Komatke Gold. Benjamin Vance

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a sign that I was a true sinner, beyond any redemption. Our minds continue to play such dirty tricks when conditioned early! Finally, I stopped calling and my heart hardened and began to corrode.

      I found solace in acquaintances with the hardest soldiers, toughened by combat or personal loss or both. I took the most difficult and most distant jobs in Korea, the Philippines, Germany and finally the most distant place on earth, the Pentagon. As I neared retirement, I must have feared it; dreading free time most of my life. I also found myself forever exposed to women who for a kind word or gesture would have given themselves, but I was always true to Myra. Punishment for what I’d done? Who knows? Who cared? After a while I was just a content android, going about my tasks making rank and honors, and no lasting friends.

      Although my two sons are alienated from me thanks to their mother, I did have them then and I used them to justify staying with my wife. I hadn’t had a real father, but by God I was going to make sure they had one. By most standards, I had a good career. Since I was older when I joined the Active Army, I got passed over for colonel and that stroke of luck finally changed my life. I could have stayed for another nine years, but why travel a dead-end street? I needed a break anyway. Of course, my wife didn’t see it that way.

      My youngest son was entering college, and she argued he needed our constant help with his tuition. Actually, she loved the Army even more than I. She didn’t have a good education; she’d hardly made it through high school. The Army gave her the “rank” and status she craved, but could not have gotten otherwise. When she couldn’t talk me out of retiring, she tried to get the most out of active duty and scheduled herself for a couple of helpful surgeries, including the correction of a deviated nasal septum. Although it should have been a routine surgery, she was never the same after recovery. She giggled for no reason for about three days, and seemed to drift in and out of reality. I talked to the doctors, but they threw up a stone wall and I got nowhere.

      I learned much later that she must have had a bad experience from the “depot effect” of anesthesia that remained in her fat after surgery. What there was of my marriage went downhill from there and ended in divorce two years after retirement in Florida. She divorced me citing irreconcilable differences. The differences were one-half of my retirement pay, thanks to the Soldiers’ and Sailors Relief Act, the house and its contents, three timeshares, and a sizable alimony each month. She had a great Florida judge and I had a lousy lawyer!

      However, I still had marketable skills, a decent second career offer in D.C. and for the first time in my life I was free to do what I wanted. Of course all of our friends became her friends, and my kids held me responsible for the divorce, so not only was I free, but I had a lot of time on my hands as well. I believe it was just about that time I realized there was more to life than the Beltway and semi-retirement.

      Gazing at the ceiling one night in D.C., I remembered my safety deposit box in Virginia had been completely overlooked during the divorce. It hadn’t even been mentioned. I paid the bill every year, but there was really nothing of consequence or value in it. We’d rented it prior to my going to the Philippines, which was then very susceptible to a periodic coup. Upon return I’d almost emptied it, and just kept it for my mother’s things and some other old memorabilia that connected me to the past. The map too; the map my father had in his safety deposit box was still in there! For over twenty years, I’d considered it a great fabrication, and now I had time to prove it was junk; just the excuse I needed to go back to Arizona.

      Chapter 5.

      I didn’t have a million bucks in the bank, but had managed to keep a few dollars. My beltway boss relinquished his hold on my ass for a few months, I put my valuables, mostly photographs, in storage, and headed south on I-95 toward Hopewell, Virginia. It was nice to leave D.C. for anywhere with real mountains. I had to prove my identity at the Bank in Hopewell, but I got all my stuff, including the map, and turned southwest toward North Carolina and that strip of I-85 that would steer me more and more westward. I chose to take I-10 to I-8 just so I could go through Yuma again and re-trace the U.S. 95 route I’d taken so often back then. I had plenty of time to think as well.

      I guess most people do their best thinking while driving. I sure do. I’ve often wondered why long-haul truck drivers don’t own most of the patents in this country. Maybe they get the ideas, but don’t have the eleven thousand bucks to get a patent. Who does? In any case, before I made the outskirts of Atlanta, I’d deduced a scheme to visit my fathers’ grave, and to quietly investigate the whereabouts of one Myra Page. Visiting my relatives and old friends in and around Phoenix took a distant third. So did visiting my father’s grave.

      Of course, I fantasized endlessly about the meeting. Would Myra float gently into my arms after all those years, would she try to kill me, would she even remember me? She’d probably have older kids, and perhaps even be a fat grandmother. What if alcoholism or diabetes had taken her? My God, how short our lives are. I believed the worse possible scenario would be that she would treat me with a kind, detached indifference. How that would sear my useless soul.

      All these things I pondered and more. Forever selfish is the ego! Never did I question my right to even talk to her. Never did I wonder if she’d think me evil or repulsive for not having the guts to divorce my wife and go to her like I should have. What impact would my arrival have on her family or her children? She never mentioned it, but what if we had a child she was too proud to share with me? What would my arrival do to her reputation within the reservation community, and why should she have to deal with it at her age? Never did I try to think like her. I just blundered into Parker at 2:00 a.m. on an unusually wet, cool breezy night in February. Nothing really looked the same, but I saw a familiar motel sign and the smell of desert was in my head again. I was nothing short of giddy.

      Chapter 6.

      That was two days earlier, including a stop for a pee break in the middle of U.S. 95, and I’d just started to sweat with a vicious nervous tension. I applied three times the deodorant I normally did, because nervousness can raise a stink and the knowledge alone exacerbates the process. I had a date! No, not a date with Myra Page, but with someone who knew her well; her cousin!

      Lew-Lew was not your average Indian, or at least not what Hollywood would cast as a middle-aged “squaw”. She was entirely professional and entirely gorgeous. She kept her hair in a tight bun like Myra did, but with no furtive strands. She had an easy, elegant carriage with chin always up and nose in the air. Had it not been for her isolate demeanor and overbearing conversational demands, she might have been easy to talk to and easy to know. She was shapely and her skin was flawlessly olive. She dressed impeccably, to demonstrate her shape and announce her status. Her perfect makeup enhanced her cheek bones and beautiful black eyes. Yep, she was pretty, but I’d known beautiful.

      I initially thought her lack of body fat stemmed somewhat from her desire to elude diabetes, which is such a scourge for some Native Americans. She definitely watched what she ate. No fry bread for this lady I guessed. With a degree in Anthropology, and a Master’s Degree in Native American Studies from Northern Arizona University (NAU), she’d become a teacher and political advocate for her tribe. Then she earned a law degree and turned into just another attorney. She did have a way with words though, and some people. Lew-Ann Lewis was formidable as she strolled into the Holiday Inn restaurant looking for someone she’d only heard about. I stood up and she found her way to my table.

      “Hello, Miss Lewis.” I said with a grin, as she allowed me to help with her chair.

      “Hello, Colonel.” No smile-no handshake!

      “I appreciate you coming to look at the map. It’s probably a fake, but you never know. It was in my father’s things. We found it in his safety deposit box years ago and ... .”

      “I have to drive over СКАЧАТЬ