I feel his thick, fleshy hand squeeze my shoulder tight, and then I can’t help it—there’re tears flooding my eyes. “Russell, man, that’s like the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long-ass time.”
I have to cover my face.
“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to pull my shit together. “It’s been a hard road, man, and, uh, that just means a lot to me.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “Anyway, we’re gonna be friends, right?”
I wipe my face, looking up at him from my hunched-over position.
Here I was ready to dismiss him as, like, a good ol’ boy, ex-marine, or something—a little overweight but strong and masculine in a way that’s always kinda intimidated me. But if anything, he’s really the total opposite of that. His face isn’t hard or threatening. His smile is open and sincere. His brownish-green eyes, obscured behind wire-rimmed glasses, are deep set with knowing and kindness. I’m actually pretty embarrassed, ’cause the more I truly study his features, the more I realize my initial assessment of him was totally off base. I mean, he’s like a big stuffed teddy bear. But, of course, me being from liberal San Francisco, my assumption is that all guys from the South who have crew cuts and wear college football T-shirts and like to grill outdoors and drink Budweiser are all gonna be these redneck, gun-toting, gay-bashing, closed-minded evangelical assholes.
Shit, man, it’s pretty pathetic. I mean, here I am accusing other people of being closed-minded when, really, I’m the one who was being a total judgmental asshole. I feel ashamed suddenly, and I want to apologize to Russell, even though that wouldn’t make any sense to him.
I mean, what could I say?
So, instead, I try to reach out to him in basically the only way I know how.
“Hey,” I say, kinda quietly. “You wanna go smoke a bowl, maybe, when you’re done eatin’?”
He leans back in the straining canvas chair. “You know it, brother. Thank you. I appreciate that.”
We sort of “cheers” our bottles of Budweiser together, and then Russell starts in on a massive chicken leg. I’d say he’s able to get about three or four bites down before, really out of nowhere, this giant cat with scruffy, matted fur and a missing chunk out of its left ear pounces onto Russell’s ample belly.
“Hi, there, Jezzy,” says Russell sweetly, rubbing its good ear with the palm of his hand. The cat’s not impressed. It fixes its scowl on Russell’s face and starts meowing and growling and hissing dramatically.
“This here’s Jezebel,” Russell tells me, laughing a little to himself. “We might think we run things ’round here, but ol’ Jezzy, she knows better.”
He rips off a pretty sizable piece of chicken from his plate and dangles it up over the cat, who chomps the big piece of meat down faster’n I can fucking blink. The cat then goes on to demand a piece of steak, then a piece of potato. It’s not till she’s sampled each and every food item on Russell’s plate that she finally seems contented, curling up right there on his lap and falling asleep hard—her tongue slightly lolling and some drool hanging down.
“Women!” says Russell.
We both laugh at that.
After eating, Russell takes me inside to go smoke a bowl in the backroom. He’s got his own pipe and his own stash, too, so we just match each other back and forth, making small talk and whatever. The room must be used as some sort of study or something, ’cause besides a funky, torn couch and some straight-back wooden chairs, the rest of the space is completely stacked to the top with books—I mean, everything from spy novels to historical textbooks to, like, Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. He even has a book of military writing by Mao Tse-tung. Fucking awesome.
“Man,” I say, probably sounding too excited. “This place is super great. How long have you and Kelly been living here?”
Just about two years, he tells me. They moved up from Savannah, where he used to work leading carriage tours around the city.
“I’ll tell you, man, you wanna hear some interesting stories, just talk to a carriage driver. Those guys I worked with were like history geniuses. Did you know the pirate Blackbeard held the city of Charleston for ransom? I mean, that motherfucker stuck up the whole goddamn place. He used to light fuses in his beard when he was charging into battle so there’d be all this smoke comin’ off him—scare the shit outta everybody. Blackbeard was a heavy dude. All those pirates were.”
“Pirates, huh?”
He goes on to tell me about how almost all the pirate captains were ex-Navy-trained soldiers who had been either disenchanted or disengaged with the service. He talks to me about their ships and military strategies—both of us still passing the bowl.
“Down here,” he says, “we all come from a culture of fighters. Sure, there was the Civil War and all, but it’s more’n that. The way I was brought up, back in Mobile, my daddy instilled in me that it was my duty to serve my country. Joinin’ the service wasn’t a question; it was something I had to do.”
He tells me about going to school at the Citadel and how, after graduating, he joined the Rangers and was deployed to a bunch of different unstable Latin American countries.
“Basically,” he says, as though talking in a dream—his eyes are good and glazed over at this point—“our orders were just to march through the jungle until we met resistance. When we met resistance, well, it was either they killed you or you killed them. I had no idea what the hell I was doing there. All I knew was that these people were trying to kill me.
