Читать книгу Where War Ends - Tom Voss - Страница 19

7

FAMILY TIME

Jack led me up the stairs, past his glaring wife, and into his bedroom. He guided me through the room and into the bathroom and shut the door behind us.

I’d transitioned into the care of the therapists at the VA, so I wasn’t going into Jack’s clinic as often. So it made sense that this time, when he asked me to bring him some weed, he asked me to bring it to him at home. And that felt like a step in the right direction. Smoking pot with a licensed clinical social worker was a step up, mental health–wise, from pounding shots at the corner bar. It was good for me to be around another combat vet. Someone who understood what I’d been through. Right?

“Come over and hang out,” he’d said. “We’ll chill, we can smoke. It’ll be a good time.”

I drove to his home in Elkhorn, nearly an hour southwest of the city. My beat-up Honda trudged along dark freeways that cut through frozen cornfields and farmland. I arrived at a two-story single-family home in the heart of Wisconsin suburbia in the dead of winter. It’s the kind of place where cops and teachers drink Miller Lite during Sunday football games and take their kids to basketball tournaments at the YMCA. I rang the bell, and Jack opened the door. He led me through the kitchen, which opened onto a large, sunken living room. His whole family was there, sitting in the dark, watching a movie together.

“We’re just gonna be upstairs for a bit,” Jack told them.

His wife looked at me but said nothing. Maybe no one had told her, when they married, that in the holy military trinity of God-country-service, family was an optional fourth add-on.

As I greeted his family with a quick wave, something flickered inside me, then faded. It felt far away, like the soft thud of bass music pulsing from a distant car. It felt like something I used to know, something I used to be a part of. It felt like Saturday morning in the blue house at the top of the hill. It felt like the blue-gray tufts of shag carpeting in the living room, or the taste of raw cookie dough when my mom let Beck and me lick the bowl clean. It felt like begging for my friend to come over and play. Then the flicker became a sound, and I could hear my dad’s voice telling me no, my friend couldn’t come over right now. Because right now was family time.

Family time.

I couldn’t look Jack’s wife in the eye again. I was tumbling down a rabbit hole into another memory of my family. I was fifteen. I was sitting at the dining room table with my sister and my mom. My dad was standing over us, holding a handful of burnt, crumbling debris in his hand. He was so mad, his eyes were set to bulge out of their sockets.

“Are you kids smoking GRASS?” he sputtered.

Beck and I managed to swallow our laughter. “Grass!” we’d giggle later, laughing at the dated term for marijuana, which we called weed, or pot, but never grass. Beck and I seemed to agree, telepathically, that our only hope for survival was our mutual silence. She knew the weed wasn’t hers, just like I knew it wasn’t mine. But I didn’t know if it was hers, and she didn’t know if it was mine, and we didn’t want to throw each other under the bus in case one of us was, in fact, guilty. Beck thought the weed belonged to a friend of mine. I thought it was probably her boyfriend’s. We both looked down at the table and said nothing.

My dad waited, his whole body tense, for one of us to admit to our dark deeds. As the social work supervisor for the county, my dad spent his days with juvenile delinquents. He worked with social workers whose job it was to help families stay together and help biting, kicking, screaming, law-breaking adolescents stay out of jail. His worst fear seemed to be one of his own kids becoming the type of kid he worked with every day — the type of kid who stole cars and sold drugs and smoked lots and lots of grass.

My mom started to cry.

“I didn’t bring children into this world,” she wept, “to do drugs.”

After what felt like an hour but was probably only five minutes, my dad took the handful of grass, puts it in a ziplock baggie, and announced, “I’m taking this to the lab for testing.” The lab was the police forensics lab, which was located in the same complex as his office. The implication was that he knew people at the lab, and boy, would we be sorry when he got the results back and the results pointed to grass.

A few days later he got the results back.

The substance he had in his hand that day was a big dirt clod mixed with actual grass — the kind that grows on your lawn. It was not, to his great disappointment, marijuana.

He shared this news with Beck and me with narrowed eyes, like we’d pulled one over on him. Maybe we’d switched the grass with actual grass when his back was turned.

As I followed Jack past his snuggling family and up the stairs, the faint flicker of these memories began to shine brighter. Their glow was like a spotlight on a part of me I’d forgotten. It was the morality instilled in me by my parents, the morality that defined me before I went to war.

Family time is sacred, it said.

You shouldn’t be smoking grass, it said.

You shouldn’t be smoking grass during family time, it said. Especially not someone else’s family time.

Upstairs, on Jack’s bathroom counter, proudly displayed like a trophy, was a marijuana vaporizer. It had this giant bag that trapped the cannabis vapor so you could take long pulls and get super high. I took two or three long, deep breaths from the bag. About twenty minutes later, when we were done smoking, we walked downstairs. I’m not sure if I said goodbye to his family. I walked out the door, got into my car, and drove home, stoned out of my mind. I wondered who else Jack had had over in the middle of family time to do sordid things in the bathroom while the kids watched Disney movies downstairs.