Old Country by Matt Query

Author:Matt Query
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

17

HARRY

SHIT, DAN, JUST come out and ask it. All this lead-up is an awful strenuous length to go just to pry for morbid answers to morbid questions. I ain’t afraid to talk about this stuff. I just ain’t bringin’ it up on my own, so you gotta just ask.”

“All right, shit, Harry, we ain’t gone down this road yet so I figured I’d just feel ya out first, kinda like a new rifle, or a woman, you know?”

I chuckled and reached my hand out for another beer.

We were in Dan’s little hayloft man cave, looking out at the beautiful view. It was surprising how the greens and emeralds of the valley got replaced by browns and tans as the heat of the summer bore down on the land. Dan and I had turned our little beer-in-the-hayloft sessions into a fairly regular thing. He was a smart fella, and a trove of knowledge. I enjoyed the hell out of talking with him. He had been taking time out of what I knew were busy days to come help me at our place.

He’d brought his Ditch Witch a few weeks earlier to help me dig some new drainage ditches along the driveway, and he’d bring over hay and feed in his tractor for the sheep and kept refusing my offers of cash, saying he’d just give me a total at the end of the year. Dan would say “you want some alfalfa mix in their diet and I’ve got a barn full. Joanne keeps ’em alive but feeds ’em the cheap shit; you gotta spoil ’em every once and again.”

Dan even helped show me the best way to mend leaks in the sprinkler lines through our yard. He took me into town to the hardware store to show me the right size couplings to buy and then helped me make the repair. He was like, well…a dad. First dad-like figure I’d ever had, at least.

I opened my beer as Dan finally asked the question I knew he’d been wanting to ask me for a while now. “So…you ever kill anybody over there?”

I finished my first sip and nodded. “Yeah, I killed some guys.”

“Well…how many?”

“Four, for sure. Four I shot and watched die, but I don’t know the total for certain. There were a handful of others I could’ve killed. It’s not as clear-cut as it is in the movies, or when you’re shootin’ at the old bear-chase fella, for instance. Sometimes it is, but mostly it’s not. Some guy takes a potshot at our patrol from a ridge above us, a dozen of us light up his position, we find him dead, no sayin’ who actually killed him. Or you think you hit someone, they fall, get up, and run off; could’ve just nicked him, could’ve missed him entirely, or you could’ve put one through his liver and he runs off to bleed out in a poppy field, can’t say for sure. That kinda shit just happens in combat.”

Dan stared at me for a long moment in the low evening light.

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