Around the bend, he caught up with Bear, who stood under a tree reading her book. Her dress fluttered in the wind.
“Aren’t you freezing?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she assured him. “Walk with me?”
They walked side by side. Neither spoke, but her company helped keep him going even as he felt himself weakening. An aching hunger and thirst constricted his throat. Maybe if he lay down in the snow, he’d wake up back in his cell? There’d be food waiting for him; he’d never wanted one of those bars more in his life. Funny the things you found yourself missing.
“Don’t even think about it,” Bear said, reading his mind.
“I’m tired.”
“You slept on the plane.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Ellie’s all you’ve talked about. You can’t quit now.”
At the mention of his daughter’s name, Gibson felt ashamed. For all the pleasure it had brought to plot revenge on Damon Washburn, it had been Ellie who had kept him alive. Seeing her again was the only hope that captivity hadn’t stolen, yet he already wanted to take the easy way out. He lowered his head and shuffled forward until he became hypnotized by the progress of his feet. He couldn’t feel them anymore, so it reassured him to see them hard at work.
When he looked up again, he saw modest houses set back from the road. He should ask for help, but the idea of knocking on any of the doors terrified him. It would mean talking, and not to someone like Bear or his father who understood what he’d been through. The people inside these houses would see only a madman in a windbreaker. Or mistake him for an escaped convict, which he supposed wasn’t too far from the truth. There had been a time when persuading people had been second nature to him, but now he couldn’t remember how. What would he say to them? How would he even begin?
Duke Vaughn leaned against an old Ford pickup truck with a “For Sale” sign in the window. His dead father beckoned to him, and Gibson went up the driveway. Bear had vanished again. She and his father avoided crossing paths, he’d noticed. They didn’t seem to get along so well these days.
“I can’t do this,” he told his father, eying the home’s front door.
“You know how many doors I’ve knocked on in my career? Asking perfect strangers to vote for my candidate?”
Gibson shook his head. “Looking like this?”
Duke conceded the point. “I’m not saying you don’t have certain liabilities. You used to like a challenge.”
“It’s not a challenge. It’s an impossibility.”
“Most people would say Damon Washburn is impossible. But we’re going to do that too. But first, you have to knock on this door.”
“What do I say?”
“How much cash do you have?” Duke asked.
Gibson didn’t know. He leafed through his wallet and counted ten crisp twenties. He didn’t remember having them when he’d been captured. A gift from the CIA? Mighty generous of them to give him severance pay for time served. Not that two hundred dollars would take him very far. He still had his credit cards, but they would have been frozen for nonpayment a long time ago. He looked at the clean-cut kid on his driver’s license with a feeling close to nostalgia. It was valid until his birthday in 2021. He wondered if it had expired.
Gibson caught his reflection in the window of the truck. Unwinding the T-shirt from around his head, he considered the man staring back at him, foreign and familiar in equal measures. The face of a vagrant, feral and adrift. But at least he finally had an answer to the question that had tormented him. He was still him. Such as it was. But it wasn’t a face you opened your front door to. He looked unfit for human company. The hollow sockets of his eyes were the red of septic bandages. His beard unfolded like a tangled thicket to his chest, and his long, matted hair fell to his shoulders. Gibson attempted to comb some discipline into it, but his hair felt like barbed wire on his blue-black fingers.
“Doubt a couple hundred bucks is enough to get you this sweet baby.” Duke winked and patted the pickup. “But who knows, maybe they’re in the mood to negotiate. Just give ’em that old Vaughn charm.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’ll work wonders.”
“That’s the spirit.” Lately, his dad acknowledged sarcasm only when it suited him.
Gibson went up the walk to the front door, debating whether he’d make a worse impression with a T-shirt wrapped around his head or in full Sasquatch mode. In the end, he left off the T-shirt, opened the glass storm door, and rang the bell. A boy no older than eight threw open the inner door. A wall of heat greeted Gibson, making his face tingle. The boy wore a tank top and shorts and looked up at Gibson from under a Cincinnati Bengals helmet.
“You don’t look so good.”
From the mouths of babes.
Gibson opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He pointed at the pickup. The door closed, and Gibson heard the boy hollering for someone.
“You’re going to have to do better than pointing at things, Tarzan,” Duke said.
“I’m working on it.”
A woman in her fifties, clutching a bathrobe at the neck, came to the door, makeup half done. She opened the door an economical crack, gave him a once-over, and asked his business. Gibson stood there in mute panic, mind a blank. Despite the cold, sweat rolled down the back of his neck. The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she started to close the door when her eyes fell on the T-shirt in his hand.
“You a Marine?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Use your words,” Duke said.
“Sing me the hymn,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“You heard me. And don’t be giving me no Halls of Montezuma neither, just skip on down to the third verse.”
He knew it. Every Marine did. They could have left him in that cell until his brains were scrambled eggs, until he couldn’t remember his own name, and he’d still know every word to the hymn. But the idea of saying so much petrified him. He opened his mouth and shut it again.
“I ain’t got all day,” she said.
“You can do it,” Duke encouraged.
Gibson cleared his throat and rasped out, “Here’s health to you and to our Corps. Which we are proud to serve; In many a strife we’ve fought for life. And never lost our nerve. If the—”
“All right, that’ll do.” Her expression softened. “What do you need, son?”
“Home,” he managed.
She nodded as if she knew exactly where he meant. “I let you inside . . . you going to do something stupid? Cause me to shoot you?”
He shook his head.
“Then take your shoes off and come warm up.”
“You did it,” Duke said, exulting. “This is the first step, son. I’m proud of you.”