Page 6 of The Jackal

My house was waiting with its crooked porch and its three ridiculous dogs and its sofa I would not be sharing tonight or, in all likelihood, this decade. I let them out, and they thundered into the yard to interrogate the same fence about the same squirrels.

I stood on the back steps in the dying heat and thought about Max at his gate, weight on his toes, eyes on the door, keeping faith with a man who was never walking back through it.

I thought about how I'd sat with him, anyway. How somebody has to. How the whole of what I was good for, in the end, came down to that one stubborn thing—staying with the ones who'd been left, refusing to let them go down into it alone.

I just wished, some nights, that the staying ran both ways. That somewhere out there was a man who knew how to do for me what I knew how to do for them.

4

CASH

There's a sound a flag makes when men carry it slow.

Not a flap. Not the snap you hear over a ballgame or a courthouse lawn. When six men carry a casket at the pace the dead are owed, the flag draped over it doesn't catch the wind so much as breathe with the motion. A low rustle. Almost nothing. The most solemn sound I know. I've heard it more times than I can count, and it has never once gotten smaller.

It was past midnight in Germany, and cold the way Europe gets cold—wet and patient, working into the seams of a man. I stood at the dark edge of the tarmac where the floodlight went thin, far enough back that I was just a shape, and I watched them carry Leonard Beasley onto the plane.

He didn't look the way I'd left him. That was the work of other people, and it was good work. Almost no one knows it gets done.

When I bring a man back to friendly soil, my part ends and theirs begins. Mortuary affairs. Quiet people in a quiet building who receive what's left of a life and handle it like scripture.

They had taken Beasley—what the warlord and his saw and a week in that house had made of Beasley—and they had given him back his shape. Cleaned him. Set what could be set. Closed what could be closed. Dressed him in the uniform he'd earned, ribbons squared, until the thing in the casket was a Chief Petty Officer again and not a horror somebody had to be warned about before they looked.

They do it for the family, so the family gets a flag and a folded silence instead of a nightmare. They do it for the man. They do it, mostly, because somebody has to, and they're the somebody. I have never met a one of them and I'd lay my life down for any of them. We're in the same trade. The far end of the same long table.

Six SEALs carried him up the ramp. Beasley's own—the men he'd bled the worst rooms on earth beside, flown in to take their brother the rest of the way home with their own hands, because they would not have it any other way. They moved like the casket weighed nothing and everything at once. At the top of the ramp, they set him down with a care you cannot train into a man. They stood a moment, and one of them laid his hand flat on the flag the way you'd touch a sleeping child's back to feel it rise.

Then, they came back down, and they saw me.

They knew what I was. Not my name—nobody gets my name—but what I was. The one who'd gone in alone to a house full of men who'd done unspeakable things to their friend, and come back out with him, so that this could happen at all. The ramp. The flag. The slow carry. Two of their own teams had tried for Beasley and come home with empty hands and a new kind of quiet. Then, the call had gone somewhere most of them have only heard about in rumors, and a man they'd never met had walked into that house and walked back out carrying the brother they'd already started grieving.

Each of them found me at the edge of the light. And each of them nodded. Slow. Deliberate. The whole of what they had to give a man like me.

I nodded back.

That was the entire conversation, and it was exactly the right length.

They didn't come closer. They never do.

I've made my peace with that, the way I've made my peace with most things. Men in that line of work aren't afraid of much. They walk toward gunfire like it's a chore on a list. But there's one thing they can't walk toward, and it's me, because I'm proof of the part they don't let themselves look at.

They know death the way you know a man you nod to in a hallway. I know it the way you know the house you grew up in. They understand the mission—go get our brother, bring him home—and they think they understand mine, and they nearly do. What they can't square is the man. What kind of creature does this work and comes out the far side of that house steady. Sleeps fine after. They look at me and some old, animal part of them takes a step back. The decent rest of them is ashamed of it. So, they nod, and they keep their distance, and both of those things are true in the same breath.

It's all right. I understand it better than they do.

Death is heavy. That's the thing nobody says out loud. It's too heavy for most men to hold for more than a few minutes at a stretch, which is why they set it down so fast. Why they fill the silence. Why they say he's in a better place and change the subject. It isn't weakness. It's mercy they're showing themselves, and they've earned the right to it. I just don't need it. I've been carrying death so long, it stopped having weight, the way a pack stops having weight somewhere in the second decade and becomes a part of your back.

There's a reason for that.

There was a day, a long time ago, when I came as close to dying as a person can come and still be standing on a tarmac years later to tell you about it. And in the place I went—the in-between, the threshold, whatever word lets you keep reading—I saw something. I won't say what. Not because it's a secret. Because the words for it were never invented. I'm not going to insult it by reaching for the cheap ones we've got. I came back without the thing that makes other men flinch. And where that used to be, I was handed something I've never found a good name for, either, except that the nearest word is peace. The kind most people chase their whole lives and never touch.

It cost me the world to get it.

Not money. Belonging. I came back from that edge and I was never all the way on this side of it again. Like a monk who climbs the mountain and comes down holy and useless for ordinary living, fit only for the one strange work the mountain made him for. Set apart from everything. Pointed at it like a blade. I guard a world I'm not quite a citizen of anymore. I do it gladly, and I do it alone. Most nights, that's a fair trade.

Most nights.

"Clean work."