He paused for just a brief second, and I could feel Roy hanging on the pause. He was listening in a way I hadn’t seen him listen before. I could see it on his face.
“When we’d go out on a mission, they’d issue us Darvon and codeine, which I didn’t much use. They were for the pain, and I was lucky enough not to have gotten injured. And then they gave us Dex. You know. Dexedrine. Heavy-duty speed. Really good-quality stuff straight from Uncle Sam. And sometimes they’d give us a steroid shot. We kind of knew what they were doing. They were experimenting with supersoldiers. Pharma-created supersoldiers. I didn’t get tired so easy with Dex. I could do so much more in a day and hardly feel it. But it wasn’t just about physical energy. The Dex made me feel powerful. Hell, it made me feel invincible. I could face anything on that stuff.
“I didn’t find out until about a year after I got home that there was another reason for all that ‘better living through chemistry’ stuff. They were trying to get on top of combat stress. They figured out that drugs could help guys hold it together through the worst Nam had to offer. Guys break down under the stress, and this was mostly keeping it from happening. I had a counselor at the VA after I got home, and I don’t know if he was supposed to tell me this or not, but he told me the breakdown rate was ten percent in World War Two. Four percent in Korea. But Nam? One percent. Better living through chemistry, like I said. But then he told me the downside. What they learned in the long run. You give a guy enough drugs to hold it together during combat, it doesn’t keep him from the effects of the trauma. Just postpones it. It’s all there waiting for him when the drugs wear off. But, hell, I didn’t need him to tell me that. I was a case study in it by then.”
He stopped to take a breath, and you could’ve heard a pin drop in that room. And everybody but Roy and me had heard this a gazillion times before.
“So I started doing a ton of Dex,” Joe said. “You would think there’d be a limit to how much I could get, but there wasn’t. There was an amount the army recommended, but in my unit they were handing the stuff out like candy. I don’t know what it was like in other guys’ units, but that stuff flowed like a waterfall in mine. But the problem was, it wore off. And when it wore off, you felt so bad. I mean, you just wanted to chew somebody’s head off. So here we are, a bunch of guys with guns who were just about ready to murder somebody over nothing because it’s so hard to come down off that stuff. The more Dex I took, the worse it felt at the end of the day. And I couldn’t sleep. I tried the Darvon and codeine, but it wasn’t enough. So that’s when I started smoking scag.”
I thought he would say what scag was on his next breath, but he didn’t. So I missed a sentence or two of his sharing, catching Roy’s attention.
“What is that?” I whispered in his ear.
“Heroin,” he mouthed back. No real sound.
“. . . like, two dollars for a hit of really pure stuff, and it was everywhere. So I leave to go over there like this perfect Boy Scout, and I come back stateside addicted to both speed and heroin. Lost my marriage and my little boy. My wife took him away and never told me where. I have no way to get in touch with her and tell her I have seven months clean and sober. I’ve been looking for them this whole time, but nothing so far. But my sponsor’s always telling me it takes time to clean up the wreckage of my past. Anyway, I have a decent job now, and a car that runs about ninety-five percent of the time. And that’s not bad for seven months. And I can get to sleep at night without using anything. I still don’t usually sleep too long, though. Like, two hours at a time. If I get down too deep, the nightmares start to get their hooks in.”
His eyes tracked over to Roy again.
I wondered if Roy had nightmares. If so, he had them quietly.
“That’s all I got to say for now,” Joe said. “Roy? You got anything you want to share?”
“No,” Roy said.
This time Joe did not even push him to say his name before the sharing moved on.
“Give you guys a lift home?”
We were walking through the parking lot when we heard it.
I stopped and turned. Roy kept going.
It was Joe.
“Roy,” I called. “Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier on your foot to take the ride?”
I watched him teeter to a halt on his crutches. Secure his balance. I watched his resistance crumble.
“I guess,” he said. “Yeah.”
I knew he didn’t want to get into a car with Joe, so I took his agreement to mean that he was in even more pain than I realized.
We moved off toward Joe’s car together. Slowly.
Joe drove a powder-blue Corvair, which was a model of car my mother once told me she would never so much as go near. Apparently they were not big on safety, those Corvairs. I didn’t care. I could tell Roy was tired and discouraged, and I just wanted to get us home.
Joe slid the seat way back on the passenger’s side to accommodate Roy’s crutches and bad foot. He helped my brother ease in. Then he came around the driver’s side and held his seat
