“Hey, no fair listening to a radio,” Richard said.
Was he the only one, Ann thought, not electronically cheating? “A hurricane?” she asked.
“Listening to music is the only way I can sleep. I put earphones on,” Dex said. “Pacific Island radio has some good stations. Otherwise I tune into KROQ in LA.”
“What’s the difference between a tropical storm and a category one hurricane?” Ann asked.
“Nothing to worry about,” Loren said. “Storms hardly ever come this far. A couple raindrops.”
Dex put on some music and jumped on the table, playing air guitar. They all danced: Richard with Titi, Loren with Wende, Ann with Cooked. Perhaps the love potion had worked after all. Cooked brought out pahu drums made of coconut wood, and soon Dex, Richard, and he were beating out a syncopated rhythm on them. Titi did a native dance, and Wende joined. Finally, with much pulling, Ann got up. All three women, hips rocking back and forth, circled Loren, who sat blissfully in the middle of them. He closed his eyes with a smile on his lips, looking like a skinny, contented Buddha. Their hips tumbled and tumbled, keeping tempo with the accelerating and branching rhythms of the drums, faster and faster, unable to release from their grip, circling, circling, until with a great thumping climax of music, the women draped their arms around his neck.
“Now I can die,” Loren said. “I’ve reached heaven.”
* * *
Sometime during the evening, the wind stiffened and ruffled the palm fronds. By the time Ann noticed and looked out on the water, a gray woolen cloud was unfurling across the water. Wende and Cooked again disappeared, while Loren, Richard, and Ann played poker at the table. Of course Ann knew better, but still she was disappointed that the love potion did not seem to have worked.
“Where’s Dex?” Richard asked.
They heard a tussling in the undergrowth. There were no wild animals to worry about on the island, so Ann went to investigate. She found Dex crawling on his stomach with the kitchen rifle cradled in his arms.
“What’re you doing?”
He sat on his haunches. The farthest fare, Wende and Cooked’s probable love nest, was fifty feet away, and light shone out between the gaps in the matting.
“In the Gulf War. Did recon. Doing a little recon again tonight.”
Ann grabbed the rifle out of his arms. “What’re you talking about? You already were playing with Prospero then.”
Dex lowered his eyes. “None of your business.”
“You weren’t there,” Ann said. “What a stupid thing to say. You’re like a little boy.” She had the urge to hit him with the rifle. “Is this thing even loaded?”
She pointed it up to the sky and pulled the trigger. It exploded, the kickback knocking her to the ground. They both were in shock as everyone came running.
“I love her,” Dex whispered sloppily, drunken tears falling down his stubbled cheeks. “I can’t bear what she’s doing.”
“Oh,” Ann said — the possibility of his truly loving Wende had never occurred to her. How had she moved from potential groupie to den mother so quickly? “Poor you. I’m so sorry.”
* * *
For many years, Dex had imagined what combat was like, what moving around armed felt like, so when he actually did it that night, it was an unimaginable relief. Wende didn’t realize what she was doing to him, and the sadness that it had triggered.
His older brother, Harry, had been the smartest, the handsomest, the One Who Would Go Far. Dex was the ugly duckling in the family, tongue-tied and introverted. The one with acne; the one who got detention for smoking a doobie on school grounds; the one who drank too much at the school social and mooned the homecoming queen; the one who incessantly masturbated even after his mother told him it would make him go blind; the one who used raw liver for the family dinner to facilitate his bliss as an ironic literary homage, only to have his parents find out and then send him to counseling; the one neighbors thought was adopted because he didn’t look like his healthy, blond, outgoing parents, or his football player brother, or even his pretty baby sister. He was like a mongrel that got dumped in a litter of golden retrievers and had to pretend to their ways.
Even though the two brothers had nothing in common, Harry took his role as older brother very seriously. At the age-appropriate times, he introduced Dex to beer, porn, cars, and girls. Harry always laughed off Dex’s oddball ways: “He’ll grow out of it.”
The folks — conservative, Reagan-voting California Republicans — put all their faith in Harry making good, keeping up the legacy of going to Stanford, following in his father’s large CEO footprints. His sister, Janey, predictably, wanted to be a teacher. Only to Dex did she confide about her secret life of partying, drugs, and sex, her voice raspy from chain-smoking cigarettes.
It was a prideful shock when Harry enlisted, though not unexpected. Men were supposed to be men in his family. All through their childhood, Dex’s father had been an avid bird hunter. Along with his buddies, he had taken a young Harry out fall mornings toward Lancaster and Bakersfield to go shooting with his friends. Many of the male relatives in the family had done military service; it was considered a noble sacrifice. Dex hated guns, hated shooting, hated dead birds and war. In every way that mattered, he was a grave disappointment to his father.
Harry graduated summa cum laude and went straight into basic training just as Dex started playing in bands, skipping classes, and dropping acid. Coming home stoned one night, he overheard his father telling his poker friends about his “loser son.”
After Harry was reported killed by friendly fire, his father told the preacher, “I’m not coming back to church. God took the wrong one.”
Dex left home after that. No matter how famous, no matter how rich, he would always be just a slacker to his dad, a guitar player, the one who didn’t die. Dex didn’t contact him when his father’s company was accused of being involved in a plot with a pharma conglomerate to peddle substandard drugs to the third world. Neither did he contact him when it was discovered the firm had been involved in a cover-up of the effects of depleted uranium relating to Gulf War syndrome. He did not contact him after his father’s company was indicted or after it collapsed, or after his father’s high blood pressure diagnosis, or after his first stroke, or the second. None of it brought Dex home. He simply had his manager, Lori, write out the checks, both for his parents’ retirement home (they had lost all their money in attorney’s fees) and for Janey’s rehab, divorce, and monthly support for her and his little niece. He fantasized about telling his father that at least the money that they were now living off was clean. He didn’t tell the old man off because he loved his mom and Janey.
He missed his big brother something terrible. He knew his life would have gone better in all kinds of indefinable ways if Harry had been there by his side. Harry loved Dex, loved his music and supported his making it. He was the definition of what family should mean, a tie where blood was only the beginning. Some of the soldiers in Harry’s squad listened to Dex’s first tapes while deployed in Kuwait, and Harry burst with pride for his baby brother. He understood that everyone had to play the hand that he was dealt in life.
In the years that followed, Dex began to be haunted. He felt guilty that he had not been brave enough to enlist and go fight at his brother’s side. He had the grandiose fantasy that he might have saved him; more probably Harry would have been saved while looking after his inept little brother. Harry never would have allowed something paltry like death to interfere with that sacred duty. But the truth was that, even back then, Dex could think of nothing more devastating than making the accommodation in his soul that would have allowed him to kill another human being. Not even if the act was removed by advanced weapons to the level of a fancy video game. Becoming a soldier would have killed the musician in him. How did Harry — a better man than he was — make that accommodation in his own soul? They never had a chance to discuss it.