Harlan's Race

wouldn’t find it, and stealthily went there to tend it. One day he found his plant in wilting ruins, and accused me of having pulled it up.
    “There’s a deer out there somewhere,” I shrugged, “who is in Nirvana.”
    Guns and knives would be useful to a fledgling terrorist. One day, I finally broke down and told the two vets about Vince’s intentions. The three of us walked alone on the beach, and the vets listened, their somber eyes sweeping the dunes as we strolled along. Always competitive, we were skipping stones on the water.
    “The kid has potential as a fighter,” Chino admitted, hurling a flat white stone. “He’s loco ... aggressive... smart.” I skipped a piece of beach glass. It sank near the shore. “He’ll probably try to recruit you guys,” I said.
    Chino seemed to think this was funny. Harry just frowned. “What do you want us to do?” Harry asked.
    “Help me talk some sense into him. He has a following in the community. All he needs is a dozen other smart, aggressive locos, and he could start a movement that would hurt all of us.”
    Harry squinted at me. “Where’s your pull with the kiddo?”
    “I’m too close to home ... I don’t carry any weight.” “So we try to turn Vince,” said Harry. “Is that it?” “Don’t tell him I put you up to it.”
    They both chuckled.
    “Oh, we’re fairly subtle,” Chino said.
    “A few things, though,” Harry told me. “Once Chino and I go in, you stay out and you don’t know a thing... unless we ask you in. Understand why?”
    I didn’t.
    “You’re in love ... compromised,” put in Chino.
    Was this how I looked to them? As their sunglasses stared at me impassively, I had to face the gap between my emotion-racked present and the leatherneck past. In their eyes, my wild feeling for this wild young man made me a discipline problem. I’d hired them, but they outranked me.
    Next, my jealous lunacy reared again. Would either of the vets succumb to my lover’s charms? These guys wouldn’t let sex wreck their work, would they? If they were that loose, they’d have died in Southeast Asia.
    Angrily I fired a stone. A breaking wave engulfed it. “Nobody needs to know but us three,” Harry was saying. “Anybody else — Chino and I decide on who.”
    “How about John Sive?” I asked.
    “Not unless we have to.”
    Chino said, “Halaaaaa,” under his breath in Spanish and hurled a stone five yards farther than Harry or me.
    Harry went on, “We’ll have expenses — can you handle that? No questions asked?”
    In the name of the greater good, I choked down my jealousy. “Sure,” I said recklessly.
    The vets’ eyes held mine — quiet, narrowed, pondering.
    “Hey, sweet thing, what do we call this operation?” Chino asked Harry, with a glint in his eye. “Rolling Paper Thunder?”
    “Oh, something simple,” Harry said. At times, Harry was as humorless as me. “How about ‘Boomerang’?”
    The next day, Harry returned from the Davis Park marina, where he’d used a pay phone for a confidential phone call.
    “I talked to Julius,” he said. “Lab report on the rock. Our sniper is a genius of the generic. The three letters are common Canadian newsprint, three different fonts, looks like three different newspapers. LEV. might have a job that involves travel — picks paper stuff out of the trash. Common dime-store glue, a brand sold all over the country. The rock is South Shore granite. Either he’s a local guy—which I don’t believe
    —    or he brought his materials, and made the thing here. A few pollen grains of local plants. But no fingerprints. No hairs or fibers stuck in the glue. Nada.”
    Harry had also been drifting through mainland marinas
    —    Bayport, Patchogue, Bellport, Sayville. He’d asked about a lone bird-watcher with a boat. Nada.
    As August neared, and LEV. made no more moves on us, I started feeling a little silly. But Chino and Harry didn’t let us drop our guard. Frequently, my lover walked the beach with them, deep in talk. I noticed his pot use was tapering off. He was thirsting for target practice with firearms, but you couldn’t do that on the Beach. In the Patchogue army-navy store, he’d found a good knife of his own, and he threw it obsessively for hours.
    For a guy whose most lethal weapon had been his hairdryer, it was a change.
    The two vets found a few off-duty hours to have their own summer things. When they went home to L.A., they’d probably be standing in line