smoke so bad I’m ready to go on a shooting spree.”
“I don’t think you can say that in an airport.”
“If they throw me out I can get to my smokes faster.”
We separated while the soldiers all regrouped to turn in their government property. Cade and I retrieved the Saturn and pulled it around to the pickup lanes, idling as we watched Elias make his way through baggage claim. As soon as he was outside, he stopped in front of the open automatic doors and lit a cigarette. Other travelers moved around him, casting shy reproachful glances in his direction.
“Eli,” Cade shouted. “Over here.”
Elias nodded and meandered over. In spite of the cool November breeze he unbuttoned his uniform jacket and folded it into his duffel bag, revealing just a thin sandy-brown T-shirt. He turned his face toward the sun, closed his eyes and pulled in a deep breath of air. “No dust,” he said. “Nice and cool. Fuck, yeah, it’s good to be home.”
“Still got five hundred miles to go, bro.”
“Yeah, but not until tomorrow. This is close enough. No question.”
He dropped his bag into the trunk and climbed into the back passenger seat. As we turned out onto the highway he gazed out at the landscape, squinting, blowing thin cyclones of smoke out the window. After his initial friendliness, he’d gone quiet.
“Did they debrief you?” asked Cade.
“Yep.”
“How’d it go?”
“Fine.”
Cade glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Elias set his boot against the center console and flicked ash out the window. After a minute he said, “It’s good to see green again.”
“Well, you’ll see all the green you can stand back home.”
“Have you talked to Mom and Dad?”
“Not in a while. I avoid it whenever possible.” Elias chuckled, and Cade added, “Anyway, I’ve been busy. I’ve been working on this damn campaign for five months that only just ended. We won the election, at least.”
“What do you do, Jill?” he asked, and in surprise I glanced back over my shoulder at him. “You run around doing all this election stuff, too?”
I shook my head. “No way. I couldn’t care less about politics.”
“Well, that sounds like a match made in heaven.”
I smiled, and Cade said, “She hangs out with farm animals all day. So we both deal with a lot of bullshit. It works out.”
“We both run, too,” I told him. “I ran track in high school, and Cade’s always training for some half marathon or another. So we go running together a lot.”
“I bet Cade tries to outrun you,” Elias said, “competitive son of a bitch that he is.”
“And you wonder why I don’t bring you home to meet my family,” Cade said to me. “You hear the stuff they say about me?”
Elias laughed low. “Just speaking the truth, bro. She’s got to learn it sometime.”
It wasn’t long before we made the turn back into College Park. Cade and I lived in the dormitories on campus—he in a single room, me with a snooty roommate—but on the weekends he often crashed at the apartment of his friend Stan. Up until the previous year he and Stan had been roommates, but now Stan had his own place, at which he held frequent parties. He was generous in offering his futon—or a patch of carpet—to whoever couldn’t drive home. Cade, whose ambition for an elected office made him ultraparanoid about getting a DUI, spent so much time on that futon that he actually kept a toothbrush in Stan’s medicine cabinet. It hadn’t seemed like much of a stretch, then, to ask to borrow the place for the night when Cade got the call that his brother was coming home and wanted to spend a day hanging out before making the trek back to New Hampshire.
Cade unlocked the door, and Elias stepped inside. He set his pack down on the floor beside the futon and looked around: at the mannequin head with the dart stuck in it, the poster of a trio of blonde girls in bikinis posing on a beach, the dry-erase board above the old metal desk that was the central piece of furniture in the living room. He caught sight of the photo clipped to Stan’s computer monitor—of Stan in a black suit and tails, popping out his lapels with his thumbs and flanked by two transvestites in full regalia.
“What in the hell is that?” asked Elias.
“That’s Stan,” Cade explained. “The guy you’ve heard me talk about a million times. This is his place. He’s dressed up like Riff Raff