Win Lose Kill Die Epub Free Download

[Jenifer Griffard]

Treyslowly turned the car around. Tires crunched the gravel along the shoulder as the car dipped briefly off the road. Then we were pointed right at the sign, headlights washing the poles holding it aloft, staring.

His eyes were kind of half-closed, and he did this thing with his head to flick his hair out of them. The part of the basement where he was sitting had the most shadows, so his teeth looked extra white in the dark.

The guy in the corner unfolded from the beanbag chair and we all trooped up the stairs. Because he was the one with the hook-up to the good weed, we let the new guy sit in front so he could give directions while the rest of us crowded into the back.

We all looked where the new guy pointed with a tilt of his head and for just a moment, we did see someone standing there where two crumbled sections of brick that once had been walls met. Something gleamed in his hand and it could have been a razor blade or just a piece of broken glass. Then the moon went behind a cloud and when it came back, there was nothing there at all.

The video ended and started again without any of us touching the phone. It could have been a special effect, some movie makeup bullshit, except it looked really fucking real. And we knew, we all knew, whose lips those were, and that as the new guy said without saying, we were all to blame.

The girl who killed herself was a cheerleader. She hanged herself from her bedroom ceiling fan. And we all thought, stupidly, because it was the least important thing in the world right then when we heard, how it was hanged, not hung, because our English teacher, Mr. Melton, had made a big deal of it earlier in the year. An active word, not a passive word. Hanged, like it was emphasizing that this was a thing she chose.

We hooted and hollered and defied our terror with the sounds of forced joy. When our bladders were full, we stood up unsteadily to piss against the nearest trees, afraid of straying too far. We brought enough tents that we could all have our own, but we only set up two and crowded into those.

You called him a pussy. You called him a cocksucker. He was so scared he pissed himself and that only made you laugh harder. You only wanted to mess with him, push him around a little, but he slipped into the hole and you said oh shit, but you were still laughing. You pulled him out and his skin was blue.

For you, it was only a second between when he fell and when you pulled him out, but for him, it was a lifetime. Burning in the cold, unable to tell up from down. Certain the ice would close over his head and you would leave him there and no one would care.

We set out looking for the billboards, wild with mortality and anger and fear. We had some bullshit idea that we could be heroes. We would burn the billboards to the ground, fell them like trees with axes and chainsaws.

Young people. Old people. So many people we kind of sort of vaguely knew, but had never thought to ask about, had never tried to care about, not in a sense that mattered anyway. A plague, rippling out through the town, and we were patient zero.

We dreamt about Ryan, who looked kind of like someone we knew, crawling out of the lake, crawling into our beds, whispering killing words into our ears, closer to us than skin to bone, slipping inside us and making a home.

A long time later, years after my father died, my mother and my wife found the box when they were clearing out some old family junk. My wife knows how much I like big cats and all other varieties of predators and raptors, and she painstakingly glued the tiger back together and gave it to me as a present. It's roaring at me again as I write this: it stands on a shelf in my study, surrounded by what I hope is more congenial company -- grimacing windup monsters, maddened dinosaurs, a couple of snarling dragons with their wings outspread, and a sullen rubber shark opening wide to take a bite at passersby. The tiger seems to fit right in, but I sometimes suspect it feels shanghaied. My father hadn't got it because he was fond of tigers or because he had any interest in nature. He'd bought it in Korea, where he'd been a fighter pilot during the Korean war; his squadron had been called the Flying Tigers.

My wife hadn't known that; I barely remembered it myself. My father didn't like telling war stories. He'd accumulated fistfuls of medals over there, and he kept them stashed in an anonymous little plush case at the back of his closet, where they went unseen for decades. That was all part of the past, and he had no use for the past. He used to wave off any question I asked about the world before I was born, irritatedly dismissing it as if all of that were self-evidently too shabby and quaint to interest a modern kid like me. "It was a long time ago," he'd always tell me, which was as much as to say, "It's meaningless now."

And yet every night, whenever he'd sit down in his easy chair, he'd be confronted by the tiger glaring at him. What did he think about when he saw it? Did it remind him of the distance he'd traveled from that war, or of how incongruously bland and safe his life was now, now that he'd amassed a commercial-perfect suburban family in the depths of the American heartland? I don't know, because he wouldn't say. Whatever patina of private associations the tiger had for him is gone for good.

If my wife hadn't rescued the tiger it would have been cut loose to make its own way in the world -- to languish in rummage-sale boxes and end up with new owners who'd never suspect how far it had wandered through the world to reach them. But I have the feeling my father wouldn't have minded that; he never liked other people knowing his business.

That's the common fate of mementos. They're never quite specific enough. No matter what their occasion was, they sooner or later slip free and are lost in a generic blur: a Day at the Carnival, a Triumph at the State Finals, a Summer Vacation, My First Love. It's particularly true, I think, of the mementos of soldiers, because nobody other than a soldier remembers the details of any war once it's safely over. What really happened in Korea? I don't have the slightest idea; war just isn't an experience I'm up on. I was barely young enough to miss the Vietnam draft, and I'm old enough now that the only way I could figure in a future war is as a victim. The tiger can't preserve the memory of the bombing missions my father flew. Its odd rippling surface doesn't correspond to the landscape of North Korea, terrain my father knew by heart -- which had once saved his life: on one mission his plane malfunctioned, and he'd had to find his way back to his base with no instruments, no radio, and fuel fumes filling his cockpit. Nor does that frozen roar speak to the complex of murky policies that had sent my father into battle in the first place, thousands of miles from home. To me, the tiger is just a platitude -- if it means anything, it's a symbol for all the violence in life I've been spared.

People my age and younger who've grown up in the American heartland can't help but take for granted that war is unnatural. We think of the limitless peace around us as the baseline condition of life. War, any war, is for us a contemptible death trip, a relic of lizard-brain machismo, a toxic by-product of America's capitalist military system -- one more covert and dishonorable crime we commit in the third world. All my life I've heard people say "war is insanity" in tones of dramatic insight and final wisdom, and it took me a long time to realize that what they really meant was "war is an activity I don't want to understand, done by people I fear and despise."

But there've been places and times where people have thought of war as the given and peace the perversion. The Greeks of Homer's time, for instance, saw war as the one enduring constant underlying the petty affairs of humanity, as routine and all-consuming as the cycle of the seasons: grim and squalid in many ways, but still the essential time when the motives and powers of the gods are most manifest. To the Greeks, peace was nothing but a fluke, an irrelevance, an arbitrary delay brought on when bad weather forced the spring campaign to be canceled, or a back-room deal kept the troops at home until after harvest time. Any of Homer's heroes would see the peaceful life of the average American as some bizarre aberration, like a garden mysteriously cultivated for decades on the slopes of an avalanche-haunted mountain.

In our own culture the people who know what war is like find it almost impossible to communicate with the children of peace. In the last election Bob Dole was defeated in large part because of World War II -- what he thought it meant, and what he didn't see it meant to people of a later generation. To Dole, World War II was a teacher of positive values: courage, self-sacrifice, respect for authority, dedication to a common goal -- values he thought were signally absent in the soft and cynical selfishness of Clinton's generation. But it was just that cynicism that Dole couldn't crack. Everybody knew that if those values had ever really existed in America, they were only the result of some Norman Rockwell collective delusion. We're smarter now -- smart enough to see through war, anyway. We think it's a sick joke to suggest that war could ever teach anybody anything good.

Out of idle curiosity, I've been asking friends, people my age and younger, what they know about war -- war stories they've heard from their families, facts they've learned in school, stray images that might have stuck with them from old TV documentaries. I wasn't interested in fine points of strategy, but the key events, the biggest moments, the things people at the time had thought would live on as long as there was anybody around to remember the past. To give everybody a big enough target I asked about World War II.

I figured people had to know the basics -- World War II isn't exactly easy to miss. It was the largest war ever fought, the largest single event in history. Other than the black death of the Middle Ages, it's the worst thing we know of that has ever happened to the human race. Its aftereffects surround us in countless intertwining ways: all sorts of technological commonplaces, from computers to radar to nuclear power, date back to some secret World War II military project or another; the most efficient military systems became the model for the bureaucratic structures of postwar white-collar corporations; even the current landscape of America owes its existence to the war, since the fantastic profusion of suburban development that began in the late 1940s was essentially underwritten by the federal government as one vast World War II veterans' benefit. (Before the war there were 3 suburban shopping centers in the U.S.; ten years after it ended there were 3,000.)

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