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When school let out the two of us went to my backyard
to fight. We were trying to make each other tougher. So in
the grass, in the shade of the pines and junipers, Gordon and
I slung off our backpacks and laid down a pale-green garden
hose, tip to tip, making a ring. Then we stripped off our shirts and put on
our gold-colored boxing gloves and fought.
Every round went two minutes. If you stepped out of the ring, you lost.
If you cried, you lost. If you got knocked out or if you yelled stop, you lost.
Afterwards we drank Coca-Colas and smoked Marlboros, our chests heaving,
our faces all different shades of blacks and reds and yellows.
We began fighting after Seth Johnson—a no-neck linebacker with teeth
like corn kernels and hands like T-bone steaks—beat Gordon until his face
swelled and split open and purpled around the edges. Eventually he healed,
the rough husks of scabs peeling away to reveal a different face than the
one I remembered—older, squarer, fiercer, his left eyebrow separated by
a gummy white scar. It was his idea that we should fight each other. He
wanted to be ready. He wanted to hurt those who hurt him. And if he went
down, he would go down swinging as he was sure his father would. This
is what we all wanted: to please our fathers, to make them proud, even
though they had left us.
This was in Crow, Oregon, a high desert town in the foothills of
the Cascade Mountains. In Crow we have fifteen hundred people, a
Dairy Queen, a BP gas station, a Food-4-Less, a meatpacking plant,
a bright-green football field irrigated by canal water, and your standard assortment of taverns and churches. Nothing distinguishes us from Bend or
Redmond or La Pine or any of the other nowhere towns off Route 97, except
for this: we are home to the 2nd Battalion, 34th Marines.
The marines live on a fifty-acre base in the hills just outside of town, a
collection of one-story cinder-block buildings interrupted by cheat grass and
sagebrush. Throughout my childhood I could hear, if I cupped a hand to
my ear, the lowing of bulls, the bleating of sheep, and the report of assault
rifles shouting from the hilltops. It’s said that conditions here in Oregon’s
ranch country closely match the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan and
northern Iraq.
Our fathers—Gordon’s and mine—were like the other fathers in Crow.
All of them, just about, had enlisted as part-time soldiers, as reservists, for
drill pay: several thousand a year for a private and several thousand more
for a sergeant. Beer pay, they called it, and for two weeks every year plus
one weekend a month, they trained. They threw on their cammies and filled
their rucksacks and kissed us goodbye and the gates of the 2nd Battalion
drew closed behind them.
Our fathers would vanish into the pine-studded hills, returning to us
Sunday night with their faces reddened from weather, their biceps trem
bling from fatigue, and their hands smelling of rifle grease. They would talk
about ECPs and PRPs and MEUs and WMDs and they would do push-ups
in the middle of the living room and they would call six o’clock “eighteen
hundred hours” and they would high-five and yell, “Semper fi.” Then a
few days would pass and they would go back to the way they were, to the
men we knew: Coors-drinking, baseball-throwing, crotch-scratching, Aqua
Velva–smelling fathers.
No longer. In January the battalion was activated and in March they
shipped off for Iraq. Our fathers—our coaches, our teachers, our barbers,
our cooks, our gas-station attendants and UPS deliverymen and deputies
and firemen and mechanics—our fathers, so many of them, climbed onto
the olive-green school buses and pressed their palms to the windows and
gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can imagine and vanished.
Just like that.
Nights, I sometimes got on my Honda dirt bike and rode through
the hills and canyons of Deschutes County. Beneath me the engine growled and shuddered, while all around me the wind, like something alive, bullied me, tried to drag me from my bike. A dark world slipped past as I downshifted, leaning into a turn, and accelerated on a
straightaway—my speed seventy, then eighty—concentrating only on the
twenty yards of road glowing ahead of me.
On this bike I could ride and ride and ride, away from here, up and over
the Cascades, through the Willamette Valley, until I reached the ocean, where
the broad black backs of whales regularly broke the surface of the water, and
even further—further still—until I caught up with the horizon, where my
father would be waiting. Inevitably, I ended up at Hole in the Ground.
A long time ago a meteor came screeching down from space and left
behind a crater five thousand feet wide and three hundred feet deep. Hole
in the Ground is frequented during the winter by the daredevil sledders
among us and during the summer by bearded geologists interested in the
metal fragments strewn across its bottom. I dangled my feet over the edge
of the crater and leaned back on my elbows and took in the black sky—no
moon, only stars—just a little lighter than a raven. Every few minutes a star
seemed to come unstuck, streaking through the night in a bright flash that
burned into nothingness.
In the near distance Crow glowed grayish green against the darkness—a
reminder of how close to oblivion we lived. A chunk of space ice or a solar
wind could have jogged the meteor sideways and rather than landing here it
could have landed there at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy
Queen, no Crow High, no 2nd Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination
to realize how something can drop out of the sky and change everything.
This was in October, when Gordon and I circled each other in the backyard after school. We wore our golden boxing gloves, cracked with age and
flaking when we pounded them together. Browned grass crunched beneath
our sneakers and dust rose in little puffs like distress signals.
Gordon was thin to the point of being scrawny. His collarbone poked
against his skin like a swallowed coat hanger. His head was too big for his
body and his eyes were too big for his head and football players—Seth
Johnson among them—regularly tossed him into garbage cans and called
him E.T.
He had had a bad day. And I could tell from the look on his face—the
watery eyes, the trembling lips that revealed in quick flashes his buckteeth—
that he wanted, he needed, to hit me. So I let him. I raised my gloves to my
face and pulled my elbows against my ribs and Gordon lunged forward, his
arms snapping like rubber bands. I stood still, allowing his fists to work up
and down my body, allowing him to throw the weight of his anger on me,
until eventually he grew too tired to hit anymore and I opened up my stance
and floored him with a right cross to the temple. He lay there, sprawled out
in the grass with a small smile on his E.T. face. “Damn,” he said in a dreamy
voice. A drop of blood gathered along the corner of his eye and streaked
down his temple into his hair.
My father wore steel-toed boots, Carhartt jeans, and a T-shirt
advertising some place he had traveled, maybe Yellowstone or
Seattle. He looked like someone you might see shopping for
motor oil at Bi-Mart. To hide his receding hairline he wore a John Deere
cap that laid a shadow across his face. His brown eyes blinked above a
considerable nose underlined by a gray mustache. Like me, my father was
short and squat, a bulldog. His belly was a swollen bag and his shoulders
were broad, good for carrying me during parades and at fairs when I was
younger. He laughed a lot. He liked game shows. He drank too much beer
and smoked too many cigarettes and spent too much time with his buddies,
fishing, hunting, bullshitting, which probably had something to do with
why my mother divorced him and moved to Boise with a hairdresser and
triathlete named Chuck.
At first, after my father left, like all of the other fathers, he would e-mail
whenever he could. He would tell me about the heat, the gallons of water
he drank every day, the sand that got into everything, the baths he took
with baby wipes. He would tell me how safe he was, how very safe. This was
when he was stationed in Turkey. Then the reservists shipped for Kirkuk,
where insurgents and sandstorms attacked almost daily. The e-mails came
less frequently. Weeks of silence passed between them.
Sometimes, on the computer, I would hit refresh, refresh, refresh, hoping.
In October I received an e-mail that read: “Hi Josh. I’m OK. Don’t worry.
Do your homework. Love, Dad.” I printed it up and hung it on my door
with a piece of Scotch tape.
For twenty years my father worked at Nosler, Inc.—the bullet manufacturer based out of Bend—and the Marines trained him as an ammunition
technician. Gordon liked to say his father was a gunnery sergeant and he
was, but we all knew he was also the battalion mess-manager, a cook, which
was how he made his living in Crow, tending the grill at Hamburger Patty’s.
We knew their titles but we didn’t know, not really, what their titles meant,
what our fathers did over there. We imagined them doing heroic things:
rescuing Iraqi babies from burning huts, sniping suicide bombers before
they could detonate on a crowded city street. We drew on Hollywood and
TV news to develop elaborate scenarios where maybe, at twilight, during a
trek through the mountains of northern Iraq, bearded insurgents ambushed
our fathers with rocket launchers. We imagined them silhouetted by a fiery
explosion. We imagined them burrowing into the sand like lizards and firing
their M-16s, their bullets streaking through the darkness like the meteorites
I observed on sleepless nights.
When Gordon and I fought we painted our faces—black and green and
brown—with the camo-grease our fathers left behind. It made our eyes
and teeth appear startlingly white. And it smeared away against our gloves
just as the grass smeared away beneath our sneakers—and the ring became a circle of dirt, the dirt a reddish color that looked a lot like scabbed
flesh. One time Gordon hammered my shoulder so hard I couldn’t lift my
arm for a week. Another time I elbowed one of his kidneys and he peed
blood. We struck each other with such force and frequency the golden
gloves crumbled and our knuckles showed through the sweat-soaked, blood-soaked foam like teeth through a busted lip. So we bought another set of
gloves, and as the air grew steadily colder we fought with steam blasting
from our mouths.
Our fathers had left us, but men remained in Crow. There were
old men, like my grandfather, whom I lived with—men who had
paid their dues, who had worked their jobs and fought their wars
and now spent their days at the gas station, drinking bad coffee from Styrofoam cups, complaining about the weather, arguing about the best months
to reap alfalfa. And there were incapable men. Men who rarely shaved and
watched daytime television in their once-white underpants. Men who lived
in trailers and filled their shopping carts with Busch Light, summer sausage,
Oreo cookies.
And then there were vulturous men like Dave Lightener—men who
scavenged whatever our fathers had left behind. Dave Lightener worked
as a recruitment officer. I’m guessing he was the only recruitment officer
in world history who drove a Vespa scooter with a Support Our Troops
ribbon magnet on its rear. We sometimes saw it parked outside the homes
of young women whose husbands had gone to war. Dave had big ears and
small eyes and wore his hair in your standard-issue high-and-tight buzz. He
often spoke in a too-loud voice about all the insurgents he gunned down
when working a Falluja patrol unit. He lived with his mother in Crow, but
spent his days in Bend and Redmond trolling the parking lots of Best Buy,
ShopKo, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Mountain View Mall. He was looking for
people like us, people who were angry and dissatisfied and poor.
But Dave Lightener knew better than to bother us. On duty he stayed
away from Crow entirely. Recruiting there would be too much like poaching the burned section of forest where deer, rib-slatted and wobbly-legged,
nosed through the ash, seeking something green.
We didn’t fully understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only
understood that they had to fight. The necessity of it made the reason irrelevant. “It’s all part of the game,” my grandfather said. “It’s just the way
it is.” We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh,
refresh, hoping they would return to us, praying we would never find Dave
Lightener on our porch uttering the words I regret to inform you . . .
One time, my grandfather dropped Gordon and me off at Mountain View Mall and there, near the glass-doored entrance, stood Dave
Lightener. He wore his creased khaki uniform and spoke with a group of
Mexican teenagers. They were laughing, shaking their heads and walking
away from him as we approached. We had our hats pulled low and he
didn’t recognize us.
“Question for you, gentlemen,” he said in the voice of telemarketers
and door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses. “What do you plan on doing with
your lives?”
Gordon pulled off his hat with a flourish, as if he were part of some
ta-da! magic act and his face was the trick. “I plan on killing some crazy-ass Muslims,” he said and forced a smile. “How about you, Josh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Kill some people then get myself killed.” I grimaced even
as I played along. “That sounds like a good plan.”
Dave Lightener’s lips tightened into a thin line, his posture straightened,
and he asked us what we thought our fathers would think, hearing us right
now. “They’re out there risking their lives, defending our freedom, and you’re
cracking sick jokes,” he said. “I think that’s sick.”
We hated him for his soft hands and clean uniform. We hated him because he sent people like us off to die. Because at twenty-three he had attained a higher rank than our fathers. Because he slept with the lonely wives
of soldiers. And now we hated him even more for making us feel ashamed.
I wanted to say something sarcastic but Gordon was quicker. His hand was
out before him, his fingers gripping an imaginary bottle. “Here’s your maple
syrup,” he said.
Dave said, “And what is that for?”
“To eat my ass with,” Gordon said.
Right then a skateboarder-type with green hair and a nose ring walked
from the mall, a bagful of DVDs swinging from his fist, and Dave Lightener
forgot us. “Hey, friend,” he was saying. “Let me ask you something. Do you
like war movies?”
In November we drove our dirt bikes deep into the woods to hunt.
Sunlight fell through tall pines and birch clusters and lay in puddles
along the logging roads that wound past the hillsides packed with huckleberries and on the moraines where coyotes scurried, trying to flee from
us and slipping, causing tiny avalanches of loose rock. It hadn’t rained in
nearly a month, so the crabgrass and the cheat grass and the pine needles
had lost their color, dry and blond as cornhusks, crackling beneath my
boots when the road we followed petered out into nothing and I stepped
off my bike. In this waterless stillness, it seemed you could hear every chipmunk within a square acre rustling for pine nuts, and when the breeze rose
into a cold wind the forest became a giant whisper.
We dumped our tent and our sleeping bags near a basalt grotto with a
spring bubbling from it and Gordon said, “Let’s go, troops,” holding his
rifle before his chest diagonally, as a soldier would. He dressed as a soldier
would too, wearing his father’s over-large cammies rather than the mandatory blaze-orange gear. Fifty feet apart, we worked our way downhill through the forest, through a huckleberry thicket, through a clear-cut
crowded with stumps, taking care not to make much noise or slip on the
pine needles carpeting the ground. A chipmunk worrying at a pinecone
screeched its astonishment when a peregrine falcon swooped down and
seized it, carrying it off between the trees to some secret place. Its wings
made no sound, and neither did the blaze-orange-clad hunter when he appeared in a clearing several hundred yards below us.
Gordon made some sort of SWAT-team gesture—meant, I think, to
say, stay low—and I made my way carefully toward him. From behind a
boulder we peered through our scopes, tracking the hunter, who looked,
in his vest and ear-flapped hat, like a monstrous pumpkin. “That cocksucker,” Gordon said in a harsh whisper. The hunter was Seth Johnson.
His rifle was strapped to his back and his mouth was moving—he was
talking to someone. At the corner of the meadow he joined four members
of the varsity football squad, who sat on logs around a smoldering campfire, their arms bobbing like oil pump jacks as they brought their beers to
their mouths.
I took my eye from my scope and noticed Gordon fingering the trigger of his 30.06. I told him to quit fooling around and he pulled his hand
suddenly away from the stock and smiled guiltily and said he just wanted
to know what it felt like having that power over someone. Then his trigger
finger rose up and touched the gummy white scar that split his eyebrow. “I
say we fuck with them a little.”
I shook my head no.
Gordon said, “Just a little—to scare them.”
“They’ve got guns,” I said, and he said, “So we’ll come back tonight.”
Later, after an early dinner of beef jerky and trail mix and Gatorade, I
happened upon a four-point stag nibbling on some bear grass, and I rested
my rifle on a stump and shot it, and it stumbled backwards and collapsed
with a rose blooming from behind its shoulder where the heart was hidden.
Gordon came running and we stood around the deer and smoked a few
cigarettes, watching the thick arterial blood run from its mouth. Then we
took out our knives and got to work. I cut around the anus, cutting away
the penis and testes, and then ran the knife along the belly, unzipping the
hide to reveal the delicate pink flesh and greenish vessels into which our
hands disappeared.
The blood steamed in the cold mountain air, and when we finished—when
we’d skinned the deer and hacked at its joints and cut out its back strap and
boned out its shoulders and hips, its neck and ribs, making chops, roasts,
steaks, quartering the meat so we could bundle it into our insulated saddlebags—Gordon picked up the deer head by the antlers and held it before his
own. Blood from its neck made a pattering sound on the ground, and in the
half-light of early evening Gordon began to do a little dance, bending his
knees and stomping his feet.
“I think I’ve got an idea,” he said and pretended to charge at me with the
antlers. I pushed him away and he said, “Don’t pussy out on me, Josh.” I was
exhausted and reeked of gore, but I could appreciate the need for revenge.
“Just to scare them, right, Gordo?” I said.
“Right.”
We lugged our meat back to camp and Gordon brought the deer hide.
He slit a hole in its middle and poked his head through so the hide hung off
him loosely, a hairy sack, and I helped him smear mud and blood across his
face. Then, with his Leatherman, he sawed off the antlers and held them in
each hand and slashed at the air as if they were claws.
Night had come on and the moon hung over the Cascades, grayly
lighting our way as we crept through the forest imagining ourselves in
enemy territory, with trip wires and guard towers and snarling dogs around
every corner. From behind the boulder that overlooked their campsite, we
observed our enemies as they swapped hunting stories and joked about
Jessica Robertson’s big-ass titties and passed around a bottle of whiskey and
drank to excess and finally pissed on the fire to extinguish it. When they
retired to their tents we waited an hour before making our way down the
hill with such care that it took us another hour before we were upon them.
Somewhere an owl hooted, its noise barely noticeable over the chorus of
snores that rose from their tents. Seth’s Bronco was parked nearby—the
license plate read SMAN—and all their rifles lay in its cab. I collected the
guns, slinging them over my shoulder, then I eased my knife into each of
Seth’s tires.
I still had my knife out when we were standing beside Seth’s tent, and
when a cloud scudded over the moon and made the meadow fully dark I
stabbed the nylon and in one quick jerk opened up a slit. Gordon rushed in,
his antler-claws slashing. I could see nothing but shadows but I could hear
Seth scream the scream of a little girl as Gordon raked at him with the antlers
and hissed and howled like some cave-creature hungry for man-flesh. When
the tents around us came alive with confused voices, Gordon reemerged
with a horrible smile on his face and I followed him up the hillside, crashing
through the undergrowth, leaving Seth to make sense of the nightmare that
had descended upon him without warning.
Winter came. Snow fell, and we threw on our coveralls and
wrenched on our studded tires and drove our dirt bikes to Hole
in the Ground, dragging our sleds behind us with towropes. Our
engines filled the white silence of the afternoon. Our back tires kicked up
plumes of powder and on sharp turns slipped out beneath us, and we lay
there in the middle of the road bleeding, laughing, unafraid.
Earlier, for lunch, we had cooked a pound of bacon with a stick of butter.
The grease, which hardened into a white waxy pool, we used as polish, buffing it into the bottoms of our sleds. Speed was what we wanted at Hole in
the Ground. We descended the steepest section of the crater into its heart,
three hundred feet below us. We followed each other in the same track, ironing down the snow to create a chute, blue-hued and frictionless, that would
allow us to travel at a speed equivalent to freefall. Our eyeballs glazed with
frost, our ears roared with wind, and our stomachs rose into our throats as
we rocketed down and felt like we were five again—and then we began the
slow climb back the way we came and felt fifty.
We wore crampons and ascended in a zigzagging series of switchbacks. It
took nearly an hour. The air had begun to go purple with evening when we
stood again at the lip of the crater, sweating in our coveralls, taking in the view
through the fog of our breath. Gordon packed a snowball. I said, “You better not
hit me with that.” He cocked his arm threateningly and smiled, then dropped
to his knees to roll the snowball into something bigger. He rolled it until it
grew to the size of a large man curled into the fetal position. From the back of
his bike he took the piece of garden hose he used to siphon gas from fancy foreign cars and he worked it into his tank, sucking at its end until gas flowed.
He doused the giant snowball as if he hoped it would sprout. It didn’t
melt—he’d packed it tight enough—but it puckered slightly and appeared
leaden, and when Gordon withdrew his Zippo, sparked it, and held it
toward the ball, the fumes caught flame and the whole thing erupted with
a gasping noise that sent me staggering back a few steps.
Gordon rushed forward and kicked the ball of fire, sending it rolling,
tumbling down the crater, down our chute like a meteor, and the snow
beneath it instantly melted only to freeze again a moment later, making a
slick blue ribbon. When we sledded it, we went so fast our minds emptied
and we felt a sensation at once like flying and falling.
On the news Iraqi insurgents fired their assault rifles. On the
news a car bomb in Baghdad blew up seven American soldiers at
a traffic checkpoint. On the news the president said he did not
think it was wise to provide a time frame for troop withdrawal. I checked my
e-mail before breakfast and found nothing but spam.
Gordon and I fought in the snow wearing snow boots. We fought so
much our wounds never got a chance to heal and our faces took on a permanent look of decay. Our wrists felt swollen, our knees ached, our joints felt
full of tiny dry wasps. We fought until fighting hurt too much and we took
up drinking instead. Weekends, we drove our dirt bikes to Bend, twenty
miles away, and bought beer and took it to Hole in the Ground and drank
there until a bright line of sunlight appeared on the horizon and illuminated
the snow-blanketed desert. Nobody asked for our IDs and when we held
up our empty bottles and stared at our reflections in the glass, warped and
ghostly, we knew why. And we weren’t alone. Black bags grew beneath the
eyes of the sons and daughters and wives of Crow, their shoulders stooped,
wrinkles enclosing their mouths like parentheses.
Our fathers haunted us. They were everywhere: in the grocery store when
we spotted a thirty-pack of Coors on sale for ten bucks; on the highway
when we passed a jacked-up Dodge with a dozen hay bales stacked in its
bed; in the sky when a jet roared by, reminding us of faraway places. And
now, as our bodies thickened with muscle, as we stopped shaving and grew
patchy beards, we saw our fathers even in the mirror. We began to look like
them. Our fathers, who had been taken from us, were everywhere, at every
turn, imprisoning us.
Seth Johnson’s father was a staff sergeant. Like his son, he was a big man
but not big enough. Just before Christmas he stepped on a cluster bomb. A
U.S. warplane dropped it and the sand camouflaged it and he stepped on it
and it tore him into many meaty pieces. When Dave Lightener climbed up
the front porch with a black armband and a somber expression, Mrs. Johnson, who was cooking a honeyed ham at the time, collapsed on the kitchen floor. Seth pushed his way out the door and punched Dave in the face,
breaking his nose before he could utter the words I regret to inform you . . .
Hearing about this, we felt bad for all of ten seconds. Then we felt good
because it was his father and not ours. And then we felt bad again and on
Christmas Eve we drove to Seth’s house and laid down on his porch the rifles
we had stolen, along with a six-pack of Coors, and then, just as we were
about to leave, Gordon dug in his back pocket and removed his wallet and
placed under the six-pack all the money he had—a few fives, some ones.
“Fucking Christmas,” he said.
We got braver and went to the bars—The Golden Nugget, The Weary
Traveler, The Pine Tavern—where we square-danced with older women
wearing purple eye shadow and sparkly dreamcatcher earrings and push-up
bras and clattery high heels. We told them we were Marines back from a
six-month deployment and they said, “Really?” and we said, “Yes, ma’am,”
and when they asked for our names we gave them the names of our fathers.
Then we bought them drinks and they drank them in a gulping way and
breathed hotly in our faces and we brought our mouths against theirs and
they tasted like menthol cigarettes, like burnt detergent. And then we went
home with them, to their trailers, to their waterbeds, where among their
stuffed animals we fucked them.
Mid-afternoon and it was already full dark. On our way to The
Weary Traveler we stopped by my house to bum some money off
my grandfather, only to find Dave Lightener waiting for us. He
must have just gotten there—he was halfway up the porch steps—when
our headlights cast an anemic glow over him and he turned to face us with
a scrunched-up expression, as if trying to figure out who we were. He wore
the black band around his arm and, over his nose, a white-bandaged splint.
We did not turn off our engines. Instead we sat in the driveway, idling,
the exhaust from our bikes and the breath from our mouths clouding the
air. Above us a star hissed across the moonlit sky, vaguely bright like a light
turned on in a day-lit room. Then Dave began down the steps and we leapt
off our bikes to meet him. Before he could speak I brought my fist to his
diaphragm, knocking the breath from his body. He looked like a gun-shot
actor in a Western, clutching his belly with both hands, doubled over, his
face making a nice target for Gordon’s knee. A snap sound preceded Dave
falling on his back with blood coming from his already broken nose.
He put up his hands and we hit our way through them. I punched him
once, twice, in the ribs while Gordon kicked him in the spine and stomach
and then we stood around gulping air and allowed him to struggle to his
feet. When he righted himself, he wiped his face with his hand and blood
dripped from his fingers. I moved in and roundhoused with my right and
then my left, my fists knocking his head loose on its hinges. Again he collapsed, a bloody bag of a man. His eyes walled and turned up, trying to see
the animal bodies looming over him. He opened his mouth to speak and I
pointed a finger at him and said, with enough hatred in my voice to break
a back, “Don’t say a word. Don’t you dare. Not one word.”
He closed his mouth and tried to crawl away and I brought a boot down
on the back of his skull and left it there a moment, grinding his face into the
ground so that when he lifted his head the snow held a red impression of his
face. Gordon went inside and returned a moment later with a roll of duct tape
and we held Dave down and bound his wrists and ankles and threw him on
a sled and taped him to it many times over and then tied the sled to the back
of Gordon’s bike and drove at a perilous speed to Hole in the Ground.
The moon shone down and the snow glowed with pale blue light as we
smoked cigarettes, looking down into the crater, with Dave at our feet. There
was something childish about the way our breath puffed from our mouths
in tiny clouds. It was as if we were imitating choo-choo trains. And for a
moment, just a moment, we were kids again. Just a couple of stupid kids.
Gordon must have felt this, too, because he said, “My mom wouldn’t even
let me play with toy guns when I was little.” And he sighed heavily as if he
couldn’t understand how he, how we, had ended up here.
Then, with a sudden lurch, Dave began struggling and yelling at us in
a slurred voice and my face hardened with anger and I put my hands on
him and pushed him slowly to the lip of the crater and he grew silent.
For a moment I forgot myself, staring off into the dark oblivion. It was
beautiful and horrifying. “I could shove you right now,” I said. “And if I
did, you’d be dead.”
“Please don’t,” he said, his voice cracking. He began to cry. “Oh fuck.
Don’t. Please.” Hearing his great shuddering sobs didn’t bring me the satisfaction I had hoped for. If anything, I felt as I did that day, so long ago, when
we taunted him in the Mountain View Mall parking lot—shameful, false.
“Ready?” I said. “One!” I inched him a little closer to the edge. “Two!” I
moved him a little closer still and as I did I felt unwieldy, at once wild and
exhausted, my body seeming to take on another twenty, thirty, forty years.
When I finally said, “Three,” my voice was barely a whisper.
We left Dave there, sobbing at the brink of the crater. We got on our
bikes and we drove to Bend and we drove so fast I imagined catching fire
like a meteor, burning up in a flash, howling as my heat consumed me, as
we made our way to the U.S. Marine Recruiting Office where we would at
last answer the fierce alarm of war and put our pens to paper and make our
fathers proud.
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