Read Online Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn - Free Book Online

else’s boat. We go out for the afternoon, catch a few fish, and he drops us off again. We knew the boat was stolen, even though he said it was a friend’s. We knew there’d be trouble if we were caught but we went anyway. His impunity thrills me, I mistake it for fearlessness, though years later he will admit to being afraid all the time. When he decides to put an addition on our house he takes me down to the lumberyard and I see how he pays for a couple sheets of plywood and a few two-by-fours, how he takes the slip out to the yard and backs up to a stack of plywood and has me get on the other side of it so we can load the whole pile onto his truck, until the springs sag. We jump in the cab and he slams it into drive and with the first jerk forward all the plywood slides out onto the ground. We get out and reload it, his entire body now coiled energy, waving off an offer of help from the guy who works there. That weekend we double the size of my mother’s cottage, the second and last house she’d buy, all of us and a few of his friends furiously hammering, desperate to finish quickly because Travis never bothered to get a permit. The last thing we do that Sunday night is paint the whole thing yellow, so it will blend in with the rest of the house. It will take two years to get around to shingling it, and only then when the yellow is peeling off in sheets.
     
    In Vietnam he’d been a mine-sweeper, the guy who cleared the path, made it safe to put your foot down. Usually he was good at it, but sometimes he’d screw up, and when he did someone was blown to pieces. After being in-country for a year he signed on for another hitch, but caught some shrapnel a few months into it and was shipped home. In the States he became a color guard in Washington, standing at white-gloved attention at high-level events. But he’d landed back in the “world” with a short fuse, and when a car full of hippies honked at him at a traffic light that had turned from red to green Travis got out and pistol-whipped the driver, pulled him right through the car’s window. Half an hour later, when the police found him, he was in a fast-food joint eating a burger, having forgotten what he’d done. He got off, but then Kent State happened and they ordered him into the basement of the Pentagon, “full combat gear, the whole nine yards.” He refused. He knew he’d be sent to college campuses, and was terrified that he’d have to kill more kids. They locked him up in Bethesda for six months, shot him full of thorazine, gave him an honorable discharge, cut him loose. A few months later he was at our dinner table.
     
    I liked to play what were called “practical jokes.” I had a spoon with a hinge, a dribble glass, a severed rubber hand. I’d leave booby traps around our house, usually a piece of thread strung across a doorway as a tripwire, one end tied to a broom or the racks from the oven, anything that would fall and make a racket. I don’t think I knew that Travis had spent his time in Vietnam checking for trip-wires—I don’t know if knowing would have stopped me. I would set the trap and maybe it would catch someone and maybe it wouldn’t. One night Travis took the racks and tucked them between my bottom sheet and the mattress. I came in later that night and crawled into bed. Why I didn’t notice the racks right off I can’t say, but hours later I awoke from dreams of torture.
    Midafternoon one Saturday Travis comes home after digging sea clams with a buddy. Leaning on pitchforks knee-deep at low tide, they’d each managed to kill a case of beer before noon. He dumps the clams in the sink and tells my brother and me to circle around, he wants to show us his photo album. For the first few pages he’s a teenager, cocky beside hot rods, girls sitting on the hoods, one with her arm draped over his shoulders. The next page shows him at boot camp, Parris Island—crewcut, sudden adult. The next shows Vietnamese women dancing topless