By early afternoon, the summer heat of Bakersfield had settled over Cypress Avenue like a wet wool blanket. The air shimmered above the baking asphalt, turning the distant horizon into a watery, distorted mirror. Sidewalks had bleached from gray to pale bone, and even the crows had abandoned the telephone wires for the meager shelter of dry oleander bushes.
I sat inside the cab of my battered pickup truck, letting the cracked air conditioner wheeze a pathetic stream of lukewarm air against my face. My fingers drummed a frantic, hollow rhythm against the cracked vinyl steering wheel. I was tired. Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep cures, but the bone-deep, hollow exhaustion that comes from carrying thirty years of memories that refused to stay buried.
My name is Hollis Crane. People around these parts knew me as a guy who ran a small engine repair shop, a man with a silver beard, quiet manners, and a limp in my left knee that acted as a personal barometer whenever a storm rolled in off the Sierra Nevada. But long before I turned wrenches or patched lawnmower carburetors, I answered to a different title. Sergeant. Infantry. A man who had led squads through places where the earth burned and the sun was an enemy as lethal as any sniper’s bullet.
That afternoon, I had business across town to pick up a reconditioned crankshaft, but traffic on Cypress Avenue had ground to a sickening, complete halt.
Cars idled in long, gleaming lines, their drivers trapped in metallic ovens, staring blankly ahead through tinted glass. Up ahead of me, near the curb of a quiet residential block, something looked terribly wrong. A large, olive-drab military-surplus backpack lay discarded on the pavement, its heavy nylon straps splayed out like the broken wings of a downed bird.
Several feet away from it, a man lay flat on his back on the radiating black asphalt.
He was broad-shouldered, perhaps in his early fifties, wearing a faded, collarless military-issue green shirt and heavy combat boots that looked completely out of place in a civilian California neighborhood. A silver-streaked beard rested against his heavily breathing chest. His sunglasses had shattered under his own weight when he dropped, and a thin, white-hot line of sunlight cut straight across his unmoving face.
People were stopping. Of course they were.
A teenager leaned against the fender of a Honda, holding up a smartphone, filming the scene with the detached curiosity of someone watching a glitching video game. Two women stood near a chain-link fence, whispering behind cupped hands, keeping a safe, calculated distance.
Nobody stepped closer. Nobody cast a shadow over him. Nobody offered a drop of water.
And then, cutting through the heavy, stagnant air, came a flash of bright, lemon yellow.
Her name was Willa Mercer. She was eight years old, wearing a faded denim skirt and scuffed sneakers, and in both hands, she carried a children’s umbrella that looked like it had survived a hurricane or two, its metal ribs slightly warped. She lived three blocks down with her grandmother, sent out on a simple afternoon errand to return a library book.
I watched through my dusty windshield as she paused at the edge of the asphalt. She didn’t look at the phone cameras. She didn’t look at the whispering adults. She looked only at the man on the ground, at his dry, cracked lips and the relentless hammer of the afternoon sun.
A woman near the sidewalk hissed, “Hey, little girl, get away from him! He could be dangerous!”
Willa didn’t flinch. She simply opened the yellow umbrella with a sharp, echoing snap, walked right up to the fallen man, and knelt down in the dirt, angling the bright canopy to block the searing light from his face.
As I shifted my truck into park and reached for the door handle, my chest tightened. I recognized that uniform shirt. I recognized the specific weave of that tactical pack, and the way his fingers were curled against the hot tar like he was trying to dig into a foxhole.
And as I pushed the door open and stepped out into the furnace-like air, I realized with a jolt of pure dread that I knew exactly who was lying under that sun—it was Marcus Vance, a sergeant from my old battalion—and I knew the explosive violence that would erupt if someone startled him the wrong way out of a heat-induced delirium.
My God, I thought, looking at the approaching shadow of a city police car down the street. He thinks he’s back in the sandbox.
Marcus’s hand twitched violently toward a concealed side zipper on his military pack, his knuckles turning chalk-white.