The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(84)

“I’m not in a rush.”

“Give me back my keys.”

“Why don’t we order something? I could use a bite.”

“I’m not hungry.” He took out a Bud Light from the fridge. On the door, a magnet that said WALLACE INSURANCE held down a piece of paper with a phone number on it. In loopy letters next to it was a name. Samantha. A girl he’d met at my sister’s barbecue, taken on a date, and never heard from again. I scanned the kitchen counter. No glasses or knives in plain sight.

“Pizza or Chinese?” I asked.

“I don’t care.”

“Pizza it is.”

While I placed the order, he put a bunch of paper towels under the tap and wiped the dirt and blood from his face. His right eye was closing fast and his left was turning blue. “I think I have a Coke somewhere in the fridge,” he said. “Help yourself.”

I found a bag of hash browns in the freezer, stuck behind two empty vodka bottles, and gave it to him. He held it to his eyes, one after the other. I could already feel a massive headache settling in, and the cut on my eyebrow throbbed. What I wouldn’t do for a shower now. What I wouldn’t do to be back in bed, away from all this. While we waited for the pizza to arrive, he opened another beer. “Remember Rodriguez?” he asked.

“Rodriguez from Texas?” I said.

“No, Rodriguez from New Jersey. I’ve never seen anyone drink as much Coke in my life. Dude could down three cans in an hour, easy.”

“Well. Let me tell you a story about Rodriguez from New Jersey. He was driving us on a recon, and he’d had so much Coke he had to take a piss. But he couldn’t hold it. ‘I gotta go,’ he kept saying. ‘I gotta go.’ We found him a plastic bottle and he did his business, but when he tried to cap it he dropped it on the floor. We had to sit in a Humvee for three hours smelling his piss.”

“Dumb fuck.”

“I wonder what happened to him.”

“Back in New Jersey, last I heard. Delivers sodas.”

“No way.”

“Dude. I swear it’s true.”

When the pizza arrived, we ate quickly, stacking the slices one on top of the other like hamburger buns. Then Fierro wiped his mouth with a napkin. “This is good.”

“Yeah. Not bad for Domino’s.”

“No, I meant us. Here, like this.”

“I can’t be around all the time, man. I have my own life.”

He watched me for a moment. “All right. Listen, I’m sorry I showed up at your girl’s place. I wasn’t trying to scare her, I really wasn’t. I didn’t know where you went, that’s all. It’s not like I’m some pervert or anything. Besides, you never talk about her. I didn’t even know you were still seeing her. You’ve been avoiding me, like you’re ashamed of me or something.”

But I wasn’t ashamed of Fierro, I was protective of Nora. That was why, from the beginning, I’d tried to keep the two of them apart. Maybe that had made things worse. “You need to get help. Medical help. I thought I could help you, but I can’t.”

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

“You’ve said that before, but here we are.”

He shook his head slowly, like I didn’t get it. “Sarge said I could stay with him for a while. Help him out with the bees.”

“Fletcher called you?”

“No, I called him.”

This felt like a punch in the gut. He knew how I felt about Fletcher, and yet he’d reached out to him, and brought it up at this particular moment. I was angry, but mostly I was tired, so very tired. I could see that he still wasn’t ready to face whatever troubled him, that he was only trying to run away to a different place. He’s made his choice, I thought. And I would make mine.

That was the last time I saw him, though I heard from him a few more times. The first time was about two months later, when I was working the Labor Day shift, and was alone at my desk. He told me he’d been learning a lot about bees, because Fletcher had 40,000 of them. Queens can lay as many as 1,500 eggs each day, drones are kicked out of the nest every fall, if a queen dies unexpectedly, worker bees can develop reproductive organs and lay a replacement queen. But he didn’t like the Waynesboro area very much and complained that people in the South weren’t as nice as he’d expected them to be. Another time, maybe eight months later, he called me in the middle of the night to ask if I wanted to meet him for drinks, he was only four hours away in Nevada. He was calling me from a pay phone near a freeway overpass, and the sound of traffic made it harder for him to hear me. I had to tell him twice that I couldn’t go anywhere, I had to work early the next morning. I didn’t ask what he was doing in Nevada.

The Marines had brought us together, two dumb kids from the desert, and although we’d fought side by side for years, in the end we’d come out just as we’d gone in: two different people. Now it was time for us to go our separate ways.





Nora




Somewhere on the Grapevine, a truck had crashed on the northbound side of the 5, spilling its cargo of toys and turning the freeway into an obstacle course of nerf guns, action figures, and assorted dolls. Traffic was blocked for miles. So it was almost midnight by the time I reached the 880 and glimpsed, with relief, the orange and green lights of Tribune Tower. I had worked there as an intern one summer, back when the Oakland Tribune still had its offices in the building. It was one of my favorite places in the city. My apartment was on the third floor of a pink Victorian house with no garage, no elevator, and no laundry room, and until recently I could afford it only because I had a roommate. That night when I came in, I found Margo in the hallway, still in her jacket, having just returned from a late dinner at her brother’s house. “How are you holding up?” she asked as we hugged. “Let me help you with your bags.”