12
They had just clocked out and were sitting out back, the cigarette a red bead passed between their lips in the cobalt dark.
It was one of those days where you work your skin off and have no desire, no strength even, to go home. There was a kind of luxury to be amongst this place of sweat and ache and yet sit and suck a cigarette down to its soggy nub and have no one tell you anything because you’re off the clock. A dignified, defiant rest.
“Sick boots,” Russia said.
“These?” Hai tilted his head and regarded his boots from an angle.
“Those the ones Nike made for the army, right? My cousin’s friend had ’em when he came back from Afghanistan. Said he dodged so many RPGs, those things should be sponsored by the NFL.” Russia laughed, his buckteeth flashing in the blue.
“At least he came back.”
“At least he came back. He told us a story about it too, after a crazy meth binge one time. Like, this guy was tweaking for days, right? I’m talking just in a shed, without a bucket or nothing, for, like, two days. We were having a cookout, my cousin, Danil, and I. Well, not really a cookout—but a grill with some chicken on it.”
“I get it,” Hai said.
“I was flipping this piece of chicken and all a sudden this guy comes stumbling out the shed. And I’m looking at my cousin like, ‘Yo, who the fuck do you have in your shed, dude? Like, there’s a grown-ass man crawling from your toolshed.’ And my cousin was like, ‘That’s Dumbass Rob.’ ”
“Dumbass Rob,” Hai repeated, nodding. “Okay.”
“Rob was one of those guys that was addicted to war, you know?”
“Addicted?”
“You know, those guys who can’t get right once they come home, so they keep going back for another tour. To feel camaraderie or some shit. Rob was one of them. He was in this thing, Operation Phantom Fury, and everything. Anyway, Dumbass Rob is crawling toward us on his belly, like some freaky commando, his mouth all foaming, high as fuck. Like I’m talking psycho-high. Dude looked like The Exorcist.”
Hai sucked the bogie and flicked it into the mist, where it sparked and faded. “So what’d you do?”
“My cousin saw me getting all shook, so he was like, ‘Just flip that chicken, man. Don’t sweat old Rob. He’s good people.’ So I’m flipping our chicken and my cousin is trying to stay cool but he’s all fidgety and I’m like, man, is my cousin on meth too? Know what I mean? And now Rob’s getting closer to us, like three feet away, trying to grab this plastic lawn chair. So my cousin holds the chair down so this guy can climb into it, which takes a long time, and I’m just standing there flipping these chicken breasts as the plastic chair clacks all over the place and my cousin just going, ‘You okay, my man. You alright, Robbie. You’re good, Robbie.’ But Robbie was not good.”
“You give him some chicken at least?”
“I took a piece from the grill, nice dark meat like Wayne does it, and blew on it to cool it and all. Then handed it to him with my spatula. He grabbed it and popped it in his mouth. Soon as he finished chewing Danil was slapping his face to get him out of it.”
“How’d he even get in there—the shed, I mean?”
“Turns out Rob was an old high school friend of Danil’s, so he let him use his shed to shoot up whenever he wanted.”
Russia lit another bogie, cupping the flame with his palm. Hai watched him without him noticing. His face was sunken and glistening from the day’s work, which made Hai want to wipe his brow clean and touch the back of his neck with his lips. The boy wasn’t beautiful. Not even handsome in this gentle, dusky light. It was only that they were the same age, and that they worked there, shoulders touching through the steaming, aching hours, passing cigarettes back and forth in this lot, the filter’s taste changing: slick and slightly sweeter from the blue Gatorade Russia sipped through his shift. Can camaraderie—the bond of working in unison—be enough to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face, to find him somehow more complete despite his unrecognizable beauty, the smell of his armpits seeping through his work polo, that garlicky, vinegary scent of humanness canceling the drugstore deodorant he wore to hide it? Yes, Hai realized now—it was.
Russia paused to text something on his phone, his lips resting in a pout, then went on. “He started telling us about this grenade launcher that blew up two dudes from his company. Can you imagine? Said the sand turned black. That’s how much blood there was. But his head was rolling about and jerking while he talked. It was scary as fuck. So what I did, I just kept feeding him chicken. After a while he ate all the chicken, and Danil and I, we just stood there. And that’s when I noticed his boots. The same ones you got on. I like the design. How it’s soft where the ankle is so you don’t roll it. It hugs you as you walk, doesn’t it?” He stared at Hai’s boots and smiled to himself. “Sony, your cousin, he’s crazy about the army, huh? That kid’s, like, obsessed.”
“His dad was in it. Just like yours, I guess.”
Russia cleaned his teeth with this tongue. “My dad’s a big loser. Or should I say, Major loser.”
“Major Loser.” They laughed harder than the pun deserved, smoke rising from their throats and lacing the moment with beleaguered tenderness.
“An old friend of mine had these,” Hai said. “When they were too small for him, he gave ’em to me. When those wore out, my mom got me the same pair for Christmas. When I opened the box, she was like, ‘You know how many pedicures I had to do to afford those? Eight! That’s sixteen feet I had to scrub just so you can cover two of yours.’ ” He shook his head and smiled.
“My mom left us a while back. But my grandma’s been holding it down like a legend.”
“How’s Anna doing?”
He shrugged. In the gloaming, Russia’s acne, which in the day resembled smeared blueberry jam, was now blending with the smoother parts of his cheek, like weathered cuneiform on old marble. It was almost unnoticeable save for the Band-Aid he had put on in the middle of his shift when the bleeding became too much, after a woman drove up to the drive-thru to collect her food and got upset, convinced that he had bled on her meal. The crew watched as he held his face with both hands and dashed, red with shame, to the bathroom. The bandage had since come loose, attached only by one end, and fluttered in the breeze as he paused to think of his sister, in rehab in New Hampshire now for two months.
Hai decided to keep his own stint in rehab to himself.
“They said she relapsed twice so far.” His voice dropped, gone was the soft, sweet lilt. Russia was eighteen but still had the raspy timbre of adolescence, the kind of voice that makes you want to say yes even if he’s just asking you the time. “But they said that’s expected, I guess. Most of ’em need four relapses to get right. If they make it that far.”
Hai didn’t know much about Russia’s situation but knew, like everyone else at HomeMarket, that the kid was working his tail off to put his sister through recovery. He also put in graveyard shifts at the FedEx warehouse loading trucks on the side, enough to keep her in New Hampshire one month at a time.
“You don’t get scared?”
“I’m used to it.” Russia bit his lip. “Anna’s just like my grandma. She’s strong.”
They didn’t say anything for a while, though for different reasons. The quiet settled over them and Russia sparked another cigarette, neither of them really wanting to go home.
“I keep thinking about this story,” Russia said at last, “about this thing that happened back in this village outside Konstantinovo, where my dad was born.”
“That why his name’s Konstantin?”
“Original, right?” He smirked. “Anyway, there was this man who walked out one night to get a pack of cigarettes from the village store. When he didn’t return an hour later, his wife came out to look for him. It had just snowed and everything was white and quiet. She followed his footsteps until they led to a wooden fence. But that’s where they stopped. Right there in the yard. Just vanished mid-step.”
“What happened?” Hai took the bogie from Russia’s fingers.
“Nothing. That’s it. My dad said the guy just disappeared. Like, they never found him again. Ever.”
“You sure he didn’t climb the fence?”
“Could’ve, but then where’d he go? That’s it, dude. My man just poofed. I bet it actually happens all over the world all the time.”
“Really?”
“People vanish all the time and leave no trace, even here in America, especially in the national parks. Shit, my dad used to tell me that story right before bed, drunk as fuck sitting on the floor. But it worked.” He laughed with all his teeth. “I was so scared my brain just turned off. I think of that story about once a month. Like, where is that guy now? Is he just floating somewhere in nowhere-land?”
They both nodded to themselves in the dark.
Hai finished the cig and tossed it. “You know they’re talking about reinstating the draft, right?” Sony had told Hai about it earlier, grinning ear to ear. It was all the talk at his group home.
“Fuck ’em. The Feds just want free oil,” Russia said. “But those boots are sick, though, no lie.”
Russia pointed with his chin at the soggy leather wrapped around Hai’s feet. “Shit, I might get my skinny ass drafted just to get a pair.”
