Love and Obstacles (22 page)

Tiny stumbles upon a nearby bar and drinks with the locals, who buy him booze as an expression of support to our men and women in uniform. He tells them that Sergeant Briggs,
a genuine American hero,
was one of his best buddies in Iraq. He also tells them about Declan, who was like a brother to him. Declan got shot by a sniper, and Briggs dragged him home under fire, got his knee shot off. At the bar, the booze keeps coming, for they are all proud of their boy Briggs. They want to hear more about what it was like over there, and Tiny tells them not to trust the newspapers, or the cocksuckers who say that we are losing the war.
“We are tearing new holes in the ass of the world,”
he says.
“We are breaking it open.”

Outside, snow is piling up. Tiny steals a pickup truck parked outside the joint and goes to Sergeant Briggs’s house. This time, he does not knock on the door. He goes around to the back, where he exposes himself—
hard and red, his dick throbbing
—to a little girl who is rolling up a big snowball. The girl smiles and looks at him calmly,
untroubled by his presence, as though she were floating in her own aquarium.
He zips himself up and walks back to the truck, stepping gingerly into his own footprints.

In the stolen pickup, he drives farther north, to the Upper Peninsula. Declan came from Iron Mountain. Declan is dead, it turns out, but Tiny talks to him as he drives through a snowstorm. Declan lost his mind after the
unfortunate instance.
Briggs forced him to get on top of the girl, taunted him when he could not penetrate her. Tiny watched over him afterward, because Declan was ripe for suicide. And then he deliberately walked into an ambush, shooting from the hip. Briggs dragged home a corpse.

In the midst of a blinding blizzard, a bloody wall, ten foot tall, emerges before Tiny. He brakes before he hits it. He steps out of the pickup and walks through the wall, like a ghost. He arrives in Iron Mountain in the middle of the night. He wakes up freezing in a vast parking lot.
Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but immaculate whiteness.
His clothes are soaked in blood, though he has no cuts or wounds on his body. He rubs the stains with snow, but the blood has already crusted.

He finds Declan’s parents’ house. Before he rings the bell, he notices that in the trunk of his pickup is a gigantic deer with intricate antlers, the side torn open. Tiny can see the animal’s insides, pale and thoroughly dead.
The deer’s eyes stuck wide open, as big as paperweights.

Declan’s parents know who Tiny is, Declan spoke about him. They are ancient and tired, tanned with deep grief. They want Tiny to stay for dinner. Declan’s mother gives him her son’s old shirt, far too big for him. She hasn’t washed it since Declan left. Tiny changes in an upstairs room that smells sickeningly of apple-and-honeysuckle Air Wick. On the walls are faded photos of African landscapes: a herd of elephants strolling toward sunset; a small pirogue with a silhouette of a rower on a vast river.

But it was only when they sat down to eat that I recognized Declan’s mother and father as my parents. The old man asks incessant questions about Iraq and war, keeps pouring bourbon into Tiny’s glass over Mother’s objections. Mother keeps bringing in the same food—meat and potatoes and, instead of spinach and potato, apple and rhubarb pies. She insists that Tiny drink water, for she can see that he is too drunk already. Father segregates his food on the plate. There is absolutely no doubt—everything bespeaks my parents, the way they talked, the way they ate, the way Declan’s mother grabs Tiny’s hand and kisses it,
pressing her lips into the ghost of Declan’s hand.
Tiny is suddenly ravenous, and he eats and eats. He slips into telling them about the
unfortunate instance of miscommunication with local civilians,
but leaves Declan out of it. He blames himself, tells them the gory details of the rape—
Lamia’s throaty moan, the flapping of her skinny arms, the blood pouring out of her
—and the old man listens to him unflinchingly, while Mother goes to the kitchen to fetch coffee. They don’t seem to be troubled, as though they did not hear him at all. For an instant, he thinks that he might not be speaking, that it is all in his head, but then realizes that there is nothing inside them,
nothing except grief.
Other people’s children are of no concern to them,
for there was no horror in the world outside Declan’s eternal absence from it.
Mother cuts a piece of each pie, the crusts breaking, and puts the slices on a clean plate. Tiny is sobbing.