The more they watched, the more they drank, the more excited they got by the war in their living room. “Sleeping giant,” Nick yelled, grabbing the bottle of Captain Morgan from Levi so he could drink straight from the bottle.
“No one messes with the good old U-S-of-A,” shouted Levi. “No one.”
One of the three girls who lived downstairs pounded a broomstick on her ceiling. Nick stomped on the floor. “Didn’t you hear, ladies?” He yelled at the floor. “Someone messed with the wrong country.”
“Shut up,” they heard a shrill voice yell back.
Nick swirled the last swallow of rum in the bottom of the bottle. He poured it down his throat and looked at Levi with wide eyes. “Dude,” he said. “Follow me.”
“Idea?”
“Idea.”
Nick rushed out the door, down to the outside of the house, and around the corner to the porch that led to the downstairs apartment. He plowed through the flimsy screen door and kicked the cat’s food dish, spilling kibbles all over the floor.
Levi stopped short behind him and held his breath. Nick held a finger to his lips and then pointed at two boxes of Rolling Rock at the back of the porch.
After a moment of standing there in silence, when it became clear that no one was investigating the clatter, Nick made a show of tiptoeing over to the beer. He handed a box to Levi and picked one up himself. He nodded in the direction of the screen door.
Levi led the way up the stairs. When he set his box of beer on the counter, Nick said, “Nuh uh. Follow me.”
Nick went to his room and climbed out the window that went to the flat patch of roof over the porch where they had stolen the beer. He stepped to the ledge and cracked a bottle open, throwing the cap into the alley. With one hand he pulled out a hard pack of cigarettes.
They stood in silence at the edge, smoking and drinking.
Levi turned around and looked up at the few stars and his breath.
“Man. Just think,” Nick said.
“Think what?”
Nick gestured up at the ridge, a wide sweeping motion with the hand that held the bottle. “If we climbed high enough, we could probably see it going down.”
“See what going down?”
“The bombs bursting in air, dude. Raining down some justice tonight.”
“True.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Yeah. Yeah.” He said it slowly, in a whisper. He had that crazed look again. The same one he had when he packed up his car to go to New York in the wake of The Attacks. The same one he had when he got drunk and walked around downtown passing out twenties to every bum who asked.
He blurted it out. “Let’s join the army.”
Levi snorted and spit out his beer. “What?”
“Let’s join the army.”
Levi stared off down the alley.
[Sudden? Yes. But this is the way I remember it. It was that sudden. And I don’t know if that was the moment the idea came to you or if that’s the moment you finished turning it over in your mind. Knowing you, you had the idea days, or even weeks earlier, and you thought about it, and you stayed awake at night praying about it. But unlike some of your other ideas, this one didn’t make me laugh; it made me sit down so my feet could dangle with nothing solid beneath them. I sat there on the ledge sadly, stung that I had nothing better to do than drink on the sticky tar roof of some old Victorian full of co-eds.
You couldn’t have struck at a more vulnerable moment. An image flashed in my mind. It was just a glimpse, but it enthralled me just the same. For a moment, I saw myself screaming, face covered in gunpowder and dirt, flashes of artillery behind me, a steel safari helmet jauntily askew, riding pants and tall boots, wool tunic with the mandarin collar unbuttoned, rifle with fixed bayonet in hand, charging forward with my war face on.
Then another. You and I leaning against some drab army truck smoking cigarettes together. Cocky smiles and big belt buckles. Somehow, the washed-out tans of the uniforms put us on equal footing. In this image, I wasn’t some small skinny kid with hair falling into my eyes and a shyness I couldn’t shake. Our denuded military scalps looked the same, and in this image, I had bulked up from our training and I now look self-assured. The big boots made me grow six inches—at least—and I could finally look you in the eye without feeling bad about myself, about how I always dragged you down. I could, for once, let you drag me up.
And wasn’t it in my blood? I thought of that picture of my grandpa as a young man in uniform. His smile was huge. His eyes sparkled. His pompadour made him look like a movie star. It was hard to imagine a guy who looked that happy guarding surrendered Nazis. But why shouldn’t he look happy? By the time he was our age, he had done more than we could imagine. He had traveled, he had helped save the world from tyranny, and he had helped liberate millions.
Then, of course, my own dad fought in Vietnam. He probably told you more than he told me. He never said a word about it to me until after I got back, and by then I didn’t want to hear it, but I had seen that one sepia-toned picture in my mom’s underwear drawer when I was a kid. Rather than the thick Vitalis side-part I knew, the man in the picture had long hair swept to the side. Instead of the close shave, soft jawline, starched collar, and fat Windsor tie knot of my father, the man in the picture wore a mustache that cascaded over his upper lip and flowed around the edges of his mouth. His green shirt was open in the front, revealing a hairless chest and stomach. The man in the picture had the kind of sharp abs, malnourished ribs, hollow cheeks, and well-defined jaw muscles that underwear models envy. He was standing, but leaning slightly, reaching for the rifle against the row of sandbags behind him. A smile played at his lips and the photo froze him like that forever: You caught me without my rifle. Busted. The smile made it look like he was actually having fun.
Then it struck me: I had never lived a day in my life. Thinking about my grandpa and then that picture of my dad, I realized that for all my talk and complaining about how boring our lives were and how we never did anything exciting and how my parents just didn’t understand, I was the one who didn’t understand. I was the one who had never taken a risk. I was the one who played it safe and stayed near home for college. I was the one who was all talk and dreams and no action.
And I thought, hell, why shouldn’t I take a risk? I was no younger or less worldly than Grandpa or Dad when they set out to conquer the world.
But also, I thought, taking a deep breath to calm my own growing giddiness, this isn’t just some fanciful idea, some daydream. We could really be a part of it all. The army was a real thing. Real people made up the army. Maybe real people weren’t actually slaying dragons with swords like in the commercials, but actual sailors were firing those missiles off aircraft carriers. Flesh-and-blood soldiers were jumping out of airplanes with guns. Perhaps a future Nobel Prize-winning author was sitting behind the controls of a medical helicopter at that very moment, scribbling in a notebook as he waited for the call to fly. And that guy, the guy in the helicopter with the notepad, was actually earning his story, unlike the Dr. Buddy Jacksons of the world. Men with histories and childhoods and mistakes and successes and hometowns and varying levels of education were huddled in tanks and trucks and planes, and they were all taking action. They were taking the fight to evil people.
And just like the army was a real thing made up of real people, the recruiter’s office was a real place. It was an office down on State Road on the south side, in the middle of a trashy strip mall. It was made of bricks and mortar and drywall and whatever other materials trashy strip malls are made of, and it was a tangible place where we could drive. If push came to shove, it wasn’t so far away that we couldn’t walk.
And perhaps my response came quicker than you expected. Perhaps it was the exact opposite answer of what you were expecting. Maybe you were looking for me to save you from yourself, to talk you out of it. After all, you had so much more to give up. I was going nowhere while you had your entire life mapped out for you. All you had to
do was finish your degree and the family business would be yours.
Perhaps it was the wrong answer, and perhaps I should have told you that you were crazy. Perhaps it took you by surprise, but I thought about it some. A whole lifetime of thought went into those few seconds back then, back when we had a whole lifetime left to live. ]
“Okay.”
Nick stopped pacing. “You’d actually do it?”
Levi waved his bottle at him, a gesture of effrontery. “What the hell does that mean?”
Nick took a breath and tried to speak judiciously. “It means sometimes you talk. Sometimes you spout opinions and grand ideas and nothing ever happens. It means I’m asking if you’d really do it, and not just talk about it.”
“Hell yeah, I’d do it. It’s about time we actually did something.”
“That’s the whole point,” Nick said, sitting down next to him. “To do something. Seriously, it’s a good idea. I think they pay for education, so we can still finish that. But the great thing is, instead of just going to school and not doing anything, we’ll actually be making something of ourselves. We’ll be contributing. We’ll be doing something important, something bigger than ourselves. We’ll be standing up for people who can’t stand up for themselves. We’ll be doing something good.
“When those planes flew into those towers and killed all those innocent people—all those people just going about their lives who never put a uniform on, never held a gun, never went out looking for a fight—the world changed. The world changed overnight. Now it needs guys like us—no, men like us—to stand up and do what needs to be done. Now our country needs men like us to shelter her in this new and terrible age. It needs people willing to do more than stick flags out by their windows and call it good. And if we don’t go, who will?”
Levi nodded, enjoying the way Nick could get his sermons rolling. He brought his cigarette to his lips. He blew the smoke out. “Okay, sure.”
“Seriously. This is like, our generation’s defining moment. This is the time for action. Not for witnessing the action on some little TV.”
Levi laughed and swilled his beer. “I already said okay.” He got up, walked across the roof and exchanged his empty bottle for a fresh one.
Nick looked at Levi, narrowed his eyes, took a sip of his own drink.
“Levi, it’s more than just an alternative to doing nothing. There’s meaning in it. There’s nobility. You’d really join the army? Put it all on the line?”
“You trying to convince me or yourself?”
Nick smashed his bottle of Rolling Rock against the cedar siding, grabbed Levi’s skinny right wrist, and sliced the green glass across his outstretched palm until it dripped deep red onto the roof, his heavy-handed way of letting Levi know that covenants meant nothing without the shedding of blood.
Levi, caught mid-swallow, pulled his bottle of beer from his lips and looked down at his bleeding palm. Nick held out the shard of glass in his left hand and stretched out his own right palm.
Levi shrugged again, as if, “Why not?” was the only thing he knew how to say. He took the glass in his bleeding hand. He tilted his head back and poured the rest of his beer down his throat. He heaved the bottle into the air while releasing a jubilant bellow—a “Whoooooooo” that filled the town, surrounded them, and bounced between the Mississippi River and the bluffs that hemmed them in. He held Nick’s hand and put his face close to concentrate on what he was about to draw there. When he heard the crash of the bottle on the street, he carved a line to match his own, appraised it with pride, looked at Nick, and shook his hand.
Silence followed. They looked in each other’s eyes, searching for weaknesses, wavering confidence, a way out, a hedged bet.
“Well, all right then,” said Nick.
“Apparently.”
“Hit the recruiter tomorrow then?”
“Yup.”
•••
And so, they signed away their lives in a fit of youth. Long before they bled for each other, before they bled because of each other, they bled with each other for an America that, to them, on that day, was worth every drop. Standing on the soft tar of the flat roof of their off-campus house on a brisk autumn night, mere weeks after starting college, they figured out their whole lives. They joined in a fit of idealism and naïveté. They joined in a fit of patriotism and zeal. They joined in a bout of underage drinking and hands covered in blood, in a fit of juvenescent exuberance with no intentions of ever looking back.
1.9 LOUSY SERVICE
Levi winced against the pain as he grabbed the nozzle to turn the shower on, wondering if Nick would say anything about their blood oath. Maybe he would act as though nothing had happened. As if it were just another one of many drunk and stupid nights, no different from when they held cigarettes on each other’s forearms trying to win a bet, and no different from when they wound up wrestling for an hour on the concrete patio by the Schwartz’s pool, each of them earning an oozing road rash, which left them in daily pain for over half the summer.
This morning, in the aftermath of it all, Levi didn’t know if Nick had been serious or just drunk enough to get caught up in romantic notions. With the television off and his buzz long gone, he had a hard time feeling any excitement for the idea. The most he could muster as he stood in the shower, lightheaded and slightly nauseous, was a half-hearted desire that he could leave all his temptations behind, sober up, and make his own way in the world.
Awake and clean, but not refreshed, Nick and Levi drove to Oma’s Pub, the bar and grill on Main Street in Bangor, their hometown. Oma was just opening, so Nick and Levi pulled all the chairs from the tables while she walked around flipping the switches and pulling the chains to illuminate the assorted Miller Genuine Draft, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Leinenkugel’s, and Green Bay Packer lights and signs.
They sat at the bar. They sipped on sampler-sized glasses of Schlitz, hoping the hair of the dog would cure what ailed them.
Nick still hadn’t mentioned the previous night, but he kept turning his hand over and looking at it. Nick’s gash looked far worse than his own, which was barely discernible from the lines in his palm, but it hurt like hell all the same. Levi grit his teeth and wondered why he had cut his friend so deeply.
While waiting for their late morning breakfast of deluxe bacon burgers and fries on the house, Nick looked up and broke the silence. “Well, Oma, you can finally retire for real. No more school for me; no more tuition for you.” Now that they were sober and in the presence of a witness, Levi felt a sudden tightness in his chest. As if Nick saying it aloud somehow closed any doors that might allow either of them to back out.
From the grill, Oma turned to look over her shoulder and raised one eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“Yup.” Nick looked down and picked at the scab on his hand, which he held under the bar out of sight. He looked back up at her. “You know what you should do? Sell this joint, buy a boathouse on the Mississippi, spend all morning drinking coffee and catching sunnies off the dock. Spend the afternoons playing euchre with your friends. That sounds like the life, right?”
“You think so?” she said as she deftly flipped a burger in the air.
Nick’s breezy tone betrayed the seriousness of the conversation. Levi knew it couldn’t have been easy for Nick to throw away his birthright so rakishly. Nick had been groomed to take over the bar since he was young. That’s not to say that he wanted it—in fact, it was the last thing he wanted—but everything his grandparents had built, everything they had done had been for him.
Levi gulped the last swallow of his beer. He nudged Nick and put his hands up to question what he was doing. Nick shrugged, as if to say, “What?”
Oma turned and crossed her arms. She stuck one foot out and frowned. “Why don’t you tell me what’s really up.”
“Nothing’s really up.”
“Won’t take long for you to figure out that playing guitar for beer doesn’t pay the rent,” Oma said, leaning forward. She rested her forea
rms on the bar. “Big market for death metal these days?”
“Punk rock,” said Nick quietly, swirling his tepid beer.
She slapped his forehead with her metal spatula, and her eyes did not twinkle with playfulness when Nick looked up in surprise. Levi was glad it wasn’t him. “Tell me what’s really going on,” she said.
“Nothing’s going on.” He rubbed his head, smearing the grease left over from where he was stung. He pulled his napkin from under his beer to rub it off. “What’d you hit me for?”
“I’m going to ask one more time. What’s going on? Why are you coming in here on a school day, obviously not in school, telling me you’re quitting school.” She hit him again.
“Knock it off,” he cried, stepping back off his stool. “I’m not just dropping out. We’re joining the army.” Nick looked over at Levi for concurrence, but all Levi could do was fold his hands and look down.
“Why in the world would you do a fool thing like that?”
Levi could feel Nick still staring at him, but he kept his gaze on his feet.
“Levi wants to rid the world of tyranny and needs someone to look after him.”
Levi looked up at him for the first time. His head reared back as if he had just been accused of a crime. “It’s not just me.”
Nick shrugged. “We just kind of feel like we should actually do something. You know?” He eased back onto his stool, keeping his eye on the spatula as he did so. “Help me out here, Levi.” He furrowed his brow and looked hopefully at Levi.
[In that look you gave me, I knew you needed me. Your heart was pure as were your intentions, but in the face of your grandma’s admonitions, I know the words were failing you. We needed all the emotions and spirit and tangible reasons and plans of the night before gathered in a pile so you could once again set it on fire and convince Oma of the righteousness of the thing.
But the only thing I burned for was a glass of water. Maybe a nap. Once again, I wasn’t there when you needed me.]
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