I let out a sigh. “To let the guy save face. I figured the girl put him in a corner.”
“Of course she did.” William laughed. Then he said, “Either that, or one of your friends said something.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe we should have taught him a lesson. I mean, two of my friends are big. Really big. They would have killed the guy on their own.”
William nodded. “But nobody did.”
“No.”
“And nobody admitted they said anything.”
“No.”
“Shitty situation to put you in, if one of them did say something.”
I shrugged and swiped at the condensation on the outside of my glass. “I didn’t care.”
“Yeah, you did,” William said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have brought it up, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
I nodded. “Maybe.”
“You might need new friends,” William said.
And there it was. The reaction I could never predict. “They’re good guys,” I said, backpedaling. “Like I said, I think this guy was just looking for a fight to impress his girlfriend. I think she put him up to it.”
William nodded. “But the question is why? I think you already figured that out. Someone said something.”
“Maybe,” I said again. “But I wasn’t going to fight the guy just so he could save face . . .” I paused. William waited. I shook my head. Why was I bullshitting? “The truth,” I said, “is I’ve never been in a real fight.” I shrugged and left unsaid the obvious.
William let almost a minute pass, staring at the people in the bar before he reengaged me. “You know the definition of a hero?”
I figured I could make up one on the fly. “Someone who acts without considering his own safety?”
“Someone too stupid not to consider his own safety and gets himself and other people killed,” William said, sounding adamant.
Again, not the answer I’d been expecting. I let William’s statement sit a moment, not quite certain what it meant. Finally, I just asked, “You think I did the right thing?”
“Never get in a fight if your heart isn’t in it. You’ll lose. Especially if the other guy has something to fight for. This guy did. His honor. You didn’t. You’ll get yourself and others killed.”
I nodded. Made sense.
“It’s like Vietnam,” he said, although I had already deduced it. “None of us had our hearts in the fight. What was the point? Why was I supposed to care about a war in a country halfway around the world? How did it impact me? The government couldn’t give us an intelligent reason why we were dying over there. They kept saying we were stopping the spread of communism.” He frowned. “What does an eighteen-year-old care about the spread of communism?”
He doesn’t, I thought, but didn’t say.
William stared at me, as if looking straight through me. Then he asked, “Why’d you tell me that story?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just wanted to hear what you’d say.”
He nodded. “Was it what you expected?”
My turn to chuckle. “No.”
“What did you expect?”
“I figured you would have beat the crap out of the guy.”
William smiled, but it was pensive. Then he said, “Like that hulk at the softball game?”
“Yeah,” I said, still chuckling.
“Only because fighting was what I was brainwashed to do,” he said. “Listen, I didn’t have a choice to fight or not fight. I couldn’t back out or back down. My country put me in that position. Kill or be killed. Period. But you had a choice,” he said. “And you made the right choice. The smart choice. And that takes a lot more guts than anything I did because I had to.”
That made me feel good. For some reason, though, I said, “Sometimes I wish I was more like Todd, with that badass saunter of his.”
William got quiet, a queer expression on his face. “You think Todd walks like a badass?”
“You don’t? He saunters like Arthur Fonzarelli.”
“It’s not a saunter,” William said. “It’s a limp.” William looked as though he was uncertain what more to say. Then he said, “He got it in Vietnam.”
“What happened? If I can ask?”
William sipped his drink. “You can ask and since Todd told me, I’ll tell you. Todd had been outside the wire for weeks on search and destroys. When he got back to his base, they rotated in a new lieutenant. Officers rotated out every six months, just when they finally had enough experience to know shit.”