ENTRY WOUNDS
A Collection of Short Stories
by Bobby Mitchell
A thesis submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Fine Arts.
Baltimore, Maryland
May, 2015
Abstract
A collection of short fiction with an emphasis on the war in Afghanistan and it's effects.
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Contents
Homecoming – 2
Entry Wounds – 5
Can You Just Tell Me Something? – 13
The Father’s Love – 37
Parabolic Path – 43
This War Will Find You – 55
The Comet – 58
I Could Tell You Any Number of Things – 82
Tinseltown – 88
iii
Homecoming
We came home in caskets. We came home in airplanes. We came home missing pieces of ourselves. We came home whole. We came home to our sons and daughters waving index-card- sized American flags stapled to dowel rods on the landing strip. We came home to empty parking lots at two in the morning, piling out of the bed of a Dodge Ram. Who needs a drink?
I’m buying. We came home to the smell of another man in our bedroom, to his name on our children’s lips. Uncle Johnny bought this for me. We came home to empty homes, to sets of keys resting on hand written notes on dining room tables. We came home to loving wives who’d waited eighteen months without the tenderness of touch, who wore lingerie under summer dresses and sprinted in flip flops as fast they could but not fast enough to wrap their legs around our waists before the tears came. We came home loved.
We came home to psychologists, to their endless evaluations. Did you see anything that disturbed you? How have you been sleeping? We came home to mothers wearing Army Mom sweatshirts, sporting gray streaks in their hair and who shook antacids from bottles into their hands at all hours. We came home to little brothers who’d enlisted and little sisters who got engaged to Marines. We came home to discount haircuts and the handshakes of strangers whenever we left the base in our uniform. We came home to fathers who didn’t recognize us. We came home to fathers who recognized the new weight in our faces and the movements of our hands and who knew if we lived to be their age that weight and those movements would still be there.
At home, we tried to fit in. We tried to adjust to the sun after being nocturnal for so long.
We tried to get used to grass after so long with only dirt and dust and sand as far as we could see.
We tried not to panic when we stood up from dining room tables and there was no rifle sling
1 hooked around our boot, no pistol holstered at our side. We apologized for swearing so much.
We apologized for nothing. We sat silence so long that when we wanted to speak the people we needed to hear us were gone.
We found new religions. We held onto old ones. We went into churches and held our arms high over our head and closed our eyes and sang as loud as we could about a God who still loved us anyway. We stood silent at Parade Rest while people around us sang and waited to feel something. We believed because we needed to believe. We lost our faith, too. We couldn’t see it any more, not in this new light, not in a world where suffering and sin and judgment were no longer abstractions. We threw ourselves into books. We read philosophers. We read fiction. We watched television shows about aliens who made us in their image and left and we thought there was some sense to that, too.
Sleeping was difficult, but we found ways. We drank. We drank beers by the six pack, stacking cans into the shapes of our FOBs and our gun turrets and the compounds we’d fast- roped down onto. We drank liquor until our lips went numb and our eyes closed and when we woke up before the sunlight we laced our Nike’s and did laps on Long Street. We had dreams of faces. We had dreams of body parts. We had dreams of wounds that we could never close. We had dreams of Sergeant Matthers, draped across our shoulders, and of Chinooks in the distance that would carry him to the medics, but our boots grew into the ground and our bodies became trees and our limbs and branches grew all around the friend that could never be brought back.
We reenlisted. We volunteered for missions, for our first chance to go back. I can’t take being in garrison another day, Top. We got out. We got medical discharges and paychecks in the mail for the rest of our lives. Staff Sergeant Rodriguez, this panel has determined that you are ninety percent disabled. This entitles you to a number of benefits. We carried our limps and scars
2 and half-limbs into corporate offices and were trained to make spreadsheets and word documents and became fascinated by the idea of white space, of the potential in things yet to be filled. We went to colleges. We took courses with children who were only four years younger than us but who moved and spoke in ways we couldn’t make sense of. We graduated with honors. We failed every class. We argued with professors. We ate in their homes.
We got married. We found women and men who would love us. We found the ones who asked the right questions. We found the ones that didn’t ask anything. We found the ones who wanted excitement, the rush of a wild life. We found the ones who wanted quiet. We spoke softly to them in the middle of the night. Do you think any of this is real? We woke up from memories and pressed ourselves on top of them until they choked and screamed because we wanted to keep them safe. Stay down! They’re still firing. We drank with them. They watched us drink. We made them cry, and they did the same to us. We got divorced. We stayed single. We played the field. We lived in our basements. We called hotlines. We called our war buddies. You have reached Adam Carter. Please leave a message after the beep.
3
Entry Wounds
The tough box had wheels, rubberized, thick and ideal for dragging through gravel and sand. On special order at the hardware store on Skibo, thirteen of them, the black ones, hard, reinforced plastic with telescoping handles and wheels for a Psychological Operations detachment pushing out in May of ’08, slated to makes their home in Afghanistan for the next year. You’re going to want tough boxes when you get over here, that’s what the detachment in country had told the outbound soldiers, you’re going to want them when you have to lug your gear all over this goddamn country.
So they get the tough boxes, this outbound detachment, load them up in the back of a couple pickups and drive them back on to Fort Bragg, doing 70 on All American Freeway with the boxes sliding and slapping in the back so hard they damn near lose one, knocked around so bad this one’s got a nice scuff across the lid before it even gets unloaded in the grass behind
Alpha Company Headquarters. The tough boxes are getting hoot-and-hollered over by the soldiers, all except this tough box, the one that’s all scuffed up, all except this soldier, the one who reclassed to Psychological Operations, a non-combat occupation, after he quit during phase two of the Special Forces training pipeline. He gets stuck with the scuffed box because, the rest of the detachment, they aren’t too keen on this guy on account of his history.
They make a night of it, a few cases of Yuengling from the Class VI and stencils and spray paint borrowed from Supply. The soldiers get good and shitty while they put their name, rank, and social on their boxes, fat block lettering in yellow that drips and bubbles on the hard black plastic. When they talk about what they’ll pack in the tough boxes, they really talk about
4 what they’ll leave behind. X-Boxes. Whiskey. Dogs. Wives. They talk about the things they’ll need to survive over there. Spare boots. Kevlar. Bibles. Socks.
My box, a couple of the soldiers say, like the spray paint makes it true, like the name on the box makes it that way. The scuffed box says DAVIS now, DAVIS ANDREW J. SGT 3380, and it gets loaded in the bed of a silver Dodge and driven to Eagle Point Apartments and dragged up three flights of stairs before the first thing goes in. Three months Davis has lived here, since the lease went up at Cross Creek and his roommate got stationed at Fort Carson. Barely out of the boxes, but the battalion will help him break this new lease and set his bed up in storage. Davis packs a poncho liner and a pair of boots into the tough box before racking out on the couch for the night.
The tough boxes get packed three days before the deployment. Mostly this is standard issue, a laundry list of clothes and gear, nonnegotiable and well defined, twelve pairs socks, green, rolled. Ten shirts, khaki, in Ziploc bags. Seven magazines, not loaded. There’s room enough for personal effects, for deviation. Room for playing cards and laptops, journals and photographs, for Playboys and pamphlets on Afghani customs and dialects, for things they think they will want when they think about being in a place they know nothing about. Davis packs some of these things. Playing cards. Laptop. External hard drive with four hundred gigabytes of porn and DVD-rips of Judd Appatow movies. Swedish Fish. A chess set. A book by Hemingway his father sent with a note, Maybe this will help you sort some things. An extra gas mask he’d come into possession of by chance, just in case there was such a thing as fate, a point Davis was still undecided on. Mostly, he packed the tough box with hope that there would be time enough for diversions and that the magazines inside would remain unloaded.
5
When the soldiers descend into Bagram, the altitude drops so fast that gravity gives out and Major P, who’s out cold with three Ambien and prone on the floor, floats up off the ground like light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board with no hands on him and he’s dropped face to metal on the skin of the aircraft as it banks starboard. The tough box isn’t there. It’s down below, in the cargo-hold of the C-130 that carried the soldiers to Afghanistan, palletized with the others, stacked like children’s blocks with the stenciled letters facing out, gone glossy from the shrink wrap holding them all in place.
The tough box is there when they land, though, there to be lugged from the airstrip to the pickup, from the pickup to the ready room, from the ready room to the team house, back to the room Davis and his tough box will split with Specialist Thompson, two wall lockers, and a space heater that coughs out a few degrees of warmth when you hit it just right. The tough box, packed eighty pounds full with Davis’ gear, rolls easy over the gravel surface of the honeycombed walkways between concrete Jersey barriers that sprawl over the base.
Someone groans about having to haul the weight of their gear, There's not a van we can use?, but Davis appreciates the tough box for its wheels. He thinks about Selection, about the twenty-four days he spent at Camp Mackall during the first phase of Special Forces training in the pine forests of North Carolina. He thinks about Team Week, about six crates of ammo, three, poles, and a tire and the thirteen men who had to move it all nine clicks down a dirt road. Davis thinks about the tough box and its four sturdy wheels. He thinks about the way they'd lashed the poles together, the wobble of the wheel on that make-shift vehicle and the ways that weight is pulled in hard places.
The tough box is wheeled into the team house, through the cypher-code door and over the layers of Persian Rugs gone heavy and rough from dust, into the first room on the left, the one
6 with a sheet on a string for a door that Davis will share with Specialist Thompson. In this second-hand room, the slept-in mattress, the initial-carved bunk, the wall locker with torn picture corners concealed under strips of masking tape, the scuffed tough box is something unworn, something about which Davis can have notions of property rights.
It becomes a step for Davis, the tough box, standing at the foot of his bed and waiting to bear the weight of him as he hoists himself into and out of the top bunk each morning and night.
It becomes a chair, a sturdy place for him to lace up his boots at the start of the duty day, 1730 local time, just as the remains of the day would magnify the ridge of the Hindu Kush like an eclipse. It becomes a nightstand, a desk, a bench.
Once, it becomes a place for gain and loss. It becomes a poker table for six of the soldiers from the detachment, a thing gathered around, played on, wagered on. It becomes a place where, during the round of betting between the flop and the turn when Davis is sitting on an up-and- down straight possibility and a folding chair, the uneasiness between Davis and the detachment comes to a head. What, Staff Sergeant Andrews asks as he slides a stack of red clay chips across the lid of the tough box, going to fold again like you did in the Q Course?
Davis does fold, wrist-flicking his hand into the pot and getting to his feet. He makes to leave the room when Andrews slaps his open hand off the tough box. Don't be such a pussy.
Take a fucking joke, man. Davis stops in the door frame, turns and stretches his triceps over his head. He's not a soft man. He's hard and durable and quiet, compressed muscles like the heavy plastic of the tough box and the soldiers sitting around the box know this. Davis wants to tell
Andrews not to talk about things he doesn't know about, wants to ask him to leave or when it was that he went to Selection, but he doesn't. Don't, Davis says, just don't.
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Andrews doesn't back down though, not in this space, gathered around the tough box with the junior soldiers like Specialist Thompson watching and learning how to wear stripes.
Andrews takes a stab at the high ground. He goes for the arteries, for the pressure points. He stands up. Last I checked, Buck Sergeants don't tell E-6's what to do. You can get your panties in a bunch if you want, but don't think it changes the fact that you're a goddamn quitter and you're proving it right now. You think any one of us wants to get down in the dirt next to someone who gives up when it counts?
*
The next week, the tough box becomes a box. It’s not on account of what happened with
Sergeant Andrews, Major P assures Davis, that he's getting pushed out to a liaison position with a field artillery unit from the 25th Infantry Division, Tropic Lightning, pushed out to Camp
Blessing in the middle of nowhere to mitigate fall out from collateral damage in recent skirmishes. It'll be good for you, Major P says, to get away from your history.
For Davis, though, there is nothing to get away from, no history to pack up in his tough box and take with him out to Camp Blessing in the valley outside Wanat. There's no disgrace to find room for between his night vision goggles and his body armor. Seven weeks in the woods learning, they called it, Small Unit Tactics. Learning how to set up an ambush, how to lie in wait until the enemy had entered the kill zone, how to start with a claymore and finish them off by checking for signs of life with two rounds from a pistol: double-tap, they called it. Learning how to break an arm, how opposing pressure on the joints creates compound fractures, how holding a knife handle horizontal in the fist creates a more effective killing tool, how swinging a heel into
8 the base of the skull can end a confrontation. Learning how, after seven weeks, he was not a killer. For Davis, quitting isn't what he wants to get away from, it's how he got away.
Davis opens the tough box his first night at Camp Blessing. Here, at this outpost, this non-fixed structure, there are no Jersey barriers to create the sense of inside and out, nothing to keep the enemy at bay but the firepower facing out from the camp and the men standing behind it. Davis takes the magazines from the tough box and sets them along with the boxed ammo on the closed lid in the open tent, a wide space with a sagging tan roof and empty cots for augmentees. He loads the rounds, 5.56 with a tracer every one in ten, individually, deliberately, into the magazines. A pair of 88-Mikes at the end of the tent offer him a speed loader, but he passes. He sits on the tough box, feeling the plastic go cold, stiffen in the unheated space, and loads the rounds, wanting to feel each one between his fingers as he considers the places they might go, the small entry wounds, the places where they might become lodged or the things they might take with them when they leave large exit wounds.
Davis is lying awake on his cot at Blessing, working through an imagined conversation with the artillery commander about how to turn sentiment in the area in their favor, about how to handle intel that civilian casualties are turning the local populace in favor of hostile forces. He’s lying awake when the first rounds hit, heavy, banging the earth like a bass drum pitting his insides. He’s slept through mortar fire before and he thinks he might again until it strikes him how close it all feels, like each blast reverberates inside his chest and straps him down to his cot until the direct fire starts, 7.62 cranking off metal, and Davis starts to move.
It happens without him, almost. Training is moving his body for him. The lid of the tough box is open and his body armor is strapped across his chest. He’s moving through the tent stuffing magazines into his cargo pockets, M4 at the low-ready, and he thinks about his training,
9 all the ways he’s been prepared to bring the fight to the enemy, about the tactical advantages of assaulting the lower ground. He thinks about the tough box and the things he is missing. Helmet.
NVG’s. IFAC.
He’s in the prone firing position in a file of soldiers, sending rounds into the darkness of the valley in the direction of muzzle sparks and the smoke of RPG-launchers. He’s not looking down his sights, just firing, just squeezing the trigger and feeling the action ride all the way back through his body. He’s firing when he hears it somewhere on his left, Shit, Adams, you’re hit, goddamn it, Adams. He’s firing when the gunship flies overhead, when the howitzer on some distant hill lights up the valley like a meteor shower, and he’s still firing when the howitzer stops. And he’s talking, later, when the firing has stopped, when they’ve turned back the assault and evac’ed the casualties, when they've collected the insurgent dead by their most intact parts into a heap under the heat-swollen barrel of a Humvee-mounted .50 Cal.
He’s sitting on his tough box in the augmentee tent talking to the guys from the 25th I.D., the ones he’d gotten down next to in the dirt and opened fire with, and they drink Rip-Its and pass around a couple boxes of Girl Scout Cookies from the last care package that came through.
Damn, dude, one of them says, laughing. You were in it. How many rounds did you burn through? He mimics Davis, his mouth a sudden burst of rounds piling up, his hands a fever of a rifle being emptied and clumsily reloaded. You had them pinned down though, I’ll give you that.
Just don't go blowin' your wad the next time we get a little hit, alright? Save a few rounds.
About a year later, back in country, Davis will sell the tough box. He’s on his way out, his contract is up and he tells the Reenlistment NCO to fuck off when he calls Davis up to
Battalion Headquarters to talk bonuses. He’s got his gear, all that’s left over after returning his
10 issued items and selling his body armor to a civilian contractor in a grocery store parking lot, and he wheels the box into a surplus store outside the south gate on Reilly Road for a quick buck.
He gets offered fifty for the gear, sixty if he’s willing to part with the box, too. Davis thinks about the box. He thinks about the things he packed it full with and the things it held for him. He thinks about the box, empty, absent of these things. He thinks about the firefights. Not about the firing, not about sending rounds down range and what he might have hit, not about the heavy resistance of dead weight. He thinks about the kick, how he knew he was still alive from each hit of the firing bolt riding back into his shoulder, from the violence. Could the box be a table for him again, bearing up the weight of ammo and poker cards and flattened palms and his whole body stretched and lifting up? Or would the box, empty now, buckle under the weight?
11
Can You Just Tell Me Something?
It bears saying what my father did the night I left for boot camp. It was September 16th in
’05, a Friday, and I was supposed to head out from our West Virginia home the following morning to ship out for Infantry School at Fort Benning. Trouble was, our Cowboys were playing on Sunday, and not just any game. I was resigned to missing the next fourteen games while in training, but that Sunday night they played the Redskins, and it meant something to us to watch that game together.
We drove over to the station together on Friday, about ten miles over in Martinsburg where my little sister was still just starting out as a freshmen at the high school and where I had just graduated that June, and when we pulled into the strip mall parking lot, Sergeant
Cunningham was taking a phone call, leaned against the office window, dip packed thick in his lower lip. He saw us rising out of my father’s Charger and he must’ve known it right then, that it was trouble, because by the time we crossed the lot the phone was in his pocket and the dip was in the dirt of the potted juniper tree by the door.
Sergeant Cunningham said, “Recruit Mitchell, how you feeling about the first day of the rest of your life? Ready to kick ass and take names?”
My father said, “Let’s go inside,” and Sergeant Cunningham just nodded and opened the door for us to head inside.
“Here’s the thing,” Sergeant Cunningham said. He leaned forward in his chair, his arms held out palms up like he wanted my father and I to hold his hands and pray with him. “The ball’s already rolling on this, and the Army goes rolling along, you know what I mean? If he
12 doesn’t ship tomorrow, he’ll be AWOL on his first day. Is that how you want to start your career,
Mitchell?”
On the way over in my father’s car, the only thing that broke the silence was my father, eyes straight ahead, shifting into fifth, saying, “Let me handle this, alright?” So I kept my peace in my chair and stared at the poster on the cubicle wall behind Sergeant Cunningham, a parade of deployed parachutes, a single soldier in free-fall waiting for the opening shock, Do You Have
What It Takes?
My father, red in the face, leaned back in his chair like he meant to snap the chair-back clean off. “I don’t care how it happens, just get it done. Lose some paperwork. Tell them he’s sick. He can leave after Sunday or not at all. Get me?”
In Afghanistan, I’d get phone calls about once a week or so. The SEALs I was attached to had a satellite phone and I’d ask to borrow the thing, usually after a strike when I needed some grounding. The phone relayed through a number in Virginia Beach, and our families had been given strict instructions to make like we were stateside, running training ops. Goofy, I know, but our story was that we weren’t there, in country, and we went to some length to stick to the authorized version of the truth.
Only, my father was shit at this.
“How’s Afghanistan?” He asked.
“How should I know?” I answered, hoping he’d take the hint. Sitting on top of the aircraft hangar I used for hill sprints on my morning workouts, a trick I’d picked up from the SEALs who told me you don’t want to get caught out of breath when we’re scootin’ around in the
13 mountains, I looked out over the empty, red dust plains that stretched out to the Hindu Kush mountains that stood between our little FOB and the border with Pakistan. In the background through the phone, tucked up between my shoulder and face as my hands held each other still, I could hear my mother say Robert, you can’t say that!
“Are you busy?” He asked. “Do you have a lot of work?”
“Pretty busy,” I said. “Pretty busy week this week.”
“Can you just tell me something?” He said.
“I read Romo is going to be healthy for the Redskins game,” I said.
“That’s what they say,” my father said.
“They need that one to keep pace.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a big one.”
My father was fifteen years old and none too happy about it when a man named Jimmy shacked up with his mother. Jimmy was a mechanic who got his training on the government’s dime, riding his G.I. Bill after a two year stint in Vietnam. Jimmy was the end of a string of would be husbands his mother had brought home since my grandfather split two days before my father’s eleventh birthday. He’d been settled in the house only a couple months when he took my father aside and said, “You call me Dad or sir, I’ll leave it up to you, but I hear Jimmy out your mouth one more time I’ll break it, all right, Alan?” He was hard like that on the boys.
My father and his older brother, Danny, took the brunt of it. Jimmy’d keep them up late on Friday nights, both bone tired from Varsity games where my father had joined his older brother on the team as the tight-end, being already a hair over six foot. They’d run Oklahoma
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Drills for an hour, both boys lying on their backs in the dark behind the house and Jimmy would press a football into one of their chests – there was no discernible pattern, as one night my father carried the ball every damn time. Jimmy would shout move! and the boys would flip over and scramble to their feet, the one trying to bring down or run through the other, and they’d do this until Jimmy stopped seeing boys and started seeing men for a change.
He was hard on my father’s younger sister too, though in a different way. She dressed different after Jimmy moved in. Things fit better. He wouldn’t have his girl out in the neighborhood with straps slipping off shoulders or shorts riding up for free peeks. It was his sister who took to the man most of all. On Sunday’s they’d sit together in his heavy recliner after everyone had changed out of their Sunday Best and she’d cheer her little heart out for her
Daddy’s Redskins and Jimmy would set his arm like a belt across the girl’s lap, his fingers buckled into her sides in a way that staked a claim my father felt he had no right to.
On December 16th of 1979, with under seven minutes to play in the fourth and the
Redskins ahead 34-21, my father declared himself for the Dallas Cowboys. Jimmy said, “You want to cheer for a bunch of faggots,” Jimmy said, “and their cock-sucking Navy quarterback, you go ahead, princess.” And when Staubach connected with Hill as time expired to give the
Cowboys the division and knock the Redskins from playoff contention, my father laughed and cheered until Jimmy threw a half full can of Budweiser at his head and my grandmother sent the children to their rooms.
On the night I left for Boot Camp, my mother made fajitas. There’s nothing special about these fajitas, some sautéed chicken and green peppers, caramelized onions, and a few habaneros
15 tossed in for heat. She tops them with a little cheese and bakes them for a solid ten, a dollop of salsa and sour cream and you’ve got the same meal I had once a week until I left for Boot Camp, the same meal I make now on down days like today, telling this story. And it’s not that this story is a particularly sad one. In fact, I think you’ll see it ends up with more love than I can squeeze into the space of these pages. But the route it took, the things we went through, that’s what gets me down.
When I walked into the recruiter’s office for the first time in July of ’05, Sergeant
Cunningham asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, screwing my face up into something that might have looked like bravery, “Fight.”
So he had me take the ASVAB and a piss test, and when I came back with a 96 and a clean sample he called up the station commander and said, “We got ourselves a goddamn unicorn, Sergeant.”
And I asked him, sitting shotgun on the way back from the testing center, what the hell he meant by unicorn.
“This might surprise you,” he said, “but we don’t get a lot of geniuses with a clean record volunteering for the infantry.”
After that, they were ready to get me off in a hurry. September 17th, that was the very first ship date they could get their hands on and even then they had me come by the recruiting office twice a week, just in case I wised up or got cold feet. And when September 15th rolled around and my father and I walked into the recruiting office, Sergeant Cunningham certainly had his doubts about whether or not he’d actually see me ship out to Fort Benning.
16
After a few phone calls, Sergeant Cunningham said, “Here’s the best I can do. Sunday, no later than midnight, in the parking lot with his bag packed and his boots on.”
“That should work,” my father said.
“If he’s late, I can’t guarantee his slot. If he doesn’t ship on time, he’ll go Needs-of-the-
Army, and they’ll stick him with some brainiac job.”
My father said, “You ought to hope the game doesn’t go into overtime, then.”
In Boot Camp, Drill Sergeant McGinnis gave me the nickname Giggles. Sergeant
Cunningham had told me before I left to be the gray man, to keep my head down and keep from being noticed. He didn’t tell me, though, that the intercoms in the barracks worked both ways and that the Drills were always listening.
“I hear you do impressions, Giggles,” Drill Sergeant McGinnis said to me during the second week of training when I, and the rest of my platoon, stood at attention at the feet of our bunks during mail call.
“No, Drill Sergeant,” I said.
“You calling me a fucking liar, Giggles?” Drill Sergeant McGinnis barely cleared five foot nine with his desert boots on, but he had a way of puffing himself up, especially when he wanted to get in someone’s face. He tucked his hands behind his back, bowed his chest out, and brought his face close to mine, his breath hot in my left ear.
“No, Drill Sergeant,” I said, my eyes dead ahead. In the first week, I’d made the mistake of making eye contact when he’d come close to me like this, and he’d drop the platoon for pushups on account of my having made fuck-me-eyes at him.
17
“Private,” he said. “You make me laugh right-fucking-now or I’ll have Fourth Platoon doing pushups until someone’s arms break.”
“God Damn It, Privates!” I shouted, affecting McGinnis’ Southern Virginian twang.
“You’re about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. You all looking like a bunch of retards trying to fuck a door knob. The next time you look me in the eye, soldier, you better be on your knees with my dick in your mouth.”
Drill Sergeant McGinnis turned around to the shocked-silent soldiers.
“Is that funny, soldiers?” He asked
Wessels, a real brown-noser, shouted, “No, Drill Sergeant.”
“Shut the fuck up, Wessels,” Drill Sergeant McGinnis said. “I thought it was pretty damn funny. Giggles, from now on, it’s your job to make me laugh whenever Wessels pisses me off.
Got it?”
“Hooah, Drill Sergeant,” I said.
And I got through Boot Camp that way. I guess you could say it never took for me, the whole break-‘em-down-build-‘em-up thing they do there. The yelling didn’t bother me much.
Nor, for that matter, did the exercise, skinny shit that I was in those days; I could bang out pushups by the hundred and I left Benning running my two mile in just under twelve and a half minutes. Even the heat, hot as it was in Georgia that fall, the kind of hot that clogs up your pores with sweat and makes you feel like there are fire ants crawling on the wrong side of your skin, I had a sense of humor about.
It was the ruck marches, that’s the one thing that got to me. Our platoon would get into two single files on either side of these dirt roads and just walk. We carried rucksacks, beat up green bags on rigid metal frames, and a thing called a kidney pad where it pressed against your
18 lower back. And I thought that was a bad sign, that they named the thing after the organ it was designed to protect, because you’d think once they realized this bag was out to destroy our organs they’d design a new one. But that’d take time and money, and we already had the rucksacks, and the Army places an emphasis on expediency. And these bags were damn heavy, filled with boots and uniforms and Meals-Ready-to Eat and a god damn shovel on the side that slapped against the bag with every step I took and in the quiet mornings as I was marching along that slap against the bag was the only thing I could hear besides my own damn heavy breathing.
So we were marching down this dirt road, headed for the M203 range. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and I had this thought. I’m not going to get to watch football games on Sundays with my dad anymore. When I get out of here, I’m going to be stationed somewhere, or sent somewhere. I’m not going home.
My father was the first and last of his family to go to college when he left his home in
Rockville and enrolled at Frostburg State. That first fall my father stuck his hand out to everyone he caught eyes with, introducing himself sometimes as Robert, sometimes as Bob, but never again as Alan, the name he’d been called by his whole life. His accent, too, was changed, to something close to LBJ, the sort of clean affectation that belongs to a man who tortures himself over his roots only to reveal himself whenever he asks for a glass of wooter or announces that he needs to warsh up before heading out for dinner.
It was the following spring semester when my father got the phone call that his grandmother had died in her sleep and, either too proud to ask for help or too embarrassed at the thought of having his family met by anyone from school, my father resolved to hitch-hike the
19 hundred and some miles home to see her laid to rest. He was six miles down the road before he was picked up by an older couple, Jehovah’s Witnesses, who could take him as far as
Winchester, West Virginia, and who were greatly concerned with the teaching of natural history at my father’s school, and whether or not he’d taken any biology classes, which he hadn’t.
“Still,” the woman cautioned him, “you must always bear in mind the beauty of Jehovah’s creation, and the wonderful smallness of man.”
From Winchester, my father was able to catch on with a trucker for Safeway who was able to get him as far as Bethesda. On the radio, Howard Stern took calls on the ground breaking of the new Vietnam Veterans Memorial; “Howard, you know that there wall was designed by a
Chink.” The trucker adjusted the 82nd Airborne baseball cap on his head and told my father the memorial was a wall, all black, that it just goes on and on listing the names, and he said it was a good idea, too. “People need to feel it for what it was, you know?” he said.
My father nodded and he thanked the man when they parted ways at an Exxon five miles south of my father’s home. When he called from a payphone to ask for a ride to the service and one of his mother’s sisters, one who had been living down in Lynchburg, answered and asked who it was, he answered Bob. “We don’t know a Bob,” she said.
Four miles on foot later, his good pants and a collared shirt still in his Rockville Rams duffel at his side, my father walked into his home with mud-caked dress shoes and the sweat- stained Rush t-shirt my mother had gotten him on his nineteenth birthday, and his mother’s family continued to work on their fried chicken and sun tea and cups of coffee as he pressed through a crowd of their turned backs to the kitchen where he hoped to find his mother.
She was there, blonde bun high on her head and, for the first time, he noticed the white strands curled into the mess there, sweat streaked across her forehead as she stood, smiling, a
20 pair of tongs at the ready on her hip, and Jimmy intercepted my father’s path before he could reach her. And let me say, now, that we aren’t touchers, not my father, not his, and not me, and so that day when Jimmy put a hand on my father’s shoulder, not here, on the edge of the socket but there, right there, so that his rough fingers were half at home on my father’s neck, let me just say that’s not the way we behave. But Jimmy did it and he said only this, “No crying, not in front of your mother, all right?”
His uncle had taken a few Polaroids at the wake with it in mind to show my absent father, his grandmother a stiff slab of impossibly slender gray against the plush milk-white cushions and swallowing sheet pulled half way up her chest so that you could almost believe she was sleeping if she didn’t look so damn dead. My father thanked his uncle, who offered to let my father keep the pictures, on account of everyone knew how close he was to her, but my father declined.
Danny, my uncle, emerged from the bedroom he and my father had shared as boys, eyes bloodshot from the deep shattering of blood vessels, and in his hand he cradled the old ball, high and tight across his chest, how Jimmy had taught them late nights in the backyard when he would punch the ball, closed-fist, until his knuckles were shredded and the boys stopped fumbling. They took the ball out front and tossed it back and forth a while before the other boys, guys from the neighborhood, their cousins, a few of the uncles, came over and they put together a game.
It occurs to me that you might be wondering how I came to know so much about my father. The obvious answer is that he told me, and I could just leave it at that, but it’s not the truth. It’s not that my father and I don’t communicate, it’s that we’ve got our own way of going
21 about that. Here’s what I mean to say: When I left for Boot Camp my father said, “It’s a rebuilding year for the Cowboys, anyhow,” and what he meant was, “How could they win without you here?” And when I deployed to Afghanistan I said, “This is our year,” and what I meant was, “Let’s just believe everything is going to be okay.”
My mother, not being equipped with our circuitous dialect, has always spoken directly to my father, and she’s the keeper of his stories. Sometimes, she’ll pass them on to me, when she feels I need to understand my father a little better than I do.
I left for the Army on September 17th of ’05, my father and I pulling into the parking lot of the recruiter’s station at 11:48 p.m. But I’d made up my mind to go some months earlier at a pep rally at Martinsburg High. It was a Friday, November 5th in ’04, a couple days after Bush got reelected. We had Jefferson coming up that night for Homecoming, and on Saturday I had designs to lose my virginity to Stacey King, my date for the dance.
So they had us, the football team and the cheerleaders out on the basketball court and the whole damn school is in the stands, and Dave Getty, who played some safety on top of being our running back and who, we’d just heard, had committed to playing for Maryland over the
Mountaineers next year, was standing cool with the microphone in his hands.
“Who wants to see us kick some Cougar ass?” Dave shouted before the principal took the microphone out of his hands and motioned for him to get back in line with the rest of us. I saw
Stacey laughing with her friends in the stands, and I gave her a wave.
Then they brought out the JROTC nerds, these kids marching out in front of us like they owned the place, twirling these wooden rifles in the air and slapping them pretty damn hard, it
22 sounded like anyway, against their shoulders. Some of us guys on the team were doing our best to keep from laughing, but weren’t having much success. They all came to attention, rifles shouldered squarely, eyes front, still as statues. The principal introduced a recruiter, Sergeant
Cunningham, from the station right down the street.
“How about that drill team?” Sergeant Cunningham shouted, and he got a solid round of applause and gave a nod to the JROTC behind him. He talks a little bit about the game, about having played for the Bulldogs when he was a kid, about how victory is something you take by force from the man across from you. And then, out of left field, Sergeant Cunningham starts going on about the election.
“How many of your folks voted for President Bush this week?” he asked.
Raised hands and cheers came from every row of the bleachers.
“Well, let me tell you something, young men and women,” Sergeant Cunningham said with a smile, pacing in front of the student body. “This election is going to change the course of human history. How about that? We’ve got the right man for the job, and now we’re going to go in and open up the Middle East for Christ and we’re going to give the Arab people the freedom they’ve been longing for! And your generation, well, go ahead and take a look at these men and women behind me,” he said, spreading out his right arm not to the football team but to the glasses-wearing, skinny fucks in their JROTC uniforms. “This fight belongs to your generation.
And I hope some of you in the stands, some of you getting ready to take the field tonight against
Jefferson, will join my brothers and sisters in arms in claiming this victory for our nation.”
And I’ll be damned if Sergeant Cunningham didn’t get a standing ovation, going one by one to each JROTC kid, shaking their hand and thanking them for their commitment to their
23 country. It was probably later that same night my mind was made up, but I didn’t tell my parents until March rolled around and my acceptance letter from WVU came in the mail.
When I got my Sergeant stripes, my father took off work and drove down to Fort Bragg to be a part of the promotion. First Sergeant walked my father through the ceremony.
“It’s pretty simple,” First Sergeant said. “When the corporal over there starts reading the orders, you rip the Specialist rank off your son’s chest and you throw it on the ground. Don’t pocket it, just throw it right on the ground.”
My father nodded. He should have looked out of place on the parade field in front of
Battalion, being the only one there in civvies, a blue button down, brown sports coat, and a silver crew cut, surrounded by a hundred or so soldiers in their ACU’s, but standing there in front of the Battalion I was proud my father fit in so well that a rumor, one I didn’t discourage, started flying around that my father worked for the CIA or the Pentagon, a deep cover sort of guy.
The First Sergeant went on explaining the ceremony to my nodding father. “You got the
Sergeant Rank? Good. You take that and Velcro it to your son’s chest. This next part is optional, but it is tradition, so I’ll leave it up to you. You give the new Sergeant here a punch, square on his rank there. What do you say, Specialist Promotable Mitchell? Up for getting your blood rank?”
“Yes, First Sergeant,” I said.
“Good man,” First Sergeant said, and then added to my father, walking away, “Give him hell.”
24
The Battalion was still talking about that punch two years and two combat tours later. My father placed my stripes on my chest. Usually, this task falls to the NCO who brought the soldier up through the ranks, a sort of rite of passage. Whatever I was, though, I credited my father with that, and so I asked him to make the drive down. He pressed the rank on with his right hand and then my father, a south paw, brought his left fist to my chest, his hips turning to bring the blow home like something out of a Mickey Ward highlight reel. I took a single step back with my right foot, and it was all I could do to pull myself up straight, and a month later I left for Afghanistan.
As a freshman at Frostburg, my father rushed the Theta Chi chapter of Tau Kappa
Epsilon and, under these circumstances a newly christened Bob the Slob stumbled down the bar at Bowery Street Pub to where my mother had been waiting all eighteen years of her life to have a lamppost of a man in too-snug high-water blue jeans sing to her, with the dance to boot, I’m a little teapot, short and stout. And my mother, a curly haired Catholic girl from South Philly nursing a light beer on a bar stool next to her older sister, made him buy her a pack of Camel
Lights and walk them home.
In the spring, his grandmother passed away, and in the summer my father proposed to my mother. They were on the way to her parents’ house in South Philly, where my father had intended to ask for her father’s blessing. They sped up the expressway holding hands in a car my father had borrowed for the weekend from a frat brother, the engagement ring tucked away safe inside the glove box. And when the State Trooper pulled them over for going eighty-two in a sixty-five and my father, who’d never owned a car, explained that he didn’t know what a registration was, the Trooper told my mother to open the glove box. So that’s how it happened,
25 the engagement, pulled off to the side of the road on the Atlantic City Expressway, cars moving over to the far left lane to give the moment a wide berth, the Trooper bent over and looking through the window, the little box open, and my father saying, “I was going to ask your dad this weekend. I was going to ask you on the beach.” And the Trooper, he was decent enough to let them off the hook, leaving them there to kiss and cry in the car, saying only, “You need to slow down. It’s not a race.”
Then there was the first pregnancy, and the first miscarriage. Standing, as they do now, only a few shorts months apart in the scheme of a life, it’s strange to think the way the future opened up for my father, my mother, the day of the positive test, how, far from the anger or fear my mother imagined before telling him, he was humbled by joy. And when she lost the child, though the date had already been set – my mother’s 20th birthday – and the dress had been measured and bought, the invitations mailed, even so the passing of what was inside her came with a chance for them both to choose again. The wedding went forward, bound as they were by this first small heartbreak, though to see them smiling on the altar at St. Monica’s, you would not imagine the weeping that came first.
The night before the wedding, my father could lean back in his chair at Donovan’s Steak
House, my mother beside him, there with his groomsmen – his brother, Danny, and his frat brothers, Dirty Mike, Scat Boy, Singapore Sling, and Rooster – he could lean back and imagine that his life would always be this way, untroubled. His biological father, who he hadn’t seen in four years, almost to the day, had turned up. “You’re still my son, aren’t you?” he’d said. His mother had wanted to come, but Jimmy knew my father’s father and had strong objections, so his mother kissed her son on the cheek in the Catholic Church on South Seventeenth after the rehearsal and told him they would see him at the wedding.
26
Even after my mother’s parents had left, taking home her young brother and sisters, after
Scat Boy had cozied up to Susan, my mother’s older sister, with a beer in his hand and an arm over her shoulder, after my father’s cheeks had gone red from the drinking and stayed that way for the rest of the night, his father was still there, saying, “Drink up! Who wants another round?
Don’t worry about the check, it’s taken care of.” He stood up, his small glass still half full with whiskey stretched in front of his face, my father hushed the table up fast, saying “my dad wants to say something.”
And he did, not in a slurred way, though he’d had a few. He knew how to handle his booze. “Just seeing you here,” he said, “seeing this beautiful girl and you two got so much ahead,
I’m proud. Very proud. To my son.”
There was a clinking of glasses and a round of applause and, in the quick way, the only way he knew, my father’s father was gone and the bill was delivered and there was a great emptying of pockets, my father’s brothers and my mother’s sister, Dirty Mike sending Scat Boy to an ATM with his card while he calculated the cost. And there was my father, sunken into his slender self, his chin low against his blue silk shirt, ashamed, my mother with an arm coming around his chest and her fingers firm on his shoulder, whispering to him, “Just us, from now on, just us.”
It breaks her heart, my mother, to this day when she tells me about that rehearsal dinner.
Here’s something else she told me, this on the Sunday afternoon in March of ’05 when I told my parents I was joining the Army and my father had said only, “No.”
27
She said it meant something to my father that I go to college. I told her that my father had finished college just fine in night school in the years after my birth, after my parents dropped out of school to start a family. My mother told me about the truth about the degree he’d held over his family in any argument over factual information, as in, “I think you ought to trust someone with a business degree on this.” And the truth was that the degree he’d been holding over us, it was still in the works.
She told me how, for the first eleven years of my life my father had worked as a janitor. I remembered seeing him in the mornings as a boy, always in dress pants and a tie and I understood it that my father was someone important, that he’d gotten a degree in business and worked for a company whose name meant something when I said it to the parents of my friends.
And arriving at work, my father would slip into the bathroom to change out of the dress pants and tie he wore, for whose benefit it was hard to say, and into the dark jeans and one of the blue polo’s of his work uniform gone rough from so many washings.
On the night I left for Boot Camp, we ate fajitas together at the dinner table, my father, mother, sister, and I. My mother said, slicing off a piece of corn bread and setting it on my plate,
“Just keep it in mind, all the advice Sergeant Cunningham has been giving you. You’re going to do great.”
My little sister, who was looking forward to the popularity boost at school of having a hero for a brother asked, “Are you nervous?”
“It’s only training,” I said. “What’s to be nervous about?”
28
And my father said, between large bites, “Let’s get the table cleared and the dishes warshed before kickoff.”
Once the tables were cleared and the girls had retreated to the basement, I made for the living room and turned on the pre-game show, which was in its last few minutes, a wide panning shot of Texas Stadium as seen from above, the hole in the roof and the sun starting to set behind the Irving skyline. My father came in from the kitchen with two Oktoberfest’s in hand, tops popped, and handed one to me, the first time he’d ever done so.
“Here,” he said. “Don’t tell your mother.”
“Don’t tell the recruiter,” I said
We’d given the living room a fresh coat last November, two weeks before Thanksgiving dinner when my mother had decided the house could stand to look a little more inviting. And the fresh, bright shade of cranberry my father and I had rolled onto the walls over the course of a long weekend had set the tone just right that holiday season. Spring rolled around, though, and then summer, and the room took on this heavy feel, like you were drowning in a glass of wine.
That night, though, with the cold coming early that year, I could feel the room coming around again, and how soon there would be pinecones strung over the fireplace and a fat Douglas Fir in the corner.
We nursed our beers, my father and I, through a quiet first half, Dallas taking a three-to- nothing lead early in the second quarter that would hold up until intermission when he would head back into the kitchen and grab a couple more beers and a bag of pistachios. We said things like, “He’s got to lead him with the pass a little more,” and, “God damn! Did you see that block?”
29
I said to my father, “I don’t know why they run these long developing sweep plays. They take forever and the defense is reading it right away.”
My father said, walking back from the kitchen, beers in hand, “It takes a while to develop, but they’re looking for the homerun shot, the big payoff. You got to set those up. Here, just this one more,” he said, handing me the beer. “I can’t be dropping you off drunk when the game ends.”
With six minutes to go and a Cortez field goal giving Dallas a lead of 13-0, I told my father, “It’s nice to leave on a win.” And over the next six minutes with each long touchdown pass from Brunell to Moss our hearts sank a little, so that when the game ended, like it did, like it had to, 14-13 in a loss, my father said, “Grab your bag, it’s time I drove you to the recruiter’s station.”
My mother and sister came upstairs to say their goodbyes.
“Did they win?” my mother asked, and my father shook his head.
When I came back from Afghanistan, it was about half past midnight on Saturday. It was a long year, the one we were trying to put behind us that night. We tried first to leave the bodies behind us in country. Not only the bodies, but the sensations, too. The feeling of pulling a trigger and knowing for the first time that it wasn’t paper or a pop-up plastic target waiting on the other end. The cool touch of a telephone receiver against our ear, and the way our sisters and wives and fathers had become their voices so completely that even the pictures of them we carried felt like lies. For me, I tried to leave behind the young Pashto girl who’d died on target, her black
30 hair and her open eyes, but she came home with me, too. When we failed to leave them in country, we tried again to leave them in the bed of the truck. For my part, I’m still trying.
All thirteen of us, me and the rest of the detachment, made it back in one piece, so to speak. Before we left, Sergeant First Class Meyers had promised that in a year we’d all come home together, safe and alive, if we kept our focus and did our jobs. But he also liked to quote
Eminem, “I don’t write checks, I write rhymes,” and he had a couple screws lose from his first two tours in Iraq, so don’t blame us for not taking his word to the bank.
When we came home, there was no parade down Longstreet for us. There weren’t any children waving flags on the airstrip or smiling wives waiting to kiss their husbands in a crowded baggage claim terminal. There was, instead, the dark parking lot on Fort Bragg behind battalion where our families had been told, forty-eight hours prior, to wait for us to be dropped off by a truck.
We piled out of the bed of the truck, unloading our tough boxes and feeling how strange it was to be back home. It was the trees everywhere, that’s what struck me first, then the grass, and I realized I missed things I didn’t notice I’d been missing over there. I saw my parents siting in my father’s Charger and I wheeled my tough box over to the car. My father was the first to open his door, recognizing me in spite of the beard I’d grown out, the dusty uniform and scarf I still had draped around my neck. He stepped past his door and I set down the box, sticking out my hand to him, and he pressed past my hand to hold me in his arms in the dark parking lot and we didn’t say a word.
*
31
Twelve years after the wedding, my parents had two children and separate addresses. My mother, sister, and I lived with her parents at their place in Jersey. My father had moved into his little sister’s basement. When he would visit, my father would take my sister and I for rides in his
Firebird, sometimes together, sometimes separate.
Alone, we would ride down state roads with our windows down, a Jimmy Buffet cassette playing through the speakers, and he would set for me small algebra problems, “If x times 5 is
30, Bobby, what is x?” He asked me if I thought it was better to be a janitor in an elementary school or Fortune 500 company. “Either way,” I told him, “the person would still be just a janitor.” My father set me problems he knew the answers to, and it was a mystery to me, then, what he could and could not puzzle out. After a long drive, sitting in our seats in the driveway after a ride, my father’s knuckles went white around the steering wheel and he said to me “Son, don’t get married young.”
In the winter and spring that followed, I spent weekends with my father in the basement of his sister’s house, his collared shirts stacked high on the tabletop ironing board by his computer where we would sit together for long nights, machine-gunning and chain-sawing through demons as, together, we fought through Doom’s descending levels of Hell until we shared his half inflated mattress until morning. On Sunday mornings we walked to the 7-Eleven on the corner, two donuts, one tomato juice, one milk, and a Sunday Post, and my father would spend two hours sorting through the sports section and grocery coupons while I worked through comics and advertisements for electronics.
Then, on Valentine’s Day, my father picked me up unexpectedly from Our Lady of
Sorrows, the Catholic School in Jersey my sister and I attended, where I was then in Sister Chai-
On’s seventh grade English class. Jimmy had collapsed on his way to the garage that morning,
32 and we needed to go to the hospital to be there for him. An aneurism, the doctor at Shady Grove
Adventist explained to my father, and the word was a strange one because even when the doctor had explained it to him it offered nothing by way of an explanation, and three days later my father and his mother made the decision between alive and living and on February 19th we buried
Jimmy.
The casket was open when my father spoke. Jimmy, his black hair slicked back, looked easy in his salmon colored button down and white suit, like death was no bother to him in the first place after the years he’d been through. As a boy, I learned about Jimmy through my mother. I knew he and my father didn’t see eye to eye on most anything, and I knew that on at least one occasion it had come to blows. And on the strength of that, it was easy for me to say I felt little for him by way of compassion, even at twelve. So when my father spoke about him, saying, “My father, my father,” what I felt mostly was betrayed, that somehow the story I knew was incomplete.
There were things I didn’t know about Jimmy that I learned from my father that day. I learned about Vietnam, how he’d volunteered and how he’d come home. Jimmy had taken a fall in the war, a pretty bad one down into a ravine escaping an ambush, and with it went his chances at children. He’d been there at Saturday morning football games for his wife’s sons, taking long shifts on Saturday nights to keep hitting overtime in order to put his wife’s daughter into decent clothes. In high school, my father would sneak into Jimmy’s closet to wear his silk shirts out on dates because, whatever else Jimmy was, he was also damn cool. At my father’s wedding, when his father had snuck off the night before, Jimmy was in the dressing room, telling my father he was a good man, that my father was ready, that he was proud. Most of all, though, he stayed, and this, my father said, had made all the difference.
33
It wasn’t long after that my father, my mother, my sister and I, our family, were together under one roof again. It would be simple to say they chose each other, that love saved the marriage of my father to my mother, and maybe it did. And it might seem true to say that they chose us, their children, that what they’d set out to do in the first place after all was make a family. But it was the funeral, the way that he cried, how it stopped him short, and I couldn’t understand it then, I was only twelve, but the germ of an idea took hold in my mind that day, an idea of who my father was and what could save us.
The night I left for Boot Camp, my father and I talked a lot about the season ahead on our ten minute drive to the station. I thought they could get it right, if only the offense could start to put the pieces together. Between Jones and Barber, I thought, they had as solid a running back tandem as you could hope to find. My father was less optimistic.
“It’s a rebuilding year for them, anyway,” he said.
And then we were there, in the parking lot in front of the recruiter’s station, a light on in the window where we knew Sergeant Cunningham was waiting to see if I would materialize. The word suddenly is problematic, in that it’s rarely true. I want to say that I suddenly realized that
I’d joined the Army and that I’d be in Boot Camp in only a couple days’ time, but it’s not really sudden if you’ve known something for three months and you’ve just been pretending it was never going to arrive. So I won’t say suddenly. What all I will say is that I was scared. And, being scared, standing between my father’s car and the recruiter’s door, I made to hug my father.
He was quick that night, maybe in a way he could still be now, though he’s older. He took a step back, his left hand drawn up and clapped against my shoulder, his right hand out waiting for me to shake it. And I didn’t know then about Jimmy, the way he’d touched my father
34 the day of his grandmother’s funeral, or about my mother, the way she’d held my father through his pain the night before their wedding. I didn’t know how he would hold me, four years down the road and on the wrong side of a war. I didn’t know then how much love was pressed between our hands when we shook and my father, for his sake and mine, shook my hand and said, “All right, son. It’s time.”
35
The Father’s Love
This is a Christmas story, and like any story, it starts with a man in some trouble. So we've got this man, I’ll call him Jim, who's managed to let the weeks between Thanksgiving and
Christmas slip through his fingers, which seems to happen every year with Jim, and he finds himself spending hours on end in the crowded Susquehanna Valley Shopping Mall, bouncing back and forth between Boscov’s and The Bon-Ton trying to scratch names off his list.
This is a Christmas story, and maybe if we want to make it a bit more direct, let’s say there is a particular present, let’s call it the Garmin nüvi 2555LMT, state-of-the-art and top-of- the-line, the one with the red trim, of course, not the base model, that Jim has to track down, because in some ways a Christmas story is about trying to find something elusive, the feeling that something important is missing, and then that sigh when it’s found.
Like this, for example. It was the Christmas I was home from the war. Would you believe they let me go home for Christmas? How about it? But that’s Christmas for you, soldiers coming home from war and people hugging in the snow. My dad is so damn happy on that Christmas.
He's happy I’m alive, happy I’m home to watch the Cowboys play, Christmas day at four, and happy I can watch my little sister open presents. He’s so damn happy he decides to make mojitos with Meyer’s Dark Rum first thing in the morning but goofs up the portions and by ten we're both staggering around the house, picking up wrapping paper and ribbons and he says to me,
Son, I’m so damn proud.
Ain’t that a Christmas story for you?
It’s something like that, what Jim is out at the mall looking for, because really, when it comes down to it, we’re just buying presents for that moment when the wrapping paper comes
36 off and you see what’s been under the tree this whole time. It’s not about whether they wear the damn thing, or if it breaks two weeks later, and sure, we’d like them to get a lifetime of use out of this or that gift, but that’s not Christmas. Christmas is about the wrapping paper coming off, and the cheeks being invaded by a smile that says you did a good job, and the Christmas story is like that, we always do a good job in the end, don’t we?
So Jim is checking names off the list, he’s got Casey, of course, cute-as-a-button-Casey who we should have seen earlier in the story, just in passing, bits of pink in her hair and just coming into her own and we’d know he’s not shopping for his wife when Jim walks up to the perfume counter at the Bon-Ton, slipping side-shoulder through shopping bags and sequined shirts as he gags on the cocktail of fragrances that hangs on the crowd of women. Jim is looking for that good-job-gift for his youngest daughter that’ll make her eyes go like a string of variable speed multi-colored bulbs.
It’s funny, you know, the way parents talk about their kids to strangers. It’s funny in the ways we expect it to be, like how Jim tells this woman behind the glass-top counter, let’s call her
Glenda because she’s got blue hair and crow’s feet and she sells perfume, that Casey is such a sweet girl, pretty little thing, just coming on fifteen and she wants the boys to notice her, how he says all this with a smile but we should know, from earlier in the story of course, that Jim had just given Casey what-for when she asked about a date with Todd Strickland’s boy from down the block.
It’s funny in other ways too, though. Like how much Casey’s dad sounds like my dad the time the C.F.O. of Jones, Heigel, and Schmitt swung by the his office for a quick chat after a board meeting on acquisitions. The C.F.O. says to my dad, picking up the picture frame on his desk, the one of me in my Class A’s, This your boy, then? The one in the Army? And my dad
37 smiles and says, Yep, that’s him. Won’t be home for Christmas this year, though. It’s going to break his mother’s heart, to not have him around, but we can’t help but be proud of him.
See, it’s funny how my dad, he doesn’t want me away, didn’t want me in the Army in the first place if we’re going to tell the truth, but he doesn’t mind bragging on me. He can’t help but be proud, and Jim, he doesn’t want his little cute-as-can-be-Casey going for rides with any boys with ideas, but he doesn’t mind bragging on her looks and he’s going to buy her that sweet perfume.
Christmas is funny like that, how it makes us hold two things in our heads at once, how when you think about it, the whole thing is a little suspect. Jim, for example, he’s not a big believer. He’s got ideas about God and he was brought up Methodist, but Jim opens the sports section of The Post more times in a week than he’s cracked a Bible in the past decade. But
Christmas rolls around and Jim wants the works, candlelight service on Christmas Eve, O Holy
Night, and a prayer over dinner and at the center of it all is this recurring character named Christ that Jim hasn’t got much to do with. Jim’s got bigger fish to fry, like gifts for his wife, one naughty, one nice, like they’d agreed to do every Christmas more than twenty years ago. And, knowing Jim, and that this is a Christmas story, we’ve got to keep it light and humorous, so for the sake of the story let’s say Jim already got this year’s naughty gift, a frilly number with bows up and down the corset-style back and he’s facing the prospect of having to put that under the tree since it’s the only gift he’s got.
This is the circumstance that brings Jim into the jewelry store, the one across the way from the Auntie Anne’s pretzel shop and he’s sucking down a lemonade and the sticker prices on diamond earrings when the sales associate comes around to press Jim down the glass to the premium tags. Jim’s thinking about Stacey and what she might have gotten him, how last year
38 she surprised him with a Montblanc, a diamond encrusted fountain pen like the one the C.F.O. had that he’d told her about last June, and he starts to wonder how he can slip a tennis bracelet past her as something he’d thought long and hard about, because Christmas is really about that, too. It’s about getting a chance to prove that we listen to the people we care about, that they matter, that they are on our mind, and it makes you wonder how it all got started.
Of course you can’t tell a Christmas story without telling the Christmas story, even if it’s just an abbreviated one. It starts with a man in trouble. We’ll call him Balthazar. Balthazar’s a bit of an amateur astronomist who does the best he can, but for the 1st century B.C.E. he’s got some faulty notions and he sees in the stars that a king is about to be born. The trouble for Balthazar is in finding this king, a sort of validation of his view of the world and hey, it never hurts to get in good with a king from day one. He gathers a few of his closest friends and scours the desert for this guy, and it looks quite bleak for a while, but it all ends up happily, with Balthazar finding the king and having the perfect presents to boot.
It’s like this for Jim, too, we imagine, as he doles out four figures on a diamond necklace with a silver chain and a fat rock that Jim knows will drop Stacey’s jaw and keep him out of the doghouse.
But it comes down to the damn Garmin nüvi 2555LMT, that Jim can’t seem to track down. It seems everyone had them in stock at some point or other, but what with Black Friday sales and then the big rush last week, stores seemed to be picked clean. It’s for his son, the
Garmin nüvi 2555LMT, and this is the thing that Jim keeps explaining at each store, and why he
39 can’t understand that it just isn’t anywhere. I mean, it’s for his son, for Christmas, you know?
His son who’s away at the war. And no, he won’t be back home on Christmas day, but that’s beside the point, really. It just needs to be wrapped and under the tree, Jim thinks, just wrapped and under the tree so that, in some way, his son is home. It’s not a Christmas story if he doesn’t find it, so Jim keeps searching, because the Christmas story is all about the good-job gift, the sigh of relief, the finding the thing you searched for and everything being set right in the end.
The truth of the matter, though, is that things don’t always get found, that the search comes up empty, that Christmas stories don’t ever hold up.
Like Balthazar, for example. When he was searching for the king, he bumped into this local governor, let’s call him Herod, and Herod seemed a bit too up in arms about the whole thing, and a little too eager to hear back from Balthazar when he found what he was looking for.
So Balthazar skips town and the baby king and his parents get out of dodge too, but this guy
Herod, well he doesn’t know anything except, apparently, some king has been born down the street and he’s not making way at the top of the hill for a baby, so he decides to clean house, all boys under two are, well, Herod sends them off to an early grave. Not so happy in the end, you know?
Or like my dad. Because the truth is, soldiers coming home from war for Christmas and people hugging in the snow, well that’s only in the stories. Truth is I got home for Christmas that year on a two week R&R from Iraq and I brought the war home with me, grabbing my little sister’s wrist damn near to breaking because I can’t find the sidearm she knows sure enough I
40 didn’t bring home with me. But I’m whispering to her at the kitchen table over French Toast and
Mimosas that she better stop being a little bitch and tell me where my gun is. My dad, he sure got drunk that Christmas, and he told me he was proud of me too, more like a wish, though, like his words could make the world the way it ought to be. He ends up picking wrapping paper and ribbons off the family room floor by himself at the end of the morning, my mom and my little sister in a car headed Southbound down 95.
And poor Jim, he ends up not being able to track down that Garmin nüvi 2555LMT, ends up being forced to give up the search the night before Christmas Eve as the shops roll down heavy bars to block their doors and Jim makes his way back home. He’s torn up about it, of course, but as he wraps up the necklace for Stacey, the perfume for Casey, he lets himself off on account of the fact that he can go back out and search on Christmas Eve. Even if he can’t find it before Christmas he thinks he’ll pick it up for his son, this thing, when they come back in stock, wrap it up and put it in the basement.
And, hell, it won’t matter, not in the end, just so long as he can keep looking. Because it was never about the gifts, not really. And it wasn’t about getting them, either. It was about Jim holding out hope that people could find what they’ve been looking for, that they could be forgiven, that they could come home, that if he just kept believing then eventually this Christmas story would end up right, and people wouldn’t have to stay dead, not really, not forever, and that in the end there’d be this big sigh, like the universe exhaling after holding its breath forever, just waiting for things to turn out. And isn’t that the real Christmas story, in the end?
41
Parabolic Path
When the bullet passed through the girl’s head, pulling gray matter down through the broken cranium, restoring the fractured skull, stitching together the delicate, dark skin between her eyebrows, when the bullet encased itself in its shell and spun and rushed and sped into the muzzle of Sergeant Sofie Afridi’s Beretta at a rate of 1,100 meters per second, when it came to rest in the chamber of her sidearm and the force of the bullet sent a shock of shivers through her rigid arms, she knew she’d become a mother. Just a few minutes earlier, Afridi scarcely allowed herself the hope.
When she first saw the girl, blood smeared on her face and pooled, suddenly wet on the earthen ground of a mud home in a small compound near the Khyber Pass, Afridi knew the girl would be born soon. She looked to the other soldiers in the room with her. Private Murphy.
Specialist Granger. Sergeant Carter. One of these would be the girl’s father, Afridi thought.
There were other bodies in the room, too. Their pale, cold forms, dimly lit, cast small shadows on the ground where the dawn’s twilight had crept in through the west-facing windows. Afridi dusted her hands off and knelt beside the girl. She held two fingers to the girl’s carotid artery.
She hoped for a pulse, for the first small beat. In some births, Afridi knew, there could be a long, quiet period of a slow, weak pulse before the first painful and beautiful screaming breath. For those born in war, and there were always so many born that way, birth involved a lot of blood.
There was, of course, a variety of other and less violent ways to be born, but for those who had seen a war-birth, there was no arguing that it was one of nature’s most beautiful miracles.
Afridi stood up, buttoning the chin strap of her helmet into place. She stretched out her arm, pointing to the other bodies in the room. She called out to her fellow soldiers, asking for a status report. The other soldiers – Private Granger and Specialist Murphy were closest to her –
42 shook their heads, meaning no one was breathing, not yet anyway. Specialist Murphy stood, his legs spread wide and slightly bent, his weapon drawn, standing next to the body of an unborn soldier he and Granger had carried with them to this home. His nametape said Ramirez, so that’s what they would call him. Somewhere on this compound, Murphy knew Ramirez had a father or a mother waiting for him. He’d said so on the way to the compound, he just knew it, why else would he be lugging the body around with him?
Afridi looked back to the little girl on the ground, the wet blood all but gone, the last trails of it snaking its way across her face. Afridi broke the holster strap on her sidearm, her weapon drawn and steady, waiting for the bullet which, a moment later, had ripped out of the girls head and traced its parabolic path into Afridi’s gun.
The girl screamed. She scooted across the floor, hands behind her bent back, her heels digging into the ground and pulling her small self towards Afridi. The girl’s eyes were wide and her chest rose and fell in massive heaves. Afridi wanted to holster her weapon, to kneel back down in the dirt to comfort the girl, her daughter, her first child, but she knew she couldn’t. The compound was ringing with the hollow bangs of bullets coming loose from the secret places where they had been lodged, waiting for this moment when the soldiers would come along to collect them. The bullets pried loose from mud walls and feather bedding, from bookcases and hand-crank-radios, from livestock and people alike, and once a soldier drew their weapon they kept it out until the last bullet tore through the air.
Nineteen rounds in all, that’s what Afridi collected. She’d had to drop the magazine in her M9, which was mostly full when the first round, the one that had been lodged inside her daughter, was collected. Afridi had an empty magazine in her cargo pocket. She seated the magazine into the butt of the gun, and it too was nearly full by the time the last hollow crack of
43 gunfire sounded through the house. Just behind her, Murphy was running his hands over
Ramirez, who was born and breathing and talking. He had a bandage compressed tightly to his chest that Murphy worked to get loose. The girl, Afridi’s daughter was on her feet. She was quiet, and then she wasn’t. She had her arms in the air. Tears were working their way into the corners of her eyes. She was saying, please, please.
Afridi stood with her weapon still drawn. The girl was terrified of it. In front of her was a man who’d just been born, same as her, several rounds drawn from his chest into Granger and
Carter’s raised carbines. He had a full beard, a tangled mess of black curls and a limp as he rushed to stand between Afridi and her daughter. He held one hand out towards Afridi and the other soldiers, his other arm held out like a bar across the girl’s chest. He was shouting.
Sergeant Carter, who’d spoken a little Pashto when he was born almost fifteen years ago but had since forgotten all of it, looked to Afridi and gestured with his carbine towards the man.
Afridi, who spoke Pashto and Arabic, English and a little French, was a born interpreter. Carter wanted to know what the man was shouting about; didn’t they realize that the soldiers were there to help, that they’d just brought them to life? He told Afridi to translate, but it was too loud for
Afridi to sort things out, and she still had her weapon drawn. Outside there was the pounding of feet, screaming, a door being kicked closed twenty meters away. In the distance, Afridi heard the twin blades of the Chinook they’d flown in on chopping at the air just behind the ridgeline, and then it was gone, engulfed by the sounds of close gunfire.
Afridi told the man she was sorry, that he’d have to slow down if he wanted to be understood. She said not to be alarmed by the soldiers or the guns. They were there to help; he’d never seen a gun before, but shouldn’t he have known what they were for? Afridi felt time running short. Soon they, herself and the other soldiers, would have to make their way back to
44 the Chinooks, would take off and head back to the base. She would be gone and might never see her daughter again, might never even learn her name. She nearly boiled over at the thought, but the man in front of her daughter was still shouting and pointing and, behind him, her daughter was crying still. Afridi raised her gun to the ceiling. One last round, she’d noticed it on the way in, had been lodged in the ceiling, and it came loose the moment she pulled the trigger.
The man and the girl lowered their hands at the sound of the bullet being collected and the hard stone of the ceiling lifting off the ground and crashing against the spot the round had come loose from. It calmed them to see for the first time what the guns were for – for putting things together, for making people whole. It calmed them all. The soldiers lowered their weapons. Smith asked the girl for her name. She was done crying now. She said her name was
Pamir. It was a beautiful name. Afridi told her so, told her that her own name was Sofie Afridi.
The blades of the Chinooks outside grew louder. Afridi heard the footsteps outside, heard the
Major shouting instructions. It was time to fall back. Afridi wanted to hold the girl, to wrap her arms around her, but she couldn’t. She was constrained. She was already walking, one foot behind the other, back towards the door. She called out to the girl, shouting as she passed through the doorway. She told her to have a beautiful life. She told the girl she would never forget her.
On the flight to America, Sofie Afridi couldn’t sleep. She lay awake, her head propped against her rucksack, her toes flexing and unfurling inside her desert boots. Intellectually, she knew everything she could possibly want to know about life there. But she’d never been, had
45 only ever lived as a soldier and only in the hills and mountains of Afghanistan. Before she boarded the plane, she took one last look out onto the snow-capped peaks. She would miss them and their permanence, for the certainty of them. The world was always in flux, things constantly being pulled together and so many people being born around her all the time. The aircraft to
America was populated by so many soldiers who’d been born so recently that they were perfect strangers to her. There was always so much change.
Major Hastings, her commanding officer, was working his way through the narrow aisle between the feet of soldiers stretched out and sleeping on the aircraft’s cool skin. He stopped by
Sofie and sat down beside her. She wanted him to put his arm around her shoulder, the way he had before. She imagined herself to be too grown up for all that now, at least in his eyes. Major
Hastings had been there when Sofie was born. To Sofie, he was like the mountains, something permanent and fixed. He could tell something was bothering her, so he told her to soldier up and spill it. She told him she was worried. She didn’t know who she would be when she wasn’t a soldier anymore. She’d become a mother three times over during her first year. She’d gotten used to this life, growing up with her brothers and sisters in arms. What would she do with herself now?
Major Hastings nodded. He understood. He wanted to tell Sofie a story, and she wanted to listen. He told her about when he first became a father. It was twenty years past now. When
Sofie had lived as long as Major Hastings had already, she’d be a little girl, enjoying her last few years without a care. Back then, when his body was old, giving and fragile, when his bones were still hollow and waiting for the vigor of youth to fill them, back then he’d been General Hastings.
He’d visited a cemetery. There, in the shade of an old maple, its red leafs just starting to turn to a beautiful yellow, he saw the headstone: Roger D. Hastings. The Major told Sofie that he visited
46 the grave often. He was there when they pulled the body from the ground, when they took the body to the hospital. All those years ago, the Major had stared a long time at the unborn body of the man, his form impossibly old, pale face heavy with wrinkles, sunken into white linens. He sat by the bedside and waited for the man to draw his first breath. And when he did, the Major held his hands.
Sofie told the Major it was a beautiful story.
He said in those early days all he knew was being old. His son was old, weak and mumbling, incoherent. He’d bathed his son and pulled him about in a wheelchair. The Major thought he would be old forever, that his turn at youth would never come. He told Sofie he spent those first ten years so concerned with who he would be that he forgot to enjoy the world around him. He told her, and he said it was so important to him that she hear it, that every day in this life was precious. When he first saw the tombstone, he believed he would be a father. He didn’t know what it would be like, or who he would be when his sole purpose in life was to care for his fragile son. But he had faith. He knew he would be exactly what he was destined to be, and couldn’t ever be anything else. He told Sofie to have faith, too.
Sofie met her wife – the woman who would one day carry Sofie in her womb at the end – the day she and the other soldiers landed in America. Her name was Mina. She was beautiful, that was the first thing Sofie noticed. She had smooth, almond skin and dark hair that fell in curls around her shoulders. Mina had come to the airfield that day because she felt something was missing in her life, and when she saw Sofie, she knew what would fill it. The soldiers filed out of
47 the C-130, waving, smiling, shielding their eyes as they looked over their shoulders at the families waiting on the tarmac. There were husbands and wives, lovers, sons and daughters, all waiting. And there were others, like Mina, who had come to find their wife, their husband, whoever they would meet and make a permanent part of their lives, till death parted them.
Mina reminded Sofie of that day often. The way Sofie had hugged her, the way her body had become weightless in Mina's arms, the way Mina told her she was home. Sofie had been a young woman, then. Now, five years later, Sofie had grown into a girl. At her last physical, the doctor read the results of her blood work - eighteen years, give or take a few months. It was no surprise. After her time with the Army, Sofie had done odd jobs, had worked in a dentist's office as a receptionist, as a cashier at a clothing store, as a movie theater attendant. It was while she was working at the movie theater, picking popcorn buckets out the trash and setting them down on the sticky floor between the aisles, that Sofie figured it was time for her to retire. Mina agreed, and they enrolled her in the school system.
At the school, Sofie met Charlie. He wasn’t the first she made love with, but he was the last. There’d been others: Steven, who’d enrolled a year early, who was a tree of a man and had a scratchy beard and a chest thick with soft animal hair and a sour scent like wet leaves whenever he came out of the shower; John, who was overweight but sweet, who she was close with until she was with him that first and only time and then never spoke to afterward; Kelsey, who told her that she had done it with other girls and women, many in fact in her life, who promised Sofie she would enjoy it and been right. Charlie came last, though, in her third year at the school.
Mina liked Charlie. She liked him for Sofie. He’d been born only a few years before
Sofie. She remembered reading about it in the paper. He’d been born with a terrible cancer, his insides riddled with tumors. He’d spent the first two years of his life in a hospital bed. It had
48 done him some good, though. Too often, she thought, those born young were in too much of a rush to do everything. When Charlie finally got out of the hospital bed, he had a stillness to him.
He was always quiet. Mina liked that about him. Sofie did too.
Maybe what she liked best of all about Charlie was that she could whisper with him. She told him her secret things. He slept in Sofie’s room in Mina’s house, a narrow little townhouse in a row of narrow little townhouses. Sofie’s bedroom was on the third floor, an attic space with a slanted ceiling they had to crouch under. Her twin bed pressed against a lunette window that looked out over a park with slides and swings and bars for children. They liked to lie naked together on her bed in the afternoons and wait for the morning and its beautiful oranges and yellows and blues. Sofie was looking at the window one afternoon, out at the children in the park, chasing their wives and husbands, smiling and laughing, going up slides, leaping onto swings and pumping their little legs. She asked Charlie what he thought it would be like, to be that young. He asked her how she was born.
It was a bomb, she said. The kind that grew in the ground in Afghanistan, usually under roads. She said when the Major – he was an old friend of hers, though they didn’t speak anymore
– brought her body to the road, she was in so many pieces he was too scared to count them. He told her he had seen birth in so many ways, he’d been there for so many himself, but when he carried those pieces of her out into the road, each bundled and bleeding in his arms, it was the first time he doubted someone would be born. But he set the pieces of her down, some on this side of the road, some on the other, some inside a truck that had started to smoke badly and was threatening to catch fire. When the bomb went off, he said it was like the sun came down to
Earth. It was a miracle.
49
Charlie asked about her parent, did she have a father or mother or both. Sofie said she didn’t have parents. If it was anyone, it was the Major, but the Major said Sofie’s father was
God. She asked Charlie if he believed in God. He ran his fingers through her hair, along the knots of her spine. He kissed her. She pulled him tight and rolled on top of him. There was the sweet electric, gasping moment, first for Charlie, then for Sofie as she rocked her hips against his body. She leaned down and kissed him. They made love and promised each other there would never be another. They made love until the desire grew so strong it overcame them and they had to stop. She dressed Charlie, and he dressed her, kissing her as he went, from her rough knees to her forehead.
Mina could hardly believe how small Sofie had become. It broke her heart to think that the small girl who walked the halls of their of their apartment building, who held her hand and sat in her lap and spoke only sweetly to Mina, who clung to her waist and rested her head against her breasts, this was what was left of the woman who'd walked off the plane and into her life nineteen years ago. Soon, Mina would be alone, and though she would never admit it to Sofie, the idea scared her and kept awake in the late hours of the morning. Sometimes Mina thought she would have another wife, or maybe a husband. It was common for a woman to have more than one, to meet a new wife or husband even at this stage of life. Mina wouldn’t, though. For her,
Sofie was always enough.
Sofie was asleep on the couch, drool trailing into her open mouth, her plaid jumper peeking out from under a sea of blankets that the child was peacefully adrift in. It would be a
50 shame to wake her, but Mina liked to give the girl play dates, to make sure her little wife was as happy as she could be in those last few years. She bent down and lifted Sofie lightly in her arms.
She stirred and cried a little but was quickly back to sleep and buckled into her car seat, her eyes drooping asleep and flashing awake. Closer to the park, Mina and Sofie were nodding their head in rhythm together, Mina humming and Sofie singing along to a song about a baby whale and her wife swimming together under the deep blue sea. Only a few years ago, Sofie would have thought the song terribly droll, but there was a simplicity that came with childhood, with being truly grown up. The simpler the thing, the truer it was for Sofie. Dogs became puppies. Trees became seeds. Stories started happy and ended all full of problems, but it was okay, because if the story kept going, it always ended up right. She asked Sofie if she hoped anyone would be at the park today. Sofie hoped Charlie would be there.
Traffic slowed down. Sofie saw smoke first through the window, then the fire out the windshield. Mina told Sofie to look at how bright the fire was. Wasn't it beautiful? And Sofie asked her mother if someone was being born, and Mina said yes, maybe, it sure looked that way.
Sofie saw the paramedics, the firemen standing by the car that was on fire and overturned. She wondered who would put the bodies inside, if there were any. Who will be the mommy or the daddy, she wanted to know. Mina said she didn't know, it was a mystery. Sofie said she was a mommy, that she'd been a mommy three times, in fact. Mina said she knew. Sofie had started to forget things, to repeat herself the way children. In a few years, she wouldn’t be able to speak at all.
Mina had never been a mommy, but she was so happy to be Sofie's wife that it didn't matter, not one bit. Sofie said Afghanistan was very pretty, that the mountains were tall, that there was always snow coming up off the ground, that it was a place where people were
51 becoming mommies and daddies all the time. She hoped Mina could go some day, and Mina said she would like that.
The next day, Sofie crawled into Mina's bed. It was not a very big bed, and it wasn't very comfortable. Living somewhere small, living with few nice things did not pay very well, but it also didn't necessitate an expensive job. Mina paid a small sum, a mere ten dollars an hour, to work at a nail salon. She enjoyed the work, lifting polish off nails to reveal their natural beauty, washing feet to bring them into balance with the way the body wanted to be. Mostly, though, she enjoyed being able to have Sofie with her at the salon, and so she lived humbly in a small apartment with two small bedrooms and two small beds so that she could be close to her wife for all her remaining days and nights. When Sofie crawled into Mina's bed, her face was puffy and wet and Mina knew she would be crying soon.
This happened more often these days. Mina knew it would pass. She asked Sofie what was wrong with her little love-bug. Sofie had had a nightmare. Mina asked her what happened.
Sofie struggled to explain. It was a nightmare of a world that was all mixed up. Instead of babies going into their wives, instead of spending their final months as close as could be to the woman they'd loved for so much of their lives, in Sofie's nightmare babies came out of their wives.
Instead of growing younger, people grew older. They changed and got bigger and older and died alone. In her nightmare Sofie saw the girl, her first daughter. She said she did a bad thing to
Pamir in her dream.
Mina cried. It was an awful, awful dream. It was the saddest story that she had ever heard. She held Sofie. She ran her fingers through her hair. She said she loved her, and that she would never let her nightmare come true. Sofie was a good girl, and Mina would take care of her and love her and she would never, never ever die alone. Sofie asked Mina to go to where she was
52 born, to carry her little body inside her to those mountains. That's where she wanted to die. And
Mina said of course, she promised she would, anything for Sofie, who she loved and would love and would never forget as long as she lived.
53
This War Will Find You
She asks, “Why’d you volunteer for the war? You have a death wish or something?” And there are good answers to this question, answers to do with patriotism and faith and duty, but it wouldn’t be the truth. Here’s the truth: you couldn’t hide from this war. This war will find you.
This war will find you when your son walks into your living room, chest puffed out, all bony eighteen years of him standing up straight and he says, “Mom, Dad, I’m joining the Army,” and you feel it then, this sick feeling like warm saliva on the back of your tongue, and your boy is dead already. Even then, standing there in the living room, his bright eyes dead ahead into a future where he can beat his chest and call himself a man, even right then he’s bleeding out in the killing fields of Afghanistan or scattered across the interior of a Humvee on the road from
Ramadi to Baghdad.
This war will find you when you train this boy to fill the ranks, to fight this new war that you won’t be a part of, when he asks about the 10th Mountain combat patch on your right shoulder and you tell him, “Even when the Army reassigns you, you wear the patch of the unit you went to war with. You carry it with you for life,” and this boy tells you he wants that, a combat patch, something to carry with him for life, so you make him do pushups until his arms give out because what are you going to do, tell him the truth?
It’ll find you when you’re out with your sorority sisters in Chapel Hill at a night club and you meet a good Christian boy, out for the night with the guys from his detachment, and at the end of the night he gives you a hug and his number and you see each other damn near daily in the four months leading to his deployment. You make quiet love in his apartment on Saturday nights and dress for church on Sunday mornings facing away from each other, and when he
54 comes home a year later and you hold him close and say, “Thank God you’re safe,” he says,
“What a joke,” and then he laughs like it really is funny, a deep down laugh, you know he won’t give it a passing thought when you tell him three weeks later that you just need some space, just for a while.
When the U.S. Army puts up an outpost half a kilometer from your families compound in
Afghanistan and a young soldier steps forward from a parked convoy of Humvees and offers your father work, putting together tables and bunk beds for the new barracks, and at the end of the week he pulls MREs from his shoulder bag and more Afghanis than you’ve ever seen from both his pockets, when he smiles as he wipes the sweat and sawdust from his face, and then when he frowns in the morning because of the letter that’s been left at the foot of your front door in the middle of the night, “If you enter that base again, we will kill your sons first,” when your father takes the MREs and the money out in front of the house and burns them, hoping to God someone is watching, the war will find you.
At a dinner party, a few drinks into the evening, and you ask him, a veteran now, “Was there something in particular you saw, over there?” and what you’re really saying is, “Tell me something fucked up,” and then he does, that’s when the war finds you. He tells you about this girl on a target who had no business dying there, how her hair spilled out of her hijab into a pool of blood and cerebrospinal fluid and how it looked something like vinegar being dropped into olive oil, how, from what he could make out, she was beautiful, her skin still soft in the places it hadn’t been peeled back or curled forward like the burnt pages of a book, how the young Ranger, scared and heavy and quiet during the debriefing could only say, “I saw the threat. I took the threat,” how the veteran at the dinner party sits there saying all this only inwardly, and then he breaks the uncomfortable quiet of a dozen silent sips of white wine, he says only, “I saw a girl
55 once. She was dead,” and you nod and say, “What happened?” and he only nods, picks a grape from the cheese plate on the coffee table, and says, “She was dead.”
Or, here’s a hypothetical: let’s say he doesn’t go to war, this boy, and he finishes up his degree at the Bible College instead of dropping out and enlisting, and he goes on to seminary, like he’d planned, like he’d been born to do, and from there he gets a New Living Translation of the Bible and an acoustic Epiphone to go with his first appointment at Ashland Christian Church as the Youth Pastor, and six months in, Bradley, one of the bright ones, enlists the day after graduating from Patrick Henry High and he stands there, the Youth Pastor who didn’t enlist, about a year later in the sanctuary, in front of the parents, the fathers and the mothers, the siblings, the cousins, the sons and daughters, and he says, “Brad is something special for us. He’s an example of Christ’s love. It was Christ, when predicting his own death, who said that a kernel of wheat, unless it falls to the ground and dies, it’s still only a single seed. But if it does fall, it brings forth fruit. Brad gave his life for us, and isn’t that something?” and then later, when the
Youth Pastor gets home, and Bradley is still dead, the war finds him there, too.
Don’t mistake me. These aren’t soldiers’ problems. These are your problems. These are your children’s problems. Go, or don’t. It doesn’t make a difference. That poor Youth Pastor, he knows he’s full of shit when he stands up at that pulpit and he says, “greater love has no man than this,” knows what happened to that boy was a waste, plain and simple waste, but it doesn’t make him any less right. Because the war did come, and the seeds did fall, and the harvest is in your hands.
56
The Comet
It was light out when he left her, and then she had the afternoon and the evening and the night to be alone. David had wanted tacos before he left, the drive-thru kind, not fresh, though she had offered.
had
They ve got a special Mountain Dew there, David told her. You can t get it at
the store. So Becca took him to get his tacos and she watched him eat them in the passenger seat of the old, red Neon her dad bought her three years back when she was a Junior at
Shady Brook High. They sat together in the parking lot outside the compound and Becca watched David trail taco shell crumbs through his new beard down onto the Velcro straps
Afghanistanof his Army Combatduring the Uniform coming and year. she wondered who would do her husband s laundry in
There were no clearances for wives and the restricted compound where the soldiers had planned to meet meant Becca and David had to say their goodbyes pressed up against
histhe lips.driver s Becca door cried of theirand cried car. David until the kissed whole her thin all wrongg was ruined., too passionate and no goodbye on
Just He left smile, her there, alright? with David his taco said. trash I don t crumpled want to and see stu youffed like into this. the passenger door and the soda cup sweating onto the gear shifter and she could have screamed right there in the parking lot but she put the car in first and drove to the commissary.
57
She was rough with her face, more than she meant to be, as she dried her eyes and cheeks so that her tan skin looked burned and three days later it would start to peel at the corners of her nose from where she would rub the skin raw.
Becca bought vine ripened tomatoes. She pushed her big, empty shopping cart over to the baked goods and bought the good bread, the kind in the paper bag with the fancy,
Italian sounding name, the kind David complained about as a waste whenever he rummaged the bags she sat on the kitchen counter when he got to them before she'd managed to get everything into the fridge and the pantry. She bought singles of American
Cheddar. She bought herself a bag of kettle cooked chips with sea salt and cracked pepper and she was planning herself a fine meal when she came across the bottled sodas. And maybe it was because she was trying to forget how long David would be gone, or maybe it was because she remembered, but Becca bought four bottles of Mountain Dew, one of every flavor they had, hoping one would be right and David would smile when he saw it waiting in the fridge.
ing for
The checkout clerk asked Becca, Did you find everything you were look
today? In country, David taped a picture of Becca her senior year in her track shorts and a thin-strapped white penny that showed off the freckle– d and tanned skin of her shoulders, her curls up with white ribbons to the inside of his body armor. He poked fun at her cooking with the guys in his detachment.– He gave his stomach a two-
handed pat and said, I think First For Sergeantthe first week, deployed David my wrestled fat ass just with to time get me zones away and from his circadianmy wife s rhythm.deep fryer. He woke up with the setting sun and started his day with dinner, thawed and fried chicken
58 fingers and soy milk. His mind charted its way through two theaters of war, Greenwich
Mean Time, and the breadth of the Atlantic to his waiting wife who, just then, he imagined, would be stepping out of the shower, still sweating from her morning six mile run, massaging her slender calves dry with a towel.
She That wasn t. first night, Becca had tried. She warmed a can of tomato bisque in a saucepan
and buttered and browned thick slices of the bread she d bought and pressed them flat grilledagainst cheese a layer and of melted soup on cheese hard days,and sliced and had tomato done in so a skillet.many times Becca s duri mother would make year at Shady Brook, the year after David graduated and left for the Armyng and Becca s Becca Senior worried he would forget the thin band and its slight stone that she wore on her finger to every class and around her neck at every cross country event and track meet.
the kitchenShe couldn t table while stand steam the tasterose fromthat night, the tub and where so the Be sandwichcca had mixed and the two soup cups cooled of Epsom on
Salt into the rising water. While the tub filled, she undressed herself in the bedroom. She unfastened her bra, a front-closure with white lace, the style David had favored since the
breastsfirst time to she, him while and he straddling had smiled. him She in thecupped bed ofher Tony breasts Donato s. They pickup, felt small had in opened her palms, her and her nakedness felt alone in the quiet house.
She put her hair up, high and off her shoulders before she went into the tub, first with her fingers to feel the water and then with her feet. The water rose and fell around her and she turned the knob with her toes, letting out a little cold water before she closed her
eyes and wanted to hum but couldn t, for the life of her, come up with a song and so she 59 managed instead the notes of a marching cadence, one David sung around the house, about a girl who wore a yellow ribbon in her hair.
In Bagram, David practiced a few Pashto phrases. Lasuna wusha ya. Show me your hands. Dalta rasha. Come here. Da muhimi da. This is important. He practiced the words as he washed himself when the shower was empty, the soap-water running over and between wooden slats to the ground some ten feet below. He dried himself on the metal landing outside the door to the shower wearing flip flops, Ranger Panties, and dog tags dangling against his bare bird chest. He was up high enough to see over the fence to the goat herders and mountains and the ruins of homes that had been broken by Soviet bombs before he was born. Da muhimi da, he said as he dried himself.
He called Becca, though mostly she had talked. Her questions were the sort he
whencouldn t he answer.got there? Where Instead would he told he be her going, that theand weath when?er O wasr, at fineleast, and what he wouldremarked he be on doing the beauty of the place, the mountains, and how dark it could get at night. David tried to explain
himthat howhe wasn t the food frustrated was. by her questions, but because he couldn t answer them. She asked
before Shit, David said. Nasty shit. Except breakfast. They do that alright. And we have it
-eight-bed, so it gives me something to look forward to. She asked him what time it was. a Oh while afterhundred, she hung local up, time. even You? pretended She told he washim stilit wasl talking late. Hein casestayed any in of the the phone guys booth
hewaiting opened in linethe door.thought the conversation had been too short. He said, I miss you, and then
60
The day after David left for Afghanistan, Becca got into her Neon and drove from
expectingFort Bragg her, to her had parents half the home neighborhood in Shady onBrook, the phoneVirginia. by Htheer timemother, Becca who reached hadn t thebeen porch. They sat out most of the day, receiving guests with sweet tea and zucchini bread and
Becca was all smiles with her two brothers and her sister-in-law and Shauna, her little niece, until her Dad pulled up sweating hot from the leather seats of his Charger and the humid air and he asked just what the hell was going on before he even managed a hello for his daughter.
I guess I ll get over to the store, then, Becca s father said. Wish you d told me we were having the whole damn family for dinner or else I d have bought something. the foreheadHe got and back she in said,his car and drove off to the Kroger s and Becca s mom kissed her on ready for dinner. Becca and That her sister- man, in and-law, then Debbie, she led got them the tableall inside together the house while to her get
bouncedbrothers Shaunastayed on on the her porch hip and for sang a smoke to her. before Shauna they cl cameapped in her to handswash up. and Becca s smiled mom for
Becca sHer mom. dad came home with a value pack of shrink-wrapped ribeye steaks, eight in
intotal, the and grill he and yelled about for ready the boys to go to by quit the smoking. time He said, You should have had brother the charcoal
I got back here. Becca s oldest complained that he hadn t known her dad would be grilling and the man thought for a gomoment about throwing the package of steaks at his son. You think I m about to cook eight
ddamn steaks in the oven? Boy, you better put that cigarette out and get the grill going.
61
In the house, Becca's father kissed her mother on the forehead. He kissed her, and she curled her fingers sharp behind his neck to hold him close a moment, long enough to
whisper in his ear, She needs you. Becca s-wide father grin stretching crouched tothe bring tight, his worked face to skin his of his granddaughter smouth. and he smiled, his too
Who sThe li my girl? Becca s father asked. Who s my princess?
ttle girl held her arms out and said, Papa. chest andHe herlifted arms her enfolding from Becca s his head.mother s He kissed hands, her holding stomach her hibeforegh, her he hips leaned against out from his his granddaughter and finally said to Bec
David and his detachment pushedca, It s out goodfrom toBagram see you, to Kandadoll. har three weeks into their deployment. It was a lucky stroke, the detachment commander told them. Kandahar
Airfield was well funded and infrequently hit by mortar attacks. There was, almost unbelievably, a boardwalk of shops and restaurants in the heart of the base, a sprawling rectangle of wooden slats and the scent of deep- detachment commande fried food., by It the has south a Pizza gate, Hut, far guys, from thethe boardwalk and too closer tosaid. their He barracks,hadn t mentioned the base ophowerated a series of incinerators for
tongue.burning paper and human shit, the stench of which cooked the taste buds clean off David s
And it was like that for a while, the unexpected comforts pressed against the shit of the deployment, and the war and the danger and what all David had worried over in bed at home the nights leading up to his deployment the nights he pressed himself rough and
–
62 wild into Becca like he thoug those worries seemed to remain only ideas, elsewhere.ht he d never get the chance again –
David fought in the war by designing pamphlets on a computer, brightly colored tri- folds with pictures of smiling Afghani children. His design, in English, promised peace, health, and education for the boys and girls of this country, Coalition Forces and your
thegovernment Pashto words are building in deep agreen, strong Arabic Afghanistan. script overlaying He couldn at lightread bluethe final, background, printed products, but David felt them. He felt the promise in the gentle slopes of each character, the binding together of the letters into unified words. For months, David kept a spreadsheet of the places his pamphlets went, Kabul, Jalalabad, Khost, Ghazni, and he imagined himself a part of something.
Two days after David had flown from North Carolina to Afghanistan, Becca woke up
lilacin the walls bedroom and four she d tall slept windows in her on whole the s life before she married David, a corner room with still dark outside those windows when sheecond dressed floor hers of herelf forfather s her morning Colonial run, home. track It was shorts and her t- shelves of her armoire.shirt from Becca the found Three her Bridges father, Marathon slacks and she d a tie found and a neatly coffee fmug,olded standing in the on the porch and facing up towards the sky.
It s early, Becca whispered. towards Come the sky, look, still her dark father but just said. lightening He held his at coffeethe far mug horizon. high Beccaout in sawfront the of brighthimself tail, the motionless, hurtling head of a comet, a streak of white holding its silence in the night
sky. He asked his daughter, How about it? 63
He It s lowered so bright, the Becca cof said. Is it close?
fee mug to his lips and sipped. He said, Tens of millions of miles.
It looks close, she said.
I don t mind you visiting, doll, Becca s father said, his eyes stillwo fixedwith onus. theBut comet. you
You call your mother and let her know any time you need a day or t can t stay here. This isn t your place anymore.
It caught Becca off guard, the decidedness of what he was saying. Just for a little while, she said. Just at first. right now, right
He shook his head. I told you, alright? You had to marry that boy away. I told you, just give it some time. You made a choice, and now you re going to see it through.David You belongstayed awaydown from there, the at boardwalkyour home. as Your best home, he could. alright? It pissed him off, really, that
lf a world from his wife and his home to sit in an office and have one day offhe d a beenweek sent and hajust around the corner is this boardwalk with pizza and fast food burgers and Co-ed volleyball games in the sand pit at the boardwalk's center. It was part
embarrassment, what pissed him off, that he d been scared for his life before he left, that asswhen designing he got home pamphlets. folks would call him a hero and here he d spent the year sitting on his
He spent his time instead at the gym, twice a day most days. On this day, David got up at 1600, dressed himself in his PT uniform and jogged from the door of his barracks tent down the gravel road past the incinerators, past the boardwalk, and hooked a right through a small opening in a series of Jersey Barriers. He opened the door to the tucked away weight room that was understood to be for the sole use of Special Operations Command
64 units. He kicked off his sneakers and stepped on the scale, the tall, manual contraption like
thefrom one- a doctor s office that stood just inside-fifty- the gym s door. He tipped his weight down from shades ofeighty the way he d he arrived remembered at to the himself one afterseven Boot he d Camp, worked the way his Beccaway to. had He spent was lean, the night after graduation tracing the hard lines of his abdomen, the deep ravines of his hip
flexors.On You re his way so tostrong, the shower, she d said a hand to him towel that laid night over. his sweat-soaked gray shirt, David looked to the sky to track the comet he knew Becca would ask about. Two months gone by
workingand every at time night, they how spoke he could she asked, spend Didhis whole you see days it to underday? the She white loved streak the idea and of he David could catch it any time he liked.
For Becca, who waited up late nights to catch the comet and hold her phone in hopes
David would light it up from where he was, these evenings were something special. She
ith. Becca wisheddidn t work. sometimes It wasn t that the David idea hadof a leftwife her that with she a a child,nd David or at had least grown one onup thew way,
thingssomething she knew.to fill her days with. Not for lack of trying but he hadn t, and so Becca did the
In the mornings, she would run. Not on the old tank t well-preserved woods where she and David had run togetherailsr on Saturdaycut through mornings. the base s She ran on the smooth asphalt of Longstreet, passing up formations of soldiers that ran with heavy feet and the cadences on their lips that David used to fill her home with. They shouted things, the soldiers, when she ran past. How the hell are you going to let a little girl run past you like you’re standing still? Pick up the goddamn pace. They shouted other things,
65 too. If that ain’t the finest piece of ass on Bragg, it sure as hell is the fastest. Sometimes, and this was mostly when she passed soldiers from th . And if you asked her why the hell she wore it, she wore it fore 2nd, that s they doldier whosing wasa little far, louder far away. For t
he onesShe that gardened. sang, she d She slow planted and flowerslisten before first in she front picked of the her house, pace backthen aroundup. back. By the third month after David had gone there was a row of peonies in full bloom running down both sides of the driveway. The man at the nursery in Spring Lake had told her the peonies would come back every spring for years. Becca told him she lived in a house on the base, that they might not be in that house by the time the next spring rolled around, that
they dwould bebloom somewhere whether else she bywas that there time. or Thenot. manHe sold told her her a that watering was alright, can, too. that the flowers
YouDavid get phoned the petals his wife, wet hisand hair they ll still cook wet upfrom in thisthe shoheat, wer he and said. longer now than it had been since high school, up over his ears so that his Detachment Sergeant had taken to calling him Curly.
They say it s goingasked. to be at its brightest next week, she said.
Who says? he
On the news. They say it s as close as one s been in a century.
That s close, he said. He pulled the door of his phone booth closed tight. You pictures.sending mail More my like way any time soon? You know I m looking forward to a couple more
the ones you sent last time, I mean.
I m so lonely, David, she said.
I miss you too, baby, he said. 66
No, she said. I don t mean that. I mean I m alone. I m lonely. I don t know what to do with myself. I m alone here. Don t you see that?
You? he said. You want to talk about how this is hard on you? What do you think it s like for me over here?
She said, I don t know, David. I d know if you told me anything, but you haven t, not one thing. If you told me oneve timething, for I d this. know. Do what you need, go on back to Shady Brook if
He said, I don t ha you want. I have enough on my plate as it is. I can t be bothered by you getting bored, for
Christ sShe sake, called Beck. ahead this time, it being her fourth trip home in as many months and her
seventhweeks yet, since not David around had her left. home The at cold Bragg, was anyhow. still coming So Bec on caand woke wouldn t early settleon the for morning a few of her visit home, early enough to water her peonies against the frost and early enough, even, to catch the comet still bright against the morning sky, it hanging there with the half-faced moon and for a moment she felt these bodies as objects of real weight and perceptible distance, almost. She called her father.
hands around How about a mug today? of Folgers, Becca her asked, phone slipping tucked off safe her be gardentween ingher gloves shoulder and and warming cheek. her
too. You Why know don t she you,asks doll? about heyou? said. We Your show mother her your will se niorbe glad pictures to see and you. she And points the baby, and
says your name. worth of
She said, I ll be up this afternoon, and she packed two bags with a weeks clothes that she hoped she d wear through at least once. The coffee at the bottom of her 67 mug was cold by the time she left but she swallowed it and rinsed the mug, leaving it to dry on a mat while she was away.
In Shady Brook, winter felt close. Her father was always early with the decorations,
Thanksgiving still three weeks out when Becca pulled up the drive but each window of the
five-feethouse s façade across had and a dressed little candle up with on itspine sill, cones and aboveand re thed bows roof urgedof the Christmasporch, the closer.old wreath,
Your father s taken a half day, doll, Becca s mother said, unwrapping her daughter from her arms and bringing her in off the porch. The baby is down for a nap so we ve got a little quiet for the time being. They ll be home soon, though.
They? Becca asked.
Your father s got Debbie and your brother up at the True Value picking out paint, savoryBecca s scent mother of asaid. stew, She thick lifted with the seared lid on herbeef eight and thequart sweet pot, smokinessletting out ofsteam ground and cloves. the
I m afraid it s going to be a bit of a mess this weekend.
Smells good, Becca said.
I ve got something for you, her mother said. We were in the attic last week.
What were you doing up there? Becca asked. boxes, and you know
Just pulling down a few things. And I got to looking through potwhat from I found? the cupboard, You remember its tarnished your Nana s aluminum old moka and slightlpot? Beccy melteda s mother black handlepulled thecradled small in
her hands.Becca She leaned set it onin forthe a counter. better look, Do heryou fingerremember tips rotat it? ing the pot a few degrees left
and right. Should I? she asked. 68
You used to love this. Nana would let you help grind the beans. You d grind them up, her mother said, unscrewing the two halves of the pot, and you d put the grounds just right there. You don t remember?
It s for coffee? Becca asked. pot is older Your than father us, isif youbringing can believe home a it. new Oh, seal Lord for. Can it from you the store, she said. This little
believe it? Do you love it?
I do, Becca said, and she did. Nana, her mother s grandmother, she had died when dinners,Becca was her only whisper-thin four. Becca s white memories beehive, of came the woman, more from her bprokenictures English, and second-hand her pasta stories tha
n her own recollections. But the little pot did stir something in her. You know, Nana would have seen the comet.
Would she? her mother asked. She would have been, I suppose you re right. Six.
What a thing to think. Six.
Becca said, Thank you, mom. I love it. now, hisThe shoulders men in David srolled back, squad his had legs taken thick. notice There of was the talkchange of a in field him. promotion. He was broader The detachment commander placed David in charge of confidence, that he ought to spend less time with ththee junior detachment s soldiers andPT and more told time him, with in his
N.C.O. s.
Staff SergeantThere wasn t Wojciechowski much resentment, who everyone at least callednot among Wookie the N.C and.O. s, Staff Sergeant Sergeant Mayhew,
Rodriguez, they all saw David as– an up-and-comer. He had his– shit together.
It was Wookie who first brought David into the fold.
69 towards Bet the you showers, could Davidgo for stilla drink, breathing Wookie heavy said and as he pushing and D avidwet hairwalked off hisfrom forehead. the gym
Fuck yeah, David said.
How old are you,- Curly? Wookie asked.
I ll be twenty one in February, David said. rest of theWookie guys, laughed. alright? GoodYou should thing come we re over not going and drin to cardk with yo usu. Don tsometime, mention me thisand Rodto the
and Mayhew. You play cards?
Some, David said. I played Hold em with my dad and his buddies when I was in high school sometimes. mention this to any of the other guys, alright? You want to stop off and
Just don t call your wife before we head back to the office? Wookie asked.
She s fine, David said. We talk. ross the table,At Debbieher father s negotiated house, withBecca Shauna sat at theconcerning table between her hot h erdog, mother and whether and brother. or not Ac the little girl would get a marshmallow after dinner.
Yellow, Shauna said.
Debbie If said. you Shauna want your conceded, yellow finger then you dscooping better a slic finishe of yourhot dog hot through dog. Isn t a poolthat right? of ketchup and into her mouth. Debbie smiled at Becca.
Becca s older brother dipped a Hawaiian Roll into his stew and shoved it in his mouth. He asked, How long has Dave been gone now, Beck?
We re more than half way now, she said. It s been about seven months. 70
Aren t they supposed to get a break or something? Debbie asked. Seven months is a long time.
You mean R and R? Becca said. It s suspended right now, on account of the surge.
That s awful, Debbie said.
Her father agreed. Awful.
He s taking it alright, Becca said. I think I m going to turn in early, if that s alright?
It s been a long day.
That s fine, her mother said, and leaned in toward Becca s father. Dear, why don t you help get Becca set up in the den?
The den? Becca said.
Show her the air mattress, dear, her mother said. Oh, wait til you see it. It blows itself upBecca and everything. set her spoon It s into more her comfortable empty bowl. than Debbie you d stared think. at the dinner table. Shauna let a slice of hot dog slip from her mouth down the front of her shirt. She smiled at Becca.
Why can t I sleep in my room? she asked. of the dining table,
It s been converted, Becca s father said. He gripped the end pushed himself back and stood, tall, sure. Debbie, help your mother clear the table. Beck, come on. I ll show you to the den. uncoilingDownstairs and, fixed in to the the den, frame, Becca s the mattress father plugged slowly the took bed form into as the it inflated. wall, its Beccaframe sat,
afternoons.leaned against The the bed arm churned of her andfather s wheezed recliner, as it where inflate hed. often read his paper on Sunday
71
o be heard over the bed. He crouched
That s something, he said, not loud enough t down, feeling the bed inflate with his hands. Really something.
Becca said, What? I can t hear you.
He said, What?
She said, Unplug the damn thing. I can t hear you.
What? Becca stood from the arm of the recliner and stepped around the bed to the cord in
father,the wall. still She crouched, yanked it pulled from thehis handswall, the back bed from groanin the mattressg, and she to said, his knees, I said hisunplug elbows it. Herbent at hard angles. Becca watched his face, his lips pressed inward, his eyebrows folding together. He pressed himself up from his knees.
Why the hell am I sleeping in the den? Why can t I sleep in my room? she asked.
It s Shauna s room, he said.
Shauna s?
Your brother was laid off, Beck, he said. He and Debbie and the baby, they re moving in a while. Just til they re back on their feet.
Just like that? she said. Just like that, you give them my room? You let them live here?
He said, It s not your room, doll. It s my home. And I ve got to provide for my family, alright? He s got a right to come home, okay? That s my job as a father, and that s not up for question.
What about when I needed to come home? she asked.
72
You ve got a home, he said. It s not for me to provide for you any longer. That s his job, David s job. Don t bring me your sour grapes if you don t like the choice I told you not to make. He was a Sergeant now, a Non-Commissioned Officer. They even had a little celebration, non-alcoholic Coors from the dining facility, and the Detachment Sergeant read
the commendation that had accompanied his DA 4 2, for exceptional fidelity and dedication to mission readiness. o their They ranks. took turns punching David square in his stripes, the other N.C.O. s, welcoming him t
Don t fill up on this shit, Wookie said, shaking an empty can of the N.A. Coors the
DetachmentDavid Sergeant had cut his had hair, scored a clean for them.buzz all We ll around, celebrate at the rightrecommendation later on. of the commander, who said sometimes looking the part mattered just as much as acting it. His
pamphlets had gone more places than he could keep count. He d been working on a-bad new program, a series he d been putting together all through the-light. winter. It wasn t a half idea, according A little misinformation, to headquarters, pamphlets who d given informing him the Afghanisgreen of the recent killing or capture of prominent Al-Qaeda members, only the persons in question had been neither killed nor captured. T certain high value targetshere d could be a be little drawn blowback out to makeif it got a statementback stateside refuting, but itthe seemed pamphlets, if
Coalition Forces might just get a solid lead on one of them. It was worth a shot, at least, and a promotion for David.
73
Becca knew about the promotion, of course. She d been happy for him, too. When thatDavid it toldwas hergood that news he howevercouldn t tell it came her what around. he d done to earn it, she didn t press, just said
I m glad you re doing so well, she said.
Two months, babe. That s it, just two more months, he said.
I m excited, she said. a huff, justBecca said hadn t she was worn worried through for the her weeks flowers worth with of the clothes. season She turning left the so nextfast andday, she not in wanted to have them hang on as long as they could. She took the moka pot and kissed her
kissedfather, herwho d mother gotten and up the early baby to replaceand had the a good filter long and hug shine for it her up withbrother a little and steel Debbie wool. before She
despiteshe was their in the protestations. Dodge headed back to North Carolina, too tired, she d said, to stay for lunch,
It was quieter from then on. She went home, of course, for Christmas, but then it was back to Fort Bragg to wait out the winter for her husband to come home. She still ran, a little less, a little more, as the weeks wore on, though she was done with the asphalt now.
She took to the tank trails, which had hardened from the cold. She ran in the afternoons, to avoid the soldiers. She ran in the quiet with only her own heavy breathing to keep time.
In the mornings, she would steam grounds in the moka pot and feel close to her mother, with whom she talked more often now, and less of David and more of herself.
-saling
Thereand was was a fixture a little atextra the moneyflea market coming on inBragg now Boulevard. and she d taken She found an interest a couple in mokayard pots in smaller sizes and she spoke to her father about cleaning them up. She bought paintings of
74 the comet, done, the artist said, entirely through the use of cue tips as a paint brush. She bought an old record player, a Crosley, a red, wooden box.
In the morning she would drink coffee and listen to the record player. She bought old vinyls, mostly, a couple new ones, but mostly she liked the idea that she was somewhere else, in another time, sipping her too-strong coffee with whole milk and sugar and listening to Cole Porter and Doris Day. Some mornings she would just sit and wait for the phone not to ring.
And then one morning it did, very early. It was David. He was frantic.
Calm down, Becca said. Calm down. What s wrong?
Are you alright? he said. Are you okay?
I m fine, she said. What s wrong?
I was worried, he said. I wanted to know you were safe.
There were only a few weeks left in country when David showed up at Wookie s book.room thatThey night. meant He d to make been sureworking the incomingwith the Detachment detachment Commanderwas set to hit on the the ground continuity running.
I ll bet you can t wait to get home, the commander said. Get back to that beautiful wife of yours.
On No, his sir, way David out thesaid. door, I suppose David snaggedI can t. a handful of packets of Crystal Light from a care package on his desk. The lemon and raspberry flavors mixed best with vodka, and this,
Wookie said, was likely the last night they d drink in country. When David knocked on the
75 door, Wookie, Rod, and Mayhew were all inside. There lap and giggling when he came in. was a girl, too, sitting on Mayhew s
How s the office? Wookie asked.
Quiet, David said, tossing the packets of Crystal Light onto the bed next to Rod.
Well done, young man, Rod said.Mayhew.
Who s your friend? David asked
The girl held out her hand for David to shake. Amber, she said.
Private First Class Amber! Mayhew said. And Amber, you like to drink, don t you, girl? Hell,Amber David, was if youa truck showed driver, up Eighty-Eight any later she Mike, would ve and herdowned unit had the beenwhole in bottle. country for about two months now. Mayhew spotted her down at the boardwalk and invited her back
swingingfor cards andfrom drinks. lap to Amberlap, asking didn t each play of cards.the men She for did an driy particularnk, though, insights and she on took the game.turns
When she sat in David s lap, he told himself he was too embarrassed for her to tell her, not to to getmention off. It howfelt nice, little though, it seemed the he attention, and Becca and spoke a woman s lately. bodyBut then this she close was after off hisso long lap and over on the bed with Rod, her fingers gripped high on his thigh as she slurred something into his ear.
on the fold-
Call or fold, Curly, Mayhew said, shuffling his chips up card table they d picked up down at the PX. What s it going to be?
Fold, David said, mucking his cards and running his fingers against the soft stubble of his head. It s getting late.
Yeah? Mayhew said. You ought to stay a while, man. 76
Wookie put his hand on Amber s back, massaging her while she worked her mouth against Rod s neck.
A few more hands, David said. Alright.
ThereDavid played he is, loose,Mayhew raising, said, check-raisingraising his plastic on busted bottle. draws, Drink anything up. to lose his stack and have an excuse to get out of the room. Mayhew, though, was content to let the game linger, and he took small sips of his vodka through a small smile as he checked down and folded to David again and again until Amber was lying flat on her stomach, eyes closed,
on Wookie s bed.
She asleep? Wookie asked.
You tell me, Rod said. her blackWookie shorts worked aside and his hishand fingers up Amber s disappeared leg, cautious inside theat firs girl.t, thenShe let certain. out a moanHe pushed and
Mayhew laughed.
Get her panties off, Rod said. Quit dicking around.
Wookie had Amber s shorts and panties around her knees when David stood.
Stop, Mayhew he laughed said. and Rod rolled Amber onto her back.
I said fucking stop it, David said. Come on guys, you re not seriously going to do this.
Bull shit, we re not, said Mayhew. That little slut has been all over us all night, you included. She s good to go.
77
Wookie pulled her bottoms the rest of the way legs apart. off and started to spread Amber s
David said, I swear the fuck to God, Wookie. You touch her one more time and I ll cave your face in.
David Jesus, stood Rod withsaid. You rehis fists serious,balled, waiting aren t you? against the silence of these three men and the half-naked girl asleep on their bed.
Get her the fuck out of here, Rod said. And you get the fuck out, too, Buck
Sergeant. Wookie shook the girl awake. When she vomited on the floor, Wookie handed the girl her shorts and she staggered out the door, trying to push her legs through her clothes.
She never looked back into the room.
I said get the fuck out, Rod said. river for You life. say You one hear word, Wookie said to me, his face red, and we ll sell you down the
In his own home,me? two days back state-side, David felt out of place. Becca felt far from him in bed. Not only when they made love, though there was a distance in that, something not the same, but also when she slept, how far she was from him. He wanted to hold her, to take her in his arms.
It s too hot, she said. I can t sleep like that. on an endIt was table the in house, the living too. room.The music The paintings that she played of the comet,on that black little recordand white player and she d blue set
78 swirls like a fat- warmed on the stove-topfingered Kindergartner s that made only onearts cup.and crafts project. The little coffee pot she
It sHis second strong, morning she said. at You ll home likehe woke it. up early to make her a fry up some bacon and bring her out before the sun came up so they cup.could He watch thought the he dcomet together. It was nearly gone now, a whisper of what it had been almost a year ago, and he wanted to see if they could get a glimpse before the thing was done.
He meant to make a second cup after he had poured hers into her favorite, a little yellow saucer with a bird painted inside. He took the milk from the fridge and poured it in with the coffee. Putting back the milk, he noticed four bottles of Mountain Dew, four different flavors, in the fridge door, and he laughed. He went to unscrew the moka pot, to put in a fresh set of grounds.
He burnedIn his the haste, fingers David of his had right not hand,taken andinto almost account as how soon hot as thehe pulled aluminum them must ve away, been.
andswearing swell. under He knocked his breath, the moka Christ, pot damn into theit, sinkthe pads and carriedof his fingertips the yellow had saucer begun to to the harden bedroom and sat beside Becca.
She pushed herself up in bed, her back flat against the headboard.
She said, Thank you.
He said, Come on. I thought we d watch the comet. It s still dark.
She took the cup in her hands and sipped the coffee. Good, she said.
79
He ran his fingers under the blankets, against the sheets, up the smooth of her legs.
It felt numb, hollow through his blistered fingers, like the water that was flooding his skin kept him from really feeling her.
They I m ready, walked she through said. the quiet house, ligh opened the door and led her out past the peonies,ts whi offch and had holding just started each other s to bloom, hands. out intoHe the grass, wet beneath their feet, and they looked up into the sky. They wondered where it would go, and when. They wondered whether it would ever come back, and who would see it. They wondered about distance and coffee and phone calls and smallness, flowers and the colors of painted walls, nakedness and children and what they had paid, and he pressed his fingers into the back of her hand until the blisters burst and the water ran down between
their palms and together they watched the comet s last gleaming.
80
I Could Tell You Any Number of Things
I’ve got some bad news. I tried to kill myself. Of course, there’s no way to say that without sounding dramatic. I tried to off myself; to cash it in; to take a permanent break from life; to fall asleep in a bathtub after a handle of vodka and five Oxycontin. Here’s the story on that.
There was this guy, Geno. He wasn’t my brother. He was my friend. We were pretty tight. One particular New Year’s Eve in Florida we shared, in order, a hotel room, a four hundred dollar bar tab, a girl that went back to the room with us, and a toilet bowl. We took turns vomiting and laughing until our stomach’s split open and he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, man. I love you.” And I said, “Hey, man. I love you, too.”
Then we were deployed to Afghanistan, Geno sent out with a TPT from 9th Batallion, me attached to a Joint Task Force. Our paths even crossed once, at a briefing in Khabul. He looked like shit and I told him so, like he hadn’t seen a bed or a shaving kit in over a week. Geno didn’t die out there; that’s another story. I thought he did, though. I heard it through the Joe Network – what we call the rumors that fly around between the enlisted guys – that Geno had been shot and that it didn’t look good. As it turns out, that asshole got himself nicked by a ricochet while training up some Afghani police on an impromptu live fire range out in Paktika Province. Scared the shit out of everybody, but in the end he just had a solid scar on the outside of his right thigh to use on chicks, not that he needed the help.
Geno came home a few months after me, just a luck of the draw thing. He got back, and man, he looked even more like shit. His face was drawn thin, his shoulders slumped. It got so it was hard to be out with him. We’d be at Sharky’s on a Wednesday, quarter pitcher night at the
81 most lenient strip club in Fayetteville, and by lenient here I mean if you tipped enough the girls would let the bouncer know and he’d take a smoke break and you’d get a few minutes of hands- on-pants-off. Used to be Geno would stack dollar bills on the rail of the stage, folding them in half long-ways and stacking ‘em up into a little house complete with door and a pitched roof and we’d laugh when the girls would get down on all fours and shake their ass right above Geno’s little house. But towards the end, he’d just sit there, pounding Coors and staring right past the girls on the poles and I’d catch him looking into the mirrored walls in the dark, neon lit room at his reflection and I could see it on his face, he knew he wasn’t there.
I tried talking to him once.
I said, “Man, you got to get your shit squared away. You got to get your mind right.”
He said, “Fuck you, man.”
I said, “Geno, you’re stateside now. You’re home. Lighten the fuck up.”
He said nothing and kept after his drink.
I met this girl, Kelsey, after the war. Sweet girl. She was young, though, and it never went anywhere.
One day we were having coffee and she said to me, “Do you ever think about how many times you’ve died?”
I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? Past lives or something?”
She said, “No.” She sipped her coffee.
I said, “What then?”
82
She said, “Like when you’re walking down the sidewalk and a car flies past and, you know, if you’d been a foot to your right, splat. Or when you lean out over something, like from a skyscraper or a lighthouse or something, and you feel yourself start to go. Just a few inches one way or another. That’s all there is between life and death.”
I laughed.
She said, “What’s funny?”
I said, “Nothing.”
Maybe it was getting clipped that fucked Geno up. I’ll admit, it was damn scary. That same ricochet catches Geno the inside of his thigh, well, that’s where Geno kept his femoral artery, and then we’ve got ourselves a different story. Except, not really. He’d been home a few weeks when he got stabbed out back of Sharky’s, stabbed to death right outside his car on Blue
Street. I had a message from him still unheard in my voicemail when the First Sergeant called me and the rest of the detachment sergeants into his office at eleven-thirty to break the news.
The police told us that he’d picked a fight with the wrong guy at the club, something about a spilled drink. The news people said it was a tragedy. I saw his face on the TV every day for a week until the next soldier died outside a club, some guy named Haskins who got shot outside of Itz and then Geno was old news. That was the night I listened to the voicemail Geno left.
I was living with a couple guys from the detachment then, Carter and Matthers, guys I’d been over in Afghanistan with. We smoked some salvia Carter had grabbed at the head shop on
Murchison. I sat on the couch the whole time. My body was a factory, millions of workers buzzing around and I was only one of them. And there was the terror, in that state, that when I
83 sobered up I might not be the worker in the driver’s seat, that some other one would be running the show. When I came to, I found Matthers standing at attention on the counter in the kitchen.
He said, “I’m a toaster.”
I said, “You’re a fucking idiot.”
He said, “Ding.”
Matthers had a wisdom tooth out a few weeks back and he’d stuck it out through the pain so we could put together a little stash of Oxycontin, standard operating procedure whenever pain killers are prescribed to a soldier: tough it out so you can share the wealth with your buddies. I asked him if I could take one and he didn’t mind and when he left the room I took the bottle of pills and the handle of vodka that was still half full in the freezer to my room and listened to the voicemail.
Here’s where I have the chance to put words in Geno’s mouth. I’m tempted to. I want you to think he was a good guy. Maybe some sort of apology, “Hey, I know I haven’t been the easiest guy to get along with lately,” or something brave, “I’m thinking of heading up to the reenlistment office. You want to come?” I want his family to read this and say, yep, that’s our
Geno, he was a real hero. But that’s bull shit, and I suspect you know it.
He’d said, “Call me back, faggot. I haven’t heard from you in a week.” He was silent for a while, nine seconds, and then he said, “Just call me, all right?” And then he went to the strip club and got drunk and someone spilled a beer on him and he told them to meet him outside and they did. They never caught the guy.
I thought five would do the trick, with enough vodka and the bath, I’d slip in and that would be that. I didn’t want to overdo it. It was well known that my back was shit from a rough landing during a jump last winter. I had a strong opening, my parachute deployed, nothing
84 dramatic, but patches of dirt on Luzon Drop Zone were known to freeze over in the winter and my feet found one of those patches at eighteen feet per second and the shock shot up my spine and compressed a disc, a real bitch. I thought, hell, five might seem like just an accident, maybe my back flared up and my Mom could pretend I was a hero still, the way people pretended about
Geno.
I let the water run. I figured cold water might get it done faster but a nice warm bath seemed like a much better way to go out. I set the laptop up on the toilet and watched The
Fountain. I washed the pills down with a couple pulls on the handle.
As I watched Hugh Jackman ink his fingers and took a drink from the bottle, I said, “You know what? This is pretty nice. A pretty nice way to go.”
My arm was over the side of tub, still holding the bottle. That’s probably what kept me alive. That, and Carter got suspicious after I disappeared behind the bathroom door for close to three hours and it got him up off the couch. He and Matthers picked me up out of the tub naked and wet and half-coming around. They threw me on the bed. I can’t remember a damn word they said that night, and we don’t talk about it. They beat the shit out of me. I remember that. I felt these fists landing on me like baseballs against my chest, stomach, arms, thighs.
I could tell you they did it to make me throw up. I could tell you they did it to teach me a lesson: this is what happens when you try to kill yourself. I could tell you it was their way of convincing themselves it just wasn’t an option. I could tell you any number of things, really.
The next morning, pulling my tan shirt and ACU blouse over the bruises, I found Carter and Matthers in the kitchen drinking coffee. I thanked them, for the night before, for handling it.
Carter said it was nothing, and Mathers called me a pussy. I never have tried again, never even gave it serious thought, really. Because the fact is, I didn’t want to die. I suspect Geno didn’t,
85 either. He just wanted the violence, the weight of fists on his body, the pulse of the moment that might have been his last, and then the come down after, when he was still alive.
86
Tinseltown
Geno liked going to the theater after he lost his leg in the war. We went over to the
Tinseltown on Catalan Drive when I was on leave this one time, Christmas back in ’09, and he told me this was it, this was his new thing. He’d even started writing film reviews. At first it was this blog thing he did, but I guess a big site liked his sense of humor and he had a lot of hits, a lot of unique visitors, that’s what he called it, and so now they ran his articles and sent him money to go to the movies and talk about them. Of all the fucking things Geno could have been, this was what it ended up as.
It was a few days before Christmas, wet as fuck in Benton, Arkansas, had been that whole year, really. It’s coming down in these fat fucking sheets when I roll over to Geno’s folks’ place at about seven o’clock. Geno’s pop, Jerry, he comes out to meet me in the driveway with an umbrella and the water is sliding off his poncho down to the wet dirt under his feet and if he stood there long enough he would have sunk right into the ground. I remember that. So I get out and Jerry hands me the umbrella and he says, Tina wants us to go down through the basement, so we do.
We go around back of their house, a two story stone front with a one car garage, but the garage has been converted into Geno’s bedroom on account of his injury. There’s a nice deck out back that wasn’t there last time I came by and I tell Jerry it looks good and he says he didn’t build it. He paid the Fuller’s boy who’d bought a truck and started a business this past year. Real nice truck, Jerry said. And then he said, Listen, and then he handed me a folded towel off the dryer and he said, thank you.
87
I followed Jerry upstairs and Tina was waiting at the top of the stairs in an oversized
Razorback sweatshirt and a pair of jeans – not those high-waisted, light blue denim Mom jeans that try to convince you that there’s something left of an hour glass frame above hips and ass ballooned by time and babies; Geno’s mom wore a pair of black denim jeans that hugged her slender thighs and curved lightly around the same tight ass that me and the other guys had given
Geno hell about back in high school – and when I got to the top of the stairs Tina wrapped me up in a great, big hug and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind. She said, Geno’s in his room, and she pointed at the door to the mud room off the living room.
Geno smiled when I opened the door. His hair had gotten longer, shaggy around the ears, and he’d put on a few pounds, too, around the waist. He said, I figured you might not drive out on account of the rain and I said, fuck the rain, how you been, man? He said he was good and that he’d get up to hug me except that one of his legs got blown off and it made standing a bit of a challenge, and I laughed, and he said, You know, that never gets a laugh, and then he said, you ready to go?
*
This is my last story about Geno, and this one isn’t true either. It is true that he was injured. And in some ways, you never stop asking, What if? It’s silly, because a lot of folks are asking what-ifs about the people they lost, about what might have kept them alive. What if my son had been standing on the east side of the barricade? What if my wife had been two trucks back in the convoy? In some ways, we, me and Geno, are lucky, because we got out. We’re alive to ask our own what-ifs, and you can’t ask for much more than that.
88
When we had been in Afghanistan for two months, Geno stepped on a landmine. He won’t admit it, but he’s damn lucky to only be missing a leg in the wake of it. If one of your buddies goes down in a firefight, and don’t take this the wrong way, it’s still a shit day, but it’s easier to walk on over to the chow hall afterwards and fix yourself a tuna salad wrap. Easier, say, than when indig’ gets lucky popping mortars over the wire and your buddy gets scattered over the sidewalk while he’s wiping the sweat off his forehead on the way back to his hooch after his morning lift. He dies, and you’re left there, looking at the pieces of what was your buddy thirty seconds ago, and you can’t even put it together. A week goes by, and you still feel like he’s not really dead. Because there’s no sense to it, no cause and effect. On a target, your buddy is pulling his trigger, he’s in the fight, and if he goes down, well, at least it makes some sense.
So it’s a Tuesday morning in Afghanistan and we’re all a little amped up because word from the top is that the Indian Embassy got bombed over in Kabul and the Pakistani’s, their whole government and all, were in on it. So there’s all this talk, like, hey, we’ll be pushing East into Pakistan before you know it, better not get too comfortable because if we think this shit war is fubared now, well, just wait. So the rumors are going and command comes down and says we need some sort of MWR or something to get our minds right, and they come up with this idea that we’re going to have this football tournament, seven on seven for bragging rights. And then the rumor got started that the winning seven would get an extra weekend in Germany on top of their R-and-R, so of course we got our best seven together and were marking off the field at 0800 as the Colonel is going on about the importance of keeping everything in perspective.
And Geno, he wants to play quarterback because, well, that's Geno. He's a fucking asshole, always has been. He'd be five foot eight in three inch heels and he's got the body of stick insect on a diet, but he thinks he's fucking Joe Montana with the football in his hands. And
89
Williams is about six foot three, two twenty, the kind of guy you hope never goes down on target because somebody has to lug his big ass back home and he's got Geno working the skinny post while the rest of us are going through our stretches. Geno whips the ball back to him, twenty, thirty, forty yards, side arming the damn thing and stepping into it like Doug-Fucking-Flutie and
I remember admiring him, little guy that he was, because it's not like he didn't know he was small, and it's not that he didn't get that it limited him. He just ignored it and went about his business. He didn't make excuses. So Geno throws the ball and Williams catches it, his arms stretched just out to his left. He palms the ball in his right hand and points out with his left for
Geno to dig in and cut up towards the wire. He slings the ball and Geno is cruising, looking back over his left shoulder for the ball and then the dirt under his feet comes up to meet him and his leg rips apart like pulled pork just above the knee and he’s screaming something as we stand there, stunned to silence watching the dust from the explosion float out over the fence. He was on a bird to Balad maybe twenty minutes later but it didn’t matter; his goose was cooked the moment he tripped the pressure plate.
*
On the way over to the theater, I asked Geno why he still used the chair. He didn't have a good reason, really. He said he was fucking over it, the prosthetics, the rehab, the whole fucking thing. He said if someone had told him he could have a perfectly good excuse to sit on his ass for the rest of his life, he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I told him about Sergeant
Meyers, but he didn't let me finish. He said, I don't want to hear that shit. We drove down I-30,
90 my one good headlight cutting through the rain that was still coming down and putting my wipers through their paces. I asked him about the writing thing.
He said, When was the last time you got piss tested? I told him they tested the whole battalion just before the holiday exodus. He said, You want to smoke? I said, no, I'm good. He said, Don't be a bitch. So he pulled out a glass bowl from the chest pocket of his heavy coat and smoothed his wet fingers dry against the legs of his jeans. The left pant leg was sewn shut at the knee. I dialed back the knob for the heat. His fingers moved quick inside a sandwich bag, pinching off a few buds that made my car smell like skunk pussy and mowed grass. He lit the bowl, clear glass with spirals of blue and white working their way around its edges, and inhaled deeply. He exhaled and said, You remember how to use one of these, right? I said, Fuck you. I held the bowl to my mouth and told Geno to torch it for me so I could keep my hand on the wheel.
The first hit was a bad one. It burned like hell and I coughed like we were back in the tenth grade smoking down in the bathroom of Jimmy Costa’s basement, but the truth is I hadn’t smoked since before I enlisted, so I probably pulled a little hard on the bowl and it hit me like the opening shock of a T-10. I lit up a couple more times before I had to wave the damn thing away as Geno kept holding it out for me. I said, Fuck. I said, I’m good.
It’s funny. After we smoked, Geno had a lot more to say. A lot more about everything, without ever saying very much at all. The parking lot was half empty. I thought about pulling into one of the handicapped spots, but I couldn’t see Geno going for it. He wouldn’t want special treatment from me or anyone, so I found a pull-through about six rows up from the door and put the car in park. I asked Geno if he was ready to roll and he looked at me like I was an idiot, so I opened the door and popped out. I had some trouble getting Geno’s chair out of the backseat.
91
Even after I pulled the driver’s seat forward and laid down, it kept catching on the seatbelt, or else the tire was wedged against the seat, and by the time I got the chair unfolded and rolled over to the passenger side I was freshly soaked from the rain and Geno was looking at me with his leg on the ground and he said, God damn, Donnie, you’re lit as a mother fucker. He stood up and backed himself into the chair, and I walked and he rolled up to the ticket kiosk and Charlene
Daniels was chewing gum and sitting on a stool selling tickets behind the glass. She’d dyed her hair red since the last time I’d seen her, maybe like two years back.
She said, Is that you, Donnie? I said, Hey, Charlene, how you been? And she held her hand up and gestured around at the theater in a way that said, how the fuck you think I’ve been,
Donnie? But she shrugged and smiled and asked me how long I’d be in town. I told her through
Christmas, maybe until New Years, depending. She asked me if I wanted to get a drink while I was around. Donnie reached up and knocked on the glass and said, Less flirting, more tickets.
Charlene said, Fuck you, too, Geno, and then to me she said, What are you seeing? I told her we were going to see Avatar, and her fucking cheeks went bright and her eyes got all wide and she told me it was the best movie she’d ever seen, that she snuck in on breaks to watch bits and pieces because it was so good. I said, Geno’s a film critic now. She said, I know, they put his stuff in The Courier. She gave us our tickets and she wrote down her number on the back of my receipt and she wrote her name down, too, like somehow at the end of the night I was going to empty my pockets of all the receipts with girls’ numbers written on the back and not know which one was hers. Geno said she was a real slut, and then he said he wanted some popcorn.
*
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When we were kids, me and Geno, we talked about doing the Army thing. My folks wanted me to keep with school, but it wasn’t for me. Neither were my folks, really. I get on better with them now, but I don’t like them much. Never have, really. And it’s strange, the way some people get all twisted up over it when I say that. I just don’t like them, that’s all. You might not like them either if you knew them.
Geno and I graduated in ’05, and the recruiter worked out all the details for us. We had the same ship date, same everything. He even signed us up for this job where you could only be stationed one place, up in North Carolina, and we’d get to jump out of planes on top of it all.
Before it happened, before the deployment, things were the way they were supposed to be. We snuck into bars. We had keggers in the barracks. We fucked around. We were kids with more money coming in then we knew what to do with and looking back now I still can’t tell you for sure what we did with all of it. Even the hard times were good. Getting smoked in boot camp.
Getting our asses chewed when we reported to 5th Battalion somewhere between hungover and still drunk on our first day with the unit.
And then all the fun went out with Geno’s leg. I’ll admit, it was rough going the rest of the way after that. All Williams talked about for a month after Geno stepped on the landmine was how he knew he was going to die, just knew it. And then he did, shot through the neck while he was trying to pack up his loudspeaker on the way home from one of those show-of-force convoys they had us doing at the time. It chewed us up pretty bad, but the chaplain said the Lord knew Williams was ready and that we could take some comfort in that. It was bull shit, of course. Williams wasn’t ready, wasn’t psychic or anything like that. It was guilt, plain and simple, and he got what he wanted, much good that it did him. For me, I never felt a lick of guilt.
93
Nobody ever heard me talking about dying, except to say that it wasn’t in my marching orders so
I hadn’t planned on it.
Williams died, and a couple of the grunts, too. It was shitty. I came home and people asked about it and that’s what I told them, that it was shitty. And a lot of folks wanted my thoughts on policy, on whether it was worth it, or if we were doing any real good over there, ultimately, anyway. I couldn’t say, still can’t, really. But I can tell them it was shitty. Same goes for the first time I saw Geno when I got back stateside. He was still using the prosthetic then, and a cane, too, to help him get used to it. We got a couple pitchers at the Green Beret Club and he said sometimes he wished the landmine had finished the job and I didn’t admit it to him then and
I never will, but sometimes I wish it had, too, for Geno’s sake.
*
Geno wheels himself over to the butter machine with the bucket of popcorn in his lap and
I’m sucking down this Diet Coke and thinking maybe I should top it off before the movie starts and that I probably ought to get something sweet, too. I scrunch and stretch my toes inside my shoes, feeling the slippage of my wet socks against the soles and I can’t help feeling like my feet just don’t belong in this place. Geno’s got the bucket up under this little butter hose and he was swirling it around pretty expertly, like he was some professional god damn popcorn-butterer, and he looked back over at me and I shake my cup at him and point towards the concession stand and he gives me this nod that says, Move out, soldier. I’m in this line and it’s not fucking moving, not an inch, and then all of a sudden this teenager is staring at me and her mouth is moving and I realize she’s asking me what I want and that I’m completely stoned. I hold the cup out, which I
94 realize is only half empty, but I’m already at the counter so I might as well hand it to her, and I crouch down, knees bent, sitting on my heels, and run my eyes over the candy. The teenager says, Something else? Cookie Dough Bites, I tell the teenager.
Geno’s still over by the butter hose, bucket in his lap, popcorn in his hand disappearing into his mouth. He’s staring down this kid, maybe six, seven years old, over by the arcade, leaned up against the racing chair of Cruisin’ USA that’s been there since Geno and I were kids, and this scrawny little fucker with glasses has his straw shoved into his mouth. He is just slurping away, one long fucking slurp, and he’s staring at Geno, who’s eating popcorn and staring back at him. The kid’s mom comes over and sees Geno, sees that her little shit kid is staring at him, and grabs him by the hand and drags him over to the ticket taker.
I walk over to Geno, who’s still watching the back of this kid’s head as it bobs around the corner to the theater. I got some candy, I say. Good on you, he says. Fuck that kid, I say. Geno doesn’t look at me, just keeps staring at the corner the kid disappeared behind. He says, Little dude fucking gets it. He gets it, that’s all I’m saying. I take a sip of my Diet Coke, pacing myself this time around. I ask Geno if he’s ready to go into the theater, and he starts to spin his wheels.
The ticket taker waves for an attendant when he sees us coming, some forty something asshole with a pencil mustache and a traffic wand who’d been leaning over the counter flirting with the girl who gave me the Cookie Dough Bites. He looked pissed at first, but he picked up a little trot when he saw Geno and the ticket taker handed us each a pair of those 3-D glasses and told us the attendant would show us to our seats. He walked beside Geno down the drip-stained red carpet towards theater seven, swinging his wand at his side. He asked Geno if he’d seen the movie already. A lot of people had come for opening night, he’d said. Geno said he hadn’t seen it yet, but he’d heard good things. Really good, the attendant said. You’ll like it.
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The previews were already going, some Denzel hack-and-slash flick with Mila Kunis breathing heavy in her underwear, and the attendant lit up his wand and gestured towards the wheelchair accessible row off the top of the ramp. Geno is sitting there in his chair, right at the top of the ramp, and there’s a little line grumbling behind us now, with the movie set to roll any minute. Then Geno stands up and hops over to the stairs and rests his weight on the hand rail. He says, Fold that up, meaning the chair, and people aren’t paying attention to the previews anymore, aren’t grumbling, are just either staring at or staring away from us as Geno hops his way up the stairs and I follow behind him, holding the wheelchair tucked up into my armpit because I don’t know how the hell else to get it up to the top row where Geno starts scooting his way to the middle, even scoots by this chubby, middle-aged couple that’re still pawing at each other when Geno slides around them. I set the chair down at the top of the stairs and make my way to the center of the row where Geno is and I see some of the heads starting to turn back to the screen and some of them are still canted back and up towards us, just staring, and I want to yell something at them, but then I’m thinking of the attendant and that I’m not really after an incident, especially not stoned as I am, because, shit, I’m not taking an arrest back to Bragg with me when the holidays are over.
The lights come down over the theater and Geno offers me the bucket of popcorn so I take a handful that spills half onto the floor before I lean back against my seat. I slide on the 3-D glasses and I’m thinking to myself, damn, Geno, you’ve found one hell of a way to make a living, one hell of a life for sure. And we get about three minutes into this movie before I’m looking at this ex-grunt on the big screen, stuck in a wheelchair, and I’m thinking, bull shit if those heads down below us aren’t leaning in to one another and whispering about Geno, about
96 me, about some stupid shit they think they’ve got to say about him being a hero or about how sad it is for Jerry and Tina.
*
My dad was the one who put the heat on me initially about seeing Geno while I was in town. It’s not that I’d decided against it or anything, but Benton isn’t home anymore, and Geno isn’t Geno, and I think about this place the same way I think about going outside the wire, just get in and out, no wasted time, do my job and get back to my hooch in one piece. But I get home and my folks are being nice enough, nice enough after a fourteen hour drive through a whole lot of nothing when I pull into Oak Forest Village. I roll up next to my folks’ trailer and unbuckle my seatbelt and stretch out my legs and just sit there in the car, not wanting to move. But then my dad is coming out, shielding his eyes as he crosses in front of my headlights and he’s calling back into the house, Annie, baby, Donnie’s here, Annie, get that chili heated back up for him, alright? I opened the door and he wraps me in this big hug and he says, Son, good to see you, good to have you home.
My dad has a bowl of chili with me, and mom says she’s still stuffed, they waited to eat until nine but they weren’t sure when I’d roll in so they finally gave in and ate, so she just picked at a corn muffin and watched my dad and me talk about nothing in particular. My dad was in the
Marines, so it’s kind of the same, kind of different, and every story I tell, he’s got to tell me how that would have played out in the scarlet and gold. He takes a big gulp of his Coors and then holds the can out in front of himself, not saying anything, just this goofy grin spreading across his face and after about ten seconds of that I’ve had enough. I say, What? He says, I’ve got an early Christmas present for you. And I’m thinking, shit, I still need to get over to the shopping
97 center in Bryant to get something for my folks but I’m not about to let on about that so I say that
I haven’t wrapped what all I have for them yet. And he says he hasn’t wrapped this either. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his wallet. He opens it up and sets down two tickets on the kitchen table and he says, Woo pig! And I say, bull shit. And he says, bull shit nothing. He says he’s gonna ride back with me on New Year’s Day and we’ll spend a couple nights in
Memphis for the Liberty Bowl and he’s got some buddies who’ll be at the game that can hitch him a ride home so how about it, he wanted to know, what’d I think? And I said, Well, shit, looks like we’re going to Memphis.
My mom washed up the bowls and gave me and my dad each a kiss goodnight on top of our heads before she drifted back to their bedroom. My dad walked over to the fridge and tossed me a beer before grabbing one for himself. We’re sitting in the living room watching It’s a
Wonderful Life on the TV and he starts talking, not even taking his eyes off the screen, just staring away at Jimmy Stewart and Henry Travers but talking to me. He says, You let Geno know you’re in town? I say, Not yet. He says, You ought to. I don’t say anything. He says he saw Geno’s dad, Jerry, by chance at the liquor store a week ago and it sounded like Geno was in a bad way. I nodded and kept on watching the screen. He said, You owe it to him. I look at my dad and I want to say something, ask him what I owe to anyone, really. I want to tell him he’s a real asshole. It wouldn’t be the first time. But he’s just done this nice thing about the tickets and going to Memphis and he’s pissing me off, sure, but he doesn’t deserve that, me calling him an asshole a few days before Christmas, so I say, Alright, yeah, I’ll give Geno a call.
*
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I’d look over every so often to see what Geno made of the movie. For myself, anyway, I was into it. It felt real to me in a way that’s hard to put my finger on really, besides which that blue chick was not bad to look at in the least, which might seem a little weird, but I’m not the one that gave her tits and puppy dog eyes. I’m looking over at Geno, though, because he’s an expert in this shit now, and I don’t want him thinking I’m a dumbass if I don’t think the same about it as him. It’s weird, because he’s laughing all through this thing, but at the wrong moments, and he’s not even watching the movie half the time, just watching everyone else, watching them watch it.
Then the power goes out in the theater, it’s all of a sudden, just when the crippled marine is getting on a chopper and the whole theater goes black. I say, Fuck, man, and pop a Cookie
Dough Bite into my mouth. This sucks, I say. It goes on for like a minute or two, the outage, and you can hear the thunder outside now that it’s quiet and dark. A few people shout for someone to turn the movie back on. A girl screams, but it’s pretend fear, like maybe she’s teasing a friend, or her boyfriend is getting a little handsy in the dark and she wanted to fuck with him, something like that. It lights up in the theater from everyone turning on their phone, everything bathed in this soft blue light and it’s trippy, how the whole room is glowing right then. I look back over at
Geno, and the popcorn isn’t in his lap anymore. He’s holding a pistol in his lap, black with a heavy handle, looks like an HK 45, like it could do some real damage, and he’s got his thumb on the safety and he releases the magazine. It falls into his palm and he gives the bullet on top a little pressure with his thumb and it doesn’t give. He slips the magazine back in, and there’s a little click, but no one hears it, not over the noise. And he’s still watching everyone, bathed in the blue light, watching their faces, watching them stand and stretch and throw popcorn and make out in the dark, glowing theater. Maybe he’s worried, on the defensive, protecting himself, but I
99 imagine he’s thinking about it, about what it would be like if he stood up and started pulling the trigger, about how it could be real for them, all these people sitting in front of us, how everything could change with a sudden, violent act. I couldn’t tell which one of us was thinking about it, him or me, but I knew Geno, knew he wouldn’t, or at least hoped it, and so I sat back in my chair and waited for the generator to kick in. It did. The lights came back on, and Geno slid the gun back into the waist pocket of his coat and didn’t so much as look at me until we got back in the car. The movie came back on, and it ended, and everyone clapped, and Geno sat down in the passenger seat and I folded up his wheelchair and put it in the back.
We were both soaked by the time I put the key in the ignition. The water was coming down from my hair straight into my eyes and my fucking hands are soaked so I can’t dry my face to see and I’m wiping my face with my wet hands just making the whole thing worse and I punch the steering wheel and it honks and I shout, What the fuck, man?
That was it, though. I never got an answer from him on it. I drove him home. He asked me if I was going to call Charlene. I said maybe. He said the movie was horse shit, all of it, top to bottom. He said, Fuck it, man, fuck it. And that was it. I got his chair unfolded and he wheeled himself up the ramp to the front door and I was already in reverse by the time Jerry and Tina came outside.
*
During the night the Saline and the Arkansas had crested on either side of us and by morning we were in four feet of water. The fire department brought row boats to the trailer park.
They loaded me and my mom and dad into one of the boats and two of them were in the water
100 walking alongside the boat, steering us through the slow current. I told them I could get out, that
I could help, and they told me to stay in the boat, that they had the situation in hand. They pulled us past my car, flooded and fucked and I figured if the rain kept up that it would be completely under water by the afternoon.
They pulled us past our neighbors, past a couple trying to load this old basset hound that wanted nothing to do with the water into a rowboat, past water-logged packages with wrapping paper coming off at the edges, past a doe that was caught in the current by the foot of the hill that backed up to Oak Forest and the herd that was standing still, a ways up the hill, looking down at the doe. They pulled us down the street to where the water level dropped off some and loaded us into the bed of a truck with another family, and they had this little girl that was bawling, fists curled, feet stomping, and maybe her folks thought I was annoyed because they gave me this shitty look, but in truth I didn’t mind. She was acting how they all felt, I imagine. How they felt,
I say, because for me, I was already gone. The car was flooded, and I thought, just as well. I’d grab a flight out of Little Rock the day after Christmas and leave this whole damn drowned town to itself. It didn’t need me to be there to watch it get washed away.
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Curriculum Vitae
Bobby Mitchell was born in Shady Grove, Maryland in August of 1986. He served in the
United States Army from 2005 to 2010, during which time he was deployed to Iraq and
Afghanistan in support of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and with Departmental Honors in 2013. He attended the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins
University, where he received an Owens Scholar Fellowship. While at Hopkins, he taught courses in Introduction to Fiction and Poetry 1 & 2, as well as Story in Fiction and Film.
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