“I knew you’d see it my way,” Lieutenant Todd replied, smiling as he followed Ramirez to a command console.
Commander Winters put the extra six-pack of Coke on the top of the ice and then closed the cooler. “Anything else,” he shouted out the door at his wife and son, “before I haul this thing out to the car?”
“No, sir,” was the reply from the driveway. The commander picked up the cooler and carried it through the screen door. “Whew,” he said, as he loaded it in the open trunk of the car, “you have enough food and drink in here for a dozen people.”
“I wish you were coming, sir,” said Hap. “Most of the rest of the fathers will be there.”
“I know. I know,” answered Winters. “But your mother’s going. And I need to do some private rehearsing for tonight.” He gave his son a brief hug. “Besides, Hap, we’ve talked about this before. Lately I haven’t felt comfortable at organized church activities. I believe that religion is between God and the individual.”
“You haven’t always felt that way,” Betty interjected from the other side of the car. “In fact, you used to love church picnics. You’d play softball and swim and we would laugh all evening.” There was just a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Come on, Hap.” she said after a momentary pause “We don’t want to be late. Thank your father for helping us pack.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Hap climbed into the car and Winters closed the door behind him. They waved to each other as the Pontiac backed out of the driveway into the street. As they drove away, Winters mused to himself, I must spend more time with him. He needs me now. If I don’t it will soon be too late.
He turned around and walked back into the house. At the refrigerator he stopped and opened the door. He poured himself a glass of orange juice. While he was drinking it, he looked idly around the kitchen. Already Betty had cleaned up the breakfast dishes and put them in the dishwasher. The counters were scrubbed. The morning paper was neatly folded on the breakfast table. The kitchen was tidy, orderly. Like his wife. She abhorred messes of all kinds. Winters remembered one morning, back when Hap was still in diapers and they were living in Norfolk Virginia. The little boy had been exuberantly pounding the kitchen table and suddenly his arms had flailed out, knocking Betty’s cup of coffee and the creamer onto the floor. They both broke and made quite a mess all over the kitchen. Betty had stopped her meal abruptly. By the time she had returned to her cold scrambled eggs, there was not the slightest indication anywhere, not on the floors, the lower cupboard, or even in the wastebasket (she packed all the broken pieces neatly in the basket liner and then removed the entire bag to the outside cans), that there had been an accident.
Just to the right of the refrigerator in the Winterses’ kitchen, hanging on the wall, there was a small plaque with simple lettering. “For God so loved the world,” it said, “that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever shall believe in Him shall have everlasting life . . . John 3:16.” Vernon Winters saw this kitchen plaque every day, but he had not actually read the words for months, maybe even years. On this particular Saturday morning he read them and was moved. He thought about Betty’s God, a God very similar to the one he had worshipped in his childhood and adolescence in Indiana, a quiet, calm, wise old man who sat up in heaven somewhere, watching everything, knowing everything, waiting to receive and answer our prayers. It was such a simple, beautiful image. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” he said, recalling the hundreds maybe thousands of times that he had prayed in church, “Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. On Earth as it is in Heaven . . .”
And what is Thy will for me, old man, Winters thought, a little taken aback by his own irreverence. For eight years You have let me drift. Ignored me. Tested me like Job. Or maybe punished me. He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. He took another sip from his orange juice. But have I been forgiven? I don’t yet know. Never once in all that time have You given me a definite sign. Despite my prayers and my tears. One time, he thought, right after Libya, I wondered if maybe . . .
He remembered being half asleep on the beach, lying on his back with his eyes closed on a big comfortable towel. In the distance he could hear the surf and children’s voices, occasionally he could even distinguish Hap’s voice or Betty’s. The summer sun was warm, relaxing. A light began to dart about on the inside of his eyelids. Winters opened his eyes. He couldn’t see much because the sunlight was too bright and there was also a glare, a metal glint of some kind, in his eyes. He shaded his forehead with his hand. A little girl with long hair, a year old perhaps, was standing just above him, staring at him. The glint was coming from the long metal comb in her hair.
Winters closed his eyes and opened them again. Now he could see her better. She had shifted her head just a little so the glare was gone. But she was still staring fixedly at him, with absolutely no expression on her face. She was wearing only diapers. He could tell that she was foreign. Arab perhaps, he had thought at the time, looking back into her deep brown, almond-shaped eyes. She didn’t move or say anything. She just watched him, curious, relentless, without seeming to notice anything that he did.
“Hello,” Winters said quietly. “Who are you?”
The little Arab girl gave no sign that she had heard anything. After a few seconds, however, she suddenly pointed her finger at him and her face looked angry. Winters shuddered and sat up abruptly. His quick action frightened her and she began to cry He reached for her but she pulled away, slipped, lost her balance, and fell on the sand. Her head hit something sharp when she fell and blood started running down her scalp and onto her shoulder. Terrified, first by the fall and then by the sight of her own blood, the little girl began to wail.
Winters hovered over her, struggling with his own panic as he watched the blood splatter the sand. Something unrecognized flashed through his mind and he decided to pick the little Arab girl up to comfort her. She fought him violently, with the reckless abandon and surprising strength of the toddler, and struggled free. She fell again on the sand, on her side, the blood from her scalp injury scattering drops of red around the light brown sand. She was now completely hysterical, crying so hard she often could not catch her breath, her face suffused with fear and anger. She pointed again at Winters.
Within seconds a pair of dark brown arms swooped out of the sky and picked her up. For the first time Winters noticed that there were other people around, lots of them in fact. The little girl had been picked up by a man who must have been her father, a short, squat Arab man in his mid-twenties wearing a bright blue bathing suit. He was holding his daughter protectively, looking as if he were expecting a fight, and consoling his distraught young wife whose sobs intermingled with the little girl’s frantic cries. Both the parents were looking at Winters accusingly. The mother daubed at the little girl’s bleeding head with a towel.
“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Winters said, recognizing as he spoke that what he said would be misinterpreted. “She fell and hit her head on something and I . . .” The Arab couple were backing away slowly. Winters turned to the others, maybe a dozen people who had come over in response to the little girl’s cries. They also were looking at him strangely. “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he repeated in a loud voice. “I was just . . .” He stopped himself. Big tears were falling off his face and onto the sand. My God, he thought, I’m crying. No wonder these people . . .
He heard another cry. Betty and Hap had apparently just walked up behind him as the Arab couple had backed away with their bleeding daughter. Now, having seen the blood on his father’s hands, five-year-old Hap had broken into tears and buried his face in his mother’s hip. He sobbed and sobbed. Winters looked at his hands, then at the people standing around him. Impulsively he bent down and tried to clean his hands in the sand. The sound of his son’s sobbing punctuated his vain attempt to wipe his hands free of the blood.