Free I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 by Mike Bogin Page B

That’s the smarts I have. The politics is your thing.”
    Mission planning and procedure were in his wheelhouse, not politics. Yes, mission success required knowledge. Intelligence-gathering. You keep the enemy on his heels, keep him guessing, make him look over their shoulder because he knows you’re coming but never knows when or from where. But politics? Jesus, shoot me now .
    “That’s not OK,” Captain Sam screamed at him. He set the back of his head against the tree trunk, leaned forward, and banged it back hard.
    “You have to be into politics!” He was about to smack his skull a second time when Spencer grabbed his feet and pulled him away lengthwise on the grass.
    Captain Sam rolled away from the tree trunk onto his side and curled up. “I can’t remember their faces,” he sobbed. “I can’t picture my own girls.” He really wasn’t thinking about politics at all.
    Spencer placed his hand on the Captain’s forearm and looked away, past the manicured lawns, toward Wisconsin Avenue. What could he say? At Harmony Church, in sniper training, they said don’t think about faces, you push them down. If they came back in your dreams and you couldn’t stop them, then you stop yourself from sleeping.
    One time, in 2004, he rotated back to Benning and then he stayed up for six weeks straight. It can be done. It’s just different. He pushed them down, but it tied his bowels in knots so badly that he didn’t crap that whole time. So he didn’t eat much. You can make yourself do that, too. He stayed hydrated and drank cans of Ensure.
    He stopped talking to people. He spent two weeks inside a dark bedroom wanting all the time to be back in Afghanistan, back on familiar ground.
    Now, he just wanted the damned PEB squared away and to be back in Afghanistan.
    He wasn’t married and he didn’t have kids and the captain had both and the captain didn’t even give them a chance to be together as a family!

    *****

    “Captain, I am a doer. I get my mission; I get my mission squared away. Men like me; we’re trained to get the job done,” he said. “You, you’ve got a mind and a voice and a lap the girls can sit on and the parts you have all work fine. Step up, Cap. It will be different, but it can be good. Alice wants you home. I can’t say that. Nobody wants me to come home.”
    Captain Sam didn’t say anything. Spencer reached out and stroked the captain’s head, once, then let him be. The blind helping the blind. What the hell did he know? Jack, his dad, went through the motions of living but Jack was a harmless zombie. Half the time he ate his dinner out of a can without bothering to heat it.
    He thought about being 39 years old and never having a real girlfriend. How different was he from Jack?
    “At least when Jack was thirty-nine, he still had Mom,” he said aloud.
    He thought about Mercy again. Mercy, who lived next door and helped with the house after Mom went on chemo. After her mom’s boyfriend started “getting weird,” Mercy stayed with him and Jack for a year. She was trying to stay put to finish high school and then she was moved in, just like that.
    The mom’s boyfriend came around the first night. Jack walked him back off the porch. Spencer watched out the window. He must have been fifteen then. The guy was wearing an undershirt with no sleeves. He had tattoos and a mustache. He started to point at their house and tried to walk around Jack, but Spencer’s dad got in his way every time. Then he walked away a few steps. He turned around and stared, but then he left and stayed away. That was cool. He liked remembering that. Jack stepping up. He liked remembering Mercy.
    Sometimes she cooked. Her food was bad. She wasn’t very good at cleaning, either. But with her there the house came back to life. Mercy was two years older. He liked her smell. Like cheesy sweat and flowers. Patchouli.
    She taught him to play the guitar. She always had time for him. They practiced for hours, usually