Orrin heard the whine of bullets and the smack of impacts on the truck. He saw an Iraqi rise up, a portable missile tube over his shoulder. He pulled the trigger and held the M4 as steadily and surely as he had when he won the marksman championship back home. The man fell back as the projectile left the tube, but shot up, trailing smoke as it flew harmlessly into the sky.
IS THERE NOTHING ORRIN SYKES CANNOT DO?
He didn’t get sick until it was over, didn’t smell his own shit until the ambushers had run. Then he saw the carnage. Guys he had played poker with last night sprawled by trucks. Guys calling for help, one man cupping his half-torn genitals, another clawing at his shredded face. Sykes fought off nausea. He rushed to help. He’d been taught how to use the morphine. He soothed the wounded. He watched the light disappear in one man’s eyes.
And then, as the medics came, he rose and spotted something odd on the ground, by the first overturned truck. Boxes labeled FOOD had fallen out, split open, and their contents lay scattered all around.
But it wasn’t food. Sykes walked among scattered handheld Game Boys and sat phones. He went to a second box and opened it with his knife. It contained bottles of Tito’s Vodka. Not food. Not aid. Not medicine. Vodka.
He opened another box. There wasn’t food inside that one either. The box was filled with pink iPhones.
That night former Sergeants Robert Delaney and Arnold Hasselbach visited Sykes’s trailer, sat down with him, acting less like noncommissioned officers, more like pals. They handed him a fat white envelope.
“You’re a born soldier,” the ex-sergeants said.
“I don’t want this money.”
“Yes you do. You did well today. Don’t spoil it. Hey! Is that your grandfather in that photo, Sykes? Back home?”
“Are you threatening me?” Sykes said.
“Don’t be a hard-ass. You were a hero. Money is gratitude. Why are you here if not for that?”
Sykes shook his head. He didn’t want to look at the envelope. “Those guys we killed were gangsters, not soldiers.”
“They were terrorists.”
“I killed four kids over vodka!”
“You saved your buddies, Sykes! Man up!”
From then on, two convoys went out each week, and Orrin Sykes did a good job protecting them. He rode shotgun on the lead truck. He was promoted and got a raise. One day he killed a civilian driving toward them in an old Ford Fairlane. After the violence was over, they found a dead baby in the backseat, also shot, and no bomb. Another time he and other guards shot it out with ex-Iraqi soldiers when negotiations over some stolen iPhones went bad. Sykes killed two men. Hasselbach gave him an extra thousand that night.
“Hey, man, there’s nothing you can’t do,” Hasselbach said.
He started drinking away bad feelings. Hasselbach gave him some cocaine, and later sold him more. Hasselbach smiling and praising but always watching. “We’re the tip of an iceberg, Sykes. Take the money. Go home. Spend it on that girlfriend in the photo. You blew away some bad murderer dudes, man. You saved American lives.”
Six months later he was out, living in Los Angeles, burning through the $68,000 cash. There were medical terms for his condition — the hours spent playing games at a computer, the inability to get a job, the laughter he heard when he couldn’t perform with women. Some days he didn’t even go outside. He drew the curtains in his little studio on Havenhurst Street. He sat in the glow of a screen. The money trickled away.
IS THERE NOTHING ORRIN SYKES CANNOT DO?
But there was, apparently, because casting agents turned him down. “You’re not good on camera.” The payoff money ran out. He remembered the laughing face of a beautiful young actress at a swimming party in Beverly Hills. The girl leaning close, green eyes glowing, bikini snug, body filled with vitality. Half-drunk that day, he’d been going on about a wrestling award, trying to impress her. “You’re from where, Orrin? Crystal Lake? You weren’t even a big fish in a little pond! You were a protozoa in a little puddle!” She’d turned away, as if he were already gone.
Now as Sykes reached the Capitol area, the images came faster, like flipping cards. Carol Ann on the phone when he called her from L.A. “I’m getting married! You disappeared!” Sykes in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, blood on his face, but he could not remember why. Sykes waking in a men’s shelter to find a skinny guy, pants down, trying to rape him. Sykes in a jail cell. Sykes too humiliated to call Grandfather for money to get home. But finally he did, and did not even hear a dial tone, just a recording. The line was disconnected. He hesitated before calling Uncle Merrill, but knew he had to get out of L.A.
“Hi, Uncle.”
“You piece of shit! Your grandfather died asking for you! You ran away from the job! You ran away from Carol Ann. Go fuck yourself. Don’t call me again, loser.”
Now, in D.C., Sykes got turned the wrong way for a few minutes and steered the Honda along Independence Avenue, past the Museum of the American Indian and the Air and Space Museum. He made a U-turn. The road rose back toward Congress, past bomb barriers ringing the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, hydrant-shaped concrete blocks designed to block a car bomb. The gaps were large enough for a trillion microbes to float through.
But Sykes was still in the past, remembering the months after that phone call. Each time he’d thought things couldn’t get worse, they did. Each time he knew he’d hit bottom, the bottom dropped out again.
Sykes saw himself in a police line-up, but the woman whose purse he’d grabbed failed to identify him. He saw himself breaking the lock on a gas station men’s room door for a place to sleep, in Omaha, near a rail freight yard. He saw himself standing in a concrete spillway in Buffalo, gazing at a billboard announcing Warner Bros. Pictures’ Academy Award nominees. Sykes a full-fledged member of the academy of failure.
And finally the day it changed. Sykes taking refuge in an old record shop in Albany in a storm, not to buy anything, just to keep dry, standing amid vintage rock albums disdained as old-fashioned ten years ago, but regarded as valuable again. In a record store second chances were contagious.
“You look hungry,” a girl’s voice said as he stood in back, trying to stay invisible and not get kicked out.
She was pretty: jet-black hair, glistening blue eyes, lean figure, and firm belly visible below the cutoff top. He saw sympathy instead of revulsion in her eyes, kindness where he usually saw dread. Girls had not regarded him that way for years.
“I’m Mariko. You look like you need a friend.”
She’d taken his hand as if she knew him, led him outside, just opened the door to her late-model Toyota, unafraid. A miracle. An angel.
“Don’t be shy. Get in.”
The house where she brought him was filled with wonderful people who gave him a bed, and food, and didn’t ask questions. Carla and Fritz, Mariko and Morgan and Shahid. They didn’t make him leave. Weeks passed before he blurted out the story, sobbing, and even then they accepted him, gathered around and hugged him and told him he was welcome. He belonged. In that house Orrin met a man who had answers. And in his mind, he was reborn.