had a shot and the time to take it had arrived.
The American’s rifle jammed. Where there should have been another deafening pop under a blinding, white-hot muzzle flare aimed in the direction of the tobacco-scented warrior, there was a much more disheartening noise. A ringing, hollow click and retching of small gears that was as unexpected as it was disconcerting.
The enemy’s gun worked with little effort. The older rifle was off his shoulder and loosely in his trembling grip in an instant. His own shot rang loudly, the muzzle flare as brilliant as the American’s gun would have been. The bullet that leapt like a rocket from the recesses of the dark, scathed barrel did its job as precisely as any other might.
Gabriel knew his countryman would be hit even before he was. The whole attempt seemed like suicide the moment it had started. When the newer, more advanced weapon made its fatal failure, Gabriel started on the step he had stopped. He stayed behind but to the side of his fellow paratrooper, fearing the bullet’s path would find him after exiting the back of his peer a few steps ahead. The soldier slumped to his knees, revealing the breathless corporal racing out of the darkness.
The rifleman saw Gabriel too late. The teenaged soldier pounced at the bearded man, knocking the arm with the rifle in it aside just as his trigger finger squeezed firmly. The shot was a powerful, heart-stopping clap of noise. It muted the hiss of the hot bullet traveling into the snow-dusted brush and frozen darkness. The eye-opening noise did nothing to cover the deafening gasp of the enemy who sank under the weight crashing down on top of him. Gabriel watched his eyes, studying without word or thought in that incredible moment how wide and fearful they became as the dirty blade silently dug into the rifleman’s torso.
By the third, heaving breath the enemy was dead. His blood was hot on Gabriel’s trembling hand. The dust hadn’t settled around the new corpse before Gabriel was on his feet again, backing away from the life he had just taken.
“Good work, Corporal...” said a tired, hoarse voice near his feet.
Gabriel turned around swiftly to look at the fellow American laying in the dirt. He thought he could make out stripes on the man’s shoulder, but he wasn’t sure how many there were. Gabriel guessed he was a sergeant. He didn’t know his name or what company he was with. Right at that moment, it didn’t matter. Gabriel peered at the sergeant’s rifle then over at the old stranger who had owned the deadly knife. “You took that shot?”
“That’s right. And you...you’re welcome, Corporal.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. But then why-”
A bullet slapped against the sand a few feet from the lifeless paratrooper. Another round whistled hauntingly as it zipped past Gabriel.
“Another time, Corporal! The enemy’s comin’! We’ve got to move!”
Gabriel began to panic. A moment ago, his movements and decisions seemed so clear and easy to act on. Now, suddenly, Gabriel felt lost. His thoughts were jumbled up, his mind distracted by the wounded sergeant, his lack of any real weaponry, and the sharp, knuckle-digging ache that would not show him mercy emanating from the side of his chest. From the darkness surrounding them, bullets moving too fast to see crisscrossed the small arena of dirt and blood.
“Can you walk,” Gabriel asked the bleeding officer.
The sergeant tried to sit up but quickly gave up. “Ha, ha...no!”
Shouting voices echoed over the fading gun shots. The enemy soldiers were drawing closer. He could hear the brush crunching as their hurried feet crashed through it.
Gabriel nodded his head. “Okay. Okay,” he said, trying to think. He was scanning the scene, trying to see into the dark. Never more than this would Gabriel have been more than thankful for just a little bit of sunlight. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes. In a passing glance, he spotted his own rifle, abandoned with his rucksack a short walk away.
His heaving chest made him wince as he looked back down at the sergeant. “Okay,” Gabriel said again, fighting back the pain that made him want to wheeze. “i’m going to have to carry you, sir.”
“What? No.”
Gabriel nodded his head. “Yes, sir. I can’t leave you here.”
“They’ll kill us both.”
“Then we’ll die as soldiers together, sir.” There was an unmistakable honesty in Gabriel’s trembling voice. “That’s better than dying out here alone.”
The sergeant stared up at the young paratrooper. Another shot cracked in the dark distance quickly being closed. Finally, the sergeant nodded his head to Gabriel who hurried to grab his near-forgotten gear. The enemy was within sight, the shadows of the early hour bending around them then retreating away completely as their guns came alive.
The fiery rattle of deadly bullets sprayed through the air and through the brush. Gabriel narrowly avoided his life coming to an end. With his rifle and rucksack slung over one shoulder, the frightened corporal returned to his wounded officer. With gritted teeth, he hoisted the sergeant he didn’t know onto the other shoulder.
“Let’s go, corporal!”
Practically dragging the wounded man, Gabriel led them away from the blood-stained landing site. Machine guns ratcheted a barrage of bullets toward them that whistled and hissed as they sailed through the air. Thin fountains of dirt sprang up at their feet where shots fell short. Twigs snapped loudly under their hasty, stumbling gait as they ducked the searing shells passing all too closely.
Gabriel felt a shot near his leg. It singed the thin hairs on his skin as it tore through the already gashed fabric. He took a deep, crippling breath. Tears welled up in his dirt-clotted eyes. The pain only pushed Gabriel harder. He tried to run even faster, carrying himself and the sergeant as swiftly as he could into the predawn darkness.
A twig from the dried brush snapped loudly in the still, late hour. Gabriel Audaz opened his eyes in a startled instant. He didn’t breathe. That was probably for the best. The first breath he had taken had been more painful than he was ready for. A sharp, stinging ache clawed at his lungs and chest, making his breathing shallow and staggered.
A silver coil of rancid smoke from a thin cigarette snaked its way through the desert air near Gabriel. He tried to ignore it to not stare at the smoldering butt of paper and foul tobacco held between the dry lips of a man Gabriel could barely discern in the late night darkness. The battle in the air had ceased some time ago. The curtains and trails of smoke had faded to nearly transparent traces, leaving the twinkling stars in the freezing, pre-dawn sky.
Gabriel’s ears burned in the awful silence of the war weary landscape. Even the dying fires in the distance seemed to exist without any kind of noise. There was only the sound of the strange man breathing as he walked slowly through the dry brush. Gabriel’s heart pounded with a racing drumbeat in his chest. The man’s slow march was leading him away one gradual step at a time. He was scanning the dark around him, leery of any movement.
Where are the others, Gabriel thought, struggling not to panic. He didn’t want to tremble or flinch any more than he wanted to feel the reeling ache in his chest and side. Why is there no gun fire? Am I the only one left? Gabriel inhaled as slowly and gently as he could manage. The smell of the man’s cigarette was finally fading.
Wait, Gabriel thought as he quietly exhaled, wincing in the pain of what he was certain were broken ribs. He remembered the soldier from the sky. Suddenly, Gabriel realized he couldn’t completely feel the ground. His head, neck, and the top of his back were in the dirt. Cold sand had turned to matted mud in the sweat-damp hair extending past the rim of his helmet and down to his neck. The rest of Gabriel’s body was splayed across the unmoving torso and legs of someone else-the paratrooper who had fallen into Gabriel’s parachute.
Gabriel managed to move his hand, just slightly, before he froze once more. A near-silent gasp escaped his lips. A spray of dust brushed against his face. More twigs snapped in the dark. The loud movement was much closer than before. Gabriel’s heart beat was fast it was more like the vibrations of a jack hammer than a rhythmic pulse in his body. He thought at first the man from before had quickly circled back around. The figure that appeared out of the dense, cold night didn’t quite look the same. Gabriel could barely see him and he wasn’t about to strain himself to gain a better look. The stench of sweat unwashed for weeks or longer reached out like a malicious entity from the heavily garbed man. Gabriel could still hear the frozen plants breaking under the man’s feet. His gait was uneven, one leg limping behind the other.
The man stopped a step away from the spot where Gabriel was laying as still as the paratrooper half underneath him. Gabriel kept his eyes away from the hints of firelight stretching through the night from unknown places. He tried to hold his breath, inhaling and exhaling quickly when he thought the man had turned away. Over the raging stampede of his frightened heart, Gabriel thought he could hear the man mumbling. He felt the man brush against his boots as he took a few cautious steps into Gabriel’s field of view. With his eyes almost completely closed, Gabriel still saw the man’s lips moving hurriedly. They were barely visible within the wiry, greasy nest of facial hair twice as long as the hair on Gabriel’s head.
Is he praying or simply talking to himself? Gabriel couldn’t tell. He wasn’t sure if it mattered. Is he an enemy soldier or just some wandering tribesman? In the fleeting glimpses Gabriel managed, he could see no rifle or pistol in view on the man. His thick robe of hastily and inexpertly sewn fuzzy, matted patches or dirty, sweat-stiffened tunic showed no evidence of any kind of hidden firearm. So is this man checking closely for signs of life or is he looking for someone or something specific? Gabriel couldn’t answer these questions. All he could do was lay there, atop the corpse of his fellow soldier he wasn’t sure he even knew. All Gabriel could do was pray he would survive.
Still mumbling in a language far from English, the wandering stranger crouched down near Gabriel’s feet. He was out of Gabriel’s limited range of vision. Gabriel would have to move in order to see him. Moment’s later, Gabriel realized he didn’t have to move to know what was happening.
A calloused hand of thick, red fingers slapped against Gabriel’s left foot. It was a probing glance of skin against boot. Gabriel tried not to flinch. He felt his toes curl which made his heart leap into his throat. The man’s slurred mumbling continued unabated, Gabriel’s lack of lifelessness still apparently unnoticed. Gabriel wanted to swallow. He needed to swallow. His throat was on fire. Saliva was pooling in his mouth. He didn’t dare risk the movement of muscles he feared were too easily visible.
The thick fingers tapped along the top of his boot, searching for signs of life and the knotted laces keeping the heavy shoe on Gabriel’s foot. Gabriel could feel the dry, icy breezy teasing the beads of sweat collecting on his skin. How much longer, he wondered to himself. How much longer before he realizes I’m not dead?
The bearded stranger found what he was looking for. Gabriel could feel the fingers going to work undoing the loops and knots on the top of his left boot. Every nerve and muscle in Gabriel’s body was as tense and tight as a board. He knew things could get out of hand at any moment. He was going to need to be ready. Gabriel managed the will to move his fingers, bending and flexing them as subtly as he could. He felt the dead soldier’s belt under the cold tips of his fingers. Gabriel was looking for a weapon or anything he could quickly use as one.
The laces on his left boot were nearly untied. At the same time, Gabriel stretched his fingers out a few more centimeters. His eyes were looking around, scanning the edges of the cold, hellish landing spot. He spotted his dusty rucksack and rifle tangled in the nearby brush. The mumbling stranger tugged on Gabriel’s boot. On pure instinct, Gabriel tried to counter the motion, jerking his foot back toward himself.
In that same moment, the man stopped mumbling. Gabriel knew the game was up. He lifted his head, his eyes instantly drawn to the distant firelight glinting off a small, sharp knife the man had snatched with a hunter’s speed from his belt. Gabriel looked at the knife intensely, then up at the eyes of the man holding it. Their gaze was locked for only a moment, each of their hearts beating like mad. The stranger shouted something, a garbled warning perhaps. Gabriel could barely hear it through the thunderous thudding of his pulse against his eardrums.
The man raised his arm, the knife hanging for less than a second above Gabriel’s foot before the it was brought back down, the wool-covered arm moving in a blur. But Gabriel was already in motion. The padded tip of his boot connected with the man’s bearded chin with enough force to send him sprawling backwards. Gabriel felt the stained blade graze his leg, the fabric of his pants sheering under the razor edge. It missed carving into his flesh by the width of a hair.
The momentum of his defense had sent Gabriel rolling to one side and off his fallen peer. The old stranger was trying to recover in the dirt nearby. He was moaning loudly, crying out for help. Gabriel sat upright on his knees. He glanced at the man and then at the ground. He saw the knife at the same time as it’s owner, listing sideways where it had landed, tip-down, in the sand.
Together, the two men lunged at the same spot. Adrenaline was boiling in Gabriel’s veins as he collided with the older man. Neither reached the knife. They wrestled and fought feverishly, trying to pin or strangle the other before getting overpowered. The old man kept up his shouting, his groaning, rasping voice breaking through the silence around them.
Gabriel managed an advantage he thought he could hold. But a cloud of sand and pebbles peppered his eyes as he swung down with his fist. He slumped backward and off the flailing man, trying to wipe the stinging debris from his eyes. A rock cracked against his helmet with surprising force, sending Gabriel crashing to the ground. He tried to recover as quickly as he could, rolling onto his back before the man could attack again. It was too late. He was on his side when the bearded man leapt. The dirty blade glinted in his hand once more. His rasping voice bellowed noisily above him as he moved his arms in a swift, tight arch.
Suddenly, a sharp crack pierced the night. The older man straddling Gabriel’s body stiffened, his voice dropping off as he choked on a desperate breath he could not take. Gabriel felt a strange warmth on his face and neck. In the dark, he hadn’t been able to see the fine mist of blood that had erupted from the man’s chest. He had been shot, the bullet traveling fast and hot in the late night.
The dirty knife plopped against the dirt, the strength in the man’s fingers going slack. He was dead before he toppled over into the sand. Gabriel was stunned. He lay propped on one elbow in complete surprise and confusion. The sound of the brush beyond his small landing site grabbed Gabriel’s attention away from the dead stranger. Gabriel moved urgently, the hilt of the knife tucked tightly into his sweaty grip as he tried to sink into the shadows around the scene.
The man who had been smoking the cigarette appeared out of the darkness as if the night itself had given him shape. He stopped in the stirred sand between the two bodies, the dead paratrooper and the freshly shot stranger. Gabriel watched him carefully, trying to know when to move. Gabriel knew he would only have one opportunity to strike. The man had a rifle. Gabriel had a knife. He had to make his effort count.
The hunter crouched down, examining with surprise the body of the man in the long, wool tunics. Gabriel knew this was it. The rifleman’s back was turned, not all the way but maybe just enough. There was no counting to three like in the movies or books. Gathering his strength and courage, trying to ignore the racing, reverberating beat of his heart pounding in his chest and feeling another hot surge of adrenaline rush through his body like a tsunami, Gabriel leapt to his feet.
But he did not go farther than a step and half. He stopped and turned his head sharply. The fevered, mad cry of another man barreling out of the shadows made Gabriel nearly jump out of his skin. It was another soldier. Gabriel watched him with baffled amazement. The charging American had startled the rifleman who stumbled back to his feet while trying to turn around at the same time. Gabriel had managed a glimpse of the gun in the soldier’s hand. He had a shot and the time to take it had arrived.
The American’s rifle jammed. Where there should have been another deafening pop under a blinding, white-hot muzzle flare aimed in the direction of the tobacco-scented warrior, there was a much more disheartening noise. A ringing, hollow click and retching of small gears that was as unexpected as it was disconcerting.
The enemy’s gun worked with little effort. The older rifle was off his shoulder and loosely in his trembling grip in an instant. His own shot rang loudly, the muzzle flare as brilliant as the American’s gun would have been. The bullet that leapt like a rocket from the recesses of the dark, scathed barrel did its job as precisely as any other might.
Gabriel knew his countryman would be hit even before he was. The whole attempt seemed like suicide the moment it had started. When the newer, more advanced weapon made its fatal failure, Gabriel started on the step he had stopped. He stayed behind but to the side of his fellow paratrooper, fearing the bullet’s path would find him after exiting the back of his peer a few steps ahead. The soldier slumped to his knees, revealing the breathless corporal racing out of the darkness.
The rifleman saw Gabriel too late. The teenaged soldier pounced at the bearded man, knocking the arm with the rifle in it aside just as his trigger finger squeezed firmly. The shot was a powerful, heart-stopping clap of noise. It muted the hiss of the hot bullet traveling into the snow-dusted brush and frozen darkness. The eye-opening noise did nothing to cover the deafening gasp of the enemy who sank under the weight crashing down on top of him. Gabriel watched his eyes, studying without word or thought in that incredible moment how wide and fearful they became as the dirty blade silently dug into the rifleman’s torso.
By the third, heaving breath the enemy was dead. His blood was hot on Gabriel’s trembling hand. The dust hadn’t settled around the new corpse before Gabriel was on his feet again, backing away from the life he had just taken.
“Good work, Corporal...” said a tired, hoarse voice near his feet.
Gabriel turned around swiftly to look at the fellow American laying in the dirt. He thought he could make out stripes on the man’s shoulder, but he wasn’t sure how many there were. Gabriel guessed he was a sergeant. He didn’t know his name or what company he was with. Right at that moment, it didn’t matter. Gabriel peered at the sergeant’s rifle then over at the old stranger who had owned the deadly knife. “You took that shot?”
“That’s right. And you...you’re welcome, Corporal.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. But then why-”
A bullet slapped against the sand a few feet from the lifeless paratrooper. Another round whistled hauntingly as it zipped past Gabriel.
“Another time, Corporal! The enemy’s comin’! We’ve got to move!”
Gabriel began to panic. A moment ago, his movements and decisions seemed so clear and easy to act on. Now, suddenly, Gabriel felt lost. His thoughts were jumbled up, his mind distracted by the wounded sergeant, his lack of any real weaponry, and the sharp, knuckle-digging ache that would not show him mercy emanating from the side of his chest. From the darkness surrounding them, bullets moving too fast to see crisscrossed the small arena of dirt and blood.
“Can you walk,” Gabriel asked the bleeding officer.
The sergeant tried to sit up but quickly gave up. “Ha, ha...no!”
Shouting voices echoed over the fading gun shots. The enemy soldiers were drawing closer. He could hear the brush crunching as their hurried feet crashed through it.
Gabriel nodded his head. “Okay. Okay,” he said, trying to think. He was scanning the scene, trying to see into the dark. Never more than this would Gabriel have been more than thankful for just a little bit of sunlight. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes. In a passing glance, he spotted his own rifle, abandoned with his rucksack a short walk away.
His heaving chest made him wince as he looked back down at the sergeant. “Okay,” Gabriel said again, fighting back the pain that made him want to wheeze. “i’m going to have to carry you, sir.”
“What? No.”
Gabriel nodded his head. “Yes, sir. I can’t leave you here.”
“They’ll kill us both.”
“Then we’ll die as soldiers together, sir.” There was an unmistakable honesty in Gabriel’s trembling voice. “That’s better than dying out here alone.”
The sergeant stared up at the young paratrooper. Another shot cracked in the dark distance quickly being closed. Finally, the sergeant nodded his head to Gabriel who hurried to grab his near-forgotten gear. The enemy was within sight, the shadows of the early hour bending around them then retreating away completely as their guns came alive.
The fiery rattle of deadly bullets sprayed through the air and through the brush. Gabriel narrowly avoided his life coming to an end. With his rifle and rucksack slung over one shoulder, the frightened corporal returned to his wounded officer. With gritted teeth, he hoisted the sergeant he didn’t know onto the other shoulder.
“Let’s go, corporal!”
Practically dragging the wounded man, Gabriel led them away from the blood-stained landing site. Machine guns ratcheted a barrage of bullets toward them that whistled and hissed as they sailed through the air. Thin fountains of dirt sprang up at their feet where shots fell short. Twigs snapped loudly under their hasty, stumbling gait as they ducked the searing shells passing all too closely.
Gabriel felt a shot near his leg. It singed the thin hairs on his skin as it tore through the already gashed fabric. He took a deep, crippling breath. Tears welled up in his dirt-clotted eyes. The pain only pushed Gabriel harder. He tried to run even faster, carrying himself and the sergeant as swiftly as he could into the predawn darkness.
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