All right. Well. Since she asked. He found he was strangely grateful that someone had.
“I don’t think anybody knows what we’re doing over there. I mean, it’s weird. It’s like the Iraqis really hate us, you know? Just right there in our own AO, we’re building a couple of schools, we’re trying to get their sewer system up and running, we bring in tankers of drinking water every day and do a meal program for the kids, and all they wanna do is kill us. Our mission is to help and enhance, right? And these people are living in shit, literal shit, their government did nothing for them all these years, but we’re the enemy, right? So what it ends up coming down to is survival, I guess. You just pull in, you aren’t thinking about accomplishing anything, you just wanna get through the day with all your guys alive. So then you start to wonder why we’re even over there.”
Kathryn heard him out. She set her jaw.
“All right, how about this. What if you didn’t go back.”
He flinched. Then he laughed. No. No way.
“I’m serious, Billy. What if you said nope, no thanks, been there, done that, you think they’d have the guts to come after you? The big hero and all? Think of the headlines, ‘Hero Staying Home, Says War Sucks.’ You’ve got major cred, it’s not like anybody’s going to say it’s because you’re scared.”
“But I am scared. Everybody’s scared.”
“You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you’ve done nobody’s going to doubt you.” Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she’d found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, four educational deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh, 4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O’Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the “do not volunteer” box as to service overseas.
“You see where I’m going with this?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn’s done his part.”
“Kat, it just doesn’t matter. They did what they did. I’m doing what I’m doing. There’s no point in us trying…” Two fat tears seeped out from under her sunglasses, and he had to turn away.
“What about us, Billy, think about that. With everything this family’s been through, what do you think it’ll do to us if something happens to you?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me.”
She paused long enough for him to want that one back.
“Billy, there’s a way to do this. There’s a group down in Austin, they help soldiers. They’ve got lawyers, resources, they know how to handle these things. I did some research, and it looks like they’re really good people. So if you decided… look, I’m just saying, you’d have some help with this.”
“Kathryn.”
“What?”
“I’m going.”
“Dammit!”
“I’ll be okay.”
“You don’t know that!”
She was so fierce. He was touched. Then he felt scared.
“I guess I don’t. But we get a lot more of them than they get of us. And they can’t get all of us.”
She began to weep. He put his arm around her shoulders and held her close in a brotherly, determinedly nonsexual way. She cried harder and rested her head on his shoulder. Her hair had a clean woody smell, with hints of spice like fennel or freshly rained-on ferns. There was something peaceful about her crying, some sort of music or psychic nourishment in the sound. Her tears dribbled across his chest like hatchling turtles. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was that she’d gone inside to get some Kleenex, saying she’d be right back. He wasn’t even aware of falling asleep until being waked in the most unpleasant way by the whoom of the back door bursting open as if fireballed, blown out by a breaching charge, then the whhhhhhiiiiiiirrrrrrrr of the latest in assisted mobility systems. Son of a bitch! Heart going like a speed bag, eyes sparking tiny gigabytes of shock, Billy spun onto his belly, wrenching various small muscles in his back, and there was Ray buzzing across the patio. What the FOCK!!! Is that any way to wake a combat soldier? The startle reflex triggering a highly refined set of quick-response skills, i.e., had Billy happened to have his M4 handy, Ray would be a steaming pile of hamburger right about now.
Bastard, he probably meant to do it. He didn’t acknowledge his son or even glance Billy’s way, but Billy detected a faint smirk in the set of his mouth, a crimping of flesh at the corners of his lips. Ray motored down the ramp and into the yard. Billy felt sick from all the adrenaline jamming his system, but he scruffed up on one elbow and had a look around. Kathryn was gone. His mouth was skunky from all the pre-nap beers. The afternoon had turned overcast, the sun bleared by the clouds like a soap ball floating in a tub of dirty bathwater. Out in the yard Ray paused to light a cigarette. A real piece of work, that one, Billy mused. Highly intelligent and glib as hell, you couldn’t beat him in any argument. Never went to college but made a shit ton of money, back in the day. Ray snapped his lighter shut and trundled farther into the yard, his chair waddling over all the little bumps and rills. It had a sad lack of dignity when viewed from behind, as graceless in motion as a hippo’s backside, and the American flag decal stuck there dead center seemed like a cruel and tasteless joke, someone’s lame attempt at satire.
Billy leaned back on his elbows and watched his father. You’d think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing. For proof all you had to do was take a quick poll of Bravo. On Holliday’s last visit home before shipping out, his brother told him, I hope you fuckin’ die in Iraq. When Mango was fifteen his father cracked his skull with a monkey wrench, and Mrs. Mango’s comment was, So maybe now you’ll stop pissing your father off. Dime’s grandfather and one of his uncles were suicides. Lake’s mother was an OxyContin addict who’d done time, his father a dealer who ditto. When Crack was eleven years old his mother ran off with the assistant pastor of their church. Shroom, he barely had a family. A-bort’s father had been the deadbeat poster dad for the state of Louisiana, and Sykes’s father and brothers blew up their house cooking meth.
Yes, family was key, Billy decided. If you could figure out how to live with family then you’d gone a long way toward finding your peace, but for that, the finding, the figuring out, you needed a strategy. So where did you go for that? Age by itself didn’t do it for you, obviously. Maybe books, but they took so long, and in the meantime the thing was always coming at you. When violent animal forces were in play, who had the fucking time for books? The morning after 9-11 Ray was on the air advocating “nuclear cleansing” of certain Middle East capitals, playing “Bomb Bomb Iran” by Vince Vance and the Valiants and “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Billy remembers thinking, Is this how it works? Terrible things had happened, which meant more and greater terrors were on the way, as if the process was not merely automatic, but absolute. Those days and weeks have since acquired an aura of prophecy in his life. Billy thinks he sensed the fatedness of it even then — war was coming and he was bound for the war, and some occult, irresistible father-son dynamic was at work to ensure that this was so. If the father loved the war, how could the son stay away? Not that love for the war would necessarily translate into love for the son.