Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  Like that, he was thinking of his time rooming with Greg Coyle in Italy. Greg, who would boredly thwock a tennis ball against the wall whenever Dan tried to read. One time when Coyle just wouldn’t quit, Dan started to read to him the mystery of the Phaistos disc, explicated by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Discovered in an ancient Minoan palace on the island of Crete in 1908, the disc, a piece of otherwise unremarkable, unpainted baked clay, was the oldest example of printed writing in the archaeological record, dated to around 1700 BC. The printing on the disc perplexed archaeologists because the signs bore no resemblance to any known writing system, and the next example of such a technological innovation in printing would not appear until 2,500 years later and on the other side of the world, in China. It would be another six hundred years after that before such technology reappeared in the West, this time in medieval Europe.

  “Plus it’s still never been deciphered,” he told Greg.

  Coyle cocked a blond caterpillar eyebrow and said, “No big mystery there. Aliens, dude. Gotta be.”

  When they stood for inspection, Dan, like everyone, would get ripped, maybe because he’d stored his compression bandages in the wrong place or always tried to get away with not wearing the side plates of his body armor (those heavy, awkward five-by-five bastards). Greg Coyle, no matter how goofy he was, never got ripped, was always on point. Coyle, who referred to everything as a “MacDougal.” A bore snake, pliers, a target at the range, military-age males, MREs, ops, battalions—they were all just MacDougals to him. To the dismay of the whole company, within weeks of their deployment everyone was saying it.

  “We’re getting those new up-armored MacDougals next month.”

  “These powdered MacDougals—goddamn! Better than Mom’s homemade MacDougal.”

  “That other MacDougal was getting rocked by IEMacDougals,”

  They landed in Iraq in 2006, when the country was no joke, but that joke worked right through rocket attacks and EFPs.

  The second thing Dan did after he got out and visited Rudy in the hospital was attend Brent Della Terza’s wedding in Austin, Texas. A lot of his friends from Iraq were there, guys he hadn’t seen in a while because they’d gotten out after two tours. Badamier, Lieutenant Holt, Cleary, Wong, Doc Laymon, Drake in his wheelchair, “Other James” Streiss, now with two robot hands. They of course got drunk and began referring to everything as a “MacDougal,” annoying the hell out of those piqued Texan bridesmaids. Decent, churchgoing women who had never seen soldiers cut loose. How hilariously stupid they could be. In his buzz, Dan found himself wishing to return to 2006, to be back on patrol with his friends.

  He stopped to pull off his shoe and empty it of a pebble.

  The remnants of the day backlit a distant cirrus cloud. It looked like a knife with a serrated blade. As he slipped the shoe back on, he heard a car approaching from behind and stepped farther off the berm. The headlights swept up the hill, stretching his shadow ahead. When it zipped by, he felt a rough snap of wind.

  With an animal shriek, the car—actually a pickup—suddenly locked its brakes, and the whole creaking, rumbling pile lurched to a stop. Brake-red flipped to reverse-white, and the truck’s tailgate cruised backward. He gave it a wide berth as it pulled beside him, window already down. He felt that tension: the sense of heightened alert that never leaves an infantryman. As his gut tightened, he read the lone bumper sticker: THIS MACHINE MAKES FASCISTS next to a television crammed with the logos of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. It wasn’t like he knew who was in the truck, but he had that sensation only the French had given a name, the one of a life already lived.

  The truck braked hard next to him, and the driver leaned across the bench seat.

  “Eaton? What the fuck?”

  As if he’d summoned him by thinking of Lisa. Her old boyfriend, Bill Ashcraft, looked every bit as strutting and cocksure as he had in high school.

  “You swinging dick,” said Bill. “You drop off the face of the earth for a decade and think you can ignore me. What are you doing?”

  Dan forced a chuckle. How nervous it sounded to his own ears. “Home, visiting.”

  Bill swept back greasy hair, the color and shine of black leather, and his jaunty grin seemed to live in every corner of his face, from the squint of his dark eyes to the hard line of his jaw. It was a face he’d envied as a kid—handsome in a knowing, unconcerned way. He wore a wrinkled plaid shirt with checkers of violet and green, and half the collar had flipped up, though he didn’t seem aware of it. Even in the tepid light, he looked like he had a few years of hard living behind him. Like high school Bill Ashcraft left out in the elements too long.

  “Same. Get in, man, we gotta go see what’s what.”

  “Can’t. Heading to the market to pick up some stuff for dinner—”

  Ashcraft let out a booming, farting blast of air from his lips. “Eaton, fuuuuuuuck that. The devil didn’t put you and me on this hard twilight road so you could buy your fucking grandmammy groceries. Get in the car. We need to catch up before civilization’s wearing its crown of thorns.”

  Three tours and Dan still felt the stratifications of high school. The pressure to be liked by the basketball team’s greatest ball hog.

  “I can’t, man.”

  Ashcraft’s eyes cranked and crackled. “Fuck you, Eaton. You show up in my life after ten years and think I’m gonna just let those cute little apple butt cheeks strut away while I have to watch? Get the fuck in the truck, motherfucker. We’re getting a beer.”

  He reached over, popped the door handle, and threw it wide.

  Dan wasn’t even completely inside when Ashcraft whipped back onto the road so quickly that the force shut the door for him. He realized he’d left his cell in his car. He snatched for the seat belt.

  “Where’re we going?” he asked, smelling whiskey.

  “What? The graveyard. Where else? Christ, look at you, Eaton. I missed you, kid.”

  Freshman year, Hailey persuaded Dan to try out for the basketball team. Because his dad was six four, Dan spent his youth hearing from everyone that he’d grow, but he never breached the sixth inch of his fifth foot, and the only time he spent on a basketball court was in his driveway with Dad or Hailey. Yet during his doomed tryouts, Bill Ashcraft, the rising star, was unusually decent to him. He didn’t think Bill even knew his name, but from the first three-man weave through every scrimmage, he encouraged Dan, helped him with plays, called out loudly when he did something well—as if he wanted to make sure the coaches all heard. He was the quintessential jock in a lot of ways: cocky as hell, drank like a river after a thunderstorm, smoked pot like a human bong, and in a lot of ways he was the exact opposite of that stereotype: cerebral, knowledgeable, and, as Lisa promised Dan again and again, weirdly kind.

  “So get at me,” Ashcraft said, eyes leaving the road. “Where’s life?”

  “Titusville, P-A. I work for a civil engineer at a gas drilling company.”

  “Jesus! You traitor to humanity! Okay, what else?”

  “Not much. Got out a little over a year ago.”

  He glanced at Dan, his eyes caged and questioning. Only now did he see how raw and red. His breath reeked of booze.

  “Had enough of our bullshit imperial wars?” Only Bill could say this in a way that somehow wasn’t antagonistic. It was actually sort of refreshing. You tell people you served and your hand was always sore from the enthusiasm of their grip, but they took the tax cuts and were happy to forget about both conflicts between election cycles. At least Bill stuck to his guns.

  “When you’re over there,” Dan said, “you’re not really thinking about the politics.”

  The truth was, he’d been exposed to way more antiwar sentiment in the actual military. His second tour when a guy named Josie Burlingame complained of PTSD, Command Sergeant Major Hoskins told him to get the sand out of his clit, so Josie “accidentally” shot himself in the calf and joined Iraq Vets Against the War. In Afghanistan, Sep Marshall had them all watching
conspiracy documentaries about the military-industrial complex. He would go on and on about how Woodrow Wilson sank the Lusitania to get the U.S. into World War I and George H. W. Bush helped assassinate Kennedy. The boredom of war gave people time for all kinds of weird hobbies.

  “When you’re over there you’re just hoping your dick doesn’t get melted?” Bill offered.

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  Over the course of high school, people had grown to really despise Bill Ashcraft. There was a big kerfuffle after 9/11 when he tried to wear provocative T-shirts denouncing the war. His entire bearing was bull elk in rutting season. Wet nostrils always flared. It ticked Dan off as well, especially as he began to settle on what he wanted to do after graduation. He talked crap behind Bill’s back while cheering him on during basketball season, but that was the whole school, and teenagers tend to do whatever it takes to reach a perfect equilibrium of noticed but not noticed. After Dan’s failed tryout, Bill would still talk to him, say what’s up in the hallway, ask him what he was reading. Even while feeling flattered, Dan would snake away. Then one morning his sophomore year he was walking from the parking lot to the school, feeling that persistent panic of the first period bell somewhere nearby in time, and he saw Bill doing the same hustle. There were only about a dozen people in the parking lot when a beige sedan pulled beside Bill—and then about a dozen paintball pellets exploded off the kid’s head and torso before the car tore away. The shots took him to the ground, covered him in neon splatters of yellow and pink. When he turned over, Dan could see tears streaking his face, a mess of paint in his hair. He was dressed in a shirt and tie for game day. No one in the parking lot moved to help him, including Dan. Bill was sobbing, crumpled from the pain. Later, when Dan would see men writhing on the ground from real gunshot wounds, this memory would come back to him because—at least for the first moments—it looked so similar. Finally, Bill got up and hobbled to his car. That night he didn’t score a point and the Jags lost by fifteen. Dan remembered him chucking a pass into the crowd and Coach Napier pulling him from the game.

  Bill slapped down his visor and pulled what looked like a folded piece of paper stuck into the side of the mirror. “Take a look.” He handed it to Dan without saying another word. Unfolding it, he recognized the brute size of Rick Brinklan first, the way his huge shoulders occupied a room’s horizontal axis. It was a homecoming or prom picture. From the looks of Hailey’s dress, it was junior year when she wore a tight-fitting strapless number made of reflective white material. She’d looked beautiful that night with her hair twisted into a bun on top of her head and sprouting a collection of small white flowers. She was yanking Dan into the photo. He looked about twelve years old, his face a mess of red acne, hair a crisply gelled lawn, dark and wet. Hailey, still slim from a teenage metabolism and basketball practice six days a week, had her mouth and face brightly agape in a coming smile, as if she’d wandered into her own surprise party instead of homecoming. He noted the other characters in it, mostly Bill’s friends, and handed the picture back to him. “Crazy,” was all he said. Bill replaced it in the visor.

  “I don’t know why I still have that,” he said. “I took all the rest of my high school shit to the dump when my mom had me get rid of a broken recliner.”

  Bill now reached into the slot on the door and retrieved the nearly finished bottle of whiskey Dan had sniffed out. He took a swig and handed it over. The road blew by through the headlights. To change the mood, Dan said, “Now I understand why you’re driving like garbage.”

  “I resent that. I’m one of the best drunk drivers New Canaan’s ever seen. I don’t hit pedestrians, I obey red lights, and when I hit a deer—” He smacked one palm off the other so that it rocketed loudly away from him, the truck twitching left and right as the steering wheel went unsupervised. “There’s nothing left of the biggest buck except antlers and deer jelly for a hundred and fifty fucking yards.” He swiped the bottle back from Dan. “Shit, if you can’t drive these country roads loaded on cheap whiskey what’s the point of being from Ohio? What do you do on the weekends?”

  During his pro-drunk-driving rant, he must have noticed Dan weaving his head back and forth, a dumb technique the docs taught him in rehab to help get a more complete field of vision. Cats do the same thing, the docs told him.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Dan sheepishly and forced his head to be still. “So what have you been up to?”

  “Lust. Addiction. Revolution. All the shit makes life worth living.”

  “Yeah? And where’ve you been doing that?”

  “Anywhere you can dream. Loo-eez-ee-ana currently.”

  “Never been.”

  “Depressing as shit. That’s why when an old ghost from my past comes calling, wants to pay me a couple thousand bucks to mule some package from New Orleans to Ohio in a day without popping too much acid or getting busted by the pigs”—he shot Dan a knowing look—“I’m down.”

  Dan assumed this was malarkey, but then again with Bill Ashcraft, you never knew.

  “You just here to see the ’rents?” he asked.

  “Not really. I came back to see Hailey.”

  “Kowalczyk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Y’all still keep in touch.”

  “Not really.”

  “Babes, huh, Eaton? It’s why I keep a sleepwalker’s hours.”

  Dan let that one hang. Bill pulled from his whiskey and passed it to him again. The sky angled like a carnival game, deathwatch blue, while a single oil tanker of a cloud passed overhead. They drove over shadow landscapes into the paling west.

  * * *

  Dying was something he thought of every day, while at the same time keeping it buried in the heart. How scared do you get? Hailey asked him after he came home from tour #1. He honestly couldn’t answer. He did get scared, especially when the chaos got going, when bullets were flying and he got a feeling like only an anorexic housefly could navigate through them. But he just put that away and did his job. Before his first deployment he often wondered if he’d freeze up. He never had any kind of gung-ho attitude about war. He was everything the old women called him: quiet, sweet. A nice Catholic kid. But he discovered he was good in combat. By the end of tour #1 he had a reputation that Greg Coyle called “Danny-on-the-Spot.” He could be calm and do what he had to do. Sometimes he’d recite the Lord’s Prayer. It helped him flow with the moment and focus, but that was about it. Bravery wasn’t a real thing, not as such, but his friends thought he was fierce, and they thought he was brave. And Dan had never seen himself that way before.

  During tour #2, he found himself two Humvees back with Macy Gray stuck in his head because when they’d left for patrol that morning Sergeant Wunderlich had been singing her hit single in the shower. One second, Wunderlich’s tune was banging around Dan’s mental jukebox and the next he was watching a fireball shoot out from under his sergeant’s Humvee, the EFP coming up through the bottom. A geyser of dirt and concrete rained down on the rest of the convoy. Almost everyone made it out of the vehicle. James Drake lost both his legs above the knee, Kyle Nickel an arm, James “Other James” Streiss both his hands, and they all had severe burns, but they got out. Drake ended up in the BAMC complex in San Antonio where they treated the most critical cases. Nickel committed suicide in 2010. Streiss moved back to Nashville and seemed in great spirits about a career in country music when they spoke at DT’s wedding. But it was Wunderlich, one of the weirdest, most popular sergeants in the company—maybe even in the entire battalion—who they all saw burning inside the vehicle. His body was already cinders by the time Dan got a look—just the shape of his Kevlar and his face on fire, the flames and smoke lapping him up like he was a log in a campfire back in Ohio.

  That might have been the moment Dan was done. Hailey had already made her feelings clear, and Wunderlich’s death really rocked him, rocked all of them. For weeks, every time they were outside the wire he was so keyed up i
t felt like sleepwalking, and everything—the homes, the mosques, the reeking open sewers, the dust, the head scarves, the Humvees—it all began to tremble in his vision. He’d stare at something or someone for too long and begin to wonder if it was even real. At night he’d try to listen to the sound of his own breathing, but he’d get this feeling of all his past lives, between the scorpions and the sun, gathering.

  At Wunderlich’s service they listened to him get eulogized by the army chaplain, his helmet and dog tags hanging off a rifle bayoneted into the ground over his boots. Before they send you off to battle, the army makes you fill out this little blue book, which includes whatever music you want played at your funeral. As soon as the chaplain finished up, the beat and the guitar riff started up, and they all kind of looked at one another. Dan watched Coyle’s face light up in amazement. And as soon as Alanis sang I’m broke but I’m happy, / I’m poor but I’m kind, they all roared. Coyle sat beside him with his hand over his mouth just bawling with laughter. They all stood to dance, one hand per man in a pocket, peace signs wagging.

  He’d figured Ashcraft was joking about the graveyard until they pulled onto Dryland Creek Road.

  The hill rose like the curve of a breast, and at the top were the cemetery gates. Ashcraft piloted the truck through the grave markers. He pulled off to the side and angled the truck so that the headlights spilled across a certain set of footstones. He cut the engine and seized the nearly empty bottle of Jim from the door. Dan followed him across the grass, snaking between the graves while Bill stepped right on them. Dan had this long-ago memory of his father gripping his arm as a child, lifting him by the bicep away from the grass. “Don’t walk across them,” he’d said.

  He asked why not.

  “Because if one of them was your kin, you wouldn’t walk across it, would you?”

  Dan remembered thinking that these people were dead and gone and well beyond caring, but even as a little boy he knew better than to challenge his father on such matters. To this day he avoided walking on graves, and not because he thought lifeless boxes of bones held any sway or say on the mortal world.