Another Broken Wizard by Colin Dodds Read Free Book Online

think I’m just going to walk this one,” Joe said.
    “I’m with you. How long does this stuff last?”
    “What? This stuff we’ve never done before and don’t know the freaking name of? Either two hours, or forever,” Joe said, laughing.
    The laughter made the patterns in the air swarm about us like giddy, ugly angels singing our unknown names. We laughed until the cold air burned our throats. It was twenty degrees out, and the park was empty—even the cops wouldn’t bother cruising by. The drugs flushed the exposed skin on my hands and face with blood, so it didn’t feel too cold. Tommy was quiet on the ground when we got to him. He stared at the parting clouds and moved his lips, like a movie character on the verge of prophecy.
    “The stars are coming out. But not when you need them. It’s just that there’s never enough. That’s the only way you even know you’re here. The light never comes all the way through,” he said, locking his eyes on Joe.
    “Come on, we’ll go to the light,” Joe said, offering down his hand and pulling him up.
    The light in question shot up from the foot of the hill, onto a series of rough-hewn granite slabs. In darkness broken only by dirty orange street lights, the bright white memorial lights stood out like the supernatural itself. On closer examination, the slabs listed the names of the young men from Massachusetts killed in Vietnam. We three men, young during another unpopular war, on drugs we didn’t recognize, wandered past the names of the dead. It should have been more sobering, I guess. But long years of Catholic faith and middle-class anxieties had made solemnity a hard sell for Joe and me. And Tommy was just too high to care. He sat on the freezing concrete and took in the view.
    “Your dad was in Vietnam. Was he fucked up by it?” Joe said.
    “I don’t think so. He doesn’t talk about it too much and he doesn’t talk about it too little. It definitely wasn’t a good time, to hear him tell it. Mom said he used to get rattled when helicopters flew by.”
“He got shot, right?”
“In the leg. They almost had to amputate it,” I said.
“That’s fucking crazy,” Tommy said.
“What does he say about it, about being there?” Joe asked.
    Joe had never met his own father. And he was scared of my dad as a kid, but also fascinated. Sons are always on the prowl for some idea of how to live. Dad never much liked Joe. But it was touch-and-go even with me, his own son, for a while.
    “Yeah, he’s funny about it. One time I asked him why we never went camping. He said, ‘because I spent two years in the jungle being shot at, that’s why.’”
“Most of these guys died,” Tommy said.
“I think all of them did,” Joe said.
“Really? You think?”
    I wandered away from the memorial, to the darkness where the grass and the concrete met. I looked out over a pond and the golf course rising on the hill beyond it, to see what the drugs would make of it. Poised in hallucination, I lost the thread of the conversation. I thought of Joe, how he spun gold out of ordinary things—petty arguments or trying to get laid or getting high or holding a grudge or drinking— simply by taking them too far.
    “… It was the Domino Theory. We couldn’t let Communists take over the little countries and we couldn’t really go all out, because of the threat of nuclear annihilation. So we were painted into a corner, kind of,” Joe was saying.
“What’s going on?”
“Joe was just telling me why we didn’t win Vietnam. It fucking sucks. It’s sad,” Tommy said.
“Yeah, trying to get our way while being careful as a long-dicked dog in a room full of rocking chairs, basically,” Joe said
Unfortunately, the drugs brought the image to life. I rubbed my face and blinked until it faded.
    “That’s great, Joe. Now I won’t be able to watch CNN without thinking of dog dicks smushed on a wood floor. Thanks a bunch,” I said.
“Fucking dog dicks!” Tommy yelled into the