Sublime

I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.

“Prison can kill you. The person who leaves is not necessarily you, even though they have your appearance.”

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your phys

The urge to be a son to Abdel Khader Khan, to earn the blessing of his praise, was overwhelming. The hollow space in my heart where a father’s love might’ve been, should’ve been, wrapped itself around the contours of his form, and took the features of his face. The high cheekbones and closely cropped silver beard, the sensual lips and deep-set ambe

I was just a common soak.

The weakest and most opportunistic people in a wild tribe were those who prospered under the white man—a fact no less true because Lewis Moon, in their conversation that night in Madre de Dios, had made this point.

There amid the cigar smoke and rollicking laughs Billy had lifted one of the chains, testing it for heft. He was nineteen years old and had no idea that his war contained such things, and what a damn shame for him and the rest of Bravo that it has not been won in the two weeks since.