“I’ll tell you, they need to clean that shit up. The last two years the DEA’s been up here ’bout five times,” he said.
“Meth,” Mom said knowingly. “That’s the one that makes getting your coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts suspect.”
“The skin and dental issues alone,” said Mr. Clifton.
The three of them went on like that for a while as the first fireflies arrived from whatever netherworld they inhabited while the sun was up. In the year since he’d been out of the army, Dan had learned to stand by and let others do the talking, but with these three it was actually enjoyable. When you come back from deployment and you hear people blathering about stuff that doesn’t quite have the life-and-death immediacy of running your fingers around your friend’s body to check for unseen blood, you drift off quickly. You learn to turn the volume down on people’s frequencies. He’d had a friend, Everton Cleary, who’d blown out both eardrums. Occasionally, Dan wished that had been his Purple Heart instead of the eye.
“Clift, come for dinner?” Mom asked, brightening. “We’re doing pot roast.”
“Already ate, Camille, I’m sorry.”
Dad rolled his eyes. “Well then just come and drink my fucking beer—Jesus Christ.”
Mr. Clifton looked at Dan. “I get the dinner invite near every night.”
“Yeah, but Danny’s home,” Mom whined. “We need to catch up.”
“And hear if he’s getting his knob polished by anyone special,” said Dad. Mom slapped his gut. He chortled.
“That’s disgusting, and I do not want to hear about that.” She winked at Dan. “Unless she’s smart and pretty and I’d want her to give me grandbabies to smell.”
He couldn’t help but laugh. He was always surprised he didn’t grow up to be funnier—maybe the gene skips the youngest.
“I can only eat a little something,” he said. “First off, I’m picking up Hailey after work and we’re getting dinner. Then for seconds—and I keep telling you guys this—I’m a vegetarian.”
Dad reeled. “Jesus have mercy, what did I do wrong.”
“No pot roast?” said Mom.
“What about brawts? They got those little flecks of peppers and jalapenos in ’em.”
“Not sure you understand what vegetarian means, Dad.”
“I’ll give you some money. You can run to the market and pick something up.” Before he could object, Mom ran inside and returned with a twenty from her purse. He continued to protest that this wasn’t necessary, but he was preaching to nonbelievers. Ruth’s Market was a small operation, but it was walking distance. As he set off down the street, Mom called him back.
“Wait wait wait! Just one more hug.” She held him even tighter and longer this time. “My little man. Good to have you home.” And over her shoulder he rolled his eye and the matching prosthetic for the men’s benefit. Dad rolled his back at him. Mr. Clifton beamed. “It’s good you’re seeing Hailey,” she said.
When he rounded the driveway he took a final glance over his shoulder and saw Mr. Clifton following his parents inside, hands tucked in his pockets. Mom and Dad slipped into the house, bantering. Mr. Clifton stopped to stare at the glowing blue evening, the smile on his face like the lonesome North Star.
Dan watched the last streaks of ashen light winnow away to the west. Walking down Rainrock, he passed Lisa Han’s house again. Everyone else on the block had a paved driveway except the Klines. The delta of gravel still spilled into the road. It had been that way since he and Lisa were at Elmwood, and they’d skid out on their bikes.
The house sat at the end of the street, forlorn, the lawn browning, a testament to how the world never works out the way you think it will, let alone the way you want it to. He and Lisa exchanged a few e-mails in which she excitedly described her travel plans, and then she stopped responding. She had been his best friend for a time, like him a compulsive reader, and simply an easier companion than the guys who made up the punishing social web of adolescent boyhood. She left books she thought he’d like in their mailbox. Even though she was bound for higher social strata, bound to date the star basketball player, Lisa never dropped him. She made it her mission to yoke Dan into the network of New Canaan’s popular kids. Even when Lisa and Hailey had their falling out, her loyalty never faltered. She also never made him feel bad when he forgave Hailey for Curtis Moretti.
He turned up the side of SR 229, heading past the woods where he and Lisa used to climb trees and come home with poison ivy. His tennis shoes felt too soft, each piece of gravel transmitting through the sole. He missed his rough-cut, full-grain tan leather boots, army-issued, where you could step on a piece of razor-sharp rebar without feeling it.
Like that, he was thinking of his time rooming with Greg Coyle in Italy. Greg, who would boredly thwock a tennis ball against the wall whenever Dan tried to read. One time when Coyle just wouldn’t quit, Dan started to read to him the mystery of the Phaistos disc, explicated by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Discovered in an ancient Minoan palace on the island of Crete in 1908, the disc, a piece of otherwise unremarkable, unpainted baked clay, was the oldest example of printed writing in the archaeological record, dated to around 1700 BC. The printing on the disc perplexed archaeologists because the signs bore no resemblance to any known writing system, and the next example of such a technological innovation in printing would not appear until 2,500 years later and on the other side of the world, in China. It would be another six hundred years after that before such technology reappeared in the West, this time in medieval Europe.
“Plus it’s still never been deciphered,” he told Greg.
Coyle cocked a blond caterpillar eyebrow and said, “No big mystery there. Aliens, dude. Gotta be.”
When they stood for inspection, Dan, like everyone, would get ripped, maybe because he’d stored his compression bandages in the wrong place or always tried to get away with not wearing the side plates of his body armor (those heavy, awkward five-by-five bastards). Greg Coyle, no matter how goofy he was, never got ripped, was always on point. Coyle, who referred to everything as a “MacDougal.” A bore snake, pliers, a target at the range, military-age males, MREs, ops, battalions—they were all just MacDougals to him. To the dismay of the whole company, within weeks of their deployment everyone was saying it.
“We’re getting those new up-armored MacDougals next month.”
“These powdered MacDougals—goddamn! Better than Mom’s homemade MacDougal.”
“That other MacDougal was getting rocked by IEMacDougals,”
They landed in Iraq in 2006, when the country was no joke, but that joke worked right through rocket attacks and EFPs.
The second thing Dan did after he got out and visited Rudy in the hospital was attend Brent Della Terza’s wedding in Austin, Texas. A lot of his friends from Iraq were there, guys he hadn’t seen in a while because they’d gotten out after two tours. Badamier, Lieutenant Holt, Cleary, Wong, Doc Laymon, Drake in his wheelchair, “Other James” Streiss, now with two robot hands. They of course got drunk and began referring to everything as a “MacDougal,” annoying the hell out of those piqued Texan bridesmaids. Decent, churchgoing women who had never seen soldiers cut loose. How hilariously stupid they could be. In his buzz, Dan found himself wishing to return to 2006, to be back on patrol with his friends.
He stopped to pull off his shoe and empty it of a pebble.
The remnants of the day backlit a distant cirrus cloud. It looked like a knife with a serrated blade. As he slipped the shoe back on, he heard a car approaching from behind and stepped farther off the berm. The headlights swept up the hill, stretching his shadow ahead. When it zipped by, he felt a rough snap of wind.