A Once Crowded Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

from ten feet away—with eight bullets. Another battle won. Well done. Well done.
    Soldier holsters his guns, walks to the metal door, and exits the building. A slip of moon serves well enough to light his way to his truck, which isn’t too far off. There’re shots in the air. The sound of them echoes, and his hand twitches.
    At home Soldier flicks a lamp on and sits back into his couch, his pistols scratching into his side. He looks up at a poster on the wall Mashallah’d given him. It shows two people hugging, crying, and after a while, he gets tired of looking at it, and he tries to read something. He’s got a collection of books now, not military-strategy books as he always had, but classics, fictions he’s been meaning to read over a lifetime, and he picks one out, and it’s a nice enough story, but he doesn’t get anywhere with it, doesn’t see the point to it, and after too long, he gets up and walks to the kitchen to get his speech and some water.
    His speech is laid out on the kitchen table, and he grabs it and takes it and the water back to the couch. He needs to go over it again. Proph was right. He’s only wasting time. The funeral’s tomorrow, and he’s got to have it all down and proper by then. Pull the trigger.
    He reads through it a few times, tests himself, then he puts the speech back and washes the glass, puts it away in the cupboard. He goes back to the couch and sits down. He thinks about Mashallah and the Survivor and the graves and Prophetier and Prophetier’s shouting and everyone’s coming back, and he gets up and walks over to the guest room.
    His suit’s been laid out for a day, but he’ll need different holsters forthe funeral, and he’s been meaning to find them. The ones he’s wearing now had been given to him by General Pershing for leading some charge or another back in France, and they’ve got red, white, and blue brushed up and down them. Pull the trigger. All that plume and shine doesn’t do any good anymore.
    Soldier gets in a closet, starts rooting through all the junk he’s got piled up. Over the years and wars you gather a lot of junk. After almost fifteen minutes he finds a brown pair of holsters. They were hidden beneath a recon map of south Baghdad; that’s why he didn’t see them at first.
    Soldier goes to the bedroom and lays the new holsters on the bed. He draws out California and Carolina, his oldest, best friends, and sets them down too. He unhooks his belt, takes off the Pershings, and puts them in the top drawer of his dresser, next to an old, bloody medal he’d won in Italy and worn in Korea.
    Soldier coughs and takes up his suit from a hook on the back of the door and irons it again and puts it on. It’s a new suit, but it fits well enough. He gets a tie from the closet, a black tie, a gift from someone he’d saved in Laos. He doesn’t really remember who. It takes him six tries to get the knot right, but it fits eventually.
    With his tie and suit on, Soldier picks up the holsters from the bed and strings them through his belt. He looks down at his guns. The grips are pointed at him, and they are inviting. He takes them up, and they fit just right in his palms, and he puts them away in the holsters, lets them rest. And it’s all fine. Fine and done. Finally done.
    Soldier sits back down on the couch and stares at the picture on the wall. He goes over his speech in his head, mouthing out the words. When he’s finished, he sits for a few minutes in silence, then he gets up and goes to the mirror in the bathroom to look over the whole outfit. You don’t know until you look it over.
    It doesn’t quite sit right, the guns and the suit and the tie—they don’t go together no matter how rutty these old holsters are. Pull the trigger. But Soldier’s never been anywhere without California and Carolina, least not since a long time back.
    He removes California, meaning to leave her on the sink and see the suit without the pistol’s decoration; but