These Heroic, Happy Dead

TO THE LAKE

Although Bill had been a full-bird colonel in the United States Army, there was only one commander in the family. Every time I called I could hear her evil whispers poisoning Bill’s ear. “Again?” that woman, Caroline, would ask. Then the sliding door would whoosh open, slam shut—a retreat to the deck—and Bill would say, “Just take it easy” or “You get to a meeting today?” Bill out there in the snow, looking in at the females, hand raised in a situation-under-control-type gesture.

It was going on a month that Lilly had been staying with her parents, at their lake house in Vermont. She’d left after the window broke—after I punched the window. It had been a bad scene: ambulances and police, concerned neighbors milling in their robes. I let her go. I knew that Caroline—who I’m sure to this day is convinced that I laid hands on Lilly—would do her worst to turn her. But I had faith in the colonel. Bill was a peacetime soldier—his twenty had fallen smack-dab in the sweet spot between Vietnam and Desert Storm—and in his mind, somehow, that was a debt he’d never quite repay.

There was no cell service at the lake house; every time I called the landline, Bill picked up, said Lilly wasn’t ready to talk. Finally, I told him I’d quit drinking and joined a support group with the VA.

“So you’re not drunk right now?” Bill said.

“I’m tired. The group meets early.”

Bill promised to relay the news. When I called the next day, he told me, “Lilly’s delighted you’re doing that for yourself.”

“I’m doing it for her.”

“Still.”

“Still, you can tell her to come home now. It’s safe.”

“That’s Lilly’s decision, son.”

I allowed myself a swallow from my favorite coffee mug. It was my favorite because it angled out to a wide base that made it difficult to knock over, because there was often vodka in it instead of coffee, and because the wide base meant that the more you drank, the harder it became to reach the bottom.

“Some colonel,” I said.

A few days later, Bill said, “I think I’m gonna have to put an end to this.”

“End to what?”

“These talks. You calling here every night.” There was a pause, and then Bill added, “Your belligerence. Your obsession.”
“Let me talk to Lilly.”
“She’s afraid of you, son.”
“Because of the window incident?”
“Because of the window incident?” “The window incident? The window incident? What she says, the window incident was the least of it. Did you tell her she made you want to kill things? ‘Someday, Lilly, you’re gonna make me kill something.’ You never said that?”
“There was a context.”
Bill sighed. “Stick with those meetings.”

I called again—every few minutes, then every minute—but he wouldn’t answer. In the end, Bill was the same as Lilly, same as everyone. People who did not respect the covenant of human relationships. People who believed you could just hang up, walk out. When the Stolichnaya ran dry, I fetched my Bushmaster and a box of ammo, stowed them behind the bench seat of my truck, and headed north.

It was blizzarding. Not far over the Vermont line the big flakes rushed the beams like I was at warp speed and they were star tracers in a wormhole through the galaxies. At the top of a high pass I spotted a pair of hazards blinking on the shoulder. They belonged to one of those vehicles between a station wagon and a minivan. Two sets of expensive-looking skis were clamped into the racks; the dome light haloed a man and a woman. I watched them watch me stagger through the snow. The woman said something to the man, and the man, still watching me, said something back. At first I didn’t understand. Then I glimpsed my reflection in the paint of that car—the neck tattoo and face scar, that problem with my eyes. I motioned for the man to roll down his window.


“You OK, buddy?” he said.

He wore a turtleneck sweater and snow pants, and the woman, she had on something zippered and moisture-wicking. The man had only rolled down the window an inch or two; all the doors were locked—I caught the woman checking. She squeezed her hands tight between her thighs.

“I’m OK,” I said. “Are you OK?”
“Us?” said the man. “We’re OK, yeah.”
He seemed to think it was my turn to talk. Eventually, he told me, “We’re just waiting on the plows.”
“Where you headed?”
“Nowhere,” said the woman.
The man laughed. “Road’s too slick to get down, is what she means.”
“Think so?”
“I wouldn’t try it.”

I regarded the far end of the pass, where the road that had brought us all up the mountain dropped down its back side. “Is that just you, though?”
The man frowned. “It’s treacherous. Every year, some joker—”
“Nathan,” the woman said.
The man turned to her, turned back to me.
“But hey,” he said, “you be my guest.”

Once, during an ambush in Kunar, I saw a private stooping to pick spent casings out of the dirt and put them in his pocket—proof positive of the old maxim “You fight how you train.” Muscle memory, however, has its limits, and some knowledge defies inculcation. For instance, another maxim: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” That is as true, when you are all keyed up, as it is unlikely to be remembered.

I was halfway to the valley floor when my truck went sailing like a ship without a keel. The last thing I recall is a wall of white ice that looked like molten crystal—that euphoric breath before the boom, when your asshole puckers and you wait.

I woke to a teenager Velcroing a device around my neck. He was concentrating with his entire face. His mouth was closed; a rim of tongue protruded like a middle lip.

“He’s conscious!” screamed the boy.

I pushed him off and climbed out of the cab. Up on the road, silhouettes stood among a fleet of four-wheel-drive SUVs, tall radio antennas and colored lights atop their roofs. The teenager was sprawled in the snow. “Just take it easy,” he said.
“I need a tow truck.”

One of the silhouettes stepped forward. He wore a winter hat with the earflaps down, a heavy coat with a star-shaped badge. A deputy badge.

“Only place that truck’s getting towed to is the wrecking yard,” he said.
I looked. The front end was crumpled against the escarpment and the windshield sagged on the dash like a limp sheet of Saran Wrap.
“You’re lucky someone happened by,” said the deputy. He was taking stock—neck tattoo, face scar, eyes—and not feeling reassured.
“Who?” I said.
“Called it in? Couple on a ski trip.” The deputy squinted at me, like I was small or far away. “Said they saw you on the pass.”

The teenager was proffering the neck brace—real cautious, at a creep, like he was fixing to snare a rabid dog.
“Is that really necessary, Mitch?” asked the deputy.
The question seemed to wound the boy. “Depends,” he said. “If you mean is it mandated by the parameters and protocols of the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians, then yes—yes, Dep, it’s really necessary.”
“Just give us a minute, huh?”
After Mitch had sort of oozed away, the deputy explained, “First responders.”
“Sure,” I said.
“You mind?” Without waiting for an answer, he unholstered a Maglite and aimed it in my truck. “Gotta ask,” he said, craning to see, working the beam. “What were you doing out here, conditions so bad?”
“I’m going to Lake Champlain.”
“Got people up there?”
“Yes.”

What they say about the way a man stabs versus the way a woman stabs—how he holds the knife high, like a spyglass, whereas she holds it low, like a spatula? Same goes for flashlights, I would argue. There are aberrations, of course, and the deputy was one. He held his like a woman.

“Dep?” came a plaintive voice from the road—Mitch. “Can I at least assess the patient? At least got to assess, that’s bare minimum.”

I trudged over to the SUVs and sat on a tailgate. Mitch produced a stethoscope and requested that I lift my shirt.

“Damn,” another responder, a Mitch-like slob with a chin beard, commented.

Except for the one on my neck, it was all heavy, martial imagery. Intense, I’d been told.
Also: gross.

Mitch was pressing the cold diaphragm against my back—reading the names, probably, on the tombstones there—when the deputy let out a whistle. He’d opened the door of my truck and was halfway in the cab, foot in the air. When he emerged he had the AR in his hand.
“Hello,” Chin Beard said.
“That a Bushmaster?” asked Mitch.
“You betcha.” The deputy raised it to a firing position, nestling the butt stock in his shoulder. “Seen one like it at the Brattleboro show.”
“Brent has one,” Chin Beard said.
“Like hell he does,” said Mitch.
“He has one, Mitch.”
“Brent?”
“Fellas,” the deputy said.

He brought the weapon to one of the SUVs and laid it across the seat like it was a napping babe. “Relax, son,” he told me. “You’re in Vermont.”

Later, though, after Mitch had completed his assessment and I’d signed a paper refusing medical assistance and we were all preparing to continue down the mountain, the deputy, as if he’d just remembered and was embarrassed to have to bring it up, said, “Oh, yeah. One thing. Those folks who called it in—the skiers? They mentioned that when they saw you on the pass . . . well, they seemed to think you might’ve had a few. Anything to that?”