James Frey - Incite

“And what, may I ask, is your position on the war?”

It was Mary’s turn, and she drilled the 5 ball into the side pocket. She held out her hand as she walked past me and I slapped it. “Good shot.”

“Thank you.” She lined up another one.

“My father,” I said to John, “would tell you that the Vietnam War is being fought to prevent the vile spread of Red Communism and strengthen our alliance with Australia. I worked with him nine to seven almost every day of the year, selling furniture, and he said that at least four times a week.”

John smiled and put his hat back on. “And what do you say?”

“I think we’re sending kids over there to die just so the president can say we’re doing something about the ‘communist threat,’ with the false belief that, as a superpower, we have the right to invade any small country we want.”

Mary knocked in the 7 ball and then stood up.

John nodded his agreement, and the waitress arrived. She set the drinks on the table beside John. John paid her and, if I was seeing correctly, gave her a huge tip.

“And today,” John said, “the bastard has declared that he’s going to be placing mines in Haiphong Harbor, the main port of North Vietnam. There are military ships in those waters, but it’ll mostly affect imports, like food and medical care. Yeah, it will hurt the army, but it’s sure as hell going to hurt the civilians more.”

Jim nudged me. “He was over there.”

“You’re a vet?” I looked at John.

He stared back at me and then pulled up his sleeve. There was a tattoo of a skull wearing a green beret.

Mary walked over next to me. “You coming? I don’t want to have to win this all by myself.”

“She could too,” John said.

I stood up. John looked older than everyone else. He looked weathered. “John, what do you do?” I asked.

John exhaled, a deep, slow breath. “It’s a long story.”

Mary pulled on my arm. “Come on.”

He grinned. “It’s called Endgame. Now go play pool.”

I sat on one of the couches, watching Jim and Julia play nine ball against each other. Mary had stuck with me all evening, which surprised me, but I didn’t want to question it. I didn’t think a girl like Mary had ever even looked at me, but here was one who was pulling me over to the couch by the hand and was in no hurry to let go. Tommy followed us and sat down in the chair next to our couch. He put his feet up on the table in the center, and I waited for John to join us.

“So, how do you know all these people?” I asked again, more to cut the silence than because I was interested.

Mary waved her hand dismissively. “Eh, I don’t want to talk about them. Tell me about you. Who is Michael Stavros?”

I took a breath. “Well, I already told you the important stuff. I came to Berkeley to do something more with my life than just be a furniture salesman. But for now I’m a janitor. Classy, right?”

“Don’t feel bad about that,” she said. “I worked at a burger place until I got my internship. I’ll probably go back there when school starts.”

“I thought you were on scholarship.”

“Pays for tuition, but nothing else. My dad has plenty of money, but he wants me to make my contribution, which is a buck sixty-five per hour, fifteen hours a week. But it could be worse. He originally didn’t want me to go to college at all.”

“You should be a janitor. We make one eighty.”

“I’d rather flip burgers.”

“What about your internship? That doesn’t pay?”

“Nope, but that’s okay, because I don’t really do anything. I make coffee, I take notes in meetings, and I get ogled by men who are divorcing their wives. But I have a desk with a window on the eighteenth floor, and my mom took me on a shopping spree for business clothes. That was fun. You should see me before I change clothes after work. I look like a Republican.”

“Scandalous,” I said with a laugh. “I could see you as a big-name lawyer in the city.”

She grimaced. “That’s because you don’t know me very well yet. I should get paid just for having to wear high heels every day. I’m a country girl, born and bred. I hated leaving the ranch and moving here. Give me boots and a rifle and I’m your girl.”

“I liked that about Pasadena. You can be over the hills and out of the city in ten minutes. Well, scratch that. I don’t like Pasadena. It’s too suburban—is that the word I’m looking for? It’s too bland. Nothing happens there.” I laughed. “The thing I just said that I liked about it was how easy it is to get out of there.”

“Never been there. Is it close to Disneyland?”

“About an hour. If you’re still a country girl at heart, how did you ever get into law?”

“I like to argue,” she said, and laughed.

John sat down with us and put a foot on the coffee table. He was wearing boots—looked like alligator skin.

“Mike, answer a question for me.”

“Sure,” I said. “Anything.”

“I don’t know Pasadena, but there was something in the paper about it a couple weeks ago. Made me think. There was an apartment fire. A guy had gotten out safely, but he ran back inside. They found his body in a hallway—they speculated that he’d been knocking on all the doors. Now, he wasn’t the manager. Neighbors said he was quiet, and no one really knew him.”

I nodded. I’d heard about the fire. “So what’s the question?”

“Why did he run back in? He was safe. The fire department was there.”

“Do you want details from a Pasadena native? Or just my opinion?”

“Just your opinion,” John said. “Hypothetical. Let’s say you’re the guy.”

“I think he was just a good guy. Wanted to help. Got out of his depth.”

A waitress brought him a new Scotch and water, but he seemed in no hurry to drink it. “You know, the Mormon missionaries came knocking on my door once. They have a saying: ‘It becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor.’ You sure you don’t want a drink?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, and decided to change the subject. “Tell me about that game. What’s that?”

“Endgame?” John asked, and took a sip.

“It’s scary shit,” Tommy said.

Mary squeezed my hand.

“There’s a lot to know,” John said. “The history of it would take hours to tell. I’ll start with a question—what do you believe about the end of the world?”

I laughed for a moment, because I didn’t think he was being serious. But I was the only one laughing. “The end of the world? I don’t know. My mom is the churchgoer in our family. A Baptist. I’ve never paid much attention. Raining fire and brimstone, and all the sinners go to hell and the good people go to heaven, I guess? Why’s that important?”

“You want to know about Endgame, right? Mary, tell us what you know,” John said.

“What I know? Or what I was taught in catechism?”

“First what you were taught.”

She brushed some loose strands of hair out of her face. “I was raised Catholic. The Bible says that Christ will return, and that no one knows the time of his coming. The wicked will grow worse and worse and the Antichrist will come and the entire world will fall away. Finally Christ will come down to purge the wicked and sit in judgment of all people. That’s what I was taught, anyway.”

I smiled, first at her and then at John. “Are we really sitting in the back of a bar talking about the end of the world? Do you know what I’d be talking about if I was back home? Furniture. And if I went out with my friends—which I never had time to do—we’d talk about baseball. And I hate baseball.”

“Oh, you’ve just never seen good baseball,” John said with a laugh. “But yeah—the end of the world. It’s is a crazy topic. You’ve got to be a little bit nuts to deal with it all. Tommy, how about you? What do you believe?”