“I don’t know why I still have that,” he said. “I took all the rest of my high school shit to the dump when my mom had me get rid of a broken recliner.”
Bill now reached into the slot on the door and retrieved the nearly finished bottle of whiskey Dan had sniffed out. He took a swig and handed it over. The road blew by through the headlights. To change the mood, Dan said, “Now I understand why you’re driving like garbage.”
“I resent that. I’m one of the best drunk drivers New Canaan’s ever seen. I don’t hit pedestrians, I obey red lights, and when I hit a deer—” He smacked one palm off the other so that it rocketed loudly away from him, the truck twitching left and right as the steering wheel went unsupervised. “There’s nothing left of the biggest buck except antlers and deer jelly for a hundred and fifty fucking yards.” He swiped the bottle back from Dan. “Shit, if you can’t drive these country roads loaded on cheap whiskey what’s the point of being from Ohio? What do you do on the weekends?”
During his pro-drunk-driving rant, he must have noticed Dan weaving his head back and forth, a dumb technique the docs taught him in rehab to help get a more complete field of vision. Cats do the same thing, the docs told him.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” said Dan sheepishly and forced his head to be still. “So what have you been up to?”
“Lust. Addiction. Revolution. All the shit makes life worth living.”
“Yeah? And where’ve you been doing that?”
“Anywhere you can dream. Loo-eez-ee-ana currently.”
“Never been.”
“Depressing as shit. That’s why when an old ghost from my past comes calling, wants to pay me a couple thousand bucks to mule some package from New Orleans to Ohio in a day without popping too much acid or getting busted by the pigs”—he shot Dan a knowing look—“I’m down.”
Dan assumed this was malarkey, but then again with Bill Ashcraft, you never knew.
“You just here to see the ’rents?” he asked.
“Not really. I came back to see Hailey.”
“Kowalczyk?”
“Yeah.”
“Y’all still keep in touch.”
“Not really.”
“Babes, huh, Eaton? It’s why I keep a sleepwalker’s hours.”
Dan let that one hang. Bill pulled from his whiskey and passed it to him again. The sky angled like a carnival game, deathwatch blue, while a single oil tanker of a cloud passed overhead. They drove over shadow landscapes into the paling west.
Dying was something he thought of every day, while at the same time keeping it buried in the heart. How scared do you get? Hailey asked him after he came home from tour #1. He honestly couldn’t answer. He did get scared, especially when the chaos got going, when bullets were flying and he got a feeling like only an anorexic housefly could navigate through them. But he just put that away and did his job. Before his first deployment he often wondered if he’d freeze up. He never had any kind of gung-ho attitude about war. He was everything the old women called him: quiet, sweet. A nice Catholic kid. But he discovered he was good in combat. By the end of tour #1 he had a reputation that Greg Coyle called “Danny-on-the-Spot.” He could be calm and do what he had to do. Sometimes he’d recite the Lord’s Prayer. It helped him flow with the moment and focus, but that was about it. Bravery wasn’t a real thing, not as such, but his friends thought he was fierce, and they thought he was brave. And Dan had never seen himself that way before.
During tour #2, he found himself two Humvees back with Macy Gray stuck in his head because when they’d left for patrol that morning Sergeant Wunderlich had been singing her hit single in the shower. One second, Wunderlich’s tune was banging around Dan’s mental jukebox and the next he was watching a fireball shoot out from under his sergeant’s Humvee, the EFP coming up through the bottom. A geyser of dirt and concrete rained down on the rest of the convoy. Almost everyone made it out of the vehicle. James Drake lost both his legs above the knee, Kyle Nickel an arm, James “Other James” Streiss both his hands, and they all had severe burns, but they got out. Drake ended up in the BAMC complex in San Antonio where they treated the most critical cases. Nickel committed suicide in 2010. Streiss moved back to Nashville and seemed in great spirits about a career in country music when they spoke at DT’s wedding. But it was Wunderlich, one of the weirdest, most popular sergeants in the company—maybe even in the entire battalion—who they all saw burning inside the vehicle. His body was already cinders by the time Dan got a look—just the shape of his Kevlar and his face on fire, the flames and smoke lapping him up like he was a log in a campfire back in Ohio.
That might have been the moment Dan was done. Hailey had already made her feelings clear, and Wunderlich’s death really rocked him, rocked all of them. For weeks, every time they were outside the wire he was so keyed up it felt like sleepwalking, and everything—the homes, the mosques, the reeking open sewers, the dust, the head scarves, the Humvees—it all began to tremble in his vision. He’d stare at something or someone for too long and begin to wonder if it was even real. At night he’d try to listen to the sound of his own breathing, but he’d get this feeling of all his past lives, between the scorpions and the sun, gathering.
At Wunderlich’s service they listened to him get eulogized by the army chaplain, his helmet and dog tags hanging off a rifle bayoneted into the ground over his boots. Before they send you off to battle, the army makes you fill out this little blue book, which includes whatever music you want played at your funeral. As soon as the chaplain finished up, the beat and the guitar riff started up, and they all kind of looked at one another. Dan watched Coyle’s face light up in amazement. And as soon as Alanis sang I’m broke but I’m happy, / I’m poor but I’m kind, they all roared. Coyle sat beside him with his hand over his mouth just bawling with laughter. They all stood to dance, one hand per man in a pocket, peace signs wagging.
He’d figured Ashcraft was joking about the graveyard until they pulled onto Dryland Creek Road.
The hill rose like the curve of a breast, and at the top were the cemetery gates. Ashcraft piloted the truck through the grave markers. He pulled off to the side and angled the truck so that the headlights spilled across a certain set of footstones. He cut the engine and seized the nearly empty bottle of Jim from the door. Dan followed him across the grass, snaking between the graves while Bill stepped right on them. Dan had this long-ago memory of his father gripping his arm as a child, lifting him by the bicep away from the grass. “Don’t walk across them,” he’d said.
He asked why not.
“Because if one of them was your kin, you wouldn’t walk across it, would you?”
Dan remembered thinking that these people were dead and gone and well beyond caring, but even as a little boy he knew better than to challenge his father on such matters. To this day he avoided walking on graves, and not because he thought lifeless boxes of bones held any sway or say on the mortal world.