That August was as hot as Thad ever remembered a summer in Jackson County. Most of the houses he and Aiden stripped for copper were bank owned, had been closed off and powerless for months, some even years, so that the only thing the homes seemed fit for anymore was to trap heat like ovens. Beads of sweat blistered Thad’s forehead and washed over his face, dripped from his chin onto the plywood subfloor. Aiden sweated just the same, and it seemed to bog him down, his toil sluggish and halfhearted. But Thad worked through the heat and the pain with his mind someplace else entirely.
Thad thought about the first few months after he’d come home.The place where he’d grown up didn’t seem real anymore. Everything from before was now a production in which he was an actor stumbling for lines that he simply couldn’t remember. Even Aiden was unfamiliar. Things had changed, and rather than bear it, Thad loaded up his ALICE pack, laced his boots, and headed off into country that felt more like the one from which he’d just returned.
He went into the gorge where there was nothing more than rocks, trees, and sky. On a shallow ledge cut into the hillside, he hung a tarp on paracord stretched between trees to make camp. The river offered water and food, but even more so, its current seemed to fill some hole inside of him. At night, that place was so dark that he could lie on his back and see nothing but stars, a place so absent of light that even the blue-green nebulas clouding the heavens could be seen hanging like smoke left by fireworks. The place was quiet, and when Thad sat completely still he could decipher the subtleties in how the silence broke: the rustle of a sparrow in the leaf litter versus a chipmunk burrowing, the difference between a deer and a bear brushing through a copse of laurel, the sound of animals that moved on four legs from those who moved on two. And that last one was why he felt at ease there, because no matter how many sounds he heard, he almost never heard the footsteps of men.
It was winter when Thad finally came out of the woods dirtied and unshaven. Aiden looked at Thad as if he had lost his mind, but what Aiden couldn’t understand was that the place from where Thad emerged felt more real than home. Combat had made him forget the before, and there was nothing that mattered afterward. There was only war. Going to the woods had rebuilt some sort of reality, and now that the division between those two places was constructed, Thad could start to separate war from home.
He focused on the work at hand and took a long pull from the bottle of whiskey that was now half-gone. They wore headlamps that Aiden had stolen from Walmart, the type hunters strap to their foreheads to follow blood trails after sundown. Thad grabbed a pair of channel locks from the plywood floor and moved the headlamp onto the top of his head so that he could wipe the sweat from his brow. His back was killing him, it was always killing him, but he said nothing of it. He just kept his head down and worked.
He watched Aiden uncoil a thick tangle of wires wadded in the outlet box. The house was new construction that had been abandoned. The drywall wasn’t even up, so stripping the wire was a piece of cake. Aiden straightened the wires and yanked twice, and they pulled free. Thad plucked U-nails out of the framing, worked his way from top to bottom until each line was freed and the wires piled in the sawdust on the floor. A thought came to him that made him laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Aiden asked.
Thad looked over at Aiden, saw how the years had stretched the rangy boy he’d grown up with into a man. “Nothing,” he said. Then a few moments passed between them with both turning back to their work before Thad couldn’t hold it in.
“What the hell’s so funny?”
“I was thinking about that time when you and me broke into Mama’s house and super-glued her old man’s balls to the bed.” Thad laughed. “You remember that?”
“I remember.” Aiden stopped what he was doing and smiled.
“You remember when she tore ass down to the trailer screaming about how that son of a bitch got out of bed that morning and the sheets came with him and his feet got all tangled up and he damn near ripped his own balls off?”
“We almost castrated him.”
They both broke into hysterics and the sound carried all around the empty house, the copper wire balled up like spaghetti at their feet. Thad’s headlamp beamed into Aiden’s eyes, his long, narrow face in spotlight. For a second or two, Thad forgot how hard life had become and the two of them just joked back and forth like children.
“I swear I thought that old man was going to kill us in our sleep,” Aiden said.
“He couldn’t have killed us if he’d tried.” Thad took another sip of whiskey and passed the bottle to Aiden. Right about the time Aiden turned the bottle up to his lips, Thad added, “Son of a bitch ain’t have the balls.”
Bubbles gurgled deep into the bottle as Aiden busted so hard that the whiskey shot out of his nose and sprayed from his lips. He coughed and laughed, hollering, “Goddamn! Look what you’ve done,” and Thad keeled over.
The two stripped the house and Thad went back to dreaming. They worked until there were bird nests of wire bunched along every wall, worked until their bodies were sticky and spent. Aiden had his hands inside his overalls and stood in the open doorway. Moonlight cast his lanky shadow across the plywood floor. He mashed a mess of wire flat as he could with his boots, picked up the pile, and hugged it to his chest. Thad gathered a load of his own, the snipped ends digging into his skin like briars. Five trips and they’d carried all the wire out of the house. They’d already pulled the main line and the coil from the air unit outside, and the house was plumbed with PEX, so there was no need to strip that. They were out of that place in a jiffy. Not even midnight yet. New houses were always a piece of cake.
• • •
THAD’S TRAILER SAT ON a ridgeline off Charleys Creek above Balsam Lake. When winter left the trees naked, he could make out the water in the valley if there wasn’t any fog. But right now it was summer and he couldn’t see the lake at all.
Up the hill, Thad’s mother, April, lived alone. The property had belonged to George Trantham, a man twice her age, who drank heavily and used fists rather than words. When the old man finally kicked the bucket, Thad and Aiden were in high school, and April inherited six acres, a run-down house, and a single-wide with only a few bent scraps of aluminum still serving as a skirt.
Thad believed the cancer that killed George Trantham came from all the radio waves whizzing about the property. Trantham leased a half acre to the federal government way back when and they built a radio tower halfway to heaven that transmitted everything from airplane chatter to WGRC radio. On Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings, Thad and Aiden could hear the fire-and-brimstone swindlings of Wesley Browne, a snake-oil-sermon evangelical from Richmond, Kentucky, more clearly from their front porch than from the front pew of the church. Whether or not they’d kill off from cancer in the long run was unknown, but what remained certain was April took in seven hundred fifty dollars per month on the lease like clockwork.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The moon spotlighted everything on the mountain. Whether it was stars or the moon or people in town, everything always seemed to look down on them. Thad sat in a ratty recliner that reeked of mildew long before he moved the chair onto the porch. Aiden was sitting on the edge of the top step. A small radio on the railing between them blared bluegrass being recorded live from some greasy spoon in Nashville.
“I ever tell you about that time me and a couple of boys at basic went to see Jason Isbell and the 400 play at some dive in Wilmington?” Thad hunched out from the recliner. He whittled with a dull pen blade at rubber insulation on gauge too thick for wire strippers. Long threads of black rubber rolled back along the blade until the knife slipped free and the coiled shavings fell onto the back of Loretta Lynn, a mangy Pekingese that always slept in Thad’s lap. The dog’s face was smashed flat and she scowled with an underbite and one half-rotten tooth protruding from her bottom jaw. She was too old to eat dry food anymore. He’d found her almost starved to death in a ditch not long after he came out of the woods, about a year before. Thad brushed the wire shavings from Loretta Lynn’s back and she glanced up for a second. She batted her eyes, shook matted tufts of hair from the sides of her face, and licked her tongue a few dry laps across that rotten tooth before she fell back to sleep. “I ever told you that story?”
“I don’t think so,” Aiden said.
“Well, I don’t know if they lied to us or if we wound up in the wrong place or what, but when we walked into that bar there wasn’t a soul,” Thad said. “One of the boys I was with was Todd Cunningham, and he got all riled up. But me and Charles—we called him Chaz—started pouring drinks down Cunningham’s throat, and before you know it, all of us were shithoused. Every week we’d go out and get tanked, and it ain’t matter a bit because we’d get back to base and one of the medics kept all these IVs stashed in his locker and he’d hook us up to one and we’d be good as new come morning.”
Aiden stopped what he was doing and set the wire strippers onto the step. He opened and closed his hands to stretch the cramps out of his fingers, then stared toward April’s house on the hill.
“We’re all drunk and start jawing back and forth about how bad we need to get laid,” Thad continued. “About that time this old gal stumbles in all by herself, and I’m telling you I was on top of her before the door shut. I couldn’t tell you what she looked like in daylight, but I wound up going home with her.”
Thad stopped his story and took a drink of whiskey. He checked the bottle against the porch light, closed one eye, and measured what sloshed in the bottom. “So when she’d passed out, I gathered up my clothes in my arms and tiptoed my way out of there. About halfway through the living room I got tripped up and fell flat on my face. I’m naked and I look down and this girl’s mama is passed out in the floor.
“I’m standing there with my dick in my hand and that old woman leans up and starts rubbing at her eyes and looking at me all funny and I don’t know what the hell I was thinking but I just held out my hand and introduced myself. You’d think she’d have come out of her skin to be woke up like that, but she was just as polite as could be and told me it was nice to meet me. Then she asked me what I was doing and I told her it wasn’t a matter of what I was doing, but what I’d done.” Thad smiled and looked up from the thick wire he was working. “You hear me, Aid? I told her it wasn’t what I was doing, but what I’d done.”
Aiden hadn’t turned from April’s house. All the lights were out except the one in her bedroom. Thad looked at him for a second, then turned his attention back to what he was doing. When Thad came home, Aiden was living in the house with his mother and the trailer held a musty smell from having been empty for some time. Thad knew that while he was gone something had happened between Aiden and April, and in his mind that was her way of taking one more thing out of his life. Thad didn’t trust her at all. The past year or so April’d been trying to sell the property, and the way Thad figured, whatever was going on between her and Aid was just some sloppy payment for Aiden’s work. Aiden did everything from weed-eating banks to renovations. He spent a whole week splitting locust rails to build a fence that separated the trailer from the house so that potential buyers would think the place Thad lived was some derelict eyesore unattached to the parcel above. Lately, she’d had Aiden painting the inside of the house, and when he finished, she had plans for a wraparound porch, a nice screened-in section around back. Thad ran the knife along the wire, whittled the insulation back to twisted copper strands.
“How much you think we’ll get for all this, Aid?”
“What’s that?” Aiden turned back from April’s house.
“I said how much you think we’ll get when it’s all said and done?”
“Usually somewhere around two hundred fifty pounds in a house that size when there ain’t no plumbing. We ought to get six hundred, I’d say.”
“Aww, come on now, Aid. We’ll get more than that. Surely.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, either way I’m ready to get lit.” Thad smiled. “We ain’t been by to see Wayne Bryson in a month.”
“Jesus, Thad,” Aiden said. “Just as soon as we get any money at all, you’re wanting to get fucked up. We can’t keep blowing every dime we get just as quick as we get it.”
“You’re always right there beside me. So why you getting mad at me?”
“We ain’t ever going to get ahead. We keep on doing the same thing and we ain’t ever going to get out of here. Ten years from now, right here we’ll be. Ten years from now, won’t a damn thing be different.”
“And what does it matter?” Thad said. “That’s the difference between me and you, Aid. I don’t have plans on going nowhere. I’d be just fine to sit right here from now till the day I die.”
“There’s going to come a time when you’re going to regret every bit of it,” Aiden said. “Whether it’s ten years or fifteen years from now, there’s going to come a time when you’re not okay with just sitting around shoving dope up your nose. There’s going to come a day when you wish you’d played your hand a little different.”
“Fifteen years from now?” Thad huffed. “What the fuck do I care what happens fifteen years from now, Aid? I’m just trying to get through the day without blowing my fucking brains out.” He regretted saying it just as soon as the words left his mouth.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Nothing.”
“You sitting here saying shit like that. That ain’t nothing.”
There were things that Thad could never explain, things like wanting to go back to the very place that had destroyed him because war made more sense than home, or feeling so confused and scared that dying seemed easier than living. But men didn’t speak of such things. The conversations of men had always been muddy rivers, the surface’s roiling a reflection of what’s buried, but the bottom some mysterious thing that would always be hidden. The two of them sat there for a second or two, neither saying a word, both staring each other down and Thad wishing he could take back what he’d said.
“That’s the difference between us.” Aiden finally spoke. “I ain’t all right with just getting by. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of busting ass for peanuts. I’m sick of staying in a place where there ain’t no jobs. I’m sick of sitting in the same spot I’ve been sitting my whole goddamn life. I’m just sick of it.” Aiden stood up from the steps and dusted the insulation from his lap. “I’ll finish stripping this shit in the morning, or we can burn the insulation off for all I care, but right now I’m done.”
Aiden headed across the yard and Thad watched him, but the trailer’s porch light shined only so far and in a moment Aiden was gone. When Thad stood from the recliner, Loretta Lynn hopped from his lap and waddled down the stairs into the yard. He turned up the radio to some half-assed rendition of Bill Monroe’s “My Last Days on Earth,” grabbed what was left of his bottle of whiskey, and followed the dog into the moonlight. After she finished her business, Loretta Lynn stood by Thad’s feet. He knelt down and scratched behind her ears, and she leaned into his hand until she almost fell over.
Thad hadn’t been to sleep in three days. When there was no money for dope, he’d pop Stackers and Yellow Jackets and any other kind of road dope to keep from sleeping. After a few days of caffeine pills, his hands would get to shaking and his stomach would hurt so bad that only the whiskey could level him out. He hated to close his eyes because it meant he couldn’t stop his mind from turning to questions. Most of the time on deployment was just groundhog days, a bunch of goofy, sweaty eighteen-year-olds joking and wrestling like high school gym class. They’d walk patrols across the moondust, then play cards and smoke cartons of cigarettes and swap stories about home on their downtime, just dicking off. These were good memories and sometimes he thought of them, of the men he’d served with, men who’d become brothers by blood saved and blood shed, but it was the moments when he’d witnessed the world crumble that now turned to questions. In the two years he’d been home, he’d learned that memory could be a terrible thing. He was haunted by memory, by thoughts that felt more real than anything else around him.
On the morning that played again and again, he’d drawn the short straw and run point into a small village on the outskirts of Zawaka, a place in the middle of Paktika Province that really wasn’t anything more than a rock outcrop with a name. The whole place was kinetic. Thad’s squad had been engaged at least once a day for the past week, usually just a shot or two that cracked down from a hillside and kicked up sand, but the chance was always right there, death some ball and chain dragging behind each of them. They’d seen it happen before. And so even though the Afghani men sold themselves as shepherds, Thad wasn’t buying. The men who leaned against the buildings and crouched against the walls were the same hajji motherfuckers who’d fired on them just hours before. That he was sure of. So when the girl appeared from behind a dusty wall, Thad was already on edge.
Even from some distance, he could see that she was crying. He stopped, and the men behind him stopped and turned, readied their guns to the sides and rear as Thad took a knee and drew his sights just to the left of the girl’s body. He screamed for her to stop, but she kept on. No more than nine or ten years old, the girl made her way toward them with a look of hesitancy and fear. Thad knew the enemy was not afraid to use children. He’d been trained to think that way. He’d heard stories of how they’d skin the parents alive, hold a knife to the child’s throat, and tell her they’d do the same to her if she didn’t keep moving forward. If that’s what had happened, then he couldn’t blame her. He’d seen the bodies of women and children flayed and beheaded. He knew it just as the girl did, that these were not idle threats.
The sun was in his eyes and she was no more than twenty yards away and he thought he saw something under her tunic, something that was not a part of her body pushing against fabric, and he panicked and he screamed for her to stop and she kept coming and he pulled the trigger and she fell to the ground like a dropped doll. His first thought was that he’d killed a child, but then all of that feeling escaped him as another infantryman, a man named Billy Thompson who wanted to teach kindergarten in Georgia, took off toward her only to disappear in a flash of smoke like a magic trick.
Thad saw only two Americans die while he was in Afghanistan, one of those being Billy Thompson, and it was his death and the death of that little Afghani girl that now drove him into a panic. Anyone could understand being haunted by something like that. But the deaths themselves weren’t exactly what haunted him, and that was the problem with trying to explain it to anyone who wasn’t there, or anyone at all. What haunted Thad was the realization that he lived in a place where both sides of good and evil saw that girl’s death as an act of heroism. Evil men strapped explosives to a child’s body in the name of God, and good men promoted Thad from private first class to specialist for pulling the trigger. In the end, she was just a girl and Billy Thompson was just a schoolteacher, and the two of them died together. Those were the only truths to be had. To think either side was moral was a goddamn lie, and that was the biggest problem of all because Thad needed there to be a morality to it. He needed some type of justification.
There were feelings and regrets that he couldn’t even share with the men who’d been there, good men who’d lain beside him in the gravel when things went to shit. These were the greatest men he’d ever known and would ever know, and they’d promised to stay close forever. But after coming home, Thad quickly realized they hadn’t all brought back the same burden and so he came to feel as disconnected from them as everything else. Maybe some men were stronger than he was. Maybe some men were just more cut out for compartmentalizing what they’d seen and done. Or maybe it was the fact that they came home to family and friends and he came back to nothing. But whatever the reason, it didn’t matter because the end result was just the same.
When he thought of these things, the memories became questions that he could not answer, and it was that inability to answer that made him not want to go to sleep. So tomorrow he and Aiden would sell the copper and Thad would buy dope to stay awake for a few more days. At least that was something. But right then, all he could hope for was to polish off that bottle in one swallow and pray for forgiveness, pray that there was a God who could understand. Up the hill, the bedroom window was still lit, but aside from the faint yellow glows at the house and trailer, the rest of the world was painted blue by moonlight and sky. With his eyes set on those pinholes of light above, Thad took one great gulp and emptied the bottle, but he did not close his eyes.