Tough Day for the Army: Stories

Notes from a Neighborhood War

97 Notes from a Neighborhood War Billy Turner and Jimmy Elliott were ten years old. “Oh yeah?” Billy Turner said to Jimmy Elliott. “Yeah!” Jimmy Elliott said back to Billy Turner as he kicked Billy in the shin and then socked him in the gut, dropping him to the sidewalk. Billy held his shin with one hand and his stomach with the other and moaned up from the ground. “I’m going to get my brother and have him beat you up.” Which he did. Billy went home and got his older brother, Sam, who was fourteen and had hair under his arms. Sam and Billy walked over to the Elliott home and rang the doorbell. When Jimmy answered the door, Sam dragged him outside, pushed him to the ground, and held Jimmy down with his left hand while blackening the boy’s eye and bloodying his nose with his right. Jimmy looked up at the Turners and vowed, “My brother can beat up your brother.” Which was true, if half-brothers count, because Jimmy’s halfbrother Andrew was thirty-two years old, an investment banker living in a different city a plane ride away who had played some college football (Division II, but still . . .) and continued to work out four days a week. Jimmy called Andrew on the phone, after which Andrew hopped on a direct flight, stopping at home just long enough to collect Jimmy and head over to the Turners’. Billy answered the door and declared that Sam was not home, but Sam was indeed home, hiding under the bed, the third place Andrew 98 Elliott looked. Andrew dragged Sam Turner out from under the bed and proceeded to kick a few of the boy’s teeth down his throat. Billy Turner looked down at his brother on the floor, then back up at Jimmy and Andrew Elliott and shouted, “Well, my dad can beat up your brother!” This was a more dubious proposition. Billy and Sam’s father, Earl Turner, was in charge of accounts receivable at the local tool-and-dye, and at night as he changed for bed and looked at himself in the golden glow of the bathroom vanity, he saw breasts. Fortunately, one of the tools they manufactured at the local tool-and-dye was tire irons. Making sure to put the tire iron in his checked baggage, Earl Turner flew to Atlanta, signed in at the security desk of Columbus, Cornell, and Hum Financial Services, LLC, sneaked up behind Andrew Elliott, older half-brother of Jimmy Elliott, and cracked his skull with the tire iron, leaving him slumped and bleeding over his computer keyboard. Upon hearing this news, Jimmy Elliott was at a loss, for he had no father. Jimmy was the product of a second marriage by his (and Andrew’s) now-deceased father to Jimmy’s much younger mother. Luckily, Jimmy had recently completed a school unit on civics, and during those lessons he learned that our government works for the people, even individual people younger than voting age, and that when individual people have problems, they can and should contact their congressional representative. Congressperson Maxine Williams was Jimmy’s second call. His first was to Billy Turner. “My duly elected representative can beat up your father!” he shouted into the phone before hanging up on Billy Turner. Congressperson Williams enjoyed a good fight, though she was not one for actual fisticuffs, for she favored elaborate hats that were easily dented. However, she was on the Subcommittee for Domestic Military Preparedness, which meant she had the e-mail address for a couple of National Guard colonels. Col. Evan Smith, Army Reserves, 99 also enjoyed a good fight, as well as armor-plated vehicles, which his unit happened to be short on, a problem that was soon remedied thanks to the influence of Congressperson Williams after Strike Team Omega rappelled through a hole blown in the roof of Cornell Brothers Tool & Dye into the glassed-in office of Earl Turner and “eliminated ” their target with minimal collateral damage. Billy Turner would not stand for this. Billy called the number in the advertisement from the back of Soldiers for Hire magazine, the one that said, at the bottom, “Blood is thicker than water, but money is thicker than blood.” Billy met Mr. Hawk at midnight behind the Gas & Guzzle and showed Mr. Hawk the life-insurance check issued after his...