“Go away.”
“C’mon, Harrington. Would it help if I ate a bug?”
“Huh? No. Wha—”
Before he could say anything else, Rick snatched up a grasshopper that had been hanging out on a leaf and popped it in his mouth. He gave it one hard crunch, swallowed, and then immediately choked, doubled over, and puked in the dirt. Ben had never laughed so hard in his young life. They were both in tears, Ben from cracking up and Rick from trying to hock up the grasshopper’s exoskeleton. After a while they ran back into the river as if nothing had happened and splashed around and spat water at the sun.
Laughter and a fresh round of sobs passed through the crowd. A father holding his teenage daughter’s shoulders suddenly gripped her, as if she might be borne away by this hard wind.
Of course, Ben didn’t share the story of the last time he saw Rick, in the spring of ’06. Home from his first tour, Rick had added even more layers of muscle to his beastly frame. He looked like he wore a full-body Kevlar vest. He got skunk-drunk, and Ben tried to broach the subject of Bill Ashcraft. Rick and Bill, friends from the crib, hadn’t spoken to each other in nearly three years. But Rick had only grisly stories of bravery, of the fun he was having in the Iraqi desert. “One time, thought I saw this rat carrying around a piece of beef jerky. So I thought, where’s your stash little buddy? Turns out it was a finger! Little cutey-tooty rat carrying around a finger!”
“Jesus, Brinklan.”
“Aw, don’t be a puss. It’s just war.”
Rick wouldn’t talk about Bill, and he wouldn’t talk about Kaylyn, but he did want to go out to Jericho Lake and smoke a joint.
“Don’t the Marines piss-test you?”
He barked a laugh. “Bullfrog, you little twat.” This was the thing about Rick: how his coarseness, his incivility, could never mask—and was in fact tied to—his great love for you.
And they did drive out to Jericho, too drunk, cruising up over the horizon of their snow-globe town. Ben wanted to write a song about Rick, this kind of guy you’d find teeming across the country’s swollen midsection: toggling Budweiser, Camels, and dip, leaning into the bar like he was peering over the edge of a chasm, capable of near philosophy when discussing college football or shotgun gauges, neck on a swivel for any pretty lady but always loyal to his true love, most of his drinking done within a mile or two of where he was born, calloused hands, one finger bent at an odd angle from a break that never healed right, a wildly foul mouth that could employ the word fuck as noun, verb, adjective, or gerund in a way you were sure had never existed before that moment (“Having us a fuckly good time,” he’d said, as they sat in the grass, staring out at the glistening midnight sheen of Jericho). Yet his friend was in no way standard. He was freewheeling, mule-stubborn, and cunning as a coyote trickster. He had whole oceans inside of him, the wilds of the country, fierce ghosts, and a couple hundred million stars.
“There’s nothing left, man. Nothing to go back to,” Rick cryptically declared that night. He freed his runty dick from his jeans and pissed so close to Ben that he had to scoot madly across the grass to avoid the splash. “Just you and me, buddy. Just you and me and this last lonesome night in each other’s arms.”
What was he talking about? Hard to say. Rick didn’t much understand himself, but something about what, in just three short years, had happened to him. To them. The places he’d seen, the things he’d done. On his last day home before his redeployment, he got obliterated in his backyard at the fire pit, chucking cobalt-blue cans of Bud Light into the flames even though his mom always scolded him for this. He took a walk down the road, to the field where, like an idiot, he’d once tried to give his girlfriend an engagement ring. Dusk settled in, and it was that odd midwestern temperature where the remnants of winter kept stealing day after day of spring. Scabs of melting snow lingered in the brush of the field. Beyond it stretched the forest and the scotched, brush-wire look of the leafless trees. Aqueous daylight came slanting over the horizon. Like a filter, it rendered the color of things differently, so that the field’s distant cows looked maroon and yellow in this kaleidoscopic sunset. He stood, smacking a melted puddle with his foot, waiting on the crows. You had to have faith, he figured. Faith that whatever pain you had in your life, God made up for it later.
Crows had taken to roosting in the woods near the industrial park about a mile away. Foraging in the dumpsters and the hackberry bushes, multiple flocks teamed up to become a larger and larger horde. His dad called them the “mega-murder” because of what happened at dusk. Rick watched his image wobble in the puddle, and when it went still, he would smack it, and his features would get that horizontal interference all over again. He was drunk and got to thinking. Thinking about this cage he lived in, this prison where it felt like he’d spend the entirety of his life, cradle to grave, measuring the distance between his most modest hopes and all the cheap regret he actually ended up living. You passed your time in the cage, he figured, by clinging pointlessly and desperately to an endless series of unfinished sorrows.
Then the crows lit out, thousands of them, pouring across the sky’s last light. They seemed to swell with a violet hue, creatures somewhere between rats and angels, cawing, descending into the forest in an eerie blanket, covering every naked winter branch…
When all was said and done with the parade, the crowd converged around the stage and those on it fell into their embraces and prayers. The wind sneaked up their sleeves, gouged at their eyes, and seemed to hustle them toward departure. Jill Brinklan dropped her plum handkerchief and never picked it up. Marty Brinklan turned to hug Lee, so he wouldn’t have to look at his wife. Kaylyn hopped off the stage quickly. Ben Harrington smeared tears across his cheek with the back of a cold hand. Vehicles from the procession began to peel off. A city maintenance truck arrived to fish the flag out of the branches of the oak tree. The casket was returned to Walmart. It was October 13, 2007.
In terms of our story, the parade was perhaps most notable not for the people who showed up but for those who were missing that day. Bill Ashcraft and Nasty Tina. Former volleyball star and First Christian Church attendee Stacey Moore. And a kid named Danny Eaton still doing his time in Iraq, a few years away from losing one of his pretty hazel eyes. Each of them missing for reasons of their own, all of them someday to return. It’s hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear. There is only this wild, fucked-up flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died.
So we begin roughly six years after the parade thrown in honor of Corporal Rick Brinklan, on a fried fever of a summer night in 2013. We begin with history’s dogs howling, suffering in every last nerve and muscle. We begin with four vehicles and their occupants converging on this one Ohio town from the north, south, east, and west. Specifically, we begin on a dark country road with a small pickup truck, the frame shuddering, the gas tank empty, hurtling through the night from origins yet unknown.
BILL ASHCRAFT AND THE GREAT AMERICAN THING
WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS a truck cruising along on a hot July night with a small unmarked package strapped to the underside of the wheel well. This after a fourteen-hour drive from New Orleans to Ohio with the driver cranked out of his moon on LSD. This after Bill Ashcraft had pulled into his hometown and encountered two relics of his country’s imperial, war-savaged heart. After he found bemedaled hero Dan Eaton strolling aimless and hollow-eyed on the twilight roadside. After visiting Rick Brinklan’s cool, glass-smooth grave, his first time since Brinklan’s fractured body came home. After the bar fight suddenly extinguished by Eaton’s inventive use of a glass eye. Then throw in a few other schoolyard ghosts he’d yucked it up with at that bar: Jonah Hansen, the scion of a housing dynasty, and former Rust Belt football icon Todd Beaufort, and what a web of truly vexing remembrance these aging boys had constellated within him. Tuck all that away, though. Dan Eaton will explain all that eventually. For now just understand that stuff went down, but for Bill, the mystic, intertwining energy of the night was not exactly decelerating. From the moment he popped the tab onto his tongue and pulled into the swamp-ass heat of the bayou highways, he understood he’d be navigating some bends in the river on this one, but even by his standards the path felt oxbowed, unpredictable far beyond what one expects when returning to your frayed and haunted hometown to make a shady delivery to a figure from your deep, dank, dark damning past, which is to say, Dear Territory: I’m a stranger here myself.