Enemy Combatant

By David Winner

ENEMY COMBATANT is a hyper-charged misadventure driven by a young American's rage against his government. After stumbling on evidence of CIA secret prisons in Armenia and Georgia, Peter recruits an old friend to help free a dark-ops detainee -- an impossibly reckless prison-break mission, with no skills and no resources, no connection to the captured soldiers and no solid plan for getting home -- fueled by too much alcohol, a pressure-cooker marriage and the recent death of a parent. Set during the second Bush administration, ENEMY COMBATANT takes readers on a fantastical, adrenaline-packed journey from a smelter in Caucasia across the Turkish borderland to Homeland Security at JFK. Dark, comic and action-packed, ENEMY COMBATANT is the story of an aggrieved man acting out on the global stage, a raucous portrait of collateral damage from America's war on terror.

"ENEMY COMBATANT covers a lot of territory, factually and metaphorically. It appropriates Americana, from road movies to virtual reality games, and provides –as the cliché goes -- 'a rollicking good time,' while undercutting that notion entirely, as selfish, unaware, and dangerously self-serving. Sound like any country you've ever heard of? So, as I read it, this novel gathers its tropes and its metaphors as it speeds toward a kind of enlightenment for its two hazardously American male characters. It's obviously a cautionary tale and a cosmic warning. To make a bad pun: It's a take no prisoners book." - Ann Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck: A Novel

"With his unsettling and completely original style, Winner brings together the buddy film, the war on terror and extravagant foreign settings in this novel that feels like a soon to be discovered blockbuster. Over and over, sentence by sentence we're caught off guard, leaving us in state of eerie suspense the whole book through." - Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen: A Novel

"David Winner's hypnotic page-turner, ENEMY COMBATANT, takes us back to the Bush era, during the Trump one. Winner's humor and agile imagination make the improbable story of two crazed Americans trying to rescue a prisoner from a CIA secret prison in Armenia both moving and believable." - Karl Geary, author of Montpelier Parade

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781944853815

David Winner

David Winner is a freelance journalist and has written two previous books, Those Feet and Brilliant Orange. He lives in Rome.

Book preview

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Tyler’s Last

The Cannibal of Guadalajara

"Waterboarding is absolutely fine

but we have to be much stronger

than waterboarding…

We have to beat the savages."

– Donald J. Trump

Prologue 

He had suffered neither stroke nor seizure, but those happenings in the Caucasus still afflicted him. His synapses were off, his reflexes. If you hammered his knee, his arm might spring out.

When he learned of children being separated at the border, he could only think about how Bush, thepresident before the last president, had landed in a small plane on an aircraft carrier, handsome in his bomberjacket, and declared the mission accomplished in Iraq in those clipped Texas tones when the war had only justbegun, Iraq about to devolve.

When Trump pulled out of the Paris Treaty, he thought not of rising oceans and burning forests, but thatAmerican female soldier, just a little bit pretty, holding an Iraqi prisoner on a dog leash at Abu Ghraib, the prison in Bagdad where his countrymen had been depositing the prisoners that he suspected that they picked up atrandom.

He’d stuck his head so far inside his laptop during the Bush years that his wife and his work began to slip away from him.

Then an inept doctor in Arizona performed emergency A-fib surgery on his mother’s heart.

And failed to stitch her atrium back right, so her organs started failing three days later.

Different kinds of evil twisted all up into each other like they were mangled in the same car crash.

He wasn’t crazy, he’d insisted to Sarah, when she’d suggested a psychiatrist.

And he had medication of his own.

He could inhale wine until it was no longer good enough and vodka was required.

And suction marijuana like oxygen.

But that was long ago, and Peter should be able ignore what came across his newsfeed. Hardly anyonehad newspapers on the subway. No headlines flashed in his face.

But his fingers kept searching for new horrors on his phone as his brain bounced backwards to old ones.

When he saw pictures of children in cages, he couldn’t not think of those other damaged creatures, barelyhuman, that he’d captured with his phone in the Republic of Georgia. And when the girl died in Charlottesville and so many people got murdered in so many shootings, he could only think of his mother like she’d been the victim of something darker than incompetence.

When they okayed the killing of Kurdish allies, he could only fume that the president before the lastpresident looked reasonable in comparison.

That he might be forgiven for his empire of wrongdoing, remote corners of which Peter had witnessed himself

Chapter One

Lori Valley, Armenia July 2005

On the first day of their search, Peter and Leonard had only made it as far as the unpaved detour near the Georgian border, which was too rough for the old Lada and Leonard’s faltering stick skills. The young waitress at their hotel restaurant had rented them herfather’s old car, but it had manual transmission.

Periodically, they stopped to peek into rusted-out factories and roadside restaurants. Packs of small dogs snarled at them. Groups of sheep and goats drifted onto the road to delay them. Nothing struck them as ordinarythough they had no idea of an Armenian normal.

They were both beginning their thirties and were neither reporters, NGO workers, nor spies. Fourteen years before, they’d shared a college dorm room, and a torrent of happenstance had landed them back together. At home, Peter designed webpages and worked on saving his marriage, and Leonard had just been booted from his residency in a Washington hospital for drinking on the job.

Peter was white, ash blond, and scroungy from days spent caught up in his and Leonard’s mutual dysfunction, whereas Leonard was Asian with a misshapen crew cut given to him by a Georgian barber.

After they made it back that first afternoon, the waitress served them a bottle of wine, then another on the house.

This time they avoided the bar upstairs and went straight up to their room for another drunken nap.

They barely spoke to each other much less to anyone else because what they were looking for was so awful and absurd at the same time that they didn’t want to name it aloud.

They’d get laughed at or locked up as insane.

What they were looking for lurked somewhere in the valley. The taxi driver Peter encountered in Georgia had named two of them: the one he’d worked for and the other here in Armenia. Peter wanted to prove they werereal because skeptics back in America didn’t believe they existed but was right in the head enough to fear the consequence of actually finding them. Leonard was just along for the ride and not particularly scared as he was foolhardy and off his rocker.

Taking cellphone photos was all they could think to do if they found anything, and they weren’t looking tocapture UFOs or ancient ruins but one of those secret facilities where Americans were torturing the people they caught in Afghanistan. The prisons would lie in the seamy world of conspiracy unless someone involved leaked information, or they managed to find the one in the Lori Valley and document it.

Peter’s mania had started after the American election got stolen.

Worsening once the Towers went down and the odor of bodies and burnt electricity crept across the river.

Worsening still since his mother got stolen from him too.

And he’d started bolting impotently around the Internet in search of evidence of the enhanced interrogation.

Going on somewhere in the thick hills surrounding them.

The next day he and Leonard went native. Driving around in a filthy old Soviet car had been a start, and thatmorning, while heading the opposite way than the day before, Leonard slammed the brakes as they were passing astall by the side of the road. A moment later, he returned from it bearing a pack of cheap cigarettes and somematches. Immediately, he ripped it open and lit one up.

Even in the depths of depression and debauchery before Sarah had demanded the trial separation, Peterhadn’t gone back to smoking, but he bummed one, then another. Their chests ached. Their brains buzzed.

Several cigarettes later, they’d stopped beside a shiny, black BMW parked by another roadside stand, but inside was just an Armenian guy in his thirties bitterly fighting with his girlfriend in Los Angeles English.

Leonard took advantage of the stop to buy more cigarettes but returned bearing a liter bottle of clearliquid. Before getting back on the road, he gulped from it, and Peter could see from the relief on his face as it rumbled down his throat that it was the booze that they’d promised to give up. He handed it to Peter who keptswigging until it knocked him up like he’d bashed his head into a concrete wall. Probably over a hundred proofbut it wasn’t the strength that struck him – he’d developed incredible tolerance – it was the squalor he was living in.Back in New York, Sarah was arriving at the DA’s office or going through the security line in court if she had a trial, her stomach pretty pregnant by this point, her body smelling of woody perfume. Meanwhile,

Peter seemed more like the people she prosecuted than someone she’d want to spend her life with. Yes, she mightbe pleased that he was actually getting up and doing something instead of just ranting, but she would neverunderstand why he had to decompose in the process. After taking another sip just to fuck himself, he consideredgiving up on this stupid misadventure and staying put in Armenia until his money and liver gave out.

For the rest of the day and for the rest of the next day, abandoning all prohibition, they drove down windy roads in their fucked up old car, chain-smoking and gulping down firewater.

Rather than return to the hotel for lunch, they stopped at roadside stands where the word kebob got them sandwiches for less than a dollar.

They traveled on all the major roads in the Lori Valley, stopping at suspicious places and unsuspicious places.They drove from Arevashogh to Spitak to Stepanavan, down-on- their-luck factory towns, infrastructures rusting and rotting.

Was the Iraq War too expensive, the CIA saving cash by outsourcing guards like the Georgian driver who’d stolen his money but spilled such seditious secrets? If so, the Armenians were hopelessly camouflaged,impossible to identify.

They’d given themselves two days. In two days, they would return to Tbilisi, the first step on their long journey back to the United States. In two days, they would give up their diet of moonshine and cigarettes and close this eerie chapter of their lives.

On day three, they hit pay dirt.

They’d headed towards the Georgian border, then turned left onto a smaller road. Rather than dead-end into a farmhouse or bramble patch, it circled up a hill and down the other side, leaving them on a two-lane highway they didn’t recognize.

Peter had been in the midst of lighting Leonard’s latest cigarette and taking a pull from their most recent bottle. It was late afternoon, just past five, the hour in which they generally headed back to the hotel.

But a vehicle suddenly breezed by them going the opposite way, a brand-new black van with tinted windows unlike anything they’d seen in Armenia.

Peter didn’t have to say anything. Moonshine plus days of practice had sharpened Leonard’s stick skills. Hetwisted the car easily around and followed behind.

Despite the perilous turns, the ravines into which they nearly tumbled, despite the substandard shocks that made each bump reverberate painfully through their bodies, Leonard got the car up to nearly seventy miles an hour.

Within minutes, the black van was visible on the road ahead, and Leonard was braking slightly to maintain an unobtrusive distance.

Guitars blasted from the van speakers. Leonard began to sing along. Queen. We will, we will rock you. Wewill, we will rock you.

About five minutes later, when the van pulled into an outdoor restaurant, Leonard slowed but kept ondriving.

A little farther down the road, he U-turned and came slowly back. He sidled the car behind a tree justoutside the parking lot far away from the van, which was idling near the aluminum tables on which peopledrank vodka and ate kebobs.

Leonard dug around his feet for his cigarettes, lit one for himself and one for Peter. Peter obediently took adrag. Though damaged in the long term, their lungs had been strengthened by all the recent smoking. Cigarettes hardly affected them now. The car was soon thick with smoke.

By the third cigarette, they glimpsed the blond white guy and the curly-haired Latino in brand new jeansand tee- shirts that failed abysmally as blend-in clothes heading back to their vehicle. A jolt of electricity shivered through the Lada as the two men gave off a particular vibe even from far off: their clothes but also theirswagger. Peter and Leonard could almost smell it, a familiar pheromone, an American military one.

Undigested food from deep inside Peter’s gullet got stuck somewhere in his chest until chunks of boozy barf spewed up through his throat, and he pushed open the door to avoid throwing up on himself.

This was real. This was actually happening.

He looked over at Leonard and saw that he’d stuck his knuckle into his mouth and clamped down upon it.The strange game the two of them had been playing had just gotten serious. Real live combatants had emerged about to get into a van loaded with weapons many times more powerful than the little Beretta they’d picked up in Tbilisi. Leonard saw tears in Leonard’s eyes. The amusement park roller coaster had flown off the tracks.

Just as they heard the black van’s ignition, Peter reached to tug on the most recent bottle of moonshine, butLeonard grabbed it from him and tossed it out the window. The guy was a raging alcoholic but understood the deal. Drink had taken his job away from him, but this was worse. They were already drunk; getting drunker couldkill them. The guys in the van would knock the shit out of them and disappear their bodies.

Though a bottle tossed from a Lada full of cigarette smoke probably seemed too Armenian to capture their attention.

A moment later, Leonard put the car back in gear and set out after them.

Following about fifty feet behind, Leonard turned on the radio and cranked Armenian pop, though the armoredvan, having graduated to AC/DC, couldn’t possibly hear anything coming from the dinky car right behind them.

Neither Leonard nor Peter said anything as they drove along, nor looked each other in the eye. The trees passing by them still looked like trees. The mountains rising above them still looked like mountains. They hadn’tleft this world behind. And if they stopped right then, nothing could happen to them.

After a few more minutes of twisty mountain driving, they began to descend into a valley with a town theyhad not yet visited. A sign announced Alaverdi in Roman letters alongside a Soviet one in Cyrillic with ahammer and sickle.

Crumbling tenements and apartment blocks appeared on the sides of the road.

Their last cigarette was put out, but the air didn’t seem any cleaner. Their noses ran. Their throats smarted. They coughed and wheezed in the fruity-smelling, chemical air.

The van pulled to a stop near the bottom of the hill in front of an enormous triangular-shaped building thatdidn’t look like it could house American personnel. The structures emerging from the mist looked like a factory.

But Peter knew that the valley had once produced copper for the Soviet Union and figured it to be an old smelter.

Each of its three levels was narrower than the one beneath, which made it Pyramid-shaped like a Mayantemple The air was too foggy and filthy for Peter to get much of a sense of what lay behind the flimsy columnsthat held each level in place, but the wide stone circles scattered in between looked like they must have once beensmokestacks.

Brimming with people and machines back in Soviet times, it couldn’t have functioned for decades. Therewere no workers, nor cranes, but Peter saw a broken-down railway car, which must have once brought materials away, and several black armored vans that looked brand new and must have come from America.

The sun wasn’t due to set for a couple of more hours, but the pollution created a peculiar twilight.

They stopped about half a football field away. They were easily visible. Binoculars and assault rifles could be trained on them.

The only vehicles they could see were black armored vans, so their old sedan might attract attention.Leonard had his foot on the gas, ready to split if anyone approached, but no one did. The Americans weren’t just processing copper but didn’t seem to care that strangers lurked nearby.

Then Peter and Leonard heard what sounded like a faulty old engine. An old car like theirs was comingaround the bend. The men inside looked local: frayed clothes, darker skin.

Maybe this was part of the deal, why Peter and Leonard hadn’t attracted attention themselves. Sometimes locals drove by, locals from this more authoritarian part of the world who’d keep their mouths shut. But while thecheap clothes they’d purchased in Tbilisi might fit in, their features would not: Peter too fair, Leonard too Asian.The people at the smelter couldn’t be allowed a closer look.

A moment later, one of the armored vans headed up the road towards them. When Leonard put his foot on the gas, the car just stalled, while the van drove by them without incident. A second one, following rightbehind, paused for an agonizing moment once it got close.

Indistinct American-inflected voices came from deep inside.

And Peter tried to breathe easy. Not a bad time to get discovered. Their passports proved their identity,and they could only be accused of trespassing.

But the driver of the second van drove off. Then Leonard got the car moving again and began to back out.

They had to return to the hotel, get themselves psyched up and come up with a game plan. They would return at a more vulnerable hour, the middle of the night, when there might only be a skeleton staff, to learnwhat the Americans were doing at the smelter and try to take photographs with Leonard’s new Nokia.

They’d bring the Beretta along, but Peter didn’t plan on shooting anyone. He only liked immobile targets at the range, nothing living. Bush and his gang were in Washington D.C, anyway. Minor league accomplices postedto backwater- Armenia didn’t deserve bullets in their brains.

Back home, carrying and concealing wouldn’t help anyway, not even with Columbine-style psychos. Moreguns would go off. More people would get shot. But this was different. You couldn’t face American military unarmed.

Not that their little pistol would really help. These guys at the smelter could blast them into tiny shards offlesh and bone.

More confident at stick, Leonard drove up from the copper smelter, through town, and onto the highway. And even though they’d followed the black armored van to Alaverdi without paying much attention to where they were going, Leonard easily found the tiny road, which ran up and down the hill and deposited them on thehighway to Dzoraget.

They didn’t speak to each other on the drive. Nor while parking the car and climbing the stairs to their hotelroom.

Inside of which, they stood a few feet apart from each other near the window, shaking and shivering though they were hardly cold.

You know, began Peter, his voice reedy and childish, we don’t…

We came all this way, interrupted Leonard, dogmatic cowboy words.

Peter nodded his head. The lunacy was underway, irremediably. Approaching Leonard, he reached into the loose pockets of his polyester pants and pulled out his phone, so they wouldn’t forget to charge it before theyreturned to the smelter.

They haggled a bit with each other over when they should leave, settling on 3:00 a.m., deep in the night butstill far from morning.

They needed to bring everything essential with them because if the soldiers at the smelter caught hold of their trail they’d have to drive straight for the border. Peter’s backpack was big enough to fit their clothes, pluspassports,

credit cards and cash. Despite the chaos Leonard had left behind in Turkey, he’d somehow managed to keep hisfirst- aid kit. No matter how low he sunk, the Eagle Scout never fled the man.

Leonard reached for the Beretta as if he were taking charge of it, but Peter grabbed it himself and stuffed it inside the pack along with the extra bullets and ammunition the woman at the Tbilisi gun store had provided.

They were ready to go, but it was only eight in the evening, and they had seven hours to occupy themselves.

We should act normal, commanded Leonard like this was a situation he’d handled before. Later someone might ask what we were like the evening before.

So they went down to dinner in the hotel restaurant as they had been doing every night. They ordered a bottle of wine and tried to chat casually, which was tough, as they couldn’t say anything about their upcoming misadventure nor really talk about their miseries back in America.

As they silently picked at their food, Peter considered how they might be perceived by the other diners. Two men sharing a room, wining and dining every night, now suddenly quiet like they’d gotten into some terrificquarrel.

By the time they got back to their rooms, it was nearly nine. Setting an alarm for 2:30 a.m., they lay fullyclothed on top of their beds, waiting for a sleep that refused to wash easily over them.

Peter slipped quietly out of bed to look for the place in the knapsack in which he’d placed Sarah’s shirt, theone that smelled so reassuringly of the soap she used, the sweet tang of her body. But breathing it in just madehim ache. It could be all he’d ever have of her now; his attempts to reform himself had been near total failure. He thought about her

warm smile, the eager look she’d get after one or the other of them had been out of town. But he also remembered the cross-eyed suspicion that she reserved for recidivists and their attorneys, himself too when he’dfucked things up, the way she looked at you when she didn’t believe a word you said.

If they made it back safely, they would return to Tbilisi the next day, and the United States soon after that. Peter could spend the last weeks of his exile from Sarah at least trying to reform himself, getting started on the projects coming in through his e-mail, the account he hadn’t been checking since he left. The tossing of moonshine out the car window was a good start, but seriously cutting down on drinking was going to be tough.He’d try to consume a little less each day until it wasn’t so unreasonable.

Wide awake now, he considered the situation into which he’d placed himself. Who would be a better father, the man who gotten fucked up and thrown Sarah’s parent’s wedding picture at the wall or the man who treasonously trespassed on secret government facilities abroad?

It wasn’t a great choice, and if things got dicey, he might be better off just getting shot. If he justdisappeared from the planet, he might not drag his wife and his child down with him.

Except he really didn’t want that  to  happen.  He felt foolish but not so agonizingly sad. His rage against his government had expanded inside his brain like some awkward tumor, but he didn’t have to give into it. Someone else should take this risk. A child would get born pretty soon in America. Its father shouldn’t beembarking on kamikaze errands.

Pushing himself up with his elbows, he looked around for the backpack that contained his most important possessions. He could grab them and run out before Leonard noticed, but the rigid position of his old friend’s body showed how awake he was.

His eyes were opening, and he was glaring defiantly at Peter. They’d shared a room way back in college. Theyknew each other so well it was ridiculous. The fucking loony tune had gone ahead and read his mind.

Peter cleared his throat but did not speak. He could neither talk Leonard out of it nor abandon him andtake off on his own, not until Leonard wiped the resentful expression from his sad and twitchy face.

They just had to drive back there; Peter assured himself.

They didn’t have to do anything once they arrived.

Lightning didn’t often strike twice, and though there was probably a CIA prison in the Lori Valley – the one in Georgia as real as fuck. – American accents and black vans didn’t necessarily place it in Alaverdi. The Americans were probably up to what Peter’s North Carolina grandmother used to call no good, but it might just involve stealing Armenian resources or dumping hazardous material.

And even if he managed to talk Leonard out of returning to the smelter, he would still have to make up some crazy fib to tell Sarah. He couldn’t say he’d gone all the way to Armenia, run into Americans driving around insuspicious black vans and done nothing about it.

Peter couldn’t get out of their dangerous errand, but he obviously wasn’t going to get any sleep. They had an hour before they left. Wandering might calm him. And outside was better, under cover of darkness.

The hotel, a grandiose manor either radically renovated or built brand new in imitation of some pre-Sovietsplendor, lay cheek by jowl against crumbling wooden farmhouses. During the day, bellhops dressed as if fromthirties movies mixed with peasants in torn clothes, but neither were around at this ghostly hour.

Peter reached for his phone in his pocket: the same device that had photographed those pathetic prisoners in Georgia, that had gotten him back in touch with Leonard for better or for worse.

He appraised its foggy screen and considered who he could contact. His mother was dead, and his wife only wanted him to e-mail during their separation. He had friends back in Brooklyn, but their numbers weren’t in his phone and he hadn’t kept in touch.

His old Virginia number returned to him. His father still lived in the same house with his second wife. He’dbarely spoken to his old man since his mother’s death and for good reason, but before his brain could reason his way out of it, his fingers were crossing over continents.

If the new wife picked up, Peter would just hang up.

Maybe no one would pick up at all. Peter couldn’t wrap his mind around the time difference.

But his father answered on the second ring.

And asked if Peter were okay with what sounded like genuine concern.

Peter brought the phone a few inches from his ear to protect himself and got his fingers ready to hang up immediately if necessary.

How is Sarah? The baby? His father asked questions without waiting for answers. The baby wouldn’t be a baby for several more months.

I don’t know, Dad. I’m not there right now. Why not? Where are you?

He certainly wouldn’t explain what had happened between Sarah and himself. His father drank away hisfirst marriage. Peter couldn’t admit that the behavior had been passed on.

A little vacation when your wife is…well…and what’s in Armenia?

The answer to the question wouldn’t stay down Peter’s throat. Suddenly fatuous, he described this thingwe’re doing tomorrow, as if it weren’t hazardous and crazy. Someone in America needed to know about it. If they got blasted into pieces, someone should have some clue where they’d been. And break the news to Sarah. His father hated emotional scenes, but his father would have to do it.

There was a silence on the other line as his father prepared to dress him down.

But then he didn’t.

Wow, man, that’s really something?

"Wow, man?" The older his father got the more childish he sounded.

And he must have thought that they were even crazier than they were. Peter hadn’t explained that they weren’t aiming to burst into the place. They only wanted to take pictures and get away.

Just one second, Peter, just one second.

Once his father had returned to the phone quite a few seconds later, Peter began to recognize the slurring in his voice, evidence of the taste for bourbon that his second wife had failed to curb.

No, he couldn’t obey his father and call back later, the following morning in America, with an update. His father would be too hungover to pick up the phone and would barely remember their conversation if he did.

Peter had been about ten, eleven maybe, when his mother had gone off to be with his sick grandmother inCleveland, and he had been invited one evening into the hallowed sanctuary across from the kitchen, the backsitting room, with the television set.

Previously, Peter was only allowed in there to watch PBS and the cop shows that played on cable: Starsky and Hutch, Hawaii Five-O.

His father had generally slipped furtively into the liquor cabinet, but that night the bourbon had stood naked and proud on the night table in front of his father’s leather armchair.

On the screen, a fearless New York Jew passed out leaflets and faced down factory owners. Peter, sitting next to his father, had listened with rapt attention to the wise Jew inspiring the brave workers at the union meeting and the pretty young Sally Fields as Norma Rae rallying the crowd. Gushing with emotion, Peter hadmouthed the words along with her. Union! Union!

Many years before while still in his teens, his father had participated in civil rights sit-ins in the Greensboro of his youth before going farther south to march with black people against Jim Crow, a red-faced white man (in Peter’s imagination) who his father had sucker-punched and wrestled to the ground.

Then his father fought personally against the Vietnam War, leading marches, chants, these things calledactions against very bad guys.

His mother smiled when his father told the stories. Maybe she remembered it differently, and Peterappreciated her silence. His father’s feats were like the wispy hairs growing on his chest and groin. You couldn’tjust pull them off.

And it was so satisfying to imagine his dad, thin and thick-mustached like in old photos, leading groups ofpeople and yelling at bad guys.

You didn’t need Sally Fields. The New York Jew could be done without. Early next morning – his father hadsworn – they would drive down from Virginia to North Carolina to find that asshole mill town even though they’dmiss days of work and school. They’d make sure the faggot owners hadn’t broken the union.

And those had been sallow, melancholy days: Peter uselessly shy with the girls in his homeroom, hismother too preoccupied to pay him her usual tender attention. He slept later and later on weekend mornings,lacking the initiative to play whiffle ball with his friends.

But Peter jumped out of bed early the morning after Norma Rae and checked his parents’ bedroom everyten or fifteen minutes for signs that his dad was rising.

He’d packed his blue suitcase with clothes for the journey south along with toiletries and schoolbooks, sohe wouldn’t fall too far behind.

But when the old man struggled out of bed around eleven, he’d glared glassy eyed at Peter so witheringlythat Peter could tell the deal was off.

His father had drunk coffee and nursed his hangover while Peter took his suitcase back from the car, snuck into the fridge and late breakfasted on chocolate chip ice cream.

Later that week, Peter found a TV Guide in his parents’ bathroom in which political movies had been circled:Missing, The China Syndrome, Hearts and Minds.

On the evenings of those films, his father would pick up a fifth of Jim Beam from the ABC store on Main and down nearly half of it by the time the movie was over.

And overruling his wife’s petty objections, insist that Peter watch with him. By Peter’s bedtime, he’d havesworn up and down that they would organize a group of people in Charlottesville to march with them to Washington like he used to in the sixties, which would get Peter’s blood boiling despite his anticipation of the morning let-down.

Peter hadn’t been so many years younger than his father during his father’s Civil Rights days. He’ddecided to model himself on the way his father used to be rather than how he was turning out. Jim Crow wasdead, but there was Ronald Reagan to contend with. Peter imagined him with a bulbous nose and monstrous features, spending his last days in office starting wars with communists and scattering evil union-busting bossesacross his country like lethal apple seeds.

Once Peter got big, he would drive his friends up to the Pentagon in a brand-new station wagon, or down to the Carolinas orKentucky in search of evil factory owners and mining executives. He wouldn’t get all drunk and nostalgic like his dad. The older he’d get the more determined he’d become. He’d put the president of the United States on notice whomever the president of theUnited States happens to be.

Chapter Two 

The Virginian

Suddenly, it was 2:30 in the morning, and they were springing into action. Peter peed. Then furiously brushed his teeth until his cheeks got foamy and his gums hurt. He couldn’t offend American agents nor Muslim prisoners with halitosis.

Next was the pistol.

As Peter took out the retaining pin and got the cylinder, he heard the southern voice of the former marine who gave people tips at the gun range, reminding everyone to keep the trigger