1. Promises on the Rooftop
PROMISES ON THE ROOFTOP
COLE
Present Day
The truck starts knocking eight miles outside a town I have never heard of.
A hitch in the engine at the bottom of a low rise.
Let off the gas and the stutter quiets. Give it gas and it comes back louder.
The gauges are clean. Nothing on the dash is telling me anything.
But the knock is the kind that gets worse before it gets terminal, and I have heard enough engines die in enough places to know what I am listening to.
"Don't fucking do this to me."
The truck does not listen. Two miles later she dies — the engine quitting between one breath and the next. I coast her onto the gravel shoulder and turn the key.
Click.
"Son of a bitch."
I turn it again. Nothing. I get out, pop the hood, and there it is — oil where oil should not be, slicking the block, dripping down onto the gravel.
I stand there and look at it.
"Well, that's good and fucked."
Tuesday, late May. Fourth day of the drive. And I am done driving.
I lean on the grille and look at the mountains instead of the truck. The Wind River Range sits right there. Close enough to see snow in the gullies. Close enough to touch.
One bad piece of metal between me and it.
Fifteen years I kept trucks alive in places that wanted them dead.
But those were old iron — mechanical to the bone, nothing between me and the problem but my own two hands.
This thing's a rolling computer. Sensors and modules and a hundred things that won't tell me a damn thing without a reader plugged into a port under the dash — which I don't have, on a shoulder with a dead cell phone, six miles short of the nearest town.
I know military engines. I don't know Holt's truck — never did get under the hood of it while he was alive, and now here I am learning it dead on the side of a road, the both of us.
"Well, that's good and fucked."
There is a joke in there somewhere. Holt would already have found it.
A laugh comes out of me — one short hard sound.
If the others were here, Hagen would be telling me this is what I get for bringing a Ford.
Holt would be telling Hagen to shut up, because Holt loved this truck.
Reyes would be losing his mind in the back the way Reyes always lost his mind, and one of us would already have his phone out calling AAA while the other three gave him shit about it.
The others are not here. They were going to be — we were all going to drive out and do this together, the whole team.
Then time did what time does. Hagen has a wife now.
Reyes has a mother who needs him. The rest have the lives men build when they finally get to build one.
Family. Obligations. Things that hold a man in one place.
Nothing holds me. So it is me.
Just me and a leaking engine on a Wyoming shoulder.
Well. Holt is here. Riding shotgun, more or less — an urn on the floor of the passenger side, wrapped in a wool blanket, because putting him in the bed with the spare tire was not a thing I was ever going to do.
Thirteen months gone, and here the two of us are — stranded on a Wyoming shoulder, me keeping the promise I made to him.
I crouch on the passenger side, lift the blanket, put a hand on the urn for a second, then cover it back up.
Too light. Holt was a big man — could haul a hundred and forty pounds of gear up a ridge line and still be the one cracking jokes at the top, still the one carrying a wounded brother's load on top of his own.
Fifteen years I watched him do it. What is in this urn does not weigh enough to be that man. That is the part I cannot get used to.
I wipe my hand on my jeans and stand up.
The wind comes down off the range and finds the sweat at the back of my neck. Out here I can see weather an hour before it arrives. Right now there is no weather. Just blue sky going on forever. White mountains. A two-lane road with nothing on it in either direction.
My phone died somewhere back around lunch.
The cord finally gave out, and I figured I'd grab a new one at the next gas station.
No phone now. No calling AAA even if I wanted to.
Just me, a dead truck, a dead phone, and a dead brother riding shotgun.
Three out of four of us not talking, and the fourth one's me.
I wait.
Waiting is a thing I am good at.
Twenty minutes before the first truck comes.
An old two-tone Ford pulls onto the shoulder behind mine, the paint two shades of blue that don't quite match — the newer coat worn through to the older one underneath, a truck somebody fixed instead of replaced, more than once, on purpose.
Thing has to be thirty years old and runs like it intends to see thirty more.
A thirty-year-old Ford, come to tow a dead one.
Holt would've loved that. The driver climbs out slow and square, no motion wasted. Sixty-something. Flannel. Work boots.
I check his hands. Old habit. Fifteen years of checking hands does not switch off in thirteen months of being a civilian. They are empty, and they are working hands — thick knuckles, a thumbnail gone black, calluses earned the hard way.
Not a threat. A rancher, or close to it.
"Morning." His chin comes up at the hood. "Trouble?"
"Some."
"Mind if I look?"
"Please."
He pops the hood and goes silent for the better part of a minute the way you go silent when you are actually looking at something. Straightens.
"I ain't a mechanic. Something is leaking that shouldn't be. You got Ed Larsen in town — he'll know inside of five minutes. I can tow you in. Six miles."
"I'd be obliged."
He puts out a hand. "Walt Mercer."
His grip is what a grip is supposed to be. Firm, brief, telling me nothing he doesn't mean to tell. He does not squeeze. He does not hold it a beat too long to prove something. He shakes my hand the way a man shakes a hand when the handshake is just a handshake.
"Cole Mathison."
"Where you headed?"
"Cirque of the Towers."
He nods at that and does not ask why. Most men would.
A stranger headed alone into the mountains with a wrapped-up something on the floor of his truck — that earns a question.
Walt does not ask it. He stopped for me, and now he is letting me keep what is mine to keep.
Two things I appreciate, in the first five minutes of knowing him.
A flip phone comes out of his shirt pocket. He makes a call in nine words and closes it.
"Ed'll look at her soon as we get her in."
Walt goes to the back to rig the chain and I go with him. I take the hook, feed it through the frame where it ought to go, and set the tension while he works the other end. He watches me do it. Doesn't correct me. Just nods once, the way one working man nods at another.
Then I go to the passenger side, lift the wrapped urn off the floorboard, and carry it to Walt's cab. Set it down carefully between my boots, where I can keep a hand on it. Fifteen years I had this man's back. I am not about to let him roll around loose on the floor of a tow.
A medal hangs from the rearview on a worn chain.
St. Christopher — the one travelers carry for safe passage.
My grandmother kept one just like it on the dash of her Buick, pressed my hand to it every time she backed out of the drive.
I have not thought about that in thirty years.
Somebody wanted this old truck watched over too.
My eyes do the cab the way they do any new space. What is in the side pockets. What is on the dash. A working man's truck. A clean one. A box of shells in the door pocket. A pair of leather work gloves folded over the visor. A photograph clipped to the dash so faded I cannot make out the face.
Walt gets in, sees me do the eye-sweep through the glass, says nothing about it. Puts the truck in gear. Pulls us both onto the two-lane going west.
The mountains slide closer through the windshield.
Walt drives without talking. One more thing I appreciate.
The road is empty. The sky is bigger than anything I have seen since the last deployment.
And down at the floor between my boots is a man who sat on my kitchen counter for thirteen months while I got my shit together.
Before I could put him in a truck and drive him to the only place he ever asked me to go.
After the funeral, Hagen handed me the box and said take him home, Mathison.
He did not specify which home. Holt's mother is in Pinedale.
Holt's father is in a graveyard outside Cheyenne.
Holt's actual home, by his own definition, was the team — so the team gave him to the team. Me being the team in this case.
Holt wanted this trip for six years. Talked about it the first time on a rooftop in Kandahar with the sun going down behind the wire, plastic bottles of warm water in the heat, the call to prayer rolling up through the city from a hundred mosques at once.
He traced the route with his finger on the dust of the rooftop ledge.
Lander to the trailhead. Big Sandy. Jackass Pass. The Cirque on the third day.
He said, “Mathison, we are going to be old men one day. We are going to wish we had spent more weeks in the mountains, not fewer.”
I told him a week was too long.
He said it quiet. “We're doing this trip, Mathison. Out there it's so quiet you can hear God in the mountains. I've thought about it my whole life. And when we get the ever loving fuck out of this sandbox, we're going.”
Then later, near the end of the watch, off-handed the way he said everything. “If I don't make it back, you do the trip for both of us.”
I told him to shut the fuck up.
He made me promise anyway. Three weeks later he did not make it back.
He never got to be old.