I didn’t sleep that night. When the alarm on my cell phone went off, I crept into her closet, flipped on the light and huddled under a row of dresses bagged in dry-cleaner’s plastic. Logan picked up before the first ring finished. All it took was the sweet sound of his trying-hard-to-be-a-tough-guy hello for my stomach to settle some and my no-sleep headache to ease off a notch or two. Still, I could hear right away the boy was in some kind of mood.
We talked a lot about the Army and how much he hated it now. When Logan first signed up, he said he was all gung-ho. But then he got over there and it stopped making the same kind of sense. Or any kind of sense at all. They stuck him on something called a forward operating base in the middle of nowhere, way out in the desert. What were they protecting? Nothing. A tiny three-house town. One of the things he noticed straightaway was the kids. They didn’t appear all that different from the ones at home. Nor did their games and basic boyish hijinks. In fact, one kid in the village near his base bore a strong and eerie resemblance to his cousin Holt. This troubled him. Logan had no stomach for shooting people that looked like his own kin. The TV had prepared him for towelheads in white, billowing dresses. Men wore pants here like everywhere else. For the most part, he found the war boring. Another surprise. Soldiering mainly consisted of cleaning things and using swear words and long strings of letters to describe normal objects.
But this all changed after the attack that killed two of his friends—Krantz and Petersen. Nothing was the same after those two died. Nothing. They were driving in a convoy through a small town near their base. Narrow, twisted streets with a thousand places for the enemy to hide. An IED bomb blew up under his friends’ vehicle and then someone tossed a bottle full of gasoline from a balcony above. He’d watched these boys burn to death from a Humvee ten feet behind them. Only one of them managed to get out. He ran across the street with his head on fire. Krantz. He was dead before he fell to the ground. And even though they’d killed the man who threw the gas bomb, the world stopped meaning what it did before. The sun didn’t even look the same to him. He got hit by shrapnel in that attack. Nothing all that bad, he said, a little cut on his shoulder. Ten stitches. He wished his body had been torn up even worse, so it’d match outside with how he felt inside. Logan told me he couldn’t concentrate on anything for the rest of his time over there. It was all he could do every morning just to pull himself out of his cot and zombie through the day. Every day, the same old shit—sand and sun and shouted orders. Logan paused for a moment after telling me all this, and then said, “Blood smells different out in the sun like that.”
I arranged Dani’s shoes according to color.
“Sometimes,” he said after this three-year pause, “the sun will shine off a windshield someplace, like the parking lot at the PX on base, and my mind will do this fucked-up thing where I see some plain Toyota as the Humvee Petersen and Krantz died in. And now, Lynn … I don’t know. I can’t even take elevators anymore. No thanks, I’ll take the stairs from now on. Does that make sense to you? Why wouldn’t I want to get stuck inside an elevator?” He let out a ragged, breathy ahhhh sound. “You must think I’m crazy.”
“Nah, man,” I said. My heart twisted and turned over on itself like a wrung-out washrag. “I don’t think nothing like that, Logan. You a had a shit-poor time over there is what I think.”
“Fucking right,” he said softly and did a pretend kind of laugh. “Once I get going, it’s just like blech.” He made a puking noise of sorts.
“If it’s got to come out, it’s got to come out. You can talk to me about that stuff all you want.” So he went ahead and told me a few more things. How he wished he had a dog—he’d always had a dog since he was a boy. How he missed eating barbeque at the restaurant in his hometown. How bummed he was about not being able to take the illustration class he’d signed up for. He explained how his fiancée broke up with him two weeks after he got back from Iraq. Wrote him a Dear John letter and tucked it under the wiper on his car. It sounded to him like she’d gotten it off the Internet someplace. How-to-break-up-with-a-vet-dot-com. She ended up marrying a guy he used to play football with in high school, one of the crew he ran with back then, drank beer with. “This is a guy who used to yell and scream about how he wanted to kill him a whole shitload of towelheads. Course, he never signed up for shit.” The news about the wedding hit Logan in the head like a big, pointy rock. His exact words. “They even had the nerve to send me an invitation. That’s why I went out there with the bat. Left a surprise for them in the parking lot.”
“A bat?”
“It was nothing,” he said. “Just being stupid. I didn’t hurt anybody. I thought about smashing out the headlights on their limo. I couldn’t even do that. I left the bat on the hood and went home.”
We had another one of those long, uncomfortable moments of silence. When this kind of awkward pause happened at home, my mom would say, “Somewhere, an idiot has been born.” But I didn’t know him well enough yet to make a joke like that. Finally, he said, “So, about that picnic?” We made plans to meet that Friday at Guido Gardens, a religious park at the edge of town, and go out into the country somewhere nice for the picnic. I could have kept listening to him for hours, but Dani’s mom started moving around upstairs and I got nervous and told him I had to go.
I checked on Dani, who was still asleep. Her fight with Hazel had left her with a big black eye and a bite mark on her arm that looked like a Doberman had been gnawing on her. Maybe she could wear a long-sleeved shirt, but her eye was a mess no amount of makeup was going to hide. And you can’t wear sunglasses at breakfast unless you play in a rock band. She looked worse than awful—like a halfway rotted eggplant. When her mom saw that, she’d be grounded for the rest of her life.
I didn’t bother leaving a note.