Weapons of Mass Destruction by Margaret Vandenburg

could see.
    “What’s going on, Sinclair?”
    Trapp led him across the rooftop, as far away from Evans as possible. Sinclair craned to avoid losing sight of the body. Nothing registered except his head wound. Nothing else even existed. Trapp held Sinclair’s face in his hands, forcing him to make eye contact.
    “It’s me. Trapp. Come back.”
    The urgency of Trapp’s expression broke through, restoring a modicum of reality. Now Sinclair was in two places at once, in Montana and in Iraq. The past merged with the present. The platoon knew about Pete’s death, but not the details of his suicide. The aspen grove. The self-inflicted head wound. Sinclair strained to see the body again. It still looked like Pete, not Evans.
    “What’s going on?” Trapp repeated. “What are you looking at?”
    “Pete—”
    “What about him?”
    “He shot himself.”
    “Why’d he do it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Yes you do. He was your best friend.”
    He should have known all along, especially after the spectacle at the funeral. His sister, Candace, went berserk, crying and carrying on like it was all about her. She kept saying Sinclair needed to take responsibility for what happened. They all did. Somewhere deep down, Sinclair must have felt guilty as charged. He vaguely understood that this flashback meant that something was rising to the surface. Some terrible secret. He could either confront the truth or bury it again, this time with Evans.
    When they were kids, he and Pete told each other everything. They dreamed the same dreams, even though one boy’s father owned the ranch and the other’s was just a broken-down bronco buster. Bonds like theirs were indissoluble, no matter what did or didn’t happen on the road to manhood. If Sinclair’s grandpa really forced them to attend college, they’d join the same fraternity and take the same classes. When they graduated, they’d run the ranch together.
    “Equal partners,” Sinclair said.
    “We’ll marry sisters and raise a whole passel of little cowboys and Indians,” Pete said.
    “You’re kidding, right?”
    The older they got, the more Pete called attention to the fact that he was Native American. Out of pride, Sinclair thought. Sometimes he wished he were Native American too, the real McCoy if ever there was one.
    “You’re nuts,” Pete would say. “Like anybody really wants to be Indian.”
    Kids at school made stray redskin jokes. But they were all just part of the fun, like cracks about wetbacks and fags. It was a country school with one foot still in the bygone era of seasonal labor. Mexican students came and went with harvests. Ranchers’ sons attended spottily during foaling season. Pete Swan was always absent the same days as Billy Sinclair. Teachers almost never demanded an excuse. When they did, Sinclair’s grandpa wrote the note for both of them. Pete all but pretended he was an orphan. Being the son of a cliché embarrassed him.
    Pete’s father, Eugene, was still the best horse breaker in the county when he was sober, usually on Sundays. Liquor stores were closed and he invariably raided his own emergency stash sometime late Saturday night. Once he slept off the week’s dissipation, he climbed on the bare back of the orneriest stallion in the paddock and bucked till it broke. Eugene only kept his job because the Swans had worked the Sunset Ranch since the Civil War. In the beginning, Sinclair’s great-great-great-grandfather traded the horses Pete’s great-great-great-grandfather bred from wild stock. They called them all great-grandfather for short, dissolving the distinction between generations and even families as they traced their ancestry back to the heyday of the Wild West.
    There were several versions of the history of their founding fathers, all of them mythic. The one constant was that Samson Swan, Pete’s distant progenitor, was the best dadblamed breeder west of Kentucky. His partner’s claim to fame was subject to debate.