Chapter 3 #2
BURNER ONE: Fifty-one people. Nineteen kids. Whatever else is true, that is fifty-one people who have not eaten each other yet, in month eleven. That is not nothing. That is close to a miracle.
BURNER TWO: It is fifty-one people who need a man who can shoot, who just found one.
He shifted on the rock. Down in the valley a hawk came off the burn and slid south without a wingbeat.
BURNER ONE: Say it plain. What are you actually asking me to do.
BURNER TWO: I'm asking you to notice that you're about to hand a child to strangers and call it rescue, and then walk back up here to your potatoes.
BURNER ONE: She cannot winter here. You know that. Look at the shelter. Look at her shoes. Twenty below in January and a canvas wall. She would be dead by February and it would take her a long time.
BURNER TWO: Agreed. She goes. That was never the question.
BURNER ONE: Then what is.
BURNER TWO: Whether you go with her, and what you do when you get there.
Burner picked up a flake of stone and turned it over in his fingers.
BURNER ONE: I am one man. I have two hundred and twenty-two rounds. There are six of them with a truck and a concrete building and fuel. You want me to walk into that for people I met an hour ago.
BURNER TWO: No. I want you to stop pretending the reason is the numbers.
BURNER ONE: The numbers are real.
BURNER TWO: The numbers are real and they are not the reason.
You would not be sitting on this rock for four hours over a math problem.
You'd have solved a math problem in ten minutes.
You're up here because something in you already knows the answer and the rest of you is trying to find a respectable way not to give it.
Burner threw the stone flake off the rib and watched it go.
BURNER ONE: All right. Then let's do it your way. Let's say I go. Let's say I stand on a hill above that maintenance yard and I put a round through a man's chest. What is that.
BURNER TWO: That is a thing you have done twice already.
BURNER ONE: Those were different. Both of those were a man coming at me in a doorway. That is not the same as lying in the grass at four hundred yards and killing a man who is drinking coffee.
BURNER TWO: Why not.
BURNER ONE: Because one is defense and the other is an execution.
BURNER TWO: Say that sentence out loud in the clearing you were standing in yesterday.
Burner shut his eyes.
BURNER ONE: That is not an argument. That is a picture. You are showing me a picture to stop me thinking.
BURNER TWO: It's a true picture.
BURNER ONE: Every man who ever did something terrible had a true picture in his pocket.
That is exactly how it works. That is the whole mechanism.
You find a thing so bad that no further thought is required, and then you never have to think again, and six months later you're the one at the fire ring.
BURNER TWO: So you'd let them go on doing it, to preserve your ability to think clearly about it.
BURNER ONE: I would rather be a man who did nothing than a man who became them.
BURNER TWO: Those are not the only two options and you know it.
BURNER ONE: Name a third.
BURNER TWO: There isn't one. That's the point.
There is no clean third thing. There is no version of this where you walk out with your hands unmarked.
That is what you have been buying up here for eleven months, and the price of it has been paid by everybody down there in that valley, and you have been very careful not to look at the receipt.
Burner got up and walked to the edge of the rib.
Below him, small, Shyla had come out of the shelter and was standing near the fire ring with Yak.
She had found a stick. She was throwing it about six feet and the dog was picking it up and bringing it back and dropping it a yard short of her, over and over, patiently, as if teaching her something about distance.
He watched for a while.
BURNER ONE: Here's the thing you're not saying.
BURNER TWO: Say it then.
BURNER ONE: If I go and I do this and it works, then I am the man who did it. And there are fifty-one people who will know it. And I will not be alone anymore, ever, because you cannot kill for people and then be a stranger to them. That is the real cost. Not the risk. The company.
BURNER TWO: Yes.
BURNER ONE: And that terrifies me more than the six men.
BURNER TWO: Yes.
BURNER ONE: Why.
BURNER TWO: Because you had people once and you watched what the world did to them, and you decided that the safest thing in creation is to have nothing that can be taken.
And that worked. It worked beautifully. And then a child crawled out of a woodpile and it stopped working, and you have been sick about it for two days.
Burner stood there a long moment.
BURNER ONE: Suppose I take her down there and hand her over and come back. She's safe. She's warm. That is the entire good outcome. Everything after that is me choosing to add risk for strangers.
BURNER TWO: Suppose you do. And suppose in March that truck comes back and takes the Kettle apart, and she is in it.
BURNER ONE: That's speculation.
BURNER TWO: It's the second thing they've done twice.
BURNER ONE: So I'm responsible for every possible future now.
BURNER TWO: No. Just the one you can see coming.
The sun climbed. His shadow pulled in under his boots.
BURNER ONE: Then let me ask the ugly one. What if Halloran is lying.
BURNER TWO: Go on.
BURNER ONE: What if the Kettle is worse than he says. What if there's a reason a place with fifty-one people always takes children. What if the vote he mentioned is a vote about what to do with men who won't fight, and the kids are the hook he uses on men like me.
BURNER TWO: Then you'll find out, because you'll be standing there.
BURNER ONE: And she'll be standing there with me.
BURNER TWO: Which is a reason to go with her rather than send her. You just argued yourself into it. Did you notice.
Burner exhaled.
BURNER ONE: I noticed.
BURNER TWO: There's one more.
BURNER ONE: I know what it is.
BURNER TWO: Say it anyway.
BURNER ONE: If I walk her down there and leave, I have to look at her while I do it. She has to watch me turn around. After two days of walking behind her.
BURNER TWO: And.
BURNER ONE: And she will not argue. That's what I can't carry. She won't cry and she won't grab my coat. She'll just stand there with that face she does, and she'll say okay, and she will file it with everything else that has happened to her, and she'll be right to.
He sat back down on the rock, slowly, because his knee had gone stiff.
BURNER ONE: I don't want to be one more thing she files.
BURNER TWO: No.
BURNER ONE: That is not a moral argument. That is just me not wanting to feel a thing.
BURNER TWO: Most moral arguments are, underneath. That doesn't make them wrong.
He sat with it.