I didn’t feel like talking. Even if I got him home without getting stuck, it would be too late to turn around and go back to town. And there wasn’t even anything in town. There was no sense in going up there looking for it. The people who were in the bars were just as lost as I was.

“If you just get me to Aaron’s. You know Aaron, don’t you?”

Well, I knew Aaron. I didn’t know what Mr. Aaron would think about me dumping Squirrel on him.

“Yeah, I know Aaron. I imagine he’s in the bed asleep by now.”

“You just get me to Aaron’s and I’ll be all right. I wouldn’t think of impoin on you, please, please.”

I told him not to sweat it, that I’d been off with drunks who didn’t want to go home, that he was in good hands now. He talked some more about losing his eighty dollars. He said it made him sick. A dollar was so hard to come by, he said. I clamped my lip shut and drove.

“I was on the front lines at Korea,” he said. I looked sideways at him.

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “Hell yes.”

I listened then, because moments like that are rare, when you get to hear about these things that have shattered men’s lives. I knew my daddy never got the war out of his head. When he got to drinking that’s what he’d talk about. Mama said when they first got married he’d wake himself up screaming from a nightmare of hand-to-hand combat, knives and bayonets and gun stocks. With sweat all over him like he’d just stepped from water. I listened to Squirrel.

“First night out, they was fifty of our boys got killed. Just cut em all to pieces with machine guns. Half of em my friends. I mean friends like you and me. They wadn’t nothing nobody could do. I can’t forget about it. I thought about it all my life. Please, please.”

There wasn’t much I could do but listen.

“They was this one boy with me in a foxhole one night. He was my old buddy. Been knowing him ever since basic training, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. But then he got away from me and a machine gun cut loose up on top of a hill. He was screaming for me, Help me, Help me, all night long. Them goddamn bullets like to cut him half in two. Wasn’t nothing I could do. You know that. I thought about it all my life. Please, please. Next morning he was dead.”

There wasn’t anything I could say.