Dad was right. Dan had always noticed Brokamp watching from near the concession area, arms crossed, stance wide. He never actually sat in the bleachers. He had a wildebeest build, a head as bald and shiny as the chrome knob on a truck hitch, and a nose that looked like a gnarled chunk of pink charcoal. He shared with Beaufort the same ruddy complexion and near-handsome Neanderthal face. The kind of face where the brow is heavy, but with youth it looks serious. On the elder Brokamp, it only looked cruel, a concentration-camp-guard quality to it.
And yet Beaufort seemed totally oblivious. He sat in the bar, not fifteen feet away from the guy, and it appeared to matter nothing to either of them. How frequently did these two not acknowledge each other in one of New Canaan’s five or six watering holes?
With Jonah and Bill back at the table, the chatter began again, raucous and hearty. Spanning three classes of New Canaan High, they relived, they returned. Stories of sports victories and senior pranks and the teachers who’d been in the closet—all the last dredges of what they had in common. Dan had served three tours. Bill had traveled the world. Beaufort had flamed out on a college football career. Jonah had bought a helicopter. That history burned away as they attempted to reanimate themselves through stories of their roaring youth.
Dan listened but found himself drifting back to Coyle and the night their unit sat on a rooftop during the famed surge. The Baghdad suburb was quiet, an entire platoon having cleared and secured a few square miles. He and Coyle sat facing west as the sun set. They shared some beef jerky, talked about home, about war, cracked dark jokes. They talked about Greg’s daughter, who was five months old. He only knew her from a computer screen. She sat in his wife’s lap, a blinking lump back in San Lorenzo, California. Once an inveterate womanizer, now Coyle hung his head when he walked, his mind always elsewhere. This introspective aspect of him, this kind, complicated piece had taken over. And this was Dan’s favorite night of the war, strange as that sounds. They talked about what they did to lie down at night. Greg would lift weights, play video games, mix sleeping aids with Boom Boom energy drinks for a tawny strung-out high, watch bootlegged movies and TV shows. He laughed because, “All you do, Danny, is read behind blast walls.” It was the only way Dan could calm down. Hard to sleep when you came back from a firefight and all the screaming and the cussing and the percussion and the sweating still had your adrenaline at Mach 5. They talked about what it looked like when a person got shot, how a guy doesn’t get blown backward the way it’s sometimes depicted; he just kind of crumpled, like he was being deflated. Then there was twitching or sometimes perfect stillness—from life to no life. From existence to meat that dogs will pick at and shit out all over the city. Just like that. They talked about what it was like to kill someone. Decided it’s not that they never thought of the wives and children and families of the people whose lives their bullets took, “But there’s one of two outcomes: either this man will die or I will,” said Coyle. And the exultation of winning this duel and walking away to continue living—it was a narcotic joy not even the pillheads of the Ohio Valley could understand.
“Violence solves nothing,” Coyle joked, gesturing to the quiet streets below and smiled, dust trapped in his blond stubble. “Well, except for this whole MacDougal.”
The pink sky turned purple then blue, writhing with the dust to create the most chilling pond of sky, cleaving around minarets and modest skyscrapers. Apaches and drones thudded and buzzed over the most crowded airspace on the planet, but still everything felt whisper-still. How breathless you can feel gathered together with your friend looking at some wild sunset.
“How could you not think about it?” said Todd Beaufort, and Dan blinked back into the moment. “Soon as it happened everyone was talking about there being a curse again.”
“Blech,” said Bill Ashcraft. They were talking about Curt Moretti’s death by heroin overdose in ’06. “No such thing as curses. We’re all just dust to dust.” He poured beer into his open vortex of a mouth and gargled with it like mouthwash. “People got a real problem with that. So they go about trying to explain it any way they can, adding up numbers so they get letters.”
“Forget a curse. It’s this whole mystery murder thing,” said Jonah, wiping perspiration from his brow, his drunk ratcheted. “That’s what we should all be paying attention to.”
“What murder thing?” Dan asked.
“Awww sheee-it,” said Jonah. “You’ve been gone, Eaton. You haven’t heard of The Murder That Never Was?”
“I admit my ignorance.”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Bill, nodding. “Got enough dead friends to’ve heard of it.”
“Lotta bodies to consider,” said Jonah.
They were all drunker than Dan, and he did not appreciate the cavalier nature of this conversation.
“What is it?” he repeated.
“New Canaan’s greatest urban legend,” Jonah explained. “Someone got murdered, and someone did the murdering and somehow it all got swept under the rug.”
Bill rolled his dark eyes. “And I heard Tony Wozniak got big into Satanism and cut off his own dick. Doesn’t make it true.”
“Where’d the rumor come from?” Dan asked. “The murder, not Wozniak’s dick.”
Jonah looked at him like he was mental. “Who the fuck starts any rumor? That’s what makes it a rumor.”
Fair point. Rumors were cheaper than tears. The point was never veracity. When everyone in a community has lost someone they care about people go in search of an explanation.
Ashcraft blew air through his nostrils. “Shit, a lot of people got murdered, sure, but if it happens in a war zone, it gets classified differently.”
“S’all bullshit,” said Beaufort. He glared at his beer.
Jonah flippered a hand around. “A curse, yes, that’s bullshit. But the murder? Bet on it.”
“Wasn’t Curt. He was sitting right there on his stoop for everyone to see,” said Beaufort in a way that made Dan wonder if he’d been right there, maybe shooting up beside his buddy. He imagined Beaufort coming out of his high and finding Moretti with vomit on his chin and no pulse. He had to admit the image gave him a nasty bit of satisfaction.
“ODs, blown up in Iraq, who the fuck even knows what else,” said Jonah. “Either of you guys been to Fallen Farms lately? Bet the Flood brothers have at least a couple bodies buried out there.” He laughed by himself.
“This is a grim conversation,” said Bill.
“Grim like a lizard,” Jonah agreed and fingered something stuck in a molar. “That’s why I totally buy it every which way. Shit like that doesn’t just pop up outta thin air. Somebody had too much to drink, let a little something slip, and then it entered the grapevine. Psychos walk among us, man, trust me.”
“There’s no such thing as psychos.” Everyone looked at Dan at the same time. Jonah was raising his blood pressure, similar to how he’d wake from a dream of smoke and metal fragments. Occasionally Dan felt like civilians had no idea about either bad luck or grace.
“Uh, yeah there is,” Jonah asserted like a second grader explaining that ghosts are real.
“Remember Mrs. Bingham’s class? Seventh-grade Ohio history?”
Jonah gave him a baffled shrug. “I guess?”
“She talked about the massacre at Gnadenhutten—remember that?” Blank stares. “During the Revolutionary War, American soldiers, they led a bunch of Delaware Indians into two killing rooms like they were cattle or pigs, including thirty or so children. And while the Indians kept on singing and praying and kissing each other good-bye, one by one the soldiers beat their heads in with a common cooper’s mallet. So a couple of months later the Indians captured an American commander, this guy William Crawford. First they scalped him clean to his skull. Then they cut off both his ears. Then his nose. He was still alive, begging to die, when they stripped him naked. Then the women of the village took turns burning his body with firebrands, so the flesh slid right off. There was this white man with the Indians named Simon Girty. A guy raised on the frontier, who spoke the Indian languages and fought alongside them against the Americans. Still, he was white, so as Crawford’s being tortured, he pleads for Girty to shoot him. All Girty had to say was, ‘I have no gun.’ ”