The War Whisperer: Book 1: Geronimo Page 8

  “I’m here because I can’t burn down UCH without hurting a lot of persons I would rather be helping.” He grinned. “And to be honest about it, if UCH hadn’t made me a gardener’s assistant I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

  “You mean still stuck in Uvalde?” I joked. “Goose, what do I do when my button gets pushed and all I want to do is explode?”

  He gave me his three-second rule. “Simply count silently to three.”

  “What will that do?”

  “It allows you time enough to engage your brain before operating your mouth or fists.”

  Then the session was done.

  I knew what he meant. Where he was, just then, was in a position to help UCH kids not go crazy, not murder, not commit suicide, not quit. For those he couldn’t help, he would do what he could.

  I didn’t have the worst of the world. There were lots shittier homes in the world than UCH. We did get food and clothing, dry places to sleep, access to computers, education and training of a sort, not the world’s worst instructors. The one thing we didn’t have were responsible role models. Doctor Guzman did what he could to fill that gap for me. But there were thousands of children and many thousands more coming. He was one man trying to make a difference. Perhaps in the overall scale of things he was whistling into a hurricane. But he made a big difference in my life.

  It was good to get away from UCH for awhile, go downtown and see something other than the crappy little homes on Benson Road, fences, and hundreds of kids doing what they could to get by and who just wanted to be someplace else. The buildings in center city Uvalde looked horrible: Old, either boxy or grotesque, almost all painted in faded loud colors. Several buildings were abandoned, their dark empty windows staring out onto the street. Two of the bigger buildings had been burned out. Glad to see downtown, though. It was different. It was like watching a dead whale eaten by maggots: a change. Interesting, despite the stink.

  My session with Goose had been important. Make myself more than a cipher; focus, put my anger into running, into excellence. When my emotions want to take the upper hand, count to three. Engage brain before operating body. Get out then do what I had to do.

  It seemed so clear as I walked down from Goose’s office on that creaky old staircase: Walk that line, accumulate the right numbers, burn off my angers in activities, get out and bring down hell on UCH. Since then “what I had to do” had changed so many times, wreaking revenge on the Uvalde Children’s Home was eventually demoted to a childish resentment then fell completely off the list.

  Reality presents lists of tasks for an individual to do. Some are easy, many are hard, and a few appear impossible. Reality gathers them beneath the label “duty.” One’s internal policeman is that sense of right and wrong called “conscience.” Then as now the main conflict and contradiction of life is struggling both to do one’s duty and dull that sense of right and wrong.

  Destiny

  At the bottom of the stairs I opened the door and stepped out on the dusty sidewalk along Main Street which, although in the shade, felt like an oven. I didn’t even think about running.

  Around the corner of the building in the full sunlight, the van and about four other vehicles were diagonally parked on West Street, south of Main. Mister Makin was waiting for me next to the school van. When he saw me he opened the front seat door on the passenger side and I climbed in after thanking him. Mister Makin closed my door, walked around the front and got in the driver’s seat and buckled up. I buckled my own seatbelt.

  Before he started up the van, he looked at me with genuine concern on his face and asked, “What do you think, Jerry? Did Doctor Guzman do you any good?” He nodded back toward the building.

  Time for me to pick my battles and choose my terms of peace.

  I nodded. “I like him. Yes sir, I think he did help me. I’m real sorry for what I did to Mister Dover. I really want to apologize to him for what I did.”

  He looked at me, a shocked expression on his face. “You serious?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Mister Makin looked forward, shrugged slightly to himself, and looked back at me. “He’s in Memorial Hospital east of here on Sunshine and Creek. It’s only a five minute drive.”

  “I’d really like to see him, sir. Can we?” And that would also be a lot more new scenery I could see before having to go back to UCH.

  “Sure, Jerry. I think it’d do Walt a lot of good. He really loves you kids. Right now his head is really messed up, inside and out. What’d he do to set you off like that?”

  I looked sheepish. “You know. He called me ‘Geronimo’. Kids who call me that just want to fight. I suppose Mister Dover was just trying to be funny. I shouldn’t have gone off on him like that. I think Doctor Guzman helped me see that.”

  Yeah.

  He helped a bunch.

  Wait until they don’t have a lock on you, hombre, then burn the fucking place down. That was not exactly Goose’s message, but it was the message I chose to hear just then.

  We turned right onto Main Street, passing the park on the left. Facing the park in the next block was the Uvalde County Government Building where the riots took place the day Thiago and Bodey died in the playground. Five men, three women, and two little girls lost their lives in the riot the same day the two boys died at UCH. We were never told what the riot was about; Just that it was. Mister Makin stopped at the Getty Street light, and I pointed at the County Building. The few people marching in front of the County Building were demonstrating against the war in Egypt.

  “Mister Makin, do you know what the riot was about here that day Thiago and Bodaway died?”

  He frowned deeply, looked down at his hands on the steering wheel, glanced up at the still red light, glanced left at the park and the County Building. He shrugged and looked back at the light.

  “It was about no jobs, not enough food, national health care that doesn’t cover anything, not enough of anything, facing one more day with it all staying the same or worsening. It was about frustration and deaf leadership.”

  “Like Thiago and Bodaway,” I said. “Wire happy, but on the other side of the wire.”

  He turned his head and looked at me, his mouth hanging partway open.

  The light changed, someone behind us beeped, Mister Makin got the van moving, we rode in silence for a minute, then he nodded several times. “You’re right. Dammit, you’re right, Jerry. Wire happy. I guess it doesn’t matter where the wire is. If you can’t see any hope, the wire is in your mind.”

  “What do you make hope out of, Mister Makin?” I asked.

  Across Main Street from the Uvalde County Building was City Hall which looked like a huge Spanish mansion, the entire Main Street side of the block lined with palm trees. After getting past the government buildings there were closed businesses, shabby looking open businesses, a probably once beautiful park, and sad fellows here and there on street corners at stoplights wearing cardboard signs:

  “Will work for food.”

  “Disabled Veteran.”

  “3 medals, 2 kids & no job.”

  Mister Makin gave twenty dollar bills to each of them. By the time we got to the hospital I still hadn’t settled in my mind whether Kendall Makin was a sucker, a saint, or a really rich do-gooder. I found out later that he was a veteran, too. Egypt. He had been a major in the missile artillery the first time around.

  After he parked in the visitors lot, the van facing away from the building and toward the late afternoon sun, he sat in the driver’s seat, frowning, and looking through the windshield at the reddish-orange sky.

  “Hope,” he said. “You throw a thousand passes, at least one or two will be completed. Out of all the people who die of influenza each year, most don’t. Life isn’t a guaranteed disaster, Jerry. Losing is not a certainty, and that’s just the law of averages. If you are also in there fighting for yourself and those you love, and doing so with courage, perseverance, and intelligence, I believe you can edge the odds into your favor.”
He smiled and looked at me. “Most of those who graduate or drop out of UCH will get low paying jobs, most of which come with no room for advancement at all. At the first hint of an economic slowdown, most of them will probably be laid off. But we also have college graduates, inventors, military innovators, scientists, and even vid stars and producers.

  “Dr. Guzman graduated from UCH,” I said.

  Mister Makin nodded. “He did. The point is that hope isn’t a promise, Jerry. Hope is a chance and perhaps another chance. Education and growing up are the preparations we do so that when those chances arrive we can recognize them and take advantage of them.”

  The hospital looked like pictures I’d seen of big western motels. Flat, two stories, a sand colored brick portico out front with “Uvalde Memorial Hospital” on it arched over a faded image of what was supposed to be a tree. The legs of the portico were of cream colored cement, the bottom two meters worth covered in red, blue, and black graffiti.

  Mister Makin and I got out of the van and walked the stove-hot asphalt toward the entrance. On the way Mister Makin asked me if I had any idea what I wanted to do once I got out of UCH.

  I didn’t say “organized crime” or “terrorism.” That would be picking the wrong battle and nailing my cipher permanently onto the “troublemaker” designation. The truth was, I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do. I never thought I would live long enough to have to make that decision. I counted to three and said, “I don’t know.”

  He said that my testing indicated an aptitude for a military career, and I should think about it. “You’re pretty big and strong for your age, Jerry. You might even think about college and football. Even if you don’t make the pros, you might just get yourself an athletic scholarship to a good college. You also exhibit an aptitude for music. Do you play an instrument?”

  “I pick a little on guitar. I used to sing before Abril left.” I looked at him. “Where did Abril go?”

  “As I understand it, Abril was given a scholarship to an exclusive private school in the northeast. Have you ever heard of the Randall J. Black Academy?”

  “No sir.”

  “It’s supposed to be a very special place for very special students.”

  “What do you have to do to go there?” I asked.

  “You should look at their website. From the description it sounds almost like a penal colony.”

  I counted to three and restrained myself from making the obvious comment about UCH.

  “Think about the military,” he continued. “All the armed forces have a number of highly technical jobs that could make use of your aptitudes. Remember that battery of tests everybody took earlier this year?”

  I nodded. “Sure. I remember.”

  “Well, you did very well on those tests and on the problem solving units you scored in near genius levels. If there is anyone who needs problem solvers, it’s the military.”

  My initial reaction was not positive. The military seemed like yet another prison, except with people shooting at you. It was easy to see myself on the street with a sign hanging from my neck reading “Will gain yardage for food.”

  Football always seemed to me like a vid I’d seen of rams—real rams, butting their heads together time and time again, trying to prove who was best at beating one’s head against someone else’s head. Still, the military and college might be good cards to hold in the game of Me vs. the World. Judging by what Mister Makin said, discarding cards before having something better in my hand is the loser’s game.

  In his hospital room, Walter Dover looked like pictures I’d seen of raccoons. Apparently I had broken his nose, as well as two ribs, and caused a concussion as well as a cranial fracture. Mister Makin and he talked while I waited outside his room.

  At the proper moment I entered the room, made my apology, and it was as heartfelt and sincere as I could make it. With his boss watching, Walt Dover couldn’t say what he really wanted to say either, so he said it was fine and to forget about it. “Everybody has a bad day once in awhile,” he offered grudgingly.

  I had to own up to it: I really did feel guilty for what I had done to the man. I agreed to try out for his football team. That actually brightened him a lot. He was laughing when the nurse came in to run us out of his room.

  Football would be okay, I thought as we walked back to the van. Might be an authorized way to hit people, to focus some of my anger. I might even be good at it.

  After we arrived back at UCH, Dylan was waiting for me in the school office when Mister Makin dropped me off there. As we walked across the playground to the middle school dorms, he handed me back Thiago’s old Barlow knife.

  “How did you get it?” I asked.

  He shrugged and held out his hands. “Mira, security at this place sucks, hermano. Somebody should write a letter.”

  In computer science class that year we learned about the new generation of Implantable Communication Interfaces that American politicians running for office promised everyone would soon have just as soon as they could get the AmeriCare national healthcare system out of bankruptcy. The ICI was a little gadget injected into a sinus cavity that would set itself, find the proper nerve conduits, and wire itself in. It would be powered by body heat and for most persons would be operated by thoughts, with only a little training. Soon everyone would be able to speak all languages, share thoughts instantly, watch movies seconds after release, and hear news from anywhere in the world and in any language and still it would be understandable; All this and just using our minds and about twenty-eight trillion dollars of someone else’s money.

  That someone else, however, already couldn’t feed his own family, or pay the mortgage, or afford to send any kids to college. And that someone else could still vote and pushed back hard. After the election, the bill withered in committee. AmeriCare was still bankrupt and we weren’t going to get any of the obsolescent mobile phones either.

  The history portion of the ICI segment, justifying the intrusive government control of an entire industry, seemed very improbable. It was practically a scientific law that if it was a computer, it could be hacked. However, all but the first generation ICI’s were unhackable. The later devices tapped into some less-than-conscious neural aspect involving self-preservation that foiled ICI hack attempts, and was also uncontrollable by the user or by any hacker.

  This was the same aspect that was tapped into when the matter of ICI vidgame zombies became an issue. Once that was done, the gamer zombies could still fry out on games but had to do it the old fashioned way. An individual ICI user could still commit suicide; he or she couldn’t do so by allowing a hack or virus through the device.

  It was claimed by the textbook authors that late in the first century of the “computer age,” there was the evolution of what was then called “social media.” Social media was a way, if true, of taking one’s entire life, image, property, possessions, intellect, reputation, future, every idle thought and impulse and publish them to the world making them available to every competitor, criminal, terrorist, psychotic killer, thief, police officer, district attorney, and asshole who could gain access to a computer. It would be like a lamb purposefully climbing into a pit full of ravenous wolves and bringing his own tub of mint jelly.

  It was my opinion at the time that no one could be so ignorant, stupid, mentally impaired, cavalier, or naive to publish such information enabling just anyone to have access to it.

  My mistake.

  Our instructor, Mister Yost, played for us a vid about an early social media app called Facebook in which users were showing everything from intimate feelings, really gross sex images, likes and dislikes, and even when individuals would be away from home leaving their possessions unguarded. Twitter, and other instant message apps, were ways of sharing half-baked thoughts, off-the-cuff remarks, outright lies, and orders from terrorist leaders to their field combat units, followers, and admirers attracting at last such heavy government regulation that installation and use of any of the forbidden apps b
ecame probable cause for a general warrant under the Patriot Act of 2031.

  All of this eventually evolved into the short lived “atavarial existence,” or AE. AE was one person’s completely fictional existence paraded before everyone else’s fictional existences to solicit fantasy responses to fantasy thoughts, beliefs, and reported actions. Entertainment to some, addiction to others. Besides not being real, most of the fictional existences were as boring and ill-phrased as their creators. Hence, these all diminished in popularity.

  Social media eventually became exclusively a marketing tool and a way for fourth-graders to try and coax classmates into committing murder or suicide. The rest became what it is today: Publish nothing for which the publisher is not paid, the most popular apps being those that purported to sort through the morass of available information to pick out from it the few kernels of useful truth. The various definitions of truth, “Blue Truth,” “Red Truth,” “White Truth,” “Fem Truth,” and so on at least allowed viewers to select the brand of lies they would be told.

  It looked to me as though Doctor Guzman’s prediction of a flood of new kids at UCH had been wrong. That year new Hispanic orphans dropped to a trickle. Some that we already had suddenly had parents looking for them, withdrawing them from UCH, taking them back to their home countries which weren’t any better off than the U.S., but they weren’t any worse.

  Between graduation and withdrawals the total student population at UCH dropped to four hundred and forty-two. There were no new jobs in the U.S., most of the jobs remaining were either highly technical or really sucky. Unemployment and welfare benefits were cut way back to make it possible to employ more people in the government to create jobs, raise wages, and make payment distributions more efficient. Such government plums were not available to just anyone. So, might as well pick up the kids and go back to wherever.