After he had showered, Rogers dressed himself in a clean white t-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. He could smell bacon and eggs frying in the kitchen and strong coffee. It made him smile. His friends were awake and making breakfast and it felt good to have someone else in the house with him again.

He closed the distance in a rush and crossed the polished hardwood into the kitchen where, once again, Scott Ewell served as chef. Ever hungry, and hardly able to afford the calories he required, the tall teen was making the most of the Dunn’s ample larder, prodding skillets filled with scrambled eggs and sizzling bacon with a spatula. He glanced over his shoulder as Rogers entered the room, smiled, lifted his chin, then returned to his task. Gunnar sat on a stool before a plate of food at the counter and eagerly shoveled eggs into his mouth. He held a fork in one hand, a piece of toasted bread in the other, and he worked the implements like construction equipment. He looked up when Rogers entered. The fork poised with a full load, the crust of the toast hovering just above the plate, Gunnar’s cheeks bulging like a chipmunk. He lifted his face ever so slightly and his eyebrows moved up and down in acknowledgement before his attention returned to the food.

“Morning, slacker,” Scott said. He flipped a lonesome scrap of surplus bacon into his mouth with the spatula. “’Bout time you drug your ass outta bed. Aren’t you supposed to be in training or something? Here you are stayin’ up late, sleepin’ in, partyin’ and shit. Ain’t gonna win no national championship like that, bro. No sir. Especially not with that squad you’re runnin’ with. Now if you had me on the team? Maybe. But, you and a bunch of rez runners? Uhm, no. Just another reason why you’ll see me at Gonzaga.”

He turned and offered Rogers the cast iron frying pan in his hands.

“Breakfast?”

Ewell’s rhetoric was ridiculous, but his cooking was good, eggs scrambled with diced potatoes, onion, and cheese. Rogers ate with a ravenous hunger and mashed the final tiny remnants with his fork until his plate was perfectly clean, save a thin layer of grease patterned with a faux finish from brushstrokes of bread crust. When he was done, he rose and rinsed his dish in the sink and dried his hands on a towel that hung nearby.

The other two members of the group had still not appeared, and he went in search for them. He found them in the den, a sight at which he nearly laughed out loud. He stifled the giggle with a silent smile and pulled his link from a front pocket and captured the scene with its camera. A few quick operations on the touchscreen and the image he had just made appeared on the large display embedded in the far wall. Behind him, Rogers heard Gunnar’s laugh as he stepped into the room and saw it.

Brady and Lee were asleep on the sectional. Lee was half lying on the chaise, his head lolling back, mouth open wide. Brady was stretched across the couch, his face in Harper’s lap. Rogers hopped into the air and landed atop them.

“What the fuck?” complained Lee.

He was hardly awake and completely hung over, more precisely still drunk, and his face was twisted in a primal expression that communicated clearly his disorientation and displeasure.

“Dogpile, dude,” Gunnar cried, and he leaped on top of Rogers.

“Get the fuck off me,” Harper growled at the two of them.

He shoved them with both hands and raised them forcibly from the couch. Brady added a boost that sent the big redhead flying from the sofa and he careened painfully off a corner of the coffee table. Gunner landed unceremoniously in a heap on an oriental rug. Undaunted, he rubbed his bruised leg and pointed at the display and laughed uproariously.

“Look at the little lovebirds. Aren’t they cute?”

“Damn you bastards,” muttered Lee.

He clambered to his feet and shouldered past Rogers. He tottered to the screen with one eye clamped shut against the pounding that appeared immediately in his head and he poked at it with a thick finger. He was not fully awake and his mind still cloudy with drink and sleep, or the lack of it, and he squinted at the device through one bloodshot eye and glared at it like it was alive and aligned against him. Finally, he found the appropriate controls and powered down the wall display.

“Can’t you two dicks see I’m hung over as fuck?” he asked rhetorically.

“No worries. I tagged you in it,” Rogers told him. Harper glowered as he dug in pockets of his clothes, searching for something. “So you can check it out later.”

“Might help you get a date,” Gunnar added. He was at the portal to the net and was poking at it with a nearly translucently white finger. The room rumbled at the opening percussion of a heavy metal tune. The vocals entered with a scream. “With someone with a limp wrist, mebbe.”

“What...is...this... gawdawful shit?!” Lee thundered.

Harper flung a throw pillow in Gunnar’s direction as he quit rummaging through his garments and began searching about the room. The redhead snickered.

“Fuck!” shouted Lee.

Leighland Harper hated contemporary music. Pop, metal, rap, country, it didn’t matter. He abhorred it all equally, without prejudice. It was an aversion that extended far beyond music. His distaste for modernity was sweeping. He detested current trends in clothes, mores, vocabulary. His was a study of the past, and he actively rejected anything new. The way he saw it, the one thread common to the modern era was that it lacked integrity and ideal. All the gains that man had made, everything worthwhile, had been forgotten or discarded, and everything today but a sad parody of a more refined age. He considered it his personal charge to remind the world of that.

“Eines,” he muttered.

He felt in the pockets of his heavy canvas ranch coat, and his dark eyes glared at Rogers and Gunnar. Brady squirmed on the couch behind him, stretching like a waking babe. Lee turned and leveled an unhappy gaze.

“First fuckin’ thing in the morning, no caffeine, no nicotine, hung over as fuck and no fuckin’ ‘eines,” he grumbled, the comment aimed in Brady’s direction. “Ya got any snuff? I can’t find my fuckin’ tin.”

“Nope,” Brady answered.

“Fuck,” Lee stated flatly. He stomped out of the room.

Gunnar was still at the screen, searching for something. Brady pushed himself to his feet and shuffled in the direction of the kitchen, following Harper and the smell of food. The loud music halted abruptly and a video began streaming on the wall display. Gunnar plopped down on the black leather sectional and kicked his feet up on the matching ottoman. He pulled out his link, intending to skip the video forward, stopped and looked over at Rogers.

“Dude, man, just let me sync up,” he said, imploringly. “Is that really too much to ask?”

Rogers could only shake his head in reply.

______

They were sprawled about the den, draped on various pieces of furniture like dead bodies. Their eyes blinked only at extremely long intervals. Mouths hung open on several of them, jaws draping loosely. Lee Harper was staring intently and nodding his staunch approval.

On the screen in front of them, the movie was ending. Credits rolled, and Gunnar pulled out his link. Everyone stirred. Lee got to his feet.

“Now that right there, gentlemen,” he said. He shook his head even more vigorously. He had been bobbing his chin up and down with enthusiasm since the final scene. Now he slammed one heavy fist into the other meaty palm. “That’s a fuckin’ classic.”

Leighland Harper was average height, but his build had been defined by generations of toil and labor, and he bore the powerful forearms and strong grip of his caste. His palms were thick and meaty, but his fingers petite, so that his big wrists tapered into tiny fingertips and childlike nails. He made a fist with his right hand and slammed into the left as he reiterated his assessment.

“Absolute fuckin’ classic.”

He paused, deep in thought, and then turned to face them. His head shook mournfully.

“Now there’s something we ain’t never gonna see, boys,” he said. “That there is a thing of the past. Won’t see no hero like that sacrificin’ himself for the greater good, won’t see nobody jumpin’ on grenades like the Marines on Iwo Jima.”

Scotty leaned toward Brady.

“Hey, bro,” he said. “You know what the hell he’s talking about?”

Scott Ewell’s personal experience with the past taught him it was best forgotten and Harper’s tirades bored him. Brady shrugged and continued lacing up his boots.

“I’m talkin’ about samurai, asshole. Slittin’ open their own guts. I’m talkin’ about boys chargin’ machine gun nests to save their entire platoon. Facin’ enemy fire to save one of their buddies and then going back to do it again. I’m talkin’ about shit you’ll never understand and never see, neither. No sir, not in this unprincipled modern era.

“Fuck yeah, Max,” he said and he turned toward the screen and raised his fist in salute. “Fuck yeah.”

They stared at him blankly. Gunnar didn’t even acknowledge him.

“You people are fools,” said Lee.

“I am not buying it,” Rogers said. He got to his feet and stretched his arms toward the ceiling. “What about religious fanatics, then? Suicide bombers? They blow themselves up for a cause and they think that is right. Where is the honor in killing a bunch of innocent people?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Lee asked. He feigned distress and cast about at the others as though he were a trial lawyer pleading his case before the jury box, which they all expected him to become. “I’m not talking about some dipshit cookin’ off a vest full of C-4 in the mall or something. Fuckers like that don’t blow themselves up for a principle. They’re either psychopaths or they think they’re gonna be kings, fuckin’ forty virgins in heaven and shit. Ain’t the same thing, pard.”

“I get that,” Rogers said. “But I think it a stretch to say that heroism is dead. I mean, there are cops and firefighters risking their lives every day for complete strangers.”

“Sublimators and self-loathers,” Lee said.

He noted the estranged look on Scott’s face.

“People who have to be bad so they find legitimate ways to do it and people who hate themselves so they secretly seek their own destruction,” he explained condescendingly.

“Oh,” Scott said. He shot Brady a plaintive look and motioned with his head toward the exit.

“Now you are just talking nonsense,” Rogers interjected.

Lee stood in the center of the room, arms raised toward the heavens. One knee was bent. His head lolled rearward and his eyes looked skyward. It was a classic posture of defeated supplication, imploring the gods for assistance. Brady and Scott pushed themselves up from their seats and moved toward the exit.

“Oh, mighty Zeus, why must you suffer me so?”

He dropped the pose and winked at Rogers.

“Hey, where you guys goin’?” he called after Scott and Brady.

“Up the Yaak. Chuck some lead,” Yargus answered. “Wanna come?”

“Well, hell, yeah, I wanna come. Can the Duke take a punch? What red blooded American boy don’t wanna come? You fuckin’ tell me that, and maybe I’ll learn something from you for a change.”

Lee followed their path out the door, all the while talking to the air.

“Goddamn, boys. Hangover’s pert near gone, done me a little phil-soph-o-lizing, seen Max kick some ass, ‘bout half tempted to have me a beer. What time is it anyways? Can’t drink all day if you don’t start before noon, right? You got any beer, Guts?”

His voice echoed in the foyer. There was the sound of the front door being opened and then Lee’s face reappeared around the corner. He pointed at Rogers.

“What are you two doing?” he asked.

“Gonna catch a ride with my folks to Spokane, pick up my new wheels,” Gunnar replied energetically.

“Going with him,” Rogers added.

“Meet here later?”

Lee uttered the phrase as a question but it was more of a command.

“Look for us.”

“See you here later.”

“No party.”

“Here. Later.”

“Serious,” Rogers said.

“Always.”