Soldier of Fortune

BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON

FROM Glimmer Train

 

HER NAME WAS Holly Hensley, and except for the two years when her father was transferred to a naval base in Florida, her family lived across the street from mine. This was on Beechwood Drive, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Our parents held garage sales together, threw hurricane parties, went floundering in the shallow, bottle-green water under the causeway. If the Hensleys were working overtime and Holly was staying late for pep-squad practice—which meant grinding against Julio Chavez in the back seat of his Skylark—my mother would pick up Holly's younger brother from daycare and watch him until they got home. Sam had been born while they were living in Florida. ("My old man got one past the goalie," Holly liked to say. "There's nothing more disgusting.") In 1986, the year everything happened at the Hensley house, Sam was three. Holly was eighteen, a senior at King High School, and I was a freshman, awkward and shy and helpless with love.

Most mornings we walked to school together. Holly's hair would be wet from the shower, her eyes wide and glassy with fatigue; she'd yawn and say, "What's buzzin', cousin?" She liked to drag her fingers along the chain-link fences we passed, and to stop at Maverick Market to buy Diet Cokes and steal candy bars. I waited outside, worrying she'd get caught. We talked about what she'd do after graduation—some days she planned to enroll at the beauty college, others she wanted to dance at the Fox's Den out by the oil refineries—and about Roscoe, the collie she'd adopted in Florida. She told me how her little brother preferred her Aggie sweatshirt to his baby blanket. I invented stories of girls I'd been with, wild things named Rhonda and Mandy and Anastasia who attended different schools and who, I hoped, might make Holly jealous. Usually she'd just bump me with her hip and say, "You're more of a slut than I am." We never talked about the rumors that she and Julio had let a crowd of kids watch them in bed at a homecoming party, or that she'd recently been spotted leaving the Sea Ranch Motel with Mr. Mitchell, the geology teacher. Even my parents had heard about Mr. Mitchell. My mother said Holly was just trying to get her parents' attention, acting out because of the new baby. My father said she was trouble and if he caught me alone with her, he'd whip my ass. But I rarely saw her after we got to campus. Holly would disappear onto the school's smoking patio, a dismal slab of concrete where stringy-haired surfers and kids with safety pins through their eyebrows loitered, and I would go find Matt Rickard.

Matt and I had been friends since elementary. We'd played on the same soccer team, joined and quit Boy Scouts together, leaned despondently against the gym bleachers and watched couples sway at the junior-high dances our parents made us attend. In our freshman year, Matt wore sleeveless shirts and tucked the cuffs of his camouflage pants into military boots; he had a pair of fatigues for every day of the week—desert camo, woodland and blue woodland, tiger-stripe and black tiger-stripe. For a while we'd been into guerrilla warfare. We bought Soldier of Fortune magazines, made blowguns from copper tubing, slathered our faces with mud when we crept under the lacy mesquite trees behind his house. We saved our allowances for the gun expos at the Bayfront Auditorium and loaded up on Chinese throwing stars and bandoliers of blank bullets, butterfly knives and pamphlets on chokeholds, and MREs that tasted like gluey chalk. We ate meals with the forks and spoons attached to our Swiss Army knives. Over the summer, though, I'd grown bored and embarrassed by the warfare stuff—my walls had been draped with camouflage netting, and over my bed I'd had a poster of one ninja roundhousing another—but Matt still liked it, so I'd recently told him he could have my cache. He was disappointed in me, I knew, as if I'd defected to the enemy, and probably the reason he hadn't yet come to collect my stuff was the hope that I'd change my mind. But I'd already packed everything into my army duffel, and each afternoon I waited for Matt to take it away. I didn't think we'd stay friends much longer.

When my father came into my room on a Friday night in early October, I thought he'd say Matt was on the porch. I was on my bed, staring at the acoustic ceiling where the ninja poster had been and listening to my stereo. My father crossed the room and lowered the volume. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie; he'd just gotten off work. He gazed through my window and into the backyard.

"Is Matt here?" I asked.

"You need to take care of Holly's dog for a few days."

"Roscoe," I said.

"Make sure he has food and water. Maybe play with him a little."

I sat up on my bed. My father's voice sounded frayed, as if I were hearing him from far away. His hands were clasped behind his back. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke on him, but then I realized it was floating down the hall from the kitchen.

"Are they heading out of town?" I asked. The Hensleys had a van and sometimes drove to Comfort or Falling Water in the Hill Country.

"Don't go over there tonight," he said. "You can just start in the morning."

"Okay," I said. A wind gusted outside. Tallow branches scraped against the side of the house.

"If the dog shits on their patio, spray it down with the hose."

"Is Mom smoking again?"

"She might be, Josh," he said, and put his hand against the window. "Yes, that might be happening."

 

In 1986 my father worked at the naval air station—most everyone's father did, including Holly's and Matt's—but he was also moonlighting at Sears, selling radial tires and car batteries, which he blamed on Reagan. It was the year the president denied trading arms for hostages in Iran and the space shuttle Challenger exploded and Halley's Comet scorched through the sky. It was the year I loved a reckless girl, the year being around my best friend made me lonely. It was the year my mother was working at the dry-cleaning plant and trying to quit smoking. I knew she occasionally snuck cigarettes—I'd seen her in the backyard on evenings when my father was at Sears—but she hadn't smoked in our house for months. On that night in October, when the filmy scent of smoke wafted into my room, I could only think that Holly's family was moving again. The last time her father had gotten news of his transfer, they were gone within a week.

But they weren't leaving. There'd been an accident earlier that day, something involving Sam, Holly's little brother. My father only knew that Sam had been taken away in an ambulance and the Hensleys would likely spend a few nights with him at the hospital. He relayed the information in a detached tone, as if summarizing a movie he didn't want me to watch. He'd moved from the window to sit on my bed, where he looked small. He said their mail would be held and there was a key under the ceramic cow skull on their porch. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen Sam, but couldn't—maybe the previous weekend, when he and Holly drew on their driveway with colored chalk, or maybe when Mr. Hensley was watering the yard with Sam on his shoulders. In my room, my father kept dragging his hand over his face, as if trying to wake himself up. I asked if he knew how Holly was doing, and he said, "She's hurting, Josh. They're all hurting like hell."

My mother baked all night—brownies and lemon bars, biscuits and an enchilada casserole. She fried chicken and sliced vegetables and made salami-and-cheese sandwiches that she quartered into triangles. When I went into the kitchen on Saturday morning, the counter was crowded with foil-covered dishes. My mother was walleyed. She poured me a glass of orange juice and put two pieces of cold fried chicken on my plate. "Breakfast of champions," she said.

With all the foil, the kitchen was bright and strange. The table was tacky with humidity. My mother shook a cigarette from a pack, then lit it from a burner on the stove. I heard it sizzle.

"Liz called last night," she said, and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. Liz was Mrs. Hensley, Holly's mother. My mother said, "Little Sam is sedated in intensive care."

"I don't know what's happening," I said.

"He burned himself," she said. "He's scalded all over the front of his little body."

Sam, my mother explained, had woken with a fever, so Mrs. Hensley kept him home from daycare. He spent the morning watching cartoons and napping on the living room couch. While he slept, Mrs. Hensley was cleaning the house and washing clothes, then decided to make tuna salad for lunch. She put water on to boil eggs. She checked on Sam on the couch, then stepped into the garage to put a load of laundry in the dryer. They had an attached garage, so she left the kitchen door open in case Sam woke up and called for her. She got sidetracked looking for dryer sheets and stayed out there longer than she'd intended. Then she heard her son screaming: he'd pulled the pot of boiling water down onto himself.

I felt cored out, not like I was going to vomit but like I already had. I pushed my plate away. At Sam's last birthday party, my parents and I had given him a toy garbage truck. Holly gave him a baseball cap that read, I Wasn't Born In Texas, But Got Here As Soon As I Could. He'd been wearing it when Mr. Hensley watered their lawn.

My mother opened the oven, looked inside, and then closed the door. Her cigarette was in an ashtray on the counter, smoke ribboning toward the open window.

"That poor family," my mother said.

"They're behind the eightball," I said. It was a phrase my father used.

"They sure are," she said. "Liz couldn't find Holly until very late. She thought she was off with that Julio."

"She had pep-squad practice," I lied. "I saw her when I walked home."

"You did?"

"There's a game this weekend," I said. "A big one."

"Then that's a relief. I worried she was with the teacher again."

"I don't think that really happened, the stuff with Mr. Mitchell," I said.

"I know you don't, sweetheart."

I took another bite of chicken, drained my orange juice. I said, "Matt might come over today. I'm giving him all my war stuff."

"I'll leave some chicken for you two," she said. "Your father and I are taking the rest to the hospital."

"I want to go," I said.

She brought her cigarette to her lips, then stubbed it out. She said, "No, Joshie, I don't think you do."

 

Their house had always been nicer than ours, and bigger. Over the years, workers had renovated the Hensleys' kitchen and added two rooms on the house's backside, a study and a game room. They had a bumper-pool table, thick carpet and Saltillo tile, lights with dimmer switches, and a fireplace. "Who needs a fireplace in Corpus?" my father had said one night. He was squinting through the peephole in our front door, watching smoke rise from the Hensleys' chimney. "Don't try to be something you're not, boy," he told me, and then told me again when they bought an aboveground pool for their backyard right before Mr. Hensley was transferred to Florida. I'd assumed the transfer was a demotion or punishment, but my father said Hensley had applied for it. (By way of explanation, he'd only said, "They're Republicans, Joshie.") While they were away, the Hensleys rented the house to a Catholic deacon and his wife, and when they returned, they paid to have new vinyl siding installed. It was gray with white and black trim, the shades of a lithograph.

Until that October weekend, I'd never been alone in their house. It seemed illicit, like when Matt and I paged through his father's Playboy s. The darkened rooms made me anxious. I had the sense I would do something I shouldn't, the dangerous and disappointing feeling that I couldn't be trusted. Had there been a route for me to bypass the house and still reach the garage where Roscoe's food was, I would've taken it, but I didn't have their garage-door opener—their automatic door was another extravagance my father resented—so I had to cut through the kitchen. I went twice on Saturday, three times on Sunday. I moved like a thief on each visit, never lingering or touching what I didn't have to. The air in the house smelled of potpourri, cloistered and spiced, and I tried not to breathe. I averted my gaze from the familiar and mysterious artifacts of the Hensleys' lives.

And yet I couldn't keep from seeing the coffee table Mrs. Hensley had pulled over to the couch so Sam wouldn't roll off, Holly's Aggie sweatshirt spread over the cushions, little red high-top shoes upturned on the carpet. I pretended not to know the Hensleys and tried to piece together a different family based on evidence they'd left behind. Their son is an only child, I thought. His parents have taken him to a swimming lesson. Or I imagined all of the Hensleys were home and hiding, waiting for me to break or steal something. My heart pumped in my ears. I left the lights off. In the kitchen, the floor tile gleamed; Holly's father had come home briefly Friday night, mopped up the spilled water, and grabbed fresh clothes for everyone at the hospital. The copper-bottomed pot was in the sink. Four unopened cans of tuna were stacked on the counter.

In the backyard, Roscoe always barreled into my legs and knocked me sideways. He jumped as high as my shoulders and scratched my chest through my shirt and licked my hand with his warm tongue. I let him chase me around the pool, and I threw pinecones for him to catch. We wrestled in the grass the way Holly had said he liked, then I scratched the scruff of his neck until he snored. I fed him more than I should. Before school on Monday morning, maybe because I'd been hoping Holly would appear on her porch and we'd walk to school together, I opened one of the cans of tuna and let Roscoe eat it from a spoon. That evening there was diarrhea all over the patio.

 

At school, the story kept changing. Sam wasn't scalded, he'd drowned in the Hensleys' pool. He'd slipped on a wet floor and hit his head. His brain was swelling. He'd been hit by a car, he'd eaten roach poison. Someone claimed to have seen the geology teacher taking flowers to the hospital, and someone else said they'd been in the faculty parking lot and found him weeping in his truck. On Wednesday, Matt said he'd heard the whole thing was a lie to cover up how Sam had accidently shot himself with his father's unregis-tered pistol.

We were standing by the statue of a mustang, the school mascot. Matt was in his blue woodland camos. He said, "I bet it was the Luger she showed us. If it was, the kid's toast."

Shortly after she returned from Florida, Holly had taken me and Matt into her parents' bedroom and showed us her father's pistol. She'd been babysitting Sam, and we'd been climbing the retama tree in my front yard. We were wearing our camouflage with pellet rifles slung over our shoulders, pretending to be mercenaries. She'd called across the street, "Yall want to see something cool?" The pistol was a German Parabellum 1908, a semiautomatic Luger. We'd read about them in our magazines.

"He burned himself," I told Matt. "He's sedated in intensive care, but he's going to pull through." I made up the last part. The night before, I'd asked my father about Sam and he told me to concentrate on my schoolwork and not to give Roscoe any more tuna.

"I heard he did it in the game room," Matt said. "I heard there's a gnarly bloodstain under the pool table."

"You heard from who?"

'Jeff Deyo," Matt said.

'You don't know Jeff Deyo," I said. Jeff Deyo was a red-eyed senior, a friend of Julio's who'd gotten held back. He wore the same flannel shirt every day, unbuttoned and tattered, and when I passed him in the hall, I smelled the smoker's patio.

"We've been hanging out," Matt said. "We've been getting high. If you tell, I'll kick your ass."

"You need to come get all of my gear. If you don't want it, I'll throw it away."

"Don't take it out on me just because your girlfriend's brother blew his face off."

"She's not my girlfriend," I said.

"Right," he laughed. "She's dating Mr. Mitchell and you're with Anastasia from across town."

"You're an asshole."

"Check the game room," he said. "I heard the stain looks like a pot leaf."

Later that night, Mrs. Hensley called. My father was working his shift at Sears, and I was watching television on the couch while my mother smoked beside me. After answering, my mother handed me the receiver and told me to hang up once she switched to the kitchen phone. While she made her way down the hall, I told Mrs. Hensley about Roscoe catching the pinecones I tossed. She thanked me and said Holly would call me once things calmed down with Sam. Then my mother said, "Okay, Joshie, I got it."

"Okay," I said, but I just pushed the mute button and stayed on the line. I wanted to hear if Mrs. Hensley would say anything more about Holly, if she'd mention Mr. Hensley's Luger.

"We're going to Houston," Mrs. Hensley said. "They're moving him to the burn unit at the Shriners Hospital."

"Okay," my mother said. "Okay."

"I don't know. I don't know if it's okay."

"Are the doctors saying anything else?"

"You're going to Houston, that's what they're saying. They're saying, We can't help him here."

 

I checked out the game-room carpet on Saturday morning, then crept through the rest of the house that night. I knew I wouldn't find a bloodstain, just as I knew stealing through their hallways was a betrayal, but I couldn't stop myself. The moonlight canting through the blinds was bright enough in most rooms, but I also used the angle-head flashlight I'd bought at a gun expo. In the near dark, the Hensleys' house seemed smaller, not bigger, which surprised me. A fine layer of dust on the surfaces—the marble-topped dressers, the pool table's rails, the framed pictures on the walls—shone in the light, reflected it, and made me think of silt on a riverbed. Moving through their rooms gave me a jumpy, underwater feeling, as if I were swimming through the wreckage of a sunken ship, paddling from one ruined space to another. I avoided Sam's room.

And I'd told myself I wouldn't go into Holly's room, but on Sunday night I did. The moon hung low in the sky, a lurid glow seeping through her curtains and puddling on the carpet. The room smelled of lavender. I'd been in there before, but stripped of noise and electric light, the layout seemed unexpected. Her bed was made, piled high with frilly pillows and stuffed animals—open-armed bears, mostly, and a plush snake stretching the length of her mattress. Four silver-framed photos topped her vanity: Holly and Sam in an orange grove, Julio on Padre Island flexing his arms and smirking, Roscoe licking Holly's face with her eyes closed, and a picture of Holly when she was younger, eating ice cream with a fork. Green and white streamers were tacked to her closet door, and when I moved too quickly, they fluttered and startled me. She had a banana-shaped phone on her nightstand, and I began worrying it would ring. Or I thought my father would silently appear in her doorway, his eyes narrow with disgust. Leave, I thought. Go home. In my chest, my heart was wild as a trapped, frantic bird.

And yet I stayed. Outside, Roscoe trotted around the pool; his tags tinkled. Once, he started barking and I dropped to the floor and shimmied under Holly's bed. The Hensleys, I knew, had returned from Houston. I imagined Holly coming into her room and calling someone—Julio or maybe even Mr. Mitchell—to relay news about Sam. I imagined her turning off the lights and weeping and falling asleep with me under her. I considered bolting, trying to climb out the window and into the backyard, but knew I'd make too much racket. Roscoe kept barking. He was racing from one fence to another. I held my breath. I listened to phantom footfalls, the murmur of floorboards and studs behind the walls, the sad and random noises of an empty house at night. My hands were trembling, so I tucked them between my chest and the carpet. I still had the same underwater feeling, though now it was as if I were sinking, watching the surface grow blurry and distant. I waited to hit the bottom, to be discovered in the darkness.

But the lights in Holly's room never came on, and eventually Roscoe settled down. I pulled myself out from under the bed. I thought of how Matt and I used to crawl on our bellies in the brush behind his house, our faces obscured with mud. It occurred to me that while I was hiding in the Hensleys' house, he might be getting high with Jeff Deyo, and I felt suddenly and intensely alone. I had an odd sense of erasure, as if I were seeing the set for a play be dismantled. It was disorienting. And now that I'd crossed into Holly's room, I knew I'd return every night. The knowledge left me feeling resigned and melancholy, but also shot through with boldness. Before leaving, I dialed Matt's number on the banana phone, and when he answered, I didn't say a word.

 

My father was off from Sears that Thursday, so when he got home from the base, we mowed the Hensleys' lawns. Maybe my mother had asked him to do it, or maybe he'd gotten the idea after finishing our yard. I hoped it meant the Hensleys would return soon. As he pushed our lawnmower across the street—the engine idling, the blades scattering debris like when a Chinook lifts off—I followed him with the rake and bag of clippings.

A cold front had silvered the sky, unraveled the clouds. The air smelled briny, and every so often a wind would gust and eddy the fallen leaves. I waited for my father to announce the Hensleys were driving back from Houston, but he never did. While he swept the back patio, I said, "Maybe when Sam comes home Mom will quit smoking."

He leaned the broom against the house and fished his handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his forehead. Roscoe was snortling along the fenceline. I looked at my shoes, flecked with cut grass.

I said, "Maybe she'll be less stressed and—"

"Josh," he interrupted, "when Sam comes home, he might not look the same. We need to start preparing ourselves for that."

I nodded and dragged the rake across the grass; the trimmings jumped like grasshoppers. I thought of the picture in the silver frame on Holly's dresser, the one of her and her brother in the orange grove. Originally I'd assumed they were in Florida, but now I believed they might have been in the Rio Grande Valley. In the picture, they're holding hands and heading away from the camera so their faces are invisible. It had become my favorite thing in Holly's room. Since Sunday night, I'd lain on Holly's bed, opened her closet to press my nose into her clothes, even spritzed her perfume on my Windbreaker so I could inhale her at home. I'd dialed every number I could think of on her banana phone—my mother at the dry cleaner, my father at the base and Sears, the secretary at King and the principal and my own house—then hung up when anyone answered. I never looked in her drawers, and I never stole anything, but every night I considered taking the orange-grove picture. I could stare at it for hours, imagining where they might go once they stepped beyond the aperture.

"He's behind the eight ball," I said.

"This kind of thing can tear up a family," my father said. "It can rip even a strong family to shreds. It's not easy to watch."

"They need our help," I said. "You're saying we need to—"

"We'll help however we can, Josh, but what I'm saying is we're not going to let them drag us into their problems."

"I understand," I said, though I didn't.

"What I'm saying is when Holly needs a shoulder to cry on, don't let it be yours."

 

But the Hensleys didn't come home. Mrs. Hensley, I knew, called my mother late at night every couple of days, and I kept hoping to wake up and see their van in their driveway, but it never appeared. One night I overheard my parents talking about skin grafts and a neoprene bodysuit that would keep Sam's flesh hydrated, compressed. Their voices were hushed and somber. My father also mentioned how Mr. Hensley's sick leave and vacation days were long gone. Another night I thought they were talking about Sam again, but they were just discussing the breakdown of talks between President Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland. The neighborhood started getting ready for Halloween, carved pumpkins appearing on porches and cardboard witches hanging in windows, and the temperature was dropping, especially in the evenings. In Corpus, the fall is damp and glomming. I laid out a pallet of blankets for Roscoe in the garage and started pouring warm water over his food. I used the copper-bottomed pot that Holly's father had left in the sink.

I'd barely seen Matt since the day we talked about the bloodstain. He'd been skipping school a lot, and on those days when I did glimpse him in the hall, I hid behind my locker door or ducked into the bathroom. With the changing weather, he'd taken to wearing a plaid flannel shirt with his fatigues. He hung out on the smoker's patio in the mornings and afternoons. I called his house every night from Holly's banana phone and never said anything. Sometimes Matt hung up right away, others he'd lay the receiver beside a radio he'd tuned to a Tejano station, or he'd read classified ads from Soldier of Fortune into the phone: The survival knife you've been waiting for, ten-inch blade and hollow compass-topped handle. Bounty hunting is legal and profitable! Silent firepower: crossbows and slingshots. The duffel bag with all of my warfare stuff was still in my room, and though I no longer expected Matt to take it away, I also hadn't unpacked it.

So on the morning when he waved me over to the smoker's patio and said he'd pick up the duffel that afternoon, I should have been relieved. There were a few other students on the patio, sallow-skinned seniors I'd seen with Holly, and who'd always intimidated me. I was surprised by how easily Matt fit in, saddened by it. He was wearing his tiger-stripe camos, toeing out a cigarette with his combat boot. He blew smoke over his shoulder, the way my mother sometimes did, and said, "Is that cool? Jeff said he'd give me a ride."

"I threw it away," I said.

"No way," he said, his voice light with disappointment, as if I'd forgotten his birthday.

"I didn't think you were coming. I was tired of seeing it."

"That really sucks, Josh."

"And there wasn't a bloodstain," I said.

"What?"

"At Holly's house," I said. "Sam didn't shoot himself."

"That's what this is about?"

"I looked. There's no bloodstain," I said. "He burned himself with a pot of water. He'll probably have a skin graft."

Matt nodded, his eyes downcast and thoughtful. A small wind picked up, wafting the acrid smell of put-out cigarettes. I thought Matt was thinking of something kind to say about Sam. Once, when I got stung by an asp behind his house, he broke off a piece of aloe from his mother's plant and rubbed it on the wound.

Now, though, he just grinned and said, "I bet his face looks like melted cheese, all stretched and gooey. He won't need a mask for Hallowe—"

My fist connected right above Matt's temple. "Oh shit," a girl said, and a crowd of smokers cinched around us. Before Matt knew what was happening—before I knew what was happening—I'd hit him again, on his mouth. Already there was blood on his teeth, in the corners of his lips. Then I was on top of him and we were falling to the patio and he was trying to cover his face with his forearms and saying, "Dude, come on, please no," and I was waiting for someone to stop me, to pull me off him, to save both of us.

 

The principal called my mother at the dry cleaners to pick me up from school; he'd suspended me for three days. I expected her to be angry or embarrassed, but when I apologized to her, she said, "Oh, Joshie, we always thought Matt was a twerp."

We drove to the bayfront and sat on the seawall. Although we were out in the open—the bay seething in front of us, the docked sailboats bobbing in the marina to the west—I felt as if we were hiding, staking out a place to plot our next move. The tide heaved. Waves walloped the barnacled pylons; the dirty foam spread and dissolved. Eventually a crisp, salted wind nosed ashore and my mother scooted closer to me. I kept expecting her to light a cigarette.

"Sometimes I snoop in the Hensley house," I said.

"I know."

"You do?"

"I watch your little flashlight beam from our window," she said. "It reminds me of a fly trying to get out."

"I don't take anything," I said. "I just look."

"I know that too."

A white gull hovered over us, then banked off and wheeled over the surf. I could hear cables clanging against hollow masts in the marina, the wind soughing through the dry palm trees that loomed along the seawall. Behind us stood the Bayfront Auditorium, where the gun expos took place. My knuckles ached.

"Dad says Sam might look different when he comes home," I said.

My mother nodded. She was watching the gull. It had landed on a pylon, its head moving around in twitches.

"And he said I should stay away from Holly."

"Her life's already sewn up," she said, her gaze still trained on the gull. "Matt's is too. And now probably Sam's."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Good," my mother said, resting her head on my shoulder. "Good, I'm glad."

 

Now I think of 1986 as the year my life pivoted away from what it had been, maybe the year when all of our lives pivoted. It was the year my parents spoke in low, furtive tones and I strained to hear what they weren't saying. It was the year I surrendered the weapons of my youth—the morning after I fought Matt, I did throw out my duffel bag—and the year Holly Hensley shocked everyone by dropping out of school and joining the coast guard. This happened right after Thanksgiving. Her enlisting, I remember, was met with disillusionment and disdain—it seemed selfish and rash—but she found her footing in the military and enjoyed a distinguished career. After the coast guard, she moved to the army and was stationed in Hawaii, Guam, and, until her chopper went down two days ago, Afghanistan. According to the short obituary my mother just e-mailed me, Holly is survived by two sons and a husband, and she achieved the rank of staff sergeant. I hadn't seen her in almost twenty years. Funeral arrangements are being made in Corpus. I'll send flowers, and if I can find it, I'll make a copy of the orange-grove photo and mail it to her family.

The night after I got suspended, I decided to steal that picture of Holly and her brother. I'd been lying on my bed earlier that day—my father had taken away my stereo and television privileges, and until my suspension ended, I was only allowed out of the house to feed Roscoe—and I'd thought having the orange-grove photo might quell my desire to sneak into Holly's room. I'd also started thinking Mr. Hensley would return soon, so my access to the house felt fleeting, like a journey to a foreign country—a deployment—was coming to an end. I wanted a souvenir.

The moon was full that night, lamping the Hensleys' backyard and rimming the curtains in Holly's room. Everything else lay in deep shadow; I clicked my flashlight on and off to see, and wondered if my mother was watching from across the street. I suspected she was and didn't mind. The house still smelled of potpourri, a little dank. I'd debated over grabbing another picture from Holly's parents' room to replace the one I wanted to take, but finally decided I'd just cluster the remaining three photos and hope Holly would have forgotten what had been there before. It seemed possible.

I was standing in front of her dresser, trying to visualize the most inconspicuous way to rearrange the pictures, when from behind me I heard, "What's buzzin', cousin?"

I spun around, knocked into the dresser. The frames toppled. My heart kicked in my chest. Holly was on her bed, lying on her side among the stuffed animals. Even when I looked straight at her, her image was obscured in the dark.

"I didn't take anything," I said.

"You should have," she said. "I would."

"I just like the picture of you and Sam in the orange grove."

"I do too," she said. "What you can't see is that the oranges are frozen solid. It was last year, right before we came back, and there was this massive cold snap that killed everything."

I clasped my hands behind my back; they were trembling again. I said, "I'm sorry for sneak—"

"We're alone here, if you're wondering," she said, shifting on the bed. "My parents are still in Houston with Sam. Julio came to get me. If I don't go back to school, I won't graduate."

"I'm suspended," I said.

"And Matt's a bloody mess."

"You heard?"

"I heard you were defending Sam," she said. "I almost went to your house to thank you, but then I saw the grass clippings on the carpet and figured you'd be back."

"I never looked in your drawers," I said.

"You'll do better next time," she said.

A raft of clouds floated past the moon, shrouding the room for a moment. I looked at the ceiling and couldn't see it. I could hear myself breathing.

"I wanted the orange-grove picture," I said. "I was going to steal it."

"You can't have that one, but I'll make you a copy," she said. "Want anything else?"

"I want Sam to get better."

"Me too. He's trying. Anything else?"

"I want to know about Mr. Mitchell," I said.

Holly rolled onto her back. She tossed a stuffed white bear into the air, caught it, then did it again. She said, "I'll tell you, but you only get three wishes. You're sure this is how you want to use your last one?"

I wasn't sure of anything at that moment. I felt as if I were balancing on a precipice, and I needed to think clearly. I tried to imagine how disappointed my father would be if he knew where I was, tried to understand what my mother had meant about everyone's lives being sewn up. I thought of how Sam used Holly's sweatshirt for a blanket, and the baseball cap she'd given him for his birthday. I wondered how it would feel to live outside Texas, what it would be like to walk through a frozen orange grove or to douse yourself with boiling water or to see your young son lying in a coma and not recognize him.

And then, like that, I understood. Before I could stop myself, I said, "He's yours, isn't he? Sam is."

Holly tossed the bear again, higher. In the air, it spiraled and looked like a silver fish flashing through murky water. She did it again, higher still. I thought she was trying to hit the ceiling I could barely see.

"That's why you went to Florida," I said. "Your parents didn't want—"

"Josh," she said.

"Yes?"

"Stop talking," she said.

"I won't tell anyone."

"Come here," Holly said. "Just come here."

I thought I would lie beside her and she would whisper the trajectory of Sam's life to me, explain who else knew her secrets and who his father was. It gave me a sensation of inertia, of countless mysteries parting around me like currents. But Holly offered none of this. She just lifted the comforter and I took off my shoes and she pulled me on top of her. We kicked her stuffed animals to the carpet, stripped off our clothes, tangled into each other. Roscoe barked in the backyard and ran along the fence; Holly said, "He chases possums." The house groaned. I shivered. I thought of the Luger in her parents' bedroom and wondered where Matt was at that late hour. I worried my father would come looking for me, but also felt certain my mother would run interference. Soon Holly said, "I just want him to be okay," and started sobbing against my chest. I was fourteen years old, scared and inexperienced and mystified by the luck of my life, and though I could think of nothing to say, I held her close, as tight as I could. Eventually her breathing slowed so completely I wondered if she'd gone to sleep. I hoped so. I was wide awake, my eyes open and adjusted to the darkness. The edges of her curtains were again framed in moonlight, and in the shallow glow, our skin looked new and smooth and unblemished, ready for the scars that were lying, somewhere, in ambush.