Via Dolorosa (12 page)

“Mr. Granger insisted, Nick.”

“I won’t drink if he’s picking up the tab.”

“He’s a stubborn old bastard,” Roger said.

“Sure, he told me so himself. But don’t make me walk half a mile to find another bar, man.”

“Fair enough,” Roger said. “Just, when you see him, don’t let on that I said anything.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Roger disappeared and returned two minutes later with a short, wide glass of scotch chocked with ice.

“Thanks, Roger.”

“No problem. You want a menu?”

“No,” he said. “Not hungry.”

“Your wife meeting you?”

“She’s…I don’t know…”

“Well,” Roger said, suddenly intentionally busying himself with a dishtowel that he’d swiped up off the countertop, “let me know if you change your mind and want something to eat.”

“You’re a pusher.”

“I’m trying to make a living.”

“Sure,” Nick said. “As a pusher.”

“Can I ask you something? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“What is it?”

“What happened with you and Granger’s son?”

Something deep within him stiffened. He was abruptly face-to-face with young Myles Granger: he could see every crease in the boy’s face, every pore and pock and drying scab on his face. Unshaven…but there was not much to shave. His eyes were dead blue…and there was something of…perhaps a hint of vague accusation in them, as well.

“You really save the kid’s life?” Roger went on.

“We were in the same platoon over in Iraq. We broke off into teams and were ambushed marching into Fallujah. Our entire squad was killed. Except for Myles Granger and me. Myles, though…he was hit pretty badly. I could tell just by looking at him that there was maybe a chance he might live but that he’d lose his legs. He didn’t want to lose his legs. He screamed about his legs.” Almost reflectively, he said, “He screamed over and over about his legs.” Nick tasted his drink, and said, “He died two days later in triage.”

Roger pressed his lips together and shook his head. It was a universal reaction—what more could one do?

“He was the only guy I saw still moving around in the dirt when the smoke cleared and I could see anything at all. I made my way to him and grabbed him and carried him down an alleyway. He was screaming and wanted me to kill him, to put my gun to his head and kill him. He said he knew he was going to die and he just wanted it to hurry up, so why couldn’t I put my gun to his head and bring it to him as quickly as possible? He was trailing blood in the sand, in the dirt, and I remember the way it looked, falling there. As I carried him, my footsteps kicked fresh sand over the stains of his blood, and it was covered up so quickly, it was as if there was no blood at all, and nothing of the sort even existed.” He heard himself snort. “Funny, the stuff you remember…”

“Christ…” It seemed all Roger was capable of saying. Either that or it seemed the only appropriate thing to say. “Christ, man…”

“The attack came from a nearby mosque. They hit us hard and fast.”

“Yeah?”

“Sometime later, an F-16 came in and razed the mosque.”

“Everyone was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone but you and Myles Granger,” Roger said, and it was not a question.

“Yes,” Nick answered anyway.

“Is that how you hurt your hand?”

“Sort of. A wall fell on it.”

“How did you get out?”

“Out,” Nick nearly muttered. “Out. We got out. It’s—we got—we just got out.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Roger.

“We just got out,” Nick went on, almost not hearing the bartender.

Thankfully, Roger had no more questions. Nick did not think he could answer any more, anyway. Yes, he and Myles Granger had been in the same platoon . . . he had been platoon leader, first lieutenant, and he had walked them straight into the ambush. The shelling had started from the windows of the mosque. It shook the ground and many men rolled in the muddy ditch between the road and the giant stone wall. Some were all right. The wall was very large and looked strong but would not provide full protection against the shelling. Further ahead, pressed low in the dirt, he could see Myles Granger with his head down and his hands laced together at the back of his helmet. He looked very dark and small pressed into the dirt. He did not move. No one moved for a long while. At the time of the ambush, Nick found himself thinking of the men that had gone down ahead of them during their campaign from
Ramadi
and into the city, ambushed by soldiers pressed against the flanks of the high road, and he found he could not take his eyes away from Myles Granger. Even when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded just several yards to his left, he could not take his eyes away from the boy. Later, much later, there would be questions about who had actually instigated the shooting, and accusations that their squad had been the aggressor, had perhaps opened fire on the mosque first. Nick, who found no rationale in such thinking (what were the odds that they would have happened to open fire on a mosque which just happened to be rife with armed Muslim insurgents? He should play the lottery and find himself so lucky), had paid the accusations no mind. Anyway, nothing ever came of it. Nothing, he understood, had come of any of it. He used to think wars killed only the bad, but that quickly proved to be a child’s presumption. Then, after a time, he believed that wars killed both the good and the bad alike. But that proved wrong, too. How could he have been so ignorant? Now, he understood, there existed no good and no bad, and that they were all just lost and broken and weak and, perhaps most importantly, they were all uninformed. He, too, had been uninformed.
No one ever becomes
informed,
he told himself.
When you fight, you have no impression of the
fighting. Nothing is sustained in you. You are broken and unable to be mended…
which lessens the impression of debilitation and heightens the constant ailment of who you were for that brief period in your life, and how it never truly occurred to you that you would ever be there. War—who would ever be there?
Who ever
imagines themselves dying like a dog without purpose?

It was an uncontrollable fix, sanctioned by the propriety of youth and youth’s willingness to forfeit. Youth always forfeited, Nick had come to understand. It was akin to those fumbling, constipated
groanings
associated with adolescent sexual encounters: existing because there was a need for it to exist and, even if you did not understand it—not completely, anyway—some feral, ingrained part of you knew it to be true, and knew it to be a part of what it meant to be human. Or was that all too much? No…he did not think it was too much at all…

Abruptly, he did not want to think about Iraq, about Myles Granger. Turning away from the bar and looking behind him, he could see the night beyond the wall of windows. With the veil of trees blocking out the moon, it was the darkest night he could remember seeing. Still, in his head, he could see Myles Granger, dying Myles Granger. “Is the island still dead?”

“Dead?”

“The power,” he said. “It’s still out?”

“We’re still on the backup generators,” Roger told him, “but I came back from taking my boat up the beach about an hour ago and I could see lights further up the shore.”

He teased his drink, not truly, heartily, dedicatedly drinking it, but just tasting it enough to know what it was and to know that to truly, heartily, dedicatedly drink it would be to do so quickly, feeling the smoky burn of the scotch and hoping that he could just stop his mind from thinking for a minute. Just a minute. Was that asking too much? But he didn’t drink the scotch quickly at all, knowing damn well the scotch itself was the real tease, and that there was no magic bullet to forget and to stop thinking. Instead, he set the drink down on another handbill for the Club Potemkin that someone had left on the bar, and looked out over the restaurant. A young couple was seated at a table, the man talking severely with his dark, full eyebrows knitted together and his hands placed palms-down on the tabletop. Across from him sat a young woman. She looked diet-trim and amphetamine-nervous. Both her legs bounced beneath the table as she listened to the man, rapt, and watched him with intensity, as if to do so in any other fashion would equate to some sort of personal surrender. She had both her palms pressed flat against the knobby white bulbs of her kneecaps. She was like a bird. Sitting across from her, watching her, Nick could almost imagine her heartbeat—racing, fluttering, thumping blindly behind her narrow ribcage like a hummingbird caught in an aluminum mailbox.

“Another,” he told Roger as the bartender made a second pass to collect his empty scotch glass.

“Pushers,” Roger said, half smirking. “We get you hooked, don’t we?”

“Forget it. I changed my mind.”

“I’m just giving you a hard time. We do that in Milwaukee, too, you know…”

“Sure,” Nick said. “But I’m all right.”

“You sure, man?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“What?” Roger said. Nick’s face was telling.

“You think you can call me a cab?”

—Chapter VI—

Outside, the air was soggy, uncomfortable. The taxicab came and shuttled him through the island’s wet, sodden streets. The whole night was black. Feeling his hand throb against his leg, he could not shake the rethinking of what had happened in Iraq. It occurred to him that tonight, in front of Roger at the bar, was the first time he had told anyone what had happened in Iraq aside from his military superiors and the medical review board. The telling of it made it impossible to escape it. Granger, too, made it impossible: he was relative to what had happened, so it made sense that he could not be fully clear of it all while around Granger, and around the hotel. It had been Granger who, as a form of gratuity, had gotten Nick the job painting the mural. And that had come about because of his son, Myles, and how he, Nick, had tried to save his life.
Sure,
he thought.
I’m a regular goddamn hero. A
true American.
He had accepted the gratuity because he thought it would be disrespectful not to accept it and, anyway, his own life had been disrupted and he needed to start over somewhere, and on a new page. He and Emma quickly married and he had agreed to work at the hotel for the summer. He could paint during their honeymoon and attempt to recapture whatever the war had seen fit to terminate within him. An island getaway—how bad could that really be? At the time of his decision, however, it had not occurred to him that his stay on the island and at the hotel would not be a turning of the page; in fact, if anything, it was only managing to prolong everything he was so anxious to try and forget. Granger reminded him, the talk of Myles reminded him, the mural and his goddamn hand reminded him. There was no escape.
Again with
escape,
he thought to himself.
Good luck with all that garbage.