Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [134]
[THE LAST OF OUR INTERVIEWS takes place late at night in a bar called the Thirsty Whale, located on Lake Minocqua, now abandoned for the season. Outside, the wind is howling through the bleachers, where summer people watch waterskiing shows. On one portion of the tapes, Matt is trying to enlist some help in destroying his ex-wife’s Durango. Come on! Let’s push it in the lake! Or set it on fire in the woods out by my folks’ house!
He keeps talking about how he got more resolutely fucked than anyone else who was involved. He confesses that part of the reason he wants to talk about this episode in his life is that he hopes that a letter-writing campaign will ensue. He wants his day in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I asked Sergeant Kenneth Buff, Matt’s platoon sergeant and the first guy to find money that day, if victimhood was simply Matt’s default identity. Buff said that Matt Novak was the kind of guy you wanted to hang out with. He was universally liked. Funny. Clever. It was only after all this that Matt had changed. “Matt sunk into a real depression,” Buff said. “And I don’t think he ever recovered.”
Matt doesn’t deny that he tried to steal money, but he is more interested in knowing: In the movie, is he the good guy or the bad guy? Maybe his guilt depends on the precise moment he made that crucial decision that his desires came before the greater good. As Rideout says: “A good supply sergeant, very few of them are probably legally correct. This guy was right on the edge of right and wrong.” Was it the hypnotic power of seeing $200 million in cash, the golden ring in front of you? Or before that, when he kicked down that first door to take a sweet Sony television so his unit could watch porno movies in more dramatic fashion? Or earlier, when he got to Kuwait and was told he had to steal shit to do right? Or even earlier, when he was an infant, a fetus, a zygote that mutated imperceptibly? Or was it pre-Matt, in the primordial ooze, and it just so happens that anyone in Matthew Novak’s position would take that money?
At the Thirsty Whale, Matt picks out a girl from across the room and takes a seat next to her at the bar. Her name is M. She works in customer service, and she recently had a nervous breakdown. She’s medicated now. She and Matt hit it off almost immediately. She looks a little stiff, with her primly crossed legs and glossy new handbag. But Matt could smell the emotional injury on her, the fragility, the liability of having had a nervous breakdown.
M says, “Don’t I recognize you? Are you from here?” What kind of line is that?
Well, you know the war in Iraq, right? The flush of false modesty rises.
“Yeah,” M says.
Anything special you remember about it?
Everyone’s silent, staring at him with vague smiles. They desperately want to go there with him, wherever it is he might be taking them, but they don’t know what he’s talking about. Earlier that night he said: Hopefully, this chapter in my life is almost over, or this novel in my life, because that’s what it is. But it’s not going to be over if it continues to be a more attractive identity for Matt than the one he’s currently living.
You remember any stories?
“Like?” says M. “Stories?”
“Jennifer Lynch or whatever?” the bartender says.
You remember anything about money? Something about GIs finding two hundred million dollars and trying to steal twelve million of it? They all smile now and nod, though whether or not they know the story is anyone’s guess. Yep, Matt says, that was me, no shit.]
DEVIN FRIEDMAN is thirty-four years old, works as a senior writer for GQ magazine, where this story was published, and has never been in the army. He believes he would have been tempted by finding two hundred million dollars in American currency in the middle of a war zone, but believes even more strongly that no one really knows