Page 17 of What is Found
Which was pretty much like saying,Being a man, doing what a man’s got to do, is too much for you.
His father’s gun club was north of the Old Tragedy Tree or Hanging Tree, depending on who was doing the talking. The tree got its various names on account of the eight men lynched and then buried on that spot way back in 1863. Story was that the men had been on their way to Mexico with a heap of cash. Some versions said they were going to buy cattle; others said they were Confederate deserters. Whichever way it was, they were unlucky enough to meet up with Confederate soldiers from Camp Verde.
What exactly went down after was a little murky. No one to this day knows who decided that lynching was a better option than a trial. Legend was that a couple soldiers wanted nothing to do withthatand rode off. Those who stayed watched all but one of those men swing. The one fella they spared the rope begged to be shot rather than slowly strangled.
When the bodies were discovered a day or so later (buzzards being an excellent marker), the men doing the discovering also found a musket’s steel ramrod pinning one man to the ground. That was why some people first said the Indians—and not whites—killed those men. Anyway, the town buried the men right there and put up a gravestone with their names and the date. That marker remains to this day. Descendants even come to visit.
One bit of the story about that day said there was a boy with those men. No one knew who the kid was or why he was with those guys in the first place.Some even said he was an Indian, a Comanche boy they’d scooped up on their travels. The boy didn’t end up hanged, though whether he got away or the soldiers let him go, no one could say. The boy just disappeared—and so did all that money.
For many days after the towers fell, the boy whose name was not yet John biked out to the Old Hanging Tree. If the wind was right, he caught the distant crackle of gunfire and the occasional cannon-likeboomhe knew was a .50 Desert Eagle—and maybe even his dad’s. (Which, when he was older, he understood was just the silliest weapon anyone could own. People said it wasfun,but the recoil on that thing was like getting your wrist kicked by a horse. The one time his mother tried that monster, she near about knocked herself out.)
After a week of sitting with eight dead men and stewing in his own juices—of listening to what his father said onlyrealmen did—the boy who would become John Worthy went to see his Uncle Dare.
CHAPTER 3
Only a monthor sobefore9/11, during the trip to Glacier, his dad showed themFull Metal Jacket. His mother said it was too violent; his father, who was a Vietnam vet, said it was right on the money in a lot of ways. Like that Marine mantra: a rifle was only as good as its master, and a person who hadn’t mastered himself could not master a weapon.
His father allowed thathewas good, but his brother, Darron, was on a whole different level. Dare was the kind of man the Army wanted in a Ranger: a patient man who could live by himself in the jungle, who knew how to be invisible. A man who knew his way around a sniper rifle and never lost his nerve.
No one could say, precisely, what Dare had done or how many VCs he killed. All anyone knew was that Dare was so good he survived, on his own, in the jungle after being cut off from his team for almost six months and, really, until the very end. In fact, thelegend was that Dare was waiting for a clutch of VC to clear out thesameday he happened to catch some radio chatter that the U.S. was throwing in the towel. Dare was at least two days away from an exfil site. With the VC in his way, that trip might take him even longer. Dare decided, heck with it; trying to sneak around these guys was going to be too hard. So, he pulled out a sawed-off M79, which fired big old grenades, and started blasting:whomp, whomp, whomp!Obliterated five guys right off the bat. By the time the remaining VCs recovered, Dare had already come blistering through their line and just kept on.
There never was a better hunter of men than Dare. He was like smoke. Kill a gook or a couple of gooks or a whole squad then let the darkness swallow him again. Your uncle was ice,his father said.Your uncle was stone.
The cabin Dare built was seven miles south of town and on the banks of Abby Lake near Medina Lake. Unlike Medina, a manmade reservoir on the river of the same name, Abby was natural. Medina’s water levels could drop, sometimes by as much as thirty or forty feet, but Abby Lake, fed by an underground aquifer and nestled between limestone cliffs, never did. Deep and cool, the lake was known to ice up enough in winter for a man to drill out a hole and drop a line. Everyone in town said Abby was good for largemouth bass and catfish. Even so, anglers stayed away from Dare’s side of the lake. Just...better all the way around.
Churning the pedals, he reached the cutoff for hisuncle’s cabin in record time, dumped the bike, then stagger-stumbled the remaining half mile on a narrow path threaded with the exposed roots of live oak. Branches whipped at his arms and stung his cheeks, the woods’ greedy fingers stretching to grab and nip and tear and then, all of a sudden, the woods let go, and the forest pulled apart?—
And then there was Dare’s cabin, sheltered beneath the shade of a grove of mixed live oak and a few maples which had escaped the confines of the Sabinal and their Bigtooth cousins off yonder west at Lost Maples Park. The boy he had been pounded up the steps to the front porch and hammered on his uncle’s front door so hard, it was a miracle every single little bone in that hand didn’t shatter.
When his uncle opened up, he blurted, heedless of the tears streaking his cheeks,Teach me to shoot! Teach me to be a man to be like you!
Then he waited, his mouth tasting of dust and the sweat wicking away from his neck and face and back. This close to the lake and shaded by both trees and the cliffs, the air was cooler. A breeze set the hair on his arms to prickling, and he shivered.
His uncle was a tall, dark-eyed man, his body all angles and sinew and hard bone. He stared down at the boy for a long moment as a line of piano music, something soft and mournful, floated from somewhere deeper in the cabin. Then Dare said,Come on in, son.
The cabin’s front room smelled of wood smoke,wood sap, fried meat, fresh coffee, and worn leather. A pot-bellied stove squatted in a corner next to a hand-pump sink.
Make yourself at home. Just perked up a fresh pot. Dare wrapped a cloth around the handle of an old-fashioned percolator, the kind with a glass knob on the top.You want a cup?
He hated coffee. He drank coke. (Which didn’t have tobeCoca-Cola. “Coke” was the word they used in Texas just as he later discovered that people in Wisconsin called any fizzy drinkpop.) Real men didn’t drink coke. Men sat around on logs or barrels or crates or in front of campfires and jawed and cleaned their weapons and guzzled coffee from enameled mugs so hot you could scorch your fingers on the handle.
Anyway, he said,Yes, please, coffee.
While his uncle puttered, he plunked himself down in a worn leather chair, the kind a person could sink into and near about get lost. The music coming out of the record player was slow, low, a little sad. The jacket was an off-beige with an older black woman with an old-fashioned flip-do at a piano.
Mary Lou Williams.His uncle handed him an enameled blue mug with white speckles.Criminal the way no one knows about her. What that woman could do with just a bass and drums can make you cry. Now, then,his uncle said, settling himself into an old hand-carved rocker. He took a noisy slurp from his mug.Tell me what’s on your mind.
He tried a sip and near about boiled his tongue. The coffee was charry and so hot that when he finally swallowed, he felt the burn all the way down the center of his chest.I told you.
I heard what you said.Dare sucked in another swallow.But tell me again. Don’t leave anything out. Tell me everything.
So, he did. He talked about his dad, so angry all the time, especially after the trip to Glacier, and now so much worse. His brother. The two of them together, his brother and his father, stalking the house. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that his father loved his brother more. Saw his brother as almost a man and not likehimat all.
That’s why I need to learn,he said.I need you to teach me how to be like you.
Dare said nothing. The recording had ended, and the speakers only hissed.
Pushing up from his rocker, Dare crossed to the record player.Son,he said, carefully plucking the vinyl disc from the turntable and slotting the record back into its cardboard sleeve,I can teach you to shoot. Any human alive can shoot. That’s the easy part. But learning to bemeso thatthis—he bunched a fist over his heart—this is ice and stone, that’ll be different.