The War Whisperer: Book 7: Changes, page 2
I thought of that statement I had made to each and every one of the survivors: “My name is Jerry Track and I am your brother.” I toyed with the memory inwardly shaking my head at those who had called me a healer. Memories and times lost in the shadows of time, but still very much alive in my thoughts.
“Really good to see you again, Checo,” said Reb, interrupting my guilt wallow.
Checo walked from the door, took Reb’s left hand, held it, and said, “I am happy we could make it in time.” He cocked his head toward me and asked Reb, “He said you are my Uncle Reb. He pulling my leg?”
Reb slowly shook his head. “About family, never. Orphans have to piece together family from whatever we can. You are White Cloud’s son, I am his brother. That makes me your uncle and you my nephew.”
“Well,” said Checo after a sniff. “It is my honor, uncle, to hold your hand. You are such a great scientist and hero.”
“Thanks,” said Reb, a confused expression on his face. His hand once more beneath the electric blanket, he looked from Checo to me. “Hero?”
“We’ve been called a lot worse, Mental Horse,” I remarked.
“Yeah,” he said and nodded. “Very true.”
Checo excused himself to go out of the room and keep an eye on the hallway. Once he got out there we heard someone loudly blowing his nose.”
Reb closed his eyes and grinned. “We are all just a bunch of sentimental slobs. I was once called a Yankee because I went to school in Maine.”
I nodded.
“Jer, you remember those Maine guide hats we used to wear at Black that Santamas after we started The Hand Band?”
“I do.”
“That night those idiots at that one bar who tried to attack us because he thought we were all Jewish?”
“I do remember that. I also remember the ambulance crews that showed up to haul them to Franklin Memorial in Farmington. The paramedics on one of those ambulances actually were Jewish.”
We laughed. A shame that so many of our laughs were rooted in broken bones, bloody noses, and dead bodies. The anti-Semitic duo did survive, however, to do eight months each in the Franklin County slams. It was amazing how many vids of “Hava Nagila” their fellow prisoners managed to play right next to them day and night, the ancient “Fiddler On the Roof” a new vid favorite.
“You still have your Maine guide hat?” asked Reb.
“No. That got lost when we all got kicked out of Misty.”
“Lost mine, too. They had you wearing a different hat in Villa Regina,” said Reb. “Jazmín y Jerónimo,” he said as he nodded. “That was a sharp hat. Cool sounds. Man. Wasn’t Jaz spectacular in that costume?”
“Dazzling.”
“The look, the sound, the music we made—so important to me. In your life, what do you think was most important to you?”
I frowned and thought for a moment. “I want to say it was cracking The Hook, protecting the freeland, and helping to make all the freelands possible.”
“That sounds pretty good for a headstone,” said Reb.
“It isn’t that, though.” I thought for a moment and shrugged. “It’s almost you, Jaz, Tex, and Lorena in my life, Kim, Pop, and Mamacita, Juan Diego, Checo. The people, the family are close to the top of the list.”
“But they aren’t it,” he prompted.
“No.” I thought on how to put it so that it wouldn’t sound small, trivial, insignificant. How it sounded to others, however, was not the issue. In those moments alone with myself, the world of politics, assassinations, poverty, and slavery locked outside my door, there was one thing that I could reach to and touch, bringing me through the current storm. “It was a dance, Reb.”
“A dance?”
I nodded. “Decades ago at Los Huertos in Villa Regina, I danced with a young girl there who was so frightened she cried. She got her tears on my shirt. But we danced. I led her back to her table and she kissed my cheek. Then you, Tex, Jaz, Lorena, and I set fire to that girl’s torturers. The dance, though,” I said as I nodded, “that is the image I want in my mind’s eye when I die.”
Reb looked through the window. He could see a row of hedges and a couple of large trees, and he stared at it for a long minute. “Suppose there’s anything after this, Jer?”
“Like an afterlife?” I asked.
“Yeah. Not that I want to wind up sitting on a cloud and plucking a harp for eternity. Never liked the harp.”
“I don’t know, Reb. There isn’t any way to know for sure, except by dying, so I’ve never heard testimony from someone with experience, so I never thought much about it. I do wonder at times how much worse Hell could be in comparison to some of the places we’ve been and some of the things we’ve seen.”
“I was sort of counting on not having to find out about Hell, Jer,” he joked.
I thought for a moment. “Science tells us we’re made out of old stars and eventually we’ll become stars again. Conservation of mass and energy; Nothing gets wasted. The reincarnation folks might have the edge.”
“Everything including the squeal,” Reb said as he pulled the cords of the hoody until the hood closed tightly around his face, then put his hands back beneath the covers and in the hoody’s warm-up pockets. “The worms get the meat, the juice eventually goes back to the sea, and the bugs get the particulate leftovers,” he said, “I guess all that electro-chemical colloidal stuff in my skull that is the me I call ‘me’ gets shunted to ground or sent into space, everything to be passed around until somewhere down or up the food chain maybe another human or fox baby gets a piece.”
“My mother is continuing her work with Jaz on harvesting human engrams shortly after death to imprint on something like a robot or android.”
“They anywhere close?”
I shrugged. “I suppose if you can imagine an android with a head the size of a battleship.”
“I’m guessing that’d be a little top heavy for playing in the band.”
“Or anything else,” I added.
“Well, Jerry, if they come up with a practical model in time, maybe I can be imprinted into something taller than five foot six.”
“Would you?” I asked, suddenly serious. “If they could do that, would you want that?”
He closed his eyes, was still for a long time, then slowly shook his head. “No. Maybe just to try it out, but no, man. I’m tired. We won a big war, Cloud—a lot of big wars. I’m glad we did, but without heavy medication I can’t sleep for all the bodies I helped make dead. I’m bone-ass weary. And if the Bible thumpers are correct, when I die, if I can talk my way through the pearly gates, I’ll get to see Lorena again. There are a shitload of those Bible thumpers out there, brother. Maybe they know something.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“What pisses me off,” said Reb, “is I got too sick to do anything by the time I got to Texas. I never got to raise the Stars and Bars over my front lawn. It would have been glorious pissing off the knee-jerk bigots.” He grinned for a moment.
“I can put it up for you,” I offered as I leaned back in the chair and crossed my legs.
“Not just the flag,” he said. “Never even put up the flagpole ‘cause I didn’t even get the property. Devil of a time getting here. By the time my car made it to Crockett, I was so sick I went right into the hospital. Haven’t been out since.” He glanced at me. “The staff you sent did wonders. Thank you for that. They bought me a couple more months, but curing all cancers is still out of reach.”
“The people at AIN tell me they need to be looking for more than one cure,” I said. “Maybe two hundred or more.”
The silence extended into awkward territory. “This seems a nice place,” I said.
“It is for what it is. A nursing home is still where you go to kill time until time kills you.” He frowned for a moment then nodded. “I’ve had several kinds of adventure for a life, Jer: The things I invented, the missions I was on, the things I’ve learned, the people I’ve known, the great music I was a part of making, freedom.”
“Don’t forget The Blue Negro,” I added.
Reb laughed and laughed until his face reddened. When he stopped he looked through his window and said, “Jesus, didn’t Washington get pissed at that. Did you know that most of the critics of The Blue Negro think I’m white?”
I nodded. “That was one of the things that made it hilarious.”
His expression grew somber. “But when I’m gone, and the few who knew me well are gone, it will be like I never existed.”
“I disagree, man. A big hunk of the world’s freelands, including Texas and the ones to come, belong to you, Reb. The history books will remember.”
“That’s right,” he said with a mischievous smile. “We won. We get to write the history books.”
I leaned forward and said, “I’m writing a book about my life and my experiences. You are a very big part of my life and a big part of the book. You’ll be remembered.”
“A book,” he said. “Names and everything?” He glanced toward the door then back at me. “Villa Regina?”
I nodded. “When I can. I’m not going to out anyone still on missions,” I assured him.
“The names will be changed to protect the guilty,” he quipped.
I shrugged. “I don’t even think about the book getting published for my dozens of readers. Doing that messes up my head. Right now I’m just writing the story because it gives me something to do in the wee hours besides entertain ghosts. A long time to go before I decide what to do with it.”
Reb thought for a while then glanced to his left. “Jerry, over there in the nightstand drawer, I got the address of the cemetery where Jacob Davis and his wife are buried. Understand?”
“Your many times great grandfather who was in the Texas 5th Infantry.”
He nodded. “Their graves are west of the main cemetery, about two thirds of the way north in a stand of trees. About sixty years ago they moved all the Civil War veterans over there to get them and their battle flags out of view. Originally they were going to take all the remains, cremate them, and dump the cremains into the gulf.”
“That’s one way to rewrite history,” I observed.
“Lots of descendants of veterans in the county, though, who threatened mayhem if anything like that was attempted. The compromise was to rebury them in the hidden corner of the cemetery where a number of slaves and former slaves had also been buried. Many of the descendants of those veterans paid to have their dead ancestors dug up and reburied with the vet. Next to Jacob Davis and right in the middle of all those old Confederate soldiers and their family members is where I want to be buried.”
“With your family,” I said.
He nodded as a wistful expression crossed his face. “Family. I guess we were pretty lucky, Jer. We had a hell of a run, didn’t we? Monkey House. Heller. The Hand Band. Little Johnson Nub . . .” He grinned, “the night the chicken shit. God, what a stench.”
“It was that,” I agreed. “When those flash bangs went off I was a little afraid the ones inside Foghorn would die.”
He raised his gaze and looked at me. “Tell me, Jer. Villa Regina, at the school. I was outside pumping rounds through one of the doors to let in the air. But you were inside looking at it—looking at those boys burn.”
I sighed and nodded. “I watched them.”
“I just think about it and I get sick,” said Reb. “How do you handle it?”
I smiled and gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t. I never stop seeing it,” I answered, “so I never stop feeling sick about it. I’m a little tired myself.”
“They were cruel little rapist murdering bastards, weren’t they?” said Reb.
“They were all of that,” I agreed.
“And they were all slated to become future ISW leaders. So we did a good thing?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but they were also someone’s’ child, someone’s brother, someone’s pride and hope for a better future.”
“It got Hatchet Haddad dropped from a chopper,” said Reb. “It destroyed the ISW and the Twelve.”
“It did that,” I said. “It cleaned out terrorist central for the ten days it took for the Islamic Nation to move in.”
He was silent for a long time, his eyes staring at nothing.
“Sorry, Reb—”
“Jerry,” he interrupted, “did Misty do any good? Did you and I do any good there? Any good at all?”
I thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know about Misty, Reb. We dropped a whole lot of bad guys, but certainly in the long run the world is still full of bad guys.” I took his hand in mine. It felt cold. “But you and me, Reb, in the end I think we did enough good in Tamaulipas to outweigh the bad. There is a lot of acreage on this planet we helped make free, hundreds of millions of children not going to go to bed hungry tonight nor being forced into shame, mutilation, horror, and death. You and I worked the Black Diamond, Reb, and Texas is free. A few Mambas changing the world, Reb. We helped do that.”
He squeezed my hand, closed his eyes, nodded as a tear slipped down his cheek. “We did that,” he barely whispered. “And we finally got you your micros. That took one hell of a long time, a lot of sleepless nights, but we finally did it. Every black or pink diamond that went up on that pylon on Diamond Hill was like a rebuke, driving us to get you your micros.”
“It was a heroic effort, Reb.”
“You know, AIN took our research on the micros and came up with micro robots programmed to do all sorts of things from diagnoses, clot removals, targeting tumors, to delicate surgery.”
“You did it, Reb,” I said. “You saved a lot of lives and helped free over a billion humans. Just think about the billions of lives your work will save in the future.”
“Eat out your heart Abe Lincoln,” he joked weakly. He was slipping away. I held onto his hand as though I could pull him back. “I wonder how it’s going to turn out, Jer: Freeland Texas. Lots of protesters in the big cities.” He turned his head to his left. “Jer, in my nightstand. You know. When it’s time.”
“I got you, brother,” I said, gripping his hand. “I love you, Reb, and I am so proud to be your brother and your friend.”
“Love you, Geronimo,” he said followed by a small smile. “Jerry. Love you,” he whispered, then he seemed to drift off. At one point he said, “Why would you ever want to write a book.”
Before I could answer, Reb drifted off into something different. His nurse said that Reb was in a coma, but resting comfortably. After looking at the monitors, it was her opinion Reb wouldn’t come out of it. One by one his remaining organs were shutting down.
After the nurse left the room, I said, “I’m writing the book, Reb, to keep alive those I loved and kill off again those I hated. Maybe I’m writing it to put the things that make me feel guilty up for judgment, as though the judgment of a bunch of people with a veso to spare will somehow exonerate me.”
Checo came up behind me and placed his hand on my shoulder. I could feel the tears welling in my eyes and I leaned toward Reb until my forehead touched our clasped hands. Eventually his breathing grew ragged. In another forty minutes Reb stopped breathing and his hand began growing even colder. He had a do not resuscitate directive filed, and that was that.
After a crushing tearful moment, I placed his hand on the blanket, got up, walked around the bed, looked in his nightstand, and found what he wanted me to read at his burial and looked it over. Afterward I placed the envelope in my pocket and called Tex and Jaz, Pop and Mamacita, Doctor Takahashi, Goose, and Juan-Diego.
Out in the parking lot, Checo and I stood in the dark, a gentle wind touching my cheek. “So, what do we do now?” asked Checo.
I shrugged. “If there was a church that either Reb or I respected, I suppose we could go there.”
“You think praying for someone’s soul helps?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if souls exist. I do know praying to a god doesn’t win battles or baseball games.” I looked at him. “Before the hurricane took away your family, Checo, did they go to church?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “No. Sometimes they go to the Presbyterian church on Christmas to hear the carols.
I smiled at a memory. “That’s what we did: Reb, me, and rest of Monkey House. We celebrated Santamas.”
“I suppose we could get drunk,” he suggested.
I looked at Checo. “I’ve never seen you even drink before.”
“I don’t drink. You don’t either. I don’t suppose it would be a good idea to start now. We got Uncle Reb’s funeral arrangements to check and the funeral to get through.”
I looked up into the night sky. I could see Mars. Juan-Diego once said Mars was a mere stepping stone. “There is a universe out there and a universe of possibilities both here and there. All the human race needs to do is to take the chains off its dreamers and inventors.”
And now the space entrepreneurs in Nuevo Leon will probably take over and rejuvenate the facilities in Texas. And what might the Human race reap from the new Mars expeditions? We owed Reb for much of that, as well.
“We’re getting there, Reb,” I said. “One freeland at a time, we’re getting there.”
Liz, doing a bit more mindreading, drove up and took us to a motel she had made reservations at off St. Mary’s next to the old Interstate. That night I wrote almost a quarter of the book covering my years at Black Academy. It was one way of filling the immense hole Reb’s death was to leave in me. With it written down, any time I wanted I could revisit those days and see again that smiling face in the school cafeteria.
“Hey, Shiloh. Drop the pack and lower property values over here along with me.”
The Promise
The funeral was held four days later. In the tiny segregated cemetery deep in the trees west of the main cemetery there were five hundred and thirty-seven graves, all either slaves, former slaves, veterans of the Confederate States Army, their relatives and descendants. Fourteen of the graves contained the remains of slaves who had enlisted in the CSA. Following Reb’s instructions, his open grave was located just to the north of his ancestor, Jacob Davis. Jacob’s wife, Nora Lee, occupied the plot on the other side of Jacob’s.
