“With friends like that, what do we need them for?”
I remember asking that question a few times, usually gesturing towards the enemy trenches. We’d been fighting this war for too long already, but even the daily threat of death wasn’t enough to keep some jerks from being jerks, and Clint Derrow was some jerk. He was the same rank as the rest of us, and had been there just as long, but was probably the most intolerable guy on either side.
He just needed to pick on the rest of us. It was always something; he’d make fun of our families if he saw us looking at pictures, laugh at us if we were injured, poke fun at anybody who was scared, or made any kind of mistake. Most days, I spent more time worrying about what he was going to say than whether or not I was going to get killed.
The worst thing was that the other guys would join in. It was like they were perfectly happy to help him pick on somebody else, so long as he wasn’t picking on them that day. The truth is, even I wasn’t innocent of that. There were days when I was so glad that I wasn’t his target, I’d be just as bad as him, helping him make someone else’s life difficult. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, but I usually did it anyway.
There was one day, though, when Clint showed me a different side of himself. He hadn’t been around for a few days. Some of us had joked that we hoped he’d been killed, but it really wasn’t that uncommon for guys to get lost in the shuffle for a while. It was pretty quiet without him around, and that was giving me time to sit in the trench and think.
Thinking didn’t go so well for me. The gravity of the situation started to set in, I thought about how it had been since I’d seen my family, and whether or not I ever would again. That was making me sob a little bit, and I guess Clint was back and must have heard it, because he came over sat down beside me.
This was the first time I’d let him catch me with my guard down. In all the time we’d been out there together, I’d never let him see me cry. I figured he was going to give me one hell of a verbal licking over this, but instead he just sat down beside me and said, “What’s bugging you?”
That caught me off guard a little, so I just told him the truth. “I want to go home,” I said. “It seems like we’ve been here forever and I can’t even remember why.”
Clint shrugged. “I don’t know why we’re here either,” he answered. “Fighting the good fight, I guess.” He handed me a cigarette, then gave me a light. We could smoke in the trenches; it wasn’t like they didn’t know where we were here.
“If we’re fighting the good fight,” I argued, pointing over my shoulder, towards the enemy trench, “what fight are they fighting?”
“They must think they’re fighting the good fight too,” he suggested, trying to light his cigarette with wet matches. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be here.”
I passed him my cigarette so he could light his from mine; that was usually easier. While he was doing that, I wondered out loud, “If we all think we’re the good guys, who’s right?”
Clint took a drag off his smoke. It was only half lit, but he’d given up on getting it any better than that. It was wet out there, and sometimes half lit was all you could hope for. “I guess whoever wins,” he smirked.
We both chuckled at that, then just smoked and listened to the sounds around us. It’s hard to describe what it sounded like, and I don’t care to try. Listening made me want to sob again, but before I did, Clint started talking again.
“I’ll tell you what,” he started, “have a piece of this.” He produced a red strand from a pouch on his uniform. “Licorice,” he declared, as he broke it in half and handed me a piece.
I took it and looked at it. “Where did you get this?” I hadn’t seen candy in a long time.
“My wife gave me a whole pack when I shipped out,” Clint answered. “She told me to eat a little bit whenever I get homesick, so I’ll think of her, and maybe feel a little better.” He had a bit of a distant look on his face. “I lost her picture on my first tour, and I haven’t gotten a letter, so this is all I have left.”
I looked at the licorice in my hand, then back at Clint, who was still staring off into space, as though he was trying to remember his wife’s face, but couldn’t quite visualize it. For the first time ever, I felt for him. “I can’t take this,” I told him, handing it back.
He finally looked back at me. “It’s the last piece,” he explained. “After this, it’s all gone. I want to share it with someone, so I don’t forget.” Then he looked me in the eyes and pushed my hand back. I wiped off the piece of licorice. It was muddy, but we were all used to that. Looking, back, I don’t know if I’d even liked licorice before that, but I enjoyed that piece. So did Clint, by the look of it. Maybe we talked more after that, but if we did, I don’t remember what was said.
What I do remember is that I hoped things would be different with Clint after that, but they really weren’t. He still ragged on me, same as ever. Well, almost the same. It may have just been my imagination, but sometimes I thought maybe it was more of a friendly ribbing that it used to be. To this day, I’m not sure. For my own part, though, the rest of the war seemed a bit easier. Sometimes I still felt homesick, and I won’t try to tell you that I didn’t cry again, but I never forgot the flavor of that licorice, and thought about it whenever needed a boost.
Clint never did make it home. I wasn’t there when he died, so I don’t know how it happened, but I remember hearing about it. When I got home I decided to look up his wife. It seemed like the right thing to do, and I guess I thought I owed her a piece of licorice. Another guy I knew from the war worked in a court house now, so I called in a favour and got him to look up Clint and figure out where his widow lived.
It was quite a shock when I found out that Clint Derrow had never been married. He’d enlisted at 18, and shipped out before he’d even moved out of his parent’s house. The one time he’d seemed like a human being, and it’d all been a lie. It was almost sickening; I wrote Clint off, and didn’t even think about him for a while.
A few years later I was walking home from work. It’d been a tough day, and although I’ve long since forgotten what I was upset about, I remember the red licorice for sale at the newsstand I walked by like it was yesterday. As a lark, I bought a piece, thinking maybe it would still cheer me up.
I still worked, just like it had back in the trenches! It also reminded me of Clint. Walking home that evening, sucking on a piece of licorice, I thought about how the hardest parts of the war hadn’t been when he was busting my chops, but rather when he hadn’t been around to distract me. The war itself was too big for one man to deal with, but Clint was a problem that I could at least try to manage. I didn’t realize it until that moment, years later, but his being a jerk had made the war bearable.
Was it possible that he knew what he was doing? Was Clint actually trying to make us focus on him so we didn’t lose hope be focusing on the war? I’ll never know for sure, but I do know that on the day when I needed it the most, he told me exactly what I needed to hear; who cares if it wasn’t true. To this day, I keep a bag of licorice in the pantry, and whenever someone I care about, is having a bad day, I break a piece in half, and tell them a story about old Clint.
I wish I’d had more friends like that.