1

I went over to him and said to myself I might have to shoot him again. If I had to I would. He was my mother’s boyfriend but he was wrong. He looked dead but I had to make sure so I lick my hand good and wet and kneeled down beside him. I put my wet hand in front of his mouth and nose so I could feel if there was still any breath in him. There wasn’t so then I knew for sure he was dead.

I knew what to do next, but first I went over to Cassie. I was hoping but I knew she was dead too. Had to be, with her chest all crush like it was. But I lick my hand good and wet again and put it in front of her mouth but there was no breath in her either. I held her in my arms and cried, thinking of what my mom always said when she left for the laundry, take care of your sister. But I didn’t take care of her. I should have shot that son of a bitch before, that would have been taking care of her. And it would have been taking care of my mother too because I knew he hit her sometimes and she would laugh at her black eye or split lip and say we were just rassling around Benjy and I hit my face. Like I would believe that. Even Cassie didn’t believe that and she was only 9.

After I finished crying I went to the phone. It worked. It didn’t always but that day it did because the bill was paid. I call 911 and a lady answered.

I said hello, my name is Benjy Compson and I just killed my mothers boyfriend after he killed my sister. The lady asked me if I was sure the man was dead. I said I was. She said what is your address son. I said it is 19 Skyline Drive in the Hillview Trailer Park. She said is your mother there. I said no, she is at the 24 Hour Laundry in Edendale where she works. She said are you sure your sister is dead. I said I was because he stomped on her and crush her chest all in. I said I lick my hand and felt for breath and there wasn’t any. She said okay son you stay where you are and officers will be with you shortly. I said thank you ma’am.

You might think police would be coming already what with the gunshot and all, except the trailer park was on the edge of town and people were always popping off at deers and coons and woodchucks in their gardens. Besides, this was Tennessee. People shoot guns there all the time, in Tennessee it’s like a hobby.

I thought I heard something, like maybe mom’s boyfriend was getting up to make a run at me even though he was dead. I knew he couldn’t do that except I was thinking of a movie I sneaked into. I sneaked Cassie in with me and she hid her eyes at the gorie parts and later she had nightmares and I knew it was mean of me to take her. I don’t know why I took her. I think there’s something mean in people and sometimes it comes out like blood or puss. I would take that movie back if I could but not shooting the boyfriend. He was a bad, bad person to kill a harmless little girl. I would have done it even if it meant going to the reform school.

Anyway there are only zombies in horror movies. He was dead as dogshit. I wondered if I should put a blanket or something over Cassie but thought no, that would be sad and awful, so I call the 24 Hour Laundry from the paper taped to the wall where the phone was. A lady answered 24 Hour Laundry and I said my name is Benjy Compson and I have to talk to my mother Arlene Compson, she works on the mangle. She said is this an emergency. I said yes ma’am it is. She said we’re awfully busy this morning, what is this big emergency. Which I thought was nosey and snotty, maybe just because I was so upset but I don’t think so. I said my sister is dead. That is the big emergency. She said oh my God are you sure and I said please let me speak to my mom. Because I had enough of that nosey bitch.

I waited and then mom came on the phone all out of breath and said Benjy what happened? This better not be a joke. And I thought it would be better for all of us if it was a joke but it’s not. I said her boyfriend came in all drunk with his arm in a cast and killed Cassie and tried to kill me but I shot him dead. I said the police are coming, I can hear the sirens, so you come home and don’t let them take me to jail because it was him or me.

I went out on the top step of the trailer, which weren’t really steps at all but cement blocks my mom’s last boyfriend, the one before the bad boyfriend, made into steps. That one’s name was Milton and he was okay. I wish he stayed but he left. He didn’t want the responsibility of two kids, mom said. Like it was our fault. Like we ask to be born. Anyway I went out on those steps because I didn’t want to be in the trailer with dead people. I kept asking myself if Cassie could really be dead and telling myself yes she really is.

The first cops came and I was telling them what happen when my mom came. The cops tried to keep her from going in but she went in anyway and when she saw Cassie she scream and moaned and carry on so much I put my hands over my ears. And I was mad at her. I thought what did you think was going to happen. He hit us before just like he hit you so what did you think would happen. Sooner or later bad people do bad things, even a kid knows that.

By then all our neighbors were out and looking. One of the cops was nice. He sat me in the cop car where the neighbors couldn’t look so easy and give me a hug. He said he had some candy in the glove compartment and did I want a piece and I said no thank you. He said okay Benjy just tell me what happened. So I did. I don’t know how many times I told that story but it was quite a few. Anyway I started to cry and the cop give me another hug and called me a brave kid and I wished my mother would have a boyfriend like that guy.

While I was sitting in the cop car and telling what happened, more cops came and a van that said MAYVILLE POLICE FORENSICS UNIT. One cop from the van took pictures and I later saw some at the hearing but not the bodies. I don’t know why the people at the hearing felt like I couldn’t look at pictures of bodies I already saw in person. But what I want to say is that one of the pictures that man took got in the newspaper. It showed the cookies my sister made, how they were scattered all over the floor. Underneath it said SHE WAS KILLED FOR COOKIES. I never forgot that, how it was mean and true at the same time.

I had to go to the hearing. It wasn’t with a judge but with 3 people. They were 2 men and 1 woman who looked like teachers and talked like teachers. There was nobody in the room except for them and me and my mother and the cops who were first to get to the trailer, which they called ‘the scene.’ We didn’t have a lawyer like in Law & Order on TV and we didn’t need one. The woman said I was a brave boy and told my mother I should get counseling. My mother said that was a good idea, then later said to me some people think money grows on trees.

We go to leave and I thought it was over but then I of the men said just a minute, Mrs Compson. I need to say something. I need to say that you have to shoulder some of the blame for this tragedy. Then he told a story about how a scorpion beg a ride across a raging river from a kind-hearted frog but halfway across the scorpion stung the frog and the frog said why did you do that, now we will both drown and the scorpion said it is my nature to sting and you knew I was a scorpion when you let me ride on your back.

Then the man said you picked up a scorpion Mrs Compson and he stung your little girl to death. You could have lost your son as well. You didn’t but this trommer will be with him for the rest of his life. I suggest the next time you come across a scorpion you crush it under your foot instead of giving it a ride.

My mom got all red in the face and said how dare you. I never would have put my children at risk if I knew something like this could happen. The man said you are keeping custody of young Benjamin because we can’t prove otherwise. But if you did not have warnings of Mr Russell’s violent nature, maybe only a few, maybe many, I would be very surprised.

My mother started to cry and that made me want to cry. She said you are so unfair, sitting there on your high horse. When was the last time you had to do 40 hours of sweat-labor to bring home groceries? He said this isn’t about me, Mrs Compson. You have lost one child because of poor choices, don’t lose the other. This hearing is closed.

2

At some point during that summer – his season of many identities – Billy re-reads the story of Bob Raines’s death and the hearing that followed. Then he goes to the window and looks out at the courthouse, where a sheriff’s car has pulled up to the curb. Two cops in county brown get out of the front seat. One opens the back door and they wait for the man in there to climb out. The prisoner is rangy and skinny, wearing carpenter’s jeans that bag in the seat and a bright purple sweatshirt – too hot for this day – that has the Arkansas Razorback on it. Even at five hundred yards he looks to Billy like one sad fucking sack. Each cop takes an arm and they lead him up the wide steps toward whatever justice awaits him. It’s exactly the shot Billy will have to make when (and if) the time comes, but he barely sees it. He’s thinking about his story.

He set out to tell it as the dumb self, but it turned into something else and he only realized it after reading it cold. The dumb self is there, all right, any reader (Nick and Giorgio, for instance) would say the man who wrote it sticks mostly to Star magazine, Inside View, and Archie funnybooks, but there’s something more. It’s the voice of the child self. Billy never set out to write in that voice – consciously, at least – but that’s what he did. It’s as if he has been regressed under hypnosis. Maybe that’s what writing is, when it really matters.

Does it matter? When the only people who’ll ever see it are him and a couple of Vegas hardballs who may already have lost interest?

‘It does,’ Billy says to the window. ‘Because it’s mine.’

Yes, and because it’s true. He’s changed the names a little – Cassie instead of Cathy, and his mother’s name was Darlene, not Arlene – but mostly it’s true. The child’s voice is true. That voice never had a chance to speak, not even at the hearing. He answered the questions he was asked but no one asked how it felt to hold Cathy with her crushed chest. No one asked how it felt to be told take care of your sister and fail at the most important job in the whole round world. No one asked how it felt when you held your wet hand in front of your sister’s mouth and nose, hoping even though you knew hope was gone. No one ever knew that the gun’s recoil had made him burp as if he had done no more than drink a soda fast. Not even the cop who hugged him asked those questions, and what a relief it is to let that voice speak.

He goes back to the open MacBook and sits down. Looks at the screen. He thinks, When I get to the Stepenek House part – only I’ll call it Speck House – I can let that voice be a little more grownup. Because I was a little more grownup.

Billy begins to tap the keys, slowly at first, then picking up speed. The summer rolls on around him.

3

After the hearing me and my mom went back home. We buried Cassie. I don’t know who buried the boyfriend and don’t care. In the fall I went back to school where some of the kids started calling me Bang Bang Benjy and I got held back that year. I didn’t get in trouble for fighting but I skipped school a lot and my mother said I had to smarten up if I didn’t want to get taken away and put into a foster home. I didn’t want that so next year I tried harder and passed my courses. When I got sent to Speck House it wasn’t my fault, it was my mom’s.

She started drinking heavy after Cassie died, mostly at home but sometimes she would go out to bars and sometimes bring a man home with her. To me those men all looked like the bad boyfriend, assholes in other words. I don’t know why my mother would go back to the same types of men after what happened but she did. She was like a dog that pukes and then laps it up. I know how that sounds, but I will not take it back.

Her and those men, there were three at least and maybe five, would go in the bedroom and she said they were just rassling around but of course by then I was older and knew they were fucking. Then one night when she was drinking in the trailer she went out to the 7-11 for a box of Cheezits and on her way back she got pulled over. She was charged with drunk driving and put in the jail for 24 hours. She got to keep me that time too, but she lost her license for six months and had to take the bus to the laundry.

A week after she got her license back she got stopped for drunk driving again. There was another hearing, this time just about me, but what do you know, that same man who told the story about the scorpion and the frog was sitting at the table along with 2 new ones! He said you again. My mother said that’s right, me again and you know I lost my daughter. You know what I’ve been through. The man said I do know, and you don’t seem to have learned your lesson, Mrs Compson. My mom said you have never walked in my shoes. She had a lawyer that time but he didn’t say much. After, she gave him hell and asked what he was good for. The lawyer said you haven’t given me much to work with, Mrs Compson. She said you’re fired. He said you can’t fire me because I quit.

When we came back to the hearing room a day later they said I would have to go into foster care at a place called Speck House because she was an unfit mother. She said you are bullshit artists and I will fight this all the way to the supreme court. The man who told the story about the frog and the scorpion said have you been drinking. My mother said kiss my ass you fat bastard. He didn’t come back on her for that but said you have 24 hours to put Benjy’s things together, Mrs Compson, and to say goodbye. It will mean more to him if you’re sober when you do it. Then him and the other 2 walked out.

We took the bus home. My mother said we’re going to run away, Benjy. We will go to another town and change our names. We will start over. But we were still there the next day, and that was my last day in Hillview Trailer Park, the last day I lived with my mother. A county cop came to take me to the Speck House. I wished the cop had been the one who hug me, but it was another one. Deputy Malkin wasn’t so bad though.

Anyway, mom didn’t make trouble because she was sober. She said to the cop I put off packing his things because I didn’t want to think this would really happen. Give me 15 minutes. The cop said that was quite all right and waited while she pack me a duffle full of clothes. He waited outside. Then she made me 2 PB&J sandwiches and put them in a lunch sack and told me to be a good boy. Then she started to cry and I did too. It was her fault I had to go away, everything was her fault, she was the one who gave the scorpion a ride and she was the one who kept getting drunk and blaming it on Cassie being dead, but I cried because I loved her.

When we went outside, the cop said I could probably call when I got to Speck House in Evansville. My mother told me to call Mrs Tillitson next door and said to the cop it’s because right now our phone isn’t working. Which meant the bill wasn’t paid again. Deputy Malkin said that sounds like a plan and told me to hug my mom. I did. I smelled her hair because it always smell good. It took about 2 hours to get to Evansville. I sat up front. Behind the front seats there was a wire thing that made the back into a cage. The cop said if I stayed out of trouble I would never have to ride back there. He asked me if I would stay out of trouble and I said yes but I was thinking that when you were riding to a foster home in a cop car you are in trouble already.

I ate 1 of the PB&Js and saw she put a devil-egg in the lunch sack too and that made me cry again, thinking of her hands doing that. The cop patted my shoulder and said it gets better, son. His little nametag said F.W.S. MALKIN. I asked him what F.W.S. stood for because I thought it was some kind of special job. He said it stood for his name, which was Franklin Winfield Scott Malkin but he said you can call me Frank, Benjy.

I wasn’t crying then but he must have seen I was sad and maybe scared too, because he reach over and pat me on the shoulder and said you’ll be okay, Benjy. There are lots of nice kids there. They all get along and if you mind your p’s and q’s, you will get along, too. I know all the foster situations in the tri-counties and the Specks aren’t the worst. They are not the best either but we haven’t ever had any trouble with them. Some of the things I’ve seen, you don’t want to know. If you behave and go along to get along you will be fine.

I said I miss my mother. He said of course you do and when she gets her feet back planted on the ground, there’ll be another hearing and you can go home. In the meantime, she can come on Wednesday evenings and any time Saturday or Sunday up to 7 oclock. Be sure to tell her that when you speak to her.

Only my mom never did get her feet back planted on the ground. She kept drinking and got a boyfriend who gave her crystal meth and when you get on that stuff you’re feet hardly ever get to the ground because you are high most of the time. At first she come to see me quite a lot, then once in a while, then hardly ever, and then she stopped coming at all. The last time she come some of her teeth were gone and her hair was dirty. She said I hate for you to see me like this Benjy and I said I hate it, too. I said you are a mess. By then I was a teenager, and teenagers say anything to hurt when they are hurting.

Speck House was out in the country. It was rickety but big like a mansion with rooms everywhere, 3 stories. Maybe even 4. It look good outside but inside it was old and drafty and leaky and cold in wintertime. Cold as a whore’s fuck in a freezer, Ronnie used to say. But I didn’t know it was old when I got there, I thought it was new because rickety or not it had bright red paint and blue trim. I found out pretty soon that the Speck foster kids painted it every year and got $2 dollars an hour. One year it was green with white trim and then yellow with green trim. You can see why me and Ronnie called it the House of Everlasting Paint! The year I left to join the Marines it was back to red and blue. Ronnie said it’s only paint holding this rambling wreck together, Benjy. That was a joke, she was always joking around, but it was also true. I guess most jokes have some truth in them, and that is what makes them funny.

Deputy F.W.S. Malkin said the Specks weren’t the worst or the best, and that turned out to be true. I was there 5 years by the time I was old enough to sign for the Marines and sometimes Mrs Speck would slat me side of the head with a towel or dishrag, but she never hit me with her hand and she never hit one of the little kids like Peggy Pye who was six and had her eye put out by a cigarette. When she slat me side of the head I deserved it. I only saw Mr Speck slat kids a couple of times. Once it was when Jimmy Dykeman broke a storm window throwing stones and once when he caught Sara Peabody dancing around Peggy and singing Peggy Pye, Peggy Pye, cross my heart and hope to die, Peggy Pye with just one eye. Mr Speck slap her face for that. Sara was a mean girl, a bad person. Once when I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up she said I’m going to be a call girl and fuck famous men to get their money. Then she laughed like it was a joke so maybe it was.

The Specks weren’t good people or bad people, just people living on money they got from the state of Tennessee. They passed all their inspections. We went to school on the bus and always in clean clothes, and when I decided to join the Marines, Mr Speck went with me to one hearing so I could get emancipated from my mother and another one so he could become my legal guardian. That way he could sign the paper and I could join at 17 and a half instead of waiting to 18. I thought my mother might show up at the emancipation hearing but she never did, and how could she when she didn’t know there was going to be one? I would have told her but she was gone from the trailer park and also the apartment where she lived for a while with the boyfriend that turned her into a meth-head. After those 2 hearings Mr Speck said to me God help you now you can do what you want, Benjy. I said I don’t believe in God and he said you will, give it time.

What I learned in the House of Everlasting Paint: There aren’t just 2 kinds of people, good and bad, like I thought when I was a kid who got most of his ideas on how people act from TV. There are 3. The third type of people go along to get along, like Deputy F.W.S. Malkin told me to do. Those are the most people in the world and I think they are gray people. They will not hurt you (at least on purpose) but they won’t help you much, either. They will say do what you want and God help you.

I think in this world you have to help yourself.

When I came to the House of Everlasting Paint, there were 14 kids counting me. Ronnie said that was good because 13 was an unlucky number. The youngest was Peggy Pye, who still wet her britches sometimes. There were twins, Timmy and Tommy, who were 6 or 7. The oldest kid was Glen Dutton, he was 17 and went in the army not too long after I came. He didn’t need Mr Speck to become his legal guardian and sign for him, though, his mother did it because Glen said he would send her the lottment. Glen said to me and Ronnie, that bitch would sign me into slavery with the ragheads if there was money in it for her. Glen was big and curse all the time, even more than Ronnie who could swear like a sailor, but he never bullied the smaller kids. He was a whiz of a painter too, always up on the highest scaffold.

When Deputy Malkin pulled his cop car into the driveway, I was almost blinded by what was next door. It was junk cars far as I could see, not just a few but hundreds. They went up this one hill and I soon found out they also went down the other side, getting older and rustier as they went. The sun was reflecting off all the windshields of the cars that still had windshields. Maybe half a klick down from the Speck House there was a green auto body shop made of corrugated metal. I could hear people inside running noomatic drills and wrenches. Out in front was a sign that said SPECK’S AUTO PARTS and SMALL REPAIRS and BEST BUYS LOWEST PRICES.

Deputy Malkin said that’s Speck’s brother’s place, quite the eyesore isn’t it. It’s just outside the county zoning, which is how he gets away with it. Your Speck is just inside the county zoning, which is why he had to put up a chainlink fence around the sides and back. I’m telling you so you won’t look at all that fence and think you’re going to a prison. That auto graveyard is a dangerous place, Benjy. Off limits for a reason. Don’t take it into your head to go there, all right? I said yes but of course I did. Me and Glen and Ronnie and Donnie. Just me and Ronnie and sometimes Donnie after Glen left for the army, then mostly just me when Ronnie ran away. Sometimes I wonder where she got off to. I hope she’s all right. It was sad without her. Maybe that’s why I went into the Marines, but if I am going to tell the truth, I might have gone anyway.

The 5 years I was a Speck Boy was long enough to see the House of Everlasting Paint change color 3 times. There are some things that stand out from when I was there, like the time I got suspended from school for fighting when 2 boys called me Bang Bang Benjy, which had happened many times before but that time I got sick of it. They were bigger but I kept fighting even after one of them black my eye and the other one almost bust my nose. That one, his name was Jared Klein, I got hold of his pants and yank them down so everyone saw his pee-stained underwear. He got teased about that plenty which served him right.

Another thing that stands out is when Peggy Pye had to go to the hospital with pneumonia. Then a week later, or maybe it was 10 days, Mrs Speck got us all together in the living room to pray because she said Peggy passed on and went up to heaven to be with Jesus and now she could see out of both her eyes. Donnie Wigmore said I hope the food is better up there and Mr Speck told him keep your smart remarks to yourself if you don’t want me to slat you one. Anyway we prayed for Peggy’s soul and Ronnie had to put her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing at what Donnie said only she was crying too. Other kids were also crying because Peggy was everyone’s ‘pet.’ I didn’t cry but I felt bad. Later on when me and Ronnie and Glen and Donnie were out in Demo Derby, Ronnie cried some more. Glen hug her and Ronnie said Peg was a sweetie wasn’t she and Glen said yes she sure was.

Then she hug on me and I hug on her and that was one happy thing that come out of Peggy dying because I was in love with Ronnie Givens. I knew nothing could come of that because she was 2 years older and crushing big on Glen, but you can’t help how you feel. Feelings are like breathing, they come in and go out.

Demo Derby was what we called the car junkyard behind the House of Everlasting Paint and next to Speck’s Auto Parts. It was our special place. Being told to stay away from there made us want to go even more. Ronnie said it was like the Forbidden Fruit Tree Eve wasn’t supposed to eat from in the Garden of Eden. Glen wave his hand at the rows and rows of junk cars with all those windshields reflecting and turning one sun into hundreds of suns and he said this is a whole motherfucking orchard, which made me and Ronnie laugh.

When we went there we would look for the best cars, like Cadillacs and Lincolns and Beemers, or once there was this old Mercedes limo with it’s whole rear end gone. Glen always carry a broom and whoomp the seats a couple of times before we got in to scare away the mice if there were any. Once he scared out a big rat. Donnie was with us and he said there goes Mr Speck and we laughed fit to split. Anyway we would sit in those cars and pretend they were whole and we were going someplace.

We could get into the Demo Derby easy because there was a hole in the chainlink fence at the back corner of the playground and once Glen said who knows how many fucked-up foster kids have gone through this hole and where they are now. That made us all laugh but then Ronnie said probably noplace good. Donnie laughed at that too, but me and Glen didn’t. I looked at him and he looked at me and we were both thinking ‘noplace good’!

Sometimes Glen would sit behind the wheel and pretend to drive and Ronnie would sit in the shotgun seat. Sometimes it would be the other way around, and when Glen was in the shotgun seat he might yell stuff like WHOA RONNIE DON’T HIT THAT FUCKIN DOG and Ronnie would turn the wheel and pretend to swerve. Glen would flop over with his head in her lap and Ronnie would push him away and say buckle your seatbelt dumbass.

I would always sit in back, with Donnie if he came with us but mostly on my own. Which I preferred. A couple of times Glen brought a can of beer which we would pass around until it was gone. Then Ronnie would give us Certs to take the smell off our breath. Once Glen brought 3 cans and we got a little bit high and Ronnie swooped the wheel back and forth and Glen said don’t get pulled over by 5–0, girlfriend. They laughed at that but I didn’t because my mother really did get pulled over by 5–0 and it was no joke.

Donnie smoked. I don’t know if the same person who got Glen his beers got Donnie his cigs, but he kept a pack of Marlboros behind a loose board under his bed. He mostly did it out back by the kitchen, but one day he pulled out his smokes when we were sitting in a big old Buick Estate wagon and pretending to drive to Vegas where we would play roulette and shoot craps. Ronnie said don’t you dare light up out here where there’s all these dry weeds and spilled oil. Donnie said what are you on the rag or something. Glen turned around and made a fist and said take that back unless you want to eat your front teeth. Later on, when I was in Fallujah, this one time I saw Sargent West shoot an RPG into an insurgent safe house in the part of town we called the Pizza Slice, and it blew sky-high because of all the ammo inside. Lucky we didn’t all get killed because we weren’t expecting it. That made me think of how Donnie also used to smoke sometimes in the supply shed, where the Specks stored all their paint. That was probably a lot more dangerous than out in the Demo Derby.

Donnie took it back but Ronnie punched Glen a good hard one on the shoulder. I don’t need you to stand up for me Dutton, she said.

When Ronnie called you by your last name, you knew she was mad. She turned around to the back seat and said I don’t need to be on the rag to worry about fire Wigmore because I got this. She held out her arm and showed the shiny burn scar there. We all seen that before. It went from halfway up her forearm just about all the way to her shoulder. Her parents got burnt up in a housefire, you see. Ronnie, she jump out of a 2nd story window just about in time with her arm burned and part of her leg on that side and her hair on fire. That’s how she wound up in the Speck House of Everlasting Paint when her one relative, an aunt, said I am not taking her. The one time she visited Ronnie in the hospital she said I raised two of my own, both hellions, and that’s enough. Ronnie said she couldn’t blame her for that.

I know what fire can do, she said. If I ever forget I only need to look at this arm to remember. Donnie said he was sorry, and I did too. I didn’t have anything to apologize for, I just felt bad because she got burned but also happy because it wasn’t her face, which was pretty. Anyway we was all friends again after that, although Donnie Wigmore was never a friend to me like Ronnie and Glen were.

4

‘We had some good times in the Demo Derby,’ Billy says.

He’s looking out the window at the courthouse again. August has given way to September, but still the heat shimmers. He can see waves of it coming off the street. It reminds him of the way the air used to shimmer above the big incinerator behind the House of Everlasting Paint’s kitchen.

The Specks were the Stepeneks, Ronnie Givens was Robin Maguire, Glen Dutton was Gadsden Drake. Gadsden after the Gadsden Purchase, Billy figured. He had read a book while still in the Marines, Slavery, Scandal, and Steel Rails, which had covered the purchase of that arid chunk of land from Mexico. He’d read it in Fallujah, between Operation Vigilant Resolve in April of ’04 and Phantom Fury in November. Gad said that before his mother died of lung cancer, she’d told him that his long-gone daddy had been a history teacher, so it made a degree of sense. I might not be the only Gadsden in the world, he said once while they were out in Demo Derby, pretending to go somewhere, but I bet there’s not more than a dozen. With it as a first name, that is.

Billy has changed the names of his friends, but Demo Derby was always Demo Derby, and they really did have some good times there before Gad joined the army and Robin ran off to … what did she tell him?

‘To seek my fortune in seven-league boots,’ he says. That was it. Only her boots hadn’t been of the seven-league variety, just scuffed suede with tired elastic sides.

I loved her among the wrecks, Billy thinks, and goes back to write another paragraph or two before calling it a day.