Bill tore apart pieces of a napkin, let the snowflake bits fall to the floor. Beaufort sat with his back to the man who might have been his father. Finally, Jonah said, “Gross, Danny! What the fuck’s your point?”
“Point is…” His eyes flitted up and back down. “We lack a whole lot of imagination about violence. We want to chalk it up to ‘psychos,’ whatever that means. It’s a notion that feels safe. It’s comforting. But shit like My Lai or Auschwitz or Gnadenhutten—that’s not aberrant. It happens because of what we all have in common. How frail we are. We’re insecure, we’re greedy, we want a promotion at work, we’re afraid of the guy in charge—that’s the stupid, mundane bullshit that makes people do terrible things to each other.”
The four of them were quiet, looking at the table, except Bill, who glared at Dan with what could only be described as a kind of jealous affection. Jonah hopped up from the table.
“Not that you aren’t a real ray of sunshine, Danny, but I got my chance with this filly.” He nodded happily at the young woman Brokamp had left alone, either for a cigarette or the bathroom, and Jonah made tracks to sidle up beside her at the bar.
Beaufort had his thick arms crossed, and his gaze was impossible to read beneath the bill of his Buckeyes cap.
“Shit, that’s spot-on,” he finally said. “That’s really spot-on. You get into a shitty place, you might do all kinds of stuff that don’t make sense. Man—” He pulled the bill of his hat farther down on his head, as if retreating beneath it. “There was a time I couldn’t get through the day without about two hundred milligrams of Oxy and a couple of benzos. Couldn’t face the world, just a total slave to it.”
This revelation hung in the air, and Dan felt great pity for this guy who he’d always viewed caustically, one-dimensionally.
Dan offered, “My lieutenant, a guy named Holt. He needed painkillers for all kinds of things, and when he got out, last I heard, he went straight to being a full-blown addict.”
Beaufort squeezed the plastic cup so that it crackled and kept sharing. “Got my first scrip for ’em when I separated my shoulder sophomore year on jayvee. Basically didn’t stop popping until a few years ago. Hardest thing I ever did in my life was get off that shit. You’re not yourself. You’ll do evil, unbelievable things. And there was moments.” He nodded his head, matter-of-fact. “Was a lotta times I wanted to eat a whole bottle and just have done with it.”
He reached for the pitcher to pour himself another. Dan had the sense he was about to say more.
There was a meatpacking thunderclap and a sharp cry from the bar. Their heads all whipped in time to catch Jonah, reeling back, blood gushing between clawed fingers as he clutched his nose. Brokamp, back from the bathroom, gave his hand a shake and closed it back to a fist. Jonah stumbled and slid to the floor.
No one in the bar moved.
“You got balls, fucker.” Brokamp grabbed Jonah by the shirt and hauled him to his feet, muttering, “I know you. I know you, fuckface bitch.”
Bill stood, knocking his stool back. He hovered just out of the guy’s reach. “Fuck off, man! Leave him alone.”
“You want this too?” Brokamp asked. He got his knuckles righteous again, his arm pistoned, and Jonah’s nose exploded. He drew back the fist. Doused in brown-crimson, it looked like a brick, and he wore an enormous metal band on his ring finger that probably had traces of other people’s blood in its grooves. Dan made no move to help and instead gripped the edge of the table as if anchoring himself. Because at the sight of blood, his instinct was to grab this man’s skull and try to break it against the bar. He could already see what it would look like when his head opened up. Dan had seen such things many times. The girlfriend watched from her stool, disinterestedly, drunkenly, twirling an earring between thumb and forefinger. No one in the bar looked ready to break this up, maybe because they could feel what Dan felt, the electric buzz of tragedy on the way. He thought of Rudy, whose own father was killed in a drunken altercation. Guy takes out a knife over a stupid disagreement that he wasn’t even a part of, and there you go, no more Rudy’s dad. Happens all the time, Rudy had said. Go look in any city paper sometime, Eaton. Every Sunday go look in the paper. People get drunk; they think they’re invincible. Beaufort now stood but made no move to intervene, and Dan wondered if the look on his face was that of a coward, like he’d seen among the insurgents—people who were willing to visit violence upon others as long as the odds were weighed endlessly in their favor. Or maybe he watched the man who might have been his father with total disinterest—maybe even a bit of drunken glee that he was at least getting a free show. Jess Bealey clawed through her purse, probably looking for her cell phone. The frantic but unsurprised look on her face told Dan this guy wailing on Jonah was a problem client, that she’d been here before, and yeah, he just might kill Jonah if someone didn’t pull him off. Because the unemployed and underemployed came in here, drank away a disability check, and then went looking for an excuse to wail on anyone, to open up some cheek flesh. Brokamp had unrequited revenge in him, and he would take it out where he could. Here was his chance to feel like he could hit back. And when he drove his fist down a third time, the sound Jonah’s nose made was the crunch of dry cereal stomped to dust underfoot. He went limp.
Jonah had tossed his pack of cigarettes on the table—Virginia Slims—and now Dan drew one, put it to his lips, and lit it with a Harley-Davidson Zippo. As Brokamp ordered up his arm again, elbow cocked, Dan slid from the stool. Took a step to within an arm’s reach.
Dan said, “Hey, man,” and Brokamp looked up. His expression was delighted curiosity. Who would be dumb enough to interrupt his lovely moment?
“He’s good,” Dan said. “You made your point.”
Brokamp let go of the fistful of shirt. Jonah oozed to the floor, trying to cup the blood from his ruined nose.
“Man.” Brokamp’s voice was a whiskey whistle. “I’ll take your pride too if you want.” Breath heaved in and out of his barrel chest. His face and skull were sweat-streaked, the bright pink of a crayon.
Effete smoke drifted from the moon-white Virginia Slim. Worried he would cough, Dan didn’t inhale. The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” played on the jukebox.
Dan nodded, thought about how best to put this. Maybe this would work, maybe it wouldn’t.
“Whatever you say, boss. Only so you know, I got a particularly high threshold for pain.”
Then Dan took the lit cigarette and stuffed the burning orange ember in his eye.
Someone in the room gasped, a sound that seemed to come out of the walls.
He ground the cigarette into his prosthetic for a moment, ashes between eyelashes, lids wide so as not to singe them, and then let the butt drop to the ground.
The girlfriend’s expertly shaped eyebrows shot up. Brokamp’s face fell, like he suddenly glimpsed sobriety and hated what he saw. He looked worn out. Ready for bed. Todd Beaufort barked a short laugh. Dan blinked away smoke and debris.
“I never wanna hear you say / I want it that-a way.”
Bleary, Brokamp said, “Fuck this configuration.” He looked to his lady friend and cocked his head at the door. Jonah whimpered, blood puddling on the hardwood.
The woman hoisted up her top and threw back the remainder of her beer. She bopped off the stool in a dainty move and stepped around Jonah. Wobbling on her heels, fat pouring from the undersides of her midriff-exposing top, she took her man’s hand and led him to the door. On her way out, Dan heard her ask him, “I thought you couldn’t smoke indoors no more?”
Instead of responding, Brokamp stuck his ring finger deep into his mouth, seeming to forget the blood on his hand. He wet the finger and then tugged the ring off so he could clean it on his shirt.
When they were gone, Jess Bealey ran to Jonah with a bar towel. Beaufort tried to hoist him to his feet, but Jonah slipped and sat back down. Bill looked at Dan in total awe.
“Well, fuck me, Eaton!”
Jonah sat in his blood, eyes wet, and took the towel from Jessica. His nose called to mind Marjah after Operation Moshtarak.
“Just a stupid bar trick,” Dan said. Picked up from a guy named Benny Steidl, who’d also suffered an ocular penetrating injury. He’d been fitted for a prosthesis before Dan and was flying through the PT vision training when they met. He took Dan out to a bar near Ramstein Air Base and told him to watch his flawless pickup move. He put out a cigarette on his eye for a table of middle-aged German women, and they lost their minds. Works almost too good, Steidl told him. Last Dan heard, Steidl was having an affair with a married gal.
“What a night,” said Bill giddily. “These ten-year reunions should be a doozy.” Laughter floated in the ponds of his two real pupils.