Weapons of Mass Destruction Read online

  “We’re going to need another minute here, boys,” Trapp said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Postmortem debriefing, if you know what I mean.”

  “Five more minutes is the best we can do.”

  Sinclair was usually a rock, a dogged fighter with just enough heart to be truly brave. The tougher the soldier, the harder he falls when he cracks up. The platoon would be swinging their battle axes again within the hour. They couldn’t afford to leave a part of Sinclair frozen on that rooftop, staring at something no one else could see.

  “What’s going on, Sinclair?”

  Trapp led him across the rooftop, as far away from Evans as possible. Sinclair craned to avoid losing sight of the body. Nothing registered except his head wound. Nothing else even existed. Trapp held Sinclair’s face in his hands, forcing him to make eye contact.

  “It’s me. Trapp. Come back.”

  The urgency of Trapp’s expression broke through, restoring a modicum of reality. Now Sinclair was in two places at once, in Montana and in Iraq. The past merged with the present. The platoon knew about Pete’s death, but not the details of his suicide. The aspen grove. The self-inflicted head wound. Sinclair strained to see the body again. It still looked like Pete, not Evans.

  “What’s going on?” Trapp repeated. “What are you looking at?”

  “Pete—”

  “What about him?”

  “He shot himself.”

  “Why’d he do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes you do. He was your best friend.”

  He should have known all along, especially after the spectacle at the funeral. His sister, Candace, went berserk, crying and carrying on like it was all about her. She kept saying Sinclair needed to take responsibility for what happened. They all did. Somewhere deep down, Sinclair must have felt guilty as charged. He vaguely understood that this flashback meant that something was rising to the surface. Some terrible secret. He could either confront the truth or bury it again, this time with Evans.

  When they were kids, he and Pete told each other everything. They dreamed the same dreams, even though one boy’s father owned the ranch and the other’s was just a broken-down bronco buster. Bonds like theirs were indissoluble, no matter what did or didn’t happen on the road to manhood. If Sinclair’s grandpa really forced them to attend college, they’d join the same fraternity and take the same classes. When they graduated, they’d run the ranch together.

  “Equal partners,” Sinclair said.

  “We’ll marry sisters and raise a whole passel of little cowboys and Indians,” Pete said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  The older they got, the more Pete called attention to the fact that he was Native American. Out of pride, Sinclair thought. Sometimes he wished he were Native American too, the real McCoy if ever there was one.

  “You’re nuts,” Pete would say. “Like anybody really wants to be Indian.”

  Kids at school made stray redskin jokes. But they were all just part of the fun, like cracks about wetbacks and fags. It was a country school with one foot still in the bygone era of seasonal labor. Mexican students came and went with harvests. Ranchers’ sons attended spottily during foaling season. Pete Swan was always absent the same days as Billy Sinclair. Teachers almost never demanded an excuse. When they did, Sinclair’s grandpa wrote the note for both of them. Pete all but pretended he was an orphan. Being the son of a cliché embarrassed him.

  Pete’s father, Eugene, was still the best horse breaker in the county when he was sober, usually on Sundays. Liquor stores were closed and he invariably raided his own emergency stash sometime late Saturday night. Once he slept off the week’s dissipation, he climbed on the bare back of the orneriest stallion in the paddock and bucked till it broke. Eugene only kept his job because the Swans had worked the Sunset Ranch since the Civil War. In the beginning, Sinclair’s great-great-great-grandfather traded the horses Pete’s great-great-great-grandfather bred from wild stock. They called them all great-grandfather for short, dissolving the distinction between generations and even families as they traced their ancestry back to the heyday of the Wild West.

  There were several versions of the history of their founding fathers, all of them mythic. The one constant was that Samson Swan, Pete’s distant progenitor, was the best dadblamed breeder west of Kentucky. His partner’s claim to fame was subject to debate. Great-grandfather Tyler Sinclair was alternately altruistic, shrewd, or downright disreputable, depending on the teller. He sold horses to the Confederacy or the Union, if not both armies, in which case he narrowly escaped swinging on the end of a rope. Sinclair’s father, who was a confirmed skeptic, insisted that Tyler had deserted from the Confederate army, saving his skin by hiding in a hollow log to elude bloodhounds. As far as Sinclair was concerned, his father was a notoriously unreliable narrator, especially when the story involved military exploits. Vietnam had convinced his generation that war was just an excuse to open up foreign markets. If he’d been old enough for the draft, he would have slipped into Canada, especially since the Sunset Ranch was so conveniently located near the border.

  “It runs in the family,” Sinclair’s father liked to say.

  “What does?”

  “Draft dodging.”

  “Knock it off, Dad,” Sinclair said. “Just because you’re a traitor doesn’t mean great-grandfather Tyler was.”

  “Neither of us are traitors, Billy. What’s the point of getting your butt blown off in a senseless war?”

  “The Civil War wasn’t a senseless war.”

  “It was if you knew damn good and well you were on the losing side.”

  “There was more at stake than just winning or losing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Honor. The right to defend your land.”

  “A bunch of slave-holding rats clinging to a sinking ship doesn’t make them honorable, Billy.”

  His father’s relentless pragmatism offended the youthful idealism Sinclair had no intention of outgrowing. For him the central issue was patriotism itself, allegiance to a cause. The politics of the Confederacy were less important than the right to determine their own destiny. Democracy itself was at stake in the Civil War. When America fought wars, democracy was always at stake.

  Grandpa’s version of the story was much more circumspect. For one thing, he referred to Tyler’s move to Montana as a migration rather than a desertion. Big Sky country beckoned and he went west with all the other young men. A hollow log and bloodhounds were involved. But the identity of the troops in pursuit was more nebulous.

  “They could have been Yankees chasing a loyal Confederate soldier,” Grandpa said.

  “That sounds more like it,” Sinclair said.

  “If they’d been rebels tracking a traitor, they’d have nabbed him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Better bloodhounds. Used to tracking runaway slaves.”

  Grandpa’s interpretation, cleansed of troubling nuances, appealed to the black-and-white clarity of Sinclair’s moral universe. He simply couldn’t comprehend anything that didn’t fit into the scheme of good and evil. Right was right and wrong was wrong, and the measure of manhood was standing up for what you believed in. There was no question in Sinclair’s mind that Tyler was a loyal patriot. But one troubling fact still dogged him. Horses with the Sunset Ranch brand—an “S” with a snake’s head—had been registered in both Confederate and Union armies. The only possible explanation was that Yankees had commandeered the horses of fallen rebel heroes. Spoils of victory. Pete, whose imagination was less encumbered by moral certainties, offered a less exalted explanation. Tyler was a businessman, an entrepreneurial American dedicated to the belief that what was good for the goose was good for the gander. Whether this meant he was a traitor or not depended on your definition of the pursuit of happiness. One man’s opportunism was another man’s free enterprise. Pirates were notoriously hard to distinguish from patriots, especially
during the Civil War.

  Pete and Sinclair may have disagreed about the details of the illustrious history of the Sunset Ranch, but both boys blamed their fathers for its recent demise. Previous generations loomed in heroic relief against the immediate backdrop of alcoholism and cynicism. Whatever pride Pete took in his heritage had pretty much dissipated by the time he was a teenager. The Great Spirit had been distilled into a bottle, and the noble savage was a drunk. Sinclair’s father’s faults were more subtle, but no less egregious. The hired hands called him Mr. Sinclair, not without a hint of wicked western irony. All he ever did was sit at his desk, balancing books and delegating chores. He wore chinos and loafers and actually drank tea. With milk and sugar. Grandpa was the only real man left on the ranch, a throwback to the days when ranchers were still cowboys, not accountants. A lot can change in a single generation.

  Grandpa was a living reminder of the unprecedented moral integrity of the Greatest Generation. His country sounded the alarm, and he mustered the quintessence of honor and altruism that transformed mere men into heroes. He rarely talked about how he came by the medals locked in his desk drawer. Humility was the better part of valor. But he liked to tell tales of his father’s adventures in the war to end all wars, the nation’s first brush with greatness. Times were hard in the hinterland. The ranch was struggling financially as the horse market adjusted to railroad monopolies in commercial transportation. The Sinclair boys picked up day labor when they could find it, especially in the off-season. Grandpa’s father had been mining silver in the high country when he first heard the distant drums of war. A backward backwoodsman and proud of it, he wound up drinking champagne in the capitals of Europe. Needless to say, there was a fair amount of fighting somewhere in between the woods and the champagne. But no matter how much Sinclair probed, he always heard the same expurgated version of World War I.

  “In the days when mountains still had veins of silver and whores had hearts of gold,” Grandpa always said as he warmed to the telling.

  Sinclair sat on Grandpa’s lap until he was old enough to know what a whore was. Then he sat at his feet on a bear skin rug. There was always a fire flickering, if not on their hearth then somewhere near the front lines. Grandpa’s voice seemed to travel great distances, spanning decades as well as continents.

  “Without a moment’s hesitation, he and his pals shipped off to see the world. Miners and ranchers and farm boys who’d never stepped foot outside Montana. Who’d never even heard of Archduke Ferdinand, much less the Young Bosnians. Just imagine.”

  Sinclair’s imagination took wing. For every dyed-in-the-wool military man, there was a narrative archetype, a story that captured his fancy and held it hostage until he enlisted. In every war, the brutality of cold hard facts on the ground eventually gave way to the irresistible aura of heroism. No doubt Grandpa told his father’s tale rather than his own because it sounded more mythic than real, at least until soldiers ended up shell-shocked or blinded by mustard gas. He willingly recounted fording the River Somme and breaking the stalemate at Château-Thierry. But when the Great War descended into the dank darkness of No Man’s Land, something always came up. He had errands to run or it was high time Billy went to bed. The mere mention of his own tours of duty, three decades later in the same war-torn European fields and forests, sent him rushing off to nonexistent chores.

  “Can’t you see he doesn’t want to talk about it?” Sinclair’s father would say when Grandpa disappeared.

  “He’s modest, that’s all,” Sinclair said.

  “He’s trying to forget. Stop badgering him, Billy.”

  Sinclair’s worldview was free of doubt and ambiguity. A family’s military legacy was something to be proud of, plain and simple. If anything, Grandpa’s reticence to reminisce about actual combat enhanced its mystique. Surely blood-soaked trenches epitomized the honor of sacrifice, not the futility of butchering a generation of young men for the sake of a few cubic feet of devastated land. Where his father had the gall to characterize fascism as the sinister side of nationalism, Sinclair revered the patriotic spirit that inspired the French to resist the Germans and the Americans to ride to the rescue, saving civilization from the barbarians at the gate.

  “War itself is barbaric, Billy.”

  “You sound like Mom.”

  “Have you ever really listened to your grandpa’s stories?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “Something’s been lost in translation.”

  By the time Sinclair was a junior in high school, he and his father stopped talking about politics. For one thing, the topic was forbidden at the dinner table. His mother was sick and tired of their endless wrangling. Besides, neither one of them wanted to hate the other, the inevitable outcome of continued discussion. They could maintain at least a semblance of filial devotion as long as they confined their conversations to sports.

  The older Sinclair got, the more the armed forces appealed to his clear-cut sense of right and wrong. Another boy might have considered becoming a minister. But the Sinclairs were Sunday Christians. Too much religious zeal smacked of Mormonism and all those crazy sects in the deserts of southern Idaho. Pete accused him of being a zealot in his own right, worshipping at the altar of the gods of war. He was keenly aware of the fact that history had winners and losers, no less than military campaigns. Witness the fact that the Swan family name had mysteriously disappeared from legal documents verifying the ownership of the Sunset Ranch. For all its democratic high-mindedness, Sinclair’s patriotism was more a privilege than a right, the purview of the landed gentry.

  “My great-grandfather couldn’t have been a patriot if he tried,” Pete said.

  “Why not?” Sinclair asked.

  “Didn’t have a country, remember?”

  “Give me a break. Indians are as American as apple pie.”

  “The American army didn’t wipe out apple pie.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody wiped out anybody.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “Where are who?”

  “The Sioux.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you? You and your dad.”

  “Guess we slipped through the cracks.”

  One minute Pete couldn’t stand being Native American, the next he wore it like a badge officially authorizing him to bash the government, especially the military. The idea that serving in the armed forces was a noble commitment to God and country was just pie in the sky. If half the country stood to gain, believing in that crap, the other half suffered for it. Or what was left of the other half.

  It got to the point where Sinclair couldn’t talk politics with either Pete or his father. He could have sworn they were in cahoots, conspiring to convince him that America’s devotion to democracy was just an excuse to carry a big stick. But this would have required an unwonted spirit of cooperation. For whatever reason, Sinclair’s dad never took a shine to Pete the way Grandpa did. He was proud of his own iconoclasm, a clear sign of intellectual maturity. When Pete expressed similar views, he got in trouble for being disrespectful. Mr. Sinclair had his own theories about the potential demise of the Sunset Ranch. He always pretended to know something nobody else knew about Pete Swan.

  Sinclair and Pete never dwelled on their differences. They had better things to do, especially during hunting season. The deep hush of mountain forests put everything in perspective. Wild animals led them back to the source of what really mattered. Pete bagged his first ten-point buck the autumn of their junior year, the most thrilling event of both their lifetimes. A more sublime season was unimaginable. Then the weather took a permanent turn for the worse. It had never occurred to Sinclair that the simple joy of boyhood might not withstand the storm of adolescence. Pete was less naive, but equally devastated.

  At first Sinclair blamed this girl Chelsea at school. He wasn’t exactly dating her. The nearest movie theater was miles away, and neither of them was old enough to drive. There was a soda fountain in the village, the last vestig
e of Norman Rockwell’s prophylactic idea of courtship. But they’d outgrown that kind of thing before they were born. When the snow thawed, they took walks along Bear Creek. Chelsea was fond of wildflowers. The fact that Sinclair knew all their names convinced her that he was a sensitive young man. He lost his virginity on a pine-needle bed.

  Chelsea was surprisingly accommodating, bordering on promiscuous, according to Sinclair’s strict codes. But he managed to quiet his scruples sufficiently to take full advantage of her lapses. Her parents were shockingly permissive, or just oblivious. He started sneaking in and out of her wing of their house with effortless, if guilty, ease. Sex was a lot more fun than he thought it would be, once he got the hang of it. But it took awhile. The first time Chelsea laughed in bed, he got defensive.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re laughing, aren’t you?”

  “I’m having fun.” Chelsea grabbed the scruff of his cropped hair and yanked till he yelped. “Aren’t you?”

  He finally learned to let his hair down, as she put it. But there was still something vaguely unsettling about it all. The fact that he’d been watching livestock go at it for years probably didn’t help. The whole business seemed starkly libidinal, even compulsive. He found himself sniffing around her house when he could have been off in the woods with Pete. What Chelsea called making love he called sex, though not to her face. They didn’t love each other, no matter what she said. Sometimes it felt like he was at the mercy of a strange new force that threatened to sully the purest pleasures he had ever known.

  He wasn’t the swaggering type, though guys his age routinely compared notes with their buddies. Pete, on the other hand, was reluctant to talk about sex. At first Sinclair assumed he was just clueless, pretending to know the score when he was obviously still a virgin. And then, just as obviously, he wasn’t. Not that he breathed a word about the big event. For some bizarre reason, he continued to avoid locker-room talk. Granted most of their friends were chivalric enough to refrain from divulging specifics. The identities of the girls themselves remained unspoken, if only to avoid fistfights. But Pete was downright secretive, even with Sinclair. It was the first real wedge in their friendship.