We had a deal, he and I,
of no bullshit between us.
If one of us got wounded,
the other wouldn't lie.
So when he got hit
and he asked me,
"How's my leg?"
I looked him straight in the eye
and told him, "It's fine."
It looked fine to me,
laying over there,
looked as good as new.
No Lie, GI.
David Connolly
I swore to my father that I wouldn't enlist.
Robert Baratheon was a fat, drunken asshole who spends most his time sitting on the couch I paid for with my money. He wasn't good for anything, except for beer, and on a good day maybe some takeout. The coffee table, if you could call it that, was usually littered with a pile of unpaid bills. From the outside, no one would have guessed that we were living off microwave dinners and that the only bill Robert ever paid was the electric and the cable. No hot water, no AC.
The car sat in the driveway, the only thing of value my father hadn't tried to sell on ebay. It belonged to his father, a 1955 Ford Thunderbird that I put gas into because my father is unemployed. The keys were hidden somewhere he'd never find them. Mostly because gas is fucking expensive and I could barely afford to get myself to school and back. But also because I was afraid he'd get it in his head to go visit some of his old army buddies in New York, take the keys with a BAC of .16, and wind up in an accident before he got five miles from the house.
I used to think maybe he'd die that way. He almost had before. Usually it was alcohol poisoning, but there was a close call with an OD once. I was always the one to find him, wallowing in his own vomit or passed out, lips turning blue. I was the one who spends long nights in hospital waiting rooms, cramming for AP Lit tests in between filling out health insurance paperwork and wondering if this would be the time he succeeded in offing himself.
But it wasn't anything like that. It was hepatocellular carcinoma, which is just a really long word for liver cancer. You'd think that with a bunch of haywire cells trying to shoot your liver, you wouldn't try to help them along with drinking, but Robert drank pretty much up until the end. When he realized that the doctors intended to keep him in the hospital and prohibit his drinking, he checked himself out to die slowly and probably painfully at home. But he had his booze, and his painkillers.
Eventually I hid the painkillers with the keys, afraid that he'd stop breathing. He got desperate towards the end, when the pain got really bad. Two days before he died, he was going through my room trying to find the little, white oxycodone pills. He should have known better. I would never be so stupid as to hide them in my room.
Instead, he found a flyer I'd taken without thinking from an army guy at the college fair, tucked away half-forgotten under my SAT prep book. They came to recruit the seniors, mostly, so I wasn't sure why I'd kept it. But that eight by eleven piece of paper kept nagging at the back of my mind. I knew I wouldn't be able to afford college, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the most brilliant solution for getting out of King's Landing. And god knows I wanted out.
When I came home from work, dropping my backpack in the doorway, I immediately knew something was wrong. My father sat on the couch, staring blankly at me, a piece of paper clutched in his thick fist, and I saw a quiet kind of defeat in his black, beady eyes. "The hell is this, boy?"
I met his eyes with my own. People constantly told me much I looked like him, and I saw it in the old photos they had on display at the high school. But my eyes were my mother's, a bright, steely blue, and sometimes I thought that small difference was the only thing that kept me sane. Her eyes and her name were the only reminders that I was not a carbon copy of my father. "What does it look like?"
It took a minute for him to absorb the fact that after years of him screaming and ranting about the horrors of war that I would even bring this kind of treacherous blasphemy into the house. When he finally understood, he reached out his hand to me, paper clenched in his fist. I took it, smoothed it out, throat tight.
"Read it." His voice was deep, deadly. And for a moment, I heard in it the soldier. The man who killed people. The man who watched people die in front of him. The man who was welcomed home to King's Landing like a hero, their own personal suburban hero returned from Kuwait unscathed by the horrors of war. They'd seen the burning oil wells on their television, red flames bursting up from the ground and black smoke curling up towards coalition fighter jets…but he was Robert Baratheon, local quarterback-turned-soldier, back from the dead with the same determined gleam in his eye and cocky grin on his face as always.
I read the flyer, the whole damn thing, voice shaking the whole time. He listened to the words, laughed obscenely when I got to the part about the army subsidizing my education. He'd always thought I was absurd for even caring about school, and by the time I finished my nails had left little half-moon marks where they'd dug into my palms, hands shaking with anger and repressed loathing for him.
I heard his breathing, heavy and labored. He was drunk, eyes wild as his quiet words came out hot on my face: "If you think that you can just run off to war, play it like a video game and get quick cash for college… if you think that everything's gonna just be waiting here for you when you get back, boy, you've got another thing coming. There's no job, no girl, no friends waiting for you. You enlist in the army…you either win, or you die. And you best pray to God you die out there, because this life…this is where hell really is."
Then he wasn't there with me anymore, lost inside his mind, rambling on about some Iraqi kid caught in the line of fire…he focused on that kid a lot when he lost it. Or maybe there's more than one kid, I didn't know. But I knew he was distraught, trying to get me to promise that I wouldn't do the things he did. He made promises of his own: that he'd pull himself together, go back to the hospital, get treatment. That we wouldn't be so dirt poor, and that he'd stop drinking.
"Okay, dad," I said, even though I knew his promises were bullshit. "I won't enlist. It's just a dumb flyer, okay?"
"Promise me," he said heavily, eyes dark and heavy. "Gendry, promise…"
"Yeah. Yeah, I promise."
But the thing is, he's dead now, so that promise is pretty much shot to hell.
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