FIVE
Finch and me didn’t always live in the woods. There was a before for us, a different life.
It’s a long story, but here is the abbreviated version and I guess I will start with this: when I was seventeen I fell in love. Not that twinkle-eyed, see-no-wrong type of love. Sure, that was part of it, but it was bigger, what we had, me and Cindy.
I guess you could say it began on the high school track-and-field bus. That was the first time I ever talked to her. Cindy. We did track together, and that day she was late for an away meet and the only seat on the bus was next to me.
She walked up the aisle with her blue track uniform on and her yellow backpack and sat down by me and said, “Hey, you’re Kenny, right?”
I didn’t know she knew who I was, but I knew her because she was Cindy Loveland and everybody knew her. She was rich and beautiful, a cheerleader and a track star, too, the three-hundred-meter hurdles, and she made it look like she was just stepping right over those hurdles, like they were nothing. A lithe animal. A gazelle. And so beautiful. Which I guess I already said. What she ever saw in me, I don’t know.
She nudged me because I guess too much time passed and I didn’t say nothing, but I was still a little shocked she was talking to me. “Kenny, right?”
“Yeah, Kenny.”
“Cindy.”
“I know who you are.”
I didn’t know then that the reason everyone loved Cindy was because you couldn’t help it. All that time I’d just watched her from a distance, the way people seemed to pull to her, the way they looked at her. And I figured it was because she was popular and her dad was the district judge and they lived in the Heights. But no. It was her kindness. Her laugh that soared up and up, head back, teeth white and not quite perfect but almost. The thing about Cindy was when you were with her, there was no one else, just you. That’s how you felt, like the whole world and everyone in it just slipped out of sight.
We became friends after that time on the track bus. Just friends, technically, but deep down I was a goner. From that first day, I barely even looked at another girl. The next year, I graduated and got a job at the hardware store, stocking shelves and ringing people up, and the whole time, every day, I would think about seeing Cindy. She was a class behind me so she had another year of high school left, and sometimes, she asked me to pick her up after school and drive her home. Then eventually she graduated and geared up for college, and Aunt Lincoln told me I couldn’t just sit around and wait for Christmas break; I needed to do something. And I got to thinking, Cindy would be in college for the next four years, and I ought to use the time to make something of myself because chances were, she wouldn’t graduate from college and be interested in a guy that worked at the local hardware store.
Meanwhile this was in the time of the War on Terror. Troops shuttling into Afghanistan, hunting caves and skirmishing that rugged country, and soon we were in Iraq as well. There was an Army recruiter in town and one day I walked into their little office and signed up. They gave me a big signing bonus, and told me I was doing the right thing, serving my country, and they said this would give me a sense of purpose and discipline and I was nineteen and I believed them.
Sailed right through basic training. I’m not bragging or exaggerating when I say that—it really wasn’t hard. I was a runner, I’d done manual labor, I could shoot, I was strong. Plus I was nineteen. So young. Free of all the aches and betrayals that begin to catch up with you, even a decade later. And unlike some of the people there, I didn’t have a hankering for home that pulled and distracted. The truth is, I liked it. Back home, everyone knew me as Kenny. Kenny the boy whose mom left him, Kenny the kid who used to trip over his shoelaces in elementary school, Kenny the distance runner. The Army gave me a chance to turn over a new leaf, become someone I was not, and when I realized this, I began to thrive. I made friends. Jake was the first, of course, and the best, but I made other ones, too. I was good at something, and I don’t know, I guess it was like something transpired inside, like for the first time people saw me in a different light. Which made me see myself in a different light.
It shouldn’t have surprised me when my CO told me I should consider trying out for Ranger School, but it did. Like I said, I guess I was still getting used to the notion that I was good at something. Boot camp, Airborne School: people complained about those. But then there was RIP, which at the time felt hard but later seemed like a walk in the park. Then, if you were able to hack RIP, Ranger School. And let me tell you: Ranger School is where you start to see yourself for who you really are, because they strip everything right off you. That’s where being physically strong isn’t enough anymore. Three phases of that—Walk, Run, Crawl—and by the end you can mountaineer, you can traverse a swamp, you can fly. What the Army calls us Rangers is “Lethal, Agile, and Flexible.” And that’s exactly what I was.