Horse With No Name

I encountered Mike Holmes my second sophomore year at Eastern Washington University. The Eagles now, but once The Savages. Tiny Native Americans with tomahawks remained embedded in the athletic building brick. Reared in northern Idaho, Mike was comforted by the notion of savagery, race be damned. He'd attempted a life back east but lost his patrolman's job; shooting stoplights and clouting the mayor were factors. The stoplight, though, hung in the living room like a head on a pike. I had no idea they were so large.

Mike read a couple hundred books a year. His literary heroes were the Beats, but he was a vociferous conservative, an erudite who had mastered intellect and wit, country the Left saw as its domain. Though he nurtured his own particular hubris, he despised liberals' moral superiority. He found them neither moral nor tolerant. They embraced stereotypes, just in reverse: in their courts the evangelicals and capitalists stand in the well and the academics and agnostics occupy the bench. As for intellect or lack of it, their adherents were just as likely to spout The New Republic's talking points without considering their source or their implications as were their opposites who quoted Rush Limbaugh.

His mind was agile enough to reduce a smug liberal into blubbering revelations of his or her own prejudices. Cancel Culture and the WOKE movement would have had him apoplectic, though Me Too epitomized what he valued most in argument, a moral and logical position mitigated only by vapid rationalizations and useless stone age mentalities.

Mike's father was a Marine, as was his grandfather. Mike was born into the family business; he inherited Vietnam. Little is left to be said about that war. I recently watched Ken Burns' documentary and learned nothing, which is not criticism of Burns but a comment on how ubiquitous Vietnam has become. Its horrors have lost their capacity to surprise. That doesn't mean Mike was spared them; in fact I believe the lack of privacy adds to his tragedy.

Vietnam haunted him, like most veterans I've met. In sober moments he avoided the cliché by discussing the subject in intellectual terms: a failure of political half measures and cold war cul-de-sacs and the pitfalls of a civilian-run military. Drunk, he vacillated between the terrors he endured, the vulgarities he witnessed and committed, and the political morass that rendered those horrors meaningless in soldiers' terms. He lost his war, and he didn't think it was his fault, which made it someone else's. The scapegoat changed with his mood and blood alcohol level.

Once, Mike played a recorded firefight for a class I taught. Through the tape hiss, my students listened to helicopter gunship blades thump the air and bullets erratically sing, then a grunt—a round taking the air from the soldier next to Mike—then Mike's voice, redirecting fire. Neither the grunts nor the bullets affected my students as much as Mike's calm on the radio. Some admired it. Others thought it monstrous. Both were right.

When Mike married, his stepdaughter was named Michael, so he reverted to his middle name, Randy, not a stretch as his family had called him that since childhood. His father was Mike. A name should be your own, though rarely is it, aside from exceptions like Elvis, Adolph, Abraham—so famous or infamous, they're retired like sports jerseys, hanging in stadium rafters. Mike would have preferred either Michael or Randall. In the years we were acquainted, he ran for city council, advocated local arts funding, attired himself in various sweaters and jackets and slacks and shirts—with or without ties—to appear eligible of a more formal moniker, one that resonated not just in others' mouth, but inside his own head.

At some point, I think he discovered there would be no other title beyond what his parents delivered, which was then abbreviated by circumstance, and his last years he squandered with such purpose as to insist his legacy contain the fewest syllables possible.

He'd come up much like I had. We chafed under the paternal notion of common sense and the practical, a realm in which speaking, let alone attempts at eloquence, makes you an object of suspicion. Yet language is the soul method those with a cerebral bent give shape to what we read and hear and think. The tyranny of the present in working class families isn't fertile ground for us. We tend that garden, alone; we weed and water and turn the dirt. We embrace the work but are never unaware of it is new ground, which is a way Mike and I differed from those born into plots where such contemplation was already cultivated.

How writing became the avenue to express Mike's separateness, I don't know. For me, the enterprise commenced in fourth grade. My classroom was a trailer house the school district called portables, as if suddenly a school might appear anywhere. Teachers in such classrooms were new and yet to show merit, or they were bee-hived women akin to those inhabiting a Simpson cartoon. The metal walls sweltered in the hot months without air conditioning; winters the floors accrued frost.

That year, however, a long-term substitute, a minister's wife, deposited a journal assignment on my desk. "You are the writer," she said.

If she had employed the indefinite article a, I'd have felt one of many and likely ignored her. The however separated me from others, and I clung to it.

My classmates soon moved on to turning wrenches under rigs with their fathers. They learned fractions with sockets and algebra determining a piston's TDC. When my own father insisted I join him beneath the chassis of his truck and directed me to retrieve tools, I consistently delivered the wrong ones. Chastised and dispatched once more, I retrieved the whole box, which he considered a surrender to stupidity rather than a practical solution.

I encountered my surroundings with abstractions, which makes for a sloppy mechanic. But the language of machines was also that of men. Consequently, I learned to value Holly carburetors and Hurst gear shifts, though I could not relate what each did or why these brands surpassed others.

I approached weapons with the same uncertainty.

At the dump, my father and I practiced shooting bottles and beer cans lined on a two-by-eight and construction blocks. I was not a good shot. The snap of the rifle's report and the thrust of the butt held my attention, not where the bullet landed. Others' bullets burst each beer bottle or twisted the cans; mine too often passed the target entirely and rattled in the rocks and garbage behind.

I grew impatient and shot the air full of lead, which relegated me to the pea shooter, a single shot .22. My failure seemed less one of skill or talent than one of character.

I graduated high school, and when I returned home after my first year of college—where I floundered mostly—my stepmother showed me the door. Summers I divided my nights between my maternal grandparents and a ratty green station wagon. I slept in parks when the weather was amenable. The next year, I registered for 30 credits, then dropped those requiring I read a book I couldn't check out from the library. One semester Kay Boyle taught as a visiting writer in the graduate MFA program. I requested the waivers to enroll in graduate courses, forged the appropriate names, and attended. The university discovered my bogus registration, but Kay wouldn't permit them to drop me from her class. It was as close as I had come to winning a woman's favor in a year.

The next summer—a Friday the 13th for Christ's sake—I killed my roommate, Doug Groomes. He wanted to show me a pistol from his police internship. Someone from outside this place would have manners enough to examine the weapon and the good sense to keep it holstered; someone from here a more thorough inspection would be necessary. That person, however, would be unlikely to mishandle a weapon. I tugged the trigger on what I mistook for an empty chamber. A grievous, personal failure that has nothing to do with politics.

Doug's parents insisted the court drop the case. They had clout, and the county did so. The family asked only that I finish college and send cards on holidays and pictures when I had a family. Both oaths I kept, discovering the profundity of their Christian forgiveness when my own children arrived.

Often throughout the next months, I'd lay at night and peer at the spackled ceiling. It is strange to become awake and unconscious at the same time. Thought, pondering, weighing, doubting, and hoping: they are all impossible. I don't mean they didn't exist. It was for me impossible to conceive them. You can fence in a desert. There's not much inside, but it's still property that belongs to you. For me neither fences nor property lines nor landmarks nor roads could separate the territory in my mind or bring it together. Country too big and too minute to divide, its emptiness was both infinitesimal and vast. But it was all there was.

The pharmacists filled the appropriate prescriptions, each of which temporarily salved my wounds. Therapists wanted to view the shooting as a thousand solitary events chained to one another. Any link, if altered, would alter the rest. If we knew which link to break, we'd be clairvoyant and freed from tragedy; since we don't, we are not culpable. This theory mitigated my guilt but remained disturbingly convenient.

 

Upon my return to classes, Mike asked how I'd passed the break.

I related the details.

When I finished, he was prepared.

"One. People kill other people. I killed some."

"In a war," I told him.

"You think that matters to them?"

"It was your job."

"Again, you think that matters to those who are killed?"

"Well, it matters to you, then."

"Does it?" Mike was not so far removed from cave, torch, or club as he pretended to be. His voice resided in a primitive place. Gravelly, and decisive, he commented and questioned with intent, like a lawyer skins a witness. His tone was never without the potential for cruelty. "You think because I killed people in a war and you did fucking up with a gun, I feel less badly?" He paused. "You did fuck up, by the way. If there's a difference, I was aiming, and that seems to be a lot closer to a crime. But there's friendly fire, too, which is like yours—an accident."

We sat for a while. "Those philosophers aren't wrong," he said finally.

"Which ones?"

"All of them. They just stand a long way back to see the words on the page. Your nose is against the book. So was mine. Now I can read a few words. You will, too."

Truth be told, I'd remain in a stupor for years, and always in its remnants.

"What his parents tried to pull is the sin. They're hanging this around your neck like chicken on an egg sucking dog. The law wouldn't put you away for life, but they will. Graduating college, marrying, having your kids, if they have their way, all of it will smell like death. Fuck them. They're ghouls."

I looked at him. "Fuck you, how about that?" I said.

"There he is." He clapped my shoulder. "That's my boy."

 

In middle school, my son—a poet of national regard it would later turn out—delivered me an essay to look over. The third paragraph included two sentences with repeated information. Cut one, I told him. I can't. A paragraph requires five sentences, he said. An essay requires three body paragraphs, a paragraph a topic statement with three supporting sentences and a concluding sentence. The introduction includes the three topic sentences from the three paragraphs followed by a thesis broad enough to encompass them all. Writing has become counting.

K-12 teachers have difficulty instructing writers because the act is personal, so the process and the technique vary from one student to the next. The solution: drain it of the subjective. Choose subjects no one cares about and count sentences. Everyone knows how to count, and numbers are beyond debate.

Literature is similar. The best moves through words to transcend them and create an experience. But experiences differ from one person to the next, so schools barter the humanity for symbols and hidden meanings, which they control because the answer is in the teacher's edition.

I wrote despite my cynicism on such matters. Arduous, labored, often sentimental prose. Stories mostly, so I could work outside of the above constraints. No one graded fiction; they just nodded and patted your head like you were a good dog.

On campus, I wore green military trousers an army reserve pal had outgrown and three flannel shirts I alternated with football jerseys, one mine from high school, another purchased for a dollar from a thrift shop that announced my first name on the back paired with another's last. I thought we might become heroes somehow, Bruce Thomas and myself.

Winter following the shooting, Holly, for whom I had pined some time, crossed a room and asked if I'd take her for a walk. I would worry later pity was behind the offer, or that she found the chase of romance exasperating enough to settle on a horse clearly not up to much of a trot.

Once we watched someone get arrested outside a bar. "Next time it could be me," I told her.

She tipped herself into me and whispered the things women do when men go crazy, and she kept whispering them until, slowly, over many years, I passed the place where such a fate would be so.

 

Mike's prose demonstrated the talent of a mimic, but he never ventured much beyond imitation. No potential for revelation resided on the page because he found those moments of unfiltered light blasting into your skull disturbing.

He clearly loved stories, however. In the city's ancient bars, he drank with the ragged clientele slumped on stools or in booths: shriveled men whose histories had shriveled them further. Mike coaxed them into revelry. The great books often disappointed Mike in some regards. These old fellow's tales sprung from water and dirt and blood and human frailty. Their craft was crude, but so is adobe, and its buildings remain as beautiful and functional as any culture.

Mike moved on to a community college job. Adjunct. English 101 and Criminal Justice. He ran seven to ten miles every day. He lifted weights religiously. He had entered middle age early with greying hair, but the rest of his body opposed the notion. He and his wife, Melissa, moved into a brick home in a fashionable Spokane South Hill neighborhood. Mike stood for public office. He led local political caucuses and actively campaigned for candidates in national elections. He wrote sparingly for various local publications. I wasn't certain what kept him from his keyboard. Perhaps accounting for what he had done to take himself seriously enough to compose a worthwhile sentence was more important than typing one out.

He was hopeful in an awkward way. He maintained a childlike faith the universe would square the books for him if he was wise enough to permit it. Yet, he would not permit it. He possessed no patience for the world. He had no room for a wandering nature or fate to reveal itself to him. For all his book smarts, he refused to be acted upon, saw weakness in restraint, and thought those advocating it either lazy or uncommitted. He had too little time to dawdle, yet dawdling occupied most of his life.

He believed he was separate, and it was an ember he puffed and fanned, and this, too, joined us. Killing another man, accidentally or on purpose, throws a damp draft upon whatever burns inside you that might accomplish something of worth or decency. If killing made him different, he wanted that difference to contain something other than blood. We both had debts we couldn't square, and we could either abandon them or at least try to keep up the interest.

What we considered capital, however, differed. Despite his abrupt and passionate rants, Mike longed for admiration, but only on his terms. He joined MENSA and tried to recruit me, but I didn't have the artillery for that kind of battlefield. Eventually, he possessed too much powder himself and told one of his fellow geniuses he would tear off his head and shit down his neck if he didn't cease and desist his snide commentary. The group changed meeting times and venues and didn't inform Mike, a polite method of expulsion.

My sights were lower. I just wanted to live with myself.

It appeared Mike had managed quite well in that regard. He mingled with peers in academia, the local papers, radio, television, the art scene, politics. His reputation was as a brilliant savage who possessed what these tamer souls saw as the primitive howl of romance along with the civility of reason.

 

When Mike visited his doctor in his 47th year complaining of anxiety, the GP wrote him a prescription for Xanax and then put him on the treadmill as a formality. After five minutes, the doctor tore off the results and excused himself. Another entered. Sextuple bypass. His cholesterol was double what bad was. He'd inherited heart attacks just like he had Vietnam. No amount of weight lifting or miles under his tennis shoes or books he read or highbrow friends he acquired could protect him. All his progress, undermined.

I sent him a book: On Fire, Larry Brown's memoir as a volunteer fireman. On the cover, beneath the title was, "Life, Death, Choices." When I visited the hospital, Mike had read the book twice. It was perfect, he claimed, just what a heart patient required. Others with Mike's intellect might have found it sentimental, but Mike was completely sincere. He cried. Heart, that he thought he could rely upon. His rearing had plenty, and unlike his intellect, his family and peers celebrated it. Heart never required his attention, and now the seed of all those metaphors of bravery and adventure he took for granted had failed him.

And that was the beginning of his end.

Mike's recovery was nothing if not difficult; in fact it was so much so, it never really occurred. The hospital transitioned him home, where he slept a good deal and slugged down painkillers, a junky mentality we also shared. Bandaged and bound to his couch, he often stretched for ideas in conversation he once accessed with ease. He began to drink beyond casual. He woke once to find a teenager in his kitchen, robbing his medicine cabinet.

Months later, he still had difficulty shifting from laying to sitting on the sofa. Rheumatoid arthritis, the doctors concluded, a horrible illness. Lifting a glass requires a strategy. His sternum split and wired back, every breath was expensive. Lung infections followed, along with tremors, migraine headaches, and fear.

That Spring, I stopped at dusk. Mike sat on the steps crying. Melissa had left. He did not know what to make of it, though he was certain it was his doing. He didn't admit to hurting her. It was not the first time, Melissa would later tell me. He didn't punch or slap her. Instead, he bullied her into corners and walls with his shoulders and torso, his hands at his side or behind his back if he was especially angry. She'd endured the others, but this instance the act seemed to come from weakness rather than simple frustration, and the former frightened her more than the latter.

Mike moved into a dark, ground-level apartment downtown, one of a series of places he would reside, an itinerant soldier humping from one foxhole to the next. Like Job, the maladies multiplied: PTSD, prostate cancer, Agent Orange complications, another heart procedure.

For a while we grew closer, or I should say we spent more time together. I brought him Johnny Cash's American Songs, and when "Drive On" came on, he cried. We watched Full Metal Jacket together, and he spoke to the television screen for the duration of the movie. He gave me Dispatches by Michael Herr. "The only one that got it right," he told me. I loaned him an extra television, and he shot it. The cliché troubled him more than the loss of property.

In the meantime, I married Holly and received my MFA from the University of Iowa. Yellow manila envelopes haunted me for a few years, but I eventually began to publish stories and essays and then a non-fiction book with Holly, and following that, my first novel. My children were born. I bought a house.

At stop signs, though, I still checked both ways seven, eight times. People blasted their horns at me. It wasn't caution. It was a lack of faith in myself even in such rudimentary instances. Preparing for the worst is good sense, but I never expected anything else. Each night I went to bed and thanked the universe I hadn't hurt anyone, then reflected on my days and became convinced I had inflicted damage on the cashier at the Seven Eleven when I growled over miscounted change, or the florist in the grocery who smiled at me and I replied by showing her my back. I became as mute as I could manage. I listened to others, but like a boxer studies another, a counter puncher who bobs and tucks to survive the round.

The killing turned history, one that emanated from a point farther and farther past like a distant star that could be seen only at night. Its willowy threads have traveled so far, the light is faint and full of ambiguity and contradiction, good for nothing practical, just wonder and doubt. And regret. It took me no time to move from standing in the shower to rain to a soggy funeral. I calculated what other people wanted and responded. It might have appeared unselfish, but it was not. In a way it was the most selfish manner in which a person could behave.

Judge not, lest ye be judged, the lord says to those certain of their righteousness, and I might have appeared to obey. Yet my lack of judgment didn't come from decency but confusion. Not from faith but a lack of it. Judgment is something a good person turns away from. They pardon others. I could not pound the gavel and call the court to order, so how could I have delivered anyone mercy?

A fiction exists about this sort of thing: that it's the seed of character. It is not. You believe there are values there, religion, a philosophy. But first and always, it is sterile. If it was a room, it would be an interminable hall with rows of doors, each opening to something useless. Some quit in such straits. I am not better than them. Maybe less intelligent, maybe more stubborn, but if you ask me, I am simply trapped by the habit of gravity and stumbling forward.

As for my own work, I believe drama is what happens after an event, not what leads up to it. That belief is hard-earned. Guilt guts me each time I sit before a keyboard. The moment the actual blade enters you and tears your skin is just a beginning. The story is that you continue to bleed and drag entrails with you the rest of your days, into your work, into your children's lives, your wife's life, into your philosophy and your religion. Even if the wound closes, your awareness of it remains not just in your past but in the threads that make up the fabric of which you are still composed. The awareness is constant; it never sleeps; it fuels your fears and mitigates your victories. It turns everything you experience strange and isolates you with its strangeness. It is a seismic shift, then the constant pressure of tectonic plates against one another that continues after. I may guess at most everything in my life, but this is no guess. It's the one thing I know. That constant pressure has created me, and the redemption I have managed is part of that accidental and perplexing geography, and it has occurred in painfully slow steps as those I love navigate with me the barrenness between my conscience and forgiveness and goodwill.

 

I asked Mike to read some of what I worked on. He refused. Not impolitely. He was too busy. I asked to look at his work. A swap. He wasn't writing. I know now a fear existed in him that occupied the space between the idea of being a writer and writing itself. I had encountered something similar in Iowa. Everyone talked like writers, and at night we drank like writers. All had talent. Few were able to face their keyboards day in and day out.

On the eve of his third marriage, which would last less than a year, an editor at the newspaper and Mike's best friend organized a bachelor party. The conversation turned toward this idea or that, and it appeared to Mike we had forgotten him. He answered by unloading his pistol into the front yard lawn.

Weapons comforted him. His arsenal continued to increase those years, and he positioned guns throughout the house. He talked less. He argued words had perished from overuse. Simple repetition was undoing an epoch of sense. Books were no more than white space and black marks, a Jackson Pollock canvas. Listening thus was senseless, too. People who appeared to be in conversation were just narrating personal fictions. Everybody talked at once, but each remained snared by the trap in his or her own head.

You'd figure someone would have a monopoly on his own life's details, but it seems the one living a life is least qualified to understand it. If you have a conscience, it humbles you past truth. If you don't, you turn out the hero, also past truth. Mike still spoke convincingly, but now his arguments were weighted with the unspeakable because no words translated the catastrophe of his existence. He had longed for a lexicon he could share with others. He argued all those years and never said what he meant. At 20, even 25, this can appear a tortured charm. By the time you're in your 50s, though, you just look confused.

The truth is, for all the cynicism Mike spouted, he remained vulnerable. He seemed to insist upon it. Time with him was an exercise that left me exhausted and exhilarated. Mike distrusted allies more than opponents. Worse yet, allies bored him. He and his closest friends argued constantly. The end for me was engaging my curiosity; for him it was victory. Such is the brick and mortar for the distant, unresolved kinship that occurs too often between men. We construct a barrier rather than a bridge to cross to one another.

Divorced once more, he purchased a small house among the hippies and artists in Peaceful Valley with a VA loan. He applied for a concealed weapon permit and unconcealed it whenever someone annoyed him. Crossing the street was an adventure if a car didn't halt quickly enough to suit him. He hollered at me about a Robert McNamara book I had read and he had not. It was not an intellectual discussion but a harangue. At the bookstore parking lot, an attendant turned snotty, and before I could get between them, he had pulled the kid through the service opening by his sweatshirt.

I backed him off before it came to blows, and he unscrewed the top on a bottle of Xanax and popped three into his mouth.

This man who once thrived on argument now grew intolerant of anyone not embracing his own positions, which grew more and more extreme and less and less sensible. He drank more and went out less. He read, but more and more often he couldn't recall the subject matter. His friends were not fewer, but those artists and community stalwarts that found him intriguing now saw him as a boor. His new acquaintances were less interesting and more dangerous, as he himself was becoming.

The college relegated him to remedial classes and a glorified study hall. He would have been let go had he not filled one of the veteran hires the state required. His last published piece of writing was for a tiny local neighborhood paper. He implored me to accompany him on a road trip to the reservation. I reluctantly agreed. We visited The War Bonnet Tavern, where the patrons all eyed us with bitter suspicion until we ordered Lucky Lagers. The bartender asked for our IDs. I'd just turned forty and Mike was well past fifty. We complied. Sorry, the bartender said. We thought you were liquor control. This was food enough for an amusing anecdote, and I hoped writing it might awaken Mike.

It was night by the time we left the tavern. Mike asked if I knew a place to bunk. He wanted to get drunk. I did. A friend near the site where I killed Doug Groomes. Mike knew the place haunted me. He even brought up that history with our hosts. They politely changed the subject.

The article he produced was about drunk Indians and me as his idiotic sidekick. It was poorly written. He didn't care. It hurt me. He didn't care.

After that I was finished with him.

But I must pause here.

Those video games where you shoot everybody, some say it encourages killing, but kids aimed sticks or carrots at one another and went blam-blam-blam way before computers. What keeps us from revisiting the wild west is the knowledge that you have a life and so does anyone you might shoot. Though they may appear enemies and dark and paltry in the moment, they will weigh plenty if you have to tote their souls. Heroes are awarded medals for killing, but they still don't sleep at night.

My killing was a failure of character, a lack of forethought. I am an anomaly, a cultural hiccup, a yokel uninvested in weapons who felt required to maintain a ruse. Was this the culture's flaw or my own? The latter certainly. The former... I don't have the distance necessary for that sort of judgment.

For a combat soldier, none of the above is so. Killing is character. It is the result of forethought and careful and thorough understanding of the function of one's weapons. And all this serves the ancient and long-enduring versions of masculinity present in every culture on the face of the earth.

Yet humans like no other beings on this planet are aware life is not infinite; it ends, and each time it does, so do possibilities for love and hatred, achievement and failure, bravery and cowardice—all this we will never know, and neither will the dead. If curtailing one haunts me, how can witnessing the end of many and instigating those of others do anything but plague a man or a woman, uniformed or not? That a general ordered a colonel who ordered someone else to tell you to slay another and risk being cut down to boot justifies the chain of command, but it does not relieve one who tugs a trigger or thrusts a round into a mortar muzzle from his existential terror.

No amount of therapy or sympathy has erased my guilt. I cannot imagine any pills or conversation or confession or religious epiphanies or philosophical awakenings that would retrieve Mike from what must have been a posse of demons at his heels.

He escaped them at times, but not often and not for long.

He told me once the closest to epiphany he'd experienced was Christmas Eve the year after he left the war. He'd spent his day hawking Christmas trees, then drove to an overlook with a gram of good marijuana. Finally, at 11:30, he returned to town to discover the church parking lot full of cars. He parked and entered the sanctuary filled with hymns and carols and families in red and green. He remained the whole service attempting to sing with them. The words were printed on the missal. "It would have been easy," he said. He just couldn't bring himself to do it.

For me, a constant spiritual presence exists whose membrane we occasionally penetrate to interact with the gods or simple, transcendent beauty. It remains separate from churches or those inside. I wonder if the man I killed knew nothing else in the end, and if god revealed himself to his frantic brain as he was dying, and when he passed over, if perhaps his earthly struggles ceased but his epiphany continued.

My last conversation with Mike was no conversation at all, but a drunken message he left on my answering machine at Christmas. He reminded us he hadn't forgotten who we were, hadn't forgotten we were important to him, and that our importance had not diminished in his eyes because we had not spoken in some years. And he wished us Merry Christmas.

Spring, he finally bought the Harley he longed for with his Agent Orange benefits, and three months later he was found dead in a motel by members of his bike club, a woman half his age next to him, very much alive and non-plussed.

 

In the meantime, my children grew and prospered and failed but mostly prospered, and I fought the fights parents engage in to protect them, some necessary, others irrational and grounded in my own fears. My wife tried to teach me to separate the two, and I learned just about the time the last graduated high school.

Melissa and our family became great friends. She introduced my children to her charities through Christmas projects and donations. On the porch the night she left, Mike said he didn't think his wife liked men, but upon their divorce, she married a geologist. He was male. It was the sort of man she would tolerate that had changed.

And she wrote. Stories. One appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories not long after Mike passed. He dodged that bullet at least.

Melissa might have said Mike wanted to go out the way he did. Likely, he'd claim this was so, too. But they would both be lying. Melissa to comfort others, and Mike to comfort himself. The recon grunt who survived the Vietnamese jungle and returned both broken and reconstructed by himself—a faulty structure on occasion, on others a monument of sorts—that man didn't figure on dying, even as he hurtled toward his end.

If it were this act or that habit that put Mike in error, he could have corrected his course, but it seems he was amiss in a more fundamental way: not rudderless but uncertain what a rudder was for. In war, Mike had entered those hinterlands where reason and fear cannot abide. Then he left them. Then he returned. In the process, he found lights—several likely—literature, history, politics, and tales of strangers. And when he steered their direction,some swelled and maybe warmed him awhile, and others flickered like a match in a hard wind and smoked and died. Mike lacked the innocence necessary to pray to a god. Instead he grieved that god's murder, and his own existence was complicit in the crime. This is what his reading and thinking and his pain and absence of pain—I don't know if he ever felt pleasure—added up to: a dead end.

I don't know if he realized the other possibility. The dead end wasn't dead at all but a cul-de-sac that turned you round and round until you looked at the grass and cars in the driveways and the wear on the houses and then their fresh coats of paint and the children who grew and the adults who faltered, and then simple was not simple. Black was not black. White was not white. They were not grey, a muddled sad mix. They were white at times and then less so, and black was first twilight, then dusk. Full dark, moonless dark, even, was tempered by starlight and soon surrendered to morning's gloaming and finally a sliver of dawn in the east.

Time is what we wait for death to end. And as Shakespeare tells it, what's between is a play, but it hurts. Mike knew this better than most. Too well. And now perhaps he resides in a place where stories and wars and death and their hammers of good and evil do not penetrate. There, maybe he will surrender the burden requiring him to discern one from the other and allow the deities and earth and worms to separate the two.