Badd (30 page)

Bobby turns and stares me down, exasperated. “Because we’re not staying here, that’s why. We’re taking the captain’s truck and getting the hell out of here.”

“What? Where are we going?”

“Not you. Me and the captain.” He flings open the door and marches inside with me right behind him.

“If you’re going anywhere,” I tell him, “I’m going too.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Wait a minute,” I say to his back. “I’ve stuck with you through this whole thing. You’ve been trying to shut me out ever since you got out of the army. You’ve shut the whole family out. I’m not going to let you do it anymore.”

He stops in the doorway to the back hall. “Look, Ceejay,” he says, his face stern. “This is something only me and the captain can do.”

“You’re going to have a hard time stopping me from coming. I’ll jump in the back of the truck if I have to.”

“Then I’ll pull over and yank your ass out and make sure you don’t get back in. I’ll tie you down if I have to.”

I look at the pistol in his waistband. “You better put that thing up.”

“I don’t think so,” he says. “When things get down to the nitty-gritty, it might come in handy.”

“What things? What are you planning on doing, Bobby? Tell me.”

He looks away and rubs his hand across the side of his face. “All I’m saying is if the cops catch up to us, we’re not coming back. We’re not coming back no matter what.”

His meaning hits me like a disease, like stomach cancer. “You mean you think you’re going to shoot it out with the police? Is that what you’re talking about? Because that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re young, Ceejay. You don’t know shit yet in your life. You’ve seen what they want to do to the captain. He doesn’t want to go on living like that. And I don’t want to live like I have been either.”

“You know what? I’m tired of you telling me I’m young and I won’t understand. You just try me. Explain this one thing and maybe I’ll shut up—what happened to you in the war, Bobby? What changed you? You’ve been such a dick since you’ve been back. It’s like you’re drowning, and you’re trying to pull down everyone else around you.”

“You think you can understand?” He shakes his head. “Words can’t even say it.” He walks over and sits in this giant overstuffed chair, the one with the cedar tree and deer tapestry draped over it. He looks like he’s crouching in a forest, a weariness about his body that seems to come from everything wrong in the world weighing him down. “People think they know what war’s like,” he says. “They send you over there, and they think they know how it’ll be because they’ve seen the movies, they’ve played the video games, they’ve seen the news, but they don’t know. And then we come back, and they don’t know how that is either.”

He’s right. I can’t help but think of the times I played paintball and thought I was doing it just the way Bobby was doing things in the war. It was stupid. I can see that now. I walk over and sit on the arm of the sofa across from him. “Maybe that’s true,” I say. “I can’t understand that. I guess no one can completely understand everything someone else has been through. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be on your side. It doesn’t mean I can’t at least listen and—I don’t know—just be there.”

“But you can’t be there, Ceejay.” He stares at his hands folded between his knees. “Sometimes what happens takes you somewhere else, takes away who you are, even. Maybe it’s one big thing or maybe it happens little by little. You go into the army and they make you a soldier, and it gets into your bones and your bloodstream. It’s the air in your lungs. The heat in your brain and the taste of the words in your mouth. Then they ship you off to another planet a million miles away. It’s not like this planet around here—green alfalfa and lakes and marigolds and shit like that. And that place gets in your bones too. You’re shipwrecked there and it’s on fire. It’s salt and ashes. Flies buzz at you like shotgun pellets. There’s no water and your tongue’s turned to dust and every other person has diarrhea. That’s where I live now, Ceejay. You can’t live there with me.”

I have something to say, but it won’t come clear in my mind. It’s trapped under something. It’s like the person I’ve always been is holding down the person I want to be.

“You remember me telling you about my buddy Covell?” Bobby smiles a hollow smile.

“Yeah, the guy from Texas who lived on a ranch? Wanted to be a stand-up comic?”

“That’s him. Good old Covell.” He stares over my head. “He loved getting on the road. Everyone else hated it because
you had to have total focus on everything around you one hundred percent of the time just to keep alive, but Covell loved being on the move. Loved the wide-open spaces most of all.

“So one day we’re on the street driving through town, the sun torching us like it’s about three feet above our heads. We’re moving so slow you’d think we were stuck behind a parade of senior citizens. That’s how Covell put it—a parade of senior citizens. Then he starts riffing on old folks, especially his grandpa who claimed he was descended from some famous Wild West sheriff. It was hilarious. He goes into his grandpa’s voice and shows me how he’d draw his pistol in a gunfight, all shaky and in slow motion. I was laughing my ass off.”

Bobby smiles at the memory but only briefly.

“Then all of a sudden—
fwoom!
An IED goes off under a Humvee, two Humvees in front of us, blasting the back end off the road. Just like that. One second I’m sitting there thinking Covell ought to be in the movies with Will Ferrell, and the next second everything goes crazy. The guys in the bombed truck pile out—carrying a couple of wounded—and run for the vehicle in front of us. Our orders are to back the hell out of there, but there’s a jam-up behind us. Can’t back up and can’t go forward. Sniper fire peppers down from one of the rooftops. The people on the street are rushing everywhere, trying to get inside or into an alley. Except these three hajji.

“They’re running straight for our vehicle, their clothes fluttering white in the sun, like ghosts in the daytime. It looks like one of them is carrying something, but with smoke and fire and the chaos of the street, it’s hard to tell for sure. We’re yelling for them to stop, to stay back, to find cover, but they keep coming toward us. I swear I see something glinting in the hand of the one on the left, and then Meyers yells, ‘He’s got a bomb, he’s got a fucking bomb,’ and someone else is like, ‘Light those
motherfuckers up,’ and that’s when Covell fires. I mean, sure, Covell’s a comedian, but he’s someone you want on your side, too, when the shit flies. He’s got your back, and that’s what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks of the war, if you got your buddy’s back, you’re doing your job.

“So as soon as Covell pulls the trigger, the rest of us do too, and it’s like
bam, bam, bam, bam
, and those three hajjis—those three
men
—drop to the pavement. One, two, three. It’s like someone cut their fucking power off, like someone threw the big-bad switch. They’re over.”

He pauses, looks down at the pistol in his waistband, then goes on. “People think they know what it’s like to shoot someone. They think it’ll be easy. You just squeeze the trigger like in the movies, like on the video game, but they don’t know shit. There’s no taking anything back. There’s no starting over.”

He shakes his head. And in just that little gesture, I see the war in a different way than I ever saw it in my head before.
No taking anything back
—those aren’t just words. They’re a scar.

“We didn’t have time to think about video games and that crap, though,” he continues. “As soon as the vehicle behind us clears out, we go zipping backward as fast as we can. Me and Covell, we’re still looking at those men on the ground, trying to see what the one dude might have been carrying, but it’s too crazy to make anything out. We never did find out either. We were on the road for two days after that, and no one could tell us. Meyers said we just did what we had to do. We yelled for them to stop, and they didn’t. Case closed. But that wasn’t good enough for Covell.

“He couldn’t stop thinking about it. Neither could I for that matter, but it was worse with Covell. The thing kept playing over and over in his mind. When he went to sleep, which wasn’t often, he dreamed about it. Then he started seeing them
in the dark, those three men. They talked to him, told him their names—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

“ ‘You know who Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were?’ he asks me, this paranoid look in his eyes. I’m like, ‘No,’ and he goes, ‘They were three Jewish dudes from the Bible who lived in Iraq a long time ago. This king ordered his soldiers to pitch them into a fiery furnace, but instead of the flames taking them, the soldiers burned up instead.’

“I’m like, ‘Dude, those guys were Muslims, not Jews,’ but he says, ‘That’s just the point, man. Don’t you see? You can’t really know who people are underneath unless you’re God. It was just a boom box he had in his hand. That’s all they had. It was Abednego’s. He just bought it down the street and was taking it home to give to his daughter.’

“I tried telling him—I said, ‘Covell, you can’t know that,’ but he just nodded and said, ‘He told me, man. He told me in person.’

“After that, I tried getting Covell some help, talked to anyone I could. I mean, I had to have my buddy’s back, right? I told them Covell was having problems, couldn’t sleep, had hallucinations. They were just like, ‘He’s going to have to suck it up.’ That’s all. Suck it up.”

He looks down at his hands. They’re trembling. “I didn’t know what else I could do. It’s not like I could throw him in a truck and run away. Where could we go? So one night I’m asleep—finally I’m asleep—and Covell gets up and walks out across the sand, kneels down facing west, toward Texas, gouges the barrel of his rifle into the soft spot under his chin, and blows the top of his head off. That was it. Gone. I tried to do what I could, but it wasn’t enough. The flames took him down, and they’re taking me down too.”

I understand Bobby’s obsession with coming to Casa Crazy
now. He sees Covell in the captain, and he wants to do here what he couldn’t do over there. And it crashes down onto me how hard that must have been for someone like Bobby. Nothing he knew about fighting—left hooks, right crosses, upper cuts, ducking punches, and taking the enemy to the ground—were any good for a deal like what happened with Covell. All that isn’t any good for what the captain’s going through, and it’s no good for what I have to do now either. What I learned from Bobby about fighting won’t work if I want to help my brother get through this. I need a whole different kind of
BADD
, the kind Lacy and my mom and even my dad showed me this summer. That’s just as important as anything else in this kind of battle.

A weird quiet spreads through the room. It’s like a presence, like the ghosts of Covell, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego all together. They’ve come for Bobby. They want to carry him away, and there’s no one here but me to stop them.

“I’m sorry about your friend.” My voice feels like it’s welling up from some strange place, somewhere it’s never come up from before. “I wish I could’ve known him. There’s a lot of things I wish. I wish Grandma didn’t get sick, I wish Tillman was still my friend, I wish you never went away and the war never happened. And I wish I could understand exactly what you’re going through now. Maybe it’s this thing Padgett told me about—post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s read all about it, and—”

“I know what PTSD is,” Bobby says, wearily, as if the term itself is one more thing weighing him down.

“Well,” I say, “I don’t know if it’s that or something else, but I get it that you’ve changed. I didn’t want to believe that. You know? I just wanted to believe we’d go back to being Bobby and Ceejay just like before you left. I know that’s not possible
now, but I’m still on your side. It doesn’t matter if you’re never like you used to be—I’ve got your back. One hundred percent. Just like Mom and Lacy had Grandma’s back during her whole battle with cancer.”

Then a terrible thing happens—tears start flooding from my eyes. Actual tears! The last person I want to cry in front of is Bobby, but I can’t hold them back. I’m afraid if I keep talking it’ll only get worse, but I can’t stop now.

“You should see Lacy,” I say, wiping the stupid streaks from my face. “She’s so strong. I used to want to make her like me, but now I want to be like her. So that’s what I’m going to do, Bobby. I’m going to have your back no matter what it takes, and so is the whole family. And Padgett and Chuck and the captain.”

Bobby shakes his head. “Look, Ceejay—”

“Hold on. Just hear me out. The other thing is that you can’t give up on the captain. I don’t care how hopeless things look, you have to keep going. That’s what people do. They keep going. And you’re good for the captain. You’re the one who’s kept him on track these last few weeks. I mean, we all have to have his back too, but you have to be the leader because he’s not going to make it without you. You have to be the one.”

Bobby starts to interrupt again, but I keep charging ahead. “You might think you aren’t any good now, that you can’t do anything, but you’re wrong. You just have to look at things different. You know what the strongest thing is I’ve seen you do since you’ve been back? It’s not fighting Jace or playing chicken with a stupid Hummer. It was tonight when you cleaned the captain up like you did. That was big time right there, Bobby. Big time.”

He smiles at that. It’s a sick, sad smile, but it’s a smile.

“See, that’s what you can do—you can live here with the captain and look after him, make sure he takes the right kind
of medication or whatever it is he needs.” It isn’t easy to say. I know it means letting go of my dream of us ever sharing a place together. I hate to lose that, but it’s the only thing I can think of to keep Bobby from losing himself. I’ll just have to stay at home with the parents, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe I’ve held my grudge against them for too long anyway.

I keep plowing forward. “We’ll convince Richard that’s the only reason we took the captain out of that crappy home, so he’d have someone to take care of him who didn’t treat him like a damn stray dog at the pound. I’ll talk to Richard for you. Mom and Dad will vouch for you too. I know they will. I thought for a long time they weren’t on our side—and maybe they do screw up sometimes—but they are on our side. We’ll make it happen. We’ve got to. We’ve all got to have each other’s backs, just like Covell always had yours.”