The Sleeper Read Free

boy, and he wished Betsy was his own, and she didn’t want to be either. She went kind of wild when she was fifteen, sixteen, I guess. A lot of boys, a lot of drinking, a lot of fuck-yous to the deputy. Then her mom died of breast cancer, and Betsy moved out of the house.
    When I met her after my wars, in 1993, she was twenty-two and on her own and every bit a woman. She came up behind me in the Wal-Mart book section and the first thing she ever said to me was, “You gonna read one of those?” She was wearing shorts and flip-flops and a T-shirt that was a size too small, and the way she smiled I figured she was laughing at me inside.
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    â€œâ€™Cause you been looking at the backs of those books so long, I wonder if you can read at all.”
    Not a great introduction, but things got better after that. I asked her out, and we dated about three months, and broke up about five times, before I asked her to marry me.
    â€œWhy?” she asked when I popped the question.
    â€œTo make a life,” I said. And I guess it was the right answer, because that’s what we’d been doing, or trying to do, ever since.
    â€œWhat God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” I said the words out loud as I picked up the pace on that long run back to my wife and my baby and my home.

Chapter 3
    The ringer on the phone in our bedroom didn’t work anymore. It clicked and buzzed like a wounded robot, and I barely heard it when I got out of the shower. I thought Betsy’s voice would be at the other end. It was her morning off, and she hadn’t been at the house when I got back from my run. She usually left a note to say where she and Miriam had gone. But this time she hadn’t.
    â€œSalaam Aleikum.” A man’s voice.
    â€œAleikum salaam,” I said, feeling a chill of recognition. “Griffin?”
    â€œHah! You remembered after all these years.”
    â€œI remembered.”
    â€œYou been worried I’d call.”
    â€œNot until just now.”
    â€œI’m over at the Super 8.”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œHow about some breakfast?”
    â€œHave we got something to talk about?”
    â€œJust old times, that’s all. Kuwait, Bosnia, New York, Atlanta. You know what I’m talking about.”
    â€œLet’s meet at the Chuckwagon, it’s down the road from the motel.”
    â€œI sort of like the Jump Start. You never know who you’ll meet at the Jump Start.”
    â€œYou want to see me? Meet me at the Chuckwagon.”
    I never liked Griffin, not since I first saw him during Ranger training at Dugway, praying secretly in the desert—the ritual prayers of a Muslim. He hated me before I hated him, and I always thought part of it was a race thing. My blond hair, my blue eyes: some African-Americans looked at me and saw someone perfect to hate. In the Georgia mountains during one of the Ranger exercises, Griffin turned the whole thing personal, and there were a couple of seconds when I thought he was going to kill me. Then, later, after I’d been with the mujahedin in Bosnia, I saw Griffin in New York on a Secret Service detail. I tried to call him from Atlanta when the moment came for the terror to begin—horror so vast that America might never recover. But Griffin didn’t answer, and I had stopped the plague myself.
    To hear from him now—and here, in Westfield—was bad news. Almost the worst news.
    When I pulled the truck away from the house, the emptiness of the yard shook me a little. Where was Betsy’s car? Where was she ?
    Â 
    Griffin sat in a booth leafing through the newspaper. He looked at me, nodded, and waited for me to sit down. He folded the paper and looked again at the huge headline, holding it up for me to see: AMERICA UNDER ATTACK . “Good morning,” he said, leaning forward slightly across the table. “Glad you could make it.”
    â€œWhat brings you