Overkill

I can’t get to sleep.
Evan is sitting on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, peeling an orange. He takes the rind off in small pieces and puts them in the cargo pocket of his pants. He has one boot on. His other foot, in an Army sock with a hole at the heel, rests on the rug Nina bought last fall.
“What happened to your boot?” I ask.
“Which time?”
I turn to see if I’ve woken her. She’s asleep with her back to me and one hand under her cheek. We have an alarm set for five forty-five. Tess is sixteen and starts her first summer job this morning, as a barista at the coffee shop on Main. Yesterday she practiced writing names on paper cups until we ran out of cups. I promised I’d drive her. There’s a note on my keys downstairs that says let her go in alone. I wrote it myself.
Evan holds out half the orange. I can smell it. There’s a little white thread between his front teeth.
“Take it,” he says. “You’re always saying you can’t smell anything anymore.”
“I can smell things.”
“Okay. Name two.”
“Your socks.”
“That’s one.”
I put my feet on the floor. The orange is gone when I look back. Evan is still there, rubbing his thumb where the juice got under his nail.
All three of them come every night. If I go downstairs before they show up, I find them downstairs. The first time Evan came, he was in the shower with the curtain drawn. I could see his feet beneath it. I ran the water until Nina came to see what I was doing. I’d been standing there in my underwear for twenty minutes. By then there was only one set of feet in the bathroom and they were mine.
Mendez is in his usual spot at the bottom of the stairs, sitting sideways on the last step to let the dog out from under the banister. The dog walks right through his knee.
“Did you ever get that porch fixed?” he asks me.
“You never saw my porch.”
“You sent me about a hundred pictures of it.”
I had. He’d built a deck for his mother in El Paso the summer before we went over. I’d been sending him pictures of my rotten steps so he could tell me what to buy. His last message was still on my phone, below three pictures of a joist. You’re gonna need a second set of hands.
“I got somebody to do it,” I say.
“Good.”
There’s a scar on his forearm from the time he tried to make grilled cheese with an iron in the barracks. He turns the arm over to scratch it. I used to tell people I could pick out any man in our platoon from the sound of him coming up behind me. I don’t hear either of these two move.
I go downstairs. I keep a pad by the stove now so I can leave Nina a note when I go out. I write Back by five thirty. The time on the microwave is 2:24. I could walk to the river and back twice. I could make coffee, get dressed, and sit in the car until Tess comes out. I could knock on her door and find out if she’s asleep. I could put the pen down.
“Where you going?” Mendez asks.
“Out.”
“You get to do that?”
I put on my coat. “Most nights.”
He stands up to let me pass. I turn sideways anyway.
Outside, the laundromat is lit and there’s nobody in it. At the intersection I watch the light change twice before I cross. A refrigerated truck is parked in front of the grocery store. I’ve heard that particular engine every Sunday since June. If I get close enough I can see the driver on his phone, and if I see the driver on his phone I can go the rest of the way down the block without stopping. He’s usually watching somebody cook.
Tonight he’s asleep with his head back. I go around the truck and find Keene leaning against the brick wall by the loading dock. He’s got a pen clipped to the front of his shirt. He always carried two because people were always borrowing one. When the company commander lost a pen in a map case, Keene gave him his good one and complained about it for eleven days.
“Doc,” he says.
Nobody calls me that here. At the county garage they call me Ray. Once a man there sliced his palm on a piece of sheet metal and I made him sit on the ground because he’d gone gray around the mouth. I held his hand up and waited with him. After the ambulance came my supervisor told me I could take the rest of the day. I ate my sandwich in my truck and went back to work. For about a week afterward, every time I got out of the truck, I could feel my hand still holding his.
“You’re early,” I tell Keene.
“For what?”
“Usually you wait till I’m home.”
He looks up at the truck cab. “Guy’s got the right idea.”
I keep walking. At the laundromat I can see our reflections in the front glass. Keene is between Evan and Mendez. Evan has his other boot now. They stop when I stop. I count the washing machines behind them, then start over because I’m counting the ones in the glass too.
“You eat yet?” Evan asks.
“You want eggs?”
“Sure.”
There’s a doughnut shop on the avenue where the owner, Omar, puts an egg on a roll if you ask him. Evan had wanted eggs the morning he died. Every Friday the dining facility had started serving them from a pan. He kept looking at his watch in the truck. I told him I’d buy him a whole chicken if he’d shut up about breakfast. He asked if he could have the cash instead. He said he didn’t think our apartment complex allowed poultry. I remember that he said our. He’d never been to my apartment.
“You remember what I said after that?” I ask him.
“At the truck?”
“Yeah.”
“You said to hold it.”
I put my hands in my coat pockets. “I gave it to your bad hand.”
He studies his right hand. I can see the cuticle he used to pick at.
“I keep going over it,” I say. “I could have gone around you. I could have used the other one.”
“I know.”
“Mendez was still calling. I could hear him.”
“So could I,” Evan says.
Mendez is looking through the glass at a red child’s sock on top of a washer. He used to buy his little boy things in the wrong size and tell his wife the kid would grow. One night I heard him ask her to measure the boy’s foot against a dollar bill. He’d found a pair of shoes online and wanted to order them while he still had internet.
“You want me to say I wish you’d stayed where you were?” Mendez asks.
“I want to know if you were still calling when I got there.”
He takes a second. “I don’t know, Ray.”
I’ve asked him this before. Sometimes he says yes. Sometimes he says he can’t hear me. I’d rather he said yes.
By the time we get to Omar’s the sign is on. I take my usual seat, where I can see the door without moving my head. The other three sit down with me. Keene has to pull out his chair to get his knees underneath. He was six foot five and claimed six three on all his paperwork because six three was the height he’d wanted to be.
Omar sets a cup down.
“Can I get four egg sandwiches?” I ask.
“Four?”
I look at Evan. His hands are flat on the table. I can see a small crescent of orange rind under his thumbnail.
“Just one,” I say.
Omar goes to the grill. Nobody says anything for a while. Keene takes the pen out of his pocket, clicks it once, and clicks it again.
“He used his belt on me,” he says.
“Who did?”
“The guy from the other truck. I could see him trying to get it off. He had his gloves on.”
I know the man’s name. I’ve had his number for nine years. When I called him last winter, he was buying tile. I could hear a salesman asking whether he wanted the grout in gray or white. He told the salesman to give him a second and asked what I needed. I said I’d call back when he was home. I waited until midnight, then texted him that I’d figured it out.
“I never got over to you,” I say to Keene.
“No.”
“I got to Hall.”
“I know. I could see you.”
I put a packet of sugar in my coffee. I don’t usually take sugar. I stir until I can’t feel any of it with the spoon.
“Did you think I hadn’t seen you?”
“I figured you’d get there when you could.”
I look up at him. His pen has a strip of masking tape around it. Someone has written KEENE on the tape in block letters.
Omar puts the sandwich down between me and Evan. I haven’t asked him to cut it in half, but he has. I turn the plate a little so Evan can reach.
The night we got back to the States, somebody had put folding tables in a hangar. There were paper cups of lemonade and cookies from a grocery store. Nina was holding Tess. I took her and she put both hands on my face and asked if my beard was going to stay. I said it was a mustache. She said she didn’t like it. I went home and shaved before I took a shower. There’s a picture on the stairs of me holding her in the hangar. You can see how hard she’s pressing her fingers into my cheeks.
I have wanted that night back so many times. There are three women I can think of who’d have given anything to spend it telling a man to shave.
“Don’t,” Evan says.
I hadn’t realized I’d said any of that aloud.
“Don’t what?”
“Give it away.”
I look toward the grill. Omar’s got his back to us. He’s scraping egg off the spatula with the edge of another spatula.
I know I’m not perfect, and I deserve to be punished for my sins, but this is overkill.
I think it looking at an egg sandwich. I can’t make myself pick it up. There’s a bit of egg white on the plate, where Omar cut through the roll. I could eat that much. I push it around with my finger.
“Forgive yourself, Ray,” Evan says.
I wait for one of the others to laugh. Mendez puts his elbows on the table. Keene sets his pen down.
“You don’t get to ask me that,” I say.
“Who does?” Evan asks.
I look at all three of them. I can remember every time they made me angry. Evan smoked in my truck and stuck the butts in an empty water bottle that I drank from once in the dark. Keene borrowed twenty dollars from me to pay off a bet and then told the guy he’d earned it. Mendez took the last clean towel out of my bag and used it to wipe grease off his hands. He washed it and folded it and put it back wet.
“I was there,” I say.
“So were we,” says Mendez.
There’s a little shiver in his right leg. I remember him sitting on the tailgate of a truck, kicking his feet against the bumper. He was waiting for his turn to call home. He didn’t like to sit still on the phone because people could hear the conversation. Sometimes he’d walk so far from the trailer that the call would drop.
I pick up one half of the sandwich. It’s cooled enough to eat. I take a bite. I look down to find a napkin, and when I look back, Keene’s chair is empty. Mendez is gone too. Evan stays long enough to see me take a second bite.
“You can have the other half,” he says.
I put it in the paper bag to take home.
Tess is in the kitchen when I get back. She’s got her work pants on and one sock. Her foot is tucked under the chair.
“What time is it?” I ask.
“Five twelve.”
I put the bag down. “You want some breakfast?”
She opens it and smells the sandwich. “Did you already eat?”
“Some.”
She goes to get a plate. I sit down and try to take my coat off with my hands still in the pockets. When I finally get one arm free she’s standing by the table holding the plate in both hands.
“Dad.”
I look up.
“Who were you talking to on the stairs?”
I put my coat on the back of the chair. There’s a thread on one cuff. I pull at it and it gets longer.
“Mendez,” I say.
“From the picture in your office?”
“Yeah.”
She sets the plate down. She’s cut what’s left of the sandwich in two. There’s more egg in one piece. She pushes that one toward me.
“Will you tell me about him sometime?”
I take a drink from the glass she’s been using. It’s milk. I can’t remember the last time I drank milk by itself.
“He took me out for my birthday once,” I say. “He told them it was my fiftieth. I was twenty-six. They brought the cake out with a five and a zero on it. The waitress looked right at me and said I was doing great.”
Tess laughs with her mouth full and covers it with her hand. I had forgotten what the waitress said until just then.
We sit at the table until six. Tess finds her other sock in her pocket. I drive her to the coffee shop and watch her walk up by herself. A woman in an apron unlocks the door from inside and holds it open for her. Tess stops to say something to her and the woman stops too, one foot inside and one outside. I can’t hear what they’re saying. I wait until I see them both smile, then I drive home.
Upstairs, Nina has opened the blinds on her side of the bed. Evan is back on the cedar chest. Keene stands by the closet, clipping his pen to his shirt. In the hall, Mendez steps aside to let me through.
I take a clean shirt out of the closet and lay it on the bed. In the bathroom, I run the tap until the water warms up.
I look back just as the ghosts fade away. They’ll come back another day.
I know I’ll be all right.
It’s just overkill.