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  Marty Brinklan stepped to the microphone, stroking his bleach-white mustache, his face weary, good marble covered by bad clay. He looked to his wife sitting in a metal folding chair, squeezing a handkerchief the color of a wet plum and staring catatonically at the ground.

  “Husband, Christian, patriot, public servant,” said Marty. His eyes flitted up from the piece of paper he gripped, peeked at his friends and neighbors. “But most importantly, once you’re a father . . . that’s what you learn about being a father: it becomes the first thing you are, and everything else had better make way for it. Once you’re a father,” he repeated.

  Marty wanted to be done with the public part of this. He was good at quarantining his grief, saving it for appropriate moments when he could have it to himself, take it out to tenderly care for like an antique pistol. He wasn’t sleeping or eating well or taking care of himself. Hell, he’d even taken a couple of drinks. The first day of his workweek he’d gotten a call about a nineteen-year-old girl, dead of an overdose, found facedown in an overflowing toilet. A gruesome scene. Then he’d served an eviction for one of Rick’s former teammates from the football team, a wide receiver who wept and cussed him out until Marty found himself putting a hand on the butt of his gun. The former wide receiver looked at him just before he tore out of the driveway and sneered, “Rick would be so proud, Marty. Too bad he couldn’t see this.” That jolly job had been just yesterday.

  Jill Brinklan felt like she was on one of the cruelest reality TV shows ever dreamed up. She acknowledged Marty and his speech with a tight smile and nod, but she couldn’t meet his eye. She hadn’t been able to look at him since they got the news. She also found she couldn’t stand very well, hence her sitting in the metal folding chair. Lately, when on her feet, she sometimes lost her equilibrium. Squeezing her handkerchief, she stood, thanked everyone for coming, for being so kind, and sat right back down. She wondered if she’d ever forgive her husband for his pride. This was what pride got you. Anyone who’d read the Bible knew that. That morning, Marty had asked her which shirt he should wear, and she’d hissed at him like a cat and fled their bedroom. She went to the kitchen, obsessively running her hands over the stove because she was thinking of apple turnovers. Before Lee’s or Rick’s football games, she’d always made apple turnovers in the morning. When they first began the tradition, she let Lee handle the skillet, stirring the apple slices in butter, while Rick flattened the dough with a pizza roller. How funny little boys looked cooking, the way they got hyperventilatingly excited at each step. And later when they were ogre-like teenagers, total galoots, how amusing it was to watch them spread the apples daintily in the squares of dough and pinch them shut. The obscene exchanges she had to regulate—how did they even dream up such vulgarities? (Rick, wash your hands, we know your thumb was knuckle-deep in your ass last night; I’ll dip my scrotum in your eye, Lee.) That morning, stroking the stove, all of this came over her in one of those crippling waves that arrived as unpredictably as each freak gust of wind. She went out to the backyard, staggering past her garden to the fire pit, which still had singed Bud Light cans resting in the ashes from when Rick was last home. She lost her balance and sat down in the grass. Wanting to dig down through layer after layer of dirt until she found her son, until he was safe, until she could no longer smell this long-gone scent of burning.

  Of the four planned speakers, however, the one who truly broke the hearts of the assembled was Ben Harrington. Ben, a college dropout struggling to make it as a musician, hated coming home. To him, downtown New Canaan had this look, like a magazine after it’s tossed on a fire, the way the pages blacken and curl as they begin to burn but just before the flames take over. How vibrant and important and tough and exciting this place had seemed through the scrim of boyhood, back when he, Rick, and Bill Ashcraft rode their bikes all over kingdom come. They knew every spigot where you could fill up a water balloon and the best spot in the Cattawa River to go swimming and the best hill for sledding and the best wall to use for pushing on a guy’s chest until he passed out and had weird, twitchy, oxygen-deprivation dreams.

  On that stage, Ben told a simple story from their boyhood. Once, on the banks of the Cattawa, wading around, feeling the mud between their toes, Rick had caught a frog. He held the squirming trophy in both amazed hands while Ben, blond locks whiplashing over his eyes, stumbled away.

  “It’s just a friggin frog,” said Rick.

  “Don’t get near me with that!”

  “Just touch it.”

  “No.”

  “Just touch it.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not poison. That thing about it giving you warts idn’t true either.”

  “Get away, Rick.”

  Then Rick heaved the frog at Ben, who’d shrieked and fled, while the terrified frog ribbited the fuck away from these psychotic kids. Bill Ashcraft laughed deliriously. Ben cried, called them assholes, then sat down on the bank while they played in the water. After about five minutes, Rick came up to him, hands on his hips.

  “Go away.”

  “C’mon, Harrington. Would it help if I ate a bug?”

  “Huh? No. Wha—”

  Before he could say anything else, Rick snatched up a grasshopper that had been hanging out on a leaf and popped it in his mouth. He gave it one hard crunch, swallowed, and then immediately choked, doubled over, and puked in the dirt. Ben had never laughed so hard in his young life. They were both in tears, Ben from cracking up and Rick from trying to hock up the grasshopper’s exoskeleton. After a while they ran back into the river as if nothing had happened and splashed around and spat water at the sun.

  Laughter and a fresh round of sobs passed through the crowd. A father holding his teenage daughter’s shoulders suddenly gripped her, as if she might be borne away by this hard wind.

  Of course, Ben didn’t share the story of the last time he saw Rick, in the spring of ’06. Home from his first tour, Rick had added even more layers of muscle to his beastly frame. He looked like he wore a full-body Kevlar vest. He got skunk-drunk, and Ben tried to broach the subject of Bill Ashcraft. Rick and Bill, friends from the crib, hadn’t spoken to each other in nearly three years. But Rick had only grisly stories of bravery, of the fun he was having in the Iraqi desert. “One time, thought I saw this rat carrying around a piece of beef jerky. So I thought, where’s your stash little buddy? Turns out it was a finger! Little cutey-tooty rat carrying around a finger!”

  “Jesus, Brinklan.”

  “Aw, don’t be a puss. It’s just war.”

  Rick wouldn’t talk about Bill, and he wouldn’t talk about Kaylyn, but he did want to go out to Jericho Lake and smoke a joint.

  “Don’t the Marines piss-test you?”

  He barked a laugh. “Bullfrog, you little twat.” This was the thing about Rick: how his coarseness, his incivility, could never mask—and was in fact tied to—his great love for you.

  And they did drive out to Jericho, too drunk, cruising up over the horizon of their snow-globe town. Ben wanted to write a song about Rick, this kind of guy you’d find teeming across the country’s swollen midsection: toggling Budweiser, Camels, and dip, leaning into the bar like he was peering over the edge of a chasm, capable of near philosophy when discussing college football or shotgun gauges, neck on a swivel for any pretty lady but always loyal to his true love, most of his drinking done within a mile or two of where he was born, calloused hands, one finger bent at an odd angle from a break that never healed right, a wildly foul mouth that could employ the word fuck as noun, verb, adjective, or gerund in a way you were sure had never existed before that moment (“Having us a fuckly good time,” he’d said, as they sat in the grass, staring out at the glistening midnight sheen of Jericho). Yet his friend was in no way standard. He was freewheeling, mule-stubborn, and cunning as a coyote trickster. He had whole oceans inside of him, the wilds of the country, fierce ghosts, and a couple hundred million stars.

  “There’s nothing left, man. Nothing to go
back to,” Rick cryptically declared that night. He freed his runty dick from his jeans and pissed so close to Ben that he had to scoot madly across the grass to avoid the splash. “Just you and me, buddy. Just you and me and this last lonesome night in each other’s arms.”

  What was he talking about? Hard to say. Rick didn’t much understand himself, but something about what, in just three short years, had happened to him. To them. The places he’d seen, the things he’d done. On his last day home before his redeployment, he got obliterated in his backyard at the fire pit, chucking cobalt-blue cans of Bud Light into the flames even though his mom always scolded him for this. He took a walk down the road, to the field where, like an idiot, he’d once tried to give his girlfriend an engagement ring. Dusk settled in, and it was that odd midwestern temperature where the remnants of winter kept stealing day after day of spring. Scabs of melting snow lingered in the brush of the field. Beyond it stretched the forest and the scotched, brush-wire look of the leafless trees. Aqueous daylight came slanting over the horizon. Like a filter, it rendered the color of things differently, so that the field’s distant cows looked maroon and yellow in this kaleidoscopic sunset. He stood, smacking a melted puddle with his foot, waiting on the crows. You had to have faith, he figured. Faith that whatever pain you had in your life, God made up for it later.

  Crows had taken to roosting in the woods near the industrial park about a mile away. Foraging in the dumpsters and the hackberry bushes, multiple flocks teamed up to become a larger and larger horde. His dad called them the “mega-murder” because of what happened at dusk. Rick watched his image wobble in the puddle, and when it went still, he would smack it, and his features would get that horizontal interference all over again. He was drunk and got to thinking. Thinking about this cage he lived in, this prison where it felt like he’d spend the entirety of his life, cradle to grave, measuring the distance between his most modest hopes and all the cheap regret he actually ended up living. You passed your time in the cage, he figured, by clinging pointlessly and desperately to an endless series of unfinished sorrows.

  Then the crows lit out, thousands of them, pouring across the sky’s last light. They seemed to swell with a violet hue, creatures somewhere between rats and angels, cawing, descending into the forest in an eerie blanket, covering every naked winter branch . . .

  When all was said and done with the parade, the crowd converged around the stage and those on it fell into their embraces and prayers. The wind sneaked up their sleeves, gouged at their eyes, and seemed to hustle them toward departure. Jill Brinklan dropped her plum handkerchief and never picked it up. Marty Brinklan turned to hug Lee, so he wouldn’t have to look at his wife. Kaylyn hopped off the stage quickly. Ben Harrington smeared tears across his cheek with the back of a cold hand. Vehicles from the procession began to peel off. A city maintenance truck arrived to fish the flag out of the branches of the oak tree. The casket was returned to Walmart. It was October 13, 2007.

  In terms of our story, the parade was perhaps most notable not for the people who showed up but for those who were missing that day. Bill Ashcraft and Nasty Tina. Former volleyball star and First Christian Church attendee Stacey Moore. And a kid named Danny Eaton still doing his time in Iraq, a few years away from losing one of his pretty hazel eyes. Each of them missing for reasons of their own, all of them someday to return. It’s hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear. There is only this wild, fucked-up flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died.

  So we begin roughly six years after the parade thrown in honor of Corporal Rick Brinklan, on a fried fever of a summer night in 2013. We begin with history’s dogs howling, suffering in every last nerve and muscle. We begin with four vehicles and their occupants converging on this one Ohio town from the north, south, east, and west. Specifically, we begin on a dark country road with a small pickup truck, the frame shuddering, the gas tank empty, hurtling through the night from origins yet unknown.

  BILL ASHCRAFT AND THE GREAT AMERICAN THING

  WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS a truck cruising along on a hot July night with a small unmarked package strapped to the underside of the wheel well. This after a fourteen-hour drive from New Orleans to Ohio with the driver cranked out of his moon on LSD. This after Bill Ashcraft had pulled into his hometown and encountered two relics of his country’s imperial, war-savaged heart. After he found bemedaled hero Dan Eaton strolling aimless and hollow-eyed on the twilight roadside. After visiting Rick Brinklan’s cool, glass-smooth grave, his first time since Brinklan’s fractured body came home. After the bar fight suddenly extinguished by Eaton’s inventive use of a glass eye. Then throw in a few other schoolyard ghosts he’d yucked it up with at that bar: Jonah Hansen, the scion of a housing dynasty, and former Rust Belt football icon Todd Beaufort, and what a web of truly vexing remembrance these aging boys had constellated within him. Tuck all that away, though. Dan Eaton will explain all that eventually. For now just understand that stuff went down, but for Bill, the mystic, intertwining energy of the night was not exactly decelerating. From the moment he popped the tab onto his tongue and pulled into the swamp-ass heat of the bayou highways, he understood he’d be navigating some bends in the river on this one, but even by his standards the path felt oxbowed, unpredictable far beyond what one expects when returning to your frayed and haunted hometown to make a shady delivery to a figure from your deep, dank, dark damning past, which is to say, Dear Territory: I’m a stranger here myself.

  Then, after dropping Eaton off at the Eastern Star Retirement Home to chase his own two-toned demons, the goddamned truck ran out of gas.

  Hard to blame anyone but Bill Ashcraft on this count. He hadn’t anticipated so many distractions, and his truck’s gas gauge had the accuracy of a creationist biology textbook. Mostly he’d been thinking fondly of his bottle of Jameson, which had run dry in the spooky twilight amid the gravestones.

  The old Chevy S10 clicked, tinkled, rattled, and wheezed to a halt, sounding like she pissed herself before her engine gave out completely. Bill guided her to the shoulder, coming to rest with a scrape of tall dry grass on the undercarriage.

  “You dry bitch,” he told the truck. “You old, foul, no good—” He screamed bone-dry laughter. “Naw, I’m just kidding.” He wrapped the steering wheel in an embrace. “I still love you, girl. Ryde or die forever, boo.”

  The headlights cut an off-kilter block of light over the yellowed crabgrass on this limp, tree-lined stretch of State Route 229, maybe a mile outside of New Canaan.

  “Remember that time we drove out of Kansas with the entire fleet of staties chasing us like bank robbers? That was fun.”

  He released the wheel and sighed. Neither Bill nor his truck had ever been to Kansas.

  He was pretty fucking drunk, which for him was saying something. He was also still pretty wired from the acid. These tabs lasted For. Fuck. Ing. Ev. Er. You really had to be prepared to step into another dimension, accept the deregulations of that particular nuthouse, accept that you were never coming back, and imagine life under these new brain-bled, torch-fever-fed circumstances.

  It was okay. This crazy rat of a day would just have to steam a little longer in its shithouse.

  The thing of it—Bill mused—was this: You ran into people from high school whenever you came back to The Cane. That was double bogey for the course. But to spot Eaton on his way to visit Rick and then later sit across from Beaufort, who, having used up all nine of his football lives, now looked like a sad, soggy, bloated-corpse version of the titan he’d been in high school, on this night of all nights—well, that was pretty goddamned cosmic-hand mysterious. Though they’d been teenage enemies of a sort, he also felt the fraternity: once handsome, marbled, small-town athletes who couldn’t understand why they hadn’t conquered the world.

  Whatthefuckever. Tonight the universe was a-humming. He could feel it through his urge to vomit. He
didn’t believe in God, fate, or coincidence, but that left precious little to actually explain anything, and sometimes the right asteroid just strikes the right planet so the lizards lose a turn, and the motherfucking monkeys take over.

  “Planet of the Apes!” Bill shouted into the cab. “It’s our planet. What a twist.”

  He was at least a couple miles from the nearest gas station, and he’d thrown his cell phone out the window in Arkansas after briefly becoming convinced the NSA was tracking him. He plucked the kitchen timer from his pocket: 02:37:47. He would have to hoof it. He went rooting around in the glove compartment and found the roll of clear packing tape. Flicking off the headlights, exiting the cab, he walked over to the back left wheel. Crawling beneath, he found the small package secured to that nook with a complicated mess of duct tape and twine. He spent a couple minutes freeing all this handiwork, peeling at gobs of tape that lacquered his fingers, plucking drunkenly at knots, marveling at how the black configurations of an internal combustion system could look like a phantasmagoric dream-empire likely ruled by a barbaric autocrat (the dried mud, he decided, was the upside-down wasteland where most rebels were defeated and crucified), before the load fell away.

  He crawled back out, dusted himself off. The package was a rectangle, the length of a standard No. 10 envelope. A few centimeters thick. A nice long brick secured so tightly beneath efficient rolls of plastic and tape that it gave away absolutely nothing about the texture, color, odor, or variations of the contents. Bill unbuttoned his flannel, laid it over the truck, and stuck the brick lengthwise along his spine, right in the small of his back, a strip of packing tape attached. He then wound the tape around his back and belly, fixing the brick to his person. When it felt secure, he tore the tape, which split with that smooth-butter silence that leaves one agog at the variegated achievements of industrial civilization. He tossed the roll into the truck bed. He peered at his stomach.