Coming over a hill, she was met with the harsh glare of headlights and slowed. The vehicle was still, pulled off to the side of the road so that its high beams angled right into her eyes, and this wrenched her from her brooding dream. As she applied her foot to the brake, she saw a figure standing beside this stranded car, arms above the head, waving, flagging her down. Her own headlights cut a hole in the dark, uncovering the pale ghost outline of a woman’s face. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead above a look of dismay, of dread. Stacey hesitated, but her hands took the wheel, almost without her consent, and guided the Jeep to the left so that it brought her vehicle nose to nose with the small blue sedan. Now Stacey could see a dark smudge on the woman’s jaw that looked like a bruise or soil or soot. For the last time that night, the unnerving sense of a fated encounter descended upon Stacey Moore. Because she recognized the car. She recognized the woman. And she recognized the fear of stepping into a scene, a situation, a moment that in your heart you know is somehow utterly wrong.
DAN EATON AND THE MURDER THAT NEVER WAS
ON THE DRIVE BACK HOME to see Hailey Kowalczyk, the girl to whom Dan Eaton lost his virginity, probably his heart, and certainly countless games of driveway H-O-R-S-E, he got to thinking about Elias Wiman. Wiman was a nicotine/caffeine-addicted private who existed on a diet of dip, cigarettes, Red Bull, and Snickers, an emaciated, feral Kentuckian, who had a real chip on his shoulder about Ohioans, who he saw as effete snobs sticking their noses up at the real salt-of-the-earth south of the river. Despite this, he and Wiman became friends and had long, uninteresting arguments about what made their respective states superior. Take the night the two of them stayed up with Greg Coyle while Coyle waited to find out from his wife via Gchat if they were going to have a boy or a girl.
“You call your towns ‘hollers,’ ” Dan objected. “I mean what is that? Russellville? That place was more scarring than anything we’ll see at war.” They’d had Kentucky immersion while living at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne. Wiman was from Russellville, an hour east. One visit was plenty for Dan.
“A holler,” said Wiman, “means like ‘down the road a ways.’ It’s a term of affection, you fucking snotty-ass bitch.”
“I’m sorry but I got Eaton’s back on this. Kentuckians all have sheep DNA.” Coyle was playing with his knife, leaning back in a cheap desk chair to the point of spill. He’d thunk the blade into the plywood, twist, withdraw. Thunk, twist, withdraw. “You know why they can’t teach driver’s ed and sex ed on the same day in Kentucky?” Coyle asked. “ ’Cuz that poor fucking horse gets too tired.”
This was in Hawija just as Iraq was spiraling into what some people called civil war. They’d agreed to stay up with Coyle because who could sleep anyway? After they lit up a bunch of insurgents that afternoon in a spectacular, invigorating firefight, the adrenaline was still there hours later. Dan half read a copy of Theodore Rex, trying to calm the thunder out of his blood while they waited for Greg’s news.
“Can’t wait till you got a hot little daughter. It’ll serve you right,” Wiman told Coyle. The new pastime was giving Coyle grief about a potential daughter. One of Dan’s best friends since he’d gotten his platoon assignment, Coyle was a butt-chinned, all-American blond, California tan, muscled, and as breezy a guy as he’d ever known. He was also a total cad until he married a woman he’d been dating for only three months right before they deployed.
“I’ve just fucked so much nasty pussy in my life, it would be God’s worst kind of justice if Melody’s having a girl,” he explained.
Without looking up from his book Dan told him, “I’m not sure that’s how God operates.”
“That is how God operates,” said Wiman. His accent dripped. He wasn’t so much playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as he was gunning down civilians and shooting rockets at the police vehicles that then pursued him. “Doling out justice, vengeance, retribution to pretty boys.”
“Christ, where is she?” grumbled Coyle. He set the knife down, ran a hand over his buzz. He picked the knife back up, stabbed it into the plywood. Two weeks before he met Melody at the Cat West bar, Coyle claimed to have slept with a Tennessee Titans cheerleader. Dan tended to believe him because months after he fell in love with Melody, this cheerleader was still sending him graphic, close-up pictures of her vagina.
“Get. Some. Sleep.” Sergeant Wunderlich emerged from the kitchen area with a spoonful of cereal crunching between his jaws, his T-shirt tucked into his sweatpants.
“Can’t, Sergeant,” Dan said. “We’ve got to find out if God will punish Greg for his loose ways.”
“You ever stop reading, Eaton?” Wunderlich took Theodore Rex from Dan’s hands to examine the cover. “Wasn’t this a Whoopi Goldberg movie with a tee-ranasaurus?”
“Sergeant, I been meaning to tell you—and no offense,” said Wiman. “But if you make us be in another video for your wife, I’m filing, like, a sexual harassment complaint.”
Earlier that week during some downtime, Wunderlich had cajoled nearly a dozen guys from their undermanned platoon to be in the music video he was sending to his wife. This was like a thing in the war: soldiers choreographing and lip-synching. To our horror, Dan wrote to Hailey, the song was Alanis Morissette “Hand in My Pocket.” Part of the dance actually involved putting one hand in the pocket of their ACUs while giving a peace sign with the other, hips swishing.
“That’s what you fucking kids don’t understand about love,” said Wunderlich.
“You’re like ten months older than me,” said Coyle.
“You go trudging off to war every couple of years, puts stress on your marriage. You gotta find ways to be inventive, be surprising, so your wife don’t suck off the mailman.”
“Please, Sergeant. Your wife ain’t got shit to do with it. You chose that song for you,” said Wiman.
“ ‘Hand in My Pocket’s’ a fucking jam, Private.” He slurped milk from the bowl, lapped the stubble that seemed to grow right onto his lip flesh, and shook his head defiantly. “I have no shame.”
Greg coughed, “Understatement.”
Sergeant Wunderlich was an interesting dude. Lumberjack strong, he looked like a total badass, had civilian pictures of himself with a beard like roadkill strapped to his chin, had the tattoo of a skull on each shoulder (one with a knife jutting from the eye socket and the other with a rose clamped in its teeth). Yet he listened to music like a teenage lesbian. He had CDs from Lilith Fair. No one in the entire battalion could have told you what Lilith Fair was until meeting Wunderlich.
Wiman whistled air through his sandstone teeth. “Again, I don’t mean to be combative, Sergeant. Just mean to point out that love be like some highly dubious bullshit Hollywood made up to sell us movies and diamond rings and shampoo and boner pills.”
“Wow, what a fine philosophical rumination from a nineteen-year-old who smokes cigarettes while he’s dipping,” said the sergeant.
Dan laughed as Wunderlich returned his book. Seeing that this conversation was not ebbing, he marked his place with the photograph he used as a bookmark: him and Hailey in seventh grade.
“What it all boils down to, Private, is that no one’s really got it figured out just yet.” And for some reason, Wunderlich made a little lasso motion over his head and pretended to rope in Elias Wiman. Somewhere a few klicks away, a mortar exploded. No one even moved.