by Ben Fountain
His sleep broke with that throb of panic, a desperate lunge into waking. Someone was leaning over him, breathing in his face. He tipped open one eye to find Kathryn staring down at him through big Angelina Jolie–style sunglasses.
“You better be careful over there,” she murmured darkly. “If anything happens to you, I’m going to kill myself.”
Hunfh. He opened both eyes, lifted his head. His sister was stretched out beside him on a beach towel, propped on an elbow with her frontage facing him. She was also, he couldn’t help noticing, wearing a bikini, the sight of which cracked his lungs even if she was his sister. Despite the divot in her cheek she was undeniably hot: long, tan legs, an amply palmable rack, tummy flat and golden-brown as the most perfect pancake.
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m the reason you’re over there.”
“Oh, right.” He closed his eyes and let his head drop back. “Your bad, getting whacked by that Mercedes. Getting dumped by whatsisface, yeah, thanks. Thanks for getting me in the shit, Kat.”
She snickered, a breathy whiffling like wind through a microphone. “Yeah, but anyway. Sorry, dawg.”
“Not a problem,” he mumbled, sounding sleepier than he was. Though if he kept his eyes shut sleep would come. Kathryn rustled about, doing female preening sorts of things.
“Mom’s pissed at me,” she said.
“Imagine that.”
“Whalers, gimme a break, a fucking parade. Those guys are talking about a parade, and you might die.”
Billy had to laugh. It was refreshing, having someone put it right out there. Living at home as she had for the past sixteen months, enduring all she’d endured by way of health and family troubles and getting dumped by p. boy, Kathryn had undergone drastic and interesting changes. For one thing, her trials had burned off all her baby fat, her tendency to pudge toward the rounder, gentler line of wholesome Christian voluptuousness. Now she sported the lean, rangy frame of a girl bartender in some kick-ass honky-tonk, if such places even existed anymore. A glossy track of keloid tissue looped over her shoulder and down her back like the dangling tail of a coil of rope. Her face was “eighty-seven percent” recovered, she told him, utterly deadpan as she emphasized that “eighty-seven percent” like a dimwit sportscaster flogging statistics. She loved that her orthopedic surgeon’s name was Dr. Stiffenbach, whom she endowed with a jaw-breaking German accent. “High ham Dock-terr Shhhtiffen-bock, jah! You vill do dese exercises for your healdth, jah!” She called Billy’s commander in chief “idiot-head,” as in “What was it like meeting idiot-head?” which had provoked scolding shushes from their mother. “Well he is!” Kathryn protested. “He’s got the brains of a cicada!” Billy’s sweet, beautiful, studious, supremely square sister who’d always been so reverent toward authority, who thought only good clean all-American thoughts and never cursed or denigrated anyone, she’d become a punchy hell on wheels.
She reached into the cooler by her side and brought out two Tecate beers. “You miss drinking over there?” she asked, handing one to Billy.
“At first. But after a while, not so much.” He popped the top and savored that happiest of fizzy sounds. “There’s days, though, you’d give about anything for one.”
“No shit. Listen, I think drinking’s way underrated in our society, like for its therapeutic values? Lets you bust out from time to time, take a little vacation from yourself. It’s hard living in your own head twenty-four/seven.”
“You sort of go insane.”
“Explains a lot, eh, all those preachers getting caught doing hookers. I just hope I never have a drinking problem, then I’d have to quit.”
They drank. A healthful sense of well-being enveloped them.
“So tell me about the Victory Tour.”
“The tour. Huh. Well, it’s kind of a blur.”
“Then just tell me about the groupies.”
He laughed but could feel himself flushing from the shoulders up. A puritanical mood came over him. “Haven’t been any groupies,” he muttered.
“Lie.”
“No lie.”
“You are a lying sackful of it. Listen, boy, you better be out there hitting it! Like, get out there and get some for me.”
“Kathryn, stop.”
“The truth, dude, I’m going a little crazy in this burg.”
“You’ll be gone soon enough.”
“Soon, maybe, yeah, but not soon enough. Not one decent guy in this freakin’ town, believe me, I checked. Some nights I’m like, whatever, maybe I’ll drive over to Sonic and hit on the high school boys, like, hey bubba, come take a ride with me! Once you’ve had a chick with a scar on her face you never go back.”
“Kathryn,” Billy pleaded.
“I should be graduated by now. I could be making sixty thousand a year someplace.”
“You’ll get there.”
“Yes, I will,” she said firmly.
“You’re getting there,” Billy amended.
“If I don’t go crazy first.”
Her last two surgeries were scheduled for spring. In January she’d start a couple of classes at community college, which she had to do, otherwise the compassionate bankers at College Fund Inc. would start charging penalty interest on her student loans. “You know what’s funny,” she said, “everybody around here’s such a major conservative till they get sick, get screwed over by their insurance company, their job goes over to China or whatever, then they’re like, ‘Oooooh, what happened? I thought America was just the greatest country ever and I’m such a good person, why is all this terrible shit happening to me?’ And I was one of ’em, man. Just as stupid as the rest. I never thought anything bad would happen to me, or if it did there was a system that would make it all right.”
“Maybe you didn’t pray hard enough.”
She coughed up a laugh. “Yeah, that must be it. The power of prayer, dawg.”
They drank. Kathryn touched the cold beer can to her cheeks, her neck, her navel, each touch triggering starbursts in Billy’s brain. He asked what their mother planned to do about the home equity loan.
Kathryn frowned. “Who knows what that woman’s going to do. She’s not rational, Billy. She’s not dealing with the facts. Look, don’t you worry about the damn loan. Not your life, not your problem, or mine either, really. She and dad are gonna do what they’re gonna do, and we can’t stop them.”
“How much do we owe on the medical?”
“We? You mean they. Or I suppose me too, if you want to get technical.” She consulted her beer. “Four hundred thousand, give or take. Bills keep coming in from stuff they did a year ago.”
Four. Hundred. Thousand. It was like God appearing in all his nuclear glory, omnipotent, all-consuming, incomprehensible.
“No way.”
Kathryn shrugged. The numbers bored her.
“Not your prob, Bill. Let it go. And anything you get from your movie deal, keep it. Don’t be blowing it trying to bail those two out.” When Billy said nothing, she laughed and rolled onto her stomach, her bottom smartly rising from the small of her back like an island appearing on a tropical sea.
“You know what Dad bought that girl when she turned sixteen?”
“What girl?”
“Come on, Billy, our sister. Half sister.”
“No, I don’t know what he bought her when she turned sixteen.”
“A damn car.”
Billy swallowed, turned away. He could be cool about this.
“Mustang GTO, dawg, right off the lot. This was before he got fired. But still.”
Billy could feel the air hardening in his chest. “New?” He hated that his voice cracked.
“Total cherry.” She laughed. “So don’t be a sap. Anything you do for him or Mom, they’ll just dump on it. Look after yourself and let them do whatever they’re going to do.”
Billy managed to refrain from asking the color of the car. “Well.” He reached beyond the blanket and pulled up a twist of dry gra
ss. “It’s not like I’ve got anything to give them anyway.”
Kathryn brought out two more beers. Billy’s philosophy was, any buzz you caught during daylight hours was a bonus; that time didn’t count against your total allotment here on earth, therefore the daytime buzz was that much sweeter. And today, what could be more perfect than lying in the sun, drinking beer with an extremely hot blonde in a bikini? The only problem, of course, being that the girl was his sister, but what was the harm in pretending for a few short hours? The afternoon took on a spangling beer-buzz glow. He didn’t mind that Kathryn probed him about life “at the front,” as she called it. How’s the food? How’s your quarters? The Iraqis, what are they like, and do they all hate us yet? She kept touching him, tapping his shoulder and squeezing his arm, pushing her bare feet up against his blue-jean legs. All the contact simultaneously sharpened his senses and made him passive, relaxed, as if an especially fine drug was kicking in.
“What’s gonna happen when you get back?”
He shrugged. “The same, I guess. Patrol, eat, sleep. Then get up and do it again.”
“Do you dread it?”
He pretended to consider. “It doesn’t matter what I feel about it. I’ve gotta go, so I’m going.”
She was lying on her side with her head propped on an elbow. A small gold cross lay on the swell of one of her breasts, a tiny mountaineer going for the top.
“How do the other guys feel?”
“The same. I mean, look, nobody wants to go back. But it’s what you signed up for, so you go.”
“Then let me ask you this, do you guys believe in the war? Like is it good, legit, are we doing the right thing? Or is it all really just about the oil?”
“Kathryn, Jesus. You know I don’t know that.”
“I’m just asking what you believe, what you personally think. It’s not a quiz, dude, I’m not looking for the big objective answer here. I just want to know what’s going on in your head.”
All right. Well. Since she asked. He found he was strangely grateful that someone had.
“I don’t think anybody knows what we’re doing over there. I mean, it’s weird. It’s like the Iraqis really hate us, you know? Just right there in our own AO, we’re building a couple of schools, we’re trying to get their sewer system up and running, we bring in tankers of drinking water every day and do a meal program for the kids, and all they wanna do is kill us. Our mission is to help and enhance, right? And these people are living in shit, literal shit, their government did nothing for them all these years, but we’re the enemy, right? So what it ends up coming down to is survival, I guess. You just pull in, you aren’t thinking about accomplishing anything, you just wanna get through the day with all your guys alive. So then you start to wonder why we’re even over there.”
Kathryn heard him out. She set her jaw.
“All right, how about this. What if you didn’t go back.”
He flinched. Then he laughed. No. No way.
“I’m serious, Billy. What if you said nope, no thanks, been there, done that, you think they’d have the guts to come after you? The big hero and all? Think of the headlines, ‘Hero Staying Home, Says War Sucks.’ You’ve got major cred, it’s not like anybody’s going to say it’s because you’re scared.”
“But I am scared. Everybody’s scared.”
“You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you’ve done nobody’s going to doubt you.” Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she’d found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, four educational deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh, 4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O’Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the “do not volunteer” box as to service overseas.
“You see where I’m going with this?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn’s done his part.”
“Kat, it just doesn’t matter. They did what they did. I’m doing what I’m doing. There’s no point in us trying . . .” Two fat tears seeped out from under her sunglasses, and he had to turn away.
“What about us, Billy, think about that. With everything this family’s been through, what do you think it’ll do to us if something happens to you?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
She paused long enough for him to want that one back.
“Billy, there’s a way to do this. There’s a group down in Austin, they help soldiers. They’ve got lawyers, resources, they know how to handle these things. I did some research, and it looks like they’re really good people. So if you decided . . . look, I’m just saying, you’d have some help with this.”
“Kathryn.”
“What?”
“I’m going.”
“Dammit!”
“I’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know that!”
She was so fierce. He was touched. Then he felt scared.
“I guess I don’t. But we get a lot more of them than they get of us. And they can’t get all of us.”
She began to weep. He put his arm around her shoulders and held her close in a brotherly, determinedly nonsexual way. She cried harder and rested her head on his shoulder. Her hair had a clean woody smell, with hints of spice like fennel or freshly rained-on ferns. There was something peaceful about her crying, some sort of music or psychic nourishment in the sound. Her tears dribbled across his chest like hatchling turtles. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was that she’d gone inside to get some Kleenex, saying she’d be right back. He wasn’t even aware of falling asleep until being waked in the most unpleasant way by the whoom of the back door bursting open as if fireballed, blown out by a breaching charge, then the whhhhhhiiiiiiirrrrrrrr of the latest in assisted mobility systems. Son of a bitch! Heart going like a speed bag, eyes sparking tiny gigabytes of shock, Billy spun onto his belly, wrenching various small muscles in his back, and there was Ray buzzing across the patio. What the FOCK!!! Is that any way to wake a combat soldier? The startle reflex triggering a highly refined set of quick-response skills, i.e., had Billy happened to have his M4 handy, Ray would be a steaming pile of hamburger right about now.
Bastard, he probably meant to do it. He didn’t acknowledge his son or even glance Billy’s way, but Billy detected a faint smirk in the set of his mouth, a crimping of flesh at the corners of his lips. Ray motored down the ramp and into the yard. Billy felt sick from all the adrenaline jamming his system, but he scruffed up on one elbow and had a look around. Kathryn was gone. His mouth was skunky from all the pre-nap beers. The afternoon had turned overcast, the sun bleared by the clouds like a soap ball floating in a tub of dirty bathwater. Out in the yard Ray paused to light a cigarette. A real piece of work, that one, Billy mused. Highly intelligent and glib as hell, you couldn’t beat him in any argument. Never went to college but made a shit ton of money, back in the day. Ray snapped his lighter shut and trundled farther into the yard, his chair waddling over all the little bumps and rills. It had a sad lack of dignity when viewed from behind, as graceless in motion as a hippo’s backside, and the American flag decal stuck there dead center seemed like a cruel and tasteless joke, someone’s lame attempt at satire.
Billy leaned back on his elbows and watched his father. You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing. For proof all you had to do was take a quick poll of Bravo. On Holliday’s last visit home before shipping o
ut, his brother told him, I hope you fuckin’ die in Iraq. When Mango was fifteen his father cracked his skull with a monkey wrench, and Mrs. Mango’s comment was, So maybe now you’ll stop pissing your father off. Dime’s grandfather and one of his uncles were suicides. Lake’s mother was an OxyContin addict who’d done time, his father a dealer who ditto. When Crack was eleven years old his mother ran off with the assistant pastor of their church. Shroom, he barely had a family. A-bort’s father had been the deadbeat poster dad for the state of Louisiana, and Sykes’s father and brothers blew up their house cooking meth.
Yes, family was key, Billy decided. If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace, but for that, the finding, the figuring out, you needed a strategy. So where did you go for that? Age by itself didn’t do it for you, obviously. Maybe books, but they took so long, and in the meantime the thing was always coming at you. When violent animal forces were in play, who had the fucking time for books? The morning after 9-11 Ray was on the air advocating “nuclear cleansing” of certain Middle East capitals, playing “Bomb Bomb Iran” by Vince Vance and the Valiants and “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Billy remembers thinking, Is this how it works? Terrible things had happened, which meant more and greater terrors were on the way, as if the process was not merely automatic, but absolute. Those days and weeks have since acquired an aura of prophecy in his life. Billy thinks he sensed the fatedness of it even then—war was coming and he was bound for the war, and some occult, irresistible father-son dynamic was at work to ensure that this was so. If the father loved the war, how could the son stay away? Not that love for the war would necessarily translate into love for the son.