Lake Country Read Free

Mike, one for Darryl, one for himself. “How’d you know the girl?”
    If Darryl registered any of this, he didn’t let on. If he noticed the free shooter full of Old Crow sitting on the bar in front of him, he didn’t announce that either. He’d gone dark since the news went to sports. For the past few minutes he’d been sitting on his stool, hunched over his beer, generating his own surly atmosphere.
    Mike said, “We knew her brother.”
    “You don’t know him anymore?”
    “Not anymore.”
    Looking at Darryl, Hal put two and two together. “This brother have a name?”
    “Lance Corporal Morse,” Mike said. He’d actually graduated Sibley High a year ahead of the guy, though they hadn’t known each other in school. Hadn’t once met, in fact, before landing in the Sunni Triangle together with the 4/8 Marines. “First name Evan.”
    “Lance Corporal Morse,” Hal repeated. “Final rank, I take it.”
    “E-3 for life,” Mike said. He took a pull from his beer. “Died the same day, the way it went. How’s that for a story?”
    “Same day as what?”
    “As his sister.”
    Hal glanced at the television, where the girl’s picture had been a few minutes ago. Nothing about a brother.
    “They weren’t together at the time,” Mike told him.
    Hal waited for the story, which sounded more mysterious than what it was. The 4/8 had been banging full tilt inside sunny Ramadi for three days straight when word came in through forward command that Morse’s sister had been in a car wreck back home. The kid’s company commander had cleared him to take the ten-day emergency leave, but Morse decided to stay put with his squad, which had lost guys already. He’d figured he could keep in touch with his family from outpost until they had more news.
    More news came two days later, when a team from Fox Company—Sergeant Mike Barlowe, a machine gunner from West Virginia named Darryl Potter, and a couple of other available grunts—had pulled Morse from his team’s position in a shelled-out café in the market square. They’d shuttled him back to command, where a lieutenant colonel informed him that his sister had died stateside that morning.
    Morse hitched a ride from the forward operating base back to Camp Ramadi with a returning supply convoy after nightfall. The rear gun truck—the same up-armored Humvee Morse had climbed into—hit a roadside IED on the edge of town, and that had more or less been that.
    “Christ,” Hal said.
    “Their old man went so low over it that he offed himself after the funerals.”
    Hal raised an eyebrow. “No shit?”
    “Negative shit,” Mike said. “Drove himself to this little place they had up in the lake country. Paddled a canoe out to the middle of the water, sat up on the gunwale, and shot himself in the gourd.”
    After a minute, Hal said, “Congratulations. That’s the saddest goddamn story I’ve heard this week.”
    “Yeah, well,” Mike said. “It’s only Tuesday.”
    Pool balls clacked around the tables. The wrench monkeys threw darts and the old-timers bitched. The jukebox played Springsteen now. On the television, the weather guy called for more rain tomorrow.
    Hal picked up his glass. He studied it a moment, then said, “Lance Corporal Morse.”
    Mike sighed. “And his kid sister.”
    “Ooh rah,” Darryl muttered, and knocked back his shot without waiting for them.
    They drank more to Lance Corporal Morse as the night wore on. And his kid sister. They drank to the 4th Battalion, 8th Marines. They drank to Lily Morse, who’d lost her family one member at a time until she’d woken up all alone one morning in a tidy house in West St. Paul. Nobody could decide whether to drink to Bill Morse or not, checking out the way he had, but they erred on the side of sympathy. They made the rounds again every so often, just to be thorough. By closing time, Darryl was only getting warmed up.
    “Guy straight up kills somebody,” he said, still talking about the architect