Read Online Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter - Free Book Online Page A

“You sent the books.”
    “It sounded like the pickings were slim.”
    “Well, everybody took note of the fact that you sent them to all of us.”
    “Thirty-seven plays is a lot for any one person.”
    “Those books are still in the little library at the Naval Special Warfare Center.”
    “I remember sending them. I remember—”
    “Shakespeare.”
    “Yeah, Shakespeare. And a few other things.” She notices how careful he is with the food. He never asked if he could use the kitchen; he just saw that no one was cooking, and he moved to fill the void.
    “He was into thinking and talking about thinking. And helping.”
    “Helping?”
    “Yeah. He always helped the other guys.”
    “Kind of sounds like a group of guys who don’t need that much help.”
    “Not true,” Sam says. “Guys get tired. You’re pushed. One guy was really struggling. It’s due to Jason that he made it to the Teams. On the runs, he would fall behind, and Jason would drop back and run behind him. He would push him—literally push him forward so he could make it. That struck everyone.”
    “He’s good at that. Helping.”
    “And in the water he was like a fish.”
    “He loves the water,” Sara says.
    “The guys used to joke that maybe he had a third lung. And he always said these crazy things.”
    “Like what crazy,” she says.
    “Like ‘follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost realm of human thought.’ ”
    “Tennyson,” she says.
    At that moment, one of the local cops patroling the property pops his head in the small screen door off the kitchen.
    “Hey Sara, we have a little crowd out here building up again,” he says. “I think the local reporters saw that government car and wanted to know—”
    “We don’t have any news,” says Sara.
    “I’ll just keep ’em out at the end of the driveway, okay? They’re noisy, but don’t worry about it. Guys from the papers, mainly. They shake their pencils, but they don’t like it when they think I might use this,” he says, tapping his handgun, smiling.
    “Thank you,” she says. She had seen him remove it and load it the night he had arrived at the house.
    And then Sara says, “Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He wrote a poem called ‘Ulysses,’ and that’s a line from that poem. Jason’s father used to quote it, too. ‘Little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself, and this gray spirit yearning in desire—to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’ The poem is about a warrior in repose. It’s about Ulysses, back from the
Odyssey
. He misses the war.”
    “What does he miss?”
    “Have you read the
Iliad
?”
    “I have.”
    “That’s what he misses,” she says. And then, “Jason worshipped his father. And his father loved poems.”
    “We eventually impressed upon him the importance of training his poetry skills on more popular artists.”
    “Like?”
    “Like Eminem.” Sam is laughing.
    “Eminem?”
    “Yeah. It got him into trouble once. We were in the Kill House. Will you eat pesto?”
    “Sure,” she says. “What’s a Kill House?”
    “He believed the world could be a better place. He was honest.”
    “I might call that idealism, not honesty.”
    “Sorry, two separate thoughts: he believed the world could be a better place. And I believed he was honest. All the guys did. And that meant something.”
    They sit for a while. Sara doesn’t know what to do with herself. She looks out the window, past Sam’s shoulders. She can see movement at the end of the drive through the trees and the rain, like a poorly lit silent film.
Signifying nothing
, she thinks.
    “The Kill House is where we learn how to clear rooms. Close quarters combat.”
    “I remember close quarters combat.”
    “Jason used to call it ‘The Royal U.S. Navy Performs
Swan Lake
.’ ”
    Hearing her son talked