Devils in Exile (3 page)

That was two Septembers before 9/11.

Before Afghanistan.

Before Iraq.

Many speak of the fog of war, but for this kid, war brought clarity. It gave him a mission, clearly defined. Rules of Engagement. A six-article Code of Conduct. He experienced the fellowship of men in combat and learned to give and to earn respect. He
was commended, awarded, promoted. Honor, Discipline, Integrity: all those formerly bullshit, silver-plated words came to mean something to him. He was recommended for the six-month Q Course training and even learned passable Korean to earn his Special Forces tab.

He wore the Green Beret. He was accepted, even esteemed, if never totally understood. For the first time in his life, Neal Maven belonged.

And that vengeful, damaged kid, the one everyone tried to piss on? He was gone forever.

Or so Maven had thought.

I
T HAPPENED TOO LATE FOR ANYTHING TO BE IN THE NEXT DAY’S
papers. Maven spent the morning walking around in a daze, waiting for a call from … who? The police? His boss?

He returned to work that night without any idea what he might be walking into. The rain had cleared, the night mild and almost meek in comparison. The day guy had nothing for him. Maven had stashed the previous night’s take under the counter and would make a double deposit that evening; with banks closed for the weekend, his boss would never be the wiser.

He went over to where the fight had happened, the rain having washed away any blood. Cars started pulling in, and bit by bit the tension in his chest began to go away.

The Boston police detective stopped by around eight thirty. A black guy, he pulled his unmarked Sable over onto the curb, came out with a badge and a quick handshake. Smelled of Italian food, tomato sauce and oregano. He belched softly into his fist and excused himself. He wanted to know about a guy they had found earlier that morning, unconscious and bleeding a block down the street. Two fingers broken, a fractured wrist, his right thigh sliced open like a Sunday roast. Maven told him that he hadn’t seen anything, and the detective pointed out that a guy cut like that tends
to make noise. Maven shrugged, reminding him of last night’s rain.

“You a veteran?” asked the detective.

Maven looked at him, bewildered.

“It’s the boots,” said the detective.

Maven noticed the cop eyeing his hands. Looking for cuts, for bruises.

“Between you, me, and the butcher,” noted the detective, “said victim has a rap sheet this long. Not exactly the innocent-bystander type, know what I mean? The blade he got cut with was his own. I’m thinking maybe he tried to roll the wrong person last night. What do you think?”

Maven shrugged and had no idea.

The detective took down Maven’s address and his digits before thanking him and heading home for the evening.

That was it. Maven played his misshapen tongue against his lower gums, a ruminative habit. Funny how large the tongue feels inside your head. The wound was not much bigger than a nick, but inside Maven’s mouth it felt like a major deformity.

He stood like that until a passing girl caught his eye. Over an expensive top and a tight skirt, she wore a clinging wrap that detailed rather than concealed her figure. She was hugging it to herself for warmth, her hair flowing behind her like a black satin scarf. She turned at the gate, stepping onto the lot in dagger heels. She didn’t mince in them, but strode sure-footedly with the confidence of a woman used to walking on knives.

Then Maven recognized her face. Danielle Vetti. In the flesh.

“Huh,” she said, close enough to speak, looking disappointed. “I bet him a hundy you wouldn’t be here.”

Her body was like the fulfillment of her high school promise. She moved with assurance, hugging the night to herself as she did her crocheted wrap.

“Do you talk?” she said.

“Yeah. Sometimes.”

She kept a few yards between them, appraising him as she
might an unfamiliar dog. “You were going to kill that guy, weren’t you?”

Maven tried to shake his head. It wouldn’t move.

“Is that why you ran off ?”

Maven did not have an answer for her.

“He dragged the guy away from here. So you wouldn’t get in trouble. Ruined a two-hundred-dollar shirt. I waited in the car.”

A breeze came up, cartwheeling a flattened drink cup across the pavement, stirring her hair. She hugged herself a little tighter.

“Why didn’t you just give them the money?”

Maven shrugged. “I never even thought about the money.”

She shook away the hair strands blowing across her face and opened a tiny clip purse. She stepped to Maven, presenting him with a card, blank but for a handwritten phone number.

“His number, not mine. He wants to meet you.”

“Meet me?”

“I think he wants to offer you a job.”

Maven looked at the numbers on the card again. “A job? But why would he … ?”

“Want to hire someone he stopped from killing another man in a parking lot in the middle of the night?” She shrugged. “He collects people like you. If you ask me.”

The alarm chirped on a silver BMW, and she sat inside, starting it up and pulling around to the gate. Maven raised the orange-striped arm, watching her profile for something more, anything—but she pulled out without another glance his way.

MAVEN CRACKED OPEN HIS SECOND ROCKSTAR ENERGY DRINK AT
the 3 a.m. mark, drinking half of it before setting down the tall can behind the lottery machine. He had already restocked magazines and candy, cleaned and refilled the coffee and Slush dispensers. Soon the news carriers would arrive in their open-doored trucks, dumping off bundles of newspapers. Skimming the
Herald
and the
Globe
would take him through to the first-shifters stopping in for Merits and City Oasis java. At some point he would sell his first scratch ticket of the day, and then dawn wouldn’t be far behind.

The City Oasis was a four-pump gas station and convenience store on Hancock Street in downtown Quincy. The owner’s name over the door was Iranian, which was ironic, or
Iraq
-ic, as Ricky once said, Maven now employed by a Middle Eastern man selling gasoline to Americans. But the guy was totally hands-off, letting Maven and Ricky eat their fill of corn chips and Yodels so long as the store was kept clean and secure.

The buzzer went off, Ricky checking the pump cameras, a white F-250 awaiting a fill-up on pump two. Overnight drive-aways were a problem in the down economy.

Ricky switched on the pump after the debit card was approved, saying, “We should put a sign up out there, apologizing.”

“For?” said Maven.

“The fifty-dollar fill-up. I feel like we went out and liberated Iraq, and somehow the cost of a barrel of light sweet crude doubled. Somebody fucked up somewhere. Must have been us, right?”

“Yeah. Me and you.” Maven tapped the $3.99
GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS
yellow-ribbon magnets for sale on the counter. “What happens when the price of gas goes higher than the price of a ribbon?”

Ricky reached for the bathroom key and pulled a copy of
Hot Rod
off the magazine rack and headed to the john in back. “Then we cross out the word
troops
and write in
cars
instead.”

Maven guzzled more caffeine, looking out at the lit island of gasoline pumps. A white Mazda pulled into the handicapped space, three kids walking to the door, the chime sounding as they filed inside. Not much younger than Maven, but looking like kids to him, decked out club-casual for a night of let’s-get-lucky, which, evidently, they had not. Maven could smell the failed evening on them, the booze, the endgame before last call, the flop sweat. He could hear it in their husky voices. Half-in-the-bag and light-in-the-pocket, yet happy. Upbeat. Too wound up to do the sensible thing and call it a night already.

One pulled a quart bottle of chocolate milk from the wall cooler and uncapped it and started chugging. Another snagged a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a bottle of phosphorescent green AMP. The third wax-bagged two stale Boston cream donuts from the pastry cabinet and a flavored Diet Pepsi. They reconvened at the front counter and pooled their bar-dampened dollars, one of them plucking a
Maxim
from the display underneath the mints. He flipped through it with a practiced hand, pointing out the good parts to the others, one laughing, the other sighing, the
magazine holder sticking his nose into the fold and inhaling deep.

In a moment of woozy solidarity with the working stiff behind the counter, the kid with the magazine turned it around toward Maven. It was an actress peeling the back of a white lace thong off her ass crack, lips pursed. “You see this, dude?” the kid said with a grin.

Maven looked. “That’s not a dude.”

The other two chuckled at their horndog buddy, who pushed the wrinkled magazine to the counter, adding it to their tally. “My goal in life, man? Seriously? Two chicks at once.”

Maven said, “My advice would be, start with one.”

The other two hooted, grabbing their bellies to keep from choking, while the third guy grinned good-naturedly, proud to have discovered a clerk with character.

Then the laughter died away and their smiles flattened. Ricky had returned from the back of the store, standing to the side. Maven wondered what exactly about Ricky spooked them. The dent in his head? His left arm, the way it hung stiff and crooked at his side? Or the fact that Ricky was their age, his eyes looking out at them from a place they had never been.

All three, Maven figured, watching them collect their purchases and change and pushing back through the chiming door to the Mazda.

Ricky, if he was even aware of his effect on them, said nothing, coming around to return the bathroom key and finding his patrol cap where he had left it, the one he always wore, popping it back onto his head. “Lightbulb out over dairy.”

“Magnificent,” said Maven, finishing his soda. “This oughta chew up a good ten minutes.”

T
HE TOP OF THE STEP LADDER AFFORDED
M
AVEN A GOD’S-EYE VIEW
of the store and its overbright, machine-cooled aisles of candy-
colored packaging. Ricky once said that others could keep their clouds of dead relatives playing harps; his idea of heaven was an immaculate convenience store.

“You know what we need?” said Ricky, sipping a blue raspberry Slush Puppie below.

“College educations?” said Maven.

“Our own lightbulb joke. Example. How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know because
you weren’t there, man
.”

“Okay,” said Maven. “That’s actually pretty good.”

“Now we have ourselves a project, see?” Ricky nodded excitedly, sipping more blue. “Now the rest of the night’s gonna fly.”

People assumed that Ricky Blye had gotten his screws knocked loose in the war, but Maven suspected he had always been a little off. Skinny, gawky, not so smart, and not so good at sports either. One day the D student at Gridley High School walked into a recruiting office in Brockton, Massachusetts. One year later, he was driving a diesel supply truck across the Fertile Crescent between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, known in ancient times as Mesopotamia, the reputed site of the Garden of Eden.

He had been driving down a trash-strewn road outside Al Gharraf when his front left tire rolled over a discarded U.S. army humrat—the humanitarian rations distributed to civilians, distinguishable from military meals-ready-to-eat by its bright yellow packaging—rigged as an improvised explosive device. The blast drove Ricky’s head into the ceiling of the cab with such force that it pushed the dent in his helmet down into his skull, the truck flipping onto its side, leaking fuel. While Ricky lay unconscious in the burning cab, another soldier from his convoy braved the heat to haul him out, just before the truck fireballed. That soldier smothered the flames on Ricky’s arm and waited with him until medics arrived.

No, that hero soldier’s name was not Neal David Maven. Maven’s role in Ricky’s military career was a little different. After
basic training at Fort Campbell, the army sends its newly minted soldiers back home to spread the word about how fantastic and rewarding military life can be. Maven walked the length of the Westgate Mall wearing his Class A uniform, looking sharp, a clipboard under his arm. His quota was five phone numbers a day.

He vaguely recognized the small-headed kid sucking on an Orange Julius. Three years behind him in high school, they had shared one mixed-grade study hall. A kid in a
RUSH
T-shirt, copying out the lyrics to “Red Barchetta” on the back of his paper-bag-covered textbook.

Ricky reminded him of this when he caught up with Maven again, two months ago, at Maven’s sister’s funeral. His half sister, three years his senior, Alexis Maven, dead of a drug overdose at age twenty-nine. She and Maven had never been anything other than sworn enemies, but in the absence of his AWOL mother, Maven had been forced to return, ever so briefly, to his hometown, to go through the motions of a graveside observance.

Ricky had seen the notice in the
Patriot Ledger.
He showed up in a short-sleeved shirt and tie, his left arm hairless and mottled, creased along the underside and withered looking, thinner than his right. He wore his old patrol cap—flat-topped, digital camouflage, his last name on the back—cocked at an angle to hide the bare patch over his left ear where hair no longer grew.

Ricky had gotten him the City Oasis job. Occasionally the headaches were bad enough to keep Ricky away from the store, dropping out of sight for a day or two, but otherwise he lived for their shifts together, for the camaraderie he had been denied when his tour was cut short. One minute he was living in the Green Zone with his asshole buddies, bitching about sandstorms, crap food, the heat; the next he was waking up in a hospital in Germany, looking at his bandaged arm, wondering
What the fuck?
Mobility restrictions in his left hand, wrist, and elbow earned him a disability retirement he didn’t want, and a one-way ticket home. Ricky appealed, requesting a desk job, anything that would get him back in uniform and back in Iraq. But the medical board
denied him, and now he found himself, at twenty-five, a disabled American veteran.