Levon's Time Read online

  “We’ll need some rules here. A plan of attack,” Fern continued.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “She’s an illegal, Merry. I know that ain’t her fault, but she’s trouble for us, and here we just got ourselves outta trouble.” And they had. Merry had only been back home for a few weeks after being placed in foster care by court order. Fern endured the near-constant presence of federal agents poking around and asking questions. For now, the revenuers had stopped coming by looking for her father. That didn’t mean they might not come back.

  “I’m sorry,” Merry said.

  “Better to apologize than ask permission sometimes. Learned that in the Corps. But we need to make sure she stays outta sight when any strangers come by. And she can’t leave the farm until we’re one hundred percent no one’s looking for her.”

  Merry nodded.

  “Poor little thing,” Fern said, looking at the girl, cheeks stuffed and eyes gleaming.

  “Did you get anything to eat, uncle? You need me to fix you something?” Merry asked, rising to take her plate and glass to the sink.

  “Coffee’s fine. You gonna introduce her to your animals?”

  “As soon as she’s done eating and washes up. She can help me groom Bravo.” Bravo was Merry’s chestnut gelding.

  “Make sure you warn her about Tricky Dick,” Fern said. Tricky Dick was his name for the Abyssinian goat Merry kept as a barn-mate for her horse. Merry had originally named him Brewster, but even she had recently started using her uncle’s sobriquet for the mischievous animal, who liked to butt anyone unwary enough to turn their back on him.

  “Roger that.” She returned to the table to take Esperanza’s empty dishes.

  Esperanza whispered a gracias to Fern and joined her new friend at the sink to help with the washing up. Fern listened to the pair chattering away over the sound of running water and clanking dishware. His niece spoke Spanish without hesitation, the apple not falling far from the tree. There was much of her father in the girl, even Levon’s ease with languages. The pair began laughing.

  “You two wouldn’t be talking about me, would you?” he asked, turning his chair.

  “I was just telling Esperanza she has maple syrup in her hair.” Merry, giggling, held up a sticky lock of the smaller girl’s long black hair.

  “Maybe she’d like her hair cut,” Fern said.

  “¿Te gustaría que te cortara el pelo más corto?” Merry said, turning to her.

  The smaller girl thought about this, lips pressed together, before nodding with vigor and a pearly smile.

  13

  “You probably think you’re in for the worst week of your life,” Gunny Leffertz said. “You’d be wrong.”

  He walked in front of a double row of men standing at ease in the center of a fenced compound, two rows of five in white t-shirts and drawstring running pants. The gunny wore pressed BDUs in digital sea camo and had an old-school campaign hat pressed down on his head. The globe-and-anchor pin on the crown was polished to a gleam. His eyes were hidden by mirrored Oakleys.

  He stopped, hands clasped behind his back, and listened for a moment to the wind whispering through the pines across the broad killing zone beyond the double fence.

  “Someday, you’re gonna be in the shit. Deep in the real shit, up to your eyelids. Maybe you’ll get your ass lost someplace where there ain’t a friend in sight. Maybe you’ll find yourself in the snow, or the water, or out in a desert somewhere a thousand miles from anyone who gives a shit about you and your problems. Maybe your ass will get grabbed up by some real motherfuckers, mean motherfuckers, who want to know what you know and will do anything to get you to tell them.”

  The boughs of the trees shush-shushed.

  “Anything!”

  The gunny shouted it. Three of the men flinched at the sudden sound. Gunny heard their sneakered feet shift in the sand. He turned his back to them to hide the thin smile that creased his lips. Damn, he loved his work.

  “And that will be the worst week of your life. And you will look back on your days here with me as a vacation. A fucking time-out from the cares and worries of the sheer hell you might face one day. This will be your spring break. You will thank Jesus for the time you spent here. And do you know why that is?”

  None of the men answered. The gunny had not addressed any of them individually. He turned back to face them.

  “Because this is where you will learn how to get your ass through the worst time of your life. I will test you. I will hurt you. You will be hot. You will be cold. You will be hungry. Hell, I’m gonna try to drown you. You might even think I’m trying to kill you. But I’m not.”

  He stepped up closer, standing directly before a tall white boy.

  “I am gonna temper you. I am gonna forge you. And if you break here, then you will break downrange. I will find your weaknesses. I will find what scares you. I will hammer away at you, sleeping and waking.”

  The white boy’s face betrayed nothing. His gaze remained fixed on the tops of the swaying pines beyond the wire.

  “And you will walk away from here a man. Or you will be carried out of here a broke-ass, useless, weak-kneed pussy. How are you leaving here, boy?”

  He had been addressed directly, so the white boy answered.

  “Walking, Gunny.”

  Gunny stepped within inches of the white boy. He wrinkled his nose, taking a few deep sniffs.

  “You smell like trouble, son. Are you gonna make trouble for me?”

  “Yes, Gunny.”

  Gunny removed his Oakleys. His eyes had a cast over them beneath scarred lids that hung heavy. He locked the white boy with his blind, unblinking stare.

  “You been in trouble, boy?”

  “A time or two, Gunny.”

  “Been inside, right?”

  “Six months in county, Gunny. Stole a few cars, Gunny.”

  “You ever try to escape?”

  “Yes, Gunny.”

  “Ever make it?”

  “Got out for a week, Gunny. Earned me another month, Gunny.”

  “Where you from? Alabama? Florida Panhandle?”

  “Alabama, Gunny.”

  “Are you a redneck? Or are you a hillbilly?”

  “A hillbilly, Gunny.”

  Gunny snorted and stepped back. He replaced his Oakleys over his sightless eyes.

  “What branch of the United States military took a squat and shat you onto me, son?”

  “The Marine Corps, Gunny.”

  “How my Corps has fallen prey to the times, allowing a pogue like you to wear the globe and anchor. You have a name, pogue?”

  “Levon Cade, Gunny.”

  “Cade, I’m gonna enjoy breaking your hillbilly ass, you car-thieving, sister-fucking, nigger-hating son of a bitch.”

  “Yes, Gunny.”

  14

  Gunny Leffertz said:

  “Details. Details. Details. Take it all in. You never know what might turn out to be important.”

  The morning call to prayer echoed through the camp from a loudspeaker set atop the admin building.

  Levon woke, stretched, and began running in place in the cell he shared with six other men. He needed to limber up the muscles that ached from a cold night on the cement floor. Running restored circulation and brought his legs and arms back to life. His stomach rumbled. No food since sometime the day before.

  He needed to eat. He needed a coat. He needed a blanket and a bunk. He needed a phone. In that order.

  The cell was built for two but housed six. Two men shared one bunk, a heavy-set Belgian and a lazy looking Thai with large eyes and the body of a boy. The second bunk belonged to a surly Corsican with a boxer’s build and a weepy eye turned milky-white with a cataract. Levon shared the floor with his German friend from the night before and a middle-aged Japanese man wearing a pair of horn-rim eyeglasses repaired with wire.

  The others watched Levon’s exercise routine. Any kind of distraction was welcome. Other men gathered at the open c
ell door, smoking and exchanging remarks in a peculiar patois of combined languages. The demographics leaned to European, with a few Asians and Africans. No Turks, Arabs, Kurds, or Uzbeks here. This was the infidel wing of the prison.

  He stopped running in place when he started to pop a sweat. Vapor rose from his head in the frigid air.

  “You are a soldier, yes?” the fat Belgian asked, first in French, then in Dutch. Levon pretended not to understand.

  “He wants to know if you are a soldier,” the German said.

  “I’m an aid worker,” Levon told them.

  For some reason, that provoked a laugh from a few of the men.

  “When do we eat?” Levon asked the German.

  “When they call our hut number,” the German said and stuck his hand out. “Klaus.”

  “Bill Hogue,” Levon said and took the smaller man’s hand.

  “On dört! On dört!” A call came from outside as the locks were undone on the barracks door. Fourteen. The number of Levon’s new home.

  Levon joined a loose column of men moving toward the far end of the camp and a low wooden building. Smoke dropped from a metal pipe atop the roof to drift away in a fog and gather in the lane between the buildings. A scent heavy with garlic and grilled meat rode the haze. Levon’s stomach clenched.

  It was cold and overcast, and a wind from the out-of-sight sea somewhere beyond the evergreen woods carried a chilling mist with it. Every surface was covered in a cold coat of salt slick.

  Despite his need for food, he dawdled a bit, falling back in the column for a good look around his new environs—three rows of five barracks buildings on a gravel lot with the cookhouse and a two-story administration building or guard shack at one end. The admin building was a sheet-steel structure and the newest construction in the yard. It was enclosed by its own fence topped with razor wire, which had a gateway equipped with a keypad. It was large enough to house the number of guards he’d seen so far. That meant they were paramilitary, housed here with the convicts 24/7. At the opposite end of the broad gravel lane was a low, windowless building painted the same bright yellow as the barracks. Showers and latrine, probably.

  The buildings sat at the center of a broad pasture of mown grass that was surrounded on all sides by a high fence with hoops of razor wire run in triple rows. Six watchtowers stood on the outside of the interior row of fencing with a second, exterior row forming a corridor that ran all the way around the camp. Four of the towers were concrete construction. The remaining two were girders topped with a wooden box. He doubted they were all occupied, but could see the reflection of protective domes that sheltered their cameras from the elements. There were cameras under the eaves of some of the barracks buildings as well.

  Bundles of wires ran from the towers and were draped along the fence tops and slung over the corridor to terminate at the guard shack. There’d be a surveillance room in there. He’d have to find a way in there to map out whatever blind spots there might be.

  He’d dropped to the back of the column. A guard growled at him, and Levon joined the other men gathered in a tight row to enter the dining hall.

  It was warmer inside. Sufi music played on the tinny speakers of a radio. The scent of cooked meat and spices overwhelmed even the odor coming off the clutch of men waiting their turn at a steam counter that ran across the rear of the space. Some men were already seated at the long picnic-type steel tables, eating from trays.

  Levon took a plastic tray from a stack at the head of the serving line. It was indented to receive portions of food. There were cigarette burns in it. He took a short-tined plastic fork and a spoon from a rubber bus tub.

  A fat Turk in an apron worn over a t-shirt supervised other men dishing out portions from a row of steel trays. He wore a hair net that covered his balding head but not his arms, which were furred like an ape’s. A spoonful of greasy rice. Another of greasy beans. A clump of stringy lamb that added to the pool of grease. At the end of the steam table were platters piled with squares of white and black bread. Levon took one of each, and the hairy chef’s shout, along with the narrowed eyes of the men behind him, made him return one of the squares to its place. One to a customer.

  He took his tray to sit across the table from the German, with the Japanese man from their cell beside him. Only the rice and beans remained on their trays. The Belgian sat at the far end of their table, his tray heaped with a triple portion of lamb and three squares of bread. He shared them with the little Thai seated close beside him.

  The radio switched to Egyptian pop music. Levon dug into the mess on his plate.

  “I need a blanket and a coat. Where did you get yours?” Levon asked after he’d downed the bulk of his meal.

  “And guten morgen to you, mein freund,” Klaus said, but he was smiling.

  “I need to get stuff.”

  “Then you will need money. Do you have money?” Klaus asked.

  “They took it all.”

  “Then no blanket and no coat.” The Japanese spoke for the first time.

  “Gedde is right. Money talks here. Or cigarettes. Or dope.” Klaus shrugged.

  “Where do you get your money?” Levon asked them.

  “I have friends outside,” Klaus said. Gedde said nothing.

  “I’ve been denied contact.”

  “A political prisoner?” Klaus asked.

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  Klaus said nothing. It was clear from his half-lidded eyes that he was assessing Levon.

  “You are a liar, but who in here is not? You will not last long. It will be colder next month, and colder still the month after.”

  “Is there a way to earn money here?” Levon said.

  “Yes. Natürlich. But you do not look like a man who would do the work required,” Klaus said. Gedde blinked, awaiting Levon’s reply.

  “Like what?” Levon said.

  “Be someone’s woman. Like the Belgier’s little toy boy,” Klaus said. Gedde’s eyes cut to the fat man dropping morsels of bread onto the tongue of the Thai, his mouth open in imitation of a baby bird in a nest.

  “There has to be other work in a place like this.” Levon mopped the last of the grease from his tray with a square of bread.

  “There is always murder,” Klaus suggested.

  “You said I don’t look like a man who would do that.”

  “I also said we are all liars.”

  “Who hires for that kind of work?”

  “The Chechen.”

  “He have a name?”

  “Only ‘The Chechen.’”

  “Can you point him out to me, Klaus?”

  “I could, but I will not. I think it is wisest that you and I not be friends, Canadian Bill.”

  “I’ll find him on my own, then.” Levon rose to take his tray and utensils and dump them into one of the trashcans filled with soapy water that stood by the door to the yard.

  “You will not help him?” Gedde asked.

  “And neither will you. Not if you ever want to see Osaka again,” Klaus said and removed his tray from the table.

  15

  It was far too important a decision to be made by Merry and Esperanza alone.

  So Sandy Hamer drove over with an armload of magazines. After two hours in Merry’s room, a choice was made.

  “This,” Esperanza said. She held up a magazine showing Natalie Portman with a blunt cut that just touched her shoulders.

  “It’s cute!” Sandy proclaimed.

  “You’re sure?” Merry asked.

  Esperanza nodded.

  They gathered scissors, brushes, combs, and a can of mousse borrowed from Sandy’s mom. Newspapers were laid down, and a kitchen chair set in place atop them. The instruments were placed on a towel on the dresser.

  “Do you think we can do this?” Sandy asked.

  “It looks simple enough. It’s just hair,” Merry told her.

  “But look at it. All the way down her back. I bet it’s never been cut!”

  “
It’s not like we can take her to Super Cuts, okay?”

  Esperanza sat upright in the chair, wide eyes glancing from one girl to another. Merry offered soothing words and began brushing the thick black mane.

  “God, I wish I was that skinny!” Sandy moaned.

  “She’s not skinny, Sands. She’s malnourished.”

  “Lucky girl.”

  “Hold up the magazine.”

  Esperanza held statue-still as Merry finished brushing her hair smooth and gathered it behind her head. The girl was already looking better after only two days at the Cade farm. The dark circles under her eyes were nearly gone. Two nights of sound sleep and three meals a day had taken the gaunt, drawn look from her features. Her face was regaining the heart-shape of a pretty young girl.

  All the more pressure on Merry not to screw up her first haircut.

  “Here goes,” Merry said.

  After few false starts, whispered consultations, and a carpet of fine black hair spread around the chair, Merry had accomplished a near-approximation of the actress’s cut. She and Sandy held their breath when Esperanza leapt up to run into the bathroom for her first look in the mirror. The girl returned, a smile stretching her cheeks and tears in her eyes. She gripped Merry in a tight hug.

  “I guess she likes it,” Sandy said.

  A commercial van was parked on the asphalt circle ringing the old live oak that shaded Jessie Hamer’s house. It was a real shitbox, with primer spots and faded sections on the sides where the company logo had been peeled away or scraped off. Blue vapor fell from the exhaust pipe. Someone inside was running the heater to stay warm.

  Jessie eyed the van as she rolled past to where she usually parked her work truck in its space in front of the barn. Her truck bore the logo for Riverstone Veterinary, featuring a silhouette of a dressage horse.

  If she disliked the van, she liked the occupants even less. A man exited the van either side to walk over and meet her between the barn and house. The pair, a heavy man in a woolen jacket and a leaner one in a hoodie and windbreaker, stood on either side of the crushed stone walkway that led to the house. The heavy guy smiled under tinted aviators. The younger man looked like he’d rather be back in the van napping.