Another Day's Pain by K. C. Constantine

Author:K. C. Constantine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Published: 2024-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

“. . . what haunts us is shit we stuff in our own minds . . . tell ourselves crap, gonna believe crap, gonna do crap . . . sleep is a process . . . best thing I ever learned from him . . .”

“Who’s he talking about?” Nowicki said.

“Might be Jim Reseta,” Franny said. “Sounds like some of the stuff they used to talk about.”

“How long you been here?”

“Not long. Twenty minutes, maybe.”

“. . . didn’t know how to relax . . . fell into bed ’cause I was tired? . . . don’t work . . .”

“He’s gonna just go on like that, I don’t think there’s much point me sticking around.”

“He wakes up, I’ll tell him you were here.”

“What’d the docs say, anything? Or they just gonna keep on keeping him quiet for a while? They say how long that might be?”

“Haven’t talked to one today. Haven’t seen one since I’ve been here.”

“So you don’t know any more today than you knew yesterday?”

She shook her head.

“. . . full-body scan . . . focus . . . tense it, relax it . . . Kabat-Zinn . . . fuck kinda name is that . . . so fuckin’ wired . . . patrol . . . miss something . . . shit storm on everybody behind me . . .”

“I don’t think I should be listening to this. Too private.”

“Up to you, Cousin.”

“I mean, doesn’t it sound kinda private to you?”

“Well, yeah, but, uh, most of it I already heard. A lot of this sounds like him talking to Jimmy. You know, don’t you? Jimmy was there too. He did the whole tour, he didn’t get a—whatta you guys call it? A golden wound the first day? Get shipped home after you fall off a truck or something. Least that’s the way he and Rugs talk about it. Jimmy was in some bad stuff. Rugs told me one time, if Jimmy’d had the wrong commanding officer, he could’ve wound up doing life, you know, in Leavenworth.”

“Jesus, I never heard that, what’d he do?”

“When they’d start talking about that, they were always talking around me, over me. All I’m saying is what Rugs kept telling me, Jimmy was there, he didn’t see it on the six o’clock news. So when he’s telling Rugs what he has to do to calm himself down, it’s ’cause he did it first—for himself.”

“Well I was in ’Nam, too, you know, did my whole tour, I didn’t get no golden wound. And just ’cause I was in logistics and supply, that didn’t mean I was some candy-ass R-E-M.”

“R-E-what? What’s that?”

“Rear Echelon, uh, you know—starts with mother?” Nowicki said. “You could be doing your job, but all the hot-shit grunts, they’d come in from wherever, look at us like we were some kinda candy-asses. Didn’t think shit about the enemy in the tunnels right under us.”

“C’mon, Wick, don’t start that again.”

“You hear that? I heard him—he’s talking.”

“Don’t get excited, he does that every once in a while.

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