Billy Summers

by Stephen King

  The anchors turn it over to a reporter who’s interviewing John Colton, one of the Young Lawyers, and Billy doesn’t want to see that. Just a week ago he and Johnny and Jim Albright were matching quarters to see who was going to pay for the tacos. They were on the plaza, laughing and having a good time. Now John looks stunned and woeful. He gets as far as “We all thought he was a really decent—” before Billy kills the television.

  He rinses out his cereal bowl, then checks the Dalton Smith phone. There’s a text from Bucky, just three words: No transfer yet. It’s what he expected, but that, added to the expression on Johnny Colton’s face, is no way to start his first day in—might as well call it what it is—captivity.

  If there’s been no transfer yet, there probably isn’t going to be any transfer at all. He was paid five hundred thousand up front, and that’s a lot of cheese, but it’s not what he was promised. Up to this morning Billy has been too busy to be really mad about getting stiffed by someone he trusted, but now he’s not busy and he’s pissed like a bear. He did the job, and not just yesterday. He’s been doing this job for over three months, and at far greater personal cost than he ever would have believed. He was promised, and who breaks their promises?

  “Bad people, that’s who,” Billy says.

  He goes to the local newspaper. The headline is big—COURTHOUSE ASSASSINATION!—but it probably looks bigger and better in print than it does on his iPhone screen. The story tells him nothing he doesn’t already know, but the lead photo makes it clear why Sheriff Vickery wasn’t in attendance at Chief Conlee’s press conference. The pic shows that absurd Stetson hat lying on the steps, with no county sheriff to hold it up. Sheriff Vickery beat feet. Sheriff Vickery skedaddled. This picture is worth a thousand words. For him it wouldn’t have been a press conference, it would have been a walk of shame.

  Good luck getting re-elected with that photo to explain, Billy thinks.

  2

  He goes upstairs to tend Daphne and Walter, then stops with the spray bottle in his hand, wondering if he’s crazy. He’s supposed to water them, not drown them. He checks the Jensens’ fridge and sees nothing he wants but there’s a package of English muffins on the counter with one left and he toasts it up, telling himself that if he doesn’t use it, it will just get moldy. There are regular windows up here and he sits in a bar of sun, munching his muffin and thinking about what he’s avoiding. Which is Benjy’s story, of course. It’s the only job he has to do now that he’s finished the one that brought him here. But it means writing about the Marines, and there’s so much, starting with the bus to Parris Island, basic… just so much.

  Billy rinses off the plate he’s used, dries it, puts it back in the cupboard, and goes downstairs. He looks out the periscope window and sees the usual not much. The pants he wore yesterday are on the bedroom floor. He picks them up and feels in the pockets, almost hoping he’s lost the flash drive somewhere along the way, but it’s there with his keys, one of them to Dalton Smith’s leased Ford Fusion in the parking garage on the other side of town. Waiting until he feels it’s safe to leave. When the heat goes down, as they say in those movies about the last job that always goes wrong.

  The flash drive feels like it’s gained weight. Looking at it, a marvelous storage device that would have seemed like science fiction only thirty years ago, there are two things he can’t believe. One is how many words he’s already put on it. The other is that there can possibly be any more. Twice as many. Four times as many. Ten, twenty.

  He opens the laptop he thought he’d lost, a more expensive lucky charm than a battered baby shoe all grimy with dirt but otherwise about the same deal, and powers it up. He types in the password, plugs in the flash drive, and drags the single stored document to the laptop’s screen. He looks at the first line—The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm—and feels a kind of despair. This is good work, he feels sure of it, but what felt light when he started now feels heavy, because he has a responsibility to make the rest just as good, and he’s not sure he can do it.

  He goes to the periscope window and looks out at more nothing, wondering if he’s just discovered why so many would-be writers are unable to finish what they have started. He thinks of The Things They Carried, surely one of the best books about war ever written, maybe the best. He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.

  All over the world there are half-finished books—memoirs, poetry, novels, surefire plans for getting thin or getting rich—in desk drawers, because the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down.

  Some other time, they think. Maybe when the kids are a little older. Or when I retire.

  Is that it? Will it be too heavy if he tries writing about the bus ride and the jarhead haircut and the first time Sergeant Uppington asked him Do you want to suck my cock, Summers? Do you? Because you look like a cocksucker to me.

  Ask?

  Oh no, he didn’t ask, Billy thinks, unless it was what you call a rhetorical question. He shouted in my face, his nose just an inch from mine, his spittle warm on my lips, and I said Sir no sir, I do not want to suck your cock and he said Is my cock not good enough for you, Private Summers, you cocksucking poor excuse for a recruit?

  How it all comes back, and can he write it all, even as Benjy Compson?

  Billy decides he can’t. He pulls the curtain closed and goes back to the laptop, meaning to turn it off and spend the day watching TV. Ellen DeGeneres, Hot Bench, Kelly and Ryan, and The Price Is Right all before lunch. Then a nap and then some afternoon soap operas. He can finish with John Law, who tick-tocks his gavel like Coolio in the old music videos and takes no shit in his courtroom. But as he reaches for the off button, a thought comes from nowhere. It’s almost as if someone has whispered in his ear.

  You’re free. You can do whatever you want.

  Not physically free, God no. He’ll be cooped up in this apartment at least until the police decide to lift their roadblocks, and even then it would be wise to stay a few days longer just to be sure. But in terms of his story, he’s free to write whatever the fuck he wants. And how he wants. With no one looking over his shoulder, monitoring what he writes, he no longer has to pretend to be a dumb person writing about a dumb person. He can be a smart person writing about a young man (for that’s what Benjy will be if Billy picks up the narrative again) who is poorly educated and naïve, but far from stupid.

  I can let go of the Faulkner shit, Billy thinks. I can write he and I instead of me and him. I can write can’t instead of cant. I can even use quotation marks for dialogue if I want to.

  If he’s writing strictly for himself, he can tell what’s important to him and skip what isn’t. He doesn’t have to write about the jarhead haircut, even though he could. He doesn’t have to write about Uppington screaming in his face, although he might. He doesn’t have to write about the boy—Haggerty or Haverty, Billy can’t remember which—who had a heart attack running and was taken away to the base infirmary, and Sergeant Uppington said he was fine and maybe he was and maybe he died.

  Billy discovers that despair has given way to a kind of bullheaded eagerness. Maybe it’s even arrogance. And so what if it is? He can tell whatever he wants. And will.

  He begins by hitting global replace and changing Benjy to Billy and Compson to Summers.

  3

  I started my basic training at Parris Island. I was supposed to be there for three months but was only there for eight weeks. There was the usual shouting and bullshit and some of the boots quit or washed out but I wasn’t one of them. The quitters and washouts might have had someplace to go back to, but I did not.

  The sixth week was Grass Week, when we learned how to break down our weapons and put them back together. I liked that and was good at it. When Sergeant Uppington had us do what he called “an arms race,” I always came in first. Rudy Bell, of course everybody called him Taco, was usually
second. He never beat me, but sometimes he came close. George Dinnerstein was usually last and had to hit it and give Sergeant “Up Yours” Uppington twenty-five, with Up’s foot on George’s ass the whole time. But George could shoot. Not as good as I could, but yes, he could put three out of every four in the center mass of a paper target at three hundred yards. Me, I could put four out of four center mass at seven hundred yards, almost every time.

  There was no shooting during Grass Week, though. That week we just took our guns apart and put them back together again, chanting the Rifleman’s Creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life.” And so on. The part I remember best is the part that says “Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless.”

  The other thing we did during Grass Week was sit on our asses in the grass. Sometimes for six hours at a stretch.

  Billy stops there, smiling a little and remembering Pete “Donk” Cashman. Donk fell asleep sitting in the tall South Carolina grass and Up Yours got down on his knees and screamed in his face to wake him up. Is this boring you, Marine?

  Donk bolted to his feet so hard and fast he almost fell over, yelling Sir no sir! even before he was fully awake. He was George Dinnerstein’s buddy and picked up the nickname Donk because he had a habit of grabbing his crotch and yelling Honk my donk. He never told Up to honk it, though.

  The memories are piling in as Billy suspected they would—knew, really—but Grass Week isn’t what he wants to write about. He doesn’t want to write about Donk right now either, although he might later. He wants to write about Week 7, and all that happened after that.

  Billy bends to it. The hours pass, unseen and unfelt. There’s magic in this room. He breathes it in and breathes it out.

  4

  After Grass Week came Firing Week. We used the M40A, which is the military version of the Remington 700. Five-shot box, tripod mounted, NATO bottleneck rounds.

  “You must see your target but your target must not see you.” Up told us that over and over. “And no matter what you’ve seen in the movies, snipers do not work alone.”

  Even though it wasn’t Sniper School, Uppington put us in teams of two, spotter and shooter. I teamed with Taco and George teamed with Donk. I mention them because we ended up together in Fallujah, both Vigilant Resolve in April of ’04 and Phantom Fury that November. Me and Taco

  Billy stops, shaking his head, reminding himself the dumb self is in the past. He deletes and starts again.

  Taco and I switched back and forth during Firing Week, me shooting and him spotting, then him shooting and me spotting. George and Donk started that way, too, but Up told them to quit it. “You shoot, Dinner Winner. Cash, you just spot.”

  “Sir I would also like to shoot sir!” Donk shouted. You had to shout when you addressed Up Yours. It was the Marine way.

  “And I would like to tear your tits off and shove them up your sorry ass,” Up replied. So from then on, George was the shooter and Donk was the spotter in that pair. It stayed the same in Sniper School and in Iraq.

  When Firing Week was almost over, Sergeant Uppington called me and Taco into his office, which wasn’t much more than a closet. He said, “You two are sorry fucking specimens, but you can shoot. Maybe you can learn to surf.”

  That was how Taco and I found out we were being transferred to Camp Pendleton, and that’s where we finished our basic, which by then was mostly shooting because we were in training to be snipers. We flew to California on United Airlines. It was my first time in an airplane.

  Billy stops. Does he want to write about Pendleton? He doesn’t. There was no surfing, at least not for him; how could there be when he never learned to swim? He did get himself a shirt that said CHARLIE DON’T SURF and wore it almost to tatters. He was wearing it the day he picked up the baby shoe and tied it to the belt loop on his right hip.

  Does he want to write about Operation Iraqi Freedom? Nope. By the time he got to Baghdad, the war was over. President Bush said so, from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. He said the mission was accomplished, and that made Billy and the jarheads in his regiment “peacekeepers.” In Baghdad he had felt welcomed, even loved. Women and children threw flowers. Men yelled nahn nihubu amerikaan, we love America.

  That shit didn’t last long, Billy thinks, so never mind Baghdad, let’s go right to the suck. He starts writing again.

  By the fall of 2003 I was stationed in Ramadi, still peacekeeping up a storm, although sometimes by then there was shooting and the mullahs had started adding “death to America” to their sermons, which were broadcast from the mosques and sometimes from storefronts. I was 3rd Battalion, also known as Darkhorse. My company was Echo. We shot a lot of target practice in those days. George and Donk were someplace else, but Taco and I were still a team.

  One day a lieutenant colonel I didn’t know stopped by to watch us shoot. I was using the M40, banging on a pyramid of beer cans at eight hundred yards, knocking them down one by one from top to bottom. You had to hit them low and kind of flip them, or the whole bunch would fall over.

  This lieutenant colonel, Jamieson was his name, told me and Taco to come with him. He drove us in an unarmored Jeep to a hill overlooking the al-Dawla mosque. It was a very beautiful mosque. The sermon blaring from the loudspeakers wasn’t so pretty. It was the usual bullshit about how the Americans were going to let the Jews colonize Iraq, Islam would be outlawed, the Jews would run the government and America would get the oil. We didn’t understand the lingo, but death to America was always in English, and we’d seen translated leaflets, supposedly written by the leading clerics. The budding insurgency handed them out by the bale. Will you die for your country? they asked. Will you die a glorious death for Islam?

  “How far is that shot?” Jamieson asked, pointing at the mosque’s dome.

  Taco said a thousand yards. I said maybe nine hundred, then added, being careful to address Jamieson respectfully, that we were forbidden to target religious sites. If, that was, the l-c had such a thing in mind.

  “Perish the thought,” Jamieson said. “I would never ask a soldier under my command to target one of their holy dungheaps. But the stuff coming out of those speakers is political, not religious. So which one of you wants to try knocking one of them off? Without putting a hole in the dome, that is? Which would be wrong and we’d probably go to muji hell for it.”

  Taco right away handed the rifle to me. I had no tripod, so I laid the barrel on the hood of the Jeep and took the shot. Jamieson was using binoculars, but I didn’t need them to see one of the speakers go tumbling to the ground, trailing its wire. There was no hole in the dome and the harangue, at least coming from that side, was noticeably less.

  “Get some!” Taco yelled. “Oh yeah, get summa that shit!”

  Jamieson said we should bug the fuck out before someone started shooting at us, so that is what we did.

  I look back on it and I think that day summed up everything that went wrong in Iraq, why “we love America” changed to “death to America.” The lieutenant colonel got tired of listening to that endless crap so he told us to shoot one of the speakers, which was stupid and meaningless when you considered there were at least six more pointing in other directions.

  I saw men in doorways and women looking out of windows when we drove back to the base. Their faces were not happy we love America faces. No one shot at us—that day—but the faces said the day would come. As far as they knew, we weren’t shooting at a loudspeaker. We were shooting at the mosque. Maybe there was no hole in the dome, but we were still shooting at their core beliefs.

  Our patrols into Ramadi started getting more dangerous. The local police and the Iraqi National Guard were gradually losing control to the insurgents, but US forces weren’t allowed to take their places because the politicians, both in Washington and Baghdad, were dedicated to the idea of self-rule. Mostly we sat out in camp, hoping we wouldn’t end up doing protective duty while a repair crew
worked on fixing a broken (or vandalized) watermain or a bunch of technicians, American and Iraqi, tried to get the broken (or sabotaged) power plant working again. Protective duty was just asking to get shot at, and we had half a dozen Marines KIA, many more wounded, by the end of 2003. The muj snipers were for shit, but their IEDs terrified us.

  The whole house of cards tipped over on the last day of March, in 2004.

  Okay, Billy thinks, this is where the story really starts. And I got here with a minimum of bullshit, as Up Yours would have said.

  By then we had moved from Ramadi to Camp Baharia, also known as Dreamland. It was in the countryside about two miles outside of Fallujah, west of the Euphrates. Saddam’s kids used to r&r there, we heard. George Dinnerstein and Donk Cashman were back with us in Echo Company.

  The four of us were playing poker when we heard shooting coming from the other side of what we called the Brooklyn Bridge. Not just isolated shots, a regular barrage.

  By nightfall the rumors had settled and we knew what had happened, at least in broad strokes. Four Blackwater contractors who were delivering food—including for our mess in Dreamland—decided to take a shortcut through Fallujah instead of going around, which was the normal protocol. They were ambushed just shy of the bridge over the Euphrates. I suppose they were wearing their armor, but nothing could save them from the concentrated fire that poured into the pair of Mitsubishi utes they were driving.

  Taco said, “What in God’s name made them think they could drive right through the center of town, like it was Omaha? That was dumb.”

  George agreed, but said that dumb or not, there had to be payback. We all thought the same. The killings were bad enough but killing wasn’t enough for the mob. They dragged the dead from the ’Bishies, doused them with gasoline, and set them on fire. Two of them were pulled apart like rotisserie chickens. The other two were hung from the Brooklyn Bridge like Guy Fawkes dummies.