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They'd both been home for two weeks when Ray showed up on Brad's doorstep in California with a can of Red Bull in one hand, a duffel bag hanging from the other, and a shit-eating grin on his face.
"Pack your suitcase, make yourself look pretty, and don't forget your purse, 'cause we goin' on a road trip."
Brad's expression didn't shift from its default "impassive and possibly pissed off" setting. "Is that you talking, Ray, or the PTSD?"
But he invited Ray in for a beer. Corona complete with lime, weirdly pansy-ass refined for a badass warrior, but that was Brad. He disappeared through a doorway off the living room. Ray had never been there before, had gotten the directions off Google Maps when he realized he still had the address on a Post-It note on his refrigerator. He didn't even remember how he got it, but it was in Brad's handwriting, precise and boxy.
Brad's house was an old, tiny, Craftsman-style bungalow, restored in random places like Brad worked on it in bits when he was home. Which was also in bits, of course. The pale wood fixtures and wicker furniture fit Brad about as well as the Corona. Perfectly and not at all.
Ray sat in an old armchair by a disused fireplace and raised his voice so Brad could hear. "So first, I'm thinking we pull a Taco Bell."
"A Taco Bell? Are you having pregnancy cravings?" Brad's voice was muffled but close.
Ray heard a drawer slam and grinned. He'd expected at least a little more protest. Brad must be really fucking bored. "No, man, head for the border. Hit up the Mexicans for some cheap tequila. Then we come back north and make a pilgrimage to Mecca."
Brad poked his head around the door frame. "Vegas?"
"Did I not say Mecca, as in the holiest city in the world?" He screwed up his face in fake concentration. "Oh wait, Vegas is the unholiest city in the world. My bad."
Brad grinned and threw a full duffel bag at Ray's chest, making him fumble the beer bottle and splash liquid on the hardwood floor. "If this is some scheme to get me wasted and drag me into some Britney Spears chapel to get married, I'll leave your ass in a back alley in Mexico."
"Aw, sweetheart, I love the way you think. So romantic."
Brad never really did anything as undignified as snort, but the huff of air he sent through his nostrils was close. "Just let me get my toothbrush, darlin'." He popped back out of sight. "And Ray? Clean up that spill."
Ray chuckled and swirled the toe of his shoe around in the puddle on the floor. The yard he could see through the glass slider had pale sand scattered around it, spread thin in the grass and blown up against the high wooden fence, like it had ridden the wind inland for miles.
Then
"Hey, Brad, how many dead babies does it take to kill a hajji?"
They'd been oscar mike for six hours after three hours of sleep, the Iraqi desert was just as fucking boring as it always was, and Ray was so high on Ripped Fuel he couldn't feel his lips.
"Ray, aren't dead baby jokes the tools of ignorant, redneck teenagers too lazy to come up with some more original way to make all the girls angry?"
"No way, you're missing the fine art that goes into the crafting of a dead baby joke. Dead babies can shock the most jaded assholes out there."
"I think dead babies are fucking hilarious," Trombley piped up.
"You don't count, my dear James, you messed up fucker."
Brad's words had a kind of drag to them, like a formal procession from his mouth. "I have yet to be shocked by a single thing you've said in the entire time I've had the misfortune to know you, Ray."
"That's because your dirty hippie parents didn't shield you from the world enough." Ray eyed the thin brown line that delineated the road ahead to the horizon from all the other brown in sight as the Hummer rolled along. This ride was gonna be too damned long if Brad had decided this was one of his stoic days. Well, more stoic than usual.
Ray waited. Somebody would ask eventually.
Trombley was probably still too butthurt or something and pretending to sleep, so Reporter took the bullet. "So how many does it take?"
"None. The dead babies come after the military blows up their village to take out the hajjis hiding in it."
Brad stared down his scope. Ray swerved around a giant pothole that he didn't feel like conquering at the moment.
"See, that doesn't shock me," Brad decreed, probably having given the matter some consideration. "Looks like you failed."
Ray reached up to slip his pimp glasses over his eyes. The glare was bad off the early-evening dunes. "Well, Brad, you are a stone-cold Hebrew whose ancestors were totally used to dead babies."
Brad kept his head turned so Ray couldn't see his face, apparently not in the mood for the usual repartee fuckery. Reporter was back there making googly eyes at him in the rearview for gift wrapping another Ray Person Quotable Quote for the record. And now it was too damn quiet. Time for some musical entertainment.
"There's a herooooo, if you look inside your heart, you don't have to be afraid of what you are...come on, Brad!"
Cold sand. Now there was a novel sensation, at least when the sun was so bright. That particular piece of California shoreline was currently Ray's best friend, maybe more than a friend since he felt like he could kiss it, hump it, and then have little sand babies with it and pay child support for eighteen years. No fucking way was he going out in those waves again with nothing but a slab of polyurethane and his own surprisingly shitty balancing skills keeping his skin from being blasted off by saltwater. He dug his toes in past the dry stuff on the top to the wet, clumpy layer that hadn't been touched by the sun.
Ray was already starting to regret the stupid road trip plan, and all it took was letting Brad decide the first stop. He was wasting two weeks of his new life as a civilian with the dude he'd been stuck in a Humvee with forever anyway and now he was further wasting it trying to keep himself from breaking his neck or being eaten by sharks in San Diego. But whatever, there couldn't be any decent surfing in Britain. Brad was probably having an existential crisis about it, trying to get in as much as he could before he left his precious Pacific ocean behind for two years. And since there was no way Ray was bringing up that subject, he couldn't really object to the last gasp.
Brad jogged up the beach toward Ray, surfboard under his arm and water glistening on his muscles like some shit out of Baywatch. Ray whistled and falsetto'd way more loudly than the distance between them called for. "Hey, baby, wanna wax my board?"
"Any time, sweet thang." Brad grinned and sank gracefully down into the sand, reaching over to rub his board indecently with one palm.
"Wow, California's hippie air is getting to you, my friend. Don't forget that all Marines are macho dickhead homophobes." Ray fought the urge to pull up his feet when a particularly ambitious wave crept up close to their spot on the beach. "Speaking of California air, why the fuck do you do this to yourself? I mean, I'm all for endangering oneself physically for cheap thrills, but I just don't see how this is worth it."
"Maybe if you didn't have the coordination of a brain-damaged, bowlegged crack baby, you'd like it more."
Ray pretended to consider it. "Nah, probably not. I mean, I've seen bowlegged crack babies who were actually pretty decent on skateboards, and it's kind of the same principle."
Brad grinned again. That was two times in the span of five minutes, not bad. "You're not accountable to anyone but yourself and the forces of nature out there."
Ray shot him an incredulous look. "Why did you join the Marines if you don't want to be accountable to anyone?"
That was a pointless question. Hardly any of those guys actually wanted to be someone's underling, a servant to The Man, but they signed up for it anyway. Ray wasn't blind to that. Some liked the sense of power. Some needed somewhere to be, some direction. Some just liked the camaraderie.
And then there was Brad. The dragon-slayer. "You're looking at it the wrong way. War is natural. Fighting is a fundamental element of human nature, has been since before we were even human. If I have to be accountable to anything, I'd rather it were a primal urge of our species."
"You could have just been a porn star, Brad." Ray squinted pointedly at the prime physical specimen of masculinity sitting next to him, lowering his sunglasses and raising an eyebrow suggestively. "I mean, you could have."
Brad just stared out at the waves, one corner of his mouth curled in the suggestion of a smirk.
Ray snorted. "So basically, you wish you were flinging shit in trees? You really are a fucking Viking." Ray scooped up a handful of sand and slung it halfheartedly to his left. It hit Brad's chest.
"Damn straight." Brad didn't wipe the sand away. It was a shade or two darker than his skin. Not that Ray was looking.
The relative quiet of the tent after the rage of the sandstorm was almost startling. Ray blinked in the glow of the lamps, forgetting for a second or two where he'd put his gear. The roar of the wind reminded him of the tornadoes in Missouri, only instead of running to the cellar or hunkering down in someone's hallway, they'd gone out into the jaws of the beast.
He finally located his sleeping bag through the cloud around his brain and lowered himself onto it very gingerly, surprised that none of his muscles just gave out in defeat. He was a Recon fucking Marine, famous for running miles carrying 150-pound packs and all that stuff they told eighteen-year-olds with something to prove, but Ray didn't even need to hit his darkest moments before he could admit to himself that he wasn't exactly a Rudy Reyes-sized human being. Even the best could be brought low by the mighty shamal.
Except that one Sgt. Bradley Colbert refused to be the logical solution to the equation of Marine plus desert. Ray had seen him striding around through the storm like he was taking the air on a promenade. Now he strode into the tent in the same manner, cheeks maybe a little pink but no sign of muscle fatigue. His damn lips weren't even chapped.
Meanwhile Ray had wicked sand burn on his cheeks where his makeshift t-shirt head wrap hadn't been adequate protection. It stung every time he moved his mouth. Or turned his head. Or blinked.
Ray flopped back on his sleeping bag, both hands under his head, trying to keep every muscle in his face as motionless as possible. All too soon, a small, hard projectile of some sort thumped onto his chest, and he opened one eye to squint at the backlit figure looming over him.
"It's Rudy's aloe facial shit, put it on." Ray still couldn't see Brad's face, but he was probably smirking, the bastard.
"Much as I appreciate your mothering instincts, Sergeant Colbert, sir, I must decline. I refuse to apply anything to my rugged, desert-hardened visage that's fruity enough to be called..." He brought the little tube close to his face and peered at the label. "A soothing, gentle skin treatment."
"Jesus, Ray, just put the damn stuff on. You look like someone scribbled on your face with a marker." And with that half-hearted rejoinder, Brad strode away, probably looking for the LT. Again.
Ray slathered on the smelly goop even though it stung like a motherfucker at first and he cursed the names of Bradley Colbert and Rudy Reyes and Aloe Vera. They were mostly forgiven when, ten minutes later, it maybe kind of felt pretty damn good. Brad never had to know.
"Remind me why we're in Tijuana, again?" Brad's eyes were invisible behind the glare off his heavy-duty sunglasses, but his mouth was drawn into a thin line.
"Because it doesn't take a million hours to drive here?" Ray spit some Skoal dip onto the dirt road to his right. An old woman passing in the other direction gave him the stink-eye from under a black hood. That was eerily familiar. He flashed her a fake, toothy grin. "What do you want, first-class tickets to Cancun?"
"I'd rather be in Death Valley than in this shithole. It's too much like every other desert shithole we've ever been in. It's like a fucking Disneyland version of Iraq."
As soon as they'd gotten past border patrol, which had taken a fucking hour and a half of Brad bitching about the incompetence and laziness of all customs officials everywhere, Ray had taken over the driving because Brad had been gripping the wheel like he'd need to evade enemy fire at any second. He was just as bad in the passenger seat, but at least he wasn't in control of the vehicle. The only thing that differentiated the atmosphere in the car from that of the Hummer in Iraq was the conspicuous lack of any weapons. Well, any large ones. Ray was pretty sure Brad was packing something in that bottomless duffel bag.
One thing about two Recon Marines taking a road trip: they never got lost. Their brains were GPS devices. Actually, this tended to cause problems in itself when they argued about the best route to take. They finally settled on a little parking lot down the street from a joint that was famous for its lobster. Brad passed the little booth that offered "Extra Security for Your Car - Don't Be Stolen!", muttering something about how it was bullshit. Ray wasn't particularly concerned. Brad would probably hunt down the motherfucker who dared to steal from the Iceman.
The restaurant was tiny and grimy despite its central location in the city, a layer of sandy dust blown in from the open windows to settle permanently on the tabletops, but the lobster melted in the mouth. They sat drinking almond tequila and eating about six huge beasts between them, seeing who remembered the most Spanish from high school.
"Tengo hombre."
"Ray, you just said 'I have a man.' I hate to break it to you, but I'm not actually your boyfriend, even if we have slept in the same room for the last week."
They spent the rest of the day wandering the tourist areas, perusing the cheap souvenirs on display and stopping at the occasional bar to restock on beer. The heat and dryness were harsh, persistent. But the people were friendly and the sunset was oddly beautiful through the thin layer of smog. A little girl came up to Ray and pressed a tiny worry doll into his hand. He looked from the doll to the girl's huge brown eyes and forked over a few pesos. She smiled, showing brilliantly white teeth.
"I can't fucking believe you got out of the fucking Humvee in a hail of bullets."
It was too dark to see Brad's face, even with the fires of a burning city glowing behind them.
"Aw, Bradley, you do care."
The Hummer's tires skidded slightly on the sandy road. Maybe Ray was driving too fast.
Vegas wasn't really all it was cracked up to be. The sheer number of strip clubs was fucking amazing, sure. And the casinos were cool until Ray threw away a hundred bucks in five minutes flat at a single poker table, and then they lost some of their appeal. But driving down the Strip just to say they'd done it turned into half an hour in traffic with the bass from some dude's Ferrari thumping on his right like rapid mortar fire the whole way. He could have gotten that experience in any overcrowded city in America, and without the gaudy lights stabbing through his retinas.
And then they took the wrong sidewalk down a dark alley when they should have followed a main thoroughfare to get back to their shitty little motel and ran right into three guys harassing a tired-looking prostitute. One kept sliding his hand up her zebra print miniskirt before she could bat it away while another closed in on the other side. The third stood a little apart, laughing, hand never leaving the pocket of his sweatshirt.
Ray quickened his steps in their direction before he realized he was doing it. He got out a loud "Hey!" before a giant hand closed around his bicep and hauled him around a wall and out of sight.
Brad slammed him up against the brick and held him there as he made a half-hearted escape attempt. "Calm the fuck down, Ray, right now!"
Ray was too disoriented to protest much, and they eventually made it back to the motel room. Brad turned the TV on to some random nature show and just sat there, staring at the flickering screen for five minutes before he spoke. "There was nothing I would have enjoyed more just now than rearranging the features of those mentally insufficient motherfuckers masquerading as fully evolved human beings until they talked out of the tops of their faces."
His hand tightened on the remote control. Ray wouldn't have noticed if the plastic hadn't squeaked.
"But we're not at war with the inhabitants of Las Vegas."
Ray sneered at the side of Brad's face. "You think I don't fucking know that? What did you think I was gonna do, shoot the motherfuckers with my invisible gun? They weren't even armed. They were probably gonna rape her, man."
"One of them was hiding something, Ray, you've got to pay attention. And if they'd shot you, you know where we'd be? Dead in Vegas with no witnesses and no avenging army at our backs." Brad took a deep breath and sat back in his seat. "If it makes you feel better, they ran away after you shouted at them." He didn't look away from the screen when he reached over to set one hand on Ray's shoulder. Ray shifted irritably but didn't shrug it off. Damn, civilian life turned Brad into a fucking mother hen. And that was just the weirdest image ever to contemplate while drunk.
"Shit, dude." He jammed a thumb in his right eye socket, trying to put pressure on the stabbing pain there. It didn't work. "I'm so wasted. You know I wouldn't have been that stupid if I wasn't so wasted, right?"
"Yeah, I know, Ray."
It wasn't football or Fruity fucking Rudy that pissed him off. Not really. Rudy was just the flick of the finger that sent all the dominoes in Ray's head crashing into each other. Of course it had to be the biggest guy on the field besides Encino Man, and those tree-trunk thighs around his neck felt like being squeezed by the fist of an angry god. He knew it was a stupid thing to do as soon as he did it -- hell, before he did it, let's be honest here -- but it felt so good to tackle someone to the ground.
And then it just had to be Brad waiting on the sidelines to be all serious and concerned, the same tone of voice he'd used on Walt when the kid'd been doing his best impression of the hollow shell casing left on the street after his civilian kill. Brad didn't need to see this, Ray's one breakdown in the entire war. Which, hello, he was fucking allowed. But whatever, right? Brad saw everything anyway.
Even the playing field had sand hidden between the blades of grass. Fucking desert was inescapable here. It'd gotten up Ray's pants and embedded itself in the skin of his left knee. He made sure he was alone before trying to dig it out.
Lake Powell had to be one of the weirdest places in the world, especially in the middle of July. Thin stretches of cobalt water threaded like veins through high cliffs of red and orange rock. Tiny clumps of struggling vegetation here and there, but mostly just the rock and the water and the sky, the red and the blue, filling the entire world.
They'd done nothing for two whole days but wander the lake on a rented houseboat with no air conditioning, practically living in the warm-ish water and emerging from it at dusk to beach the boat somewhere random and sit in canvas deck chairs, eating lunch meat sandwiches and drinking beer. Lots and lots of beer.
They hadn't seen another human being since late afternoon, tucked away as they were in a secluded cove with a rare patch of sand to anchor on. It almost felt like another planet. An empty one. You never felt that way in the Marines. No matter how alien the terrain, there was no escaping other people in a war.
And for some reason, Ray still hadn't been able to escape Brad. But Brad didn't really feel like "other people."
Ray chugged about half his beer in a thoughtful way, then broke the silence before Brad could get too used to it. "Hey, remember when I told that dead baby joke and you said you weren't shocked by the blowing up villages thing?"
"I do recall that sad moment in history."
"Was that some whack PTSD shit or what? I mean, nobody but us would have found that funny, don't you think?"
"No, Ray, I don't. There are plenty of sick motherfuckers in the world who would consider that joke comedy gold."
"Yeah, but would we have thought that if we hadn't just seen an actual village blow up? Psychology's a fucked-up thing, Brad."
"That's the whole point, the difference between us and every jaded, psychotic, middle-class, wannabe badass high school kid who enjoys sick jokes like that. For us, dead babies are part of the real world. Nothing is more vivid than death and destruction and pain. We laugh so we don't cry."
Ray squinted against the red-tinted sunset light glancing off the cliffs to his left. He'd left his sunglasses somewhere in Vegas and hadn't gotten another pair yet. Maybe they could dock at one of those weird-ass little Quicky Mart stores on the shore.
"Well, you'd cry, Brad. I'd just cough in a manly way and get over it."
Brad calmly spit over the side of the boat, cracked open another beer, and flicked the sharp-edged cap at Ray's forehead, seemingly all in one movement. Ray shot out a hand and grabbed it before it could hit its target.
Brad grinned, one of those sun-breaking-over-the-horizon things that probably made women and Jason Lilley swoon, nodded slightly, and sat back in his chair. "You can take the Marine out of the war, but you can't take the war out of the Marine."
Ray held up the bottle cap between his eyes and the setting sun and squinted until it looked like a total eclipse. "True dat, my brother. True dat."