He said to Sarah, “You can pull over at one of these rest stops, and we can switch drivers again.”
“I just passed one. It’ll probably be another twenty miles until the next rest stop.”
“You okay to drive?”
“Yeah, I’m fresh. You did all the driving the last two days and the first leg this morning. We can keep switching off every few hours for the rest.”
Twenty minutes to the next rest stop was a while, and fatigue creased sore lines in the back of his neck. Reclining his seat back a little farther seemed like a good idea, and the muscles between his shoulder blades unknotted as he lay back.
She said, “Those people who called, your clients, they’d seen some pretty terrible things.”
“That’s the job.”
“Have you seen some really terrible things?”
The ink under his skin itched from his neck down to his elbows and all the way to the backs of his knees. “Some.”
“That must be why you were so good with them.”
“Training.”
“Have you ever thought about being a counselor for real?”
“I’m a bit brusque for most civilians.”
“But those people really responded to you. You helped both of them a lot.”
“As I have been helped. I owe a debt to my fellow veterans. We all owe a debt to each other. This is the least that I could be doing.”
“Well, from the outside, from sitting here, you were amazing. I was concerned about that first lady, Warrant Officer Fan, but I think you helped her a lot.”
Sarah’s voice was retreating farther and farther away as Blaze answered her. “When we reach somewhere I can pull out my computer, I’ll send her links to those resources. If she doesn’t reach out to them, she’ll slide backward until she calls the crisis hotline again.”
Blaze listened to the air rushing outside the car window. “And even if she does reach out to those counseling centers, there’s never enough beds, there’s never enough counselors, there’s never enough places, there’s never enough resources, and there’s never enough time.”
“Doesn’t Veterans Affairs help with that? There’s a VA hospital down in Iowa City.”
“No. The government doesn’t fund the VA. I should say that one political party doesn’t fund it. They talk a good game about cutting taxes and smaller government, but then they give all the tax money to their billionaire friends and send us to die for oil reserves. The country asks veterans to give their all, and then the government gives us nothing back.”
“Is that—is that how it goes?” Sarah whispered.
Blaze’s voice was being swept away by the growl of the road under his car’s tires and the sandstorm whoosh of the air conditioning vents. “And everything in modern society seems to be designed to trigger the moral injury of warfare. Whether it’s those stupid big black pickup trucks that belch smoke like the burn pits of Iraq or some military-cosplaying asshole carrying a gun at Starbucks, or the constant and unrelenting news alerts reminding you that the world is a horrible place and the psychopaths are in charge, everything is an assault and an insult.”
It seemed like his eyelids were getting thicker, or maybe Sarah was driving through a valley where the looming mountains blotted out the sun.
As always when he closed his eyes, sleep did not come, just paralysis and deeper fatigue.
Finally, his dead surrounded him, their gazes sorrowful as they tracked where he stood, whether it was in his mid-century modern castle of a house or the sleeping bag he dragged out to the middle of the Wisconsin forest when civilized life was too much to bear.
They sat with him, each one tracing a finger over the ink under Blaze’s skin with reproach in their pleading eyes.
Blaze’s eyelids snapped open, and the fear of blindness startled him until the faint glowing marks of the car’s instrument panel and wide dashboard coalesced out of the dark. “Jesus Christ, what time is it?”
Sarah glanced over at him as she piloted the car through the night. “You slept for a few hours. I stopped for gas twice. If you reach back there, one of your usual turkey submarine sandwiches is right behind my seat.”
The lingering sense that nowhere was safe and everyone betrayed him needled through his body.
Blaze found the lever on the side of his seat and pressed it to sit up straighter. “It’s dark.”
