Since Frank wouldn’t let me smoke on his jet, I sucked a few Marlboros down on the tarmac and then slapped the nicotine patch he gave me onto my bicep.
The pilots were ex-military, so I knew we were okay there, even though they were fucking squids, meaning navy. I busted their balls a little, and they talked shit against the army too, but it was all good, because we weren’t touchy liberals who couldn’t stand to have their balls busted for any reason at all. The military had made us mentally stronger than that. If you can’t stand a little name-calling, you sure as hell aren’t going to hold up under fire, and don’t you forget it.
Because he’s a spoiled billionaire, Frank has a fucking bed in his jet. Once we were in the air, he said he hadn’t gotten much sleep since I last saw him—which meant he had been having sex with a thirty-year-old model nonstop, so don’t go feeling too bad for him—and then he retired to his “private chamber.”
I sipped my coffee and looked out at the clouds and laughed. Frank was getting old. Time was, he could grind a model mistress all night long and still have enough energy left over to be a real man in the morning. Now he needed to take naps when he was with his buddies, just so his ability to model-fuck would not decline.
I’d never want to date a woman forty years younger than me because I’m still in love with Jessica, but to each his own.
Maybe you are feeling bad for Frank’s wife. If you met her even once, you wouldn’t. That bitch has spent millions and millions of dollars on lady hats alone. She has a whole wing of their mansion dedicated to nothing but lady hats. She has done absolutely nothing for the past three decades except shop for lady hats. She could feed any country in Africa for a year just by selling her lady-hat collection. So it is what it is.
As we flew west, I palmed my father’s and my lucky dog tags, which always make me feel calm when I’m traveling by air. I’d never fly without them. And I looked down at the vast land I had fought to defend from the threat of communism and little yellow bastards and felt a small amount of pride.
I saw farms and mountains and rivers and cities and clouds and communities, which all contained millions of unseen American lives—people like Hank and Ella and Sue and Big T and Timmy and Johnny, just trying to get through ninety or so years without fucking up too badly, maybe hoping for a few laughs along the way and the freedoms and liberties necessary to get the job done.
I’ve always hated the Dallas Cowgirls football team because they have won so many Super Bowls while my Eagles have never hoisted a Super Bowl trophy high in the air, so it was easy to see why the rest of the world hated America, even as they tried so desperately to break through our borders to become part of us. Everyone is jealous of a winner, and America is the biggest winner of all. Why were we all lucky enough to be born here, instead of some other shithole country? That was one of God’s great mysteries, I guessed, and then thought I’d ask God directly if He let me the fuck into heaven, which wasn’t likely, to say the least.
Twenty or so minutes before we landed, Frank emerged from his private room, poured himself a cup of coffee, and sat in the lounge chair across from me. He asked if I wanted him to buy me a suit, and I said that I preferred camouflage while my brain healed. “I’ve always been toughest in my army-issued clothing,” I explained.
“You were a hard-ass banker for decades. You wore a suit and tie every day back then,” Frank said. “Hell, you were the toughest man in a suit I ever met.”
“That was before this,” I said, and pointed to the scar on my head.
Frank nodded. He always wore a suit and tie—that was his uniform. Even if we went to the Phillies game in the middle of the summer he wore a suit, and I respected that. But he’d never traded bullets with gooks in the jungle, and the government had never cracked open his skull either.
I asked him if he still thought this Indian business was a good idea, and he said it was.
To protect the innocent, I’m not going to say exactly where we landed, but we caught a few amazing views of mountains on the way down, and then we were on another tarmac.
I ripped off the nicotine patch and sucked down a few Marlboros before we hopped into another limousine and drove off to a mountain lodge hotel of sorts that sat proudly on a few acres of prime American real estate.
Lots of animal heads hung on the walls, and the lobby fireplace was big enough to fit Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and then some, for those of you future readers who have actually read the Bible. Frank had booked us into a huge suite with a hot tub in the living room that had a glass ceiling over it so that we could look up at the stars. Which is exactly what we did, with Cuban cigars hanging out of our mouths, after we ate a big steak dinner made from cows that had lived less than ten miles away. I ate my steak under a pair of bull horns hung on the wall behind me. Classic Americana. It was a nice place, and I had to laugh at how far I had come from eating snakes and sleeping in fucking trees.
Damn right, America is a good place to live if you’re hardworking and realistic about the world.
It is not gay to be naked and alone in a hot tub with your best man friend, provided that you are smoking cigars and no part of your body touches his at any point, and so we made sure to stay on opposite sides, getting in and out at different times so our white asses wouldn’t accidentally bump together when they were all hot and slippery. The hotel had these thick bathrobes that were like wearing the best blanket you have ever encountered, and so we put those on and finished the cigars on the couch while Frank sipped some sort of Scotch that probably cost per glass more than you will net in six months.
Frank said that the next day was going to be a good one for me, and I said that there was a good chance the big Indian might try to scalp me after all, and I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions if I had to defend myself.
Frank frowned and said, “Are you the same scared kid you were in the jungle fifty years ago?”
I told him I was never fucking scared, and that’s when he said the point was that we had changed, which meant that Fire Bear had surely changed too.