Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  The glare of the headlights created tiny shadows in the letters of the stone marker.

  RICHARD JARED BRINKLAN

  CPL US MARINES

  NOVEMBER 4, 1984–APRIL 26, 2007

  BELOVED SON,

  LOST IN SERVICE TO THE COUNTRY HE LOVED

  Bill stood over the grave while Dan kept to the side. Bill unscrewed the cap of Jim and let it drop to the ground. Tilting his head back, he took a large gulp, then another. He passed the bottle to Dan, and he took a quick hit. Then it was back to Bill, who turned it over and splashed the remaining liquid across the grass. He held the bottle with his index finger stuffed in the open neck, looking mildly annoyed. It was almost the look you’d give a vending machine that had failed to return your quarter.

  “I wonder,” Bill said. “If you could really break it down. How much money he made for Bechtel or KBR? Like who got the richest off this dead asshole from Ohio?”

  Dan wouldn’t humor him. “How’d you spend the wars, Ashcraft?”

  “Protesting.”

  “Yeah, how’d that work out?”

  “Not too well now that I think about it.”

  After a long time standing at the grave, watching him grim-lipped and catatonically quiet, Dan asked, “How often do you come out here?”

  He shook his head. “First time. My mom had to e-mail me a map.”

  “Ben’s buried here too, I guess.”

  He shook his head. “Nah. They scattered the ashes at Jericho.”

  They stood for a while longer.

  “Wanna go to a bar?” Bill asked.

  * * *

  Your worries are simpler as a kid.

  Dan thought about the weak smile Hailey gave him before she told him she was going to homecoming with Curtis Moretti, the soon-to-be starting quarterback. He’d asked her to go the week before and she had put him off with a Let me just see what all the girls are doing, referring to Lisa and Kaylyn. His stomach didn’t sink so much as it crashed through to the basement. He went to homecoming with plump, agreeable Jamie Eakins, and was hyperaware when Hailey and Curt disappeared from the bannered and ballooned cafeteria early in the night. Lisa had been getting rides to and from school with Bill, so he didn’t see her as much anymore. She came over one night to put a book in Dan’s mailbox and he caught her outside.

  “I sort of have to know,” he explained.

  Lisa shook her head against the brisk autumn wind and kicked at brown leaves piled along the curb.

  “Danny.” She crossed her arms and glared at the ground. “Fuck Hailey. Seriously, fuck her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “What’s that mean?” His befuddlement was genuine.

  “Hailey had sex with Curt after homecoming.” Dan so loved her for how distraught she looked when she said it. He was surprised Lisa had it in her to tell him.

  He searched for something adult to say. “I see.” Then Lisa surprised him by wrapping him in her arms. “It’s okay,” he said, laughing. “Whatever.”

  “I’d punch her in the vagina for you.” They both laughed, and this time his was less forced.

  “Where we headed?” he asked Bill, sweeping away this stark, unhappy memory.

  “I’m thinking Lincoln Lounge.”

  “I can only stay for a bit. I’m meeting Hailey after she gets off work.”

  Bill threw up his hands and took his time putting them back on the wheel—a couple of seconds Dan spent willing them to come home. “Just humor me while I kill time before this thing.”

  “You look like you could use some sleep.”

  “Sleep’s for people who don’t know about coral bleaching and drone assassinations. I don’t sleep without earplugs, a blindfold, and about five Diazepam.”

  “Just keep your hands on the wheel. I didn’t survive Anbar and Kandahar to become part of the New Canaan Curse in a car wreck.”

  “There’s no such thing as curses.” Fireflies thronged in the headlights. “Only shitty luck and forces of political and economic surrender. That’s how they get good, sweet kids like you to give their eyes for democracy.” He pointed to Dan’s skull. Most people didn’t even notice the prosthesis. The docs had this way of attaching the implant so the blood vessels grew into it, as well as the surrounding tissue and muscle. Then they pegged the porous implant to the prosthesis, this little almond sliver that matched the bright hazel of Dan’s real eye. It moved in the socket like a real one, and usually no one could tell unless he let them know. Maybe Ashcraft had heard, though.

  “Sure,” Dan said, snorting a laugh.

  “Hey. Question. Why’s everyone call that guy Whitey again?”

  He understood he wasn’t actually asking about Whitey’s nickname.

  As far as Dan could remember, Eric Frye was one of the only black kids in their school. It wasn’t like he endured all kinds of racist abuse, but at some point, it was noted that he had not tried out for the basketball team, knew nothing about rap music, and was otherwise quiet and smart (his dad was an orthodontist; his mom taught at Grover Street Elementary). Someone started calling him “Whitey” behind his back and it stuck. The military taught you that nicknames were inexplicable. Hell, in Iraq they called a guy “Sig” just because he once messed up the Iraqi signal for “halt.” Sig’s real name was Anthony, and soon there wasn’t a soul left in the army who called him that.

  “Ah fuck,” said Ashcraft, zipping around an Amish buggy, saved by the reflective triangle on its rear. “Had no idea. I was calling him Whitey the whole time I knew him.”

  “He never said it bugged him.” But Dan knew better. By no means had he and Eric been best friends, but when he heard about Hailey marrying Eric, Dan’s first thought was, How could you do this to me? I was like the only person in school who didn’t call you that ridiculous name.

  Bill took them through the old part of town, past the big colonial homes, and they reached downtown New Canaan. Every place needs fuel to run the engine. Like much of Northeast Ohio, once there had been real industry here. Rubber was king in Akron, Youngstown had steel. Post-World War II, it was the region’s honey, practically dripping from the mills and into the maw of the national economy. Then the rest of the world began to make non-unionized steel. New Canaan was one of the minor places that bore the aftershocks of deindustrialization. Maybe not the way Paul Eaton’s hometown of Youngstown did, but nowhere in the Midwest really escaped. Businesses closed, people left to find jobs at malls and big-box stores. DUIs, teen pregnancies, domestic disturbance calls, suicides, and assaults all spiked. New Canaan didn’t fair as poorly as some places. In the mideighties, two different companies opened manufacturing facilities in an industrial park to the south. A screen door manufacturer and an auto parts plant. Developers figured out that they could sell the town as an exurban retreat from all the cities that were going to rust. But the smokestacks of the Fountain Steel plant were still visible just west of downtown. Shuttered for as long as Dan could remember, his parents talked about its closing the way you talk about a death in the family. Maybe with even more bitterness because with its closing came betrayal. The way they’d reference that Fountain plant—which had only been responsible for some seven hundred jobs—it reminded Dan of the first time he saw a lethal wound in battle. Everyone gets their virgin taste: How it feels to look at such a thing. How when it dries, these heinous skeins of crust and dirt will cling to shredded, serrated flesh.

  Ashcraft parked in a slanted spot beneath the tacky glow of the Lincoln’s sign. Music beat in the middle of downtown’s shallow pulse. Past the crummy bar with the nonsensical Abe Lincoln motif, Dan could peer down Hudson Street and see the scrapyard. Beyond that was Allied Waste Services, the water treatment plant, and the power station. All the places towns try to tuck into a corner to keep the Main Street America façade shining.

  “One pitcher,” he told Bill.

  “Five,” he said, hopping out of the truck.

  “Two.”

  “Fine. Seven pitchers, and that�
��s it.”

  * * *

  During tour #3 in Afghanistan, Private First Class Rudy Jamirez enjoyed mocking Dan for “just how shithouse Northeast Ohio actually is.” Rudy, the son of Nicaraguan immigrants, was from a scrubby town in western PA not that much different from New Canaan. Even though he was Dan’s subordinate, he also became his fastest friend in a kid brother sort of way. Maybe it was a nerd thing. He loved graphic novels and went on long disquisitions of what he considered the classics: Watchmen, Y: The Last Man, Sandman, Miracle-man, From Hell. But they truly bonded over Calvin and Hobbes.

  “Bill Watterson,” Dan told him. “Ohio’s like a factory for talent and brilliance and guts.”

  “You got Watterson and Harvey Pekar,” he countered. “That’s it.” Only a few inches over five feet, strong, and stocky, Rudy wore a military buzz on a bucket of a head and had small, protruding curlicues for ears. He had this tattoo on his shoulder of a medieval knight, and beneath it the words Sí Se Puede. He was tough, irascible, funny. He reminded Dan of kids he’d grown up with. Even after he finished Ranger school and moved up to sergeant first class, when he really began to feel the weight of his responsibility toward the guys, Rudy would be the friend he’d look to, much like Greg Coyle, to keep him sane.

  Dan schooled him: “Uh, LeBron James? The Black Keys, Chrissie Hynde, Steven Spielberg? John Brown spent his formative years in Ohio.”

  “Christ, don’t get you started on Ohio. You’re a fucking walking Wikipedia entry.”

  “Johnny Appleseed. Ever heard of him? Ohioan.”

  They were sitting with a bunch of guys at FOB Lagman, harvesting time before they had to go back to the Hindu Kush and not get a shower for who knows how long, watching Black Hawk Down on a projector screen. Everyone who served in Iraq or Afghanistan saw this movie a dozen times, but they had nothing better to do so they talked through it, savoring the A/C while they could. Rudy changed the subject.

  “You know the problem with war movies? They never show how funny the army is. It’s always drama-this, eyes-squeezed-shut-crying-that, but c’mon, dude, the army’s fucking hilarious.”

  On-screen, a .50 gunner took a bullet in the neck. Fake gore exploded into the camera, dousing the lens. “What’s his status?!” Commander Tom Sizemore demanded, while Staff Sergeant Josh Hartnett, stricken, held the dead man in his lap.

  “See?” said Rudy. “That’s fucking funny.”

  They’d be humping up and down mountains on patrol, skittering over loose shale that broke ankles, trying to look everywhere at once for Taliban or farmers earning a buck by popping off shots at Americans, and the second they got back, Rudy would grab someone by the collar and scream, “What’s his status?!”

  Rudy had a point, though. There’s probably no funnier profession than the military. You can spend five hours arguing about something totally bizarre. On tour #2 in Iraq, Della Terza and Josh Packard got into a two-day debate about who they’d Fuck, Marry, and Kill: Harry, Ron, or Hermione.

  DT: “Ron is the obvious Kill. Put him in one of those Shiite torture basements for all I care. Then marry Harry, fuck Hermione.”

  Packard’s rebuttal: “You’re an idiot. Marrying means you get to fuck all the time anyhow. You marry Hermione, kill Harry, and fuck Ron.”

  Coyle’s two cents: “Trust me, marrying does not mean you fuck all the time.”

  Packard: “Fucking Della Terza. You fucking beshitted moron. Ron’s butthole’s gonna be the most satisfying. That’s what all the books are secretly about.”

  The two of them actually got pretty heated about this. Lieutenant Holt had to enter the fray and give them both a time-out to cool down. Years later, at Della Terza’s wedding, Dan brought this argument back up, which didn’t seem fair because Pack was in jail for firing a gun off at the Iowa State Fair and thus unable to defend his point.

  “I don’t care what the fuck Packard thinks, I still say I’m right,” Della Terza muttered, and he threw an ice cube at one of his new wife’s bridesmaids.

  Something about the mix of tension, the specter of death or grave injury, and being around guys for whom nothing is off limits—but Dan had never laughed harder than during deployments. It’s what he could never explain to Hailey: You’ll never be closer to human beings than in combat. Not your parents, not your wife, not your kids. That sense of duty you leave with—the one toward God and country—evaporates in the murky realities of Baghdad or Kandahar. What’s left is your duty to your friends, your brothers. It’s what Rick Brinklan would describe when they ran into each other in Iraq. Even after only months, you feel like you’ve known these guys for millions of miles of a hard, dark road.

  * * *

  He and Ashcraft had barely crossed into the sweet chill of the A/C, eyes working with the dim red light and HDTV glow before a boisterous greeting bellowed through the evening crowd.

  “Holy faggot-fucking shit, look at these two queers!”

  Jonah Hansen had gone seriously bald. A PacSun hat tilted back on his head, the bill nearly vertical. The visible follicles looked so thin, each like a pore with a blackhead. To compensate he now had a chinstrap beard outlining the contours of his jaw. He was drinking with Todd Beaufort, also ball-capped and battered. Sun-fed face with a slaughterhouse smell to him, looking depleted and fat under his Buckeyes hat.

  Beaufort greeted them with a jerk of his head. When Bill saw him, his face made all kinds of buried calculations before returning to its default expression of bemused distance, of riding above the storm and laughing downward at a world of jest.

  “Tee-Bee. Five-Six,” said Bill. “How you doing, man?” They shook, and it came with a stir of awkwardness. Jocks sizing each other up long after their moment of relevance.

  “Remember Dan Eaton?” Jonah said. “My class.”

  “Hey man, how’s it going?” Beaufort shook his hand, and Dan was sure it was the most they’d ever interacted.

  “Of all the dive bars in all the Midwest, you two go and walk into mine,” said Jonah. Dan started with his hand out, but Jonah wrapped him in his arms.

  “C’mon, dude, no need for a welcome parade,” said Dan, laughing.

  “Nah, it’s just you look good. All in one piece, man. That’s all you can ask for.”

  They pulled up stools, and Jonah poured the rest of their pitcher into two opaque plastic cups. He ordered another from the bartender, Jessica Bealey, class of ’02. A cheerleader who was rumored to have scored a thirty-two on the ACT by filling in bubbles at random. She didn’t seem to recognize either Dan or Bill. As she walked away, Jonah looked at her behind skeptically and said, “That thing’s gotten chunky as Campbell’s Soup.” He had a pointed, serpentine tongue that frequently slithered out to taste his lips.

  “We’re celebrating. I just bought a helicopter,” Jonah declared.

  “A helicopter?” Bill could cock an eyebrow like he was throwing a knife.

  “I fly it to our place up on South Bass.”

  Bill looked pained. “How in the fuck?”

  “Real estate. It’s been rocket fuel lately.”

  “Real estate,” Bill sniffed. “There’s a fucking depression on. There’s no real estate.”

  “Just gotta know how to play the game, dude. Everyone’s got chips in, so play the right cards and know when the other guy’s whistling bullshit.”

  Jonah had always been given to speaking like that. Back in the early eighties it was Jonah’s dad who came up with the idea to market New Canaan to retirees from the cities, and Burt Hansen went on to make a killing. He claimed credit for helping to bring the auto parts plant and the screen door factory that began New Canaan’s short-lived renaissance. Dan’s mom had this expression about the Hansens: “You can feel the devil meddling.” Burt Hansen kept fetish porn videos in an unlocked cabinet in their barn, which doubled as a glorified rec room. In sixth grade they gathered around the TV out there and Dan got a disturbing first blush with pornography, “barely legal” women enduring abusive, violent treatment.
He also distinctly remembered Burt hovering over him while he and Jonah worked on a project about the Underground Railroad for history class. “Just remember your white skin,” he told them, to Dan’s great and enduring discomfort.

  “Not shit,” said Beaufort when Bill asked what he was up to. “Working Cattawa construction.” He sipped bored beer.

  Jessica returned with shots. “For the reunion, you stank old Jags!” She beamed at Todd, who didn’t even look up.

  They slammed back tequila and replaced the shot glasses on her tray.

  “To hope and change!” Jonah’s knee jittered away, and he kept playing his hands on the table’s surface like a drum kit. “Assume you’re feeling pretty good about that now, Ashcraft.”

  Bill’s smirk was his home. “Oh, is this an Obama conversation?”

  “You wanted socialized health care, an open door for all the aliens, and an end to America’s Judeo-Christian foundations. Am I mischaracterizing?”

  “We’re both pissed, but I’m assuming for different reasons. See, I don’t like the oligarchic corporate state and necrotic ideas like market fundamentalism. For which I see Bee-O as a caretaker. You’re just pissed ’cause some black people ended up marginally better off.”

  Jonah shook his head sadly. “Everyone wants their food pre-masticated now, cradle to grave. You been to Columbus lately? If you send your kid to a school there, it’s going to be half-Muslim, no question.”

  Ashcraft brayed with laughter. “The fuck’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Here’s the problem with you liberals, Ashcraft.” He stuck one drunk finger in Bill’s face. “You’re really only about the sanctimony. You got this club for right-thinking people, and all you care about is being able to control the way we speak and what opinions we’re allowed to have. In college I had this girl blow up at me for saying ‘colored people’ instead of ‘people of color.’ Thought she was going to have an aneurysm ’cause I reversed two stupid words. But that’s what liberals are: thought police. So they want to protect a religion like Islam, one that treats women and homos like shit and doesn’t even respect free speech—so you can’t even be consistent there. But when it comes to Christians not wanting guys with dicks in the women’s bathroom? Hell, put those backward hicks on TV and ridicule them! Call ’em bigots! Chase ’em with pitchforks! Do liberals care about the economy being shit, about jobs leaving, about how no one can make it in a business or how much it costs to move to one of their precious cities on the coasts? No, of course not. They care more about the rights of illegal aliens than they do about the heroin those aliens bring in that’s killing every last person we know. Or no—you know what they care about? Not calling those people ‘illegal.’ I’m sorry, they’re ‘undocumented.’ They’ll hold a protest over a word. But they’re not protesting for Curtis or Ben or anyone else ODing, are they?”