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He fears he’s too clingy from the start. Pappy’s so laconic, so naturally at ease that Rudy feels like a hummingbird flitting around an old dog.
“Eh,” Pappy says when Rudy confesses it to him early on in their sniper training, “no old dog’s ever been annoyed by a hummingbird. They tend to like to watch them move.”
It’s nowhere near as cryptic as Pappy generally is, and Rudy reads the message clearly: It’s okay. Just be you.
“You tell me if I’m pushing you,” Rudy says. “You tell me, Pap.”
“I will,” Pappy promises, and that’s the last they talk about it for a very long time.
*
Rudy and Sherry have a long, deep conversation the first night Rudy is home on leave. It’s a tradition, from the earliest days of their relationship. He comes home, and they lay out for each other how they’re feeling and what they visualize as their future. Nothing is off-limits, and no shame is allowed.
Rudy admits he’s been in love with Pappy since the first day he met him, he thinks. He doesn’t know what to do about it. Sherry tells him to just go for it and see what happens. “You don’t love me less just because you love him,” she says.
“I can’t tell him,” Rudy says. “He’s not like us.”
“He’s more traditional?” Sherry asks.
“I don’t know,” Rudy says. “It’s hard to read him, sometimes, but I just don’t think he’d understand how I could love you and love him at the same time.”
“He married?”
“Yes.”
“Hrm.” Sherry shrugs after a few seconds. “It’s your choice to make,” she says.
“I’ll think about it,” Rudy replies. He closes his eyes, breathes deep, and lets the idea go. “What about you?” he asks.
“I’ve been restless,” Sherry says. “I want to go on a trip.”
“Do you want me to come with?”
“Yes,” she says. “Where do you want to go?”
“Well, if you’re restless, you should choose.”
“I’ll think about it,” Sherry says. “I want to go camping somewhere and be out in nature for a few days.”
“We haven’t done that in a while,” Rudy agrees.
“I’ve also been lonely,” she says. “But I don’t know why.”
“Visualize it,” Rudy suggests.
She closes her eyes and settles her shoulders, and when she opens them, she’s frowning. “I don’t know,” she says. “There’s nothing there.”
“We’ll meditate on it,” Rudy says. “See if my energy can help you.”
“Do you have time tomorrow?”
“Nothing but,” Rudy replies, and the way she smiles makes him feel like he’s won something.
*
He and Pappy go to Afghanistan, and they meet their newly minted Second Lieutenant, fresh from OCS. Pappy remarks he looks about five years old, and Rudy shakes his head at him.
“Don’t be mean.”
“Not mean if it’s fact. I didn’t say he acted it.”
“I don’t think that makes it better,” Rudy replies.
“Suppose a man can’t do much to change his face,” Pappy agrees.
“A man can only change his view of the world,” Rudy says, “and even that can be a struggle.”
Pappy looks at him, the long, considering look he’s given Rudy many times before. “You all right?” he asks.
They’d killed a man today, Rudy calling out the coordinates and Pappy taking the shot. It’s the first time Rudy has known for certain he was responsible for ending a life. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Just need to let the day settle.”
“He did not get back up,” Pappy replies, and Rudy knows he understands.
*
“I do not mean this is a shameful way,” Sherry says. “I am not ashamed of you or your work, but I cannot hear you talk about killing a man.”
Rudy had been halfway through telling her about calling that first shot in Afghanistan. He counts to ten as he considers her request. “Are you scared of me?” he asks.
“No,” Sherry replies. “I just don’t want to process what you did. I don’t need it affecting my energy.”
“I understand,” Rudy says. “I feel hurt that you can’t share this with me, but I respect your need for distance.”
“I respect that you’re hurt,” Sherry replies. “I understand why you are hurt, and I appreciate you understanding my boundaries.”
Late that night, after Sherry’s gone to sleep, Rudy stays up and thinks about what she’s said. He will absolutely respect her boundaries. It’s important to the both of them to make that a priority. But he feels like he’s lost something in not being able to tell her about Afghanistan in the same kind of detail he’s told her everything else.
He calls Pappy the next morning after Sherry’s gone to work. He explains the conversations they have when he comes home for leave, and he asks Pappy, “Am I being unfair to wish she would let me tell her about it?”
“I’m not the man to ask,” Pappy says. “I don’t talk about it much if at all.”
“Why not?”
“No reason to, I figure. It’s my job, and no matter what I did, there’d be parts I wouldn’t mention at the dinner table.”
“You don’t think that’s lying?”
“Nope. You’ve got to make an effort to lie to someone. There’s planning involved. I don’t ever plan to not say something. I just don’t say it.”
“I am jealous of your natural serenity,” Rudy says. “I need to be honest about that.”
“All right,” Pappy says. “But I don’t know why. You’re calm enough a mousing cat’d probably come right up to you.”
“Yeah, but it took a lot of practice,” Rudy says, feeling defeated.
Pappy doesn’t answer right away. Rudy can picture him pressing his lips together and thinking. “Hell, Rude, everything you’ve ever done took mountains of practice, and you got real good at everything you practiced at, so you’re probably better at this whole serenity thing than you think.”
“Thanks, brother.”
“I got to get and go check on Momma, but you call me back if you need to talk, all right?”
“I will. Goodbye, Pap.”
“See you.”
*
Rudy gets his orders for Kuwait, and he knows they’ll go into Iraq. He can feel the truth of it in his bones. Pappy’s wife comes to California to see them off, and Rudy and Sherry are invited over for dinner.
Sherry comes down with a cold the day before and tells Rudy to go on his own. He does, and Pappy’s wife greets him like he’s a long-lost family member.
“Well, gracious, if you’re even taller than I thought,” she says. “It’s lovely to finally meet you.”
“And you,” Rudy says.
“I appreciate you taking such good care of Larry when you two are working,” she says.
It takes Rudy a moment to realize she means Pappy. He hasn’t called Pappy “Larry” a single time since they’ve met. “It’s my honor,” he says. “He’s the best man I know.”
Something goes across her face. Rudy can’t quite catch it, but she looks pained for a moment. “Well, that’s just fine,” she says, and her voice breaks a little on the end. “Let’s all sit down, shall we?”
It’s a pleasant meal, though Rudy feels like he’s on the edge of his skin for the whole of it. He and Pappy fall easily into their usual conversation patter, and Mrs. Patrick is the type of natural conversationalist who can slip in and join them. Rudy likes her very much, he thinks. He wishes he knew her well enough to ask if she was okay.
When he leaves that night, she hugs him tight, and there are tears in her eyes. “You take care of him,” she says.
“I will,” Rudy promises.
“How was it?” Sherry asks when he gets home. She’s under a blanket, a cup of cold tea on the coffee table, and tissues half-filling the small waste basket they keep under the table.
“It was nice,” Rudy says. “I think you’d like her. Do you need more tea?”
“Please. I was gonna get up, but I’ve been dizzy all night.”
Rudy presses his hand to her forehead. “You’ve got a fever,” he says. “I’ll make willow bark.”
Sherry doesn’t reply. Rudy makes the tea, and when he comes back into the room, she’s asleep. He tucks the blanket more securely around her and puts himself to bed.
*
Kuwait is hot and dry in a different way than Afghanistan, though no one believes Rudy when he says it. Even Pappy side-eyes him and shakes his head.
He keeps up with his physical training, and he reads, and he spends time with his brothers, making certain they’re all doing all right.
“Fucking mother hen,” Poke says to him when Rudy asks if he needs anything.
“I am simply trying to put happiness in the universe,” Rudy says, and Poke rolls his eyes and tells him he’s full of upper-middle-class white hippie bullshit. It makes Rudy smile.
A few days later, at mail call, Pappy gives him a concerned look when his name isn’t called. “Sherry’s usually got a letter out to you by now,” he says.
Rudy shrugs. “It’ll come when it comes, brother. I think she needed more time to process this deployment.”
“She ain’t used to it by now?”
Rudy doesn’t want to admit he’s as concerned as Pappy, that he feels something off under his skin. “Being used to something doesn’t mean you can always deal with it in the same way,” Rudy replies.
Pappy snorts. “Sound like my wife,” he says and grimaces.
“You all right, Pap?”
He sighs and leans against the wall next to Rudy. “Been a rough few months,” he says.
Rudy considers letting it lie. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. “Or am I pushing you?”
Pappy thinks about it. “She’s leaving me. When she came out to say goodbye before we shipped out, it was to say goodbye for good. She don’t want to be a grunt’s wife no more, she said. It takes too much damn effort.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Rudy puts a hand on Pappy’s shoulder and squeezes. They don’t say anything else.
*
“Am I pushing you, Pap?” he asks after he touches up Pappy’s shave and offers him moisturizer. It’s mostly for fun, because it always makes his brothers laugh, but it’s also to check in because the reporter’s right there, and Rudy doesn’t want him getting the wrong idea.
“Nah,” Pappy says, and the smile he gives Rudy makes Rudy feel like everything’s just fine. Like Iraq won’t end horribly. Like maybe his Dharma is doing okay. “You’re fine.”
*
Pappy is shot, and Rudy is almost shot, and he wishes, for a moment, that he’d at least taken a flesh wound so he could maybe go with Pappy to the aid station. Not that he would for a flesh wound, but watching Pappy get taken away feels like someone’s ripping his guts out.
“You all right?” Brad asks him the next day. They’re sitting guard duty in the midday sun, and there’s no one else around.
“Feels like my right arm was shot off,” Rudy says.
“I considered being a sniper,” Brad replies. “But I hate having feelings for other people.”
Rudy chuckles. It’s work to do it, but Brad relaxes when he does, so it’s worth it. “Brother, it’s not that. There’s plenty of teams that just do the job and don’t open up to each other.”
“Too bad you weren’t on one of those,” Brad says.
“No,” Rudy replies. “No, it’s okay.”
“Be less in touch with your feelings,” Brad tells him, and Rudy’s chuckle this time is genuine.
“Can’t do that, brother. Once you flip that switch, life’s just better.”
“Pass,” Brad says, but he bumps Rudy’s shoulder with his own as he says it.
*
Mail call at the cigarette factory happens, and Rudy gets a letter from Sherry.
…Wanted to wait until you were home again, but I just don’t feel like that’s the healthy option…love you but not at the depth I know you need…didn’t want to do this over the phone because I know how little time you get to call…I care so much for you, Rudy, please know that…
Rudy meditates about the letter. He lets himself feel his anger and his sadness. He lets himself take apart his disappointment and his misplaced shame in feeling like a failure. He talks himself through it like he’d talk to any of his brothers. It’s not an uncommon occurrence, he reminds himself, and he can understand Sherry’s frustration and exhaustion when he’s gone so much and in a place that must cause her so much stress to think about.
It’s good to be sad because that means there was something worth losing, and anger is natural, he tells himself, but think about if it’s natural here. Sherry’s done nothing to wrong him. She simply wants to seek a deeper happiness, and Rudy wishes her well. He hopes for her deeper happiness as he ends the meditation and breathes deep and releases his feelings onto the wind as he exhales.
*
Pappy walks into the cigarette factory just hours before they move out. He’s limping but clearly trying not to, and Rudy feels like he’s vibrating with happiness while he stands behind Lieutenant Fick and listens to them talk.
“Tell me you’re not AWOL from the field hospital,” Nate says. “I heard you were supposed to be shipped out.”
“No one told me,” Pappy replies and hands Fick a sheet of paper that clears him for duty.
Fick sighs as he reads it. “I’m not asking,” he says. “But I’m going to radio over and verify it.”
“Of course,” Pappy says.
Fick walks off, and Pappy turns to Rudy, grinning. “Hey,” he says.
“Pap,” Rudy replies. He steps forward and claps Pappy on the shoulders. “You hurting?”
“Only a little,” he says. He curls his hands over Rudy’s wrists, and they stand like that for a moment. “That’s a legit discharge slip,” he says. “It’s just not legit how I got it.”
“Long as you want to be here, I don’t care,” Rudy says, and he can feel his smile stretch across his face.
“I’m doing fine where I am,” Pappy replies.
It’s the last moment they get until they pile in to go because everyone’s coming over to say hi and ask about the wound. Then Fick comes back and says that the discharge slip is absolutely legitimate, though his face says he doesn’t totally believe it.
Rudy doesn’t care. He swings into the driver’s seat of the Victor when they’re ordered to load up, and he watches as Pappy props his leg on the dash. “You all right, brother?” he asks. “You got pills?”
“I got pills,” Pappy replies, pulling them from his vest. “Don’t need ‘em just yet, but they’re right here if I do.”
“Good,” Rudy says. “If we weren’t here, I’d make you some tea that’d help you heal up.”
“Probably tastes like piss,” Pappy replies, but he’s smiling.
“It tastes all right,” Rudy tells him, and he’s smiling, too.
*
He doesn’t know why he attacks Ray except that he does. Because every ounce of calm he’s ever had, he’s had to train himself to keep close. Weeks and weeks of war have worn him down, left his reserves dry as the desert sand they’ve been humping through. When Ray storms off, Rudy tries to follow, but he stops when he sees Brad. He’s larger than Brad and carries more muscle, but he would never hurt him. Brad would fuck him up six ways from Sunday right now, and Rudy knows it, and so he backs away and walks away from the game. He goes and finds somewhere to sit and be still in his own head.
He goes to the second floor of the stadium administration building, squirrels away in the room farthest from the stairs, and tucks into a closet with no door, his knees pulled up to his chest. He rests his forehead on his knees and pushes aside the thought that this was how he hid when he was a kid and didn’t know how not to be angry. Always the furthest closet in the house, always with his knees pulled up.
“How’s your head?” Pappy asks above him, and Rudy hadn’t heard him coming, but he doesn’t jump.
“How’d you find me so quick?” Rudy asks rather than answer, because he doesn’t have an answer.
“Not so hard to track you. You’re the biggest son of a bitch in the whole company.”
Rudy doesn’t laugh. It’d be a lie to laugh right now. He doesn’t feel like laughing at all. Pappy steps over him and squeezes in next to him. The closet’s not big, and Rudy’s taken most of the space, but Pappy doesn’t seem to notice.
“My mama’s people,” Pappy says, “Half of ‘em are just fine. The other half are mean as sin. You don’t talk much about your people, but I figured out a long time ago which half you’d have come from if me and you were cousins.”
Rudy doesn’t reply. He hates his childhood and how it follows him around. No matter how hard he works, how much he puts kindness and love and encouragement out to the universe, his goddamn childhood loves to show up and poke around and remind him that beneath everything he’s earned, he’s still a violent, angry, awful man.
“You’d have been from the good side,” Pappy continues. “No question.”
Rudy turns his head and looks at him. “Think you’re wrong, Pap,”
“Nope.”
Rudy waits for him to say more, to justify his answer, but Pappy just sits next to him, bony knees nearly touching his chin. “I choked him,” Rudy says. “I don’t know why, but I did, and when I was doing it, it felt good.”
“Course it did. The Corps trained us into it. You know that. You just don’t wanna remember that because you think you fucked your Dharma. I don’t know about your Dharma or your karma or any of that hippie talk you go into, Rudy, but I know you’re a good man.”
Rudy leans his head back against the wall and stares into the shadows at the top of the closet. “You’re pushing me, Pap,” he says.
“Sometimes, you gotta be pushed,” Pappy replies.
Rudy breathes in, and then out, and then he drops his head onto Pappy’s shoulder and closes his eyes. “This whole place, it’s fucked, and I don’t think we unfucked it at all.”
“I know,” Pappy says, and his arm comes around Rudy’s shoulders. “But there’s some good in all this. You think for a minute, I bet you can find it.”
Rudy thinks. “We got a roof over our heads, and we don’t have to dig anymore.”
“That’s pretty nice,” Pappy agrees. “Had a fucking blister on my trigger finger for three days from all the damn digging.”
“We’re back to three meals a day.”
“There’s gin,” Pappy adds.
Rudy smiles. “There’s gin,” he agrees.
“There’s a little bit of privacy,” Pappy says, his arm tightening around Rudy’s shoulder.
“That’s nice,” Rudy agrees. He presses a little closer to Pappy. “Am I pushing you?” he asks.
“No,” Pappy says. “Doing just fine.”
“Your foot all right?”
“Nearly good as new. Doesn’t hurt right now.”
“Good.”
They sit together for a while. There’s a window high up on the wall, and Rudy watches the sun slant more to the west.
“Pap,” he says finally.
“Yeah?”
“Sherry left me.”
“When?”
“A few weeks ago. I got the letter when we were at the cigarette factory.”
“That why you choked Ray?”
“No,” Rudy says. “That was something else.”
“You just wanted me to know?”
“I haven’t told anyone,” Rudy says. “I didn’t know who to tell because you weren’t here, but then you were here, but we’ve been so busy.”
“Feel like a dog with two hind ends on a street full of fire hydrants,” Pappy replies in agreement.
“I wish her well,” Rudy says.
“Of course you do. She’s a good woman.”
“Yeah,” Rudy agrees. Too good for him, he thinks.
“She was lucky to have you as long as she did,” Pappy says like he knows what Rudy’s thinking.
“Thanks, Pap.”
The sun’s just a leftover haze in the sky when they finally get up and go downstairs. Lilley’s shouting about showing his video, and Lovell hands Rudy and Pappy cups of gin. They gather around the table with the rest to stand and watch the movie.
Rudy wants to make it through the whole thing, to see what they fought and recognize within himself that he is a man responsible for acts of war. He does not make it all the way through, but when he turns to leave, Ray is standing behind him, and when he grabs Ray’s shoulder and shakes lightly, Ray doesn’t pull away.
“We’re cool,” Ray says in an undertone as Rudy steps around him.
“Thank you,” Rudy says, and a weight lifts from him as he walks away.
He goes back upstairs and back into the office he’d been in earlier. He needs quiet, and he knows it’s not going to come from downstairs. Already, he can hear some whooping and laughter from his brothers as they feel the effects of the alcohol. Rudy sips his gin. It burns all the way down, and it reminds him he is alive and that he has made it and that he is, even when he’s hiding away, part of something larger and better than himself.
“Again?” Pappy asks from the doorway.
“Don’t need to follow me around, Pap,” Rudy says. “I’m doing just fine.”
“Good,” Pappy replies.
“Just needed the quiet.”
There’s a sudden burst of off-tune singing from downstairs. Pappy laughs. “Can’t imagine why,” he says.
Rudy closes his eyes and breathes deep. He feels Pappy step up beside him and press against his side. “I love you, Pap.”
“I know.”
“I think I might love you the wrong way.”
“No such thing,” Pappy replies. He reaches out and puts an arm around Rudy’s waist. Rudy drops an arm around his shoulders.
“I want to be out of this place,” Rudy says.
Pappy pulls at the neck of Rudy’s shirt, and Rudy leans down. Rudy is and isn’t surprised at the kiss. It’s as quiet and understated as everything about Pappy, and Rudy tries to follow it when Pappy pulls away.
“Be where you are,” Pappy says. “It’s the only place you can change.”
“Think I told you that, once,” Rudy says.
“You did,” Pappy replies. “Doesn’t mean it’s not good advice.” He tugs at Rudy’s collar again and kisses him a second time. “Am I pushing you?” he asks.
“Yes,” Rudy replies. “But I want you to.”
Pappy smiles into the next kiss, and for the first time in a long time, Rudy feels like everything about him has aligned.