splat chapter twenty-three

SPLAT CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Summer is the real challenge in Atlanta. Summer is nasty. In the spring you leave your windows open, and it's cool in the morning and evening. Starting in May, you gradually lose this quality until in August you're waking up in a sweat and it's still dark out. And that's why everyone has air conditioning and ceiling fans in Atlanta, except for Suzie and her roommate(s).

It was eighty-six degrees and ninety-three percent humidity at seven-thirty in the morning. The mosquitoes swarmed like wisps of steam when Suzie ventured out to the loaner. She was glad the air conditioner worked and she could keep the windows up. In her own car, she'd end up with fifty blood sucking insects loitering under the front edge of the seat and cruising over to her ankles for a drink.

It was hot. Really hot. It's hard to describe. Of course, it's been hot in Atlanta since March. But the heat was constant by August. All the surfaces were hot, from cars to walls to the grass itself. The night was hot. The wind was hot. The heat waves in the road acted like mirrors pointed at the sun.

There was now a permanent atmospheric inversion, and all the bubbling, fuming tar in the roads, and all the nasty uncooked sludgy air coming from the cars, and all the chemicals boiled off or released from smokestacks or evaporated in industrial lakes of simmering goo - all of it reduced and combined in injurious ways, forming ever more toxic airborne pollutants that showed up from a distance as a purple cap of gunge, fitting so tight it gave everyone in Atlanta a headache.

Now that it was August, the gunge spread all the way up the east coast, Georgia to Maine, and slimed up against the mountains separating Eastern air from Midwestern air. Atmospheric kudzu. Airborne smudge slicks. It blocked out the good sunlight, trapped the bad air, and provided a pressure cooker environment for the incubation of new and unusual viruses, chemicals, and immune blockers.

Take bird flu. The air quality in Atlanta is so bad that a chemical cocktail in our air could easily mutate the virus to spread to humans, right under the noses of the Centers for Disease Control.

August is everybody's least favorite month; I've taken a poll. The heat hits you like a branding iron whenever you leave the air conditioning. It assaults you, and it's much bigger than you are, so it always wins. The sidewalks glare beams of heat, the pavement squishes, you walk around in a permanent squint even behind dark glasses.

In parking lots you count the steps until you get to some shade, but the shade is no less hot. It's just that the surface ceases to be immediately combustible, but it's just only gone below the threshold, so you're none too grateful. You've been spared certain death by irradiation, but only until you leave the shade and walk the rest of the way to the door. Heat radiates from the cars, the road, the sky. It glints off the parked cars, and glares off the building glass; reflected sunlight like searing laser beams.

You feel your energy draining through your feet into the molten earth. You walk at a foolishly slow pace, considering the heat, but you don't use any more energy than you have to, in order to survive until you reach the air conditioning. You breathe slowly and deeply, even though it burns your lungs.

You pause whenever you reach any shade at all, even overhead wires. You carry water. Suzie never had water, so she was always parched by the time she got inside. You wouldn't think you'd need to make expeditionary plans in order to cross the parking lot at Kroger, would you? But that's August in Atlanta.

Atlanta prides itself on doing well under adverse conditions. Atlantans take pride in thriving where more refined organisms shrivel and fade. People remember how Sherman burned a fifty-mile wide strip from Atlanta to the coast at the end of the Civil War. It was a great example of conquest by scorched earth, and the Union was as proud of it as people were later proud of Hiroshima. But it didn't make no nevermind to Georgians, because the sun does worse damage to the ground every summer than Sherman and his puny army ever did that once.

Suzie didn't sleep well in the sticky heat. All kinds of things bothered her. Maybe she was just tired; worn out and exhausted by the sweaty nights and the sweltering days, drained of energy, listless, depressed. That's probably most of it right there. The heat.

The guys bothered her. Their lives were stagnant, like reruns. Every day sleep late, go out and do a loser's job, come back and sit around watching TV, talking. Talking about exploits and plans but only ever flipping through the channels and getting up for more beer. And they were total slobs. Suzie was getting pretty annoyed at them.

And the apartment. The fans moved hot air, the couch was sticky and smelly and moist. The windows were open all the time and the screens had big holes in them, so there were mosquitoes hovering around in the TV light. The house smelled like a bar, with oil of cigarette saturating every fabric, and spilled beers moldering carpet and couch alike. There were roaches, ants and mice. The couches were mildewed, from the sweating bodies every night, from the beer, from the humidity coming through the open windows. She could smell mildew when she walked in. The door frames where the paint had cracked were green with moss.

The sweaty nights were awful. Not the night sweats that signify the onset of AIDS or menopause, but the night sweats of a body simmering in a dark sauna. She had to endure it. She couldn't get away from it. She sweated so much at night that she kept a bowl of water and a washcloth by her bed, and wiped herself down whenever she woke enough to notice she was lying in drenched sheets. Weeks before, she'd wadded up the top sheet and flung it on the dirty clothes pile in the corner.

Suzie lay in the morning stillness, sweating. She had the fan dead on her face and she was giving serous thought to rigging an automatic mister that would shoot off in front of the fan every twenty seconds or so. There were mosquitoes waiting for her temperature to start rising so they could descend and enjoy their morning meal. She could hear the high whine as they cruised past her head.

She hated working as a waitress. Eight hours a night on her feet. Scurrying like a hamster in a wheel, never a rest except for a nervous nibble or sip. Her knees hurt at the end of the night; she would stagger into the pantry, and bump into doors and counters in her awkward, depleted state. She was too young to be dragging her ass. The soles of her feet had begun to hurt in the morning, doubling her over with sharp shooting pains when she got out of bed. Everything hurt the next morning. Working construction must be easy compared to lifting full trays of dishes the way she did all night. Driving a truck would be much kinder on her back.

She hated her job, hated the Club, hated the members, hated her bosses, hated her measly paycheck. She didn't hate the people she worked with, but when it's you all against the world, you make the best of it.

She hated waitressing, and knew she didn't have the temperament to jump through culinary hoops to work in a kitchen. Maybe she'd reached the end of a career and should pick another. But what? She loathed the service industry in general. It was way too servantlike. She hated retail, wouldn't stoop to fast food, wasn't cut out to sit in a call center, didn't want to do barwork. Too many drunks. Didn't want to do an office job.

Except she could she had the software skills to sign up with any temporary agency as a graphic designer with a little trouble, she could qualify for high droid wages and overtime, $40-50k a year. Oooh. But she never gave it a second thought. The idea of wearing corporate casual clothing and - ugh - panty hose every day filled her with dread.

Her relationship with Nelson bothered her too. It had been months since he'd spent any time with her. She was tired of being treated like an unwelcome guest, standing around waiting to be noticed at the shop. They never saw each other otherwise, and Suzie was still trying to encourage more of a real couple feeling, with the promise of a regular life together. It was terribly frustrating.

It made her miserably insecure. Did he really love her? Did he still dream of marrying her some day? And she could use some affection too. And some sex. Sex with Nelson was about the best there could be, and she felt such love when their bare chests touched that it was painful to break apart and get dressed again, as if part of her was buttoning up in his clothes.

However, she was beginning to see that there were severe challenges to making a life with Nelson. He would never be free of his obligations. And maybe he would never feel like moving in together. And she was starting to wonder if he would make a good husband anyway.

His way around the truth, for example. Suzie wasn't sure she could live with that. She expected him to always tell her the truth because she was his love and they could talk about anything together. But even when they were talking about casual things, she wasn't sure if he wasn't spinning her a line. If he lied to her, she couldn't stand it. She needed to be able to trust what he said, not to think through all the holes in it. She needed to feel safe, to take for granted a great foundation of love, devotion, and honesty. Nelson never told the same story twice, and it made her uneasy.

Her mission bothered her. Killing people bothered her. And even though she knew damn well she hadn't killed anybody, she felt shameful and subhuman when that FBI guy made her out to be a terrorist killer. On the other hand, she had to agree that anyone who would do what she was doing was a dangerous crazy person and needed to be stopped.

Did she hate her life? No, but she hated most of the pieces.

She got dressed and got in the loaner and drove down Moreland Avenue toward her hideout. She made a list of all the things that bothered her. It was a stupid list, and she felt stupid for making it.

She noticed a new billboard in the distance, further down the hill on Moreland going south. She sat in the turn lane waiting to clear oncoming traffic and studied it. It was a closeup of a waving flag, with a strong, patriotic typeface casting a shadow on the billowing stripes beneath. Reinsourcing America. Big fat yellow letters. Suzie fumed all the way down Hillcrest Street to Auntie Mae's house.

She noticed as she drove up that the house needed painting. Uncle Daddy was sitting in the living room with the TV on, laying back on his recliner, the room air conditioning on full blast. Auntie Mae was out at the store getting dinner. He had on a pair of shorts, and a shirt unbuttoned and hanging loose against his dark skin. His hair was showing a little gray, and it was getting long.

Suzie sat down on the sofa while he got himself a beer and got her a glass of sweet tea. The house was always kept neat as a museum piece, ever since they moved in during the Seventies. Everything had faded, and nothing had moved from its place for years, but there wasn't a speck of dust. That's why Suzie was shoeless on the clean carpet, and why Uncle Daddy went outside when he wanted to smoke.

He turned the sound down when she came in, but he was still watching some black and white movie, a western. Suzie could hear the whoops of Indians and gunshots in the background, as she brought him up to date about her job at the Club, and ranted about the awful evil rich folks she had to cater to, and started rambling about the billboard up on Moreland.

'They hate Blacks and Latinos and Jews and they're trying to take everything for themselves. They're trying to make a slave society with them on top. They're all a bunch of rich, racist rednecks,' she said, showing her teeth, her mouth curling into a snarl around each R.

Uncle Daddy seemed unconcerned. 'How about if everybody's like that, Baby Girl? How about if every kind sticks to its own and hates everybody who's not like them? What if that's how people were made? Maybe we all get along when things are good, but the moment we're threatened, we go right back into huddles and prepare for attack. For all our advanced technology and high-minded beliefs, we're still just tribal animals, scared of the dark.' Suzie fidgeted.

'Me, I hate White people, personally,' he continued. 'They're arrogant, unfair, greedy and cruel. They assume the first choice is automatically theirs, and that their way is automatically the best. And what they did to us hundreds of years ago, and are still doing today. White people are the root of all evil.' Suzie didn't take it personally. He continued, 'But your daddy was my best friend. We been through hell and back. We shared everything together, and I loved him better than my own brother.'

'But why do people hang onto shit that happened so long ago? Why are there hundreds of nations paired off trying to kill each other at any given moment?'

'They need to hate, girl. They need someone to be mad at for the way things are. People take it out on others every day.' He laughed about it like it didn't matter. 'I've been around the world almost. I've seen every kind of human there is, and I've heard the same thing out of every one of them,' he ticked it off. 'We got the short end of the stick. They're to blame. Let's gang up and kill them.'

'I don't want to live in fear,' Suzie said flatly.

'But that's where They want us. Fear makes us docile, keeps us thinking something bad's going to happen if we step out of line. That's how abusers work.' He stopped to think about it. 'That's how religions work, to tell the truth. The punishing father God, the rules, being damned to hell just by being born. What kind of religion teaches the fear of God? That people are bad and worthy of punishment? That God requires sacrifice?

Suzie sagged on the couch. 'I don't think I believe in God any more.'

'Don't say that, Baby Girl. What you need is another kind of God, a kind and benevolent God, someone who tolerates all sorts of behavior the puritanical God wouldn't stand for. A God who likes to party, and loves to get laid, and is always holding a stash of your drug of choice. A God who's your best friend, and speaks up like a pal whenever you're taking it a little too far. A God with open arms and a big hug for everyone. Not a warlike god, but a party god. Wouldn't that be a better kind of worship?'

'There'd be no need for tithing to a God of plenty. I could maybe go for that.'

'The way it's set up now, fear is encouraged. Bird flu. Terrorist alerts. It's on purpose.' He grew excited and leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees to talk to her. 'I saw a program on the War Channel the other day. Fear is the easiest way to control people. You can get them to do anything if they're afraid. It was one of them Nazi guys said it during his trial - All you have to do is remind them they're being attacked and accuse anybody who objects of treason. Look what they did after 9/11. Same tactic.'

Uncle Daddy would have got on well with Nelson. He probably wouldn't have liked him for other reasons, though. But they could shoot some shit together over conspiracy theories.

He was ticking things off on his fingers again. 'Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Communists, Republicans, Christians, Whites, Blacks, Muslims, Jews, men, women, Eskimos, gay people. Every one of those groups, and all the others I've left out, have it written down somewhere that some other group is evil in the sight of God, and needs to be destroyed, and that God has assigned them to do it.'

'Oh.' That summed up her attitude toward bad drivers.

'You'll be hard pressed to find live and let live as the major lesson in any religion. Even Buddhists go to war. It's all warlike. It's all about power, it's all based on the idea that there's only so much to go around, and if we don't take theirs first, they'll take ours.'

'Then we might as well go ahead and have a nuclear war and just God can start over.'

'Hush, honey. Don't go wishing that. Don't give up. People by themselves are just fine. But they do make mistakes, and sometimes they're whoppers. It's a real good thing there are so many second chances.'

She felt depressed. 'Uncle Daddy, do you believe in evolution?'

He frowned. 'Well, I'm a Christian, same as your Auntie Mae. But I've done a lot of questioning, starting way back when I was about your age. I must have read a thousand books. Where I part company with other Christians, don't tell your Auntie Mae we've been talking about this, is where I'm supposed to believe God created the world in a week six thousand years ago. I can look around me and see that somebody can't count.'

'But what really happened? Did we evolve from apes millions of years ago?'

'I don't know. Christians believe in Adam and Eve. Scientists start from some arbitrary point of non-apeness and call her Eve too. DNA studies show that Blacks came first, and everybody else broke off on their own branch way down the line from the first woman.

He finished his beer and asked Suzie to get him another one. 'Nation of Islam says the same thing, sort of,' he continued. 'Black people were the original humans. We were angelic gods, and we lived on the moon, and got dropped off here by UFOs. White people were actually a genetic mistake somebody made in some test tube. The white mutants were mean, and took over. But the prophesy says they would only rule for six thousand years, which is any old time now, and then the UFOs will come back, destroy the white devils, and restore us to Godhood, whereupon we'll promptly establish Paradise on Earth. Scientologists believe something along the same lines.'

'But Scientology is a made-up religion,' Suzie objected.

'Just so. The Judeo-Christian tradition has it that life on earth is descended from Noah and his three sons, who arrived in a vessel.' The cowboys and Indians were shooting at each other on TV. Uncle Daddy turned down the volume. 'The Mayans believed the Gods made the world to give them praise, but nothing praised them well enough - animals, mud creatures, wood creatures. None of them followed the rules. So they made humans out of cornmeal dough.'

'Adam and Eve were made from dust,' Suzie added, remembering her kid's Bible.

'In the Norse myths, the first people were made from logs. But my favorite creation story is Zoroastrian,' he said, pronouncing it carefully. 'Uhuru Mazda - God - made a bunch of lands to delight his people. And Angry Manyu came along behind him and introduced plague and sin into each one.'

'Then we're all wrong.'

'I think the Buddha put it best - conjecture about the origin of the world is an unconjecturable that is not to be conjectured about. It brings madness and vexation to anyone who conjectures about it.'

'We're all wrong. And there are no answers. And we might as well do what we want,' Suzie concluded.

'Didn't you say we should all get along?'

She thought about it. Did she want to follow the Avenging God, or the Party God? 'I just think it's a bunch of bull about where we came from. Nobody was dropped here by aliens.'

'All the secret societies think we were.'

She persisted. 'Nobody was made from wood or mud or cornmeal or test tube DNA.'

'I don't believe I care to argue that point with you.' He turned the sound back up.

'What I think is that we came from fairies and giants and dwarves.'

He laughed. 'Do you remember the Narnia stories your dad used to read you?'

'Well, yes. But that was just disguised religion.'

'There you are.'

Suzie felt confused. She watched the cowboys getting the bettter of the Indians.

'Uncle Daddy, I've been thinking about ditching my job at the club and getting my CDL license.'

He turned away from the TV. 'Oh, Lord, don't mention it to your Auntie Mae. She is dead set against your driving a big rig.'

'But there are lots more women getting into it now.'

'Yes, they're changing things,' he admitted. 'They've been agitating for better conditions at the truck stops, and making the men hold down the profanity a little. Everything's more gentlemanlike these days.' Suzie nodded: good. 'But you know what the hours are like, and the miles. And the paperwork's getting worse every year, and there are more dumb fu, sorry, assholes on the road than ever. The pay's still good, though. And except for your schedule, you're your own boss, and I know how much you need that.'

'Really?' Suzie wasn't convinced she had to run things. She had bosses at work. She got along.

'From a little baby.' He laughed and got up to go to the bathroom.

He came back with another beer and some more tea for her. He loved telling her stories about when she was little. 'Hell, we got you your own wheel the moment you were old enough to face forward in the car seat. Right there between us. Calmed you down no end. You'd steer the truck for hours right along with your daddy or me, and sometimes I swear you were really steering, not us. You were so determined to do it yourself. You were always like that. We couldn't pick anything for you in the diner, either. You had to order for your own self, every time.'

Suzie loved that picture of herself, a little pudgy-legged toddler demanding macaroni and cheese. 'Mac-chi, mac-chi,' she'd have squeaked. 'Why did you and dad stop driving together?'

He looked at the TV. 'I got me my own truck about the time you needed your own seat.'

'I thought you had a fight.'

He turned to look at her. 'No, child, we were never mad for long.' He shrugged and looked at his hands. 'You were his copilot. I was just extra after awhile.'

Suzie felt a wave of guilt. She felt like she abandoned her dad, that they both abandoned him, that they'd had an unspoken vow to protect him the way they watched over her. 'But I went off to live here with Auntie Mae, and it's because he didn't have a partner that he got killed.'

Uncle Daddy looked puzzled. 'Where you get that idea, Sweetie?'

'He needed someone there to watch the road for him. Maybe he fell asleep, like they said.'

'No, honey, I was talking to him the whole time. I was right behind him. It was some crazy Cobb County bitch on the phone, cut in front of him in her SUV. I told you that a million times. We'd a both been killed.'

'But I almost fell asleep the other night coming home. It's easy when you're tired. You can't control it.'

'Nothing like that. In fact we was talking about you. He said he meant to take you out again real soon for a good long run, maybe up to New York.'

Suzie felt tears come to her eyes. She missed her dad so much. 'Tell me how he died?'

'Oh, Baby Girl, you don't want to hear about that again.'

'Yes, I do, because I've been getting really mad at bad drivers lately.'

He looked at her, looked at her bag beside the couch, looked at her face. 'You're the sniper?' he threw up his hands. 'Honey, you can't go doing that. Sure, they deserve to die, but you can't go taking the law into your own hands. What would happen if everyone did that?'

She had a ready answer for that. 'There'd be a lot fewer bad drivers.'

'Including you, honey? Everybody'd be shooting at everybody, for the least little thing.'

'But the cops won't do anything. and some of them are worse drivers than everyone else.'

'No, nobody can do anything about how badly people drive, except make cars less dangerous. Put them all inside giant external air bags or something. Or magnetic spacers and automatic steering.' Uncle Daddy was into science fiction, where there are always inventive ways to solve social and technological problems.

'Or make the road test harder.'

'I hear you. Now, Baby Girl. I'm serious about this. Tell me you're not going to try to kill nobody.'

'Unless they're white redneck Klan members.'

'Not even then. You just don't run around killing people. Not even if they deserve to die. That's God's job. That's God's responsibility. It's too much for one little girl.'

'I am not so little.'

'You are too so little.'

They were going on like that when Suzie heard Auntie Mae making struggling noises at the front door, so she rushed to the door to help with the heavy bags of groceries, and hung out in the kitchen for awhile helping her put them away.

'Tell me what you been doing, child,' Auntie Mae said, out of breath. 'How's those roommates of your's been doing?'

'They're really,' Suzie paused, their qualities running through her mind. 'It's really just,' she rolled her eyes and shook her head. 'They're driving me nuts. They're just a bunch of boys.'

Auntie Mae smiled. 'I know, honey.'

'They're not growing up. That's the trouble. I want to talk about important things, and they just want to brag and tell lies.' Suzie stopped. 'Auntie Mae, did you know that Miss Charlene and Miss Mabel were fired last night?'

She nodded gravely. 'We know all about it. They were arrested, not just fired. Brother James is over at the jail right now, trying to find out what they done with those poor ladies.' And not only that, but Miss Mabel's sons had to be forcibly restrained from firebombing the Club in the middle of the night.

Suzie tried to rant and rave about the Club and its inhumane practices, but Auntie Mae was tired, and didn't want to talk about it. They ended up back in the living room, Auntie Mae small on the couch, holding ice water in her thin hand, Uncle Daddy with a glass of sweet tea. Nobody said much of anything for awhile. So she said goodbye and went down the back to her hideout.

She hadn't been there in at least a month, and the place was pretty overgrown. The mosquitoes were awful this close to bottomland. It was baked hot, all the vegetation in the clearing dry as straw, vines hanging heavy and limp on the tree limbs. She sat on the stool for a few minutes, swatting mosquitoes and thinking about all the paint and other junk she was storing there, how cheap and paltry and jury-rigged everything was.

She looked around and felt disgust for her hideout, a place where she'd always felt so focused and committed. Now she saw it as a pathetic attempt at heroism, a den of revenge fantasies, annoyance elevated to a holy war. She thought about trying to punish bad drivers for her dad's death, and felt like an idiot. She thought about her job and felt the futility of trying to get past the white glass ceiling. She thought about Nelson and felt like a fool for hoping.

Out of habit, Suzie rummaged around in her bag and drew out her paintgun and the multicolored bag of balls. Then she found the cellphone and a tube of glue, and stuck it onto the side of her wig. But her heart wasn't in it. It was too hot.

She looked around at the sagging lean-to and the tired paint stains. She was tired of this bargain basement vigilante get-up and sick of her feeble attempts at vehicular mayhem. But what to do with all her equipment? She stuffed her things back in the bag, grabbed the bag of costume parts and a couple of milk jugs, and hauled them up to the loaner to toss in the trash the next time she got gas.

She decided to go see Nelson, the louse. Maybe she could look pitiful and he'd be struck with the idea of going for a short drive with her, maybe an hour or two.

Traffic was smooth until Suzie got past the soon-to-be-ex Ford factory. The signs said Road Work 1500 Ft. Road Work 1000 Ft, Road Work 500 Ft, Roadwork Next 7 Miles. Merge Left. Traffic was going seventy, but when they rounded the curve Suzie saw brake lights come on and lots of slowing cars and trucks waiting to merge. She dragged at seventeen miles an hour through the narrow lanes, glancing over at the workers. She saw a bunch of Latinos in coveralls moving concrete barriers into the lane, and caught a glimpse of a foreman with a gun, though it might have been a guy with a shovel.

The barriers lined the road on the right. A crane and shovel on treads was perched in the middle of the closed lane, its claw swiveling around clockwise to dig up the roadway, then swinging back to pour it into a nearby dump truck.

The operator was on his cel, drinking coffee, discussing something distressing. Then he lost his temper over something stupid. Then the coffee went into his lap and scalded him. Then he dropped the phone and scrambled to stop the pain, and the claw jerked and swiveled all the way counterclockwise past the truck, past the concrete barrier, and into the traffic lane.

He dumped his load of dirt and concrete right on top of a Honda mini SUV, which went careening off across the lanes and into the concrete barrier on the left side of the highway. A pickup in the left lane slammed into him while slamming on his brakes, and together they waltzed down the road.

In the crane on the right shoulder, the guy had given himself a heart attack and was busy trying to breathe deeply and cough his heart back into rhythm before losing consciousness. The claw continued to swing around counterclockwise, coming back over the right travel lane and bouncing off the roof of a minivan, which rolled and caught on fire.

The claw finally came to rest in the road seven feet in front of a Mitsubishi Fuso delivery truck, who impacted it at speed. Within thirty minutes, traffic was stopped going south on I-75 all the way down to Hampton, twenty-two miles south. 'Clearing work continues this evening. News at eleven.'

Suzie was right there as it was happening. She was in the next lane over, and saw the arm swing out, saw the bucket swing out, and saw the operator bent over double in the cab. She sped up as everyone came to a halt behind her, and proceeded down the construction corridor alone.

Behind her she pictured dead bodies all over the road, cars bursting into flames, screams and cries and approaching sirens. She was glad she hadn't been chasing some villain through the construction zone and being a hazard herself at that exact moment.

Her adrenalin level crept toward normal. She cruised up the road, replaying the accident in her mind to make sure it had really happened. Her day seemed unreal right at the moment: driving down the road in somebody else's car, picking up speed, feeling the wind in her hair, the A/C on and the windows down, just because she could (and because of the mold when she kept the windows up). She listened to rap lyrics coming from the next car. 'I'm a motherfucking soldier. A soldier. I'm gonna die in the motherfucking Army - Be All That You Can Be.' She could hear a Vietnam War protest song looping in the background. 'War, Huh, Good God. What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothin.'

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next, more information than suzie wanted