Fives and Twenty-Fives (2 page)

It’s Dodge’s copy of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, complete with his insane brand of marginalia, half in Arabic and half in English.

Leaving sailboats behind, I slide the ragged, coverless orphan into my back pocket. I chastise myself, knowing it’s something of a ploy. I’m hoping Zahn will notice it there, rolled up and dog-eared, and mention Dodge. It would give me a chance to talk about him. Who knows? Maybe Zahn’s heard from the guy.

I walk to St. Charles Avenue and, after waiting for the streetcar in the cold, arrive at the bar thirty minutes late. It’s one of those drop-ceiling places. Uptown, near campus. Pool tables and nasty fluorescent lights. It’s cold. I pull the jacket tighter around my shoulders and push, with my hands in my pockets, through the thick, plastic sheeting that serves as a door.

Zahn’s voice hits me all at once, like a belt to the face. It’s how I remember him. Barking orders into a pack of young men. But I don’t see him. Just young guys in suits, all huddled around a touch-screen trivia game on the bar. A shaggy giant shoves his way through the pack, unhemmed pants making an untidy mound of fabric around his shoes.

His wide frame towers over them, and he shouts, “There! There! The bottom’s a different color!”

With a sinking heart, I realize—it’s Zahn.

He paws at the screen with the thick, limp digits of an all-day drunk, light beer sloshing from the plastic cup in his other hand.

I walk over and tap him on the shoulder. He spins around, takes a moment to place me, then smiles and wraps me in a bear hug. My head settles in the middle of his chest. Beer spills down my back.

“Sir,” he slurs softly.

“No,” I mumble into his shirt. “Not anymore.” And I realize, suddenly, how happy I am to see him.

The rest of his suit fits worse than the pants, like he borrowed it from his dad. He’s gained weight and grown a beard. The Zahn I knew kept his blond hair close-cropped against his scalp. Now it’s so long and knotted, it’s hard to tell where the hair ends and the beard begins.

He’s not wearing his wedding ring, or the dog tags to which he once kept his wedding ring taped. I search for the Marine I knew, behind the bad suit and the swollen face. I can’t find him.

Zahn introduces me to his friends. High school buddies who haven’t seen him in years, apparently. They’ve all just come from a rehearsal dinner, but I get the sense that Zahn’s the only drunk one.

“I’m buying you a beer, sir,” he says. “Whatcha drinking? I’m drinking beer. Let me go get two. Stay put, all right? Don’t go no place.”

He lumbers down the bar and leaves me with them. Salesmen playing the part of young gentlemen. They take turns keeping me occupied. Square up, one at a time, and launch volleys of firm handshakes. Practiced eye contact learned from their fathers. Glowing praise for the potential customer.

“Hey. Really great to meet you.”

“Walter’s been talking about you. Talking up a storm, man. You two and the war, you know?”

“Hey, it’s really great that you came out to see him.”

They step away in twos and threes to convene hushed, impromptu meetings, as if these councils of war are out of earshot. Or that their one-on-one, fraternity-rush routine has me too distracted to listen in. They aren’t, and I’m not.

I hear them discussing Zahn. What to do about him.

It’s killing their buzz, this depressive oaf in their midst. This almost-forgotten interloper who’s hijacked their night. All these guys in their midtwenties with their nice suits. Zahn snuck his way in, and they don’t know him anymore. I see it clearly. Zahn does not.

It dawns on me why they’re being so affable. Why they’re in such a hurry to make a friend of me, asking questions about my life, questions about business school, questions about New Orleans. They act genuinely interested, but always bring the conversation back to Zahn, mentioning offhand “his problems,” inching closer to the clinical with their language. Problems. Issues. Disorders.

They’re manufacturing a bond, I see, for later in the night, when Zahn inevitably passes out or puts his hand through a window. One of his friends will take me aside and say, “Hey, man. You mind taking him home with you? We can’t get him into the hotel like this.”

I’m overcome by a wave of nausea and begin constructing an excuse to leave early and take Zahn, my old corporal, with me. Something that won’t embarrass him. Something that makes sense. Anything to get him out of here.

Which is when a fight breaks out at the back of the bar.

A pint glass shatters against the cinder-block wall and a young voice shouts, “You wanna throw down, motherfucker?”

Immediately, I suspect Zahn, missing on his trip to the bar for over five minutes, has found trouble. I hustle over to the standoff with the rest. Five of them and five of us. But Zahn is nowhere to be seen.

I assess the situation. A Tulane undergraduate threw the pint glass, I gather, by way of response to a perceived slight from one of Zahn’s meeker friends. The undergraduate has the collar popped on his ratty polo shirt and his baseball cap turned around. Brown hair falls loose from his hat, draping across his forehead just so.

He advances menacingly on Zahn’s friend until the poor kid is backed up to the wall. Then he leans into the kid’s face with arms extended, flexes glamour muscles big and useless from long hours at the Tulane gym, and smiles like he’s been waiting all day for this.

I step closer, thinking maybe I can reason with the guy. Maybe he’ll guess by my age and demeanor that I’m a graduate student. Maybe he’s even seen me around campus. We’re classmates, of a sort, and surely that’s enough to sidestep a pointless bar fight. I put a hand on his shoulder, about to say something like “Hey, calm down, okay? We’ll leave. No problem.”

But before I can speak, he turns around and shoves me. Hard, with two hands firm to my upper chest. Happy for the escalation. He smiles, and I know he’s going to have this.

So I set my back foot.

Then Zahn appears. Like a bowling ball striking a fresh set of pins, he pushes through the crowd and positions himself between me and Popped Collar.

Immediately sensing the situation has changed, Popped Collar moves to throw a punch. But Zahn steps inside and takes him by the wrist. Then, while Popped Collar tries to fix his feet, Zahn reaches around with his other hand and takes hold of his upper arm. With a quick pivot outside, Zahn locks Popped Collar’s elbow and shoulder, bending him over at the waist. The poor bastard gasps. How embarrassing.

But that’s just the opening salvo. Just a quick burst of pain to distract. With a palm firmly in the small of his target’s back, Zahn applies the full weight of his frame as unnatural torque against the ligaments and connecting tissues of Popped Collar’s shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints.

Popped Collar lets out a high-pitched groan, almost a whine, as new, more urgent pain shoots through his arm, this burst delivered without regard to gentlemen’s rules. Zahn, controlling his target as he would a bicycle, walks Popped Collar into the corner and pins him there with a knee deep to the inner thigh.

“The difference between me and you,” Zahn tells Popped Collar with a scary kind of calm, “is that I’m serious about killing you.”

And I finally recognize him. The Marine I knew.

Popped Collar recognizes Zahn, too. A blood memory, a cold dread crawling up his spine, carries the realization that this is a predator.

I glance back at Zahn’s friends, gamely keeping their poise. But they can’t hide their constant, nearly imperceptible steps backward. They’re terrified, and it makes me smile. It’s Zahn who’s the grown man now. And his friends? Children wearing their dads’ suits.

I take note of my pulse. It’s steady. Hardly elevated at all. Most people, Zahn’s friends for instance, would call this a fight. But I would never think to call it that.

We’re in the wilderness. The place without rules. I discovered it on the day when I knew for the first time, really understood, that a stranger was trying to kill me and nothing would change his mind. No words to save me. No police to call. And in the end, nothing between me and the dead man in the ditch but the will I had to put him there, to break his body into wet pieces without taking the time to wonder, what happened? Where’d that spark go? That soul? An animal doesn’t think about that. It doesn’t cross his mind.

Popped Collar makes a move to get free, like he might still have some fight left in him, some pride. But Zahn just tightens his grip and puts more weight in his knee. Popped Collar winces.

“Listen to me,” Zahn says softly. “I’m gonna let you stand up, now. And you’re gonna walk straight out that front door without looking back at me.”

Zahn wants to say more, I can tell. He wants to explain to Popped Collar how easy it would be to crush his windpipe. Zahn wants to teach, dispassionately, the method. How to step inside your target’s stance and gouge for his eyeballs. How, while your target is in a panic trying to save his eyes, he’ll leave his throat open. How to sweep the legs out from under your target while keeping a firm grip on his arm. How, while your target is defenseless on the ground, you can send the edge of your bootheel into his exposed throat, just so.

But Zahn’s not a corporal anymore, and the man he’s pinned in the corner isn’t a junior Marine in need of instruction. So, Zahn keeps it simple. “I’ll watch you die and not feel a thing,” he says. “Understand? Stuff like this? It’s fun for you. To me? It’s nothing at all.”

Zahn gives the words a moment to sink in before releasing his grip. As Popped Collar stands up, my fingertips tingle at the thought that this guy might be dumb enough to open his mouth. But he goes right for the door without saying a word. His friends hasten to follow him out, in an orderly fashion, as they say. Kindergartners headed outside for the fire drill, holding hands.

Zahn’s friends leave, too, after a few quick excuses and good-byes. So Zahn and I go back to the bar, finishing our beers like nothing happened.

Then Zahn notices the book in my back pocket. I’d forgotten all about it. “Dodge give you that book, sir?” he asks with a smile. “Or did you steal it?”

“I’m not really sure,” I say, feeling guilty at how reliably my ploy has worked. “I found it in my pack the day after he left. Either he left it there, or it accidentally got mixed in with my gear after Ramadi . . .” I swallow. Embarrassed by how offhand I use the word. As if Ramadi were an experience shared between the two of us. As if it weren’t much worse for him.

“I read it as a kid,” I say, before we can settle on the topic. “Just giving it another crack. He left some notes in here. Mostly in Arabic, but the ones in English, they’re pretty funny.” After a sip, I add, “Really, though. Quit it with the ‘sir.’”

“You ever hear from him?”

“Who? Dodge?” I say, like the idea of finding him never occurred to me. “Never even knew his real name.”

“Doc does, I think. You ever get in touch with him?”

Doc. Some of my guilt evaporates as the ploy backfires, and Zahn makes it clear that if I want to ask questions about Dodge, I’ll have to discuss Doc Pleasant.

Clearly, Zahn hasn’t forgotten. And why should he?

The bartender walks over before we can get into it, telling us we should leave.

We walk back to my apartment the long way, enjoying the cool of the night. We chat like normal friends, forgetting all the facts that should make that impossible.

At my apartment, Zahn sees just how I’m making out: a tattered old couch, a lonely chair, and a mattress wedged into a corner. It seems to set him at ease.

He starts by investigating my book piles. “I’m noticing a real pattern here, sir.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“This one set of books? All about the boats? Kept nice and neat. This other set? A clusterfuck abortion. I get the sense that you don’t think much of advanced finance.”

I go to the refrigerator and grab two beers. “Well, that’s not exactly true. Finance isn’t my favorite, but . . . I don’t mind it. Always liked math.”

“Why are you in school, anyway? Thought you finished with all that a while back?”

“Getting my master’s. The G.I. Bill is too good to pass up.” I open his beer for him. “How about you? Thinking of using your benefits?”

I regret the question instantly. We had a nice conversation going, with none of the rank-based tension that so often poisoned our Humvee, and I had to ruin it, jumping in like the chipper lieutenant of old, with sprightly, unsolicited advice.

But Zahn doesn’t seem too worried about it. “Never really been the college type,” he says, and we leave it at that.

We empty my fridge of beer, get ourselves really drunk. He sits on the couch while I lie faceup on the floor, and we stay up all night talking. We talk about everything. About Gunny Stout. About Doc Pleasant and Dodge.

We talk about the day Marceau started tap dancing. It began as combat satire, an attempt to blunt the tension of a mortar attack. With the alert siren wailing late one night, and the platoon scrambling into their body armor in advance of the impacts, Marceau cut a lane through the hut with a few self-stylized shim-sham moves, held his helmet against his chest like a chorus girl’s top hat, and ended with a real windmill flourish. That became his trademark. And somehow, despite the dozen times I saw him do it, it was always surprising and hilarious. He even ordered a set of instructional DVDs to watch on his laptop during off-hours, earnestly devoting himself to the art and craft of tap.