Jonah had always been given to speaking like that. Back in the early eighties it was Jonah’s dad who came up with the idea to market New Canaan to retirees from the cities, and Burt Hansen went on to make a killing. He claimed credit for helping to bring the auto parts plant and the screen door factory that began New Canaan’s short-lived renaissance. Dan’s mom had this expression about the Hansens: “You can feel the devil meddling.” Burt Hansen kept fetish porn videos in an unlocked cabinet in their barn, which doubled as a glorified rec room. In sixth grade they gathered around the TV out there and Dan got a disturbing first blush with pornography, “barely legal” women enduring abusive, violent treatment. He also distinctly remembered Burt hovering over him while he and Jonah worked on a project about the Underground Railroad for history class. “Just remember your white skin,” he told them, to Dan’s great and enduring discomfort.
“Not shit,” said Beaufort when Bill asked what he was up to. “Working Cattawa construction.” He sipped bored beer.
Jessica returned with shots. “For the reunion, you stank old Jags!” She beamed at Todd, who didn’t even look up.
They slammed back tequila and replaced the shot glasses on her tray.
“To hope and change!” Jonah’s knee jittered away, and he kept playing his hands on the table’s surface like a drum kit. “Assume you’re feeling pretty good about that now, Ashcraft.”
Bill’s smirk was his home. “Oh, is this an Obama conversation?”
“You wanted socialized health care, an open door for all the aliens, and an end to America’s Judeo-Christian foundations. Am I mischaracterizing?”
“We’re both pissed, but I’m assuming for different reasons. See, I don’t like the oligarchic corporate state and necrotic ideas like market fundamentalism. For which I see Bee-O as a caretaker. You’re just pissed ’cause some black people ended up marginally better off.”
Jonah shook his head sadly. “Everyone wants their food pre-masticated now, cradle to grave. You been to Columbus lately? If you send your kid to a school there, it’s going to be half-Muslim, no question.”
Ashcraft brayed with laughter. “The fuck’s that got to do with anything?”
“Here’s the problem with you liberals, Ashcraft.” He stuck one drunk finger in Bill’s face. “You’re really only about the sanctimony. You got this club for right-thinking people, and all you care about is being able to control the way we speak and what opinions we’re allowed to have. In college I had this girl blow up at me for saying ‘colored people’ instead of ‘people of color.’ Thought she was going to have an aneurysm ’cause I reversed two stupid words. But that’s what liberals are: thought police. So they want to protect a religion like Islam, one that treats women and homos like shit and doesn’t even respect free speech—so you can’t even be consistent there. But when it comes to Christians not wanting guys with dicks in the women’s bathroom? Hell, put those backward hicks on TV and ridicule them! Call ’em bigots! Chase ’em with pitchforks! Do liberals care about the economy being shit, about jobs leaving, about how no one can make it in a business or how much it costs to move to one of their precious cities on the coasts? No, of course not. They care more about the rights of illegal aliens than they do about the heroin those aliens bring in that’s killing every last person we know. Or no—you know what they care about? Not calling those people ‘illegal.’ I’m sorry, they’re ‘undocumented.’ They’ll hold a protest over a word. But they’re not protesting for Curtis or Ben or anyone else ODing, are they?”
Jonah was frothing; the beery sluice of his spittle fell on Dan’s cheek. Bill looked less amused, especially at the mention of his dead friend.
“We’re all just trying to hold our ground against the deluge, Jonah. Whatever makes you feel better.”
“I’ll tell you what would make me feel better.” He did the thing where he looked around and pretended to care that he was about to say something offensive. “Just one eensy-teensy little bomb in one of those mosques in C-bus. Not while anyone’s there or nothing but like during the night. Just enough to make these Satanists think twice before building another temple.”
“Ah, a scholar of Islam right here in the Lincoln Lounge.”
Jonah laughed. He’d always loved needling the Liberal Terror of high school and raised his glass in a cheers. “Wanta cig?”
Ashcraft tapped cups. “Obviously.”
Dan demurred and Todd said he’d just had one. Even in the army, Dan hadn’t picked up a smoking habit. His mother had implored him one too many times to never take up the addiction that had taken his father forty years to quit. On his way out, Jonah walked up to a pretty, pudgy girl at the bar and pinched her flab. She bolted upright and swiveled to him. He said something, grinned, and continued on his way. A bald guy in an Oakley shirt, who’d been ordering from Jess, caught the end of it. Must have been her man (though he looked like he could be twenty years older). Dan felt like he recognized him from town rumors. The guy glared after Jonah with drunken disgust until his pitcher arrived.
“I don’t remember people arguing ’bout politics back when we were kids,” said Beaufort. “It started at the millennium. Before that I don’t remember anything besides the president liked getting hummers.”
Dan plucked at the small red hairs growing out of the pale knot of his knee.
“So what brings you back to town?” Beaufort asked.
“No reason really. I’m seeing Hailey tonight.”
Beaufort gave him a long, considered look. His teeth were square, nicotine-dark nubs. “No shit. You still in love with that trick?”
So he knew more about the situation than Dan would have expected. Curt Moretti had been one of Beaufort’s best friends. An errant memory of watching their group grilling out in the snow before a basketball game, Todd picking up Hailey and spinning her in circles while she shrieked laughter and then, when he put her down, she stuffed a handful of snow in his face. Hailey’s year with that strutting moron Moretti was the worst of Dan’s adolescent life. While it felt silly now, he recalled thinking how effortlessly cool Curtis looked. He had this stiff skullcap haircut, a heavy Adam’s apple, and a nose like a hawk’s beak. Each ear pierced with a gold loop earring. Dan thinking he could never manage this combination of style and hardness. Daily, he wished for something terrible to befall Moretti while Moretti looked through him like he didn’t exist. He probably knew Dan only as the short kid who slunk away from Hailey’s locker whenever he approached. It made him feel like he’d never left seventh grade, and he often wished Curtis Moretti dead.
“Ancient history,” he assured Beaufort.
“God, I remember y’all back in the day. Curt used to hate any time she even mentioned you. Gotta admit, though, you looked at her like an ice cream cone in the desert.” He picked something out of his beer and flicked it to the floor. “She’s still got an ass like a bomb went off.”
That Todd or Curtis had even noticed Dan was shocking as hell. That his longing for Hailey had been obvious and threatening made him feel some combination of pitiful and powerful.
“So’d you see any shit over there?” Beaufort asked.
“Not sure what that means.”
“Shit. Blood, death. You kill anyone. That kind of thing.”
“I’m not that in to talking about it.”
Beaufort poured himself more beer while he thought on this. Of course Todd Beaufort would fall into that camp. Most men who never serve do. He’d always worn blank dog tags, some inscrutable statement about his badassedness, and Dan could see the chain now. Even before the wars, he was emulating behavior many civilians would come to follow: wrapping themselves in the theater of war, pretending at honor and sacrifice without actually bothering with either of the two. Flag and bumper sticker patriots without any idea of just how gruesome the business of it could be. How rancid, wet, and sticky it was.