Brock Clarke - Exley

“Incapacitated . He thinks his dad has been incapacitated,” Mr. S. said. “By America.”

The woman smiled at me, and for a second I thought she was going to offer me some nice hot cocoa out of the guy’s thermos. “I know it’s so hard,” she said, and then turned back to Mr. S. and smiled at him, too. “For both of you.”

I realized that she thought I was Mr. S.’s son. “My name is really Miller, not junior,” I said.

“That’s a nice name,” she said. “Very unusual.”

“No,” Mr. S. said. “He means he’s not my son. I’m not his dad. Even though he thinks I’ve been incapacitated, too.”

“I see,” she said, but you could tell she didn’t. She looked at me, then him, then me again, like she was trying to figure out which one of us she could trust.

“I was actually in the war,” Mr. S. said.

“What division were you in?” the guy asked. “Were you in Armored?”

“Cavalry.”

“Wow,” the guy said. “Cavalry.” He said this the way I hoped my dad would say, Wow, Exley , when he woke up and realized that I’d found Exley. The guy’s hand drifted to the holster that was holding the sandwich, or whatever was in the tinfoil, like a soldier’s hand might have drifted to his gun. I wondered if the guy might have wanted to go to war himself if he weren’t so busy protesting it.

“Steven,” the woman said, like she was warning him.

“Everyone says that we don’t know what it’s like over there,” Steven said to her. “But I want to know.” Then, to Mr. S.: “Tell us something we might not have heard from someone else.”

Mr. S. thought about this for a while. He absentmindedly tapped the megaphone against the left wheel of his chair. Suddenly, I was as interested as Steven. I wanted to know what Mr. S. had done over there, because I wanted to know what my dad had done. “Well,” he finally said, “one of the things you might not have heard is that when you’re interrogating someone, you say that if they don’t tell you what you want to know, you’ll cut off their heads and then fuck their skulls.”

The woman gasped and then moved toward me with her hands raised. It took me a second to realize what she was going to do: she was going to put her hands over my ears so I wouldn’t hear the bad words. It made me think that her kids were lucky to have her as a mother. If she had kids. But anyway, I already had a mother, and she swore around me. So did my dad. So did everyone. It must have been obvious that I was the kind of kid who wouldn’t repeat the bad words no matter how bad they were, no matter how many times I’d heard them, just like I was the kind of kid who you could leave alone at home and not worry that something bad would happen to him. Besides, it was too late for someone to start treating me like a kid. Besides, I wanted to hear what Mr. S. said next. I took a step back from the woman, and then another.

“You always say that?” Steven asked. He sounded skeptical. I don’t know of what, exactly. But I was skeptical, too. I tried to imagine my dad saying that, and I just couldn’t.

“Pretty much,” Mr. S. said.

“In English ?”

I could tell that Mr. S. hadn’t thought of this before. His eyes sort of went back into his head, like they were searching for whatever was in there that might help him answer Steven’s question. “No,” Mr. S. finally said, “not in English .”

“Did anyone ever tell you want you wanted to know?”

“No,” Mr. S. said.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Steven said.

“You wouldn’t think so,” Mr. S. repeated. He was angry now. He put the megaphone to his lips, then changed his mind about that. He handed it to me, and I took it. “What would you think happens when they don’t tell us what we need to know? Not even after we threaten to cut off their heads and fuck their skulls? What would you think happens then?”

No one said anything for a while. I don’t know what anyone else was thinking. But I was thinking about my dad. I could imagine him now. It was still hard to imagine him saying those words. But it was easy to imagine him standing there after the words hadn’t done any good. It was easy to imagine him standing there, with his gun, not knowing what to do next. Out of nowhere the sound of a gun being fired went off in my head, and then I heard a body hitting the ground with a thump . For a second I saw myself standing over Petey, V.’s father’s dog. Then they disappeared and I saw my dad standing over a guy with a blindfold over his eyes. My dad was holding a gun. The guy on the ground had dark curly hair and wasn’t wearing any shoes. There were a bunch of soldiers with my dad. They all had guns. The soldiers were laughing at something. Probably they were laughing at my dad. I wanted my dad to tell them to stop laughing at him. I wanted my dad to shoot them if they didn’t. And then my dad was lying on the ground. I could see the holes in his head and blood coming out the holes. The guy with the curly hair and no shoes was standing over my dad, holding my dad’s gun. He wasn’t wearing the blindfold anymore. He was laughing at my dad, too. And I wanted my dad to shoot the guy. I wanted my dad to kill him so much. And then I remembered that my dad had pieces of concrete in his head, and not bullets. I tried to reimagine the guy with the curly hair rigging a bomb next to something made of concrete, but before I could do that, the guy was on the ground again. The blindfold was back on. Blood was coming out of the guy’s mouth, just like it had come out of Petey’s after I had shot him. Then I shook my head, and all that went away and we were there, outside Fort Drum, waiting for Steven to say something.

“That’s why I asked,” Steven finally said. “Because I don’t know.”

“You don’t know is right,” Mr. S. said. “You don’t know shit .”

After that, everyone was quiet again. Steven was looking at the ground. The woman walked over to him, stood so close that their shoulders touched. “It’s OK,” she told him. “It’s all right.” I had the feeling that she would have hugged Steven if Mr. S. and I hadn’t been standing there. I wondered what was going on with them. I wondered why they were even here protesting. I mean, why these two people in particular were protesting. I bet they had a kid in Iraq, or maybe a kid who’d been killed there. That had to be it. I couldn’t imagine someone caring so much about the war either way unless they had some personal reason. Once I figured that out, I didn’t want to look at them anymore: it made me too sad. But I didn’t want to look at Mr. S., either. I could hear him breathing and breathing through his nose. I remembered the day before, in my dad’s hospital room, when I felt mad. I didn’t know what I was supposed to feel anymore, so I didn’t feel anything except for cold. A big wind roared through the pine trees, and they made scraping sounds against the wire fence.

“You were a moron for volunteering,” the woman finally said to Mr. S. “But I’m still sorry about what happened to your legs.” That seemed to do something to Mr. S. He slumped down in his chair a little, and I was worried that he was going to slide all the way off and that I’d have to catch him.

“Me, too,” he said. And then he made a kind of animal noise: “Arrrrrrrr !” I put my hands over my ears as he made the noise and kept making it. It was the most incredible noise I’d ever heard. It sounded loud and jagged, like the person or thing making the sound had too many teeth. It was so loud that if Mr. S. had used the megaphone, I bet he would have broken it. It was so loud that it seemed like surely someone would hear it and come running to figure out what was going on. But no one came.