Neal Pollack

I wrote a book about having been a soldier for Todd. He needed to see drunken barracks fights on the weekends, know what he missed when Jacky Bozak and Ernie Chopper threwhands, strung out on crank and Michelob, and my best friend Edward Dilger had Charge of Quarters after the senior NCOs went home to duplexes and house trailers. I didn'’t hold back for Todd. He’d read how Dilger beat his knuckles bloody on Bozak’s plate face, himself a new corporal and six months to discharge, but couldn'’t make the wired Polack stop choking the hillbilly. Todd couldn'’t leave this earth, suddenly and beautifully with Jennifer in the collapse of a Whole Foods parking lot, and not experience Bozak’s frozen skull take Dilger’s punches. It was like watching a sledge head begin breaking up concrete. Chopper strained to keep his eyes open while his lips went dark.

I waited at Whole Foods meat counters after the novel came out and bought chicken while Todd picked free-range T-bones, his handcart heavy from organic artichoke hearts in cans. He wore fleece and suede slipper walking shoes and I knew he’d mess himself if Dilger even aimed his eyes at him and got cold. Edward Dilger taught himself to have still eyeballs by shooting coyotes with a .223 Ruger for the twenty-dollar bounty in Hall County, Texas. Todd never watched a guy like Dilger get dragged off by two MPs for having punched Bozak too long, until his eye hung sideways and he collapsed against Chopper’s back and dripped blood on his shaved head.

Todd never paid twenty-two dollars to know about guys like my buddy. He did pay dearly for chicken breasts already rubbed with herbs. The army paid Dilger, and Sidley paid Todd. The guy couldn'’t see the problem.

I'’d written about how Dilger was a good soldier, but when the MP sticked him by the stairs, four of his teeth bounced off the cinderblock wall like pellets. The CO took his stripes three days later for not calling the MPs first thing. Todd couldn'’t be human unless he saw Dilger in Key West two years after the army, Dilger making Manhattans at Sloppy Joes, and knew that he’d started shootingspeed under his tongue. But Todd probably had some college friend whose parent committed suicide junior year, just after a year in England, and finding Dilger dead in his apartment bathroom didn'’t shock him. He loaned heavy for Northwestern Law School and didn'’t spare cash for other people’s pain. If he died tomorrow in the collapse of the Whole Foods parking lot, he’d sleep forever in his Range Rover like the pharaohs in mountain tombs.

In May, after the abortion, Mike and Susan drove Interstate 80 from Chicago to the Rocky Mountains. They rented an old timbered cabin in the pines at the bottom of Estes Canyon. There was good shade from the trees and a fast stream coming down from the mountains and a narrow gravel road that dropped steeply from the highway and stopped in the jagged black stumps at the bank below the cabin. There were cottages up the highway, circled by birches, and if there were people, they did not see them. It was early in the season and very cold and rainy at night.

The stream came straight from the Continental Divide, where water became other water, all-powerful and cold, but the trout were gone from the shallows and they could not drink the water any more than they could from the Chicago River. If they’d not sent the deposit, he would have left over it. An alpine stream, the Internet ad read. Cold, clear snow runoff. He assumed he could dip his cupped hands and drink sloppily, letting the water numb his mouth, but the rental manager dropped off two cases of Evian for the week. Screw this place, Mike said. But Susan calmed him, the way she did after the happiness about his first novel faded like a new car smell. She made him look north where the woods and the canyon walls were all one thing, like a great idea, strangely jagged and soft, but always the same. They were here to let go. They were here to wash it all away and see if they could feel clean again. Relax, she told him. She lowered her voice to say it.