Tears roll down his cheeks and he slowly shakes his head. “Not him,” he hoarsely says. “He loved me.”
Positioning the chair in the bathroom doorway but out of Eddie’s reach, I straddle it backward so I can use it as a weapon if I need to, and I make myself comfortable. “Then let’s have storytime. Fill in all the blanks for me, Eddie. Then, andonlythen, will I decide if I’m going to tell you who the fuck I am, and why I want to know all of that information.”
Chapter Ten
I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I realized I was gay. I do remember pretending to like the girls my older brothers would talk about when we were out and about. If they pointed out a girl they thought was cute, I mimicked their actions and words.
Since they never took a second glance at any of the hot guys we’d pass while out on our morning PT runs—most of them guys from Dad’s base—I pretended I didn’t have any interest in them, either.
I do remember being in high school when I realized I couldn’t admit to my family that I was gay. Not that my family was blatantly homophobic or anything like that, but no way in hell was I risking finding out they were, either. Tolerating gays in general, and tolerating one of them in your family, are sometimes two completely different things. And since at no time did our parents ever explicitly tell us, “We don’t care if you’re gay or straight or whatever,” I decided to err on the side of caution and not test the waters.
There were no discussions about us being het, either—it was justassumedwe all were. As Parker and Charlie both ended up getting married, seeing my parents’ and brothers’ joyous reactions to their unions was more silent proof that staying in my closet was the wise decision.
Now that I know what I do about my youngest brother, I wonder if any of my other brothers are bi or maybe even gay but locked deep in closets of their own.
Guess I’ll never find out, because I’m not about to rockthatboat.
Among the offspring of Lt. Colonel Parker Wilson, Sr., I was the literal middle child, and tended to fade into the background as a result. Pete was only a year younger than me and Tom was three years younger. When Carter came along and Mom laid down the law to Dad about him getting a vasectomy if he ever wanted to get laid again, my place in the family was then secured.
Too young for my three older brothers to readily tolerate me, and more a babysitter for Carter than an older brother, but with just enough of an age difference we really didn’t click well together.
Although if anyone dared fuck with any of the Wilson boys, they quickly found themselves facing all seven of us.
And we were all terrified of Mom. She learned to hold her own against us when Dad was deployed, leaving her a single mom to her very own hockey team.
Losing Pete and Tom, especially so close together, devastated all of us. I think it broke Mom’s heart the worst, and that hurt all of us, too. It was the first time I saw my unofficial drill-sergeant mother break down in uncontrollable hysterics. I was there when they received the visit from the chaplain, and the sound of her wails as Dad tried to console her will forever haunt my soul in ways even the memories of the worst things I’ve done in my life can never touch.
Then when Carter nearly died, had my little brother decided to fight the medical discharge, Park and I had already secretly agreed to go to him and force him to file for medical and guilt trip him about it until he did, or holding the pen in his hand and forcing him to fill out the paperwork, if necessary.
That nearly killed Mom, hearing the news about him and fearing she’d lost another son, her baby.
Can you see why I’m hesitant to heap more on her plate?
It wasn’t until about six months after we lost Pete and Tom, with a little of the pall of grief finally starting to lift in my mind, that I learned something new and disturbing that pulled me up short and renewed my quest for more information about Cunningham.
An anonymous post on a board frequented by current and discharged or separated soldiers who’d been stationed under one then-Colonel Coltrane Cunningham.
A post alleging a lot of fuckery—literal and figurative—and malfeasance on Cunningham’s part that regularly got soldiers killed in action when he was in-country. Worse than I’d learned through my unofficial diggings.
That he’d been promoted out of active-fire locations not only to get him out of the way, but also because he was too personally well-connected for anyone to toss him out of the Army before he was ready to go. I had already moved on to a different post by the time he was put in charge of the base in Germany where my youngest brother served under him. At the time, I didn’t worry too much, thinking that Carter would be safer there than anywhere.
Cunningham became an obsession of mine, and one of the reasons I decided to remain in intel and further my career there, so I could research, learn, and possibly take him out.
And research I did.
Unfortunately, Cunningham did such a great job covering his tracks over the years—and strong-arming people into covering for him—that there was never anything official I could nail him on through regular channels to get him court marshaled and dishonorably discharged. People aren’t stupid, and no one was willing to talk to me about what he did in anything other than the most vague of terms.
A perpetual bogeyman no one wanted to take the time to dispel for fear of the wrath it could unleash on their own lives.
Not that I blame them. I get it. I hold them in complete contempt and have zero respect for them, but I get it.
The more I researched Cunningham, the less likely our paths were to organically cross. There was also never a time I could get close enough to him to secretlydoanything about him without it blowing back on me, and I couldn’t gather enough concrete evidence that I could anonymously drop to reporters to take over from there.
A solid, nuclear option to take him out without implicating me or harming my dad or other brothers perpetually eluded me.
Which is why I sometimes hunted him in my spare time, in hopes of one day getting a lucky break.
I know, I know. You’re saying that’s fine, but what does all ofthishave to do with the story Edward James Fowler spins for me in a small bathroom in a Slovakian safehouse?
