Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  Jonah was frothing; the beery sluice of his spittle fell on Dan’s cheek. Bill looked less amused, especially at the mention of his dead friend.

  “We’re all just trying to hold our ground against the deluge, Jonah. Whatever makes you feel better.”

  “I’ll tell you what would make me feel better.” He did the thing where he looked around and pretended to care that he was about to say something offensive. “Just one eensy-teensy little bomb in one of those mosques in C-bus. Not while anyone’s there or nothing but like during the night. Just enough to make these Satanists think twice before building another temple.”

  “Ah, a scholar of Islam right here in the Lincoln Lounge.”

  Jonah laughed. He’d always loved needling the Liberal Terror of high school and raised his glass in a cheers. “Wanta cig?”

  Ashcraft tapped cups. “Obviously.”

  Dan demurred and Todd said he’d just had one. Even in the army, Dan hadn’t picked up a smoking habit. His mother had implored him one too many times to never take up the addiction that had taken his father forty years to quit. On his way out, Jonah walked up to a pretty, pudgy girl at the bar and pinched her flab. She bolted upright and swiveled to him. He said something, grinned, and continued on his way. A bald guy in an Oakley shirt, who’d been ordering from Jess, caught the end of it. Must have been her man (though he looked like he could be twenty years older). Dan felt like he recognized him from town rumors. The guy glared after Jonah with drunken disgust until his pitcher arrived.

  “I don’t remember people arguing ’bout politics back when we were kids,” said Beaufort. “It started at the millennium. Before that I don’t remember anything besides the president liked getting hummers.”

  Dan plucked at the small red hairs growing out of the pale knot of his knee.

  “So what brings you back to town?” Beaufort asked.

  “No reason really. I’m seeing Hailey tonight.”

  Beaufort gave him a long, considered look. His teeth were square, nicotine-dark nubs. “No shit. You still in love with that trick?”

  So he knew more about the situation than Dan would have expected. Curt Moretti had been one of Beaufort’s best friends. An errant memory of watching their group grilling out in the snow before a basketball game, Todd picking up Hailey and spinning her in circles while she shrieked laughter and then, when he put her down, she stuffed a handful of snow in his face. Hailey’s year with that strutting moron Moretti was the worst of Dan’s adolescent life. While it felt silly now, he recalled thinking how effortlessly cool Curtis looked. He had this stiff skullcap haircut, a heavy Adam’s apple, and a nose like a hawk’s beak. Each ear pierced with a gold loop earring. Dan thinking he could never manage this combination of style and hardness. Daily, he wished for something terrible to befall Moretti while Moretti looked through him like he didn’t exist. He probably knew Dan only as the short kid who slunk away from Hailey’s locker whenever he approached. It made him feel like he’d never left seventh grade, and he often wished Curtis Moretti dead.

  “Ancient history,” he assured Beaufort.

  “God, I remember y’all back in the day. Curt used to hate any time she even mentioned you. Gotta admit, though, you looked at her like an ice cream cone in the desert.” He picked something out of his beer and flicked it to the floor. “She’s still got an ass like a bomb went off.”

  That Todd or Curtis had even noticed Dan was shocking as hell. That his longing for Hailey had been obvious and threatening made him feel some combination of pitiful and powerful.

  “So’d you see any shit over there?” Beaufort asked.

  “Not sure what that means.”

  “Shit. Blood, death. You kill anyone. That kind of thing.”

  “I’m not that in to talking about it.”

  Beaufort poured himself more beer while he thought on this. Of course Todd Beaufort would fall into that camp. Most men who never serve do. He’d always worn blank dog tags, some inscrutable statement about his badassedness, and Dan could see the chain now. Even before the wars, he was emulating behavior many civilians would come to follow: wrapping themselves in the theater of war, pretending at honor and sacrifice without actually bothering with either of the two. Flag and bumper sticker patriots without any idea of just how gruesome the business of it could be. How rancid, wet, and sticky it was.

  “I thought about joining. Even got as far as going to sign up for the National Guard. But I failed the physical.”

  “That’s tough.”

  Greg Coyle once called the National Guard units “steroidal farm boys looking to work out their feelings.” Dan wished for any other subject besides the military. Hell, he wished for Jonah and Bill to return and start talking politics again.

  “Looks like you came through all right, though, Eaton.”

  No point in explaining his prosthetic. While in recovery he’d met other guys who chose an eye patch over the prosthesis—even one dude who wore a bull’s-eye instead of the piece of acrylic that perfectly matched the living iris. Dan’s looked too good, even down to the orange tint that ringed the pupil. So much so that occasionally he’d look in the mirror and forget. The only hint a small clump of scar tissue near the zygomatic bone like a flesh parenthesis. Sometimes he’d even go a couple days and forget about it. Wait to be reminded by a nightmare of his long-gone right eye, free of his skull, a jellied lump in the dust.

  * * *

  When he got home from deployment #2, after the VBIED that convinced him to reenlist, he ordered a book from Amazon about a Union colonel name Marcus Spiegel. He’d resurfaced in Dan’s memory, a vestigial lesson from Mrs. Bingham’s long-ago Ohio history class. Maybe he was looking for reminders about why he was doing this, and Spiegel provided a template.

  A German Jew who immigrated to Ohio after the failed German revolution of 1848, Spiegel married a farmer’s daughter and when war between the states broke out, he saw it as his duty to fight for the country that had given him this second chance. It was a reminder of patriotism’s bewitching promise, how the achievement of a common goal can inspire disparate peoples to do mighty things. Spiegel began the Civil War as an anti-emancipation Democrat, steeped in the prevailing racial attitudes of the day. He quickly rose to the rank of colonel and received command of his own regiment—the 120th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. As he and his men battled farther into the heart of the Deep South, fighting through Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, his perception of what the Union was fighting for changed.

  “Since I am here, I have learned and seen . . . the horrors of slavery,” he wrote from the Louisiana bayous to his wife, Caroline, the daughter of the Ohio farmer with whom he’d made his American family. “You know it takes me long to say anything that sounds antidemocratic, but . . . never hereafter will I either speak or vote in favor of Slavery.”

  It must be a shaming, damning, beautiful moment to understand such a thing. To have your heart changed.

  Dan thought of how he felt before he left for basic training. The anticipation. The itch. He watched Saving Private Ryan over and over again. He read massive tomes about the Civil War and World War II. He tacked patriotic musings to the corkboard in his room, which were still there to this day: Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. That was Thomas Paine. And Lincoln: I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him. Because what was he going to be? The quiet, skinny bookworm who nevertheless finished with an unspectacular GPA, who never stood out, who was the wallpaper of everyone else’s young experience, a face in a yearbook? Dan came to dream of himself as Spiegel. Selfless, determined, bound by a higher cause.

  So he returned to Spiegel’s story and was still reading about it by the time tour #3 began in Afghanistan. The very first patrol a child walked up to him and asked, “You got girlfriend?” He wore a small white hat and one of those long shirts that looked like pajamas. They wer
e doing good there, Dan was sure of it. The kid pointed to his M4. “Bang, bang, cowboy,” he said. And the sun dripped over the brown hills, the nearby clay homes, their new up-armored Humvees.

  Two years into the war, Colonel Marcus Spiegel wrote to his wife Caroline: “I have seen and learned much. I have seen men dying of disease and mangled by the weapons of death; I have witnessed hostile armies arrayed against each other, the charge of infantry, cavalry hunting men down like beasts.” And yet, he said, he would never stop, never falter, never back down from the “glorious cause.” They were fighting not just to save the Union, he wrote, but to expand the reach of freedom.

  Spiegel never made it back to Caroline. His regiment was ambushed during the Red River Campaign in Louisiana following the successful siege of Vicksburg. Most of his men were taken prisoner, and Spiegel was mortally wounded by an exploding shell. Just one of 35,475 Ohioans who gave his life for the Union.

  * * *

  “I’m having a boy,” Todd Beaufort told Dan. “Me and the mom, we ain’t together. Not my decision.” He pushed his hat back to scratch. Hints of gray rested on his head like ashes. “Told her I’ll be there for the kid no matter what, but she don’t believe me yet. Not that I exactly blame her.”

  Nothing would change Dan’s opinion of the guy. He knew the kind of hick-jock shithead he’d been in high school, and yet the echo of Greg Coyle soured Dan’s stomach.

  I hold her, Coyle had said, and I swear I feel the fucking weight of eternity.

  When Bill and Jonah returned, the former was folding a piece of paper into his breast pocket. “Guy’s a delivery service,” Jonah told him. “He’ll meet you wherever, hook you up with grade A shit.”

  On his way to the bathroom, Jonah said something to the same paunchy, nose-ringed young woman. The rolls of her chin contracted like the folds of an accordion when she jerked her head back. Yet there was something striking and sexual about the way she told Jonah to fuck off. He breezed by while the guy in the Oakley shirt stared him down with murder in his eyes.

  It was a testament to Dan’s hometown—maybe to all small towns—that so much of the history and pathos could accumulate in errant pockets on any given night. Looking back and forth between Beaufort and Oakley Shirt, the pieces clicked together. Dan’s dad, one of New Canaan’s preeminent gossips, told him the story once.

  Oakley Shirt was actually a Brokamp, which was one of those families that had been in New Canaan for as long as anyone could remember, the family tree simply sprawled across the whole county. If the Hansens embodied one New Canaan dynasty, the Brokamps were its diametric opposite. Like the Floods or parts of Kaylyn’s family, they were, according to Dad, “white trash that grows right out of the soil.” This Brokamp was from the meanest branch of that line, a tributary packed with stories of domestic abuse, jail, suicide. He lived in a west-side motel and had spent much of his adult life in and out of prison. Todd Beaufort was supposedly his son.

  “When we moved down from Youngstown, I knew him from around the bars. Real piece a work,” Dad confided to Dan and Hailey on a drive to Columbus for a football game. “Todd’s mom was kinda turning tricks at the time. Not like in the sense that she was standing out on the street corner or nothing, but it was well known if a man had fifty bucks on him and was willing to buy her drinks all night—well.” Dan remembered his face growing fiercely hot as his father shared this story in front of Hailey (they’d only just started dating), but she was on the edge of her seat. “Brokamp was her frequent flyer, and that’s most likely Todd’s daddy. I mean, it don’t exactly take a geneticals test to look at the two side by side. You’d see him at every one of Todd’s football games.”

  Dad was right. Dan had always noticed Brokamp watching from near the concession area, arms crossed, stance wide. He never actually sat in the bleachers. He had a wildebeest build, a head as bald and shiny as the chrome knob on a truck hitch, and a nose that looked like a gnarled chunk of pink charcoal. He shared with Beaufort the same ruddy complexion and near-handsome Neanderthal face. The kind of face where the brow is heavy, but with youth it looks serious. On the elder Brokamp, it only looked cruel, a concentration-camp-guard quality to it.

  And yet Beaufort seemed totally oblivious. He sat in the bar, not fifteen feet away from the guy, and it appeared to matter nothing to either of them. How frequently did these two not acknowledge each other in one of New Canaan’s five or six watering holes?

  With Jonah and Bill back at the table, the chatter began again, raucous and hearty. Spanning three classes of New Canaan High, they relived, they returned. Stories of sports victories and senior pranks and the teachers who’d been in the closet—all the last dredges of what they had in common. Dan had served three tours. Bill had traveled the world. Beaufort had flamed out on a college football career. Jonah had bought a helicopter. That history burned away as they attempted to reanimate themselves through stories of their roaring youth.

  Dan listened but found himself drifting back to Coyle and the night their unit sat on a rooftop during the famed surge. The Baghdad suburb was quiet, an entire platoon having cleared and secured a few square miles. He and Coyle sat facing west as the sun set. They shared some beef jerky, talked about home, about war, cracked dark jokes. They talked about Greg’s daughter, who was five months old. He only knew her from a computer screen. She sat in his wife’s lap, a blinking lump back in San Lorenzo, California. Once an inveterate womanizer, now Coyle hung his head when he walked, his mind always elsewhere. This introspective aspect of him, this kind, complicated piece had taken over. And this was Dan’s favorite night of the war, strange as that sounds. They talked about what they did to lie down at night. Greg would lift weights, play video games, mix sleeping aids with Boom Boom energy drinks for a tawny strung-out high, watch bootlegged movies and TV shows. He laughed because, “All you do, Danny, is read behind blast walls.” It was the only way Dan could calm down. Hard to sleep when you came back from a firefight and all the screaming and the cussing and the percussion and the sweating still had your adrenaline at Mach 5. They talked about what it looked like when a person got shot, how a guy doesn’t get blown backward the way it’s sometimes depicted; he just kind of crumpled, like he was being deflated. Then there was twitching or sometimes perfect stillness—from life to no life. From existence to meat that dogs will pick at and shit out all over the city. Just like that. They talked about what it was like to kill someone. Decided it’s not that they never thought of the wives and children and families of the people whose lives their bullets took, “But there’s one of two outcomes: either this man will die or I will,” said Coyle. And the exultation of winning this duel and walking away to continue living—it was a narcotic joy not even the pillheads of the Ohio Valley could understand.

  “Violence solves nothing,” Coyle joked, gesturing to the quiet streets below and smiled, dust trapped in his blond stubble. “Well, except for this whole MacDougal.”

  The pink sky turned purple then blue, writhing with the dust to create the most chilling pond of sky, cleaving around minarets and modest skyscrapers. Apaches and drones thudded and buzzed over the most crowded airspace on the planet, but still everything felt whisper-still. How breathless you can feel gathered together with your friend looking at some wild sunset.

  “How could you not think about it?” said Todd Beaufort, and Dan blinked back into the moment. “Soon as it happened everyone was talking about there being a curse again.”

  “Blech,” said Bill Ashcraft. They were talking about Curt Moretti’s death by heroin overdose in ’06. “No such thing as curses. We’re all just dust to dust.” He poured beer into his open vortex of a mouth and gargled with it like mouthwash. “People got a real problem with that. So they go about trying to explain it any way they can, adding up numbers so they get letters.”

  “Forget a curse. It’s this whole mystery murder thing,” said Jonah, wiping perspiration from his brow, his drunk ratcheted. “That’s what we should all be paying atten
tion to.”

  “What murder thing?” Dan asked.

  “Awww sheee-it,” said Jonah. “You’ve been gone, Eaton. You haven’t heard of The Murder That Never Was?”

  “I admit my ignorance.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Bill, nodding. “Got enough dead friends to’ve heard of it.”

  “Lotta bodies to consider,” said Jonah.

  They were all drunker than Dan, and he did not appreciate the cavalier nature of this conversation.

  “What is it?” he repeated.

  “New Canaan’s greatest urban legend,” Jonah explained. “Someone got murdered, and someone did the murdering and somehow it all got swept under the rug.”

  Bill rolled his dark eyes. “And I heard Tony Wozniak got big into Satanism and cut off his own dick. Doesn’t make it true.”

  “Where’d the rumor come from?” Dan asked. “The murder, not Wozniak’s dick.”

  Jonah looked at him like he was mental. “Who the fuck starts any rumor? That’s what makes it a rumor.”

  Fair point. Rumors were cheaper than tears. The point was never veracity. When everyone in a community has lost someone they care about people go in search of an explanation.