“Well, all right then, come on back to Oklahoma. I told you I’d put you to work.”
“I got a job.”
“That newspaper thing.”
“That’s the one.”
“You know what, Cason old buddy?”
“What?”
“You sound like you got some woes to live on.”
“How do you mean?”
“Your voice. There’s an imp down in it.”
I tried to be very calm. Booger was like that. Some people thought because he was raw he was stupid. That would be far from the truth. And he had an instinct about things, could see the slightest disruption in the force. Not that he usually gave a damn how anyone felt, but he had keen radar. And in my case, he probably did care.
“I’m just tired, Booger.”
“Do I need to come down there?”
“I can’t imagine what for.”
Booger laughed. “I know I make you nervous, bro, but you ain’t got no worries. We done thrown in together. We been through hell’s ass and out the other side. We’re devils together.”
“I guess we are.”
“Sure we are. Now, listen up. You get to needing old Booger, you just flip the phone and hit the number. You’d do that, right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I don’t want my little darling here to grow cold, so I’m going to hang up and mount up.”
“Enjoy the ride, and go light on the spurs.”
“Hell, Baby Man, I’m a professional.”
When he hung up, oddly enough, I felt lonely.
Before arriving in Camp Rapture I had made a detour to get my handful of things from Houston where I had them in storage, and then I had made a detour to visit Booger.
I call Booger a friend, but I’m not really sure I mean it. He may be more of an attachment, like a growth of some sort. It was like I told Dad. I want to get rid of him, cut him out, but there are complications and attachments.
Booger makes me nervous. He makes everyone nervous.
Booger has a real first and last name, but he doesn’t go by them and doesn’t like either mentioned in polite society. He isn’t the kind of guy you take to a fancy tea. You tell him not to handle all the sandwiches, open them up to see what was inside, he might shove your head in the punch bowl and hold you there till you drowned, then piss on the carpet on his way out.
He lacks patience.
He’s not tall, but he’s thick and vigorous, and has a shiny shaved head the color of a penny. Racially, he’s marooned somewhere between black guy and honky, with a slightly Asian cast to his eyes. In Iraq, the handful who liked him called him the Copper Cat.
He’s the kind of guy who’s not averse to scratching his privates in public or beating a smartass near to death with a car antenna, which he nearly did once. No one remembers the source of the disagreement that led to the beating, not even Booger, though he has a faint memory about an argument over a game of horseshoes. And though two witnesses saw him give the beating, they had a sudden loss of sight and memory when it came time for them to give information to the law.
They get free beer for life at Booger’s bar now, or at least it’s offered. According to Booger, they don’t actually come around and hang out, not after what they saw in the parking lot. The guy Booger got onto, they found him out near the town dump with his pants pulled down and the antenna pretty far up his ass, minus lubricant, and he was running a low-grade fever and hallucinating. He lived, but he developed a solid case of memory loss himself, told some insane story about being attacked and raped by a roving band of belligerent homosexual Bible salesmen. He drives a car that won’t get radio; missing an antenna.
Around his little town of Hootie Hoot, Oklahoma, the cops make a point of leaving Booger alone. To them, he’s like the big bad ghost that lives on the hill, in the back of his bar.
Before I had come to Camp Rapture, I had been hanging out with Booger at his gun range, and then his bar. And though me and him are on good terms, it’s always a little precarious when we’re in the process of bonding. A certain shift of light, a fart blow in his direction, and he could go off the beam faster than a Baptist preacher in Las Vegas with a pack of ribbed condoms and the church funds in his pocket.
Booger had never gone off on me, but I had seen his eyes narrow and his mouth twitch from time to time, and I made a habit to watch for any telltale signs when we were together, minded my Ps and Qs around him and wondered why I bothered at all; that bother is something I keep coming back to, investigating and arriving nowhere.
I suppose it’s our Iraq connection. That kind of thing, making war together, gives us a link; sometimes, for me, that link is like a ball and chain. Booger, in many ways, has yet to quit fighting the war. Originally, he moved his inborn hatred of just about everybody from Oklahoma to Iraq, and now that he was home again, shooting squirrels and deer didn’t do it anymore. He kept hoping they’d call him back to Iraq. He liked the smell of blood, the charred odor of burning corpses. He liked being shot at. He told me so. He was that soldier who gave the rest of us a bad name.
It’s possible he could go to Iraq again. They’re taking anyone who can fog up a mirror these days. But last word from the military was they hated to see him go, but sort of had to let him, which gives you some idea of where Booger is on the reenlistment charter. They were beginning to suspect he might have killed some of our soldiers, ones he deemed weak, pussies not driven to take enough lives and enjoy the pleasure. They called it friendly fire, and he was suspected, but if it was Booger, one thing I can assure you, it wasn’t friendly. I hoped it was just a rumor. I had to believe it was.
For some reason Booger forgave my not being gung ho about killing. I did what I had to do. When I killed, I felt as if I had collected the souls of the dead, and they were heavy, a weight I didn’t want to carry. Booger knew how I felt, but in me he didn’t see it as a weakness. Coming from me, somehow, it was novel, a point of interest that intrigued him, like watching a dog leap through a ring of fire in the circus. In others, thoughts of compassion for the enemy or civilians, doubts of purpose and feelings of guilt would have been suspect and common. I was Booger’s soft spot, his Achilles’ heel. He had saved my life more than once in Iraq. Maybe he thought of me as a pet.
When I had seen him last, we had gone to his gun range. Guns are a passion of his. Shooting things with big guns so he can see them blow up, shooting them until they grow smaller and smaller and finally become one with the universe, that’s a big part of his life. He even has old cars out there and he has the big guns with the big bullets, as I have heard him say, and he likes to shoot those cars with the big bullets and see how things jump to pieces. The flying sparkle of those pieces in the sunlight is like a religious experience for Booger. In their quick bright bursts, it’s as if he sees the face of, and hears the voice of, the god of war.
After the gun range, the bar was Booger’s little slice of heaven. It’s no more than a mile from his range. And it’s where he offered me a job. But like everything else with Booger, even had I been interested, it came with complications.
Way I got the offer was we shot stuff up with the big guns and then went into the bar. When we came in, sitting on a stool was a very fine-looking Hispanic woman wearing a pair of shorts so small and tight, way she was sitting, at first I thought she wasn’t wearing any pants, just a tight white blouse and some flip-flops. It was a thrilling moment, until she shifted and I saw the blue jean shorts, cut so thin and so far up her butt that the denim had to be tickling the back of her tongue.
“How you doin’?” Booger said to the woman. He grinned at her and patted her on the back. “You still ballin’ for money?”
“I ain’t won no lottery yet,” she said. “You lookin’ to clean your pipes, Booger?”
