Meet Me Here

by Bryan Bliss

  Phil is still with Jake. He points; Jake nods. He raises his arms animatedly, and Jake nods more. Ray has gone into the Waffle House, for a drink or to use the bathroom, and once Wayne and Sinclair roar off into the night it’s just me leaning against my truck. The only sound is the cars on the highway and Phil, muffled but adamant.

  I look around, more out of habit than any other reason. When I do, I see the backpack casually leaning against my front tire. I almost turn away before I realize what it is. But then it’s all I can see. In the past few months I’ve never seen it anywhere but on Jake’s shoulder, between his feet; it might as well be another limb. But here it is.

  I act casual, trying not to draw attention to myself as I walk toward the front of the truck. When I get there, my hands are sweating. I could reach out and grab the backpack right now. Could run off into the night with it. Instead, I lean against the truck again, watching as Jake nods and Phil talks. They haven’t looked at me once.

  I turn around and unzip the black canvas bag with a near-perverted joy. It feels illicit the way my heart is racing. When it’s open, I don’t know what I expect. Cash. Drugs. Maybe pornography. Instead, it’s a rock. An unspectacular piece of sandstone about the size of a football.

  “What the hell?” Jake says from behind me.

  I spin around, the rock in my hands. When he sees it, his eyes go wide, and he takes a step back. “Put it back in the bag,” he says quickly.

  “What the fuck, Jake? This is what you’re carrying around? A goddamn rock?”

  “Put it in the bag,” he says again. “Please.”

  I’ve never seen him this freaked out. He won’t stand still; his eyes are like hummingbirds flitting through the air. I half expect him to swipe the rock from my hands and hold it close, like a child who’s gone missing. Instead, he exhales and drops his head.

  “Can we go somewhere else and talk about this?”

  “Not until you tell me what this is about,” I say, holding up the rock again. He won’t look at it. Every time I move it, he cowers like a shamed dog.

  Jake finally snatches the rock from me in one pained swipe. Once he’s got it zipped back up and stowed behind the seat of the truck, he turns to me and sticks his hand out for the keys.

  “We have to do this now.”

  “Do what?” I ask.

  But Jake only shakes his head.

  We drive slowly through the early morning, the birds coming to life all around us. The fatigue of the night is finally catching up to me, and the entire world feels fuzzy, drawn by a child. I have to pinch my leg to keep myself awake. Fifteen minutes of driving and we’re parked in the turnoff area right before the River Road bridge. We sit there for a second, not saying anything as cars zoom by us—first shift at the mills.

  “So . . .” I say, but Jake doesn’t take the hint. He sits there, staring, thinking. About what, I can’t tell until he nods once and says, “So we were over there. And it’s just crazy, right? The entire town was already destroyed.” He drops imaginary shells with his hands, blowing them up in his lap. “And there’s this church, or maybe it’s a temple. Either way, it’s old. Like older than anything in this country by a thousand years, if not more. And it’s all blown to hell. Just rubble. Guys were always grabbing stuff to bring home, you know? But I wanted something special.”

  He looks at me cautiously, as if waiting for me to catch up.

  “So the rock is from . . . a church? Why does that matter?”

  “We shouldn’t have even been over there. That’s the damn point.” He hits the steering wheel and falls back into the driver’s seat. He sits there breathing hard, not saying anything as I watch him.

  “Dad won’t like that attitude,” I joke, but only for a second. His eyes are so serious, so vacant I’m not sure how else to respond.

  “It’s not a political thing,” he says simply. “You know where I was?”

  “The Middle East?”

  He shakes his head. “The cradle of civilization. That’s where the Garden of Eden was. That’s where the devil came into the world, man.”

  We never went to church, not like a lot of people in this town. Maybe on Christmas or when my mom’s extra-fundamentalist relatives would show up for a weekend. They’d drag us, wearing the only ties in the house, to whatever church they felt was anointed, and we’d sit through the sermon, through the healing, and then usually through a second, even longer testimony. But Jake has never talked about God once in his life, at least as I can remember it. And here he is carrying on about Eden and the devil, and I’m not sure what any of it means.

  “So, the devil—” I say. He pulls the backpack out from behind the seat and goes to open the door. I stop him.

  “Jake, c’mon, man. What are we doing here?”

  He shakes the bag and says, “We have to get rid of this.”

  “And what’s that going to do? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  Jake’s eyes flash, and for a moment I think he might hit me again. I scoot back in my seat, but that’s not it. When he pulls the rock out of the bag, he looks almost sick. He sits it on his lap, and we both stare at it.

  “I fucked up when I took this,” he says. “That’s when everything went to complete and utter shit. Two weeks later the entire squad got attacked. The war was already over, man. And we get attacked?” He shakes his head, like he just walked into a cobweb. “I can’t even get myself dressed in the goddamn morning, Thomas. I wake up, and everything feels too hard. Too much to even try.”

  I sit there, not sure what I’m supposed to say. How I can help him at this point? It’s a rock, nothing more. But no matter how many times I tell him that, I don’t think it will matter.

  “You saved people’s lives,” I say.

  He shakes his head, rubs his eyes. Before I can say anything else, he looks over at me and says, “I can’t take a chance keeping this—especially if you end up over there, too. We need to balance the scorecard. We need to make things right because . . .”

  He fades away, spinning. Gone. Normally when this happens, I walk away. But not only do I want him to finish the sentence, I’m not going. And if I tell him, maybe that will be the answer. Maybe that’s been the answer all along.

  He looks at me, eyes glassy. “If you went over there and got fucked up because I did something stupid, I’d never forgive myself. I need to fix this. You’re my brother, man.”

  He looks up at me, like sharing this with me would somehow cause me to break away from him. I don’t think twice.

  “I’m not going to the army. I’m leaving.”

  He doesn’t immediately respond, and I don’t know how to say it any clearer, so I just shrug. When I do, he cuffs me in the back of the head and pushes me hard against the passenger side door. “What the fuck do you mean you’re not going?”

  “Look at you,” I say. “How can I go? How do you expect me to go over there when you’re—”

  I don’t think I can say it. But then he yells again: “Say it.”

  “You’re all fucked up,” I finally say. “And I don’t want to come back like that. I don’t think I can do it. If going over there did this to you, I’ll never be able to handle it.”

  Jake sits back, the anger fading momentarily. He looks at the backpack in his lap and then, without warning, punches the steering wheel. I’m pretty sure he’s broken his hand when he brings it back, but he doesn’t react. Only stares at me.

  “You committed,” he says. “They’ll throw you in the brig, Thomas. That’s fucking prison.”

  I balk. I didn’t know that would happen. If anything, I thought I’d have to mea culpa up over at the recruiter’s office. Live with the shame. But jail?

  The truck gets really hot, and I feel like I can’t breathe.

  “I’m going to—”

  Jake cuts me off. “What? Do you really think Dad would let you do this? And even if he did, where are you going to go?” The disdain in his voice is worse than anything he could do
to me. The way he’s looking at me, like I’m something that needs to be scraped off a boot.

  “I don’t know. California. Or maybe Canada. Somewhere.”

  “Are you fucking serious? Canada. Let’s say that happens, what the hell are you going to do once you get to Canada?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Work.”

  “Where were you going to live? How were you going to buy food? Do you have a passport?”

  I nod halfheartedly, but I can’t answer his questions. Even the answers I do have now seem unreasonable, a kid dressing up in his dad’s suits and pretending to have a job. I look past him, to the road. It’s 7:00 A.M., and I still don’t have a clue about anything.

  “If you do this,” he says, “you’ll never be able to come back. He’ll never understand this, and you know it. And if you think he’ll just let you go . . . well, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought.”

  “I’ll just leave. How will they find me?” I say.

  “Yeah, I’m sure the United States government will have a really hard time finding you,” Jake says, but his tone has softened. He leans back into his seat and cups the backpack on his lap. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I have no idea if I would’ve told him before he came back, when he was regular Jake, my brother. Would I even be in this position? I’d probably be at home right now dressed and anxious. Waiting for Dad to finish his coffee. Ready to roll.

  But with Jake? I didn’t think he would even be able to understand what I was saying, let alone give me advice. But I can’t say that.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit,” he says. “Don’t sugarcoat it.”

  “I was scared . . . of you.”

  Before, he would’ve laughed, something. Now he only nods. I don’t know what to say, how to proceed from here. Jake opens the door and gets out of the truck. When I don’t follow him, he sticks his head in the window and says, “Get out.”

  We walk across the bridge, which looks subtly different in the light of day. Jake walks confidently, and I struggle to keep up, to fight the pain that runs through my entire body every time my foot hits the ground. When we get closer to where we stood last night, I almost expect to see one of Jake’s medals on the ground, glinting like a diamond. Part of me wishes that’s how the night would end, me holding up his medal. That it would somehow fix everything. But the only things I see are cigarette butts and bottle caps.

  Jake sets the backpack on the side of the bridge, ignoring it when a passing car honks its horn. We stand there for a good minute before he says anything.

  “If I don’t take this rock, I don’t come back a freak,” he says. “If I don’t take this rock, we’re not even having this conversation. And in two hours you’re on the bus and headed to boot, the way it’s supposed to be.”

  I force myself to say something. “Jake . . . That’s—”

  Crazy. That’s what I want to say. But I revise mid sentence. “The rock doesn’t mean anything. All of this, what happened to you: the rock didn’t do any of that.”

  He shakes his head, adamantly. “You don’t understand because you haven’t been there, Thomas. There are some things you just don’t mess with. Things in the world that shouldn’t be disturbed. I did this. And now I need to take care of it.”

  He doesn’t move. He stares at the bag, a tortured look on his face. Every time he reaches for the bag, he stops himself and shakes his head, like he can’t stand to touch the rock.

  I don’t think the rock is magical or evil. I don’t think the devil is plaguing Jake or me. He’s sick, that’s it. But somewhere inside him, it is killing him. So real or not, it doesn’t matter. I need to do something, finally.

  I grab the backpack before he can stop me and throw it over the bridge.

  It falls, falls, falls, finally hitting the water with a satisfying splash.

  We stare down together, and at first I think Jake’s going to reprise my dive into the dirty river. But he stands there, staring at the slowly disappearing ripples in the water until there’s no sign of the rock, no sign that it ever existed.

  “Do you think that will work?” I ask.

  Jake stares down hard, not saying a word. I didn’t think it would snap him back to life immediately, like something from a fairy tale. A weird kiss from the prince. But I did think he would react. Instead, he stares at the water until a car comes flying by, only looking up when the rear end of the El Camino has disappeared around the corner. My phone buzzes, but I ignore it. Almost immediately afterward, Jake’s goes off, too. He looks at his and says, “Mom.”

  He answers it, and I already know the conversation that’s happening on the other end. “Where are you? Your father isn’t happy. Come home.” Jake answers all her questions, finally saying, “Yes . . . He’s right here . . . Okay . . . Yes.”

  When he hangs up, he stares at me. “Dad is waiting for you.”

  A familiar stab of anxiety plunges deep into my chest. I want to run, but I can’t. I want to drive away, but again: not happening. So all I can do is stand there, and barely that, feeling completely helpless.

  “You have to stand up to this. You need to do what’s right.”

  “I don’t know what’s right,” I say.

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

  “So I go home and tell Dad,” I say, trying not to cry in front of Jake. When I look at him, it takes everything I have to keep myself together. “And then what?”

  Jake stares at the water. “You want me to be honest?”

  I already know what he’s going to say. I’m sick because of it. I’ve known the answer my entire life. But I still nod.

  “You go, man. You go.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” I tell him. “There isn’t anything you could do to disappoint him.”

  Jake gawks at me. “You’re kidding.”

  “Do you realize what it’s like having to live up to . . . you?” I say. “All I ever hear is: ‘Look at Jake. Jake would never do it that way. Be just like Jake.’ But I can’t, okay? I can’t be like you—not before, not now.”

  I’m breathing hard, barely able to get the words out. Jake shakes his head.

  “Yeah, because my relationship with him is so great,” he says. “He thinks I’m weak.”

  “Okay.” I wave my hand at him.

  “I heard him telling Mom one night. Because I came back like this. Because I can’t just grin and bear it like everybody else. ‘Soldiers before didn’t come back broken.’”

  I stand there, trying not to let his words—his logic—penetrate my plan, shaky as it may be. Every part of my body tells me to run, to escape, but is that just learned behavior? Or is Jake right? Will I ever be able to feel peace living this way? I turn around and lean against the railing of the bridge, closing my eyes. The sun is warm on my face as I speak.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  Jake flicks me on the chest, and when I open my eyes, I’m not sure what’s real and what’s not. He looks no different from an hour before, but standing there with the sun outlining him, he looks bigger than life.

  He waits for me to look him in the eyes before he says, “Yeah, you do.”

  My phone buzzes, and I nearly throw up. But when I look at it, it isn’t Dad or Mom. There are five missed texts, all from the last two hours.

  5:05 A.M.—Hey.

  5:38 A.M.—Listen, can we talk?

  5:45 A.M.—Are you ignoring me?

  6:05 A.M.—Hello . . . ???

  6:55 A.M.—I’m at the bridge. Meet me here.

  Mallory.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  As we drive, I try to figure out what to text back to her. If I go back to the bridge, what happens? What else is there to say? I’m sorry? Good-bye? Thank you? But what happens after that? How does anything either of us says change anything that’s happened tonight?

  Dad is waiting for us in the driveway, and when we pull up, he grabs me by the arm and drags me toward the front door. I�
��m howling with pain, and he doesn’t notice until I’m two or three feet down the driveway. He bends and looks at my leg, then up at me.

  “What in the hell did you do to yourself?” he says. “They’re gonna send you to MRP, if they let you ship at all. Jesus Christ, Thomas, how could you let this happen?”

  I don’t say a word, and he stands up, his hands out to his side. “Am I talking to myself? Goddamn it, boy, I asked you a question.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I just messed up.”

  “Messed up?” He laughs, but it isn’t like any laugh I’ve ever heard before. “You didn’t accidentally color on the walls. You’ve got sixteen stitches in that leg, at least. How am I going to explain this to Sergeant Veen?”

  Jake is out of the truck, but he hasn’t jumped in to explain anything. Mom stands close to him, checking his body as if she were going to suddenly find an injury twice as bad as mine. Dad hasn’t looked at him once. But when he finally does, his eyes go red, and his volume comes up to a roar.

  “How did you let this happen?” he asks. “This is your brother. You’re supposed to keep him safe.”

  Jake doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t look away either. He stands straight, tall, barely blinking as Dad lights into him.

  “What were you doing while he was off ruining his future? Answer me!”

  “I was throwing my medals into the river,” Jake says. “And Thomas jumped in and tried to save them.”

  I’ve never seen Dad so flustered, so unable to mask how he’s feeling. His face goes from shock to disbelief to anger like cards being turned over on a table. One after the other, just like that. When he still hasn’t said anything, Jake turns to walk into the house, and Dad jumps across the driveway to stop him.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he says.

  They look like professional wrestlers as Dad tries to stop him from moving, grappling for dominance in the middle of our driveway. Every time Dad pushes, Jake counters. It’s not until Mom yells for them to stop that Jake backs down. When he does, Dad puts him on the ground with one hard shove.