‘Did she send you?’

‘Did who send me?’

‘Mel.’

‘No.’ I wanted to ask him why she might have wanted to send a private detective to his home, because she’d given no indication of that level of trouble when we talked, but it wasn’t the time for that, not yet. Instead, I said: ‘I was hoping to talk to you about your army service.’

I waited for him to ask me why, but he didn’t. He just wheeled his chair backward and invited me inside. There was a wariness to him, a consciousness, perhaps, of his own vulnerability and the fact that, until he died, he would always be destined to look up at others. His upper arms were still strong and muscular, and when we went into the living room I saw a rack of dumbbells over by the window. He saw where I was looking, and said, ‘Just because my legs don’t work no more doesn’t mean I have to give up on the rest of me.’ There was no belligerence or defensiveness to his words. It was simply a statement of fact.

‘The arms are easy. The rest-’ He patted his belly. ‘-Is harder.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

‘You want a soda? I don’t have anything stronger. I’ve decided that it’s not good for me to have certain temptations around.’

‘I’m fine. You mind if I sit down?’

He pointed at a chair. I saw that my first impressions about the interior had been wrong, or at least unfair. This room was clean, if a little dusty. There were books – mainly science fiction, but history books too, most of them relating to Vietnam and World War II, from what I could see, but also some books on Sumerian and Babylonian mythology – and today’s newspapers, the Bangor Daily News and the Boston Globe. But there was a mark on the carpet where something had splattered recently and had been imperfectly cleaned up, and another on the wall and floor between the living room and the kitchen. I got the sense that Jandreau was trying his best to keep things together, but there was only so much that a man in a wheelchair could do about a stain on the carpet, not unless he was going to tip himself out of his chair to deal with it.

Jandreau was watching me carefully, gauging my reactions to his living space.

‘My mom comes around a couple of times a week to help me with the stuff I can’t do for myself. She’d be around here every day if I let her, but she fusses. You know how they can be.’

I nodded.

‘What happened to Mel?’

‘You know her?’

I didn’t want to tell him that I’d spoken with her until I was ready. ‘I read the interview with you in the newspaper last year. I saw her picture.’

‘She went away.’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Because I was an asshole. Because she couldn’t deal with this.’ He patted his legs, then reconsidered: ‘No: because I couldn’t deal with this.’

‘Why would she hire a detective?’

‘What?’

‘You asked if Mel had sent me. I’m just wondering why you might have thought that.’

‘We had an argument before she left, a disagreement about money, about ownership of some stuff. I figured maybe she’d hired you to take it further.’

Mel had mentioned some of this in our conversation. The house was in both their names, but she hadn’t made any effort yet to seek legal advice about her position. The break-up was still new, and she hoped that they might yet be reconciled. Still, something in Jandreau’s tone gave the lie to what he just said, as though he had greater concerns than domestic issues.

‘And you trusted me when I told you that she hadn’t sent me?’

‘Yeah, I guess. You don’t seem like the kind of man who’d try to beat up on a cripple. And if you were, well-’

His right hand moved very fast. The gun was a Beretta, hidden in a makeshift holster attached to the underside of the chair. He held it upright for a couple of seconds, the muzzle pointing to the ceiling, before he restored it to its hiding place.

‘Are you worried about something?’ I asked, even if it seemed like a redundant question to ask a man with a gun in his hand.

‘I’m worried about lots of stuff: falling over while using the john, how I’m going to manage when winter comes around. You name it, I’ve got a worry for it. But I don’t like the idea of someone finding me an easy mark. That, at least, I can do something about. Now, Mr. Parker, how about you tell me why you’re interested in me.’

‘Not you,’ I said. ‘Joel Tobias.’

‘Suppose I told you that I don’t know any Joel Tobias.’

‘Then I’d have to assume that you were lying, since you served together in Iraq, and he was your sergeant in Stryker C. You were both at the funeral of Damien Patchett, and later you got into a fight with Tobias in Sully’s. So you still want to tell me that you don’t know any Joel Tobias?’

Jandreau looked away. I could see him sizing up his options, debating whether to talk to me or simply send me on my way. I could almost feel the suppressed anger rolling off him, waves of it breaking on me, on the furniture, on the stained walls, the spume of it splashing back on his own maimed body. Anger, grief, loss. His fingers created intricate patterns from themselves, interweaving and then coming apart, forming constructions that only he could understand.

‘So I know Joel Tobias,’ he said at last. ‘But we’re not close. Never were.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Joel’s old man was a soldier, so Joel had it in his blood. He liked the discipline, liked being the alpha dog. The army was just an extension of his nature.’

‘And you?’

He squinted at me. ‘How old are you?’

‘Forties.’

‘They ever try to recruit you?’

‘No more than they tried to recruit anyone else. They came to my high school, but I didn’t bite. But it wasn’t the same then. We weren’t at war.’

‘Yeah, well we are now, and I bit. They promised me cash, money for college. Promised me the sun, the moon, and the stars.’ He smiled sadly. ‘The sun part was true. Saw a lot of that. Sun, and dust. I’ve started working for Veterans for Peace now. I’m a counter-recruiter.’

I didn’t know what that was, so I asked him.

‘Army recruiters are trained only to answer the right question,’ he said. ‘You don’t ask the right question, then you don’t get the right answer. And if you’re a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old kid with poor prospects, faced with a guy in uniform who’s so slick you could skate on him, then you’re going to believe what you’re told, and you’re not going to examine the small print. We point out the small print.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as that your college fees aren’t guaranteed, that the army owes you nothing, that less than ten percent of recruits get the full amount of bonuses or fees that they were promised. Look, don’t get me wrong here: it’s honorable to serve your country, and a lot of these kids wouldn’t have any kind of career at all if it wasn’t for the army. I was one of them. My family was poor, and I’m still poor, but I’m proud that I served. I’d have preferred not to end up in a wheelchair, but I knew the risks. I just think the recruiters should be more upfront with the kids about what they’re getting themselves into. It’s the draft in all but name: you target the poor, the ones who got no job, no prospects, the ones who don’t know any better. You think Rumsfeld didn’t know that when he inserted a recruiter provision into the No Child Left Behind Act? You think he made it compulsory for public schools to provide the military with all of their student details because it would help the kids read better? There are quotas to be filled. You gotta plug the gaps in the ranks somehow.’

‘But if the recruiters were completely honest, then who’d join up?’

‘Shit, I’d still have signed on the dotted line. I’d have done anything to get away from my family, and this place. All that was here for me was a minimum wage job and beers after work on Friday. And Mel.’ That gave him pause. ‘I guess I still got the minimum wage job: four hundred dollars a month, but at least they threw in health care, and I saw most of my bonus.’ He grimaced. ‘Lot of contradictions, huh?’