Stephen Markley - Ohio

He only needed to flip through the first few to get the idea.

“Okay, but you gotta delete this one,” he said, showing them the image where Rick and Harrington both had their testicles hovering obscenely close to his face.

Rick shot him a terrified eyebrow. “You kidding? I’m deleting all of ’em. My dad would fucking send me to boot camp if he knew we were drinking in his house. Speaking of—y’all are coming over tonight and helping me clean this place top to bottom.”

Bill toggled through a few more photos. He cracked up again. “All right, this one’s pretty funny.” Harrington and Rick both wore suits and ties. They had draped his naked, dead-limbed arms over their shoulders. Both of them grinned like they were posing for a wedding picture while Bill’s head lolled back with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

“That one was a lot of work,” agreed Harrington, flipping a page of the newspaper.

He now noticed the word Bullfrog scrawled across Harrington’s back like a tattoo.

“Yeah, I passed out second,” he admitted.

“Here.” Rick handed him a plate. “Hearty breakfast for a hearty boy.”

The scent was simultaneously nauseating and intoxicating. He tried to force down scrambled eggs while taking in the view through the Brinklans’ kitchen window. Because they were like seventh-generation New Canaan, the Brinklans had worked their lineage into one of the county’s finer bucolic perches, a high grassy hill that descended into forest, beyond which their town carpeted both sides of the Cattawa River, looking nineteenth-century quaint, like the tuba solos were always on the verge of bursting forth during a Fourth of July parade. He’d loved waking up to this view since his childhood when Jill Brinklan would make them cinnamon rolls and Marty would sip coffee through his walrus mustache and mostly say nothing.

Rick broke his revelry by thwapping a small item below the fold of the newspaper. It was an AP story: Rumsfeld Confident Major Operations in Iraq Finished.

“See? Don’t you owe me an ice cream cone or something?”

He tried not to take the bait. “We will see, pal.”

Rick hoovered down a strip of bacon in a bite, hairy legs spread. “One thing you at least gotta admit is that with technology now they can really strike targets with precision. This was one of the most humane wars ever waged.”

Bill belched eggs, whiskey, and Bud Light. Tried to meet him halfway.

“Okay, right, sure, this wasn’t Vietnam or whatever, but you know they’re talking like seven or eight thousand civilians killed in the initial attack? That’s not counting like tens of thousands of Iraqi Army deaths—are we really talking about this?”

“Yeah, summer’s for hangovers and jerking off,” agreed Harrington.

Rick grinned to show this was all friendly. No more bitter arguments over T-shirts and bumper stickers. His small, squinty eyes only made his smile maddeningly big and bright. He had a single Himalayan-sized zit on his temple, of which Bill could see the crags, blood vessels, escarpments, and other skin-tectonic features. With his head now shaved into a stiff flattop, the sides of his skull milky and gruesome, he looked his part. Like he’d stepped out of central casting for Hillbilly Ohioan. Part of Rick’s appeal had always been that he knew this and played into the stereotype in a self-effacing, often hilarious way. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that the caricature had blended with his real thinking, which kept leading them to confrontation over just about anything: war, politics, Todd Beaufort’s sexual deviancy. “That’s war, man. You sit around in your safe little town your whole life, and of course it seems totally ridiculous that you’d have to fight for that safety. Then three thousand people get killed in the attacks—”

“Rawr! And for like the billionth time, dude, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. I don’t know how many different ways to say it at this point. Like should I tattoo it on your arm Memento style?”

“If you hadn’t passed out first, you could’ve written it on me in Sharpie.”

“Guys,” said Harrington, setting the paper down. “Dad says cut it out. No one—I mean no one—not me, not the girls, not anyone—wants to hear you idiots debate this another second.”

Across the room, Harrington’s funky ringtone bleated out of his cell. He went to answer.

“Maybe Iraqy-raq had nothing to do with it, and maybe they did.” Rick turned back to Bill, still smiling. “But this is bigger than any one country, man. It’s civilizational. It’s two different ways of seeing the world, and sometimes you’ve got to show strength. Hit back with all you got, so they know what you’re about.”

The hot pit of fury this put in Bill’s head. It was a black hole with a gravitational force that pulled every last atom into its dense, infinite sphere. He refused to take the bait, Lisa’s voice in his head. She thought he and Rick were engaged in macho, horn-locking, dick-comparing bullshit. She said he had to chill out when Rick goaded him. Not turn every petty issue into the Lincoln-Douglas debates. She was the one person he considered possibly smarter than him, so he’d lately been trying to listen to her. As Harrington wandered to the back porch to take the call, Bill let go of the conversation in his own particular way.

“Tell you what,” he said to Rick, “I’ll admit bombing Iraq to submission was easier than I predicted if every time you bring up 9/11, you have to suck my cock.”

Rick arched an eyebrow. “Now does that mean to completion each time? Or like one up and down gulp per September Eleventh observation?”

“Hey,” said Harrington, poking his head back in, holding the phone to his bare chest. “The girls want to go to the beach today.”

“Jericho?” asked Rick.

“Booze?” asked Bill.

“Stacey says Lisa and Kaylyn can hit the liquor store on their way.”

“Plus, we still got a thirty rack of Coors,” said Rick through an Oh shit, this could hurt face.

“Christ,” said Bill. “My liver.”

“Is that a yes?” asked Harrington.

“Well, it ain’t a fucking no. You can sleep when you’re dead, Ashcraft.”

They spent that hot summer day of 2003 at Jericho Lake. The chain of calls early Saturday morning tumbled through the ranks, and half the high school showed up. They pooled pilfered booze. Hailey Kowalczyk brought armfuls of wood, and she and Dan Eaton built a fire pit on the beach for later that night. Stacey teased both Dan and Rick that the sun was invented in a time before boys with such reflective skin. Jonah Hansen turned up twirling the keys to his dad’s boat, docked a half-mile’s walk down the shore. Ron Kruger and Eric “Whitey” Frye arrived with patched-up black inner tubes and five bottles of Zima. Tina Ross came, and in her swimsuit you could see all the weight she’d lost, her bones looking as fragile as those of a featherless bird. Tony Wozniak and Mike Yoon brought a football, cornhole boards, and beanbags. They backed Yoon’s Explorer to the edge of the parking lot and blasted 93.7 FM, pop music from Columbus.

Bill watched Rick and Kaylyn standing in waist-high water. Rick’s Stars and Stripes claw marks glared at him. Kaylyn skimmed her fingers across the surface, and when she turned he saw the tramp stamp on her lower back. He’d always hated tattoos, but Kaylyn’s made him especially disgusted—a blue butterfly with symmetrical curlicues spreading across the once-perfect crest of her ass. She wore a lime-green bathing suit and held a hand over her brow to block the sun, squinting. Rick’s lower lip puffed out from dip, he took her by the hips, his eyes hidden behind Oakleys. Bill thought Kaylyn’s gaze flitted to him, but she might have just been turning away from the sun.