"I hope you feel bad. I'm missing class for this."
He shudders violently. I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to say right now. I mean, please don't die? What if it has the opposite effect of don’t jinx me? I don't want to put him on a f*ck
ing speed pass to heaven. Or hell. Hell might be where we're all headed.
We don't have a lot of stories about where soldiers of bullshit wars go when they die.
We know where the heroes go. But we're not heroes.
"Where do you suppose we go when we die?" I ask him. "I mean, we're not exactly modern-day heroes. We didn't fight the good fight. We weren't fighting the Nazis or liberating France." He's shivering again. f*ck
. "I mean, the guys in the Greatest Generation get a speed pass straight to Saint Peter, right? But what about us? I mean, we don't have a noble cause." I grip him tighter. Clearly I'm making both of us feel a hell of a lot worse.
Counselor material, I am not. Where's Eli when I need him?
He makes another noise and this sounds vaguely like an attempt at speech.
I hug him tighter as a violent convulsion steals his ability to function. "Ah f*ck
, man. Stay with me."
Sirens and flashing lights announce the arrival of the paramedics.
I tell them what I know. Show them the bottles of alcohol he consumed.
I stand on his front step and watch them drive away.
Another payment to the butcher's bill.
Chapter 24
Josh
They won't let either of us back because we're not family. And no amount of lying will convince the nurse to tell us how he's doing. Eli has called in a favor with a friend who knows a guy on the hospital board.
And so now, we wait.
The waiting room at the university hospital is a depressing place. There's a young mom trying to get her toddler to stop screaming. His back is arched and his face is bunched up, his little lungs pushing all of his rage and fury out into the world.
"I know how he feels."
I glance over at Eli's quiet remark. "Caleb had two empty fifths at his apartment."
"I know. I was trying to convince him to go to a group session at the hospital."
I'm used to feeling this useless.
Eli is not.
The big man is hunched over, his shoulders bent, his fists knotted together and pressed to his mouth.
"If you knew he had a problem, why did you serve him?"
"Because at least if he’s drinking at my bar, I can keep an eye on him," he says. "What a f*ck
ing disaster."
I lean back in my chair.
And we wait.
The hours tick by.
"Does he have any family?" Eli asks after a while.
"Not that I have contact info for."
The war at home isn't fought only by soldiers. Guess this is part of it. The process of coming home.
"I thought we were supposed to win if we made it home." The words hurt. They don't even try to conceal the pain, the lies we were told. All the pictures of the happy couples, all the smiles, all the support, the troops signs and posters and military discounts.
They're a lie. A f*ck
ing lie. All of it.
"We did win."
His response is not what I'm expecting.
I can't help thinking of my limp dick, the useless f*ck
ing skin between my legs. And how f*ck
ed up that the only way it appears to want to work is if I jerk off to a war film.
What the f*ck
is wrong with me?
"How do you figure?"
He hesitates a long moment. "We're alive. We came home. And I f*ck
ing promise you that every Gold Star family would give anything to have their loved one back."
I sniff, trying to swallow the bitterness that threatens to choke me. "So why doesn't it feel like a victory?"
He grips my shoulder. "Because we're sitting in an emergency room, hoping one of our buddies doesn’t die from alcohol poisoning. There's no commander to hand this off to, no work to try and forget about it at." He pauses, his eyes dark, his mouth pressed into a hard flat line beneath the scruff on his jaw. "But I wouldn't trade it, any of it, even if it meant I wasn't sitting here right now."
"You have no regrets? Nothing you'd change?" My shame, the dark and twisted helplessness, is back.
Eli is as calm and steady as he's always been since I've known him. "There are different choices I wish I'd made but I can't change them."
I haven't had that certainty of purpose since before I actually encountered my first firefight. Everything since then has been vague, well inside the moral grey area that exists in war.
The nurse comes out and takes the poor mom and her screaming toddler to the back. The immediate sense of relief from the people around us is palpable.
"Hope they get him taken care of," I mumble. I can't imagine what she's going through right now. My own heart relaxes a little bit when he's no longer screaming in the waiting room, but it's not from annoyance.
No, I've heard screams like that before.
And holy f*ck
, I am not going down that path of memory lane. Not tonight, not ever again.