Five Idiots You Meet in Heaven

Five Idiots You Meet in Heaven is on hiatus. New weekly chapters will resume in January

Being a woman, Joe’s mom loved weddings, so Joe didn’t even have to ask why she’d picked this poorly edited montage of marriage ceremonies as her own personal Heaven. Instead, he asked:

“Ma, what are you doing here?”

Rather than answering his question, Joe’s mother turned around and lifted her arm gracefully in a gesture towards the wedding around them, sighing in that same wistful and self-serious tone that everyone seems to adopt after spending too much time in Heaven:

“Don’t you just love weddings, Joey?”

Old Joe looked around. The scene had transitioned to a religious compound along the Utah-Colorado border. A 14-year-old girl wearing a dress made from a tablecloth was standing next to an older gentleman in a ranch shirt tucked into a pair of tight blue jeans.

“They’re alright, I guess,” Joe answered.

“Do you remember your wedding, sweetheart? It was so wonderful.”

“Yeah, Ma. I remember.”

“Oh, let’s flash back to that. Wouldn’t that be nice? Shall we?”

“Actually, I’d rather just–”

Once again, not paying a damn bit of attention, Joe’s mom snapped her fingers and back they flashed to St. Rita’s Church. There, standing at the altar as the wedding train slowly inched its way down the aisle, was Joe at 22.

Joe-at-22 was wearing a tuxedo (”Don’t you look handsome?” whispered his mother). He gave a sidelong look at the friends and family assembled in the pews: his parents, Grandma and Grandpa Lewis, still healthy though hopelessly senile, Meredith and her new boyfriend Michael whom she had met during her second semester at Evergreen.

“This was one of the happiest days of my life,” sighed his mother. “Maybe even happier than my own wedding. You and Julie were such a lovely couple.”

“Ah, don’t start that again, Ma.”

“It’s true. I was heartbroken when you two got divorced. I think it contributed to my death.”

“Jiminy Christmas, Ma! What am I supposed to say to that?” hissed Joe.

“Now, I’m not trying to make you feel guilty…”

“How could you possibly not be trying to make me feel guilty?”

The vows were beginning, and Joe’s mother shushed him, clasping her hands together and letting out a little coo. Julie stood facing Joe-at-22. She looked beautiful, all rosy cheeks and ruffles.

“Why are we watching this?” Old Joe whispered to his mother.

“I’m here to teach you your third lesson about what your life meant,” snapped his mother peevishly. “And I’m just trying to give you a little context. But since you’ve ruined the moment, I guess we might as well just flash forward to another scene in your marriage.”

Joe’s mother snapped her fingers, and suddenly they were transported to the tiny, one bedroom apartment that he and Julie had rented just down the street from where he grew up.

Joe had worked a number of odd jobs since his marriage. For the last six months, he had been delivering milk, but the company had scaled back its operations, and Joe had been laid off. Julie was working part-time answering telephones for a shampoo distributor, but money was getting tight. As Old Joe and his mother looked on, the young couple discussed the situation:

“I just don’t understand,” Julie was saying.

“Let me take care of it. I’ll take care of it,” Joe was saying at the same time.

“But what if you just worked in the factory for a little while,” Julie said as she washed a dish rag out in the sink, “You wouldn’t have to work there your whole life. Just while you look for something better.”

“Because I don’t want to, alright? Is that ok? That I don’t do something because I don’t want to?” replied Joe, pacing around the kitchen and nearly walking right through Old Joe and his mother.”

Julie burst into tears. Both Joes rolled their eyes.

“Sool wally trolla drubba…” blubbered Julie incomprehensively.

As his younger self tried half-heartedly to comfort her, Old Joe leaned into his mother and whispered, “Mom, is it really necessary to watch all this? I mean, we can just cut to the chase, huh? What’s my lesson?”

“Honey,” replied his mother, “sometimes we don’t know what relationships mean to us until they end. Other times, we don’t know what they mean until they end, then a long time goes by, then we die and see them again in Heaven as short flashbacks.”

“I took the stupid job in the end. You know that. So what’s the point of rehashing this old junk?”

“Everything has a point, sweetheart,” said his mom with the insufferable sagacity that seems mandatory in Heaven, “we just have to look hard enough for it.”

Joe’s mom snapped her fingers, and all at once they were no longer in the kitchen. They were in the bedroom down the hall, and Julie and Joe-at-almost-25 were lying naked on the bed in the act of love.

“Ma! What the hell are you doing?” Joe gasped.

“Don’t you use that sort of language with me,” his mother replied, wagging a finger.

Joe began furiously snapping his fingers in the air, trying desperately to switch the scene.

“Snap your fingers, god damn it. Get us out of here!”

His mother gave an angry little snap before turning around and beginning to cry.

“I can’t believe you would talk to your own mother that way,” she sobbed.

“Ah, come on, Mom. I don’t wanna be watching that stuff with you. What were you thinking?”

Joe put his arm around his mother, and he was so busy comforting her that it was several minutes before he realized where they were. It was a doctor’s office, and Julie and his younger self (how old now? 27? 28?) were sitting across an imposing desk from the doctor himself.

The doctor produced a folder, folded his hands on the desk and shook his head.

“Ah, for crying out loud,” Old Joe muttered.

Years later, Joe would consider making a list of all the times he had been a selfish prick towards his sweet, long-suffering mother. If he had made such a list, it would doubtless have been embarrassingly long. It would also have been in italics and told mainly in the present tense in order to make the action seem more immediate. This would most likely have been the first episode:

Joe has been back from Korea for about two months. When his mother enters his room carrying a tray of blueberry muffins, he is lying on his bed feeling sorry for himself and also reading the sports section.

“Want a muffin, hon?” his mom asks.

“Uh, yeah. Sure, Ma. I’ll eat it later,” says Joe, barely looking up to acknowledge the woman who probably spent hours slaving away in the kitchen to bake these muffins especially for him because she’s convinced that he loves blueberries (although she’s actually thinking of someone else).

Lucille sets the tray down at the foot of the bed and sits next to her son, awkwardly stroking his hair.

“You know, Joey. I’ve always said you can be anything you want. Even the president of some company or something.”

Obstructed from reading, Joe folds his newspaper and sighs.

“Is this about the factory? Cuz I told Dad–”

“We just want you to be happy. Here, let me pick up this room for you.”

Lucille gets up from the bed and starts gathering some of Joe’s clutter.

“Don’t, Ma. I’ll get to it. I was gonna tidy up this afternoon.”

Lucille ignores him and continues cleaning. Joe sighs again and gets off the bed to join her. They both get their hands on a crumpled undershirt at the same time and do a brief, ridiculous tug-of-war.

“What kind of job do you think would make you happy, sweetheart?” Lucille asks.

“I don’t know, Ma. It’s like I told you and Dad before. I think I’m gonna try and get a job driving a taxi or maybe be a shipping clerk or something.”

Joe doesn’t know what a shipping clerk is.

“You know, this floor looks a little dusty,” says his mother, “I think I’m going to get a broom.”

“No!” says Joe, exasperated. “I said I’ll get to it. Would you just leave me alone?”

“Oh. Ok,” says his mother with a guilt-inducingly crestfallen look. “I’ll just leave those muffins with you.”

“Ma, what am I gonna do with a whole tray of muffins?” asks Joe.

Jesus. She was just trying to be nice.

What if you could see your dead mother for one more day? What if you could spend time with her for one extra day in addition to the other days you spent with her when she was alive? What meals would you eat? What activities would you plan? What important life lessons would you try to learn from her?

Lucille Kaminski, born Lucille Lewis, lived until she was twelve on a ranch near Twin Falls, Idaho, where her father worked as a hired hand. Mr. Lewis later moved the family to Washington in order to find work as a longshoreman, a calling to which he was convinced a man of his disposition and talents was better suited . It was there, after an interim of several years, that Lucille met Joe’s father. Joseph Kaminski (Senior) was aggressive, handsome enough and pulled down a decent wage for those lean times. Lucille was smitten.

Her father, to his credit, kept an open mind regarding the courtship. Though himself nominally a Methodist, Mr. Lewis shrugged his shoulders whenever his wife fretted over the papist tendencies of “that Polish boy with the chocolate.” In truth, ambivalence towards their respective faiths was one of a number of traits that Mr. Lewis shared with his future son-in-law.

Lucille and Joe (Senior) were married in the spring of 1933, and it was the happiest day of Lucille’s life, for now she would never be lonely again. The wedding was lavish by the standards of her parents’ financial situation and was performed on the neutral ground of an Episcopal church, the only establishment nearby that could accommodate their schedule. Nine months later, give or take, Joe was born.

The point is: Joe’s mother was just about the sweetest, most thoughtful lady you could ever hope to meet. She’d sacrificed so much for her children, and Joe had always felt a little guilty about what an ungrateful prick of a son he’d been.

When the magical Heaven fog lifted, Old Joe found himself in what looked like some sort of church where some sort of ceremony seemed to be occurring. There was a man who looked as if he were preparing to give some kind of ring to someone, and there were dozens of people watching who appeared to be sitting in pews of some kind.

Suddenly, Joe felt someone tap him on his lower back. He turned around in surprise to see a little girl with braided pig tails wearing a frilly yellow dress and carrying a basket of flowers.

“‘Coos me, mister. I need to get froo,” she squeaked up at him.

Blood rising to his face, Old Joe looked around and realized that he was standing in the middle of the aisle and that everyone was looking at him. Yet, their faces were not angry. They were friendly and welcoming, inviting him to join in their celebration. Embarrassed, Joe stood to one side and allowed the procession led by the little girl with the basket to continue their march towards the altar.

He stood back and watched with the rest of the audience. “A wedding,” he mumbled, stating the obvious to himself.

The bride ascended the steps and stood facing her husband-to-be. They looked into each other’s eyes with a look of deep loving love. Then, suddenly, just as the priest was about to begin his routine about dearly beloveds and havings and holdings, something very strange happened.

The entire church seemed to split apart at a seam in the middle, and that seam grew wider and wider, revealing a new image underneath, like a barn door wipe in a tackily edited home movie. The chasm swelled until it engulfed Joe’s entire field of vision. He looked down at his body to make sure that every part of him had made the transition. Yes, he appeared unharmed. The jarring scene change had happened all around him without affecting him directly.

Relieved, he looked up and found himself once again surrounded by people in the middle of a celebration. This time, the faces were all Asian, and their clothes were brightly colored. A woman in a red dress was being carried on a sedan chair borne by four guests. Suddenly, a chain of firecrackers started going off near Joe’s feet. He jumped to the side only to be ambushed by a second chain of firecrackers. A moment later, the entire party was inundated with deafening noise and choking smoke.

An old man approached Joe through the gray fog and grabbed his hand, shaking and grinning and saying something joyful in a language Joe couldn’t understand. The old man forced a cup of foul-smelling clear liquid on Joe, but before the bewildered candyman could protest, he felt the phenomenon happen again. A series of horizontal lines began to form along the old man’s face.

Joe looked around and saw the same thing happening all across the smoke-filled gathering. The scene began to separate into diminishing horizontal strips which folded in on themselves like venetian blinds, exposing a new scene underneath.

Joe was again immersed in yet another jubilant function, a joyful ceremony he recognized right away from Fiddler on the Roof. Smashing glasses, wild circle dancing, the whole bit. But before he could even say, “mozoltov,” the scene dissolved into another.

This time, Joe stood in front of a crowd of people who looked Belarusian or maybe Ukrainian. They were all watching a young couple who were standing on some sort of padnozhnik or perhaps some other kind of ceremonial wedding towel.

Next, another lame video transition brought Joe to a beach in what he assumed must be Cyprus where an assemblage of well-dressed Cypriotes sat on long benches eating what looked to be a special bread made with orange peels and dates. Then, the scene shifted to another wedding in another part of the world in which the bride was tying a yellow ribbon around the groom’s finger. Next, he witnessed a ceremony in which the bride and the groom slapped each other repeatedly.

Again and again, Joe was whisked from one joyous celebration to another, marveling at each step at how colorful and varied were mankind’s traditions regarding the rites of marriage. And though some of the customs seemed strange, the core of the experience was always the same: the eternal spiritual union between one man and one woman formed to consummate the deepest bonds of love or else to consolidate property.

Joe passed through a wedding where everyone was wearing purple turbans and eating oatmeal from shallow marble bowls. He stopped by a reception in which children tossed copper coins to the bride, who tried to catch them on her tongue. He visited another wedding in which the guests were all emptying large sacks of sugar onto the floor and then lying down and writhing around in the sweet, grainy piles.

It was during this last wedding, in the midst of all the pouring and the writhing, that Joe felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned around, expecting to offer or be offered yet another hearty congratulations. Instead, he stood face to face with someone he never expected to see again.

“Welcome to Heaven, Sweetheart.”

Joe felt his mouth go dry and tears begin to form in his eyes.

“Mom…” he whispered.

It is 1953. Joe has been home for two months. He eats sausage and boiled cabbage with his family. Julie is there, clinging to his elbow and gazing at him with concern as he fails to consume his pink kielbasa with adequate enthusiasm. His father and Meredith are arguing about her plans for college. She’s been admitted to Evergreen, but blah blah blah. 

Joe’s not really listening. He’s just grateful they’re not paying attention to him. But, suddenly, his father turns to him.

“And what about you, layabout? You going to take that job I offered you or what?”

“I told you, Pop. I’m going to try to look for something else,” Joe mumbles, poking at his cabbage.

“Right. I forgot. The candy factory’s good enough for your old man, but not good enough for Mr. War Hero and his shiny medal. Well, you better let me know by the end of the month. Otherwise, I’m getting someone else.”

Joe nods and pushes away his plate.

“I’m feeling really tired all of a sudden. Thanks for the dinner, Ma, but I really gotta get some shuteye.”

“Sleeping your life away,” says his father.

Joe retires to his bed, but he can still hear the family talking about him in the next room.

“They say he has some sort of syndrome, Dad,” says Meredith.

“Your Uncle Peter saw plenty of his share of combat, and I never heard him complain once,” replies Joe’s father.

“That’s because Uncle Peter died,” says Meredith.

“I’m so worried about Joey,” says his mother.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him,” says Julie.

During all the years they had worked together at the candy warehouse, Gonzalez had always thought of Joe as just a dull, slightly senile old man. It had never occurred to him to wonder what poignant, meaningful things had happened to the fat, crippled old warehouse fixture during his long life. Never, that is, until he was called upon to clear out Old Joe’s desk drawer.

The first thing Gonzalez found was an old pocket watch, the sort of pocket watch that fathers often leave for their sons and thus become vessels for all the unresolved feelings those sons might have toward their watch-carrying fathers. Gonzalez turned the emotionally-heavy symbol over in his hand. On the back was inscribed “Joseph T. Kaminski,” which Gonzalez naturally assumed referred to Joe.

The next thing that Gonzalez found was a pile of old receipts. These have no significance.

The next thing that Gonzalez found was a photograph, weathered with age, of a handsome young white soldier with his arm around a beaming black soldier. Beside the photograph was a war medal. Gonzalez picked it up and examined it for a few moments.

“Hey Marco,” Gonzalez called out. “Check this out. You know what kind of medal this is?”

Marco sauntered over and inspected the medal.

“Dunno, man. Looks pretty impressive, though. Not a purple heart. Medal of honor you think?”

Neither Marco nor Gonzalez realized that this was a special medal the army gives you when your best friend dies.

“Who knew Old Joe was a war hero, huh?” Gonzalez said, genuinely impressed.

He continued to poke through his deceased colleague’s belongings. He found a can of Pepsi from Japan, what looked like a lever from some sort of factory machine, and a baseball signed by someone whose name was illegible.

Gonzalez sighed. The can and the receipts he could probably just throw away, but what to do about the medal and the watch?

Joe and President Truman materialized in the middle of a firefight. Machine gun rounds exploded from the ridgeline up ahead like pop rocks crackling across a set of gums. “Take cover!” someone shouted, and Old Joe instinctively ducked down. All around him, American soldiers were doing the same.

Suddenly, a pair of jets screeched by overhead, and a billowing ball of flame incinerated the enemy position like a fudge brownie with a stick of dynamite inside. There were a dozen or more heartbeats of bizarre, unworldly silence, and then the soldiers stood up and cheered. Old Joe stood up too and laughed right along with them. Looking around him, he realized this was his old unit. There was Colby. There was Ratty. There was Sergeant Simms. There was that one guy with the lazy eye whose name he couldn’t remember. And there, slapping the dirt off his knees and grinning in sheer relief to be alive, was his younger self.

“Kaminski, Little,” Sergeant Simms was barking, “I want you two up on that ridgeline. Make sure that air strike cleared everybody out and secure the position.”

“Yes sir,” said Joe’s younger self, and he and Colby started off towards the pillar of smoke where the North Korean machine gun nest had been.

The ridge. The smoke. The sergeant’s words. His surroundings brought Old Joe’s memory careening backwards like a runaway ice cream truck towards a certain day and a certain place he’d hoped never to revisit.

“No,” Old Joe whispered.

“No!” he screamed. “Oh God, no! Colby! Wait!”

Helplessly, he planted his body in front of the two soldiers as they marched up the hill heroically doing their duty like heroes. But the two close army friends who had shared so much simply walked through Old Joe as if he weren’t really there, as if he were just some sort of ghost sent to watch their story unfold in order to learn a lesson about life.

“Stop!” pleaded Old Joe, limping after them. “You have to listen to me! Don’t go up there!”

When they reached the top, Joe and Colby found the charred bodies of several Korean soldiers. Scattered around the tiny camp were piles of still-burning rubble. Joe was just about to radio the sergeant when Colby, who had continued on about twenty yards ahead, called back to him, uttering the last words anyone would ever hear him say: “Hey Joe, better back off. I think we got some unexploded ordinance lying over– Ahhhh!”

What Colby had meant to say was that there was some “unexploded ordinance lying over here,” but he didn’t have time to finish his sentence. Before Joe could even turn around, an explosion from just behind where Colby was standing ripped him apart and sent his body parts flying in all directions.

“Noooooooo!” shouted young Joe and Old Joe in unison as Colby’s severed hand spun through the air in what seemed like slow motion.

Laid low with grief at seeing his friend exploded in front of him for a second time, Old Joe sunk to his knees and as about to bury his face in his hands when from behind him he heard a rubber duck being squeezed.

With a squeak, he found himself back in Truman’s Oval Office. The former president patted Joe’s shoulder and then walked back around to his desk, sitting forward with his hands folded and looking intently at Joe.

“Why did you show me that?” asked Joe miserably.

“Had to be done, soldier. It’s your second lesson,” Truman responded.

“Yeah? And what’s that?” Joe mumbled despondently.

“Sacrifice.”

Joe looked up from where he was still kneeling and waited for Truman to expand.

“I don’t understand,” he said finally.

“Sacrifice. Everybody does it. A mother sacrifices her evening to help her son with his homework. A man in love sacrifices three months wages to buy a ring with a diamond on it. You sacrificed your mobility to catch a baseball. Your friend sacrificed his life to stop communism from spreading to a peninsula in northwest Asia. Don’t you see, son? We all do it, but we don’t always realize what a gift it is. Sacrifice is a part of life.”

“Huh…” Joe said, mulling this over. “So what happens if you don’t sacrifice? I mean, if somehow, somebody managed to go through life and never sacrifice anything?”

“Then you’d never learn the most important lesson of all,” answered President Truman.

“What’s that?”

“That sacrifice is a part of life. Listen, son: your friend died. But you lived. Life is always a gift, and, through his sacrifice, he was passing that gift on to you.”

Something still bothered Joe about this lesson.

“But did he really have to die so that I could live? I mean, wouldn’t it have been better if neither of us had died?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Truman snapped, growing impatient. “Every time someone dies, someone else lives. And vice versa. Why, remember when I dropped those two big bombs on Japan? Don’t you know that the very next afternoon, an extra 200,000 people suddenly sprang to life in the world? How else in the name of holy thunderforce do you think I’m able to live with myself? It’s all balance, son. We’re all connected.”

Joe stared at Truman, trying to unravel the metaphysical implications of what he was saying.

“Nothing ever really ends,” Truman continued, beginning to babble now. “Just like nothing ever really begins. Everything just sort of floats around doing loopty loops out in the ether. At least I think that’s how it works. Anyway, are we clear on your lesson? Sacrifice. And we’re all connnected. Oh, and nothing ever really ends. Say, shouldn’t you be taking notes on this?”

“That seems more like three lessons to me,” said Old Joe.

“Don’t you see, son? All lessons are actually one lesson.”

With that, he squeezed his rubber duckie and vanished. The Oval Office filled with that magic fog that marked the end of one episode and the beginning of the next. Joe sighed.

It is Joe’s nineteenth birthday, and he’s still laid up in bed. Colby and a few of Joe’s other friends come to see him in the medical tent, bearing small gifts and sneaking in a contraband bottle of whiskey.

“To Joe,” says Colby, passing out tea cups filled with whiskey and raising his own, “not much of an outfielder but a helluva guys.”

Everyone laughs at Colby’s irreverent joke about Joe’s injury. One of the other soldiers, a skinny kid named Ratzenburg whom everyone calls Ratty, takes a sip and smacks his lips.

“Hey Kaminski,” says Ratty, “You’re into that whole astolomy thing, right? Your birthday’s in January, so you’re a what, a Sagittarion, right?”

“Sagittarius. But I’m Capricorn,” replies Joe.

“Naw, buddy, I think you’re Sagittarion,” Ratty shakes his head skeptically.

“My brother’s a Capricorn. What’s Capricorns like, Kaminski?” asks another soldier.

“Well, they’re supposed to be practical, ambitious and hard-working. They value romance and stability. And they often become farmers, politicians and engineers.”

“You believe in that stuff, Joe?” asks Colby, plopping down on a folding stool ad twirling his tea cup in his hands, “that we all got a destiny and everything?”

“I dunno, Colby,” says Joe, “it’s just for fun, I guess.”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, man,” says Colby whose low tolerance for alcohol is making him wistful and serious, “I feel like I got a destiny. So many dreams and plans, Joe. I got so many dreams and plans.”

Joe smiles, thinking of the long and promising life that’s ahead of both of them. 

Old Joe and Harry Truman watched Joe’s younger self pick himself up and hobble back towards the tents, wincing. If the former president and former candyman had been wearing X-ray glasses, they would have seen a fracture in young Joe’s hip, a tiny little crack that danced through the bone like a caramel ribbon through a chunk of nougat. It was an injury that would heal badly and affect his mobility for the rest of his life, effectively crippling him by the time Joe hit his autumn years.

As young Joe limped nearer the encampment, a heavyset black soldier with a round babyish face ran out to meet him. Draping Joe’s arm around his shoulders, the soldier supported his injured comrade’s weight, and together they began haltingly back to base. “Colby!” exclaimed Old Joe, smiling for the first time since Harry Truman had transported him back in time to the war-torn Korean Peninsula.

Joe had met Colby Little back in basic training, and they had been assigned to the same unit after shipping out. He was Joe’s first and only friend of African-American color, and their shared experiences had made them like brothers. Brothers that looked different because one of them was black and one of them was white. But they seldom even thought about race because they were such good army friends.

Truman and Old Joe followed the two brothers-in-arms back to the medical tent where Colby deposited the younger Joe on a stool just inside the door flaps. Young Joe groaned and grimaced.

“Hey doc,” said Colby. “We was playing some ball out by the supply depot and Private Kaminski here took a pretty bad spill. I think he might’ve hurt his leg or something.

Colby was addressing Dr. Steadman, a muscular, mustachioed physician with his jacket open and his shirt untucked who was filling out some paperwork. Only after he had finished the page he was on did he look up, put his feet up on the card table that served as a desk and light a Marlboro.

“We ain’t got enough peril on the battlefield, you boneheads gotta find ways to get yourselves injured on your downtime?” asked Doc Steadman after taking a long drag on his cigarette.

“I’m alright, Doc,” grunted Joe. “Lemme just walk it off some.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea. You should apply to medical school, Kaminski, you got such a knack for diagnosis,” said Doc Steadman, leaning back and shooting a plume of smoke straight upwards. “Go find Nurse Hancock and tell her to clear you a bed. I’ll get you off duty for a few days, you lucky son of a bitch.”

“That’s Doc Steadman,” Old Joe whispered to Truman. “He was known for being kind of an asshole, but most of us liked him.”

“Spare the narration, kid” replied Truman. “I’m not the one who’s supposed to be learning here. And there’s no need to lower your voice. He can’t hear you.”

“Well, I’m just reminding myself,” added Old Joe defensively. “All this seems so long ago. All the forgotten people and places. I remember that fly ball, though. Every time I try to climb a flight of stairs. What an idiot I was, running out onto those rocks will all that ice around. It’s funny how the stupidest things can end up haunting you for the rest of your life.”

“Stupid?” asked Truman, raising one eyebrow and looking at Old Joe like a schoolteacher. “No, son. Nothing in life is stupid.”

Old Joe cocked his head and made a vague hmmm as if he’d like to disagree, but Truman was already taking a rubber duckie out of his coat pocket and giving it a squeeze.

Squeak!

The scene around them changed. The medical tent vanished and was replaced with a twilight sky and a hill dotted with trees.

And then the explosions started.