Free Via Dolorosa by Ronald Malfi Page B

for it to exist and, even if you did not understand it—not completely, anyway—some feral, ingrained part of you knew it to be true, and knew it to be a part of what it meant to be human. Or was that all too much? No…he did not think it was too much at all…
    Abruptly, he did not want to think about Iraq, about Myles Granger. Turning away from the bar and looking behind him, he could see the night beyond the wall of windows. With the veil of trees blocking out the moon, it was the darkest night he could remember seeing. Still, in his head, he could see Myles Granger, dying Myles Granger. “Is the island still dead?”
    “Dead?”
    “The power,” he said. “It’s still out?”
    “We’re still on the backup generators,” Roger told him, “but I came back from taking my boat up the beach about an hour ago and I could see lights further up the shore.”
    He teased his drink, not truly, heartily, dedicatedly drinking it, but just tasting it enough to know what it was and to know that to truly, heartily, dedicatedly drink it would be to do so quickly, feeling the smoky burn of the scotch and hoping that he could just stop his mind from thinking for a minute. Just a minute. Was that asking too much? But he didn’t drink the scotch quickly at all, knowing damn well the scotch itself was the real tease, and that there was no magic bullet to forget and to stop thinking. Instead, he set the drink down on another handbill for the Club Potemkin that someone had left on the bar, and looked out over the restaurant. A young couple was seated at a table, the man talking severely with his dark, full eyebrows knitted together and his hands placed palms-down on the tabletop. Across from him sat a young woman. She looked diet-trim and amphetamine-nervous. Both her legs bounced beneath the table as she listened to the man, rapt, and watched him with intensity, as if to do so in any other fashion would equate to some sort of personal surrender. She had both her palms pressed flat against the knobby white bulbs of her kneecaps. She was like a bird. Sitting across from her, watching her, Nick could almost imagine her heartbeat—racing, fluttering, thumping blindly behind her narrow ribcage like a hummingbird caught in an aluminum mailbox.
    “Another,” he told Roger as the bartender made a second pass to collect his empty scotch glass.
    “Pushers,” Roger said, half smirking. “We get you hooked, don’t we?”
    “Forget it. I changed my mind.”
    “I’m just giving you a hard time. We do that in Milwaukee, too, you know…”
    “Sure,” Nick said. “But I’m all right.”
    “You sure, man?”
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “What?” Roger said. Nick’s face was telling.
    “You think you can call me a cab?”

—Chapter VI—

    Outside, the air was soggy, uncomfortable. The taxicab came and shuttled him through the island’s wet, sodden streets. The whole night was black. Feeling his hand throb against his leg, he could not shake the rethinking of what had happened in Iraq. It occurred to him that tonight, in front of Roger at the bar, was the first time he had told anyone what had happened in Iraq aside from his military superiors and the medical review board. The telling of it made it impossible to escape it. Granger, too, made it impossible: he was relative to what had happened, so it made sense that he could not be fully clear of it all while around Granger, and around the hotel. It had been Granger who, as a form of gratuity, had gotten Nick the job painting the mural. And that had come about because of his son, Myles, and how he, Nick, had tried to save his life. Sure, he thought. I’m a regular goddamn hero. A true American. He had accepted the gratuity because he thought it would be disrespectful not to accept it and, anyway, his own life had been disrupted and he needed to start over somewhere, and on a new page. He and Emma quickly married and he had agreed to work at the hotel for the summer. He could paint