“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.
Jonah composed himself by unraveling into a drunk, ranting fury. Crimson blood drying to rust on his T-shirt, hat knocked from his head and forgotten, he took three shots of whiskey in rapid succession, then stormed out of the bar barking about his helicopter and the evils of taxation.
“He gets like that,” said Beaufort.
“Should we go after him?” Dan asked.
Beaufort gave him a puzzled look. “Then we gotta listen to him.”
Dan told Bill it was time to go. He pulled something from his pocket. Dan saw it was a small electronic timer. He glanced at it and said, “Yup. Let’s boogie.” They exchanged good-byes. Dan noticed Bill’s pained handshake with Beaufort, as if both men wanted not to touch the other’s disease.
“Can I ask you something,” Dan said to Bill once they were on the road. “You got a problem with Beaufort?”
“Do I have a problem with Beaufort.” He considered this. “Nah, not really. No more than anyone else. I think that kid got about what he had coming. Maybe not. Rick had beef with him once, and he dragged me into it. Beaufort just reminds me of how this town sucks you in. Keeps you doped on its own mythology. And I’ve always felt more sorry for him than anything else. When we were smoking outside, Jonah told me he had double-digit concussions before he quit in college. Said he sometimes forgets simple things. He has panic attacks. You heard him talking about his pill problem. All that for fucking high school football and two years in a shitty small college program? Fuck.”
From the passenger seat, Dan watched the town of his birth recede into the valley below. Like a constellation fallen to earth.
“And how are you still buddies with Jonah?”
He batted a hand. “Oh, the guy’s an Agenda 21 loon to be sure, but, you know…” The hand trailed to the ether beyond the roaring window. “He’s my tribe. Gotta defend the tribe. Everyone’s friends as kids. You don’t know what makes you different yet.”
“Still, he’s like your arch nemesis politically speaking.”
“Jonah wore a jersey with my name and number on the back to games. He stood front and center and got ‘MVP’ chants going when I was at the foul line. He knew my politics. I sure as shit didn’t make it any secret. But whenever I see him, we find a way to let it lie.”
Dan was silent for a moment, wondering if he wanted to challenge Bill on this. The beer helped make that decision.
“Did you and Rick ever let anything lie?”
Bill blew out a breath and sat in silence for a long time. They went by the Walmart, and Bill watched it as they passed. It was lit up like an army base, so bright it might be visible from space. “I’d like to burn one of those stores to the ground just once. Just watch all that shit inside go up in flames or melt in cool, fucked-up ways. Like how do you think an LCD TV melts? Probably burns in lots of awesome colors, right?”
Dan said nothing. Waited. Bill turned off Zanesville Road, bombing along 229. He knew the guy shouldn’t be driving, Bill’s adrenaline mingled with his drunk and maybe some other substance. His fingertips barely grazed the wheel, scooting it back and forth, alarmingly casual. His gas light had been on the whole time, but Dan wasn’t about to say anything. With some luck, the truck would die, and he’d have to call someone for a ride.
“You know what your problem is, Eaton,” he said. “Other than you wasted the best years of your life fighting for elite profit while those bastards fucked the rest of us dry.”
“Yeah, do tell.” In Bill’s drunkenness he missed Dan’s venom.
“Your problem is your good nature, bro. Hailey—you fucked that up so bad. No wonder she married Whitey fucking Frye, man.”
Dan rarely got angry with anyone, but Ashcraft was goading him, probably because of what he’d just said about Rick. Dan stared out the window as they rocketed by the backlit pines and a yard scattered with stripped engines.
“Yeah, and what’s your problem, Bill? You’re such a perceptive student of the human condition, how about you?”
“My problem? Oh, I don’t know. Substance abuse mostly. Also all my fucking friends are dead or won’t speak to me.” He hiccupped. “But most stupid of all—and here’s my real problem—even though I know there’s nothing left but to stand in front of the tank and let it mow me down, I still believe in the old myths. I still get drippy for meeting at Seneca or marching in Selma or rioting at Stonewall. I can’t give up this idea that if you can get enough people to stand up, then you’ve got a power you cannot suppress or repress or contest. And I’ll probably chase that funny fantasy until my fucking liver melts and my heart explodes.”
“Yeah, or maybe you’re so wrapped up in your own bullshit that you can’t see the forest for the trees. Maybe your problem is you’re no different than Jonah.”
Ashcraft threw him a savage glance. “C’mon, that’s a false equivalence. And don’t spout clichés, Eaton, you’re smarter than that. Or do you wanna sit here and say you never questioned what you were doing on your two tours.”
“Three.”
“Whatever.”
Bill took the turn off 229 into the drive of Eastern Star Retirement Home. The sign was lit by halogen floodlights and an American flag rode above. His truck lurched up the drive and into the parking lot. The grounds had lights pointed at the brick, as if to keep at bay the dark of the surrounding woods, trying to convince the observer of a sense of warmth. He parked the truck in the shadows where a screen of pines shielded them from the road. Windows down, crickets screaming. They were buried in the dark, but he could see Bill’s face contorting.
“I got a feeling the only way left is the way of the knife, way of the gun, way of the bomb.” He snickered. He was worse than drunk, on something else Dan couldn’t figure. “Hard to see the truth and not want to immediately burn your eyes out. I was trying to explain that to Rick before he left—or not explain so much but belittle that stupid, stubborn asshole that he wasn’t fighting for his country or freedom or democracy or anything else. He was going to war so an overstretched superpower could flex nuts and maybe pump a few million more barrels per day onto the world oil markets—that’s what I told him. And I was so fucking right.”