For Eric Ward

We took turns stealing, little things at first, then larger items as the day progressed. “I think I can get the cooler,” Clay said.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “You’ll get busted. We’ll get busted.”

When he came out of the 7/11, he not only had a cooler, but two six packs of light beer and a bag of crushed ice. I expected him to be grinning, but he looked disappointed.

My brothers kept dying. That’s the way my mom put it when she described her half dozen miscarriages.

“God takes care of his mistakes,” she said.

I wondered about that, questions springing up like leaks.

“But I got you,” she said. “You’re more than enough for any mother. And you, you’ve got Clay.”

Clay lived next door to us. His dad sold life insurance and had tried to kill himself twice. Clay never talked about his mother and she was not around.

He liked to hunt and used just a bow and arrow. He got elk and could skin and gut them himself. He got a black bear once. He got a dean’s wife, too.

He was blonde and tan with eyes the color of sea glass. He drove an old Willy’s Jeep and wore ratty shirts and puka shells. He liked to start fires for no reason other than boredom. Once a field fire got away from him and we spent two hours hopping on weed flames until our tennis shoes melted into fondue. He never apologized because we never got caught.

Another time we ate mushrooms and went to the Asotin County Fair. The colors were liquid and streaky like squirt gun sprays of neon shooting through my corneas. Then everything was funny, even the sad, overweight ticket taker with mustard on the knees of his pants.

There was a bluff where the end of the Fair trailed off into field and we climbed it. A few times I thought I’d fall and for some reason the idea didn’t scare me at all. I expected to fly or be caught by the ever-present hand of God. I had a lot of thoughts.

At the top we gasped, my lungs blazing, thirstier than I’d ever been in my life. We spotted a couple rolling around on top of each other beneath a tree. They were all skin and hair and limbs and sounds. It felt wrong to look, to listen.

Clay couldn’t get enough of the pair, only he was crying. I’d never seen that before. It made me queasy. “Hey, what’s going on?” I asked, but he didn’t say.

I was pretty angry that he’d joined up without telling me. When I asked why, his dad shrugged through the phone, saying “It’s just something he had to do.” I hoped I’d be a stronger man than Clay’s father when I had a kid of my own, but I wasn’t sure.

Like everybody else, I forgot about the wars. They were starting to put out movies about the conflicts, none of them really blockbusters. I went to one by myself. It felt so real, which is how I knew the director had made it all up.

They call them I.E.D.’s, Improvised Explosive Devices. They’re homemade bombs, booby traps. Your boot heel catches on a wire in the dirt and you end up a mush of dust and blood.

So I’m not sure what they buried in his casket, maybe mementoes—his puka shells, yearbook photos.

After the funeral I drove to the old store and parked in the lot and sat there wishing I smoked. I tried to conjure up a spark of nostalgic fear but my nerves had short circuited. Instead I thought about the things we’d stole, forgetting where we’d put them.