Chapter 36
Chapter 36
H e was sitting cross-legged with his shirt off. Mind you, the temperature was near zero. I rubbed my eyes and tried to sit up. Only then did I notice his bandage. Right shoulder. Just below his collarbone. He was in the process of peeling off the bloody one and replacing it with a clean one. His skin had been sutured. Front and back.
“What happened?”
My question caused him to pause. He raised an eyebrow, applied the dressing, and chuckled. Finally, he pulled on his shirt, fleece, and down vest and puffer, then a Gore-Tex shell. He leaned back against the stone wall, crossed his legs, and sipped his wine as a crimson sun spilled off the side of the planet. “Shoulders don’t react well to bullets.”
I guess that was when it hit me. He’d returned a week ago from Central America and we’d not talked about his trip. Since then, we’d climbed this stupid mountain three times and finally, tonight, or rather early this morning, as I’d slipped and started falling, he’d mustered the strength and gumption to reach out with his right arm—the one that had been shot—and not only pull me back but place me safely on the rock. To this day, I had no idea how he did that. Anytime I’d been shot, I’d turned into a boy with a man-cold and started crying like a teenage girl watching The Notebook . You can ask Summer. It’s ugly. But not Bones. He was on the mountain with me. Who did that? I knew of only one man.
The insanity of it struck me. So I asked him, “You mind telling me what we’re doing up here?”
He stared into his wine as a cold wind washed across us. When he spoke, he did so from both memory and experience. “People who steal people, and then line up a train of miscreants and perverts deserving only of a single bullet, don’t think like you and me. Their business model is rape for profit. Twenty times a day. They open the door—‘Please. Come in.’ Then they sit at the table and count the dollars or smoke a Marlboro as some little girl or little boy’s spirit slowly exits their body beneath a blanket or another’s sweat or bodily fluid. The only way you and I ever catch those people, the only way they ever pay for their sin, is if we learn to think more like them and less like us.” He held up a finger. “Notice I did not say ‘become like.’ I said ‘think like.’ There’s a difference. And one way we force ourselves to do that is to override what our body is telling us. Pain is a signal. That’s all. The body’s response to discomfort. We are here learning to mute it. Because if we don’t...” He waved his hand across Colorado and the earth beyond. “We can’t hear the cries of the dying and those who wish they were dead.”
While he was sitting there with his legs crossed, I could see the bottom of his right boot. Into the Vibram sole he’d used something like a knife tip to carve two bones between the flat space of the arch and the heel. Normally, that area of the sole wouldn’t touch hard-packed ground, but in snow and soft sand it would, leaving an imprint. As I studied the snow around me, I realized I was surrounded by bone-imprinted footsteps. And as I stared back down the path I’d ascended, I saw even more.
“What’s with the bones?”
He nodded, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. For the last two years I’d asked him the same question. Each time, he’d shaken his head. “You haven’t earned that.”
By that time, I’d broken every known record he held at the academy. “When will I?”
“If you have to ask when, then you haven’t.”
Lying on the side of that mountain, face blistered, having worn the skin off my fingertips, “when” had come. I simply pointed at his boot.
He stared into his wine and then at me. “Majorca. The dungeon. I’d lost count of the months, had named all the rats, and was pretty sure I’d die in that grave.” A pause. “Whenever the priests”—he made quotation marks with his fingers—“‘visited,’ they’d bring a lantern. But I was too busy fighting for my life to see my surroundings. Plus, a lantern shoots light downward. It doesn’t shine up, so I never really got a good look with my eyes. I’d walked around feeling the walls, but that only allowed me to ‘see’ what I could reach. It wasn’t until Frank smuggled in a flashlight that I saw what I’d been missing. And it was a lot.” He sipped his wine. “I knew my ceilings were taller than I could reach, and based on the echo, they were a good bit taller. But how much, I couldn’t guess. Enter the flashlight, and I could not believe my eyes. Frank slipped that thing in my hand and I began scouring the world around me. It nearly took my breath away. I wasn’t in a dungeon and the bars weren’t prison bars. The entire cavern was an underground chapel, and I was living in a crypt whose bars separated it from the altar. It blew my mind. This entire time I thought I was just in some dank cell, but in reality, I’d been living in a thousand-year-old tomb. Prior to the flashlight, my hands told me there were these holes in the stone. I thought people had put candles in there. But the flashlight allowed me to see they were a ladder cut into the rock that led up to where the body had been laid. The entire time, some old guy had been lying in a tomb. Shield. Sword. The works. The story etched into the wall said he’d saved more than a thousand people after the Moors invaded. Lived underground for a couple of years but somehow managed topside raids at night. No one could ever discover how he got out. Night after night. He rescued countless people from untold horror, getting them out of the city. Yet when I studied the walls, no one had written his name. The only inscription I found was a single word.” He paused. “Study Scripture and the word bones is equated with the person. There’s no difference between this hard thing”—he tapped his leg—“and me. I am that. That is me. So there I was, stuck down in that hole in the earth with this pile of bones, and that’s when it hit me. I am—”
I finished his sentence. “Bones.”
A nod. “I’ve always liked the name. Just seemed to fit. Maybe I was half crazy, but I felt like that old guy spoke it over me. So that night I took my knife and carved a set of bones into my shoe. I would have carved it into me like a tattoo or brand, but I was tired of people hurting me and didn’t want to add to my pain. Something about putting my mark on the sole of my shoe meant I left an imprint wherever I went. Like, ‘This is me. I was here.’ Which, as a boy living in that dungeon, I thought impossible. In the years following, wherever I traveled, I took that old guy with me. And maybe what he did for me, in some small way, I’ve done for others.”
He sipped. Nodded. “Least I’d like to think I have.” He studied his boot. “Frank saw the crude carving and the name stuck. Which was helpful because neither of us knew our real names, so one was as good as any other.” He paused. “Maybe it was my way of telling the world, ‘You may stick me down here in the bowels of this earth, abuse me, forget me, treat me like an animal, and strip me of my hopes and dreams, but you can’t take my name.” He tapped himself in the chest. “I’m Bones. That’s me. You can take everything else, but not that. And I’ll be here long after you”—he waved his hand above him in the air, signifying the priests who lived in the world above him—“sick miscreants are gone and burning in hell.”
The falling snow muted the world around us. “My name became a knowingness. An understanding. I knew that I knew that I knew that a reckoning was coming. That’s what it was. My name was a reckoning. There in that hell, all I had were my words. And there and then I gave myself one. A name. It was the only thing I could give me. Because I had nothing else.” He raised a finger. “In the years since, I’ve come to understand—no, to know—through the hundreds of people I’ve rescued, that nothing matters more than a name. It’s why it’s always been the first thing I’ve asked them. Because no matter what hell they’ve endured, a name can call them back out. A name establishes a record. Drives a stake in the ground. Shouts across the stratosphere, ‘I’m here! I matter! I’m not invisible! And while you may think very little of me, God Himself actually thought me up. What you see in the lens of your eye, this thing we call me started in His mind. He actually took the time to think me up.’ Imagine.” Another leg tap. “God thought of me. Molded my bones like a potter. And if that’s true, and He thought of me, and then made me, and then named me, then there’s a record of my existence. Evidence that I’m real.” He was quiet a moment, slowly swirling his wine. After several minutes, he said, “When you’re in hell, slavery, nothing matters more than a name. Because with it, someone can walk up to the bars that shackle you, point at you among the many, and call you out—by name. A name is the singular thing that separates us from the ninety-nine. A name makes us the one.” The look in Bones’s eyes was one of longing. Of remembrance. And of pain. “Without a name... there is no record.”
As the snow dusted our shoulders, he stood, walked inside the cave to his left, and pulled out a rectangular padded canvas case. About four and a half feet in length. He carried it around the fire and laid it at my feet. Then he turned and spoke out across the earth, his words blanketing me. “Never doubt the power of a single bullet.”
Enter Maggie.
The memory stung and the longing returned. As did the questions. The shame. And the doubt. I missed him. I missed Bones more than I could say.
I focused through the diopter and the target came into view. I slowed my breathing, allowing the crosshairs to settle, and placed my finger gently on the trigger.