Chapter 11

The books that the Colonel assigned were hard. Not harder in the sense of vocabulary or sentence length, Quinn had never found reading technically difficult. He had devoured everything available to him since he was five years old with the hunger of a kid for whom books were brain food.

These books were dense with ideas and new concepts. Plus, the Colonel's requirements demanded he engage with those ideas and come to his own conclusions. He was daily reminded that he was nowhere near as smart as he thought he was.

Epictetus arrived -- the Discourses, dense and demanding, a freed slave lecturing on the necessity of mastering one's own mind. Then Seneca with his observations about living in the present. He sat down with the Stoics like a person at dinner with minds so brilliant that he had no business expressing his dumb opinions.

It was maddening.

He loved it.

The Colonel hated sloppy thinking. This had become clear by the third dinner conversation and was confirmed by every subsequent one, not through anger, but through a particular quality of his silence that followed an imprecise statement. His silence that said, try again; that one didn't hold its weight. He would let a sloppy sentence sit in the air between them until Quinn heard it. Then he'd wait patiently for Quinn to correct it. It was a demanding form of instruction. Quinn came to dread the silence and then came to court it because the sentence that survived was a new something.

He ended up spending way more time on the Colonel's List than on his schoolwork.

He started bringing his notebook to dinner. The Colonel had never said he couldn't. Quinn would put it on the table beside his plate and open it to a page of questions. He and the Colonel would go through it.

Why he was here, Quinn still didn't know. He figured the Colonel would tell him in his time, in his way.

Chapter 12

A man named Yaakov Hadar arrived on a Tuesday. He was a compact, muscular man, with a face that a hard life had fixed into an expression of permanent cynicism. He had a French accent and a tattoo that Quinn later identified as the French Foreign Legion's Seven Flame Grenade symbol, along with the words "Honneur et Fidélité" tattooed on the inside of his right forearm. He and Sullivan shook hands in the kitchen with the ease of men who had served together in dangerous places.

He was to appear and disappear and teach Quinn for a month or so over the next four years.

On this first day, he looked Quinn over with frank, impersonal assessment.

"Walk across the kitchen," he said.

Quinn walked across the kitchen.

Yaakov watched his feet. He said something to Sullivan in what Quinn thought was French, too quick to catch, and Sullivan responded with agreement.

"Your feet, they are fighting you," Yaakov said.

Quinn had no response to that, so he said nothing.

"They are not your enemies. They are merely sized for your future body. We will introduce your brain to them."

This was how it went.

Five mornings a week at 5 AM, Yaakov showed up in the side garden at five o'clock to teach Quinn how to fight and survive. It was not, in the beginning, anything that resembled fighting. It was basic movement: stance, weight distribution, footwork. The geometry of a body moving in space.

"The Krav Maga," Yaakov explained, "is not a martial art in the sense that it has a philosophy. It is an efficient fighting system that will keep you alive in situations where someone wants you dead or maimed. It has no interest in anything but being effective."

He adjusted Quinn's elbow position without breaking the explanation.

"What that means in practice is that we work with what you have. Your size, your reach, your speed--all of these are what they are. We build from what is rather than what would be ideal. Your reach is good. Your hands are strong. Your instincts... Your instincts are feral, not those of someone who learned to fight in order to spar. Which is to your advantage."

"How is it an advantage?"

"Because you already understand that the aim of the fight is survival, not sport. That understanding is very hard to teach. All we're doing is giving it a disciplined structure." He stepped back and adjusted Quinn's arms. "Again."

Quinn went again. And again. And again, until the movement was no longer something he did but something that happened.

The balance and his coordination slowly improved.

Chapter 13

The school year ended on a Friday in June. Quinn received his final grades from Mrs. Welkins, the counselor, who delivered them with the stunned expression of a woman who finds her universe imperfectly organized: four point zero.

He walked out of the main building and stood with Peter and James on the front steps.

"What's your summer gonna be like?" Peter said.

"Working a ranch in Montana," Quinn said.

They looked at him. He'd mentioned the ranch in passing but hadn't said much about it because he had never seen the place. The Colonel had told him, with his characteristic economy of phrase, that Quinn would spend the summer at the Colonel's ranch in Montana. Quinn would work with a crew repairing fences. He'd be back in September.

"You're going to be a cowboy in Montana?" James asked.

"Ranch work," Quinn said. "More like cheap labor."

Will walked up stashing his ever-present sketchbook in his backpack. "What's a fencing crew?"

"No idea, I guess I'll find out," Quinn said.

The next morning after breakfast, the Colonel came in and put eight books on the table: Tocqueville, the first two volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, Clausewitz, Adam Smith, a biography of Lincoln, two books on American Western history.

"One report per book," the Colonel said. "I expect clear thinking and honest engagement, not summary. Tell me what you actually think, including where you think the author is wrong. You leave on Saturday."

"Yes, sir," Quinn said, because what else was there to say.

That night he thought about what the summer would be: hard physical work away from the house and the city. He felt a mix of apprehension and excitement.

The next morning, Maria had been in the kitchen when he came down and had put a breakfast in front of him that was larger than usual. She had given him a fierce hug in the kitchen doorway as he was leaving.

"You take care of yourself and watch out for those rattlesnakes."

He hugged her back. His arms knew where to go by now.

Sullivan drove him to the airport at six forty-five, Quinn in the back with books in a duffel bag and a suitcase he'd packed with the economical precision.

Sullivan drove without speaking for fifteen minutes and then said, "Probably work hard over there."

"I figure," Quinn said.

"Ranch work is not romantic. It's up early to work and the weather doesn't give a shit about you."

"Okay."

"The kids on the crew are ranch kids. They've been doing work like this since they were tall enough to hold a post-hole digger. You'll be behind them at first."

"I'll catch up," Quinn said.

Sullivan was quiet for a moment. "Yes, I know you will."

That was the end of the conversation. Sullivan carried Quinn's bag to the check-in counter with the same economy of motion he brought to everything and looked at Quinn in the security line with a brief, direct look that communicated something neither of them was going to name out loud. He then gave a curt nod and walked away.

The ranch was four hours north of Billings, outside of a little town called Roy. It was run by a man named Dale Whitfield, who had the rugged look of someone who had spent his entire life ranching in all weathers.

Dale picked him up at the Billings airport in a dented, dirty Ford F-350. He measured Quinn with the assessing squint of a man gauging the gap between what he'd expected and what had arrived.

"You worked before?" Dale said.

"Some," Quinn replied.

Dale nodded as though this confirmed something. "You'll learn," he said, and got back in the truck.

The crew consisted of five other boys, all within a year of Quinn's age, all from ranching families around the county. They all had the confident competence of kids who had been doing ranch work since they could walk. There was Cody, whose family ran cattle thirty miles east and who was the unofficial leader of the group in the way that the most confident person in any group assumes the leadership. Rafe, who was broad as a door, could drive steel fence posts with a manual driver while holding a conversation. Rafe was a talker. Two brothers, Shane and Dusty, who were a year apart and indistinguishable in personality. They too worked with the efficiency of long practice. And Tommy, who was the youngest, had the unshakeable good humor of the born optimist.

They looked at Quinn on the first morning with the careful interest of people evaluating a new species.

"You're from the city," Cody said.

"Yeah," Quinn said.

"You work out or something? You're built kind of..."

"A little," Quinn replied.

"You done fencing before?"

"Nope."

"Huh." He handed Quinn a post-hole digger. "We're starting on the north fence line. Try not to die."

Quinn didn't die. But he came close those first three days. The post-hole digger was an instrument of Satan. It took weeks for his body to adjust. But adjust he did, the blisters on his hands became calluses, his back muscles quit cramping and his sunburn turned into a farmer's tan.

By the second week, he kept pace. By the third, he was useful.

The days were structured by light. The work he found was deeply satisfying. Up at five, fed by Dale's wife, Helen, who cooked with the same serious dedication as Maria, her meals were enormous. They worked from six until the light got too bad. His body tired in a way that delivered deep sleep without anxiety, the clean exhaustion of a person who has used themselves up doing something real.

He read at night in the bunkhouse while the others slept. Every night, without exception, lying on the bunk in the bunkhouse with a flashlight, he worked through Tocqueville, Gibbon, and Clausewitz, with his notebook beside him. The Decline and Fall was enormous in every sense--enormous in scope, in ambition, in the sheer architectural complexity of the argument--and he worked through it slowly, building a running response in his notebook that was partly summary and mostly argument, his own thinking being worked out against Gibbon's. Clausewitz he read twice, the first time for the main line of the argument and the second time for everything underneath it.

He wrote the reports on Sunday evenings on paper. The ranch had a computer in the main house office that he could use, but he wrote the first draft by hand, because he'd found that the hand slowed him down in useful ways, making him commit to sentences before he moved past them. He rewrote on the computer, printed them on Dale's printer, and put them in an envelope addressed to the Colonel, leaving them to be mailed on Monday.

The Colonel's responses usually arrived the next Monday, handwritten on notepaper in a clear, firm hand. They were not long -- a paragraph, sometimes two. They contained no praise only questions. Questions that went directly to the places where Quinn's thinking had been imprecise or muddy. Quinn read them, wrote the questions into his notebook, thinking about them during the day, then replied in following week's report.

He found he was having the time of his life. The others had thought him city-kid-soft. He showed them wrong. The scars on his back sobered them the first time they went swimming, but they soon forgot them. He was just Quinn.

The barn dances started in July, causing considerable excitement among the boys and plenty of food for teasing the week after the dance.

These were county-wide events, held Saturday nights at rotating ranches around the county. The first one in July was at a ranch a half hour away. The hosts had a barn large enough to hold most of the county's young people and a sound system that blared out country western and honky-tonk songs till midnight. The boys went in Dales truck all spruced up wearing collared shirts. Cody and Rafe arguing about a girl they both liked. When they got there she was dancing with somebody else.

Quinn had never danced before. This was a fact he whispered to Tommy, who received it with the expression of a person encountering a gap in another person's education that he considered himself perfectly qualified to address.

"It ain't complicated," Tommy said. "There ain't but three moves and the girl does most of rest."

This was not entirely accurate, as it turned out, but it was accurate enough that Quinn managed the first dance without stepping on the feet of a pretty red haired girl from Cody's high school named Becca. By the second dance, he had the basics. By the third, he was doing the real thing.

He stood outside between dances with a soda or sometimes a stolen beer and looked up at the Montana sky with the Milky Way, bright like city folk never saw, stretched across the sky.

He went back in and asked Becca if she wanted to dance again.

She did.

The pranks evolved over the summer with the organic, escalating logic of cheerful high spirits.

It had started with Rafe putting a garter snake in Shane's boot, which scared the crap out of Shane. The country was rife with rattlesnakes, and he was sure that one had crawled into his boot. After he noticed all the boys rolling on the floor with laughter, his face broke into an evil smile that meant he was planning terrible vengeance. The prank produced two weeks of increasingly creative escalation.

Quinn entered the war carefully, watching at first, learning the rules of engagement, where the line was between funny and mean. The line was clear once you saw it: nothing that caused real damage, nothing that hit a genuine vulnerability, nothing that the target couldn't tell about with pleasure afterward. And within those terms, considerable latitude existed.

His contribution was the water bucket incident, which he had planned for four days and executed on a Tuesday morning with an engineering elegance that earned him a round of sincere appreciation from everyone, including its target, Cody, who sat with water pouring off his hat brim for a full thirty seconds before he started laughing and who told the story with additions and improvements at every subsequent barn dance for the rest of the summer.

After that, Quinn was fully one of them.

Helen cooked them enormous meals, three times a day. They worked hard, joked, teased, and laughed.

Quinn fully embraced the life. He gained weight that summer--muscle weight--his frame filling out closer to its eventual shape, the angular and clumsy quality of the spring beginning to resolve into something more intentional.

He grew another inch.

They stole a bottle of whiskey and a case of beer and got gloriously drunk down at the pond, that was their swimming hole and paid for it the next day.

On the last evening at the ranch, Dale sat on the porch steps with him after dinner while the others were inside.

"You did alright," Dale said. "Better than I expected."

"Thank you, sir," Quinn said. "For having me here and teaching me."

"Didn't teach you much. You figured most of it out."

"You let me figure it out," Quinn said. "That's a kind of teaching."

Dale considered this. He had the quality of a man who thinks before he speaks as a matter of principle rather than caution. "The Colonel," he said. "You know him well?"

"No, sir. Not well," Quinn said. "I'm learning."

Dale nodded, looking at the sky. "I've worked for him for fifteen years. He's a good man."

Later, Quinn sat on the porch steps until the last light was fully gone and the stars came out in their millions, and the ranch settled into its nighttime sounds--the cattle lowing somewhere distant, the horses in the near pasture, the bunkhouse behind him with its light in the window and the sound of the others inside. He sat with his notebook in his lap and wrote the last lines of the Tocqueville report.

He thought about the question he still hadn't asked--the question that had been present since the first interview in the library, through eight months of books and dinner conversations and Seneca and the fence line and everything.

Why me?

He closed the notebook, went inside, and slept his last good Montana sleep. In the morning, he packed his bag and said an awkward goodbye to each of the boys in turn then rode to Billings.

He watched the ranch recede and thought, "I will be back."

Chapter 14

He'd been back for a week when grocery shopping day arrived. The Safeway on Clement Street was Maria's store. She shopped on Saturday mornings because, she had explained to Quinn on the drive over, the store's produce delivery came Friday afternoon, and if you were there before ten on Saturday, you got the pick of the produce.

Quinn's job was pushing the cart. He cheerfully pushed the cart, reached for high things, carried things, and listened to Maria talk.

It was a good Saturday morning. The produce was good. Maria was in the middle of a story about a disagreement between Mrs. O'Toole and the dry cleaner on Sacramento Street that had apparently escalated over three visits into a major incident. Quinn was listening with genuine interest because the fact that stern Ms. O'Toole was in a fight was a surprising and interesting anomaly.

They came out of the main entrance with two full carts. A comfortable routine they'd done enough times to have it organized between them.

Quinn spotted the men standing a car away from Maria's car. He noted them the way he habitually monitored the environment--not with alarm, just noting a possible threat.

Two long-haired, unkempt men in their mid-twenties were obviously tweaking. The was an air of jerky, abruptness of motion that he'd learned to identify as tweaker, long ago. He grew certain of it before they'd covered half the distance.

He registered with the cold, practical part of his mind that Maria's car was between them and the tweakers.

"Maria," he said quietly. "Stay behind me."

She looked at him and then looked at the men and he saw her understand.

The men's timing was off from the start, which would have been funny except that it wasn't. The taller one went for the driver's side door at the same moment Maria reached for her key fob to unlock it. The sequence of what was planned clearly existed in his head as a clean, fast operation, but his body was overloaded with drugs that made clean and quick impossible. He said something that was meant to be threatening but was instead garbled nonsense. The shorter one came around the cart, reaching, and knocked into it instead of past it. That made him stagger as he closed in on Quinn.

Quinn watched this with cold, assessing alertness. He was calculating distance, angle, the level of impairmen.

Then the taller one, getting increasingly frustrated, turned and slapped Maria, knocking her down. Her knee hit the ground, she made a sharp cry of pain and her purse flew scattering its contents.

Quinn moved.

Later, he would identify the feeling by its temperature. Not hot. People said rage was hot; in his experience it wasn't. His was utter calm-cold.

The taller one was turning back toward the car after slapping Maria. Quinn stepped at him from the side and slightly behind with the angle Yakov had drilled into him. The elbow strike to the jaw was precise and vicious, delivered with everything his body had. He felt it the way Yaakov had told him he would feel a correctly delivered strike--a meaty jolt and the guy's jaw giving way.

He staggered, and Quinn delivered work hardened open palm strike that broke the man's collarbone.

Meanwhile, the shorter guy was dumbly processing what had just happened to his partner. Quinn didn't wait. He moved inside his arm -- always inside, never outside; outside gives them the leverage, inside takes it -- another elbow strike connected with the side of the man's head. He dropped bonelessly to the ground.

Quinn turned back to the taller one, who was trying to get up. Tweakers are tough. Quinn's rage had not receded. The hard lessons of the street came to the fore.

Finish it, finish it completely so it is permanently finished.

"Quinn."

Maria's voice. Not frightened. Clear and direct.

He stopped and turned to her.

She was on her feet. Her knee was bleeding through her slacks, a dark stain spreading in a circle, and she was standing with one hand on the car for balance and looking at him with an expression that was not afraid of him -- he checked for this and was glad.

"Enough," she said.

He stepped back.

He knelt down and picked up the keys that Maria had dropped and held them out to her.

"Get in," he said tonelessly. "We should go before the cops come."

Maria took the keys. She looked at him for a moment with those clear, dark eyes. Then she looked at the two men on the asphalt, one holding his jaw with both hands and moaning in pain, the other sitting up with a vacant look on his face.

"Yes," she said. "Let's go."

She got in the driver's side. Quinn gathered the groceries that had scattered and methodically repacked the bags, fitting them in the trunk in the organized way he always loaded it. He was in the passenger seat with the door closed within minutes.

Maria drove out of the parking lot.

They were three blocks away before either of them said anything.

"We should go to the hospital for your knee," Quinn said.

"I'm fine." She was driving with both hands white-knuckled on the wheel. "It's not the first time someone's hit me."

She glanced at him, with a probing look.

"Are you alright?" she said.

The rage had receded, back to wherever it lived. A place that he didn't like to spend much time examining.

"Yeah," he said. He was shaking slightly from adrenaline.

"Quinn." She said his name with a weight that meant she was asking a different question than the one she'd just asked.

"Really, I'm alright," he said again. "It's just adrenaline."

She was quiet for a moment.

"You stopped," she said. "I wasn't sure you would."

He looked out the window. "I wasn't either."

Unfortunately, the parking lot security camera caught everything.

Sullivan was in his office when the call came. He came into the kitchen and looked at Quinn.

"Tell me about the Safeway parking lot," he said.

Quinn looked at his hands. "There was a little trouble."

"A little trouble, huh? Both men are at SF General. One with a broken jaw and collarbone, one with a concussion and a dislocated jaw."

"One of them hit Maria and knocked her down."

Sullivan looked at Maria, who had changed her slacks but was moving with obvious care.

"Oh," he said, there was a tone in the words that Quinn hadn't heard from him before, something flat and chilling.

"The police are on their way here to talk to you," Sullivan said.

Quinn nodded.

He had been afraid of this. He'd suggested they leave because someone was bound to report it. Nothing good comes from talking to cops. He had navigated the juvenile justice system enough times to understand that as an absolute fact.

"The Colonel," Quinn said.

"Out of town," Sullivan said. "I've reached out. He's not available until tomorrow."

Quinn thought about what the security camera must have caught and what the sequence looked like from outside. Two men down, one of them badly hurt.

He thought about how it probably looked.

"Okay," he said. He went up to his room to prepare for jail.

They came an hour later, two officers and a detective who had the dead-eyed look of cops everywhere.

Quinn was prepared. He had jeans and his running shoes and wore a heavy sweater. The last jail he'd been in was cold. He looked at the cops and immediately felt the familiar despair.

Fuck, things were going so well. I forgot about what the real world is like.

The detective asked him to come to the station. He said yes. Sullivan said he would follow in the Bentley. Maria stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded her face communicating things to Sullivan's that Quinn caught in the side of his vision.

He got in the police car. At least they hadn't cuffed him.

He'd been in jail twice before, both times briefly and both times in the bureaucratic limbo of juvenile processing. This was more formal. The subjects were in the hospital and the camera had what it had. The law would treat him as a felon. They put him in a holding cell with two other men, both of them drunk.

Quinn immediately found the corner that offered the best sightlines to both the door and the men. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall. He kept his eyes open and waited.

He was not afraid: he was not comfortable. But he was not afraid.

He thought about Marcus Aurelius because that's who he was currently studying.

You have power over your mind, not outside events.

He thought about Plato and Socrates and doing the right thing. The Colonel had been absolutely right. When you have the richness of great men's ideas in your head, you never lack for thought-food in bad situations.

He sat in the corner of the holding cell with his eyes open, thought his thoughts. Waited patiently for the process to run its course.

He was good at waiting.

The Colonel sprung him at eleven forty-three the following morning.

A guard unlocked the cell and ushered him out into a waiting room. He saw Sullivan first, then the Colonel in his blue suit. His pale, level eyes swept over Quinn from head to toe.

"Good morning, sir," Quinn said.

The Colonel looked at him for a moment.

He nodded.

The cop unlocked another door, and they all went down the corridor, then through another door into a room where a detective with cold cop eyes was waiting with a folder.

The Colonel listened to her account. The camera footage had been viewed, the two subjects had given their own statements from the hospital, which had required some adjustment upon confrontation with the camera evidence. The woman who ran the dry cleaning store adjacent to the Safeway had provided a spontaneous statement to the arriving officers because she had seen the whole thing from her window. He listened in the complete, focused way he listened to everything, his hands folded, his face communicating nothing.

When the detective finished, he said, "What are the charges against the boy?"

The detective looked at the Colonel. "Given the camera footage and the witness statement," she said carefully, "and the men's own revised account, the DA's office is not inclined to pursue charges. The subjects were in the commission of a carjacking. The response was probably excessive, but the woman was assaulted. They were tweaking. There's a good argument for defense of another." She closed the folder. "We'll need him available for any follow-up the DA might require."

"Of course," the Colonel said. "He'll be available."

He stood. Sullivan stood. Quinn stood.

The Colonel looked at the detective with the expression he used for ending meetings. "Thank you for your time."

The drive home was the Colonel and Quinn in the back of the Bentley and Sullivan in the front driving like he usually did with one ear cocked to hear the conversation in the back.

The Colonel spoke, after several blocks, "Tell me."

Quinn told him the whole sequence, in order, with the same honest and precise attention he brought to the weekly reports. His identification of the men, the timing, Maria going down, the sequence of the response, the cold and what it was and where it came from, Maria's voice and what it had done, the parking lot afterward, and the decision about the police.

The Colonel listened without interruption.

When Quinn finished, the Colonel was quiet for a long time. Long enough that the house appeared in the distance before he spoke.

"The rage," he said. "You've felt it before."

"Once," Quinn said. "When I was nine."

He told the Colonel about the Abernathy house. He told it plainly, without drama. He talked about the almost rape and the man, the bat, the woman and her wire whip, and the hospital afterward. He told it all with no emotion looking out the window at the city passing by.

The Colonel and Sullivan received it with complete stillness.

"I notice you stopped from finishing the tall one. He looked like he was getting up," Sullivan said.

"Maria stopped me." Quinn looked at his hands. "He slapped Maria. I knew what I was going to do. He was tweaking. Still a threat. You can't let up on those guys. If she hadn't said anything. I knew what I was going to do. I would have done it."

The Colonel looked at him with those pale eyes. "Yes," he said.

They pulled through the iron gates. The fountain was running in the afternoon light. The house sat at the end of the drive in its permanent, settled way.

"We will talk about this further," the Colonel said. "Not today. When you've had time to sit with it."

"Yes, sir," Quinn said.

"The woman at the dry cleaning store," Sullivan said from the front. "Her statement was detailed and accurate and entirely in your favor." He paused in the way he paused when he was deciding whether to add something. He added it: "She said, and I'm quoting directly, that the young man moved like he knew exactly what he was doing and stopped the moment it was finished."

The car stopped. Quinn got out and stood on the gravel of the drive in the afternoon light and looked up at the house.

Maria was in the doorway.

She looked at him across the drive for a moment. She walked out to him, put her arms around him and gave him a fierce hug then, led him into the kitchen.

"Come let's get you something to eat," she said. "You must be starving."

He was home.