Out in the No Frills Supermarket parking lot, Roscoe and I take curb. The parking lot is all cracked plots and crack pipes and sniff vials. Inside is all age-spotted old folks palming fruit, or Hessians in ripped-sleeve metal tees shopping for cheap hooch. Ground beef here goes gray quick and a big-laugh janitor in basketball shoes is always propping up a WET FLOOR sign even though he just dry-mopped.

Roscoe heard he's going back for another tour. To deal, he wants to midtown bar-crawl, but three bars and sixty minutes in, it's clear he wants to bolt over any easygoing. Which, fine. We can down our fair share. We're Nebraska boys, born and bred. What's whiskey but cask-sat grain water? Still, I've never seen Roscoe this wrecked. His walk is all wobble and falter. Stutter steps, but slow-mo, like he's a past-his-prime ballplayer with weak knees trying to show off heyday feints. He crashes over a parking bumper. Eats concrete. Scuffs his pants; his palms bleed in crosshatch. He sits down and starts hitting himself in the chest as hard as he can with his fist. Hard enough that I can picture the future bruises. Hard enough that the sound alone makes me flinch. Like an older sibling dangling a wild winged insect inches from your face. I can't even make eye contact. 

I asked the lady at the VA if alcoholism was a symptom of PTSD. "It's a good possibility," she said. A brush by, a non-answer. Walking outside and not looking both ways before crossing the street and getting smoked by a bus, that's a possibility. I wanted: there's a good chance. Better than good. One hundred percent. Roscoe got pills: white-horse tranqs to help him cope. He was also told explicitly not to drink. And sleep? Doc mimed a whole routine: yawn, stretch, beddy-bye, but Roscoe told me the truth was far from that easy. He had to cocoon himself in his basement with headphones, a sleep mask, and a brown-noise machine.

"Brown noise?" I asked. "Is that the magic tone that makes you shit your pants? Loosens stool? Releases the chocolate hostage?

"Are you done?"

"Bye-bye butthole control? Okay, I'm done."

"No, it's just a different frequency. Meant to mimic a dryer," said Roscoe. 

His actual dryer rattled so bad it sounded like a noise-rock outfit that only played washers and loose change. This was his nightly ritual, just to grope for a few hours of shut-eye.

It worked for a few weeks. Until he got another notice. The possibility of seeing Afghanistan sand again was good. Better than good. Definite. The only sure thing the Army could say.

I see tears in his eyes as he beats himself blue. Blood is streaked on his white shirt; it runs down his wrists. I don't know what to do. I want to scream stop, but he's so blown and in his own head, it's like talking to a sleepy child or a hungry animal; there are a few mewls of acknowledgment but it's just guts and blunted judgment. Grabbing him might be wise, but Roscoe outweighs me by sixty pounds. Last time I tried to physically restrain him, we were mostly joking, but I jumped on his back and he kept moving, easy as a kid hitching up his backpack to catch the bus. I don't know what to do.

So, I start hitting myself in my chest alongside Roscoe. We're in the parking lot in a pre-dawn dark only broken by occasional haloes of sodium lights, and it looks like we're staking our claim. Two men showing our domination over the space: proud chest-thumpers asserting ourselves over the used needles, the cracked slabs, the torn lotto tickets. The sound of flesh meeting flesh thuds across the lot. Crickets chirp. To passersby we would seem cavemen, Vikings, Maori warriors. Strong and cocksure. But if they look close enough, they can see how hard it is for us to clench our fists when we can't stop our hands from shaking.

Gene Kwak has work in or coming from Paper Darts, Hobart, Awst Press, Juked, FORWARD: 21st CENTURY FLASH FICTION and others. He's from Omaha.

"No Frills" is a Finalist for the 2019 Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of Bill Gracey.





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