It didn't matter to T.C. that he'd only talked to Damon about three times since we'd graduated high school, or that the time he'd driven out to Colorado to visit him, out to Fort Collins, a thousand miles away, Damon blew him off for a piece of tail. When the call came through, T.C. was ready. Born ready. The rest of us, Little Ben and me, James, Frankie—I can't say. It made us uncomfortable. We didn't really know Damon anymore, and we'd never met the woman he knocked up. What were we supposed to think? I mean, sure, it was terrible what happened, but terrible things happened to people all the time. I didn't feel responsible. None of us did. But the call came last night and we heard T.C. telling somebody he'd pick them up at the airport, no problem. Then he came and stood in the doorway with his hands folded behind his head and told us: Damon got leave to come bury his son, this little stillborn baby, and that he—T.C.—expected us here to greet him when they came by. That none of us really had anywhere better to be than home on a Friday night at eight o'clock made it easy enough to honor his wishes.
Home was a big green falling-apart house we all shared along the railroad tracks in Lafayette, Indiana, across the river from Purdue. It had once been the mayor's home, our landlord told us. Sun-bleached shingles, rotten window-frames, overgrown shrubs in the flowerbed, it wasn't anything to look at, but it was cheap. Especially split five ways. Down in the basement there was a huge rock on the bare earth that they'd built the house around, the foundation, and sometimes cave-crickets hatched down there. We could hear them singing at night. And when the trains rumbled by—not twenty-five feet from our living room window—dust rained down from the ceiling.
It was a place where we could goof off and have a good time and forget for a while that we were waiting for something better to come along, that our real lives—the ones we wanted—hadn't started yet. That's how I felt about it, anyway, because I'd just gotten my degree in Interpersonal Communication in May and was slated to start grad school in the fall. Which was my ticket out.
T.C. had gone to community college off and on for the last few years—a program in forestry and game management—and was swamped with credit card debt. He'd work a semester, go to school a semester. But it was a numbers game. He couldn't ever get ahead and finally, after flunking an English class—because the teacher, he said, was a complete asshole—he said fuck it and dropped out. Our big green house along the railroad tracks: he was stuck there. I know that he'd considered the military, back when Damon got in, right after high school, but T.C. was too hot-tempered. He had too much pride to stand in line with some sergeant barking in his face. Not that I judged him. If Frankie's and my father hadn't died and left us some life insurance money, we'd have been in the same place. I always have to remind myself that I've been lucky.
We were all sitting around the living room playing X-Box and nursing drinks when they showed up: big balding T.C. in his wife-beater and the tight jeans he wore on the weekends because he liked how big they made his quads look, and Damon in khakis and a dark T-shirt, his flattop cut high and tight. T.C. led him up the walk, talking over his shoulder and pointing down the railroad tracks, probably telling him about the Sunday we all got bored and started walking and ended up in Battleground, some fourteen miles away, and had to call him to come get our sorry asses.
T.C.'s shoulders were deep tan from painting houses all summer—deep tan, like varnished wood—but singed a little, too, burned to scales. He strolled in saying, “Hey, ladies. Would you look who the hell's here?”
“Hey, Damon,” we all said.
Damon blushed and looked around at us, his thumbs in his pants-pockets, like he wasn't sure what to make of the house and everything, and us living here. But under the circumstances—and excepting what looked like a purple shiner rising under his eye—he seemed okay. His face had broadened some, his cheeks and eyes had grown further apart. He'd muscled up. Like an honest-to-God soldier.
“Different, isn't he?” T.C. said.
Damon and I shared a glance, his green eyes looking me up and down, assessing my own changes. It had been three or four years since we'd seen each other. I'd put on about twenty pounds. I'd gone soft.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
T.C. told Damon to make himself at home and darted into the kitchen to pull a couple Budweisers from our communal case in the fridge. Inside the refrigerator were half-empty bottles of ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise, a head of wilted lettuce, some sweaty bologna, Little Ben's jar of tamales and a couple of pickled pig's feet none of us seemed to remember buying. “Want a pig's foot?” T.C. said, tossing Damon a beer. “Bastards nuked my chum or else you could have that.”
“Offered it to the train-god,” James said.
“Was I here?” Frankie said.
“No.”
“That's when it started,” Little Ben said.
At the beginning of the summer T.C. bought a can of salmon, for making salmon-burgers, but there was a hole in it, and I guess we didn't notice until this big thunderstorm knocked out the power and our air-conditioner died. The house got so hot that the fish bubbled over, and since T.C. wasn't around, James said fuck it, took the can outside and heaved it at a passing train. Which was how we started making offerings to the train-god. I can't tell you the sound of one of those big black bottles of Cordon Negro clunking against the side of a boxcar, only that it's hilarious and pitiful.
Damon twisted the cap off his beer, took a swig, looked around. The living room was pretty dingy, big spackled cracks down the walls, water stains on the ceiling, T.C.'s Bruce Lee poster covering the hole he'd punched one night after arguing with his girlfriend. I wasn't sure what Damon thought of it. I didn't know how he'd been living, if he'd been in the Green Zone or out on missions or what. Somehow it didn't seem polite to ask. Especially not since I thought the war was immoral as hell. I mean, even on 9/11—even as we all sat around watching the carnage on TV, shocked and saddened—I remember thinking that our response to this was going to be a thousand times worse, that we'd kill a thousand people for every one we'd lost. Five years later and we were already there, if not over the top. What was I supposed to say to Damon about that? He was still my friend, and he was home to bury a child. What were any of us supposed to say? The only one who didn't seem bothered was T.C. and that was because he had a mission of his own. He was dead-set on keeping Damon's mind off that stillborn.
“Well?” T.C. said. “What are we doing tonight?”
I took a look at Little Ben, a big Hawaiian with oil-black hair, who was down to the melting ice in his white Russian. He was picking a cat hair off his tongue. James was fingering a scratched and out-of-tune acoustic guitar he didn't know how to play. Frankie was pulling his scraggly red dreads into a pony-tail.
“We could go out,” I offered.
“Where?”
“Chocolate Shop.”
“Chocolate Shop's a sausage-fest,” James said, making a cheater's G and raking a gnawed thumbnail over the strings.
“Pete's then.”
“I'm 86'd there,” Little Ben said.
And then Little Ben said it was too bad T.A. Tom's closed, and Frankie reminded us that he never got to go there because he turned twenty-one two nights after they locked their doors forever. We all told Frankie to shut the fuck up. In the meantime, Damon just stood there with his beer and this kind of glazed expression which I took to mean that he was somewhere else altogether. T.C. thumped him on the back and said, “You see the kind of bullshit I have to put with from these pussies?”
“Let's just start walking,” I finally said.
We followed the railroad tracks half a block, past the public library and the blood-center, James and Frankie ahead of everybody else, walking foot over foot on the shiny rails, pushing each other and falling off and laughing. It was the end of July, and hot, but the humidity had dropped some and it didn't feel too bad to be outside after dark, taking a walk. At Main we veered off the tracks and crossed a pedestrian bridge over the Wabash, which was low and brown, its muddy banks flecked with garbage. We climbed Chauncey Hill up into West Lafayette on our way to the bars at Purdue. It's what we did every weekend. Clockwork. Only Damon held back some, looking around at everything—the houses, the streets—making himself familiar, taking his bearings. Every once in a while T.C. slowed down to wait for him and pound him on the back again and say something obnoxious. But for all I could tell, Damon seemed to feel halfway good. I even thought I saw him smile once, just looking out at the river at nothing in particular.
Since T.A. Tom's was closed and The Chocolate Shop was a sausage-fest and Little Ben was 86'd at Pete's, we ended up at Rick's Roadhouse, not the best bar on campus but not the worst, just your standard spacious college drinking facility splashed with sports décor and Budweiser frog mirrors. We sat in a big booth in the corner and ordered pitchers of Killian's. Our waitress was this blonde cutie named Deb, who brought our pitchers, two of them, dark and frothing, and set down plastic cups. She wore a blue mechanic's shirt, with pinstripes and a nametag, and when she leaned over to set out the cups we could see down the front to her silver belly piercing.
“Hey, Deb?” Little Ben said—Little Ben always struck a conversational tone with the waitresses—“How about some real glasses tonight? Our buddy here's back from the Army. Been over in Iraq and everything.”
“Yeah,” we all said.
She looked at Little Ben, then at James and me to see if he was lying. All campus bars put away their glassware on the weekends, something to do with a homecoming that got out of control, but there were always exceptions. She looked at Damon, his flat-top, the bruise under his eye. She said she'd check. T.C. slid a five across the table, which she looked at carefully, then picked up and tucked away.
Five minutes we had our pint glasses.
With the beer flowing and Rick's as packed as I'd seen it in a while—because it was graduation weekend for the summer schoolers, which meant there was no shortage of hotties in short tight skirts and tube-tops—we didn't have to talk much to keep occupied. Mostly T.C. kept the conversation going, telling Damon about our ex-roommate, Kevin, and how he was dating this skanky Filipino girl he'd met at a Halloween party. I guess she said if anybody came dressed as The Crow she was going to dance with him all night. And Kevin came dressed as The Crow. Now she was pregnant and threatening to take the kid back to the Philippines if Kevin didn't buy her a new car. It was all terrible and funny, and I caught Damon laughing hard a couple of times, which was good. He'd been so quiet back at the house and on the walk over, just taking everything in, that I wondered if he really wanted to be here at all, if maybe he hadn't come along just to appease T.C. Not that I was too sure about where else he would have gone.
Regardless, it was good to see him laugh. It meant that for a minute none of us had to think about anything other than what we were doing right then. Just sitting there telling stories and drinking beer. Everything going on in the rest of the world—as sick as it made me, that we could be killing and displacing so many people, losing so many of our own—didn't matter right then. Which was maybe how the general public thought about it anyway. I don't know. To me it seemed like everybody over here had pretty much given up and turned off the war, like it was a television show they'd gotten tired of. Nobody wanted to think about what was really going on. Every day I'd read in the paper about another attack, another roadside bomb, and the numbers of the dead—13 or 36 or 124—were just that, numbers, and didn't really mean anything. It was a subject that for tonight, for right now, I was glad enough to leave alone. But when T.C. shut up for two seconds about wanting to bang the brunette standing by the jukebox, the first thing out of Frankie's mouth—my little brother Frankie, who hardly knew Damon from Adam—was, “So how's it feel to be back in the States? Does it freak you out, or what?”
We all could've killed Frankie for asking something so stupid, and my face must of shown it because Damon waved me off. “It's fine,” he said, more soft-spoken than I ever remembered. “Things are pretty much the same here.”
“Frankie's still a virgin,” James said.
Frankie flipped him off.
Damon grinned, ran a slow finger down the side of his glass, wiping off beads of condensation. James elbowed him in the side and laughed, then looked at Frankie, dead serious. “No, look it, Frankie. I guess you weren't watching too close earlier. On the way over, Damon killed a man. With his bare hands.”
“Fuck you guys,” Frankie said.
Everybody laughed again and Damon drained his glass, said he had to take a leak. I slid over to let him out and we were all quiet a second, watching him head to the john. James said he shouldn't have said what he said about him killing a man. Fuck. What was done was done, I said. Then T.C. said that the woman who'd had his stillborn wasn't his girlfriend but his wife—this skinny white-trash girl who drove supply trucks in Bosnia. They got married after a couple of weeks of really drunking it up around base. She was the one Damon ditched T.C. for that time in Colorado. “And the reason the kid was stillborn,” T.C. said, “was because she never stopped drinking.”
“While she was pregnant?” Frankie said.
“No, before,” James said. “Shit.”
“Jesus, Frankie.”
“What?”
“Just shut up, okay?”
“How's he doing then?” I asked.
“Fine, I guess,” T.C. said, shrugging his peeling shoulders, as though he didn't really want to think about it. He poured more beer in his glass. “Funeral's tomorrow. You guys should come. It's tomorrow afternoon.”
“Where's his wife?” I said.
“They're divorced.”
“Already?”
“Shit happens fast.”
“Think he really killed people?” Frankie said, looking around the table at us. “I've never met anybody who killed people.”
“Shut up, Frankie.”
“What?”
“Just shut the fuck up.”
“That a shiner under his eye?” James said.
“Looks like,” Little Ben said. “Pretty nice one.”
Damon came back to the booth and sat down at his pint glass. None of us had committed one way or another about the funeral, but I already knew there was no way in hell Little Ben or James was going—because James had to work, for one, and Little Ben had never been to a funeral in his life—and Frankie didn't even know Damon. As for me, to be honest, I didn't much want to go either. When Frankie and I lost our father six years ago, to a heart attack, that was it for me and funerals. The heat of a Saturday afternoon in August and all of us standing around in tight ties and sport-jackets and shoes that hurt our feet. All the sorrowful fat women in their black dresses, their floppy hats. The minister who didn't even know our father, up there talking about what a good man he was, how he'd been loved by many and many would suffer his loss, blah blah blah, and how I'd tried to say a few words but couldn't, couldn't do anything but look out at the crowd gathered under that awning and see their big hanging guts and coffee-stained teeth, and behind them a grassy hill full of pink stones, and a highway, some trees, a sky that went on and on. And I knew T.C. would be disappointed, shit, but when he looked at me with his asking eyes—You gonna go?—I shook my head and looked down at my hands. When I looked up again, he was staring out the window at a smudge of moon.
He'd have expected as much from James and Frankie and Little Ben, because they were always flaking off, but with me there was something more. We went back further than the rest of them. T-ball at four years old. Back before my father died and before his parents split up and his mom remarried his asshole stepfather. Back before the world got complicated by things like wars and stillborn babies. In middle school, in the summers, we used to tent out in the woods behind my house, staying up all night, staring into a campfire and talking. Those were good times, no doubt, but they were gone and that was just fine with me, because I was ready for something new.
But if T.C. and I hadn't have had that history I don't know that I'd have held my tongue when he stared out the window, disappointed. “Too fucking bad,” I wanted to tell him. “Tonight's all I have for this. Tonight.”
But I held my tongue.
The others? I don't know what they were thinking. They just seemed bored. Little Ben was picking our table to splinters with his thumbnail. James had slumped back in the booth, one hand at the base of his empty glass. Frankie was leaning forward with his elbows on the table, sulking, long twists of red hair hanging down over his eyes. The only one who seemed half-awake was Damon. He had one of those faces that turned pink the second a drop of alcohol hit, and he was glancing around the bar, pink-faced, eager, as though the beer had finally begun to do its work. And I don't know why, but seeing him like that reminded me of the scrawny little smart-ass he used to be, how much fun we used to have tearing down the hallways at school, goofing off. I remembered a time we skipped out and went driving in his beater Omni. It was winter and we drove out to this factory that had burned down and turned donuts in the parking lot. Six of us jammed in the car, just sliding around and around, one of my fondest memories.
“Remember that day,” I said to Damon, looking up at him a second, grinning almost despite myself, “when we all skipped school, went out driving? Out at that factory that burned down?” T.C. looked back at me over his shoulder and I kept going. “Do you remember that? Turning donuts and all of us screaming?”
James slid his glass from palm to palm, said he remembered. Little Ben stopped picking at the table a second and looked up and said it was that Venetian blinds place, and it hadn't burned down, it got hit by a tornado.
“Flattened,” he said.
“When was that?” James said.
“Senior year,” I said. “Career week.”
“Where was I?” Frankie lifted his head from his hands and looked around at us. “How come I wasn't there? I don't remember—”
“Career week,” Little Ben laughed.
“Fucked up my suspension,” Damon said, nodding, remembering. He took a long drink and licked his lips and couldn't help it—he laughed. He said that that car never ran the same afterward. James laughed and poured more beer and said it was because he was ramping the fucking drifts. I snuck a glance at T.C. He must've remembered—Damon bearing down on those big snow hills that the plows made around the light poles, and the Omni crunching and tilting and throwing us to the side.
“Remember that, T.C.?” I asked him.
“Shitheads,” T.C. muttered.
“What?”
“I was at career week.”
And that brought down the house—we all howled. James pounding the table with both fists, and Little Ben with tears in his eyes he was laughing so hard. “Remember when you took Jenny Hasselbeck to the Christmas Dance,” I said to T.C., leaning down to look him in the eye. “You guys went to Pizza Hut.”
“Fuck you,” he said, but he was laughing now. He spread his hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “Nobody was eating. I was nervous as fuck anyway—it was Freshman year. None of you pussies went.”
“He ate a whole pizza,” I said.
Little Ben was cracking up, this high hyena rasping laugh. “His whole face turned green,” Little Ben wheezed.
Frankie perked up and was about to saying something but James covered his mouth with his hand. “Remember Brian McBride?” James said, looking around at us. “Now that's a Christmas Dance story.”
“Sad,” I said.
“He's gay now,” T.C. said.
“T.C. keeps tabs,” Little Ben said.
T.C. grabbed his crotch. “Eat it, fatty.”
“Quit groping yourself,” James said. He pulled his hand away from Frankie's mouth and watched Frankie a second, making sure he wasn't going to try to say anything else. “Now, Brian McBride. This motherfucker takes Stacey Woo home—you remember Stacey Woo? Offers to give her a ride home from the after-party, no big deal, right? And somehow they end up fucking in the back seat of his car. . . .”
“And he threw up afterward,” I said.
“I told you he was gay.”
“Shit,” James said.
“I told you.”
“Stacey Woo,” Little Ben said.
“I just remember that next day at school,” I said, taking a drink, the beer cool and tasteless. “Or I guess it was a Monday. Remember all the guys in the parking lot asking if she needed a ride home? Remember her date?”
“For the dance?” Little Ben said.
“Yeah.”
“Todd Dunbar,” T.C. said.
“He came to school that Monday,” I said, “and he says to me, ‘Hey, I asked her if she needed a ride home. She fucking said no.'”
Everybody laughed, remembering. Then James asked if we remembered that last day of school. We'd met at McDonald's at seven o'clock in the morning, about twenty-five of us, and smoked the place out. Swisher Sweet Cigars. Little Ben said that what he remembered was walking out to our pal Ellery's car afterward and seeing that fucking rooster in the back seat, its legs duct-taped together so he couldn't scratch anything. How they took it into school and let it go in the Freshman hallway and how Mr. Homestead, our fat ass band instructor had had to chase it around like a kid at a county fair. Which reminded T.C. of how Ellery used to keep his pot in the steering column of this junked-out Geo his grandparents bought him, and how one day they were just driving along and the panel fell off and out came about half-a-pound, spilling loose from its bag and flying out the windows, and how Ellery swerved off the road trying to stop.
I looked at Damon, who was down to the foam in his glass of beer. He was still pink-faced and grinning, but that far-off look in his eyes had come back. He seemed out of place somehow, disoriented, as though he could have been anywhere—Colorado, Kosovo, Baghdad—and it could have been yesterday or a year before or ten years before. Or ten years into the future. The reality was that he was home, in a bar in Indiana, and it was right now: he had an ex-wife somewhere who hadn't stopped drinking while she was pregnant; he had a stillborn baby to put in the ground.
And I thought about that little baby: where was he? At the funeral home, waiting, lying all alone in one of those tiny caskets? How had he gotten here? Had he come with Damon or been shipped like a package?
It hardly seemed possible, any of it, that we'd gotten old enough for marriage and divorce and stillborn babies. But here we were. I looked around at Little Ben and James, and at my brother Frankie, at T.C., and I realized without any real surprise—almost as though I had known it all along—that we weren't waiting to grow up, for life to change. We had grown up. Life had changed. Only it wasn't the golden dream I always imagined. It was just a continuation of all our old hurts.
And it was right then—of course—that I spotted Roger Rose up at the jukebox. Anybody who went to public high school knew this guy: captain of the baseball team, dumb as a log, six-foot-four with a slanting Cro-Magnon skull and watery brown dog's eyes, who ate runts like Damon for breakfast. Their lockers were right next to each other's and for four years Roger Rose knocked the books out of Damon's hands, tripped him, poked him, called him a baby-dicked homo, a fudge-packer, a faggotty-ass queer mother fucker. The one time Damon snapped, and probably because we'd smoked up that morning in the parking lot, I don't know, he just started screaming: I'd rather kiss you than fight you, Rog! I'd rather kiss you than fight you! And everybody in the hallway stopped talking and looked at Roger. He didn't know whether to deck Damon or what. Finally, he just walked off in a huff. Never messed with Damon again.
I spotted him at the jukebox, drunk and fumbling with a wrinkled dollar bill, trying to insert it into the machine and cursing every time the dollar spit back out at him. He'd gone to flab since high school, must of weighed 240. Last I heard he'd attended some dink college in Washington state on a baseball scholarship, dropped out because of grades and came home to work for his dad installing pool tables and pinball machines. He made a pretty sad picture, drunk, flabbed out, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, and cursing the jukebox, kicking it, and then rubbing the wadded up dollar on the metal edge of the machine and trying it again. I wasn't going to say anything to anybody about him, but T.C. must have seen him too, seen me watching him.
“Now would you look at that,” T.C. said.
“Don't,” I said. “Don't even start.”
“What?” Frankie said.
“I'm not doing shit,” T.C. said.
T.C. had had his own run-ins with Roger Rose over the years. There was a story I couldn't quite remember involving a BMX race where T.C. got thrown over his handle bars because Roger elbowed him or kicked him or cut him off, and he had to go to the hospital, had to have twenty-four stitches under his chin.
“He sure got fat,” James said.
“Who?” Frankie said.
“Up front, numb-nuts.”
“I'm just sitting here. I'm not doing anything.” T.C. wouldn't look me in the eye. “I bet he wouldn't talk shit to Damon now.”
“Even still.”
“I bet he wouldn't.”
“Can't get his dollar to work,” Little Ben laughed.
Finally, giving the jukebox one last kick when the dollar came spitting back out at him, Roger Rose stumbled back to his table and slunk down beside what I could only take to be his girlfriend, this chunky fake-baked blonde in a bare-midriff baby-T that said: Stop pretending you don't want me. It wasn't good. It wasn't good at all. He sat down and dropped the dollar in front of her and she started yelling at him. When he tried to light his cigarette, she slapped it out of his mouth. And even T.C., who two seconds before was ready to knock the guy's teeth out—I could always tell—even T.C. realized this wasn't the same Roger we'd known, that this poor bastard had it worse and looked like was going to have it worse than any of us, the rest of his life.
Damon took a long fierce glance at Roger Rose and his girlfriend, and for a second I could see it all. Could see Damon snapping like he snapped that time at school. Strolling up to Roger Rose and turning the table over and plowing into him. And I almost wanted him to, because I wanted something to feel certain tonight. Anything. But Damon finally just shook his head and turned away, as though he had no desire to lay hands on the son of a bitch. As though he were surprised by that.
Judging from the shiner under his eye, which had gotten darker and more severe-looking as the night wore on, Damon had lain hands on someone recently. He wasn't a stranger to fighting. T.C. pounded him on the back. “You'd have kicked the shit out of him, Damon,” he said. “I know you would've.”
“Let's get out of here,” James said.
“Yeah,” Frankie said.
And though it was a pretty big no-no in our world, we slid out of our booth and left behind more than half of our last pitcher of Killian's. Outside, it had cooled off a little, was almost chilly. We stood around the sidewalk with our hands in our pockets, wondering what to do. Frankie said this girl from his statistics class was having a party up in the acres, but T.C. said that was too far to walk. When Frankie countered that since we'd walked this far just to get to the bars it wasn't a long trip by comparison, T.C. told him to go then, he didn't care, go. But he wanted to know what James and Little Ben and I were going to do. James was smoking a cigarette and looking back the way we'd come, back to the river, and Little Ben just stared at his feet. The two of them, I knew, wanted to go to the party with Frankie. They'd been to Frankie's friends' parties before, and there was always good music and plenty of women and booze, and occasionally some super-grass these guys over in plant pathology grew in one of the labs.
“Well, ladies?” T.C. said. “What's it gonna be?”
“Let's ask Damon,” I suggested.
“Little Ben?” T.C. said.
“What?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Frankie's friends throw good parties,” Little Ben admitted, turning up his palms. “I'm buzzing, man. I can walk forever.”
“James?” T.C. said.
“Me, too.”
Then he looked at me, as though the others didn't matter, as though he knew I wouldn't let him down. And because I couldn't find it in me to tell him no—because this was all I was giving, this night; because I knew this night eventually had to end—I just shrugged and said that I'd be up for whatever.
And with that Frankie and James and Little Ben crossed the street, fought through the drunken hordes outside The Winking Lizard's, a dance club, and disappeared down the block. T.C. said he wanted to slip across the river to The Pub, this blue collar joint he and his painter buddies went to for lunch, and have a few more beers, keep talking. Hadn't that been good, he wanted to know. Hadn't it been good to remember all those stories? I didn't say anything. It had been good to talk—for awhile—but after Roger Rose showed up, and maybe even before, it seemed like the point of the stories wasn't to feel good but to keep from feeling bad, which isn't the same thing.
We both turned and watched Damon a second. He'd drifted off and was looking back into Rick's Roadhouse. He hadn't made any noises one way or another about Roger Rose—probably because he knew T.C. was right, he could kick the shit out of him—but the way he was looking into the bar, he seemed almost sad, like he'd passed up a great opportunity. “Maybe we should take him home,” I said.
“What's at home?” T.C. said, turning to me, suddenly defensive. “You think he'd be better off alone? We gotta stay with him.”
“Is that what he wants?”
“I don't know.”
“Well?”
“I'm not leaving him alone.”
He strolled over to Damon and pounded him on the back a few times—like he'd been doing all night—and said we were going to a real bar. I thought I saw Damon flinch when T.C. pounded his back, but he caught himself, stiffened, attempted to smile. He looked around. “Everybody else leave?” he said.
We stood on the sidewalk, the three of us, and waited for the light to change so we could cross. On the other side of the street was the crowd at The Winking Lizard's, dressed for a night out, laughing and dancing and looking at their watches, talking loudly, drunkenly, getting their IDs ready for the bouncers. I remember that very clearly, standing there waiting for the light. T.C. threw his arm around Damon and jostled him. He said again that we were going to a real bar, no more of this college bullshit. And even though Damon was the one home from war to bury a child, it was T.C. I pitied right then. He thought we owed something to the people we used to be, thought that because we'd all once palled around together that it was our job to take care of each other now. And it occurred to me that, hell, in five years, none of us would probably even be friends anymore, we'd have all moved on. Whether T.C. could admit it or not, it was happening. Even as the light changed and step by step we started across the street.