He shredded his napkin and started laying pieces out on the counter as if he were trying to establish some real battle lines. I shook my head at Gerri as she started toward us.
“Is that what happened on the road to Kufah?” I asked.
“Chad couldn’t say, even at the VA when we were with one of those counselors. We got five sessions! Five sessions to undo five years of war!” Radke snorted in derision. “Chad lost his whole squad. That’s all he ever said, not any details about how it happened. You know what that’s like? Guys you been eating and sleeping with, suddenly they’re lying dead all around you. They sent him home after that for four months, then he had to redeploy. And he was fine, he said, as long as he was over there. But once he got discharged, once he got home, he couldn’t take being around civilians. No one here gives a rat’s ass about what we went through. It’s hell to be there, to be going through it. But it’s a hundred—no, a million—times worse to be here where no one cares.
“‘I lost my whole squad on the road to Kufah,’” he mimicked in a savage voice. “‘Bummer, man. But what about American Idol?’ And the women are worse!”
“How’d you end up at Club Gouge?”
He gave me a sidelong look, checking me for signs of shockability or maybe prudery. “We heard this gal sits naked on a stage. And the drawings . . . It was something to do.”
I’d printed out a copy of Alexandra Guaman’s yearbook photo. I pulled it out and showed it to Radke.
“She was Nadia Guaman’s sister and she was killed in Iraq. She wasn’t with the Army, though—she worked for one of the private security firms. Hers is the face that Nadia kept painting on the Body Artist. I wondered if Chad knew Alexandra Guaman in Iraq.”
Radke shook his head. “He never said. It’s like I told you, it’s a big country. And it’s not just we’re a big Army, but the contractors . . . You know they have more contractors than Uncle Sam’s soldiers over there? Some guy, he said, ‘Iraq isn’t the war of the willing, it’s the war of the billing.’ And until you’ve seen it, you don’t get it! The contractors, they’re everywhere, building crappy housing for us, good shit for themselves. They’re hustling a buck at the PX; they’re taking convoys around. We’re busting our asses for base pay, and we have to protect the contractors, who are drawing double overtime doing less work than we are!”
His voice was starting to rise again so I broke in. “What would Chad say after you left Club Gouge if he never said whether he knew Alexandra or Nadia Guaman?”
“We’d come here—here to Plotzky’s, I mean—a lot of times. Like, the night that gal got shot, we were here, right on these stools, watching the Hawks. Marty, one of our crowd who we met at the VA, you know, he’d say to Chad, ‘Why are you letting that broad get under your skin? Did she ditch you or something?’ But Chad, he’d just say, ‘She’s rubbing my face in it.’”
“Rubbing his face in what happened on the road to Kufah or in a busted relationship?”
Tim started peeling the label from one of his empties. “If I had to guess, I’d guess the road to Kufah just because—if some girl is riding you, she can make you madder than hell but she’s not what’s giving you flashbacks. Maybe Chad wrote about her on his blog. He kept one—a lot of guys did . . . do—where they write pretty much everything. It’s not just that it passes the time, but it makes you think that somewhere someone cares if you live or die.”
Chad’s blog, of course, I should have been reading that already. Maybe John Vishneski had been right to suggest I was incompetent. Despite my brave words, I was being a slow-footed, clumsy seeker, something like a two-toed sloth crashing through a jungle. I was making it easy for a skilled hider to stay twenty steps ahead of me.
“The night before Nadia died, when Chad confronted her in the parking lot, you came out and brought him back to the club. He had some kind of dark object, looked like a cloth about yea big.” I sketched the shape in the air. “Did he show you that? Do you have any idea what it could be?”
Tim shook his head. “A dark cloth about eight or ten inches wide? Could it have been, like, a scarf folded into a square? Maybe he thought she’d knitted it for him.”
That hadn’t occurred to me. Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is, Chad had yelled. Maybe it had been something some woman mailed him. Maybe he thought Nadia had been a secret correspondent sending him presents while he was in the desert. Yet another unprovable idea. It seemed impossible to get real information about anything or anyone connected with Nadia and Chad.
I tried not to let the weight of impossibility drag me down. I thanked Tim and signaled Gerri for the check. Tim gave me the names and numbers of the three other guys in his and Chad’s band of post-Iraq brothers, as well as the name of their counselor at the VA. Chad might have told her something privately that he hadn’t felt able to say in front of the group.
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