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The off brand crayons were melting slightly, staining his little brother’s thick, stubby fingers red and yellow and blue. Drayton had been in a good mood the past couple of days; because Bubba had done all of his work and then some at the slaughter house and brought home a bonus, he’d used a little of that money to get them for him. Now he hunched over the battered kitchen table, crooning softly as he scribbled on a piece of scrap paper, drawing his family. The shabby white chicken clucked away as she roamed around the dining room, searching for scraps and bugs. Bubba had had her since he was a teenager, and the twins secretly made bets on how long she would live, but so far both had lost- Grandpa wasn’t the only seemingly immortal thing in the house. Nubbins was in the corner, playing around with some roadkill bones, some still decorated with chunks of withered flesh, mumbling to himself, and Bobby, well, he had nothing better to do than look over Bubba’s big shoulder and see what he was making. It was one of those long, syrupy Sunday afternoons when time seemed to slow down, trickling away sweet and golden like honey. Dust moats floated in the air, illuminated by the golden light of the setting sun. The radio was burbling away somewhere deeper in the house, one of those soft country songs Bubba liked. He thought about looking more groovy, The Beatles perhaps, but one look at his little brother convinced him not to.
“Mahhhh!” Bubba said, pointing down at the scribbled figure on the right, with long black hair, a stripy shirt and bellbottoms, his round head adorned with a jaunty smile and a birthmark, smudged into one.
“Hehe… that me?” He ruffled his coarse, curly hair. “Yer a mighty good artist, Bubba. I- I- I like how ya did Drayton.” In the corner, smaller than the others, the eldest brother wielded his tried and true walloping stick, bearing his signature expression, somewhere between a smirk and a scowl. He’d even given him hair that looked suspiciously like it was thinning.
In the corner, Nubbins’s bone tower collapsed with a clatter, and he began to laugh, waving his scrawny, sunburnt arms in mad circles around his head. Bubba whimpered involuntarily at the noise, clutching his crayon tighter, but didn’t look up. His tongue was darting out of his dry lips between his gappy, snaggle teeth, as it did when he was focusing. He watched him add the finishing touches to Grandpa and the chicken, before he thrust the picture into his pale hands with a dopey grin.
“F-for me?”
“Uh-huh! Uh-huh!”
He took it, holding it up reverently. “T-thanks, man!”
He folded it into the back pocket of his jeans and went outside into the sunflower fields with Nubbins to look for dead things, and there it stayed.
It went with him to ‘Nam, a little over a year later. At night, in the suffocating, wet heat of the jungle, he took it out and stared at it by the watery light of the moon, until his eyes went blurry. God, he loved them, he loved them so fucking much, even Drayton. He wanted to hold Nubbins close and never let him go. Sometimes, when the darkness threatened to rip him to shreds, he wished that they’d let his brothers come too, but Nubbins had flunked the intelligence test they administered to all of the draftees, and Bubba didn’t even have a birth certificate. The thoughts filled him with shame- his hapless twin would not last a week out here, let alone poor, simple Bubba, who wouldn't know which end of the gun the bullet came out of.
He promised himself that he would do anything at all to make it back to them, but even then he knew that all of the other men, boys really, had made the same promise to themselves, looking down at dog eared photographs of their parents and girlfriends and sometimes their kids too, and that most of them would break it. The paper grew sodden and began to disintegrate, but he couldn’t stop looking. He was fighting somebody else’s war, a war he didn’t care about, watching his people level village after village after village of people who, like him, wanted nothing more than to live, feeling his soul leave him just a little bit more every day, but if he could somehow make it back, everything would be alright.
They’d taken the hair he’d so lovingly grown, leaving him with a buzzcut that made him look like a different person. He avoided looking at himself in puddles when he could, but on the rare occasions when he did, he found himself looking back at the face of a corpse.
Now he lay in the narrow hospital cot back home, his head and face swollen all to hell, blood and lymph seeping through the bandages. The machete had cleaved through his skull and brain like a warm knife through headcheese. The other boys in the infirmary called him Chop Top. One moment of inattention was all it took for some lucky bastard to sneak up on him and then melt back into the jungle as though he’d never been there at all. He couldn’t feel it, not yet, but he would as soon as the morphine wore off. Right now, he was drifting somewhere far away, half asleep and only dimly aware that he’d been wrong; he was back, but nothing would ever be alright again. Bubba’s drawing was no longer with him. One particularly humid day the paper had simply come apart in his hands.
They were coming for him, all the way from Newt, in Drayton’s rust bucket truck. He thought about seeing Nubbins again, about pulling him close, burying his face in his greasy hair, and filling his lungs with the familiar scent of ripe roadkill and sweat, and felt a smile spread over his face, tugging at his stitches.