dock, the sound of Harleys cranking and pulling out of the parking lot. I was exhausted, tired but yet too wired to go down to the master berth for the delusion of real sleep. I had been sitting in the same spot for two hours thinking about the message the man with the falsetto voice had left with me. “
She said one other thing … if you do have this mark on your left shoulder, you are related to her. She didn’t say how. Could you be her father?”
Courtney Burke said she was nineteen maybe close to twenty. Doing the math and trying to fit it in with the time-line of my life, I thought about the women I’d known—the women I’d taken to bed. I pictured Courtney’s face, the slight cleft in her chin, the texture of her hair, the slant of her cheekbones, and even the way she carried herself—straight, shoulders back, her strong sense of presence. Who might have resembled Courtney twenty years ago? I tried to superimpose images of former girlfriends over Courtney’s face. I struggled to match a gene pool that tonight had an opaque surface hiding the passage of time and people in my life. Most of the images were faded, blurred in a scrapbook that I rarely opened for all the reasons that they were part of the past.
I closed my eyes and attempted to run a movie trailer of my life from two decades ago through the film gate of my mind. Some of the women I’d known were there in full color, captured in slow-motion angles—the way they’d turned their heads, the way they’d smiled, their physical features still vivid. Other faces were harder to see through the lens of the past, the landscape of their appearances now more distant on the horizon, and the closer I tried to focus, the more stonewashed the faces became. It was like trying to replay a dream I’d made a mental note to remember, but couldn’t.
One picture stopped. It became a freeze-frame when I remembered her eyes.
Like the image of an old National Geographic cover.
Like Courtney’s eyes.
Her name was Andrea Hart. A woman destined for better things than what I could bring to the table after college graduation. She wanted no part of a possible “military life,” hop-scotch jumping from base-to-base if I wanted to climb the ladder while, at the same time, searching for purpose in what I would do. In retrospect, after we went our separate ways, I probably have Andrea to thank for my determination to get through Delta Force training and the Special Activities Division. The experience forever changed me—the good, bad, and ugly, scars and all.
Where was Andrea Hart tonight, twenty something years later? Could she be Courtney Burke’s mother? Could I be her father?
No way
. I touched the cleft in my chin and pictured her face. I stood from the captain’s chair, my back muscles in knots, a slight headache forming over my left eye, my scalp tight. “Come on, Max. Let’s go down. I need to use the computer to track a ghost from my past. If not, the image of Courtney and what she might represent, will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
***
She knew he was looking at her. Even from behind her, Courtney could feel his eyes on her like a breath. She was stirring cream and sugar into her black coffee when the man approached. She sat at the café counter inside the truck stop and sipped from a cup of coffee in front of her. She’d felt the man staring at her twice, both times when he’d walked past her, once heading from the restrooms, the second time when he pretended to be looking at magazines in the rack.
The man moved and sat on one of the stools beside her where he waited for the waitress to return from the kitchen. He glanced at Courtney, his face ruddy and chapped, lips cracked, eyes dancing like flames across her face. He said, “This place has the best coffee of all the truck stops in Florida.”
Courtney nodded. “It’s pretty good.”
“Ought to be real good. I hear the nightshift manager, gal’s name is Flo, puts on a fresh pot
She said one other thing … if you do have this mark on your left shoulder, you are related to her. She didn’t say how. Could you be her father?”
Courtney Burke said she was nineteen maybe close to twenty. Doing the math and trying to fit it in with the time-line of my life, I thought about the women I’d known—the women I’d taken to bed. I pictured Courtney’s face, the slight cleft in her chin, the texture of her hair, the slant of her cheekbones, and even the way she carried herself—straight, shoulders back, her strong sense of presence. Who might have resembled Courtney twenty years ago? I tried to superimpose images of former girlfriends over Courtney’s face. I struggled to match a gene pool that tonight had an opaque surface hiding the passage of time and people in my life. Most of the images were faded, blurred in a scrapbook that I rarely opened for all the reasons that they were part of the past.
I closed my eyes and attempted to run a movie trailer of my life from two decades ago through the film gate of my mind. Some of the women I’d known were there in full color, captured in slow-motion angles—the way they’d turned their heads, the way they’d smiled, their physical features still vivid. Other faces were harder to see through the lens of the past, the landscape of their appearances now more distant on the horizon, and the closer I tried to focus, the more stonewashed the faces became. It was like trying to replay a dream I’d made a mental note to remember, but couldn’t.
One picture stopped. It became a freeze-frame when I remembered her eyes.
Like the image of an old National Geographic cover.
Like Courtney’s eyes.
Her name was Andrea Hart. A woman destined for better things than what I could bring to the table after college graduation. She wanted no part of a possible “military life,” hop-scotch jumping from base-to-base if I wanted to climb the ladder while, at the same time, searching for purpose in what I would do. In retrospect, after we went our separate ways, I probably have Andrea to thank for my determination to get through Delta Force training and the Special Activities Division. The experience forever changed me—the good, bad, and ugly, scars and all.
Where was Andrea Hart tonight, twenty something years later? Could she be Courtney Burke’s mother? Could I be her father?
No way
. I touched the cleft in my chin and pictured her face. I stood from the captain’s chair, my back muscles in knots, a slight headache forming over my left eye, my scalp tight. “Come on, Max. Let’s go down. I need to use the computer to track a ghost from my past. If not, the image of Courtney and what she might represent, will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
***
She knew he was looking at her. Even from behind her, Courtney could feel his eyes on her like a breath. She was stirring cream and sugar into her black coffee when the man approached. She sat at the café counter inside the truck stop and sipped from a cup of coffee in front of her. She’d felt the man staring at her twice, both times when he’d walked past her, once heading from the restrooms, the second time when he pretended to be looking at magazines in the rack.
The man moved and sat on one of the stools beside her where he waited for the waitress to return from the kitchen. He glanced at Courtney, his face ruddy and chapped, lips cracked, eyes dancing like flames across her face. He said, “This place has the best coffee of all the truck stops in Florida.”
Courtney nodded. “It’s pretty good.”
“Ought to be real good. I hear the nightshift manager, gal’s name is Flo, puts on a fresh pot
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