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By Root 1581 0

Veterans Day was always a kind of roulette game. When the kids were made to dress up and go to the cemetery to lay at each grave an annual wreath of red carnations, they would whisper, —Which grave’s got the maggot food, which one’s empty? To Mary and Jimmy, and to the twins, Johnny and Rose, those chiseled names were as interchangeable as bicycle tires, though they’d heard narrated their uncles’ battle fates on many occasions. The children knew, as did their mother, never to betray their perplexity nor raise the matter of the black flag in their father’s presence. Perry and Nick were grudgingly sacred.

Russell’s esteem, what some might call his obsession, was, as the Carpenter kids got older, an unwelcome theme at school. Wisecracks were made about Jimmy and Johnny’s nutzo pop who was stuck in the past. —Get over yourself. The Civil War is done already, Battle of the Bulge is so yesterday. Dead as croak. One Halloween, a local prankster from Washington Elementary took it upon himself to steal the flag, which Russell replaced within the week.

During dinner once, after Jimmy had taken a ribbing at school about the flag, he tested his adolescent grit against his father’s mettle, saying as nonchalantly as he could manage, —Hey, I heard something good today.

The family continued eating.

—What’s that? his mother asked.

—I heard that people think we’re pirates.

—Really? asked Johnny.

—You heard me.

—I don’t get it, said Johnny.

—Me neither, Rose added.

—Hey, Dad?

—What.

—Why do you think people would say something like that?

—People say crazy things all the time and only crazy people listen to them.

They ate.

—Pirates. Jimmy shook his head dramatically. —It must be that pirate flag that gives them the idea.

Russell’s hand swiped the boy’s cheek so fast, so hard, that the pain spread across his face before Jimmy even knew what had happened. Reddening, he scraped his chair back violently and fled the table.

—Jim, you stop right there, his father said.

—Let him go, his mother breathed.

The boy halted.

—He didn’t mean anything.

Jimmy’s father rose from the table and with a hooking finger motioned his son to follow. When they returned to the room, Russ, like some prison guard, followed his elder son whose chin was as if attached to his chest, eyes downcast, shoulders narrowed, hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets. No one asked any questions, though the quietest was Mary who understood better than most her father’s will to punish.

His ire would have been funny had it not been ugly. A stern disciplinarian, Russ fancied marine protocol and order, however ad-libbed, and brought them to bear on his household. Later that night, Jim and his brother and sisters would agree in secret that their mean friends might not be so far off the mark. Maybe it made sense to disparage the pirate flag and Russell Carpenter who waved it in everybody’s face because he was jealous his brothers were dead or deranged heroes, while he was just a living grunt stuck in a low-end job at Continental Divide Electric, dangling from the transmission grid, stringing 230-kilovolt line thirty feet above the ground. Not even high enough that if he fell it would necessarily kill him.

For somebody whose life was electricity he seemed, at least in the eyes of his daughter Mary, unenlightened. No, worse. Utterly lost in the dark.

Kip settled in at Nambé with greater ease than he or the Montoyas might have imagined. Through that first summer and into autumn, he learned his way around by watching and helping out whenever the chance arose. He took his time, which, as Sarah said, was the right time for him to take. Carl offered wages on top of room and board, but Kip told him to keep his money. All of it was Montoya charity as far as he was concerned. When he got enough strength back so he could pull weight to merit a wage, the money would go straight to the convalescent center.

Friday evenings, Marcos and Franny brought him along to the highwayside Roadrunner Cafe in Pojoaque pueblo. He was treated to quesadillas and even drank a beer with Marcos