I remember him saying, after you told us about your Catastrophe Theory, “Well, if that’s true, then by now life would be nothing but one continuous Charlie Foxtrot.”
“Which it is, to an extent,” you told him. “But bear in mind that every individual fuckup requires energy, negative energy. And every once in a while the energy dissipates to the point that there’s a nice little lull in the action. Plus,” you said, “there’s always a degree of uncertainty about how energy and time will react with one another. Then throw into that uncertainty the person or persons involved in the fuckup, and the degree of unpredictability escalates beyond any degree of certainty whatsoever.”
Hey, I can almost hear you laughing right now. Can hear you asking me, “You actually remember all that bullshit?” It’s funny but I do. I think I’ve always known I’m not one of the sharpest tools in the shed, which is why I always pay special attention when somebody smarter than me has something to say. And you—I always idolized you in a way. One tour under your belt already, those three stripes on your sleeve. Plus that way you had of never getting rattled, that was the most amazing thing of all to me.
Anyway, back to your Catastrophe Theory. Most of us were laughing our asses off, because if there was any sense to what you were saying, it was sailing away about six feet over our heads. Only Hetrick was taking it seriously. “There’s a name for that kind of thinking,” he said. “It’s called total bullshit.”
“Actually,” you told him, never even cracking a smile, “it’s called quantum physics. If you spent a little more time reading, and a lot less time pounding your pud over that cheerleader back in Hickory who has probably sucked off the entire football team by now, you might actually learn a little something about how reality works. There’s a lot more to it than an illiterate hillbilly who is only good at converting oxygen to carbon dioxide can even imagine.”
I remember feeling a little bit sorry for Hetrick after that, because he did seem to have a fairly limited outlook on life. Personally, I was always interested in your ideas, even when I didn’t understand them. I mean I listened hard to everything you told us, not only because you were my Squad Leader and had a lot more experience than the rest of us, but also because, let’s face it, you were obviously a lot smarter than all of us put together. The first time I heard you talk, I thought to myself, pay attention to this guy, and maybe you can learn a thing or two.
And son of a gun if most of the things you said back then haven’t begun to make more sense to me. Your Catastrophe Theory, for example. I know that logically it makes no sense to think that the Chinese buying out the plant and making my job evaporate had anything to do with me stopping to help that girl, but actually it does. I wouldn’t even have seen that girl if I hadn’t been so upset that I jumped on my bike without putting on my rain gear first, and if I had put on my rain gear I wouldn’t have been so impatient to get out of the rain, and I wouldn’t have taken the back way home. And that led to me taking the money. And who’s to say that my worry and negative energy over taking it didn’t somehow cause Dani’s strep throat and even attract Cindy’s father, Mr. Negative Energy Himself, back into her life?
If I wanted to I could even take the string of causes back even further, and tie in all the little things that did or didn’t happen before I carried that naked girl into her house. If my memory was good enough, I could probably take it all the way back through my mother’s tumble down the basement stairs and before that to the man who shot his seed into her and then was never heard from again.
Gee would probably say you could take it all the way back to that apple in the Garden of Eden if you wanted to. And you would probably have said, Why stop there? Why not take it back to the darkness and the void, back to Genesis verse 1. That’s the place to look for answers, you would say. That’s the place to stand there in the nothingness and scream at the top of your lungs, What the hell were you thinking?
Spending the morning alone with my girls, something I seldom get a chance to do, it was tough to keep my mind off the money. Truth is, it was impossible to keep my mind off the money. I’d watch little Emma in there in our blanket tent pretending to see polar bears and Indians out in the living room, or I’d listen to Dani pretending we were on the Survivorman TV show and having to roast lizards and bats over the fire for dinner, and how could I not think to myself how great it would be if I had the money to take them on a real camping trip somewhere? Take them out West, for example, and let them gawk at the Grand Canyon and bug out their little eyes at the sight of a real mountain or an elk or a herd of wild horses?
And then I would think, you do have the money, stupid. You have the money to take them anywhere you want.
And then I’d push that thought aside for a while. But sooner or later, it always came slinking back, whispering its poison.
I was half-asleep on the couch, and the girls were asleep in the tent, when I heard what sounded like a thump at the back door. The only people who use the back door are a couple of neighbors. Cindy and the girls and me do the same thing when we go to their houses, I’m not sure why. It seems less formal, I guess, than to knock at their front doors the way a stranger would.
So there’s this loud knock on the back door, and I sit up with a jerk, and of course, as paranoid as I am, my first thought is that it’s the druggies coming to get their money back. I don’t even know who they are, what they look like, how many of them there are, nothing. But I freeze, man. I just sit there like a deer in the headlights.
Then there’s a second knock, even louder, and I get up and go creeping out into the kitchen, thinking I’ll take a quick peek out the pantry door and if I don’t like what I see I’ll make a mad dash to the garage and grab the revolver from my saddlebag. I mean I’m ready to do it. I’ve got two little girls asleep in their tent. I’ll do whatever I have to do.
But a glance out the glass in the pantry door is all I need. It’s Janice standing out there, Cindy’s mother. Donnie’s standing behind Janice and smoking a cigarette, looking fairly pleased with himself, like he sold some schmuck a used car for twice its actual value. Janice is smiling too, but with a lot less conviction than Donnie. She’s wearing way too much makeup, but not enough to hide that sort of dazed and rumpled look she always has. Pops would say she looks like she’s been rode hard and put away wet.
I open the door a crack and say to Donnie, “You want to blow that smoke away from the door?”
Janice turns to him and says, “Put it out, Donnie, okay?” He gives me a big grin, sucks in another lungful, drops the butt down to the cement slab and grinds it out with his foot. Then he turns away from me and blows the smoke out his mouth.
Janice says, “We came to check on the girls, honey. How are my babies doing?”