“Did you know Raymond DeNoefri?” Dunne asked.

“I don’t want to talk about none of that.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“How you fucking sign up for duty, trust the fuckers, and then they fuck you up the ass. You know what I mean?”

“I think so. Which fuckers do you have in mind?”

“All of them.”

He looked at the floor, searching for a bottle that wasn’t empty.

“Let me,” Dunne said.

He spotted an unopened bottle of rum on the kitchen counter. Next to it was a plastic cup. Dunne rinsed out the cup in the yellow-stained sink. He opened the rum and poured out half a glass.

“Don’t you think he’s had enough?” Lopez asked.

Dunne had hoped that Lopez would protest.

“Fuck you, Big,” the man said.

“I want him to be comfortable,” Dunne said.

He gave the cup to the man.

“So tell me about the fuckers,” Dunne said. He took a pen and a small notebook out of his jacket pocket. The man didn’t pay attention to that.

“You know. You do your job. You do it straight-up. Then they say, hey boy, you’re a good old boy, we got something real damn special for you. Ain’t no one going to know about it. Can’t tell your folks. But if they knew they’d be real proud of their boy. Real fucking proud. Just like when you sacked the quarterback from Talladega and won the championship. You know?”

He gulped the rum.

“Or when they first saw you when you came home from Basic in your uniform. Like you were fucking superman. A god-damn Marine.”

He looked hard at Dunne and scratched the ear with the scar.

“Best friend in Basic was a colored boy, he was.”

“What was this special something they had for you?” Dunne asked.

“Ain’t even got a name. Like it don’t exist. If you work for something that don’t exist, what’s that mean? You don’t exist, right?”

“Right,” Dunne said.

“Fucking right. They brought us in, from all over. Destroyed all our records. Said, you boys don’t exist. But you do. Gave us special-ass training. Then said, you do the stuff no one else can do. You know, the stuff we can’t do ah-fish-al-lee. You know?”

“Yes, I do. When was this?”

“Back when I had two eyes … Told us to not use our real names anymore or say where we was from. Hell, we was no longer Americans. Turned me into a fucking Canadian … Shit, there’s no more beer. Maybe we all should go to Big’s place. It’s full of Marine-fags, you know?”

Dunne nodded and kept scribbling in the notebook.

“We weren’t fags. Man, we did the ugliest shit they had.”

“Where?”