She reached into the cooler by her side and brought out two Tecate beers. “You miss drinking over there?” she asked, handing one to Billy.
“At first. But after a while, not so much.” He popped the top and savored that happiest of fizzy sounds. “There’s days, though, you’d give about anything for one.”
“No shit. Listen, I think drinking’s way underrated in our society, like for its therapeutic values? Lets you bust out from time to time, take a little vacation from yourself. It’s hard living in your own head twenty-four/seven.”
“You sort of go insane.”
“Explains a lot, eh, all those preachers getting caught doing hookers. I just hope I never have a drinking problem, then I’d have to quit.”
They drank. A healthful sense of well-being enveloped them.
“So tell me about the Victory Tour.”
“The tour. Huh. Well, it’s kind of a blur.”
“Then just tell me about the groupies.”
He laughed but could feel himself flushing from the shoulders up. A puritanical mood came over him. “Haven’t been any groupies,” he muttered.
“Lie.”
“No lie.”
“You are a lying sackful of it. Listen, boy, you better be out there hitting it! Like, get out there and get some for me.”
“Kathryn, stop.”
“The truth, dude, I’m going a little crazy in this burg.”
“You’ll be gone soon enough.”
“Soon, maybe, yeah, but not soon enough. Not one decent guy in this freakin’ town, believe me, I checked. Some nights I’m like, whatever, maybe I’ll drive over to Sonic and hit on the high school boys, like, hey bubba, come take a ride with me! Once you’ve had a chick with a scar on her face you never go back.”
“Kathryn,” Billy pleaded.
“I should be graduated by now. I could be making sixty thousand a year someplace.”
“You’ll get there.”
“Yes, I will,” she said firmly.
“You’re getting there,” Billy amended.
“If I don’t go crazy first.”
Her last two surgeries were scheduled for spring. In January she’d start a couple of classes at community college, which she had to do, otherwise the compassionate bankers at College Fund Inc. would start charging penalty interest on her student loans. “You know what’s funny,” she said, “everybody around here’s such a major conservative till they get sick, get screwed over by their insurance company, their job goes over to China or whatever, then they’re like, ‘Oooooh, what happened? I thought America was just the greatest country ever and I’m such a good person, why is all this terrible shit happening to me?’ And I was one of ’em, man. Just as stupid as the rest. I never thought anything bad would happen to me, or if it did there was a system that would make it all right.”
“Maybe you didn’t pray hard enough.”
She coughed up a laugh. “Yeah, that must be it. The power of prayer, dawg.”
They drank. Kathryn touched the cold beer can to her cheeks, her neck, her navel, each touch triggering starbursts in Billy’s brain. He asked what their mother planned to do about the home equity loan.
Kathryn frowned. “Who knows what that woman’s going to do. She’s not rational, Billy. She’s not dealing with the facts. Look, don’t you worry about the damn loan. Not your life, not your problem, or mine either, really. She and dad are gonna do what they’re gonna do, and we can’t stop them.”
“How much do we owe on the medical?”
“We? You mean they. Or I suppose me too, if you want to get technical.” She consulted her beer. “Four hundred thousand, give or take. Bills keep coming in from stuff they did a year ago.”
Four. Hundred. Thousand. It was like God appearing in all his nuclear glory, omnipotent, all-consuming, incomprehensible.
“No way.”
Kathryn shrugged. The numbers bored her.
“Not your prob, Bill. Let it go. And anything you get from your movie deal, keep it. Don’t be blowing it trying to bail those two out.” When Billy said nothing, she laughed and rolled onto her stomach, her bottom smartly rising from the small of her back like an island appearing on a tropical sea.
“You know what Dad bought that girl when she turned sixteen?”
“What girl?”
“Come on, Billy, our sister. Half sister.”
“No, I don’t know what he bought her when she turned sixteen.”
“A damn car.”
Billy swallowed, turned away. He could be cool about this.
“Mustang GTO, dawg, right off the lot. This was before he got fired. But still.”
Billy could feel the air hardening in his chest. “New?” He hated that his voice cracked.
“Total cherry.” She laughed. “So don’t be a sap. Anything you do for him or Mom, they’ll just dump on it. Look after yourself and let them do whatever they’re going to do.”
Billy managed to refrain from asking the color of the car. “Well.” He reached beyond the blanket and pulled up a twist of dry grass. “It’s not like I’ve got anything to give them anyway.”
Kathryn brought out two more beers. Billy’s philosophy was, any buzz you caught during daylight hours was a bonus; that time didn’t count against your total allotment here on earth, therefore the daytime buzz was that much sweeter. And today, what could be more perfect than lying in the sun, drinking beer with an extremely hot blonde in a bikini? The only problem, of course, being that the girl was his sister, but what was the harm in pretending for a few short hours? The afternoon took on a spangling beer-buzz glow. He didn’t mind that Kathryn probed him about life “at the front,” as she called it. How’s the food? How’s your quarters? The Iraqis, what are they like, and do they all hate us yet? She kept touching him, tapping his shoulder and squeezing his arm, pushing her bare feet up against his blue-jean legs. All the contact simultaneously sharpened his senses and made him passive, relaxed, as if an especially fine drug was kicking in.
“What’s gonna happen when you get back?”
He shrugged. “The same, I guess. Patrol, eat, sleep. Then get up and do it again.”
“Do you dread it?”
He pretended to consider. “It doesn’t matter what I feel about it. I’ve gotta go, so I’m going.”
She was lying on her side with her head propped on an elbow. A small gold cross lay on the swell of one of her breasts, a tiny mountaineer going for the top.
“How do the other guys feel?”
“The same. I mean, look, nobody wants to go back. But it’s what you signed up for, so you go.”
“Then let me ask you this, do you guys believe in the war? Like is it good, legit, are we doing the right thing? Or is it all really just about the oil?”
“Kathryn, Jesus. You know I don’t know that.”
“I’m just asking what you believe, what you personally think. It’s not a quiz, dude, I’m not looking for the big objective answer here. I just want to know what’s going on in your head.”