When Brody returned to his apartment, he immediately got in the shower to remove the smell of floor polish and industrial soap. That and the call with Chiffon always put him in a bad head space. The woman could instill terror, make him see barred walls and uncomfortable prison mattresses and even smell the fires of a riot—where, he guessed, he’d most likely be dispatched when the guards were preoccupied. A shower was the only cure. Lenses out, sonar off, a makeshift sensory deprivation chamber to remind himself he still had the law on his side for the time being.
Once out and toweled off and dressed, he could see from across the room that the icon for voice mail on his screen was blinking.
Could the redaction have changed in the last hour and Chiffon be calling to inform him with unabated giddiness in her voice that he was going to spend some time in an eight by ten after all? For a beat, the smell of smoke from the prison riot fires rekindled, and the thought of someone emerging from the murk, hunched and smiling with a head full of bad thoughts, shiv in hand held low to the side, lumbering toward his open cell made his throat run dry.
He walked over to the mounted screen and read the display: Thorp Ashbury. As he stared at the name in plain black text, his mind reeled back to dusty days in the desert heat, heavy body armor on his shoulders, shared laughs in the back of the soldier troop carrier with this man. Miss Doyle’s threats evaporated and an elation he hadn’t felt in years replaced it, clicking easily in place. He told the screen, “Play voice mail.”
Thorp’s voice came across every speaker in Brody’s apartment. “Hey, it’s Thorp. Just wondering if you had a spare couple of days. Maybe you’d want to scoot out here and do a little fishing. Turkey Day’s coming up and if you wanted to stick around for that, maybe I could rustle up something. If you don’t already have plans, that is. Or just go get our own bird. Pheasant’s in season. Currently. Either way, uh, give me a call. And we’ll, you know, get something going. Take care, buddy. Talk to you soon. Bye.”
Brody asked the screen to play the message again, and he listened closer this time. The first pass he got what Thorp was saying, but now he wanted to hear how his friend was saying it. The guy rarely talked in clipped sentences like that. He had a cavalier swagger about him, a bravado that came from being the top dog in whatever small town he was originally from, lauded high school football champ or the like. Obviously, something was distressing him.
But then Brody thought about what they had been through together, all the places and disasters and awfulness that had passed before their eyes. Again, he traveled back ten years to Egypt. They had been sent merely as peacekeepers, as contracted policemen with much better firepower. They had been told several times that they were not to use their guns and their presence was all the reassurance the citizens needed. “You’re a reminder of what’s not to be messed with,” their commanding officer had told them.
Brody remembered them trying to help an old man who had gotten his arm caught in a bear trap, right there in the city’s alleys. He decided to move along through the memory, dodging the more difficult moments of it. He jumped over what had happened to Thorp, what the guy had been through and dealt with—and then the rest of that peacekeeping effort when Brody finally got blinded and was put on the same list as his friend. Invalided but for two completely different reasons and shipped home within a month of each other.
The projectionist wouldn’t let it sit merely at that, though. The incident in that alleyway, with the man caught in the bear trap, unceremoniously commenced play. Piecemeal, it came to him. Turning the corner, seeing the man hunched, his limb in the metal bite of the trap, begging in a scattered, trembling voice for help—eyes wide, his lips peeled back in a feral way.
But that was as far as Brody’s mind would allow, and he jumped the edit ahead to when Thorp had become introverted and rarely spoke to anyone about anything. His bravado had been amputated, and grafted on in its place was a staring quietness that could never be shaken. It surprised Brody to get a call from Thorp now. In all the years they’d been stateside, they’d never exchanged anything other than a vague card around the holidays. And now he was inviting him to Thanksgiving dinner? Why now?
Brody put his wariness aside. It didn’t matter how long it had been. He decided to just be thankful he had someone who wanted to spend any time with him at all.
“Call back,” Brody told the screen, and Thorp’s number was dialed.
Over the speakers of the apartment, Thorp answered on the sixth ring with a tired hello.
“It’s Brody. How are you, man?”
“Hey,” Thorp said languidly, as if he had been woken up. “How’s it going?”
“Just returning your call. That sounds like a plan to me. I could stand to get out of the city for a while. Where are you living nowadays?”
Thorp made prolonged grunting sounds indicative of a man stretching, and when he spoke again, it was with a bit higher tempo and levity.
“Chicago. Well, not Chicago proper. It’s a good drive from here. I can kind of see it from here; let’s just say that. So it’s not too much of a trek, really.” There it was, that clipped way of talking again. Perhaps it was how the man was now. Maybe he had been placed on medication or had taken advantage of some of the postwar therapy sessions the military offered. Brody couldn’t picture it, the big football star sitting in a cramped office with a shrink or organizing one of those pill-a-day containers with the seven plastic lids, but you never know.
“Fishing, huh? Sounds like paradise.”
“Yeah, well, I got myself a good chunk of land, some decent woods to roam around in. It’s old farmland and I figured why not, so now I’m trying to do the cranberry thing. Eventually, I might try my hand at selling to Ocean Spray or something when I can get through a season without completely killing my crop.”
Brody laughed. It felt good. At first it’d he felt enormously awkward talking to Thorp, but he quickly found himself falling back into the brotherly rapport they’d had so long ago. Brody realized how much he truly missed the camaraderie of friends, of people he knew he could trust and talk to about certain things that only they’d know and be able to relate with.
“What day works for you?” Thorp asked.
He had to be home next week for his scheduled visit with Miss Doyle, perhaps even leaving Thanksgiving night to ensure he’d be back in time. He folded his arms and told the empty apartment, his voice finding the microphone, “Anytime that works for you. You’re the host.”
“All right, let’s say tomorrow. That work? I’ll have a room ready for you. That is unless you want to sleep in the barn.”
“No.” Brody chuckled. “That’s quite all right.”
They exchanged their good-byes and the call ended.
Brody recalled his fonder memories of Thorp, all of which took place before the events in that Cairo alleyway. Thorp was always a troublemaker and a prankster, the gleaming life of the party where only gloom and homesick thoughts riddled their minds. Whenever their company was crowded into the boxy interior of the Terrapin ATV or in the troop carrier Darter launching from one dust-choked spot to the next, Thorp lightened everybody up with a crude joke—or a really crude one. Brody recalled how Thorp had acted out a particularly nasty one, standing in the middle of the two rows of buckled-in troops, humping the air and cackling like a madman.
Brody looked forward to his trip.
The train rolled into the station in Minneapolis precisely on time. Brody boarded and found a seat by a window but not before pausing at the steps into the train to take his final breath of city air for what he hoped would be long enough to forget the smell of exhaust and the ceaseless hum of interstate noise.
Being Sunday, not a lot of people were heading to Chicago. He had a booth in the dining car to himself and enjoyed his coffee as they hummed along southeast well over two hundred kilometers an hour on an elevated track that provided a monorail zoo tour in fast forward quality to the trip, albeit one that wasn’t remotely exotic since it only featured cattle and the occasional horse intercut with long stretches of farmland after farmland, the occasional autumnal-colored hill, and scraggily patches of trees left to grow unbothered or even manicured in any way. Life that wasn’t planted for harvesting but just grew because it was there and always had been.
The television mounted above the bar played to no one in particular. The news was on, expounding last night’s Vikings victory. Brody listened absently until the sports scores turned to grave news. A report detailing the cheerless unveiling of a monument at a Minneapolis shopping center. It was in memory of those killed last month on October 20 when Alton Noel, a retired soldier, had gunned down ten people before turning the gun on himself. “The Midtown Massacre,” as the newscaster called it, was one of the worst tragedies that had befallen Minneapolis in decades and spurred a new law enforcement effort in upping gun control.
It was the first time Brody had heard the story. He took a moment to go through the roster of men that had been in his unit while in Cairo and decided he didn’t know an Alton Noel. Either way, the news was depressing—and sadly—it made him think of the man he was going to visit, the lonely ex-soldier. He silently scolded himself for making the comparison to his friend.
The news team immediately turned to a sunnier story, the tremendous winnings a couple had scored the night before on Prize Mountain.
Brody welcomed the whiplashing topic change, sipped his coffee, and watched Wisconsin roll past his window as if it were scenery on a revolving banner.
The train pulled into Chicago a few minutes shy of two hours from when it had left Minneapolis. Brody got out into the crowded station. He knew he was in Chicago immediately. No question about it. It differed from Minneapolis in innumerable cultural ways. Women walked by in veiled hats and evening dresses made up entirely of whisper-thin fiber-optic material. Scrolling text and images of swimming sea life washed around on their elegant, tapered bodies.
Once out of the station and onto the sidewalk, Brody saw the street people and their shock-value wardrobe: the chain-mail tunics with windows cut out of them to display plump, augmented breasts or tattooed buttocks. They flitted by quick as insects on old-fashioned roller skates with swearwords written in black pen all over the white leather. One slapped Brody on the shoulder and called to him in Russian, “Watch it, shit cake.” Certainly not something you’d hear in Minneapolis, where the most alarming piece of foreign slang talk was Norwegian.
The rest of the people, those not out to shock, were mostly in suits and ties, one in three wearing a paper mask or a respirator strapped to their face.
Brody weaved in and out among the onrushing wall of people who were so preoccupied with their ordis that they absentmindedly played chicken with everyone coming the opposite direction. He wondered if it just seemed like he was going against the flow and broke off onto a side street where the foot traffic wasn’t as congested. Here he could actually walk a straight line without having to move out of anyone’s way.
He couldn’t help but look around, even if it made him look like a tourist. It’d been years since he’d been here, and while he couldn’t say it looked all that different, he had forgotten what a strange place Chicago could sometimes seem, depending on the neighborhood.
Namely this one.
Bundled tentacles of cables connected every building, as if some creature had pushed itself into and around every standing structure. Some were repurposed as lampposts, with the lights hanging on the horizontal columns of wires and tubes. In other places, if the tendrils happened to stretch in front of a business’s storefront, they simply tacked their sign directly onto it. Brody had seen a newspaper comic online about Chicago’s wire problem. It featured a man in safari apparel hacking at dangling cables with a machete in one hand, a briefcase in the other, trying to navigate the sidewalk to work. Now it made sense.
When Brody’s father was young, he thought the idea of everything wireless meant that all telephone poles would disappear and repairmen would never use anything but a computer to diagnose a connection problem, the wrench and screwdriver as extinct as the dodos and lobsters. But as nice as advancements can be, the end product had a lot of work behind it and with more wirelessness came more need to make that wirelessness possible, which, funnily enough, resulted in more wires.
Minneapolis had its share of wires but not like this. And as far as how everything else looked in Chicago compared to his city, well, that differed greatly too.
Here and there were old-style marquees. Others opted—if they had the cash—for signage made entirely of holo. On every street corner, just like back home, were the air-scrubbing units mounted to the sidewalk as commonplace as fire hydrants.
Again, Brody felt the need to step out of the churn of foot traffic to stand apart from it all and get his bearings. He feared if he just went with it, he’d end up walking right into Lake Michigan. He looked skyward at the view through the skyscrapers interlaced with more columns of wires and beyond that black net over everyone’s heads, unmanned police aircraft, drifting like paper airplanes being pulled along by strings, on constant patrolling surveillance. He had been in town only fifteen minutes, and already he wanted to leave. Cab. I need a cab so I can get the hell out of this.
Four passed him up before one finally heeded his wave. He slid into the back, glad to be able to shut out the noise. Door closed, the self-piloting cab asked for his destination in a sober voice. The question had been recorded years ago most likely.
Brody read the address from the e-mail Thorp had sent him.
“Please insert jigsaw card to verify funds,” the cab requested.
Unaccustomed to driverless cabs, Brody looked for the reader on the glass dividing the front and back of the car. He found it and slipped the plastic card in, with its jigsaw puzzle arrangement of black and white, stripes and dots, the bar codes and blocky robot text that only mechanical eyes could decipher.
After a pause, “We will be more than happy to transport you to your destination today, but be aware that your bank account is currently in the negative. Your banking establishment has been kind enough to supply you with the necessary funds for this trip, but we’re afraid to inform you that you lack the necessary funds to go any farther beyond your requested destination.”
“Okay,” Brody said, pinching the bridge of his nose. This news came without surprise to him. The train ticket had swept out those last ten credits, and now the cab was reaching a hand down into his bank account’s emergency funds. “Thank you for telling me.”
“Yes, sir,” the cab said.
Brody watched from behind the glass as the steering wheel spun around on its own. The cab gave a single burst of accelerator and wedged itself back into traffic.
On the other side of Chicago, Brody felt the tension ease off him again just as it had when he originally left Minneapolis. The cab rumbled on the desolate two-lane road in the country. Expansive farmsteads and agricultural campuses flourished out from under the gray umbrella of pollution.
In the fields, toiling with bent backs, farmers worked at picking the soil free of any large stones that’d make planting difficult, depositing them into burlap sacks lashed to their backs. Once closer, Brody noticed not a one of them was human. They stood on narrow legs that tapered down into toeless feet, just arrowheads that the robots trundled about on, elegant and weightless as flamingos. Narrow torsos and necks, heads made up of just a set of glass eyes and a round speaker approximately where a mouth should be. Artificials weren’t as common in the city, much to everyone’s surprise when they first came on the market. They were reserved for hard labor, sometimes cooking and cleaning, sometimes nursing home care, but most commonly in janitorial jobs and keeping the parks, graveyards, and roadsides tidy.
The Artificials—or Arties—stood erect and turned to stare at the passing cab. It was strange how they got distracted so easily, but Brody figured they were a hot commodity in the farming industry and theft was common. If he were to engage in conversation or even humbly approach one of the Arties working in the field, he imagined they’d group up on him and calculatedly break every one of his bones. He shuddered at the thought as he passed the robotic farmers and looked into each set of their reflective glass lenses, unable to read any indication of what they were making of him.
Just as they had raised their heads when the cab was approaching, they collectively lowered them when they saw the cab wasn’t going to slow or stop. They returned to work, silently toiling.
The cab continued on, accidentally going through a stop sign at a deserted four-way intersection. After the turn, the road went from cracked pavement with faded lines to a two-lane dirt path, rocky and rutted in two opposing sets of tracks, those going into the farmland and those coming out.
Brody rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. He waited for the cab to ask him to please put it out, but it didn’t. Clearly it was an older model. They bumped along for a few more miles and then turned into Thorp’s long gravel driveway.
They approached a two-story rust-red farmhouse with dormered windows and a barn off to the side. The whole place needed a fresh coat of paint. The cab eased to a gentle stop, and a crunch sounded as the emergency brake was thrown.
Brody waited, and the receipt fed out of the mounted printer, telling him his overdrawn account had just been shoved down to an all-time low of negative four thousand and ninety-eight credits. He got out with his solitary bag and approached the house.
The cab reversed out of the driveway and started its lonely journey back to the city.
Brody took a deep breath. The air smelled so different. There was something to be said about living out where the constant push and pull of the air on the streets wasn’t tampered with hypoallergenic filters or thick with the rank of wastewater and factory runoff. It made his throat itch, his eyes water a little. But it felt good, natural, being exposed to allergens and dust for the first time in years. It was a welcome irritation.
He rang the doorbell and heard a series of thumps inside the house, heavy footsteps on hollow hardwood.
The door opened and Thorp, aged faintly around the eyes and mouth—his laugh lines were more etched in and his crow’s-feet sprawled out nearly to his ears—smiled warmly. His hair was nearly gone on top, leaving a shaggy hay-colored mass that went over his ears on the sides and nestled down into the collar of his flannel shirt in the back. His freckled pate reflected the afternoon sun with a polished sheen. “Hey, hey, look who it is,” he exclaimed, pushing aside the screen door.
They took a moment to shake hands, get the small talk about his trip out of the way.
The inside of the house smelled like Thorp had just turned the vacuum off seconds before Brody rang the bell. Beyond that smell of vacuum-recycled air was the intoxicating aroma of ham cooking. Real meat. It had been years since Brody had eaten anything that hadn’t come out of a plastic wrapper or an aluminum can. Even America’s Favorite Automat joints that had sprung up all over Minneapolis and St. Paul only offered food that was made elsewhere, states away, freeze-dried and vacuum sealed only to be popped open and microwaved. Just like Mom used to make. Right. But here, this was something different—something amazing. He felt magnetically pulled by the aroma.
“What’s that smell?” Brody asked, wide-eyed.
His friend grinned—making the wrinkles he’d developed all the more obvious—and told him it was ham. Brody had to ask for confirmation that it wasn’t the fake stuff he was smelling, that minced mushroom and soy stuff pressed together like particle board to make fake ham. It smelled too good, he added.
“Nope. Real thing. Guy up the road apiece raises pigs.”
Brody hadn’t been exposed to allergens or eaten actual meat in years. It was beginning to feel like this wasn’t just a different state he had traveled to, but a different time. A time detailed by his grandparents.
“So, how was good old Chicago?” Thorp asked, guiding Brody upstairs.
“Congested,” Brody said. “Loud. You know, the way it always is.”
“Well, that’s the city for you. You should think about coming out this way, buying one of these plots before the developers turn them all into highways. You could get lucky like I did and have them put some wires over it and you’ll be made, my friend. Hark Telecom pays me ten grand a month just to have those wires going over my property.”
“No kidding?” Brody said.
He hadn’t noticed any power lines or wires running over Thorp’s property. It made him pause because he considered himself more observant than that, but power lines looping overhead was beyond a regular sight in Minneapolis or Chicago.
Thorp opened the door to a small bedroom with a bed and a three-drawer dresser. He threw out his arm in a grand gesture of presentation and allowed Brody in.
Brody looked it over, nodded, and set his suitcase down on the floor.
“Coffee?” Thorp asked.
Brody nodded.
“I’ll go get it on the burner. Make yourself at home. I’ll give you the tour whenever you’re settled.” Thorp clomped back downstairs.
Brody changed out of his peacoat into a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. As he stepped into the bathroom, red digits reared their ugly numerals. 02:59:59.
He sighed. He’d have to squeeze a charge into the lenses sooner than he had thought. He had a collection of the batteries with him, but all of them were nearly solid to the shake. He knew that while he was going to enjoy his vacation, it wouldn’t be without the constant worry about money and how seeing in color might have to wait a few months. Brody decided he’d wear the lenses until they counted out the very last second. He hadn’t seen Thorp in a very long time and wanted to enjoy the stay—and all its colors—for as long as he could.
He came downstairs to the smell of not only the ham in the oven but fresh coffee. When he turned the corner into the galley kitchen, he saw that Thorp was making the coffee on the stovetop. The coffeepot had a glass bubble, and percolating into it was the warm brown liquid. With an oven mitt, Thorp took the coffeepot from the burner and put it on a trivet on the counter.
“Quite a place you got here,” Brody commented.
“Thanks,” Thorp said, obviously distracted by the roasting pan he now had out of the oven and was diligently trying to scrape the ham from the bottom of.
Brody looked around the walls. Medals hanging by their silk bands from nails, a few framed plaques, a couple of photographs of their unit. He found himself and Thorp standing side by side in the middle, their arms over one another’s shoulders, cigars in the corners of their mouths. The photos were printed on standard ink-jet paper, pixelating the images around the edges and slightly mussing the colors from an apparent shortage of blue in the cartridge when the picture had printed. The men in the photo appeared to be wearing yellow camouflage, and their faces were redder than an Egyptian sun could’ve ever rendered their flesh without actually … broiling them.
The thought happened before he could catch it, and he made himself turn his thoughts elsewhere. Instead, he concentrated on the image itself, the men before they’d been burned alive, the people they were.
It had been taken the day before the ambush in the Cairo alley. They had just gotten news that after their final sweep of this particular quarter of the city, they could go home. They were prematurely in celebration, unfairly ignorant by the blindfold of fate, that the following day would prove to be something that would forever stain the two men’s minds. For Brody, though, it would prove doubly worse—being struck blind would be waiting for him a week beyond the tragedy.
He studied himself in the photo, young, the crew cut, the cigar—smiling like he had something to smile about, some victory achieved. He wanted to step closer to the photo and hiss at his past self: “You fool.” That kid with the body armor, holding the assault rifle like some sort of hero, was totally unaware of the curveball headed toward him just a few hours later.
Brody wanted to ask Thorp if he ever thought about that day but decided not to. It was a dumb question after all. Of course he did. Brody knew the events of that day probably passed with more frequency in Thorp’s mind than his own. He moved away from the photograph, blinking away memories.
“Out here all alone?” Brody took a seat at the kitchen table. It was an easy estimation. The place was decorated like a man lived here—no curtains, just venetian blinds, no framed pictures besides the ones that featured military guys. In the living room there were no decorations save for a mounted buck head on one wall.
“Yeah,” Thorp said, still struggling with the ham. It was really glued in there. “I got my profile on a few sites advertising that I’m a single guy with a big old farmstead all to myself and a steady income. But no bites. I guess young women like to sow their wild oats in the city before retiring out to the sticks with a jabber jaw like me.”
Brody smiled. “Mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all. Hell, you can have one of my cigars if you want. One good thing about Illinois, you can still smoke out here. I don’t know how you do it in Minnesota with their goddamn nonsmoker initiative.” Thorp still struggled with the ham, one hand gripping the roasting pan, the other wedging a spatula under it. He looked over his shoulder with sweat on his brow. “Can you even smoke on the sidewalks?”
“You can, but if a cop passes you, you get dirty looks.” Brody passed on his friend’s cigars and smoked one of his own cigarettes instead. “They’re just itching for that law to get passed all the way, so they can club you over the head the second you light one up.”
Thorp got the ham free with a clatter of metal on the stovetop. The ham nearly flew out of the pan. He cried, “Whoa!” as if saddled upon a disobedient horse. He put the steaming slab of—real!—meat on a ceramic platter and brought it over, still steaming, to the table. He opened the fridge and filled his arms with three different assortments of mustard, a salt grinder, a tub of margarine, and a stack of bread slices. “Beer?”
“Yes, please. Say, you need a hand with all that?” Brody asked, starting to stand when he saw Thorp nearly take a tumble with all the things he had gathered up against his chest.
“No, no, you’re a guest. I got this.” He put everything down on the table and sat.
They ate roasted ham, and Brody tried all three of the different mustards Thorp had made by hand. They were quiet for the majority of the meal.
When they finished, Brody picked up his bottle of beer and looked out the window behind Thorp. The Artificials were now toiling in the patch of land directly across the road. “You got any of those?” he asked.
Thorp threw his arm over the back of his chair and twisted around to see what Brody meant. He caught a glimpse of the Artificials and turned back around. “No. And the owner of those goddamn things needs to learn how to set the property line on them better. I came out front last week and saw them picking apart my garden. Had to go to his house and tell him to shut them off because when I took two steps toward them—on my property, keep in mind—they all turned toward me with their hands out like they were challenging me to wrestle.” Thorp took a slurping pull off his bottled beer, which apparently he had also made himself. “If it weren’t for the pork chops and ham he brings this way, I might’ve just snapped on the guy. Should probably mosey on down there sometime tomorrow, see if he’s got any birds he’d be willing to part with.”
“What all do you grow out here?” Brody asked.
“Cranberries, mostly. Some carrots, too. Potatoes, strawberries, sunflowers. Just whatever I feel like doing that year. I grow most of it for myself, can what I know I won’t get to before it spoils.” Thorp reached over to the humidor on the counter and took out a thick cigar. “Here, I want to show you something.” He opened the heavily tinted sliding glass door that went out into the backyard.
Once it was open, Brody stood next to Thorp and saw all that lay beyond. What at first glance he took to be metal sculptures were twisted wrecks of old military aircrafts positioned around the backyard like shaped hedges on display. A few of them he recognized from their own tour, certain models of the Darter troop mover and the Terrapin ATV. Big holes blasted out of them, jagged as shark bites in their metal flesh. Parts missing, the rudder of the Darter was entirely gone, in its place, a sooty amputated nub. Brody felt a pang of sympathy for his friend as they walked into the yard and Thorp showed off his collection.
“You remember this one, don’t you?” Thorp asked, nodding at the Darter.
Named after the Darter species of dragonfly, the vehicle resembled the insect in structure if slightly exaggerated in places. The bulbous head with the four jump seats—two pilots and two gunners. The abdomen could telescope out thirty feet to accommodate an entire unit of soldiers or contract like an accordion to make itself a smaller target when the soldiers had been dropped off. Four wings on the back made of lightweight titanium membrane doubled as solar panels when the mechanical beast was at rest. Two places for sentry turrets, the housing having been welded over with blank metal plates in the decommission process.
The back door ramp of the fuselage abdomen was open, and Brody bent down to look inside. The cramped interior was smaller than he remembered. The lap bars were all up, the dangling belt buckles swinging in the wind. Inside, it smelled like disinfectant, mud, gunpowder. He stood up, tried to stifle a sigh. This wasn’t what he had in mind by visiting an old friend. He felt phantom pains peck at his back and chest—that terrible punch one felt when taking fire, even through body armor. The clatter and heat of a rifle vibrating with discharge in his arms, kicking against his shoulder. Incalculable carnage.
“Got this one after the war. They were selling them online for a song. Got this one, which is mostly intact, and this other one here for even less because, as you can see, it’s in a lot rougher shape. Kind of a hobby of mine.”
“Impressive,” Brody said, knowing Thorp had been searching for his approval.
Thorp pointed with his beer toward the hill at the far side of the property. They strolled that way under the shadow of willows. They went past the barn. Through the open doors, Brody glimpsed a couple of horses standing in their stalls.
At the end of the hill, overlooking Thorp’s fields, Brody gazed at the rows of rich brown soil, recently tilled. The land divided up into different sections for different crops. The sunflower heads on their long necks bumped against one another in the breeze. Beyond the first collection of fields was the cranberry bog. It appeared to be just a pond, but there was a smattering of crimson beads off to one side, floating berries held collected by bolted together two-by-four planks meant as a corral. Even from that distance, Brody could see the carrots on the inverted glass planters lining the far side of the property, their color reminding him of the whites of his own eyes. And against his best efforts, he remembered how most of his visit would be seen in black-and-white polygons and pixels. He studied the beautiful scene of crops before him and tried to commit as much of the color and idyllic display of agriculture to memory as he could.
They stood for a while in silence, looking at the land. It soon became obvious to Brody that Thorp was slowly edging into a reflective mood. Brody was accommodating, even though he didn’t want to talk at length about the military. He took a sip from his beer and washed it over his teeth and let it settle, crackling in a pool on his tongue. He waited for the inevitable conversation to begin.
“It’s a shame what they put us through out there. It really is.”
“Yeah,” Brody said, kicking at invisible rocks at his feet.
“We shouldn’t have seen the things we did. Especially at our age. Man, we were really young. Over there, doing that shit, taking orders from guys who probably had no idea what the hell they were doing themselves.” He paused, contemplative. “Bunch of bullshit.” He seemed to be having the conversation entirely on his own. Brody kept quiet and nodded when appropriate.
After Thorp had nattered about the service to exhaustion and grew quiet, Brody felt like he was being rude and decided to contribute a small amount. He said, “Glad that’s all behind us.”
Thorp didn’t respond, didn’t nod, didn’t do anything for a moment. Then he turned and looked into Brody’s face, squinting at the gleam of the setting sun.
Brody didn’t think he was going to like what came next. Inevitably, this was when Thorp would say something he’d had on his chest for a very long time, really open up, and they’d undoubtedly end up crying or really getting into an hours long conversation about everything they experienced. Truly, Brody wanted neither. He wanted some time out of the city, maybe go fishing and hunting as the initial call had promised, but he didn’t want to revisit ghosts that he had no trouble finding on his own.
Thorp chewed his lip. They stared at one another for a few beats of silence, the crickets beginning to play their music in the surrounding wilderness. Brody waited for Thorp to unravel completely. He tried to steel himself for it as best he could.
Thorp said, “My sister’s joined up.”