Chapter
ARCHIE FOLLOWS ANDREW through the pub’s traditional wooden double entrance doors with their small square window panes in their top halves. They remove their hat and beret, shaking raindrops onto the floor of black-stained oak. A path bleached from many feet leads the silent men across wide planks to where David and Nadine are standing at the blackened bar that stretches along the back wall of the pub. Wear marks streak its surface, and behind it a mirror reflects the black-painted ceiling with its pinpoints of light illuminating the bar in a series of pools. Through the mirror, Archie scans the entrance and the three rectangular windows on either side of the double doors, with their black mullions. Satisfied his vantage point allows him to spot any threats, he shifts his focus to the glass shelves lining the mirror, which hold bottles of vodka, gin, vermouth, whisky, all the hard liquor a man who wants to forget his internal nightmares could want. They order beer—“the usual”—in answer to David’s message: “What are you having?”
David messages the bartender, who’s polishing glasses down at the other end of the bar. The bartender puts a glass down, retrieves his massive Samsung from his pocket, checks it, nods at David, and serves them their beers.
Andrew has a brown bottle of Molson Blue.
Nadine has her half pint of Lager poured into a thick glass mug.
David has a full pint of Bitter in a clean tall glass, scratched and clouded with heavy use.
Archie has his “piss brew,” as the Canadians used to joke on the base. “We have to get it specially trucked in for you, Specialist,” they’d mock-tell-him-off as they banged his bottle down in front of him. Archie got used to the ribbing. They say nothing now. In silence, they pick up their bottles and glasses and carry them down the length of the pub, past the end of the bar, past a workstation, to a table kept empty and waiting for them in the pub’s far corner away from any windows. Judiciously placed planters and the workstation that remains unused while they jaw at their table, protect the four from the other customers. They scrape their chairs back and crowd around the plain black-veneer table, placing their beer, tan Tilley hat, and army green berets on its top. They unbutton their outside jackets or dress jackets but don’t remove them.
David used to spend his days here, sitting at the collegial bar on his better days, but mostly at this lonely table, turning his glass round and round in his roughened hands. Yet he, weirdly enough, thinks Archie, didn’t get addicted to alcohol.
Archie scans the premises while he remembers how David had liked to sit and drink and drink and watch others drink or talk so that he didn’t have to think or talk to anyone. But then one day he saw his half-empty glass with its rim of foam sinking down to the pale golden liquid and disgust had overcome him. He’d shoved it away, the glass sliding to the edge of the round table with its scarring of rim marks. The glass had teetered there. David didn’t rescue it. Instead, he’d barged his chair back, picked up his jacket, slung it over his shoulders, and moved. He’d brushed his glass with the hem of his jacket, and the glass had thrown itself to the floor. That’s how David had described it to them. It was like it had acted out what David had been doing. A passing waitress had quickly reached out a hand and grabbed it in mid-suicide. David took that as a sign and had banged out the bar. He didn’t return for an entire year. Then, on Remembrance Day, he’d told his buddies it was time for one drink. They’d joined him. When Archie had arrived in Canada, he’d tagged along and was told the story as David had his one drink and the other three joined him. And then they had, one by one, related the stories that haunted them the most. David had insisted on this ritual. “Time to spill it instead of drink it and have it bloat up our bellies,” he’d messaged. Archie had resisted participating in that part of the ritual, but today David messages him: “Time to fess up, Specialist.”
Archie shakes his head and ducks it down to stare into the neck of his bottle. Archie’s left hand cradles the bottle’s body as his right hand, leaning on the table, holds his iPhone face up. David huffs beside him. Nadine says: “Never mind him, David. We’ll go first. He can go last. The wait will do him good.”
Archie doesn’t react as David grunts. A message pings his iPhone, and Archie slides his eyes towards it. “After Nadine, you’re up. No escaping this year.” Archie says nothing, only shifts his eyes back to his bottle, then leans back, letting the iPhone fall from his lax fingers onto the table with a muted clatter, as he lets his momentum lift the bottle to his lips to take a long pull of the cold, bland liquid. He swallows hard. The other three watch him, concern writ over Andrew’s face. Nadine steals a glance at Andrew and puts a bright expression on her face. She says: “Captain, I have a story you don’t want to hear.”
Her voice distracts Andrew’s attention from Archie; his eyebrows fly up into his hair: “What?”
“The day the fish fried itself.”
Andrew’s mouth drops open, then suddenly he hoots: “Nadine, you come up with the most outrageous—Okay, I’ll bite. Tell me about the day the fish fried itself.”
“It was so tired of swimming up the cold river, jumping high into the cold air only to land in colder water that when it saw the fire on the land and the steam rising from the pot, it said to itself, now that looks better and jumped over the bank. But it missed the pot and landed in the fry pan.”
Archie spews beer and bangs the bottle on the table. Andrew guffaws and leans back in his chair so far that suddenly his arms are windmilling and his booted feet are searching for purchase on the floor. David grins. Archie lunges and grabs his commander’s arm, his body shaking with laughter, while Nadine sits and watches, cat-like satisfaction purring all over her face. Archie saves Andrew from collapsing backwards on the floor. “Alright, sir?” he chokes out between laughs.
Andrew nods, grinning: “Yes, Archie, I am. Thank you.” He turns to Nadine as Archie wipes his mouth from the beer that spilled on to his chin. “You!”
Nadine grins at him. “Yes, sir, I’m guilty sir.”
Andrew laughs and claps her on the shoulder. “Well done, Sergeant, well done.”
Nadine nods and says: “Thank you, sir. Always at your service.”
“That you are, Sergeant. The best damn Sergeant I ever had. You always have my back.”
Nadine’s grin shows teeth, her blue eyes darken, and the wrinkles on the outside edges disappear. Andrew claps her again as he turns his attention to Archie. “I believe you owe us a story, Specialist.”
Archie points his bottle at Nadine. “Her first.” He looks at her with a knowing look. Nadine lifts her cheeks to extend her grin. “Whatever you say. You always needed some courage time.”
Archie quirks his mouth into a wry smile. Three iPhones ping at the same time. “He never lacked for courage Nadine”
Nadine pulls her mouth down. “You’re right, David. I’m sorry, Archie. You were the best damn American who ever served with us. You could keep up.”
Archie laughed sourly.
“It’s true,” Nadine insisted. “You earned our respect.”
“She’s right,” Andrew says, pointing the neck of his bottle at Archie, before taking a long swallow.
Archie nods.
Their iPhones ping again. “You first, Nadine. No avoiding it either.”
Nadine reads her screen and nods. “Alright, David, alright.” She picks up her glass mug, drinks deeply, sets it carefully down on the table, holds it with her right hand for a long moment, then abruptly lets go. “It was that day of the firefight. We were walking in formation behind the wall. You remember those walls, made of pale mud to go with that pale landscape that we all stood out against like sitting targets in the range.” The other three nod. “I remember the tree. There was this tree with this thin trunk and branches that didn’t know where to go. Green leaves made it stand out. Green against all that paleness.” The men lean their forearms on the table, each cradling his beer in his right hand, their iPhones resting together on the table. Their eyes glue to Nadine’s face. Nadine drops her eyes to her mug. She touches it, turning it round and round with her fingertips, then grabs it. Nadine lifts her beer and swallows hard, making a moue of distaste as she puts it back down. “It was that tree that stuck in my mind.” The air hushes around her as she stares at her beer. It, too, waits for her to tell her story in her own time. The three men know this story. They know what comes next. She’s told it before. Briefly, Archie feels that it’s a cover, that the story she wants to tell, the story that’ll free her, remains locked in her breast, behind bars of fear, fear of hearing her lips and tongue form dreaded words out loud, fear of how they, the men, will react, fear of revealing a secret she doesn’t want to be real, fear of what change will come from revealing that secret.
Archie briefly thinks about asking her to tell that story instead.
The question scrolls across his mind: Nadine, why not tell the story you’re most afraid to tell? That’s why we’re here. His heart beats a tattoo of “don’t tell, don’t tell, don’t tell,” like her heart must be ordering her to do. She’s listening to her heart; he wonders if he will, if he will, like her, tell a well-worn story, one that sounds like the stuff of hell that lives in the nightmares and daymares, but in fact has been reconciled, has been shorn of its horror in the light of retelling to companions who don’t judge but empathize, who nod their understanding and hug out their compassion for each other, soothing each other’s wounds. Their empathy means never having to say sorry for telling the same story for the umpteenth time.
Some wounds hurt too much for talk to soothe.
Archie leaves his thoughts and returns to the present reality. Nadine is saying: “…It was the blood. I didn’t expect the blood to spatter up on the wall like an abstract painting I saw once in the National Gallery.” The men nod; they know she’s referring to her high school trip when her art teacher had taken her class to the National Art Gallery in Ottawa to learn about abstract expressionism. “All I could think about at the time is, he painted in blood.” Nadine falls silent. The others remain in silence with her. Slowly, Andrew reaches out his right arm and encircles her shoulders with it. David reaches across the table with his left hand and clasps hers that’s lying on the table. Archie sits there, unable to move.
He doesn’t want to hear what his mind is telling him he sees in Nadine.
David kicks Archie’s booted foot under the table. Hard. Archie doesn’t acknowledge it by so much as a twitch in his body; instead he reaches out his own left hand to place it on top of Nadine’s left wrist. They sit like this for long moments until Nadine sighs, shifts her body back into her chair, and lifts her mug with her right hand. The three men settle back into their places.
Nadine bangs her mug down. “Your turn,” she says to Archie, her darkened blue eyes looking straight into his shadowed brown ones, both knowing but refusing to know what the other is thinking.
Archie hears himself say: “It was the righteous shoot.” Andrew and David sit up, surprised. Nadine nods. Archie clenches his teeth together. He stares into his bottle, shocked at hearing those words out loud. Andrew says: “Go on.”
“It was the righteous shoot,” Archie tells his bottle. “It was back in my unit, the Fifth Brigade Combat Team.”
The other three hold their breath, don’t move even though all three want to take long pulls at their beer. Saliva vanishes from their mouths.
Archie starts speaking, word by word. “We were in a convoy, moving fast. My commanding officer was sitting next to me, ordering me to go faster. I had my foot jammed against the accelerator. I didn’t know how speed could outmanoeuvre an IED, but my commanding officer…he knew better than I did. I hadn’t been there long. He’d been on three tours by then. He knew all about the people. I was still learning. He told me I knew nothing. This was not America and stop being a pussy. Pussy, his favourite word. Pussy this. Pussy that. He’d shut us up with that word. He’d get us to obey him with that word. No man wants to be a pussy.” Archie jams the bottle against his lips and suctions beer into his mouth. He chokes and gulps. He suspends the bottle partway back down to the table. “Speed mattered. If you didn’t react fast enough, you were dead. If you didn’t drive fast enough, you were dead. He didn’t want to be dead. And he didn’t need no pussy making him dead neither. That’s what he said.”
Archie lifts his bottle back to his lips. He swallows half the beer convulsively. He places it soundlessly on the table and continues: “So anyway, I drove. I drove so fast, I couldn’t see far enough down the road to know where it was going. The curves were hair raising. Sometimes I thought we’d tip over. I slowed down once so as not to, and he yelled so loud, I thought my ear drum would pop.” The other three wonder at the lungs of his old superior, for the engines of those LAVs were deafening. The whine must’ve been like a shell forever coming at him, forever hanging over him. But they don’t shake their heads in understanding. The three barely breathe. They don’t want Archie to stop. They know of the righteous shoot, but that’s all he’d ever said: “righteous shoot.” They only know it’d been the source of friction between him and his family, but they know nothing about it. Today, the story is escaping out of his heart’s locked box. They want to be there for him fully in soul and heart as he’s telling it.
Archie continues: “So I’m racing down this road, go round this bend in that godforsaken landscape of hell, and suddenly this man is standing there. I run right over him. Right over him. And I can’t even feel him underneath my wheels. I can’t hear anything, the engine is so loud. I jam on the brakes and—,” emotion catches up to Archie. His voice changes from deadpan to broken. He doesn’t clear his throat but lets the grief quaver his voice, for he must tell it. Now it’s released, the memory demands the light. “My commanding officer, he asks me, ‘What’re you doing? You don’t brake, Private. You drive.’ I go, ‘But I hit a man.’ He says, ‘So what? They’re the enemy.’ I go, ‘I don’t know that sir, I got to see him.’ I’ve braked the LAV and am opening the door at this point. My commanding officer is having a fit. His face is all red, and I’m worried he’s going to pop an artery or something, But I need to see that man, even if he’s going to have me up for treason. Maybe he’s alive, I was thinking. He looked old. I run to the back of my LAV and there he is all mangled and everything. And his beard—,” Archie chokes on a rising sob. “His beard is all white!” Archie’s voice rises in remembered horror. “He’s an old man. My commanding officer, he’s behind me and he’s dragging me back to the vehicle by my collar. But I’m younger and stronger and pull myself out of his grip. I squat down to feel for a pulse. But the driver of the LAV behind us comes up to me and tells me he’s dead. ‘You gotta get off the road,’ he says. He had no emotion. There’s an old man, dying in front of us, and he’s talking like we’re at a fender bender. He says, ‘Otherwise they’ll kill us. We got to keep moving.’ But I wanted to move this old man to the side of the road. I refuse my officer’s order to get back in the LAV and drive on. So the other driver and me, we pick him up. I didn’t expect him to be so heavy or to bend so, so—,” Archie gags as the others remember what it’s like to move a human body that’s been broken into pieces. Archie drags in a breath, steadying his voice. His right hand rises involuntarily to his mouth. He speaks through his closed fingers. “I didn’t know what it was like to move a broken body. It was my first one. The driver kept looking around, saying we got to hurry before the others come. ‘They all have guns, you know,’ he told me. ‘They’ll shoot on sight. Soon as they see we killed one of their elders, they’ll be gunning for us. Hurry up, man.’ But I couldn’t move faster. My legs were lead. Time was like nothing. No time existed. I could only creep forward. I couldn’t carry or walk normally. This old man’s blood was dripping all over my hands, and his torso was bending this way and that. It wasn’t natural, and I wanted to scream. But I’d been trained, and Sir, my father, said, men don’t scream. No crying either. I couldn’t let the others see I was crying. So I blinked hard. I’d dropped my end of the old man’s b— b— body. The other driver, he kept hold of his feet. They were still intact. His legs were bending the wrong way. I picked up his shoulders again, and they went kind of squirrelly in my hands, but I just shut my senses down and told myself I had to go faster. My commanding officer had gone back to the LAV, but it was like I could still hear him shouting: ‘They’ll kill us if you don’t get moving. Faster, Private, faster. Pussy!’” Archie’s arm slackens; his hand falls away from his mouth. Moments pass while time holds its breath.
“So’s anyway, we get him to the side of the road, and the driver says, ‘Let’s move.’ And I say, ‘No, I need to say a prayer.’ He snorts, ‘A prayer, in this hellhole, for who?’ ‘Him!’ I shout, pointing down at the old man all covered in dust and blood. You can hardly see his beard is white anymore. The driver…he shook his head and says, ‘Okay, but hurry up.’ We bow our heads and close our eyes, like we were taught. I say something quick, I don’t know what, just asking God to save him and forgive me. I look up first, and I see this young tall man, coming at us real quick. He’s got an angry look on his face, like he’s going to kill us. His hands are free, but all I see is that anger. ‘Look out!’ I yell as I push the other driver away, reach for my combat pistol, pull it, and shoot. I’m real accurate. Pawpaw made sure of that. He went down in one shot. I run towards him to make sure he’s dead. I’d hit him dead centre between the eyes. His eyes are flat. No life in him, either. The driver comes up to me, shakes my hand for saving his life, and that’s when I see that…that…that….” Archie deflates. His chest concaves; his neck loses strength; and his head drops. Archie whispers, “The man had no weapon on him. I searched his garments, thinking I’d seen him reach for one, but there’s nothing in all that clothing, those tent-like things they wear, those clothes I’d been told over and over they wear to hide their weapons. ‘You gotta watch out for them. They’re sneaky,’ they’d all said. But that young guy, he’d been angry, and that was all. Who wouldn’t be if your grandfather had been hit and was lying there all broken up? I was frozen. The driver, he pulled me up, told me if we didn’t get going, we’d have to shoot all the villagers, and he points into the distance. That’s when I look down the road and see them. People are coming at us. I can’t have more death. So’s I run back to the LAV and drive the hell out of there. My commanding officer didn’t have to tell me to gun it. ‘Good work, Private,’ he yells. He congratulates me. ‘You got two of them. That’ll get you a medal.’ He didn’t shout at me the whole rest of the day, just sat back smiling like the proverbial cat, telling me what a righteous shoot it was, how I’d saved their lives, how I’d rid the world of one more Tal-i-ban and one more terr-o-rist. They toasted me that night. We all got drunk. I got drunk every night after that.”