As You Were

by David Tromblay

  The mold is entered into everyone’s medical record, so they have you take hold of this tube every now and again and blow and blow and blow and blow until it seems you’ll black out. But you’re no big bad wolf, and every year after Iraq, another thirty seconds gets added onto your runtime. The chief says you’re getting slow, getting old. But then it’s a medical retirement. And the all-for-one-and-one-for-all brotherhood is gone.

  The VA asks about nonprescription drug use, and you flash back to finding mushrooms growing out of the top of some cow shit. Your partner says he thinks those are the magical kind, so you call Dispatch and tell them to go to a private channel and ask them to look it up on the internet, and, sure as shit, they are the magical kind.

  The next thing you know, the two of you are shoveling the cow patties into the bed of the six-pack pickup truck—on the watch commander’s orders—to dispose of them properly.

  When you pull into Camp Garcia, the watch commander has mustered everyone who’s marooned on the island with you for the next two weeks. He’s fully acclimated to island life, as illustrated by his Speedo, combat flip-flops, pistol belt, and Oakleys.

  He tells everyone they’re looking at hallucinogenic mushrooms. This is his impromptu drug identification course. Then he punctuates this by saying if one of us tries them, we all have to try them. Then he hollers for someone to go get the pizza pan, and he pulls the mushrooms off the patties with his Gerber one by one.

  For some reason, your mind drifts back to winding your way barefoot through the neighboring farmer’s field wearing nothing but a pair of tighty-whities and the bell Mom tied around your back and between your shoulder blades, because you have a habit of walking like a cat and sneaking off to wherever you so please, but, luckily, you were herded by the farmer’s Australian Cattle Dog, Rocky. Rocky is growling at you, and Cici is growling at Rocky for growling at you. Cici doesn’t like the farmer’s son, so he can’t get near you, let alone bring you back to the trailer, so he sets a can of Coke down on a tree stump and then goes to find your mom, who sees you sitting on a stump, sipping a Coke, kicking at Rocky. She asks, “What’re you doing?”

  “Dumb dog won’t let me go see moo-cows!”

  The farmer’s kid turns Mom’s attention toward the bull they brought in to breed with the heifers, standing less than fifty feet away.

  DRIVE ON

  YOU YANK THE WHEEL, FORCING the front end of the vehicle to lunge from one lane into the next each time you travel beneath a bridge or underpass. Seeing someone standing atop an overpass quickens your pulse, dampens your skin, clamps fingers around your windpipe. Even when it’s only a state trooper running radar. That’s when you flashback to haji holding a sat phone, calling in your convoy’s location and direction of travel. You blink your eyes a bunch, focusing on something new each time your eyelids flash open in order to ground yourself in the here and now, but you still call out objects along the route, “Stalled vehicle, left shoulder,” and swerve to the far right. Rumble strips remind you of your place and time right up until a pile of trash bags left by those who adopted this stretch of highway thrusts your mind back into evasive maneuvers. Cones squeeze three lanes down to one. Traffic slows to a crawl, causing you to clench the steering wheel so tight your knuckles turn white and pop as violently as the last handful of corn kernels at the bottom of the microwave bag while the rest blacken and burn.

  But you’ll buckle up and do it again the next day, every day, Monday through Friday. Your mind drifts while behind the wheel, wondering whether the ninety-day bottle of blood pressure pills the VA prescribed could slow your pulse enough for it to cease until an oncoming car issues out of the ether, which is enough to jumpstart your heart and force your head out of your ass. So you rattle your head, hoping to force blood back between your ears, but all you manage to do is send your glasses sliding to the tip of your nose.

  Put your hands at ten and two then slide them down to five and seven because of the thing about the airbags breaking wrists, etc. Try to look professional, at least, for when the oncoming traffic gets close enough to see you behind the wheel.

  Keep in mind the weather is overcast, meaning: everything is grayscale. Neither the sun, sky, or clouds will reflect in the glass and turn the windshields opaque.

  This other driver, her hands are at one and eleven. She’s hunched forward in her seat, peering over the top of the wheel with her eyes fixed on the road ahead of her. When you see those big square glasses with the rounded corners and that pixie-cut red hair glittering with little specks of salt and pepper, like you haven’t in some ten-odd years, you forget to allow breath into your chest. Her gaze doesn’t leave the road. She looks petrified. It’s the expression Mom has plastered on her face every time she needs to get somewhere in a hurry, especially when one of her kids needs her.

  Another time, while merging from the highway onto the freeway behind a big rig, someone in the slow lane doesn’t see you or the truck until it’s too late and sideswipes the car next to them in the passing lane, sending them into the concrete divider. It’s a safe bet the slow driver didn’t see them either. You hear warm rubber squeal against oily tarmac along with an implosive crunch of collapsing aluminum and steel. You cast your eyes to your driver’s side mirror in time to see a sedan ricochet, overcorrect, come barreling toward you.

  The car comes so close it disappears from the rearview mirror before it bends the guardrail right behind your rear quarter panel and in full view of the passenger side mirror.

  It lifts off the freeway.

  The grille, windshield, bumper cover all explode into the air, into fragments, shards, shrapnel. The fenders bend and crease. The hood releases and raises, blocks the view of those inside, so you can’t see their faces as you speed away from the raining debris that resembled an automobile a few seconds earlier.

  You floor it, push through, and don’t let up until the big rig disappears from the rearview mirror—almost missing your exit in doing so.

  You complete the stop at the next lab robotically, replete with beeps and boops courtesy of your scanner, and take a shortcut through Grandma Audrey’s old neighborhood on the way to the next clinic before heading back downtown to the main testing lab at the hospital. Her house is hidden behind a row of saplings planted by the new owners right after they moved in, right after Grandpa Bub passed—less than a year after Grandma died of a stroke while withering away from cancer. The trees are towering now, taller than the highest peak of the roof. The front stoop has fallen away from the foundation and sunk down into the dirt. The garage leans against the neighbor’s now. Grandma’s rose bushes no longer perforate the front yard from the neighbor’s. Instead, a six-foot-tall trellis stands in their place. Children play beneath the boughs of the tree where you once danced a jig at the end of an enormous dish towel, before it ripped and tore and plopped you down into the dirt. The rest of the house hides behind the neighbor’s hedges, no matter how slow you ease through the intersection.

  You don’t want to go straight home after you punch out. It’s been the kind of day when you’ll lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling until the next morning, when it’s time to go do it all again. So you take the scenic route and grab groceries for the next week before you head to where the pets go and grab Bentley a bag of food. Though that doesn’t turn out to be as mindless and distracting as you’d hoped.

  You stop dead in your tracks at the edge of the parking lot. This place sends you back to high school, when Mom worked here—washing dogs and expressing anal glands, trimming toenails, beautifying a goat or two. You’d take the city bus up here after school and wait for her shift to end, so you didn’t have to take the school bus home.

  It’s been more than ten years since her cremation, yet here she sits, beneath the bus stop with her back scooted up against the wall. Every memory, every photograph, every conversation you had with her flips through your mind the way a possessed slide projector does, disorienting the unsuspecting protagonists in a horror movie
. It’s as if every image you have of her is trying to show itself to you at the same time to make sure you understand this is Mom.

  She’s dressed like her.

  Her hair is cut like her.

  Her voice sounds like her.

  But she hasn’t aged a day.

  You can’t put what she’s saying in quotation marks because of the passing cars and the excitable conversations of families with their new puppies and their yappy little kick-me dogs. But it’s her voice. You know her laugh, and you’ve heard her grumble and yell and mutter and slur enough to know her voice when you hear it. And you are hearing it.

  When you dare walk closer, you see she’s not well. She’s talking to herself about the nonsensical. You’ve carried Mom home from the bar and heard her talk like this more than once. She’s laughing to herself and looking toward the sky and looking at things passing on the sidewalk that no one but she can see. You laugh at yourself a little, too, and chalk it up to how you’ve stumbled upon a person affected with autism, maybe, or someone who’s away from their group home and is in sensory overload, or someone who has simply missed their meds. But when the automatic doors part, she makes a guttural utterance and you look her way in time to catch her in a moment of clarity.

  She stares into your eyes, looks at you the way Mom did when she knew you did something wrong, she just didn’t know what yet. But she’d figure it out soon enough.

  People have to walk around you so they can get inside.

  She keeps giving you this look and giving you this look, and you know this look, and you know those eyes. You can close your eyes and see her face any time you want, but she’s sitting on the ground right in front of you, here and now, waiting for the bus.

  The same bus you took to come and see her.

  When that thought enters your mind, she shoots you another look, the one that tells you she knows you’re up to something and you better stop it—right now. There’s nothing to do but hang your head, shove your hands into your pockets, and walk through the glass doors.

  You don’t know what else to do but let this marinate.

  In your right pocket, you feel a set of car keys. In your left pocket, you feel the pills you should have taken three hours ago with the lunch you never got to eat.

  THE LAST DANCE

  YOU KNOW THE DANCE PEOPLE do when they’re trying to pass one another, the left-right-left-right-right-left dance, when the two of you are trying to figure out who’s leading and who’s following?

  The last time you do that dance with Grandma Audrey is right before Easter dinner, during the spring of the sixth grade. You’re in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen when she lambastes you and yells, “Get out of my goddamn way!”

  You don’t blink. You look down. You have to now if you mean to look her in the eyes. “Why are you hitting me?” you say, shaking your head. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  Grandma’s eyes flash, and her ears flush, and she favors her hand. You let her know you’ve taken note of the last little bit, nodding toward her hand, saying, “It hurts you more than it hurts me.”

  The only sound in the room while you walk out to the kitchen is Auntie Harriet’s sobbing on the far side of the dining room table. Through tears, you hear Auntie say, “Leave him alone, Auddie, he’s numb. He’s numb now.”

  Grandma Audrey grabs hold of the metal-edged yardstick she keeps tucked between the bookcase and the wall that separates the kitchen and the dining room. Seeing this, you walk to the back of the kitchen, out of sight for everyone sitting silently in the dining room except Auntie Harriet, who continues to cry.

  Grandma follows on your heels but freezes in her tracks when she watches you push the button on the microwave for a ten-minute-long defrost cycle.

  You don’t say anything. You fold your arms across your chest and watch her pace.

  There’s a box she wears on a belt that’s attached to a pair of electrodes that monitor her heart. The box is sensitive to microwaves, and Grandma has it in her head if she gets too close the box will stop working, and so will her heart. No one corrects her misunderstanding.

  This is how you put Grandma in time out, give her time to think about what she’s done.

  This is how you parent.

  SUICIDE CHECKERS

  FAMILY IS MUCH EASIER TO keep straight if you remember it this way:

  Grandma Audrey’s and Auntie Harriet’s first husbands were both named Gene.

  Their second husbands were brothers: Grandpa Bub and Uncle Harold.

  Grandpa Bullshit is twelve years older than Grandma Lynn.

  Grandma Lynn is twelve years older than Dad.

  Dad is twelve years older than Mom.

  Mom is twelve years older than Debbie.

  Sam is three years and two months older than you.

  You are three years and two months older than your little sister.

  Your great-uncle’s twin was stillborn.

  Your uncle’s twin was stillborn.

  Your twin was stillborn.

  Your father is five when he gets hit by a car.

  Your nephew is ten when he and his bike bounce off the windshield of a moving automobile, leaving him thinking he’s in trouble for hurting the car.

  You are fifteen when a ’77 Caprice Classic sends you spinning headfirst into a giant concrete planter, leaving you with yet another concussion, along with a cracked sinus cavity, seventeen breaks on your lower leg between the knee and ankle, and a shattered wrist.

  Dad married three times.

  Mom’s fourth husband finds her dead on the bathroom floor.

  Maybe you’ll beat them both with a fifth time to the altar. It’s a game of numbers, like checkers—three rows of four, twelve in total. Dad teaches you how to play. He doesn’t sit you down and read you the rules. He can’t. He can’t even read your birthday cards aloud without embarrassing himself, so he teaches you the same way he teaches every other lesson learned: he waits until you fuck something up or it looks like you’re going to beat him at his own game.

  It’s his game, after all.

  He keeps the black and red checkerboard folded up inside the drawer of the end table between the two recliners, along with the two dozen checkers, discs that are sometimes called men, black and white men.

  Dad is always black, he always goes first. You’re always white, you always go last. Along with those men in the drawer is a loaded pistol, a Mexican switchblade, a handful of guitar picks, and about a half-dozen condoms that look older than you. He even goes so far as to tell you which one he almost used the night he first slept with Mom. You cut him off, telling him you don’t want to know, it’s something a child should never know. But he must have worn one, after all. He calls you Ripped Condom—like it’s your Indian name.

  So, checkers. Dad sets up the bifold cardboard checkerboard on a TV tray so that there is a black square on the bottom left-hand corner for the both of you. He puts his black men on his black squares, and you set the white men on your black squares. He says, “You can move the men forward one space diagonally, in either direction, to an open black square, but the red spaces are off-limits. It’s like the reservation: no place for white guys or niggers. A man can only move forward and can’t land on a square that’s already taken.”

  When you jump a guy, you get to take him off the board. This continues until all your guys are gone, and Dad wins.

  He explains this as he goes along, saying things like, “Nope, put it back.”

  He wins every time.

  The rules say you should switch men after every game, but Dad won’t ever touch the white checkers unless he’s stacking them up along his side of the board—the white men he’s taken out. The rules also state if you’ve made every move you can, and you can’t move anymore, if the pieces are locked or blocked, then you’ve won.

  This is called Suicide Checkers.

  Telling Dad you’ve won is just asking for a beating. It’s suicide.

  If you do win,
then you’ve obviously cheated, and Dad doesn’t want to play anymore.

  He’ll put the men and the board back in the drawer without saying a word, other than, “Get me a beer.” And sometimes, while you’re busy, he’ll grab a flat pick out of the drawer and strum his guitar for a song or two. Sometimes he’ll play “Dueling Banjos,” all by himself, without missing a note. He’ll fade from that song right into some Flamenco guitar music. You’ll sit on the footstool and watch, mesmerized by this man and the sounds coming from the hollow body of his 1955 Dove acoustic guitar.

  HOMECOMING

  “THE DAY YOU CAN TAKE me is the day you can move out,” Dad lets go with a grunt, hoisting himself up out of the driver’s seat.

  You say nothing.

  You quietly collect your bags out of the back seat and listen to his cowboy boots clomping against the pavement on their way toward the back door of his concrete cube of a house. You make sure to move slow enough for his footfalls to turn into a fading echo, and you wait for him to say something about molasses in January, but you’re met by silence. The tacet ends when the storm door spring screams, letting you know he’s standing in the darkened foyer fumbling with his keys.

  You take your time gathering the handles of the bags in your hands. You don’t dare enter until the deadbolt tumbles open. History tells you how he’ll wind up backhanding you if he’s delayed in any way—for blocking his light, most likely. Not to mention, it’s warm out, and Dad is a stout, sweaty man who smells of stale cigarette smoke, cheap beer, baby powder, and eye-stinging cologne that comes in a ridiculous- looking decanter, along with a subtle hint of the piss he couldn’t be bothered to shake off. The back porch hallway is lined with plastic Kmart bags filled with crushed beer cans that he vows to take to the recycling center. Stale beer pools at the bottom of each bag and trickles down onto the floor, causing the whole mess to cling to the tile floor in one solid, fused mass, as if a mush-mouthed Moses worked as a barback.