Charlie Brice – The Heat of the Son

What They Did to Pat

He was the only one of us who talked back to the nuns.
During algebra class he let out a yawn that was
more like a howl.

Who did that?! Sister Joseph demanded.
I did, Pat said. You have a detention,
the nun intoned. No can do, Pat yawned
again, I’ve got to work.

We laughed as Sister Joseph’s face turned Advent-purple
with rage. She grabbed her rosary beads to anchor herself.

I’ll call your parents, Patrick.
The number’s 632-1548, bellowed Pat.
They know I gotta work.

We savored each insolent word out of Pat’s mouth.

More than anything Pat wanted to be a Marine, wanted
to go to war in Vietnam. We tried to dissuade him, but
he was adamant, enlisted right after graduation. In bootcamp
the schizophrenia bivouacked in his brain commenced a sneak
attack. He used a bayonet to cut his wrists.
His DI thought he wanted to wash out.

No one wore the uniform more proudly than Pat.

The Marine Corps gave him an honorable discharge, shipped
him back to Cheyenne in a catatonic state, lost his records. His
parents fought for a medical discharge so the government
would pay for his psychiatric treatment. I visited him in

Bethesda Hospital in Denver. He showed me a sculpture he’d
done in OT, a plaster bust of Satan—long black donkey ears
on either side of the fire-red face, eyes wide and wild from
watching the demons that patrolled his psyche.

So why write about this this sad, tragic life?

I still yearn to spend a little more time with Pat, remember
the Coors quarts I drank with him, car-parked somewhere north
of Cheyenne on a frozen prairie, eating pizza, arguing about

the war—just a few extra moments loving this boy whose
trouble was so special to all of us. At our 25th high school
reunion he wrote that he hoped he’d be dead by our fiftieth.

He got his wish.

© Charlie Brice

Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His ninth full-length poetry collection is Tragedy in the Arugula Aisle (Arroyo Seco Press, 2025). His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.