The glare of the headlights created tiny shadows in the letters of the stone marker.
Bill stood over the grave while Dan kept to the side. Bill unscrewed the cap of Jim and let it drop to the ground. Tilting his head back, he took a large gulp, then another. He passed the bottle to Dan, and he took a quick hit. Then it was back to Bill, who turned it over and splashed the remaining liquid across the grass. He held the bottle with his index finger stuffed in the open neck, looking mildly annoyed. It was almost the look you’d give a vending machine that had failed to return your quarter.
“I wonder,” Bill said. “If you could really break it down. How much money he made for Bechtel or KBR? Like who got the richest off this dead asshole from Ohio?”
Dan wouldn’t humor him. “How’d you spend the wars, Ashcraft?”
“Protesting.”
“Yeah, how’d that work out?”
“Not too well now that I think about it.”
After a long time standing at the grave, watching him grim-lipped and catatonically quiet, Dan asked, “How often do you come out here?”
He shook his head. “First time. My mom had to e-mail me a map.”
“Ben’s buried here too, I guess.”
He shook his head. “Nah. They scattered the ashes at Jericho.”
They stood for a while longer.
“Wanna go to a bar?” Bill asked.
Your worries are simpler as a kid.
Dan thought about the weak smile Hailey gave him before she told him she was going to homecoming with Curtis Moretti, the soon-to-be starting quarterback. He’d asked her to go the week before and she had put him off with a Let me just see what all the girls are doing, referring to Lisa and Kaylyn. His stomach didn’t sink so much as it crashed through to the basement. He went to homecoming with plump, agreeable Jamie Eakins, and was hyperaware when Hailey and Curt disappeared from the bannered and ballooned cafeteria early in the night. Lisa had been getting rides to and from school with Bill, so he didn’t see her as much anymore. She came over one night to put a book in Dan’s mailbox and he caught her outside.
“I sort of have to know,” he explained.
Lisa shook her head against the brisk autumn wind and kicked at brown leaves piled along the curb.
“Danny.” She crossed her arms and glared at the ground. “Fuck Hailey. Seriously, fuck her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“What’s that mean?” His befuddlement was genuine.
“Hailey had sex with Curt after homecoming.” Dan so loved her for how distraught she looked when she said it. He was surprised Lisa had it in her to tell him.
He searched for something adult to say. “I see.” Then Lisa surprised him by wrapping him in her arms. “It’s okay,” he said, laughing. “Whatever.”
“I’d punch her in the vagina for you.” They both laughed, and this time his was less forced.
“Where we headed?” he asked Bill, sweeping away this stark, unhappy memory.
“I’m thinking Lincoln Lounge.”
“I can only stay for a bit. I’m meeting Hailey after she gets off work.”
Bill threw up his hands and took his time putting them back on the wheel—a couple of seconds Dan spent willing them to come home. “Just humor me while I kill time before this thing.”
“You look like you could use some sleep.”
“Sleep’s for people who don’t know about coral bleaching and drone assassinations. I don’t sleep without earplugs, a blindfold, and about five Diazepam.”
“Just keep your hands on the wheel. I didn’t survive Anbar and Kandahar to become part of the New Canaan Curse in a car wreck.”
“There’s no such thing as curses.” Fireflies thronged in the headlights. “Only shitty luck and forces of political and economic surrender. That’s how they get good, sweet kids like you to give their eyes for democracy.” He pointed to Dan’s skull. Most people didn’t even notice the prosthesis. The docs had this way of attaching the implant so the blood vessels grew into it, as well as the surrounding tissue and muscle. Then they pegged the porous implant to the prosthesis, this little almond sliver that matched the bright hazel of Dan’s real eye. It moved in the socket like a real one, and usually no one could tell unless he let them know. Maybe Ashcraft had heard, though.
“Sure,” Dan said, snorting a laugh.
“Hey. Question. Why’s everyone call that guy Whitey again?”
He understood he wasn’t actually asking about Whitey’s nickname.
As far as Dan could remember, Eric Frye was one of the only black kids in their school. It wasn’t like he endured all kinds of racist abuse, but at some point, it was noted that he had not tried out for the basketball team, knew nothing about rap music, and was otherwise quiet and smart (his dad was an orthodontist; his mom taught at Grover Street Elementary). Someone started calling him “Whitey” behind his back and it stuck. The military taught you that nicknames were inexplicable. Hell, in Iraq they called a guy “Sig” just because he once messed up the Iraqi signal for “halt.” Sig’s real name was Anthony, and soon there wasn’t a soul left in the army who called him that.
“Ah fuck,” said Ashcraft, zipping around an Amish buggy, saved by the reflective triangle on its rear. “Had no idea. I was calling him Whitey the whole time I knew him.”
“He never said it bugged him.” But Dan knew better. By no means had he and Eric been best friends, but when he heard about Hailey marrying Eric, Dan’s first thought was, How could you do this to me? I was like the only person in school who didn’t call you that ridiculous name.
Bill took them through the old part of town, past the big colonial homes, and they reached downtown New Canaan. Every place needs fuel to run the engine. Like much of Northeast Ohio, once there had been real industry here. Rubber was king in Akron, Youngstown had steel. Post-World War II, it was the region’s honey, practically dripping from the mills and into the maw of the national economy. Then the rest of the world began to make non-unionized steel. New Canaan was one of the minor places that bore the aftershocks of deindustrialization. Maybe not the way Paul Eaton’s hometown of Youngstown did, but nowhere in the Midwest really escaped. Businesses closed, people left to find jobs at malls and big-box stores. DUIs, teen pregnancies, domestic disturbance calls, suicides, and assaults all spiked. New Canaan didn’t fair as poorly as some places. In the mideighties, two different companies opened manufacturing facilities in an industrial park to the south. A screen door manufacturer and an auto parts plant. Developers figured out that they could sell the town as an exurban retreat from all the cities that were going to rust. But the smokestacks of the Fountain Steel plant were still visible just west of downtown. Shuttered for as long as Dan could remember, his parents talked about its closing the way you talk about a death in the family. Maybe with even more bitterness because with its closing came betrayal. The way they’d reference that Fountain plant—which had only been responsible for some seven hundred jobs—it reminded Dan of the first time he saw a lethal wound in battle. Everyone gets their virgin taste: How it feels to look at such a thing. How when it dries, these heinous skeins of crust and dirt will cling to shredded, serrated flesh.
Ashcraft parked in a slanted spot beneath the tacky glow of the Lincoln’s sign. Music beat in the middle of downtown’s shallow pulse. Past the crummy bar with the nonsensical Abe Lincoln motif, Dan could peer down Hudson Street and see the scrapyard. Beyond that was Allied Waste Services, the water treatment plant, and the power station. All the places towns try to tuck into a corner to keep the Main Street America façade shining.