Marlowe lay in pieces in a coffin at Duggan-Dolan Mortuary in Butte, waiting for the official start of his hero’s welcome: a parade, lying in state for two days under the courthouse rotunda, and a picnic complete with a huckleberry pie bake-off, a three-legged race, and earnest old men in combat ball caps passing around a boot to raise money for a new veterans home. Next to Evel Knievel Days, everyone said it would be the highlight of Butte’s summer.
The rest of us got a limp salute from our commander and a three-inch stack of discharge paperwork, but Marlowe would have a big to-do — the kind of fuss showered on the dead after they can no longer appreciate it: red-white-and-blue bunting along Granite Street, his widow the grand marshal of the parade, Republican senators inserting Marlowe into their campaign speeches, and Democrats a little more reservedly acknowledging the Butte native’s service and the terrible cost of war.
Montanans love their hometown heroes. Dead or living, soldiers like Marlowe are praised with words that bloom like fireworks and boom like parade drums from their speakers’ throats.
But I knew the truth: Private Chandler Marlowe had died a coward in Iraq. Just before the bomb did its work, Rayburn told me, he’d seen the damp piss stain on Marlowe’s BDUs and the terrified crumple on his face when he heard the click under the sole of his boot. Those are Rayburn’s words — terrified crumple — not mine.
Rayburn and the rest of the squad were just back from Salman Pak, still juiced up by all they’d seen: the blood-scorched crater, the three Iraqis zip-tied and facedown on the sidewalk, Marlowe’s lone boot in the middle of the street. Rayburn and the others were upset. Where we came from, Marlowe had the reputation of being as tough as the hard rock walls of a mine. He’d quarterbacked Butte Central all the way to State, despite his daddy’s drinking and his uncle’s notorious stint at Deer Lodge that ended with the upthrust of a shiv.
That afternoon in Iraq, Rayburn and company punched the marble walls in the old palace where we’d set up our barracks. “One more week!” they cried. “There’s one more week left on the clock and then we’re out of here. Why wasn’t the dumbass more careful and watching where he walked?”
They paced and growled and yelled. “Stupid Marlowe! What was he doing out there anyway? Wasn’t this supposed to be his day off?”
Me, I just lay on my cot with the latest issue of Maxim — I’d been fondling the Girl Next Door’s boobs with my thumb before the interruption — and let the news settle in. Marlowe dead. Me still alive. Funny how it all worked out.
None of the others asked why I’d been back here while Marlowe had been out there on that street and I didn’t volunteer an explanation.
After our National Guard unit got to Iraq eleven months earlier, we’d quickly learned that luck, not muscle or willpower, would be what got us through to the other side of the deployment. That “Butte Tough” mentality Marlowe and a few others from the Mining City carried around like a chip on their shoulders lasted two weeks, until the first car bomb took one of us — Noonan, I think it was. After that, none of us were tougher than any other.
Jesus, the things we saw. Wounds the length of a body that blackened the skin. Children flung to the sky by bombs. Men turned inside out. Sights we couldn’t unsee. Blood pictures stuck in our heads. The things we’d carry forever.
Now, two weeks after putting the war in my rearview mirror, I was still dealing with it, but at least I had a distraction, a new mission. I was returning to my hometown to get a woman.
A decade before Iraq, I’d left Butte after saying good riddance to a needy, clingy girl who thought three fucks and a wake-up were grounds for marriage. For a few years, I drifted here and there around the state picking up odd jobs before deciding to join the Montana National Guard. I’d been putting it off since 9/11, but after I got fired from a hateful job I was about to quit anyway, I figured it was time to grab patriotism by the balls. I landed in a unit full of computer nerds, gun enthusiasts, overweight fathers too devoted to their daughters, and a boisterous cluster of Butte natives, Marlowe the loudest of them all.
I didn’t recognize the younger ones — I was well out of high school before they got their first pimples — but Marlowe and I had some history. I had a year and thirty pounds on him, but that skinny little bitch had still managed to kick my ass on the football field. Every practice we came at each other like rutting bull elk. I hit hard and broke his nose — head-butting all the way through his helmet — but a month later, he dislocated my jaw. Ever since that day, when I’m really pissed off, I click when I talk, thanks to Marlowe.
Our state championship year, when the whole city was painted Bulldog purple, Marlowe had his photo on the front of the sports section four times, while I only got two mentions on C3. Butte lifted Marlowe to its shoulders and carried him all the way to a banquet at the Civic Center — a softer prelude to what he was about to get this red-white-and-blue week in June. He was no genius, but he got a full-ride scholarship to Montana State, while I was voted Most Likely to Succeed.
Success to me was getting the hell out of the Mining City three months after graduation. I left it and that whiny cheerleader behind me for good. Or so I thought. Butte, pitted and tunneled to within an inch of its life, was dead to me. But then I joined the Guard and had to deal with Butte Rats like Marlowe, Noonan, and Rayburn, and I realized, with a sinking heart, the gutted city would always be with me.
I kept a low profile, did my work, and weaseled out of invitations for Sunday-night drinks with the other NCOs. I couldn’t give two shits about the boys from Butte.
And then came the day in Baghdad when Marlowe got that letter from home and started passing around the photo of his wife.
As I drove down off Homestake Pass at sunset, Butte drowsed under a bloodpool sky. The uptown streets, soaked in red evening light, were empty. I was unsurprised to see little had changed. There were a few more casinos and a new Walgreens, but other than that it was still the same sleepy place. I’d lived here long enough to know that, apart from the nightly drunk-stumble and vomit-cough at the Party Palace, nothing much happened around the old mining town. It was always naptime in Butte.
I came around a downhill bend in the interstate, the view of the city opened up, and there it was: the Berkeley Pit. The gouge of earth glowed orange in the late light. It was the oozing wound of the city, both its pride and shame. Work at the open-pit mine had stopped decades ago when the owners moved on to more mineral-rich pastures down in Chile. Once the underground pumps were shut off at the Butte mine, the pit began to fill with water laced with arsenic, sulfuric acid, and eleven other essential vitamins and minerals. One day, the water would reach the lip of the pit and breech the banks, flooding the downslope homes, drowning them in poison. Until then, the people of Butte went about their business, trying to pretend the pit wasn’t there — like a man with an eye patch insisting he could see just fine.
I was back in town for an undetermined amount of time. My job, if I could get it, was Widow Comforter. The usuaclass="underline" nods of sympathetic grief, hand pats, lies about the deceased, a suggestion of drinks at the Silver Dollar, a little snuggle later on. If I could get it.
I planned to get it.
She sat on a rock beside Georgetown Lake: arms behind her, head tilted, breasts tickling the sky, sun washing all the color from her hair. Right away I could tell two things: she wasn’t wearing a bra, and it was cold outside when the photo was taken. At first I thought Marlowe had snipped a photo from a magazine and was trying to pass a supermodel off as his girlfriend — or wife, if he was to be believed.