Scars
There's a pine tree in a grove in the Tecumseh National Forrest with a large, wide notch in it. You would think an axe went into it and one did - only this one wasn't made out of metal.
It had been, predictably, the result of some Axe family shenanigans. His family had been camping in the park and his older brother, Bob, had challenged Sam to a tree-climbing contest. Little Sam was never one to squirm out of a dare, even at five - before his mother could stop him, he'd shimmied up one of the tallest trees in the park.
When he looked down, he was several feet off the ground. Bob stood open-mouthed beside the tree, his cheeks red; his eldest brother Tommy stared up at him in horrified amazement.
"SAM! Get down from there!" he hollered, which did the worst possible thing - scare their mother out of the tent and cause Sam to lose his balance.
His total lack of fear was the only thing that spared Sam a permanent fear of heights as he tumbled down, breaking branches on the way and whacking his jaw into the base of the tree, chipping it, cutting his face and breaking his jaw. Little Sam was out like a light, missing the drama his terrified mother and father were forced to stir up on his behalf. He woke up in the hospital with his jaw wired shut and several sets of curious eyes peering down. He had never felt more loved in his life.
Sam tells this story every single time he and Michael are stuck in a swamp, the story of how he got the l-shaped notch on his chin.
****
He hit the floor. That's all Michael really remembers. He blacked out after the knuckles made impact against his mouth and he hit his head on the cabinet, blank and stopped in silence.
It had been a fight over a missing flashlight. Nate had taken it to read Spider-Man after lights-out the night before, and Michael had no idea where it was. His father -half-drunk and vicious in his anger - had punched him repeatedly.
Then he forced him to clean the blood up with a paper towel.
"You tripped." That's what they'd told his mother, even though she'd given him a suspicion-filled look. As with her every problem back then, she pushed away the issue with copious amounts of cigarette smoke and pills.
Michael spent the night curled up on his bed beneath his Superman blanket, staring dumbly at the wall, feeling blood ooze from his cheek, from under the bandage and licking it away, the rust-salt taste invading his senses the night through.
His first taste of blood.
He's never told anyone but Sam about that - with Fi it's just another piece of the past he repressed, with his mother more guilt weighing her down. But with Sam he could say anything, mean it, and it would never leave the room.
That was why he was his best friend.
***
The kid wasn't going to make it. Michael could feel the futility of the night pressing in around them in the old lean-to, straw and dirt drizzling down onto their heads as they pressed rags to his open wound.
His name was Johnson - a new kid on Sam's team, twenty-five, fresh out of boot camp. He had a kid and a wife somewhere in Portland, the promise of a career as a lifer after his hitch was up.
Sam held the boys' head in his lap, blood seeping onto his black pants as he wrung out the rag in a blue china pot filled with water. He sat thinking that someone's mother had once used that pot to serve water to her family; now it was wrecked with the blood of a stranger.
Michael sat by the window, an assault rifle in his hand, watching the jungle brush for enemy guerrillas, thinking of anything but Johnson dying slowly behind him.
Johnson passed out in Sam's arms, and the older man gently laid him among the blankets and gear strewn over the dirt floor.
He poured Michael a fingersworth of scotch into the lid of his canteen. "Drink up. If he dies, we're gonna need it."
There was something terrible about sharing the room with a dying man, in watching someone good suffer and knowing you can't do anything about it. He talked out in his delirium, and Sam listened patiently, easing his dying in ways Michael couldn't. Michael only watched Sam's father confessor act, silently impressed
They buried Johnson two days later in what was once the family garden, between the beans and the pumpkins. Chore prayers in the pouring rain, and an old Bible they'd found in the coat closet were all they could give him until their recon team cut through the underbrush and rescued them.
That day should have hardened Michael's soul against the suffering of others, but instead it taught him that whatever his father had damaged wasn't permanently destroyed; he could feel something in the depths of his soul.
It was also the day Sam started drinking heavily.
***
The palms grew higher than the electrical wires down at Sam's shack, and sometimes he just sat out on the porch and lets the wind blow through his toes as the lines jostled.
Mike and Fi brought the kids every other week, when school was out and Michael's leg wasn't acting up.
"They could've cut the tendon," Sam pointed out, staring at the gash in his friends' thigh as Michael sipped a beer at his side.
"It still acts up when I run." Sam whistled.
He thought about that for a moment. "Say, Mike - I have a budy in Boca...He's a reconstructive surgeon..."
Michael shook his head. "No more hospitals. I've got two toddlers."
One of them was sleeping on Sam's chest. "Guess you're gonna be taking it easy for awhile."
"Easy? How well do you know Fiona, Sam?"
"Too well, brother," Sam shook his head. A popping noise resounded from the kitchen, followed by a curse in Gaelic.
Michael closed his eyes, enjoying the balmy Floridian breeze. "We've got a lot of scars, Sam. I don't know how we're gonna make it."
Sam looked at his best friend, then the child in his arms. "You'll be all right."
Michael watched him curiously. "How do you know?"
"Because a scar's better than an open wound." Michael knows he's in for another lesson in Sam-style philosophy, but kindly sits still for him.
They clink bottles and watch the power lines jostle against the sky.