I sat in my office, chair leaning back, focused on the ball I lobbed into the air. Up and down. Catch, toss. Catch, toss. It wasn’t as if I had ever had grand plans to be a ball player, or was even invested much in the sport, but one of my men had given it to me, and he had. It had been all of his hopes and dreams, all wrapped up in rubber, twine, and leather.
“I want you to have the ball if something happens,” he had said.
“Ain’t nothing going to happen,” I said with all the confidence in the world.
I had to be confident. Nervous leaders made for nervous men. I could be confident. I wasn’t going out on that patrol.
Not everyone came back.
Calvin Huntington had been his name.
Toss, catch. Toss, catch.
Back home, I kept that ball with me as some kind of reminder, a token of lost dreams and misplaced hubris. Today, it was none of that. Today, it was an old baseball and something to occupy my mind, so I didn’t think.
I didn’t feel like using my brain this afternoon. I had already burned it out by reviewing the documents from my father’s estate. I had a never-ending pile of them. Insurance companies were appearing out of thin air wanting proof so they could divest themselves of their money and give it to me. Medical bills for treatments I didn’t know the old man was getting were grabbed from money I didn’t even know I had access to.
And communications from multiple lawyers. I had banks I needed to follow up with. There were accounts that needed managing. Properties that needed upkeeping or divesting. Belongings to sort, employees to pay. I didn’t want to think about it. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to deal with it from half a continent away.
I had no fond memories of tossing a ball around in the back yard with my father. We never bonded over teams or spent long, hot afternoons at the ballpark eating hot dogs and waiting for our team to hit a home run. But I had this ball, and it had been infused with Huntington’s wishes. Maybe they spilled out a little bit each time it took to the air.
“I see you’re busy.”
I didn’t shift to see my first lieutenant giving me lip.
“Mind your own business, or I’ll bust you for insubordination.”
“Your door is open, so I am taking that as an invitation,” he said as he stepped in and parked his ass across the desk from me. He sat and watched as I tossed the ball over and over.
I ignored him and his lack of official decorum. Manners be damned, I outranked him. “Show your superior some respect.”
“With all due respect, Sir, when was the last time you took leave?”
I caught the ball. It smacked into my palm. I looked dead into First Lieutenant Gardner’s eyes.
“A real leave, Bowers. One where you can sit on a beach, drink beer, fraternize with the opposite sex,” he continued with a flinch from my glare.
I chuckled. “Are you telling me I need to get laid?”
“If the boot fits, lace that bitch up and kick some ass with it.”
“What do you want?” I finally asked.
“Colonel Manning wants to see you in his office.”
“Why didn’t you say so? If he chews on my ass for being late—”
“He won’t. He said if I run into you.” The emphasis was on the ‘if’.
With a grunt, I relaxed back against my chair. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but at the moment it was about all I had the mental fortitude to deal with. “Did he happen to mention why?”
“He did not.” With a heavy exhalation of a long, weary breath, Gardner pushed himself back onto his feet. “Door open or closed?”
I stared into the empty hallway for a long moment. Fuck it. I set the baseball on my desk with a thunk and pressed up to my feet. “I’m coming.”
I didn’t feel old. I just felt tired, but the knees bitched at me as I stood. First the knees, then the back. I blamed the chair.
“Major,” Gardner said with a hint at a salute as he turned one way down the hall, and I turned the other way toward Manning’s office.
The sergeant, seated at the receptionist desk outside the colonel’s office, snapped a quick salute as she saw me.
“Is he in?” I asked.
“He’s expecting you.”
I knocked on the frame of the open door. Manning had his back toward me. His office had a real desk—unlike the folding table that served in my temporary office—and shelves covered in manuals. His desk was piled with file folders on one side and a computer on the other. And his chair looked like real upholstered leather.
My salute was lazy at best when he turned and waved me in.
“Major Bowers.” Colonel Manning’s voice rolled like booming thunder.
“Sir?”
“Sit down, Bowers.”
I sat.
He opened a file folder and read over whatever the paper inside told him. He did that for a long while. His expression was dour. Questions started to move about in my head. Nothing so vigorous as a bounce, more like a meander from random thought to random thought. Was I being reassigned? Where to? I really did not want to go overseas again, and I sure as hell was not looking forward to being deployed.
“What are you doing here, Tate?”
Oh, fuck. Manning used my first name. He only did that when something was sizable. The first and the last time he had called me Tate was when he told me my father had passed away.
“Sir? You told First Lieutenant Gardner to send me your way if he saw me.”
Manning shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. Why are you still here? Why haven’t you retired yet?”
I shrugged. “Nowhere else to be, Sir.”
“That’s bullshit, and we both know it. Your father died.”
“And I took bereavement leave,” I pointed out.
“You did, and then you came back. You’ve inherited a sizable chunk of change, Major. So, why did you come back to push pencils around a folding table of a desk?”
I shrugged. “What else was I supposed to do?”
“I am sorry you lost your father, I truly am. But why would you want to hang around here when you now have the freedom to do whatever it is you want? That’s not a situation everyone is granted.”
“If you were in my boots, would you?” I asked. I really wanted to know.
Ever since I attended the funeral, I had been walking in a cloud of fog. Thinking took effort. I wasn’t sad. At least, I didn’t think I was. I hadn’t spoken to the old man for a long time, had no idea he was even sick. He could have said something, but he never called me, either. To say we had a contentious relationship put far too much emotion into whatever it was we had. There was an obligation of family between us, and that was about it.
I didn’t feel the drive to do anything. Should I stay in the Army, or should I retire? If I retired, what the hell was I supposed to do then?
Colonel Manning leaned back and toyed with a pen and its cap. “When I was a kid, maybe eighteen, nineteen, there was this cherry red Camaro down the street from my mother’s. Nineteen sixty-nine with twin black racing stripes across the hood. It was a classic even then. Spent most of its time up on blocks. But I knew when I got the chance, I would get myself one of those cars.”
He focused on the pen and the cap for a moment in silence.
“Did you ever get your car?” I asked.
He nodded. “Uh-huh. When I was about twenty-five. I kept it for four or five years. It ran for maybe six months the entire time I owned it. It was a money pit on wheels. Every single valve and seal, every tiny piece of rubber trim had to be replaced at great cost.” It still sounded like he loved that car, even if it was taking all of his money.
“Why are you sharing this with me?”
He tossed the pen on the desk and sat up straight. “Because, if my daddy left me half the money I know you inherited, I would walk out that door” —he jabbed his finger at his office door— “and go find myself another nineteen sixty-nine cherry red Camaro and drive it into the sunset. And probably, straight to an auto-parts store. The point is, there is something out there that has your soul, and you know the means to find it and reunite with that part of yourself.”
“So your soul is a bright red American muscle car?” I had no idea what my soul was. Any chance of discovering what it might have been was taken from me by a father who thought discipline and order were the way to a life worthy of living.
“Maybe my soul is a red sports car. It is driving fast and the eternal dream of youth in jeans and leather jackets. It’s the idealization of the long drive across a desert highway and milkshakes at the next rest stop.”
I chuckled. “Your soul sounds a bit like some movie from the nineteen fifties. Something with James Dean and Marlon Brando. Or maybe Marilyn Monroe.”
“That might be a little before the right time, but you’ve got the idea. Something perfect and unattainable. Tate, you need to go out there and attain for those of us who can’t. Find your soul, live a dream life. Retire.”
