Wings to the Kingdom (Eden Moore 2)

He stared at the door to his mother’s bedroom, and then over to the door that marked his own.

“No, not yet. ”

Rudy saw him looking and hastily said, “If you want to swap out and take your mother’s room, I understand. I only took it because it was the big one with the bathroom, and there wasn’t anyone else here anyway. ”

“No, that’s okay. I don’t care. My own bed’ll be fine. ”

“I imagine it gets hot in there. I’ve got an extra fan I kept in the kitchen; you take it into your room and turn it on yourself at night so you can sleep. ”

“Air-conditioning still broke?” Pete asked, though the answer was obvious enough and it had been broken long before he’d been in prison.

“Haven’t had the money to see about fixing it. ”

“I figured. ”

“You know how it is. ”

“Yeah, I do. I think I’ll go ahead and take that fan now, if you don’t mind. The chicken’s weighing heavy on me, and a nap out here in the quiet would feel good. ”

Pete took the fan and plugged it in at the foot of his bed, turning it on full blast and letting it swing back and forth to blow away the worst of the heat. When he sat down on the mattress it squeaked and sagged. The bedding hadn’t been washed in God-knew-how-long, but Pete didn’t really care.

All things considered, he felt pretty lucky.

His sister had long since wandered off into the sunset to make trouble for someone else; Allie was busy cheating on some other guy; and the only roommate he had to worry about at the moment was his mother’s older brother, who was possibly the nicest man in the world.

Or maybe he was being nice because he was afraid that Pete would claim the house for himself and throw his aging uncle out—but Pete didn’t think so. Rudy never thought that way. Calculated self-preservation had never come naturally to him, any more than it came naturally to Pete.

“We’re a bunch of half-assed suckers,” he said to himself. “We don’t get good ideas of our own, so we don’t know how to sort out the bad ones when we see them. ”

Later that night the two men sat in front of the television with its foil-wrapped bunny-ear antenna. The local news came in fairly clear on one station, so they watched that instead of fiddling with the antenna to see if they could find something better.

“Damn shame,” Rudy said.

“About the battlefield?”

“Yeah. That ain’t right. ”

Once again—for the second time that year—vandals had raided the battlefield, spray-painting monuments and defacing the old buildings that still stood. Park rangers were complaining about how they’d only recently finished cleaning off the last of the previous graffiti, and now it was going to cost thousands of dollars to clean up the new mess.

“They never seem to make it to Snodgrass Hill though, do they?”

“What?” Pete asked.

“Snodgrass Hill. The kids with the paint, they never make it that far. They always get chased off. You know why, don’t you?”

“Sure. It’s Old Green Eyes. ”

Everyone knew Old Green Eyes kept an eye on the battlefield. Pete always wondered why people ever went there at all when they weren’t supposed to. Besides risking the wrath of the local boogeyman, why bother pissing all over a bunch of statues? What was the point?

Rudy rose and flipped the television off with the back of his hand. “It’s offensive, is what it is. It’s not right. ”

“Nope. Hey, someone in our family died there, didn’t he? At Chickamauga, I mean. Didn’t we have a grandfather or somebody who died in the war?”

His uncle turned around and almost glared. “The Bufords sent half a dozen boys to war, and only got two of them back. And one of them, yes, was killed at Chickamauga. That’s another reason it’s so wrong. You don’t dishonor the dead that way. Not our dead—and not theirs either,” he said, meaning the Union soldiers too.

The way he said it, Pete imagined that his uncle thought there was no way on Earth any good Southern kids could be up to this sort of badness, and the culprits must be the spawn of Yankee transplants.

“It shouldn’t be this way,” Rudy breathed, popping the top on another Coke.