"Private Raven! Front and center!" A voice bellowed down the barracks hallway. A head poked out of a door frame about halfway down the hallway then the rest of the body stepped on to the white tiled floor.
"Yes Sar'nt! What's going on?" The reply belonged to a boy maybe about eighteen or nineteen years old. Short cropped black hair in a low-fade style haircut, sharp blue eyes, strong jawline, smooth cheeks without a hint of five o'clock shadow, and a complexion that was somewhere between pale white and bronzed copper.
"First Sergeant wants to see you in his office"
"Roger, Sar'nt. Moving," Was all of Raven's reply. He stepped briskly down the barracks hallway, knocked sharply on a half open metal door and snapped the position of parade-rest.
"Yeah! Enter!"
Raven stepped in to the carpeted floor of his First Sargent's office. A small statured black man with a cleanly shaved head was sitting in a large black leather chair behind an even larger desk. Raven snapped back to parade rest.
The First Sergeant looked up from his lap top and leaned back in his huge chair. "You mind telling me what the fuck is going on with your family, Private?" He began.
Raven's brow furrowed. "I'm not sure what you mean First Sergeant."
"Sit down, Evan." The black man's tone softened. As Raven sat down in the chair in front of the wooden desk the First Sergeant began. "I have to say, I am a little disappointed in you. You didn't tell anyone in the chain of command that there was shit going on with your family. I got a red cross message today." He grabbed a single sheet of paper out of the many around his lap top. "There's no fucking easy way to say this so I'm just going to say it." The black man with the shiny head paused. "Your father passed away yesterday." He paused to let the gravity and weight of what he had just said to the young Private sink in. The First Sergeant waited for a reaction. If there was one, he couldn't tell. "Son, you ok?"
Raven shook his head slightly side to side. "I barely knew the man. I have very few memories of him. My mother left him with me when I was about six. After my mom…well after a few things my grandmother on her side raised me till she passed and I joined up."
There was some sympathy behind the First Sergeants eyes. "Right. Well that being said, some asshole from the BIA, whatever the fuck that is, called the battalion Sergeant Major. You need to go back to the reservation and settle your father's estate. You are going to be on a plane out of Raleigh today, emergency leave, all that happy horseshit."
Raven nodded. "Roger, First Sergeant."
"Take however much time you need, son. You are a damn fine paratrooper. Go handle this shit, bury what you gotta bury and come back here whole." The First Sergeant leaned forward, withdrew his wallet from his back pocket and peeled out a few hundred dollar bills. "Here's some plane ticket money. Billy from ops is on stand-by to drive you to the airport. He ain't coming back till he sees you get on that plane to West Virginia."
Raven strode out of the airport with his green army duffel over his shoulder. He walked over to a short line of cabs and got in the first one. "Center of town," He told the man and leaned back on the cracked vinyl of the back seat. Evan never thought he'd ever be headed back to this place. His memory of it was very faint. A mother too drunk or too hungover to feed him. Burning himself on the wood stove trying to heat the one room house. Going to school with only a bag of chips for his lunch. Kids at school calling him names like half-breed and half-red. Fights on the playground almost every day. Black eyes that his mother never noticed. He glanced out the cab window to break his train of thought.
They drove by the trailer parks first. Single and double wides all in neat rows and all with signs of rust and disrepair. Many had two cars parked alongside of them with one in obviously not drivable condition and one held together by rust, duct tape, grey bond-o and a prayer. Some had kids in the patches of grass and dirt playing on the ground. They wore cutoff jeans, dirty pro sports team shirts and faded, second hand gym wear. Dirt covered their hands and faces. None of them wore a smile.
The rows of houses were next. Faded brick, chipping paint and slouching porches with sagging roofs were the order of the day. The grass grew tall in some of the yards and long weeds popped up in the cracks in the sidewalks. About every third house had a foreclosure noticed stapled on the front door and boarded windows to match. The windows that weren't boarded were smashed and broken. It was as if almost every house was tired and just said,"I give up on this place."
A few houses had people sitting on the front porch or in the yard on folding aluminum chairs. Men and women alike drank from bottles in paper bags and had cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths. The men wore white shirts that almost weren't white anymore from tobacco spit and barely fit over their growing beer bellies. The women had long, scraggly, unkempt hair and wrinkles that aged them beyond their years.
Evan handed the cabbie the money for the fare and stepped out on to what was left of Main Street. Two stop lights controlled the traffic flow, which at this moment was a rusted out Camry, a Civic faded beyond its original red and an F-150 from the Vietnam era. About half of the shops and stores along the street showed signs of life. The others were boarded up, had no lights, or just a broken front window. Almost all had signage that was in desperate need of repair.
He walked down the street and stepped into the one with a simple plastic sign that just read "Funeral Home". The bell attached to the door rang gently as Evan stepped in. A man in his early twenties in a poorly fitting, cheap black suit greeted him.
"How may I help you, sir?"
"Yeah, since this is the only funeral home I can find on his half empty street I figured you were it. My father passed recently and I think you have his remains." Evan shifted from one foot to the other uneasily and adjusted the duffel strap on his shoulder. This place felt strange to him and it just smelled funny but he couldn't quite place it. "His name was William Raven."
"What is your relation to the deceased?"
"I'm his son. Evan Raven."
The mortician smiled with a mouth full of crooked, yellowed teeth. "Yes sir. He was brought in just a few days ago. We have already prepared the body for burial, if it pleases you."
Evan furrowed his eyebrows, almost scowling. That was a weird choice of words. "Um yeah, that's fine. Can I see him?"
"Yes, that is agreeable." The mortician clasped his hands in front of him, turned around and led Raven through a door into the back room. Here the floor was white tile with strong fluorescent lights glaring off of stainless steel. The weird smell was stronger here and it wasn't just the smell of formaldehyde or dead things. It was something else that was burning just at the edges of Evan's consciousness. Something from a very faded memory that he still couldn't place.
The mortician stepped up to a set of three large metal drawers and pulled at the middle one. There was his father.
The few memories of his father flashed through his mind like faded polaroids. The soft chanting and rocking after he awoke from a nightmare. Sweet smelling smoke wafting over him with rhythmic humming while his father thought he was asleep. A small rattle with strange writing and glyphs that he didn't understand.
Evan looked down on the man he barely knew, looking over his features and recognizing some of his own. The strong jawline, the black hair the dominant cheek bones. But his father's skin was several shades darker than his, a deep, red copper exposing his full Native American heritage. There was some fine wrinkles along the brow and at the corners of his eyes but all in all his father didn't appear in old age or to be in very poor health, even as a corpse.
"What was the cause of death?" Evan asked.
"The County coroner said that his heart gave out as he slept. The grocer found him in the bed of his cabin when he was making his weekly delivery. I have the death certificate here if you should choose to peruse it."
"No, that's fine. No need. I will need a casket or coffin and my father transported up to his old house. I plan to bury him there on his land."
The young mortician smiled again. "As you wish. We have quite the assortment of fine casket with many luxurious linings to choose from. May I recommend cherry wood with red velvet?"
Evan chuckled. "No, you may not. What's your cheapest one? A pine box?"
"Yes sir."
"That will do. That's the one he would want anyway." Evan made the final arrangements with the mortician, paid him and stepped back out on to Main Street. He started walking towards the sign at the end of the street labeled "Grocer" and noticed an old, rusty pickup truck with a "FOR SALE" sign. He stepped in to the bar right next to the truck for sale.
The inside was a dim place full of cracked lime green tile and plastic chairs. There were two skinny men in dirty jeans, torn shirts and mesh trucker hats at the small pool table. A few overweight old men with grey, grizzled beards sat at the worn down bar with an even more over weight, bespectacled barman pouring them some bottom shelf whiskey. Hank Williams was playing softly over the jukebox. Every bar patron looked up at Evan when he walked in.
"Saw the truck for sale out front. Wanted to talk to the owner about buying it."
The men at the bar turned back to their rot-gut whiskey. The two men at the pool table kept looking at him. "It ain't fer sale," One of the bearded men at the bar replied.
"That's funny because usually a "for sale" sign means something is well, for sale," Evan shifted his weight to his other foot.
"It ain't fer sale to no fucking half-bred like you, boy." The old man speaking to him turned back to his glass, almost daring Evan to make a move at him in this place, a place that might as well be his home, a place full of his friends.
That was it. That was the word. The insult he had heard almost every day of his life in this small, Appalachian town. That word felt like a scab that was ripped off a wound that never quite healed. The rage he always felt by being called that stirred in his gut. Evan took a deep breath. Closed his eyes. Not here. No rage. Keep it under control.
"Well fuck you then. Would've been an easy couple hundred bucks to keep your glass full of shitty whiskey." Evan shrugged, turned around and walked out of the bar. He was about half a block further toward the grocery store when he heard them.
"Hey boy! Half-breed!"
Evan turned around to see one of the old men and one of the pool players walking toward him. The pool player still had his cue in hand.
"I thought my "fuck you" reply pretty much concluded our business negotiations," Evan replied coolly. He shifted his weight to his right leg and adjusted the green army duffel on his right shoulder.
"Smartass," The old man was face to face with Evan now. Pool cue was just off to his right. "Looks like we got a rare breed here. One o' them educated half-redskins." Pool Cue just nodded and spit tobacco juice on the cracked sidewalk.
That was it. They had pushed him too far. Said one thing too many. Now he had to feed his anger, his rage, before he lost control and it controlled him. Evan grinned in reply to the old man's racial insults. He dropped his shoulders and swung his green duffel into Pool Cue, all his weight behind it. Surprised by Evan's speed Pool Cue hit the pavement hard with a groan. The old man was swinging a mean right cross toward Evan's face. Evan blocked the punch with his left arm meeting the inside of the old man's elbow and swung back with a huge right cross. It hit the old man squarely in the mouth and nose. As the old man staggered from the unexpected power of the blow Evan followed up with a nasty, left elbow to his face. The old man hit the ground like someone had sucked it up from underneath him.
Evan stepped on his neck, careful to not use all his body weight and crush his wind pipe. He just didn't want him getting up while he finished business. Evan bent down and grabbed the pool cue from the cracked pavement. He snapped it in half over his other leg. Using the weighted end he cracked the still prone skinny guy in the face. Twice. Hard. Evan was sure he felt something break.
As both his would be racist attackers were lying there Evan went through the old man's pockets, found the truck keys and a few wrinkled bills. He looked up to notice another truck across the street. It was full of men about his age, all in ratty, torn clothing and all Native American. He nodded at them and received nothing but blank stares in return. He threw his green duffel in the bed of the pickup, got in the cab, started it up, and shifted the creaky old truck into gear. He started the drive up to his father's house.