With an animal shriek, the car—actually a pickup—suddenly locked its brakes, and the whole creaking, rumbling pile lurched to a stop. Brake-red flipped to reverse-white, and the truck’s tailgate cruised backward. He gave it a wide berth as it pulled beside him, window already down. He felt that tension: the sense of heightened alert that never leaves an infantryman. As his gut tightened, he read the lone bumper sticker: THIS MACHINE MAKES FASCISTS next to a television crammed with the logos of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. It wasn’t like he knew who was in the truck, but he had that sensation only the French had given a name, the one of a life already lived.
The truck braked hard next to him, and the driver leaned across the bench seat.
“Eaton? What the fuck?”
As if he’d summoned him by thinking of Lisa. Her old boyfriend, Bill Ashcraft, looked every bit as strutting and cocksure as he had in high school.
“You swinging dick,” said Bill. “You drop off the face of the earth for a decade and think you can ignore me. What are you doing?”
Dan forced a chuckle. How nervous it sounded to his own ears. “Home, visiting.”
Bill swept back greasy hair, the color and shine of black leather, and his jaunty grin seemed to live in every corner of his face, from the squint of his dark eyes to the hard line of his jaw. It was a face he’d envied as a kid—handsome in a knowing, unconcerned way. He wore a wrinkled plaid shirt with checkers of violet and green, and half the collar had flipped up, though he didn’t seem aware of it. Even in the tepid light, he looked like he had a few years of hard living behind him. Like high school Bill Ashcraft left out in the elements too long.
“Same. Get in, man, we gotta go see what’s what.”
“Can’t. Heading to the market to pick up some stuff for dinner—”
Ashcraft let out a booming, farting blast of air from his lips. “Eaton, fuuuuuuuck that. The devil didn’t put you and me on this hard twilight road so you could buy your fucking grandmammy groceries. Get in the car. We need to catch up before civilization’s wearing its crown of thorns.”
Three tours and Dan still felt the stratifications of high school. The pressure to be liked by the basketball team’s greatest ball hog.
“I can’t, man.”
Ashcraft’s eyes cranked and crackled. “Fuck you, Eaton. You show up in my life after ten years and think I’m gonna just let those cute little apple butt cheeks strut away while I have to watch? Get the fuck in the truck, motherfucker. We’re getting a beer.”
He reached over, popped the door handle, and threw it wide.
Dan wasn’t even completely inside when Ashcraft whipped back onto the road so quickly that the force shut the door for him. He realized he’d left his cell in his car. He snatched for the seat belt.
“Where’re we going?” he asked, smelling whiskey.
“What? The graveyard. Where else? Christ, look at you, Eaton. I missed you, kid.”
Freshman year, Hailey persuaded Dan to try out for the basketball team. Because his dad was six four, Dan spent his youth hearing from everyone that he’d grow, but he never breached the sixth inch of his fifth foot, and the only time he spent on a basketball court was in his driveway with Dad or Hailey. Yet during his doomed tryouts, Bill Ashcraft, the rising star, was unusually decent to him. He didn’t think Bill even knew his name, but from the first three-man weave through every scrimmage, he encouraged Dan, helped him with plays, called out loudly when he did something well—as if he wanted to make sure the coaches all heard. He was the quintessential jock in a lot of ways: cocky as hell, drank like a river after a thunderstorm, smoked pot like a human bong, and in a lot of ways he was the exact opposite of that stereotype: cerebral, knowledgeable, and, as Lisa promised Dan again and again, weirdly kind.
“So get at me,” Ashcraft said, eyes leaving the road. “Where’s life?”
“Titusville, P-A. I work for a civil engineer at a gas drilling company.”
“Jesus! You traitor to humanity! Okay, what else?”
“Not much. Got out a little over a year ago.”
He glanced at Dan, his eyes caged and questioning. Only now did he see how raw and red. His breath reeked of booze.
“Had enough of our bullshit imperial wars?” Only Bill could say this in a way that somehow wasn’t antagonistic. It was actually sort of refreshing. You tell people you served and your hand was always sore from the enthusiasm of their grip, but they took the tax cuts and were happy to forget about both conflicts between election cycles. At least Bill stuck to his guns.
“When you’re over there,” Dan said, “you’re not really thinking about the politics.”
The truth was, he’d been exposed to way more antiwar sentiment in the actual military. His second tour when a guy named Josie Burlingame complained of PTSD, Command Sergeant Major Hoskins told him to get the sand out of his clit, so Josie “accidentally” shot himself in the calf and joined Iraq Vets Against the War. In Afghanistan, Sep Marshall had them all watching conspiracy documentaries about the military-industrial complex. He would go on and on about how Woodrow Wilson sank the Lusitania to get the U.S. into World War I and George H. W. Bush helped assassinate Kennedy. The boredom of war gave people time for all kinds of weird hobbies.
“When you’re over there you’re just hoping your dick doesn’t get melted?” Bill offered.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
Over the course of high school, people had grown to really despise Bill Ashcraft. There was a big kerfuffle after 9/11 when he tried to wear provocative T-shirts denouncing the war. His entire bearing was bull elk in rutting season. Wet nostrils always flared. It ticked Dan off as well, especially as he began to settle on what he wanted to do after graduation. He talked crap behind Bill’s back while cheering him on during basketball season, but that was the whole school, and teenagers tend to do whatever it takes to reach a perfect equilibrium of noticed but not noticed. After Dan’s failed tryout, Bill would still talk to him, say what’s up in the hallway, ask him what he was reading. Even while feeling flattered, Dan would snake away. Then one morning his sophomore year he was walking from the parking lot to the school, feeling that persistent panic of the first period bell somewhere nearby in time, and he saw Bill doing the same hustle. There were only about a dozen people in the parking lot when a beige sedan pulled beside Bill—and then about a dozen paintball pellets exploded off the kid’s head and torso before the car tore away. The shots took him to the ground, covered him in neon splatters of yellow and pink. When he turned over, Dan could see tears streaking his face, a mess of paint in his hair. He was dressed in a shirt and tie for game day. No one in the parking lot moved to help him, including Dan. Bill was sobbing, crumpled from the pain. Later, when Dan would see men writhing on the ground from real gunshot wounds, this memory would come back to him because—at least for the first moments—it looked so similar. Finally, Bill got up and hobbled to his car. That night he didn’t score a point and the Jags lost by fifteen. Dan remembered him chucking a pass into the crowd and Coach Napier pulling him from the game.
Bill slapped down his visor and pulled what looked like a folded piece of paper stuck into the side of the mirror. “Take a look.” He handed it to Dan without saying another word. Unfolding it, he recognized the brute size of Rick Brinklan first, the way his huge shoulders occupied a room’s horizontal axis. It was a homecoming or prom picture. From the looks of Hailey’s dress, it was junior year when she wore a tight-fitting strapless number made of reflective white material. She’d looked beautiful that night with her hair twisted into a bun on top of her head and sprouting a collection of small white flowers. She was yanking Dan into the photo. He looked about twelve years old, his face a mess of red acne, hair a crisply gelled lawn, dark and wet. Hailey, still slim from a teenage metabolism and basketball practice six days a week, had her mouth and face brightly agape in a coming smile, as if she’d wandered into her own surprise party instead of homecoming. He noted the other characters in it, mostly Bill’s friends, and handed the picture back to him. “Crazy,” was all he said. Bill replaced it in the visor.