“You heard from Fred at all?” the supervisor asked me when I came to work one afternoon.
“We were drinking at The Brickyard last night.”
“Was he so shit-faced he wouldn’t be able to make it out of bed for his noon shift?”
“No, he wasn’t that bad.”
“Well, he’s on the schedule and he’s not answering his phone. Can you and Tom swing by there and shake his ass out of bed?”
I couldn’t say it wasn’t like Fred to sleep past his shift. He’d done it many times in the past. When it came to drinking, he didn’t have the shutoff valve that most of us had. Me, I’d reach a point my body would signal my brain, woo partner, one more and you will have a nasty hangover in the morning, one more past that and you will be puking, that’s for certain, so shut it down now. Three sips max and you are done. That is not to say there weren’t occasions where I overrode that voice, when I said, dude, I know, but in my own lack of self-esteem way, I desire both the hangover and the puking to punish my no good puny self, and if you get hurt in the barrage, well, I’m sorry, that’s just collateral damage.
“You go in and check on him,” Tom said, holding his cell phone away from his mouth for a moment. He was talking to another one of his girlfriends. He was trying to explain to her why he didn’t see her last night like he had promised, but was hoping to see her tonight. This after just talking to another girlfriend telling her what a great night he had last night, but how he couldn’t see her tonight like he had promised.
Fred lived in a room over the garage of his grandmother’s house. His parents had divorced when he was ten and neither of them wanted him or his brother. His grandmother had her own business selling insurance and had at first worked out of her house. By the time Fred was in high school, her business had really picked up and she had her own office on Main Street, and wasn’t around much, but she had always been nice to me.
Fred’s car was in the drive. I walked up the outside stairs and knocked on the door. When no one came, I looked in the window. I could see him sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. I knocked again. He didn’t move. The TV was on. “Fred, hey, open up! It’s me. You’re on the schedule. Open up. What’s going on?” I was gripped briefly by panic. I tried the door. It was unlocked. “Fred! Fred?”
The room was trashed. The wall was punched-in in several places, the stereo speakers toppled. A broken chair, a smashed mirror. There was a large bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him, but it had hardly been opened. A shot glass was full in front of him.
“Fred, are you okay? What happened, man?”
He looked up at me then. His eyes were red. He looked like he’d been through the wringer and back again. On his face was a look of complete devastation.
“Fred, what happened? What’s wrong?”
He didn’t say anything. He just sobbed.
I finally got the story out of him. He’d found out last night when he’d come home. His brother had been badly injured when his Humvee was blown up by a roadside bomb. His brother was still alive, but in a coma. He’d lost both his legs and was being evacuated to a medical hospital in Germany.
I called dispatch and had them take us offline for a while, and then I helped Fred get a hold of his grandmother in New Orleans where she was at a convention, and then got him a plane ticket to Germany. I promised I’d come back in a few hours and take him to the airport.
When I came back out, Tom was still on the phone to a girlfriend. “I suppose you wiped his butt up too?” he said.
“Fuck you,” I said. “We’re heading in.”
I wouldn’t tell him why. We got back to the base, I talked to the supervisor, then punched out. I picked Fred up, drove him to the airport and waited with him until he went through the gate. Before he left, I gave him four hundred of the bucks I taken from the hospital president. I shoved it in his pocket. “You’re a good brother, Fred. Do what you have to do.”