He got to Coyle first, before their medic, Sasha Laymon. Laymon was one of the best sixty-eight whiskeys Dan ever worked with. He had lightning hands and an intuition for unseen wounds, but when he got to Greg Coyle, he knew Laymon’s gifts wouldn’t matter.
His friend had been torn in half, Coyle’s left leg completely gone and a wound going up his midsection so deep he could see hot blood boiling up from primal, interred pockets, spilling into light it was never supposed to see. His left arm was pulp. Part of his face and scalp were burned. You wouldn’t even know where to start with the Kerlix.
Yet he was conscious, shivering all over when Dan got to him, kneepads skidding across asphalt. Coyle was trying to look down at himself to assess the damage. Dan pushed him down. Cleary slid into the dirt beside him, ripping his headset off.
“Hold on, man. Lie still. Let Doc work on you. You’re fine,” said Dan.
Laymon shoved Dan out of the way so he could start on the—(On what? His leg? His guts falling out?)—damage. Coyle was still trying to get a look. He’d thrown up on himself. Bits of eggs from an MRE that morning peppered his stubble. Dan held his trembling shoulders down, but Coyle was surprisingly strong. He managed to crane his neck up far enough.
“Oh fuck,” he said. It sounded like he’d just taken a look at his taillight after a fender bender.
Dan shushed him. “Just lie still, dude. You’ll be fine, man. You’re going home.”
Several Bradleys and MRAPs from another patrol had surrounded them, and their squad came hustling over, edging in around Laymon. Lieutenant Holt called in a medevac. They all told Coyle lies because they knew that’s what they would want to hear.
“You’re good, dude,” said Cleary.
“It hurts like hell, I know, but you’re heading home,” said Wong.
“You’re gonna see your family. Hero time,” said Della Terza.
“Fuck,” said Coyle, staring at the sky, tears and blood in his eyes. “Fuck.”
Slowly their palms came in. Dan gripped Coyle’s good right hand, his fingers fierce and alive, and he put his other hand on Coyle’s vest, over his heart. Della Terza’s hand came to his midriff. Wong’s to the other side of his chest. Cleary put a palm on his forehead like his mother checking his temperature. Other hands, from the rest of the unit, found him, encouraged him.
“We love you, Coyle.”
“We’re right here, Greg.”
“You got this, dude. You got this.”
“Fuck,” Coyle hissed. Blood streamed from his ear.
They gripped him. Tried to hold his soul to the earth. He blinked tears; his whole body trembled uncontrollably, his eyes filled with panic.
“You’re going to be with her,” Dan said. “You’re going home, bud.”
Their hands spiraled around him like the spokes of a wheel. They held Greg until well after he was dead.
Dan wrote letters to Coyle’s family that night, one to his wife and mother and another to Hanna. The superstition about the short-timer dying made them all crazy, but everyone who died had a daughter, a son, a wife, a husband, brothers, sisters, parents. Everyone was about to get out. Everyone was on his or her way home. He thought about the moment when a soldier is dead but his family doesn’t know. They’re going about their lives while this awful information exists, but they don’t have to live with it yet.
Their last month ground on. A few days later, Della Terza got an e-mail from Coyle’s wife saying she wanted a chance to talk to some of the guys from Greg’s unit. They gathered around a laptop, Danny, DT, Cleary, Wong, Laymon, Drake, and Melody Coyle appeared to them on the janky video call, freezing and pixelating at various moments throughout the conversation. Dan had seen her before. When Coyle would call, he’d sometimes lift his computer and have them say hi to each other. She looked rail-thin, like she hadn’t been eating. Her cheeks were sunken, her elbows knobby. Hanna, the daughter, bobbed on her lap, smacking and drooling on a Thomas the Train. Seeing them, Dan wanted to hurl grenades at the continent of the sky until it all shattered and came crashing down.
“Say hi, Hanna!” Melody waved Hanna’s pudgy arm, and the oblivious baby gargled happily. “Say hi to Daddy’s friends.” She smiled at them. “I just wanted to catch y’all in the same place at the same time just to say—you know, to say.” Melody dragged that last word out in her Kentucky drawl and then hesitated. She was no longer the beautiful girl Coyle had met at the Cat West, who danced like a wild woman to dirty music and hooked up with him the first night they met in the backseat of her car. That girl had been dragged through motherhood and the loss of her husband. She looked exhausted.
“How you doing?” Della Terza interrupted. “Is there anything we can do for you?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Greg’s parents have been great. It’s hard being out in California, so far from home for this, but—but the reason I wanted to talk to y’all is I thought it was important to let you know how highly Greg spoke of you. He really loved you guys. He loved working with you, living with you, being friends with you. He just raved when he was home about how he’d met the very best people of his life over there. I thought it was important I got in touch and told y’all that.”
Melody managed to say this with dry eyes, while it hit them each in the solar plexus. Dan let a breath escape his chest, somewhere between a sob and a sigh, and he could feel his friends do the same.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be like this.” Melody took her index finger and tapped a single tear under her eye. It melted away. “I’ve already done all my crying. I’m exhausted by it. But me and Hanna just had to call and let you know how much Greg loved you.” Dan had been standing behind DT and Cleary, peering over their shoulders. “Danny?” When Melody said his name, they all looked back at him.
“Yeah?” He wiped his eyes. He could not bear to look at her.
“Greg left you something.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. His surfboard.”
Dan laughed. “I’m from Ohio. We don’t have an ocean or a wave for a thousand miles.”
“He left a note with it.” She picked up a scrap of notebook paper on the desk in front of her, and Hanna tried to slap at it. She read, “ ‘Danny, just in case, I leave to you my most prized possession. Get some sun and get your nose out of the books. The Phay-stoss disc, bro, that’s aliens. It’s solved. I told you.’ ” Dan burst out laughing. They all did. Their lives took place in such a claustrophobic sliver of space between suffering and laughter. “Whatever that means,” said Melody.
He was laughing so hard, crying at the same time, Melody had to call for his attention.
“Dan. Greg said he’d never met anyone as smart and stand-up as you. He really considered you one of the best friends of his life.”
That was the night Dan knew he’d absolutely re-up. He’d let Coyle down, but he wouldn’t let that happen again, not to anybody he loved. And it came back to him: He could feel his friend’s blood on his ACU, his hands, his face, the chaplain washing him with Catholic comfort, and he knew he’d be back. Until they kicked him out or carried him out, he’d be back.