Brave Captain Harvey Drinks to Justice

It was long into the afternoon when my girlfriend left me behind at the Black Wave Bar.  She’d walk the hot path home, calves scratched by overanxious grasses, and start on dinner.  I was to follow soon behind, whenever my songs on the jukebox ran out.  In these hard times, you have to see a dollar through.  I ordered what I thought my last drink would be—working on light beer now, trying to keep the earth balanced—when Brave Captain Harvey ducked his head and stepped up into the barroom.  He slapped his hands across the thighs of his chinos and swept his hand over his scalp so that his bright red bandana came off with the motion.  Behind him the stained glass of Our Lady of Holy Vengeance Church framed his silhouette, brilliantly trapping the sunset.  I lowered my head onto the bar, looking down the long, uncrowded bar through a container of cocktail straws like a duck blind.  Brave Captain Harvey never cared what was on your schedule.  As long as he was still upright and talking in sentences, he would pencil himself in.

He ambled down towards me, pushing vacant barstools in as he went.

“I can smell you, Cass.  Sit up.  You smell like leftover youth.”  He rasped, coughed purposefully, then spit into his handkerchief.  I didn’t have to look.  Somehow everything he spat, vomited, crapped out or expelled through his nose was army green.  I’d been unlucky enough to see all four.  “Where you been?”

“Around.”

“Not enough.”  He leaned across the bar, wrapped his knuckles around the edge, then pulled his weight back.  His back popped.  His ass hit the stool after an exaggerated sigh.  He knocked on the bar, and Ruthie came over.  She knew exactly what he’d have, but always waited for him to ask.

“Ruthie.  Two Wilkes Booth whiskies.”

“No, no, Cap,” I said.  “After the last bars of ‘Tumblin’ Dice,’ I’m out of here.”

“You got time.”

“I don’t know if I got the stomach.”

Ruthie snapped her fingers.  “One or two, what’s it going to be?”

“Two.  Come on, come on, Cass.”

Ruthie slid the hardwood-colored whiskey into two highball glasses, added the ice afterward.  Brave Captain Harvey nudged mine in front of me with his knuckles and raised his forward.

“What are we drinking to, Harvey?”

“Good old American justice.”

“Cheers.”

We both sipped.  Wilkes Booth Whiskey is one of those tough breeds of whiskey that fights against the ice.  Insistent, impossible to cut.  God help you if you put cola in it.  It sizzles like holy water on something undead, turns green, and settles at the bottom.  The whiskey asserts itself at the top again, daring you to try that again.  God knows what it does inside my stomach.

“Have you ever beaten a rapist?” Harvey asked.  I shook my head and stared straight ahead as if he’d only asked me if I had the time.  “Of course not,” he said.  “Look at you.  You’ve got such pretty knuckles.”

He screwed in his stomach and let out a hard sigh.  Reached his hands out in front of him.

“Look at these puppies.  Yeah.”

The skin of his fingers looked like they’d been flayed and burned and rewrapped with secondhand cells a dozen times.  The black hairs between his indented knuckles didn’t know which way to grow, what pattern to mime.  Twisted and awry, twitching like feelers.

“There are few things that make you feel more proud than getting a medal.  Beating a deadbeat rapist is one of them.”

“Tumblin’ Dice” came and went.  I stared down into my mostly full glass of whiskey, all the ice melted now and bubbling around the edges.  My eyes clicked to the wilting bottle of beer.  I tried to decide which I feared more, my girlfriend’s impatience or the death threats Brave Captain Harvey would berate me with if I stood and abandoned him mid-story.

“Keep your ass in the seat,” he hissed.

I drank.

“I was attached, unofficially, to this frogman unit in the Caspian.  Killing time between wars.  The slavs are a hospitable people, but very protective.  If you can eat it, drink it, or wipe your ass with it, they’re more than happy to spread the wealth.  But if you can ride it, shoot it, or fuck it, well.  Keep your hands to yourself, Yankee.

“We were on a long shift of down time, almost three weeks and no new orders.  There’s only so many times you can watch the money change hands in poker games, shifting from one pocket to another.  There’s only so many cigars you can smoke before you start getting that sting right up under the lining of your stomach.  You’ve never been there, that’s why I’m telling you these things.  A young man in uniform craves action, almost any kind.  So what do you do?  You go to the beach.

“Ashy Caspian beach.  No palm trees, no suntan girls.  No volleyball.  Fat blobs.  Hairy chests.  More like a Petri dish than any beach you’ve ever been to.  Nothing but faint sun and saltwater to bear a resemblance.  We were young Americans.  We wanted eye candy.  All we saw were wives and kids.

“So some heartthrob among us, Ricky something-or-another, he gets the idea we should borrow a jeep and head down the coast.  Change the waters.”

Harvey bummed a cigarette off of me.

“We drove half a day on this Eastern Bloc excuse for a coastal highway, dodging tanker trucks and mules.  Someone had a bottle of brandy.  We imitated the locals: we shared, passing it randomly, forcing it on each other.  We sang Frank Sinatra songs to local melodies.  We took potshots into the sea with our sidearms.  This is what the military was about at that time.  This is what fell under the heading of MONITORING NATIONAL INTERESTS on some folder back home.  It was great.  Ricky pulled us into a small burg around sunset.

“There was this tavern with some pigs out front of it.  We stumbled in, a little rowdy but with plenty of local currency.  The bar had a handful of old-timers.  Dirty hands, big black eyes.  A pretty young girl was filling their glasses out of a big earthen jug.  I remember this place had one of those antique pool tables.  You know, the kind without pockets.  We split into teams and started playing, making up rules that seemed to make sense.  We bounced those balls around and around, overpaid for the locals’ tolerance, and cut each other down.  We were drinking without a plan, really.  If worse came to worse we would cross the road, stumble down the hill, and sleep on the beach.”

“I’ve had those nights,” I said.  It was exactly the night I was trying to avoid at the moment.  Harvey had pointed again, and Ruthie had obeyed.  My glass was top-full of whiskey again.  Suddenly my cell phone started to vibrate across the wood in front of me.  Harvey put his mottled hand over it until it stopped.

“Girlfriend?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I saw her leave.  You shouldn’t have let her walk outta here alone.”

“She’s okay.”

He shook his head.  “There’s always a Ricky around.”

I put my head down on the bar and drank my whiskey through a cocktail straw, sipping the booze right off the surface.  “Oh, god.  Don’t do this, Cap.”

“You should be thankful,” he said.  “You should be thankful you’ve got somebody like me to teach you the ropes.”

“Just get to it.  What did Ricky do?”

“It was dark now, dark like you haven’t seen, black in a little village without electricity.  Three of us were in the jeep, passed out.  Two other guys were still clacking the balls across the felt, taking turns just testing angles and speed.  I came back from the ditch where I’d taken a piss.  The locals were gone.  The girl was gone.  And Ricky was gone.

“I poked my head into the back room which was full of jars and crates and spiders.  I went further, pushed through a plank door into the back courtyard.  That’s where I found the girl and Ricky.  I could tell immediately, drunk as I was, that there was an absence of…consensual agreement.”

Harvey watched himself extinguish a cigarette.  He was staring through the ashtray, down through the wood of the bar itself, down through the foundation, down through to the other side of the Earth, rewatching history.

“I could hear the Slavs around the corner of the building, pushing their bellies through the bushes.  They’d be there in a heartbeat.  In those kinds of moments, the old Semper Fi, band of brothers type of bullshit evacuates the asshole of your mind.  I ran straight at Ricky, bore into him like a frightened pig.  I knocked him off the girl long enough for her to get up and scream.  The Slavs came lurching forward, hefting heavy tools.  Ricky looked up at me and started complaining like a goddamned aristocrat.  Like I’d spoiled his rightful conquest.  That did it for me.  I started laying into him a second before the Slavs did.

“We passed the beating randomly, taking turns.  Sharing.  Ricky kept turning on his side, rolling this way and that, trying to anticipate the attacks.  Nothing doing.  I stood there alongside the locals, the men of the village, and raised my fists and brought them down.  We didn’t need a translator.   Ricky clutched into a bag of flesh at some point.  Stopped bracing and avoiding.  He didn’t take what was coming to him, not in a prideful sense, not in a mitigating, owning up kind of way.  In the end he just took it because he had to, because we beat all the energy and motivation out of him.  It fled in droplets, Cass.  Spit and blood and sweat.  It all left him and covered us.

“We didn’t stop for an hour.”

Harvey adjusted in his stool, clasped his hands together like he was about to say grace over a meal.

“Because, really, for every one that you catch, rapists, that is, you gotta beat ‘em twice as hard or three times as hard as they deserve, just for all the others that get away.  The slow ones and the stupid ones catch the hell.  There’s always more than enough vengeance to go around, know what I mean?”

My face was on the bar, rocking.  I managed to raise my empty glass six inches into the air.  “Good old American justice.”

“That’s the ticket.  Stick with me, boy.  Learn a few things.”