now. Panic flooded Jason, and he wished with everything he was that
the world would go back to making sense. It wasn’t supposed to be
Michael
who died. Fate had tagged the wrong Palmer brother.
‘I love you too, kiddo.’ Iron fingers squeezed his chest as he stared down at all that remained of his family. ‘You sleep
now.’
He switched off the lamp and eased himself to lay on the mattress beside Billy, feet sticking off the end of the twin bed.
The ceiling was dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars, the whorls of fake constellations and plastic
planets forming a canopy above. Wide awake, Jason counted his nephew’s soft breaths, counted and stared up at the false sky,
stared and wished he knew what he was looking for.
Oh-one-hundred hours. Back in the living room, the only light was the TV, the DVD menu for
Star Wars
still up, bright colors showing the Jim Beam was half gone. He poured another two fingers into a juice glass, threw them
back in a gulp.
They’d played at Star Wars when they were little. One of the games they could agree on. Michael always wanted to be Luke,
the responsible farm boy who saved the world. Jason preferred to be Han, the pirate who saw the galaxy and got the girl. He
remembered the broken concrete and brown grass behind the closed meat packing plant, throwing rocks through the window and
pretending they were blowing up the
Death Star
. Sometimes the police would come, and they’d run away, scampering over wrought iron fences and down the river bank, pleased
to be chased, knowing the cops didn’t care enough to catch them. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, shoulder to shoulder.
Except in the movie, Han came back to save Luke’s butt. And you let Mikey die.
The Worm twisted, stronger and crueler than yesterday. He took another gulp of the bourbon, knuckles white on the glass. Grabbed
the clicker and changed the channel to CNN, watched armored M113’s, ‘Hate wagons,’ roll through Fallujah. An Iraqi
in a striped shirt pointed out where small arms fire had chipped chunks off a concrete wall.
His brother was dead.
He tried to grasp the thought, but it was like throwing his arms around smoke. Nothing made sense. Ever since Soul Patch stepped
out of the shadows, letters tattooed on his forearm and a chromed-up automatic in his hand, the world had stopped following
rules Jason understood.
No, not yesterday. Before then. It had stopped making sense when Martinez died.
Martinez, who’d once stuffed sock tits under his fatigues and painted his lips cocksucker-red, then paraded around the FOB
with his rifle at his shoulder, a ghoulish, heavily-armed cheerleader. Even the LT had hidden a smirk and turned away, let
the grunts have their fun.
One more brother he’d let down.
Seemed like every time he dared to care for something, it went away. First Dad, the fucker, and later, Mom. He’d found a home
in the Army, and a new set of brothers. But that ended when Martinez died. He’d lost his friend, and then he’d lost his second
home, and now he’d lost Michael. If there was a rule to life Jason understood, it was that he was poison.
The bourbon cut, but he poured another, drank it fast. Conscious of the pulse in his forehead. On the television, a lonely
building burned, black smoke bruising the sky.
Cry. For Christ’s sake,
cry,
man.
He remembered sitting in the basement of Michael’s
bar. A tinny radio in the background. The old safe behind the fake radiator, Michael explaining they’d kept money there in
the Prohibition years, when the place had been a speakeasy. Michael opening it to get a bottle of Black Label, taking a pull
and passing it to Jason. Smiling at him, all arguments forgotten.
Saying, ‘To the good life, bro.’
Cry, goddammit!
He slammed a fist on the muscle of his thigh, then again, feeling the meaty thwack of it. The dull rippling pain that didn’t
change anything. What was he? How many times since his return to the States