Empty Tables, Empty Chairs

It was one of his bad days. They didn’t come along as often anymore, but when they did, they were as bad as ever. In fact, Peter thought they were harder on him now that he was not as inured to them as he once was. He suffered through his dark days like a wounded animal, shaking in a fetal position at the worst point, progressing to where he’d stagger to the truck and drive down their private mountain to the village where the local pub was.

Once there, he’d drink. A lot. He drank to forget, but it took a lot of alcohol to get him to that point. He was an O’Keefe, after all, and O’Keefes as a group were a hard-drinking, hard-headed bunch, none more so than Luke, the hardest drinking, hardest headed of them all.

Or so the legend went. It was tough being a legend when you wanted to be an ordinary man. An ordinary man, turning forty-nine, feeling like eighty. Looking around an empty pub, at empty tables where there should be comrades in arms, buddies, the friends from a lifetime as a career soldier. But those friends were gone for the most part. Lost over the course of too many years of wars that went on for too damn many years, until it seemed obscene to him to be having another birthday, to be almost fifty years old, when young men and women, soldiers with wives and husbands, with families, died on the field of battle, or worse, died by their own hands. Either way, those soldiers never went home.

Peter normally wouldn’t follow him. He didn’t feel like he had the right. He hadn’t fought on the front lines for the long years that Luke and his friends had. Only Red had done that. Normally he accompanied Luke on his trips to the pub and poured him back into the truck when he was blind drunk many hours later. But for once, Red wasn’t here, and thus it fell to Peter to do the best he could.

Which was not very well at all, he feared. His first clue that Luke had progressed to stage two of his bad day was when he went to their bedroom to offer him a late lunch, and found that he was gone. He ran down the stairs and outside. He was just in time to see the truck going around the bend — and wasn’t that a metaphor for this day.

Peter kept running until he reached the garage where they kept their supply of vehicles, talking on the phone the whole time. He needed to pass Alliance control over to another commander, address multiple emergencies that were already in the works and secure the chain of command for on-going operations. He took the first car in line — a jeep — and didn’t take the time to check it out. If he had, he might have realized that the left front tire was almost bald. He would have taken one of the half dozen other vehicles, all no doubt in better shape. But while he was a brilliant man, a genius in many fields — he knew nothing about automobiles other than how to drive them, and according to his closest companions, that was debatable.

As he barely managed to keep the Jeep from overturning after the tire blew out, midway between their home and the village, he was inclined to agree. And when he discovered that he had managed to select a vehicle that had a spare tire all right, but one that was completely flat, he was inclined to agree that he was not only an idiot, but he resided with two idiots as well.

Or rather, used to reside with two idiots. Now that Redraven spent the better part of the year in the States, things like the condition of their vehicles had definitely declined. So perhaps he could not be blamed for this situation, Peter considered, glaring at the defective spare tire, which, in all likelihood, was not the spare at all; the spare was undoubtedly already pressed into service on the Jeep, and this bald, flat tire in the boot was one of the ancient original tires.

Huzzah for deductive reasoning. He looked down the road and sighed. He had about an eight mile walk ahead of him before he was likely to meet up with a passing motorist to give him a ride to the village. He’d better get started. No doubt Luke had on his binge drinking.

*****

Luke looked around the pub. He’d deliberately driven to one a little further away than he normally went to — he didn’t want to see anyone he knew. He wasn’t in the mood to make pleasant conversation about the weather or current events or sports. He just wanted to get blind drunk. Unconscious even. He checked his wallet — good, he hadn’t been in such a rush that he’d forgotten to bring plenty of cash.

He walked up to the bar and caught the bartender’s eye easily enough. Years spent working in his father’s pub made it a simple matter to get what he wanted — a glass and a bottle of whiskey — and a nod toward a table in a secluded corner. A good bartender knew how to read a customer’s mood and Luke’s was not that difficult to read, nor was his profession. Soldier seeking solitude, easy call for any barkeep worth his salt. He dropped payment on the bar, including a generous tip, and moved in the direction the bartender indicated, away from the men playing darts and the laughing girls flirting near the television set where the soccer game was displayed. At least, he assumed it was a soccer game. Usually a soccer game on the TV in this part of the world. Just like it would be baseball back in the States, or football, that other “football.”

Once, he would have had trouble tearing his eyes away from the game, as intensely interested in the soccer game as any of his brothers. Some days, he still remembered enough of that other Luke, the soccer star, to have a passing interest in the game he once loved and played so well. Now, it was another part of his life lost to war, integrally entwined with years at military bases where he killed time — no, make that passed time playing soccer with his squadron, insisting they play soccer instead of the American football, or basketball, which everyone thought was crazy, given his ridiculous size. Until they saw him play soccer, that was. Like Pele on stilts, one of his men called him. Once, his little brother Danny had visited the base when Danny was only about twelve, and he, the kid, and Red, had taken on practically a whole squadron and beaten them flat.

Good times. Until he thought about how many of those men were gone now, twenty years later. Lee died in the second Iraq, as did Hank. Mike, Bones, Jake, all lost in Afghanistan. Now Doug — dead after suffering for all these years, and God only knew if it was an accident or whether he finally had enough of living alone and the damned fucking “pilot error” was really just another word for suicide by aircraft. Luke never knew Doug to commit pilot error — not when sober at least. But then, he was rarely sober when he wasn’t flying. Had he finally misjudged and taken an assignment when he shouldn’t have? He hoped that it was a misjudgment and not deliberate. At least he didn’t take anyone else with him.

Luke leaned back and closed his eyes. All he saw were all the young men he knew when he was young, men who didn’t live to be his age, and he wondered how the hell he survived when the men he was supposed to look out for didn’t make it. So many under his command — gone. Faces and names flashed through his mind, twenty-five years of faces, too many of them young, too many of them gone.

He reached for the bottle to pour another drink, but found it moved.

“I think you’ve had enough, Irish.”

“Red.” Luke’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “You’re not here.”

“Well I ain’t a ghost.” He waved his hand and a pot of coffee and two mugs appeared. “I’m all for celebrating a birthday but yours is tomorrow as I recall and you look like you’ve done had all the celebrating — if that’s what you could call it — that you can handle for one day. So let’s work on the sobering up part and get you home. I left Colleen changing a flat for English and by the time I get you respectable, they should be back at the house and have dinner on.”

Luke blinked. “You brought Colleen?”

Red gave a half smile. “Couldn’t leave her. I’ll tell you more about that later. Right now, you and me, we need to talk. You got yourself all worked up I see.”

“Doug.”

“Doug was a fool,” Red said harshly.

Luke looked ready to fight his best friend over that judgment and he half rose from his seat, but the three quarters of a bottle of whiskey he’d drunk very quickly prevented him from making it more than part way before collapsing back down. He put his head in his hands, whispering, “I failed him.”

Red made a rude noise. Luke peeked out at him — clearly his friend was not impressed by his dramatic guilt. He should have known better than to think he would — this was a difference between Peter and Red, among many. It was one reason why Red handled him so much better when he was like this, he thought ruefully, and grinned slightly, always willing to laugh at himself. Red handled all the O’Keefes and their melodramatic ways well, come to think of it. Must be why he and Colleen…making a face, Luke decided not to think about his niece and his best friend in that way.

Red laughed; he knew what that face meant. “Getting back to Doug, before you lose what you just drank all over the floor, and I suggest you start sipping that coffee or we’ll never be home by dinner, Doug gave up on himself years ago. You didn’t give up on him. You did everything you could for him. But the bottle became his best friend. He pushed all of us away after Hank died. We all lose people, hell, it’s what happens in wars, and he knew that. He would never have wanted Hank to have stopped living if it had been the other way around. He was weak and took the cowardly way out by choosing to quit. We all did all that we could for him, none more than you, and if you are sitting here feeling guilty over him, I’m going to have to punch some sense into you. Because I’ll tell you right now, Irish, I will never let you choose the bottle over people, and I’ll never let you kill yourself slowly like Doug has done over the last fifteen years. I’d rather you crash a plane than do this to Peter, make him watch you slowly drink yourself to death over the next ten years, but the fact is, neither of us believes you are such a coward to do either. The Luke O’Keefe we know will always choose us, and he will always choose life.”

Red’s expression was so fierce that it made Luke smile, a lop-sided smile, but a smile all the same. Not bad for one of his bad days, all things considered.

“What did I ever do to deserve you?” Luke asked, grinning broadly. He stood up, the coffee and the whiskey abandoned. He didn’t need either.

It took a lot to get him really drunk, and one bottle of whiskey, not even finished, sure wasn’t enough to do it, Red thought to himself, shaking his head. All he said out loud though was, “I think you fucked up in basic and I was your punishment. Or maybe it was the other way around. I forget. I was probably drunk.”

“Must have been. We know it couldn’t have been because I was, because….”

“I don’t….”

“You don’t….”

“Get drunk.” They finished in unison, grinning. Arms over each other’s shoulders, the two friends left the bar. Red left a truck there to pick up later, insisting that even though Luke was assuredly not drunk, he was not in the best of conditions for driving the winding road back to their mountain home either. And Red had a surprise waiting for him that he preferred they both be in one piece for him to see.

“Consider it a birthday surprise,” was all he would tell him.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Luke whispered as they rode up the road in the fading light.

Red glanced over at his friend, his blood brother. He could see from the lines of strain that it had been a very bad period. The war would never stop leaving its mark on Luke, as much as Peter had done to help heal him. Perhaps it was time to try something different.

“I’ll always be where you need me, Luke. But it goes both ways. I need you to promise to always be around too. And so do Peter, and Danny, and John. We need you, and you need us. I’m asking your promise on this, brother. To be there. For me and mine.” Red added the native word for brother for emphasis.

Luke looked out the window for a long moment. He wouldn’t make a promise he couldn’t keep, Steve knew that. Finally, he sighed heavily, but said the word his brother of the heart wanted. “Yes.”

His place at the table would not be empty, if he could prevent it.

Feedback for Arwensong

or email to arwensong@comcast.net

Return to Tenth Anniversary Challenge