Then it was over. His tank was dry. He stood a moment, feeling the cool night air on his exposed flesh. An immense calm filled him, an almost heavenly well-being. The field stretched around him like a vast carpet, creaking with the sound of crickets. He lit a Parliament from the pack in his shirt pocket, and as the smoke hit his lungs he tipped his face to the horizon. He’d barely noticed the moon before, a rind of light, like a fingernail trimming, suspended over the mountains. The sky was full of stars.
He turned to look in the direction he’d come. He could see the headlights of the van where it was parked by the side of the road, and Richards waiting there in his tracksuit, something bright and shiny in his hand. Grey climbed the fence in time to see Jack emerging from the field as well, then spied Sam crossing the roadway from the far side. They all converged on the van at the same instant.
Richards was standing in the conical glare of the headlights, his hands on his hips. Whatever he had been holding was gone from sight.
“Thanks,” Grey said over the sound of the idling engine. He finished the last of his cigarette and tossed it on the pavement. “I really had to go.”
“Fuck you,” Richards said. “You have no idea.” Jack and Sam were looking at the ground. Richards tipped his head at the open door of the van. “All of you, in. And not one more fucking word.”
They took their seats in chastened silence; Richards started the engine and pulled back onto the roadway. That was when Grey realized it. He didn’t have to look at them to know. The other two, Jack and Sam: they were just like him. And something else. The thing Richards had been holding, which Grey guessed was now tucked away inside the waistband of his tracksuit or stashed in the glove compartment; that little dancing light in the grass, like a single dot of blood.
One more step, Grey knew, and Richards would have shot him.
Once a month, Grey took a shot of Depo-Povera, and every morning a little dot of a pill, star-shaped, of spironolactone. Grey had been following this regimen for a little over six years; it was a condition of his release.
And the truth was, he didn’t mind. He didn’t have to shave as much, there was that. The spironolactone, an antiandrogen, decreased the size of the testicles; since he’d begun taking it, he could shave every second or third day, and his hair was finer and less coarse, like when he was a boy. His skin was clearer and softer, even with the smoking. And of course there were the “psychological benefits,” as the prison shrink had called them. Things didn’t get to him the way they had, the way a feeling could twist inside him for days at a time, like a piece of glass he’d swallowed. He slept like a rock and never remembered his dreams. Whatever it was that made him pull over the truck that day, fifteen years ago-the day that started the whole thing-was long gone. Whenever he sent his mind back there, to that period of his life and all that came after, he still felt bad about it. But even this feeling was indistinct, a picture out of focus. It was like feeling bad about a rainy day, something no one could have helped.
The Depo, though, played hell with his bladder, because it was a steroid. As for not wanting anybody to see him, he guessed that was just part of the way his mind worked now. The shrink told him about this, and like everything else, it had come to pass exactly as he’d said. The inconveniences were slight, but Grey spent a certain amount of time looking away from things. Kids, for one, which was why he’d taken so well to rig work. Pregnant women. Highway rest stops. Most of what was on television-programs he’d watched before without a second thought, not just sexy things but things like boxing or even the news. He wasn’t allowed within two hundred yards of a school or day-care center, which was fine by him-he never drove if he could help it between the hours of three and four and would go blocks out of his way just to avoid a school bus. He didn’t even like the color yellow. It was all a little weird, and certainly nothing he could explain to anyone, but it sure beat the hell out of prison. More than that: it beat the way he lived before, always feeling like he was a bomb that was about to go off.
If his old man could see him now, he thought. With the way he felt on the meds, Grey might even have been able to see his way to forgiving him for the things he’d done. The prison shrink, Dr. Wilder, had spoken a lot about forgiveness. Forgiveness was just about his all-time, number one favorite word. Forgiveness, Wilder explained, was the first step on a long road, the long road of recovery. It was a road, but sometimes it was a door; and only by going through this door could you make peace with your past, and face the inner demon, the “bad you” inside the “good you.” Wilder used his fingers a lot while he was talking, making little quotation marks in the air. Grey thought Wilder was basically full of shit. Probably he said the same crap to everybody. But Grey had to admit Wilder had a point with the “bad you” stuff. The bad Grey was real enough, and for a time, most of his life in fact, the bad Grey was really the only Grey there was. So that was the best thing about the meds, and why he planned to go on taking them the rest of his life, even after the court-ordered ten years were over: the bad Grey was nobody he ever wanted to meet again.
Grey trudged to the barracks through the snow and ate a plate of tacos in the commissary before returning to his room. Tuesday was Bingo Night, but Grey couldn’t work up a head of steam over that; he’d played a couple of times and come up at least twenty dollars down, and the soldiers always won, which made him think it was rigged. It was a stupid game anyway, really just an excuse to smoke, which he could do for free in his room. He lay on his bed, propped a couple of pillows behind his head and an ashtray on his stomach, and flipped on the television. A lot of the stations were blacked out; no CNN, no MSNBC, no GOVTV or MTV or E!-not that he ever looked at those stations anymore-and where commercials would have been the screen went blue for a minute or two until the program came back on. He surfed through the channels until he came to something interesting, a show on the War Network about the Allied invasion of France. Grey had always liked history, had even done pretty well in it back in school. He was good with dates and names, and it seemed that if you kept these straight in your head, the rest was just fill-in-the-blank. Stretched out on his bed, still wearing his coveralls, Grey watched and smoked. On the screen, GIs were tumbling onto the beaches by the boatload, blasting away and dodging shells and hurling their grenades. Behind them, out to sea, huge guns poured fire and thunder onto the cliff sides of Nazi-occupied France. Now that, Grey thought, was a war. The footage was jittery and out of focus half the time, but in one shot Grey could clearly see an arm-a Nazi arm-reaching out from the slotted window of a pillbox that some nice American kid had just used a flamethrower on. The arm was all burned up and smoking like a chicken wing left on a barbecue grill. Grey’s old man had done two tours as a medic in Vietnam, and he wondered what he would have said about a thing like that. Grey sometimes forgot that his father was a medic; when Grey was a kid, the guy hadn’t so much as put a Band-Aid on his knee, not once.
He smoked a last Parliament and turned off the television. Two days ago, the one named Jack and the one named Sam had up and left, not a word to anyone, so Grey had agreed to take a double shift. This would put him back on Level 4 by 06:00. It was a shame, those guys leaving like they had; unless you worked the full year, you forfeited the money. Richards had let it be known in no uncertain terms that this development did not make him one goddamn bit happy, and if anybody else was thinking of skipping, they had better think about this long and hard-very long and hard, he had said, giving the room a long, slow scan, like a pissed-off gym teacher. He gave this little speech in the dining hall during breakfast, and Grey locked his eyes on his scrambled eggs the whole time. He figured what happened to Sam and Jack was none of his business, and in any event the warning didn’t apply to him: he, for one, wasn’t going anywhere, and it wasn’t like he’d been friends with those guys, not really. They’d talked a bit about this and that, but it was really just passing the time, and their leaving meant more money for Grey. An overtime shift was an extra five hundred; you pulled three in a week, they gave you an extra hundred as a bonus, too. As long as the money kept rolling in, filling up his account with all those zeros lined up like eggs in a carton, Grey would sit there on the mountaintop until the last cat was hung.