Full Frontal Fiction

by Jack Murnighan

  This has been my job for twenty-six years. I drive a limousine. During most of the week I drive rich people who are used to limousines. I drive them from here to there, am never late and never talk unless I’m spoken to. Just before the summer, in mid and late May, early June, I drive high school kids to proms. These kids have never been in a limo before, and have saved up for months to pay for this one magical night. Some will actually call it that: the one magical night. Because of this, they very often have sex in my backseat.

  I may have to drive around Iwo Jima several times, waiting to be sure they’re completely done, and more than done, that they’re at peace, rested, happy. That’s my job, if I had to state it in such a way: to make people happy. I’ll circle around while they finish up. I’ll see our boys’ faces, their right sides, from the back. I’ll watch the names at the base circle by and blur. I’ll try to count the soldiers in the statue, but it’s almost impossible because of the way they’re climbing all over each other. Every time you look at it you think you see another arm, or another boot. All of these must connect to another soldier, you think. (There are seven of them.) It doesn’t bother me to drive as long as they need back there. I’ve driven around the memorial for hours waiting. Sometimes they’ll finish only to start again. How do I know? After twenty-six years, you learn to know. I’ve memorized every fold in every shirt on the boys in the memorial. I know how the helmets fit on the heads. I know how the backpacks rest, and whose hand is where on the flag that they’re so eager to stab into the island. Whose hand is on top.

  When they’re done in the back, I always get them out of the car to see the memorial. They like it when I do this. It makes the night feel more magical, more unique, like everyone else is in a limo but only they get a tour from their driver. Usually she’ll be wearing his jacket, smoking a cigarette, a complete mess as compared to how she looked at the beginning of the evening. He’ll look better than he did when we picked her up, more relaxed, I guess, and will sometimes hand me a couple of bucks, although I don’t know why. “This is my job,” I tell him. Which is not to say that I give it back. “Iwo Jima,” I say, pointing to the memorial in front of us. “One of the Volcanic Islands in the North Pacific, south of Japan. Site of the greatest battle in Marine history.” They’re holding hands, always, this is how it always is, they’re holding hands, and his attention is elsewhere, maybe at other girls walking around, maybe off in space, maybe replaying the events of a few moments ago, but she’s listening, so I talk to her.

  “I’ve never been to Japan,” she says, “but I’d like to go.”

  “Well, it’s amazing. It’s an amazing place. My brother wrote me letters from there, every day.”

  “Every day!”

  “Every day,” I’ll say, and sometimes I’ll feel proud of that. “We returned the island to the Japs in ’68, so I don’t know about since, but it used to be just beautiful. That’s what he told me.”

  He’ll kiss her. He’ll put his hand on her butt, and she’ll smile, as if for me. Am I happy for them? Of course I am. Who do I hate?

  “It’s a really pretty monument,” she’ll say.

  And then we’ll get to talking more. He isn’t paying attention. He doesn’t care. The further away his mind goes—and he may even go for a walk on his own at this point—the closer we get. I’ve said everything I have to say for the evening, I don’t want to say any more than I already have, so I let her talk. I let her tell me about how she’s never been to Japan, but has been to Portugal, which is really pretty. She was there for a semester, because school was becoming too much. Home was. I let her tell me about how she doesn’t usually smoke, she hardly ever smokes, she doesn’t even know why she’s smoking now. I let her tell me how she has a little brother with Down’s syndrome, and he can really be embarrassing sometimes, I’ve never said this to anyone, I’m ashamed to say it out loud, but I’ve been drinking, you know, God, I hope it’s okay that we had a couple of drinks in your car, but, well, it’s just that I love him, but. You know. But. And then I let her tell me about her first boyfriend’s car, and how the alignment was so bad, you’re not going to believe this, but he actually had to hold the wheel upside down to go straight. I let her tell me about where she lost her virginity, it was so long ago, I can’t believe how young I once was, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, you probably think I’m some kind of weirdo. She flicks the ash, and I let her tell me about her father’s girlfriend, and a food called panini, they’re just little sandwiches, and how given the choice she’ll always use a pencil. I let her tell me about her brother’s school, which is a special school in Virginia, and the music she likes to listen to, and how her room is decorated, and her friend Tracy’s night in Atlantic City when she won four hundred dollars but had to give it back when they asked for some ID. I let her tell me about what college she wants to go to, and her mom’s sleeping pills. And after everything she tells me is my implicit response. “It’s okay.” I don’t say it, I don’t say anything, but it’s there, hovering like the dust between the spotlights and the statue. I let her tell me again that she doesn’t usually smoke. “It’s okay.” I really want to learn to drive a motorcycle. Do you know how to drive a motorcycle? “It’s okay.” All the while, she doesn’t even realize that we’ve been walking, that I’ve been leading her around the memorial, around our young boys blown up huge like heroes against the night. The breeze makes her shiver, and I let her tell me about how she’s allergic to peanuts, how if one touches her lips, even touches them, she could die, and I lead her to my older brother’s name. HENRY J. TILLMAN, JR.

  “This is my brother.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right there.”

  “He’s—”

  “My brother.”

  “I’m so—”

  I interrupt her with my nod. I don’t ask her to touch the name. Wouldn’t do that. I don’t tell her about how he died, or what he was like, or any of that. Not even if she asks, which she almost never does.

  “That’s him, anyway,” I say.

  By now he’s usually come back from wherever he went. Sometimes he’s been with us all along, and only mentally absent. Sometimes he won’t let go of her hand. I’ve seen guys go off and take a piss in the bushes. I know that sometimes you have to take a piss after fucking, but still. “We should get going,” he’ll say, and I’ll lead them back to the car. I won’t look at her in the mirror, even if the glass is down. When I drop them off, he usually gives me another tip, this time a bit bigger, maybe a twenty. “It’s my job,” I tell him.

  Then I drive home. The car stays with me. It’s a leasing arrangement. I park it in a garage I rent from my neighbor two doors down. So no one will mess with it. I open my door, which involves four keys, and take off my jacket and pants. My apartment isn’t fit for a king, but I’m not a king, so it works out fine. Two rooms. Kitchen. Bedroom. I make a good living. Since the car is with me, I can pretty much choose my own hours, which is good. I want to get up at noon. I get up at noon. I need some extra cash. Not even need. Want. I get up at the crack of dawn, or before. I’ll use the car like a cab. I’ve got a sign I put on top. The neighbors upstairs are usually fighting, even though it’s already the morning of the next day. Why do they fight so much? I wish they wouldn’t fight so much. Not for me. I can take it. But. I pour myself something strong and carry it with me to my bedroom. I go to the TV, pull the video from my bag, and put it in. I sit there on my bed, in the half darkness of the approaching morning, and I watch it all again on the screen. I watch him kiss her. I watch her kiss him back. There’s a little static, but it’s all pretty clear. I can see almost everything. I watch him kiss her neck, watch her crane it and intimate a moan. I’m in the television’s glow. I watch him touch her breasts, her fumble with his cummerbund, him begin work at what is always an inconvenient dress. I can see out of the rear window the receding rotunda of the Capitol, and the blurred image of someone crossing the street behind us. The person is looking at the car, which me
ans maybe he can see. Who is that? What can he see? I watch her lick her palm, and I don’t know why, but that part always makes me so sad. I rewind and watch it again. I watch it again. I watch it dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. She licks her palm before taking his cock. Stop. Rewind. She licks her palm. Stop. Rewind. She licks her palm. Stop. Rewind. She licks her palm. Stop. Usually that’s as far as I’ll watch. Sometimes I’ll make it to the end. Then I take out the video, label it with date and names, and put it on the shelf with the others, none of which I ever watch after the night itself. Jenny Barnes and Mark Fisher—Friday, May 14, 1999. Beth Baxter and David Jordan—Saturday, May 15, 1999. Mary Robinson and Casey Proctor—Tuesday, May 18, 1999. Gloria Sanders and Patrick Williamson—Thursday, May 20, 1999. Leslie Modell and Ronald Brack—Friday, May 21, 1999. Chase Merrick and Glenn Cross—Saturday, May 22, 1999. I don’t watch the videos to get off. I never touch myself, if that’s what you’re thinking. If that’s what you’re thinking then you haven’t understood a thing.

  Iwo Jima isn’t real. The island is real. The battle is real. The monument is real, too. But it’s based on a staged photograph. Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who shot it, was there when our boys captured the island. There really were those seven marines. They really did grab at the flagpole. But he couldn’t snap the picture in time. So he restaged it. While the smoke still hung behind the soldiers, while their foreheads were still pelleted with sweat, he arranged them for the picture. And who knows how similar it was to what actually happened. He swore it was the same. Exactly as it was, he said, right down to whose hands were where on the flagpole. The picture won Rosenthal the Pulitzer in 1945, and was the model for the memorial, as is how we have come to remember Iwo Jima. Our memories are bound to that image, which isn’t even real.

  If I can go to bed at this point, I go to bed. Usually I can’t. They’re still fighting upstairs, I wish they would stop fighting already, and I’m just not feeling good enough to go to sleep. I’ll make a bowl of tomato soup from the can. Maybe a grilled cheese. I’ll drink another. Morning is coming. Should I start early? I’ll start early. I’ve got a prom at night. Bethesda. Lynn Mitchell and Ross White. Everyone, except for my neighbors upstairs, is asleep, and I can imagine the first rays pushing over the seven marines at the memorial. I can see it. I know how the sun will reveal them, how it will make them silhouettes before illuminating them. It’s cold there and it’s cold here. I’ll go back out to the car with a rag from the cupboard and clean the backseat.

  Alvin Happens Upon the Greatest Line Ever

  BY ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

  THERE MUST BE a God. Now that all those nations that got together—who knows which ones?—I’ve never been any good in Mr. Frank’s geography class—Russia’s one of them and Korea’s one, I think, some Korea or other—now that they’ve launched their nuclear missiles and we’ve launched ours and all the old geezer anchormen are crying at the same time—zap, zap, zap with the remote in my hand and Tom and Peter and Dan are weeping like babies right there before us, one after the other—now that all this end-of-the-world stuff everybody’s been talking about till you just want to go, “Oh, shut up, you people,” now that it’s finally suddenly happening, here I find myself sitting on a couch right beside the hottest girl in school, right here in the church teen center, and nobody else is around but her and me. Like, I’ve got these parents who are probably taking the trash out now, cleaning the toilets or something, determined not to let a thing like this upset their routine. They had to drop me off for the Youths for Jesus meeting half an hour early so I wouldn’t be late no matter how bad things sounded on the TV. And Jennifer Platt is sitting here right next to me, her own parents out of town somewhere, and she walked over from her house, not even knowing how things were going in the world, her being the silliest, hottest, sweetest girl God ever created. And now she sits beside me, me of all people, with my face breaking out and my hair geeking around on my head, and her long daisy-blond hair is rippling down her back and her big blue eyes are wide with terror, turned up to the TV, watching Dan Rather mopping at his eyes with a handkerchief, and she’s making a little choking sound in her throat.

  “Is this, like, for real?” she finally manages to say.

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s all over, Jennifer. Life on planet Earth.”

  “Aren’t there supposed to be horsemen or whatever?” she says.

  “Horsemen?”

  “Like in the Book of Revelation?”

  She’s looking at me now in a way she never has. She’s got nobody else. Her eyes are as blue as the sky that’s about to disappear for a year or so in the nuclear winter and they are still wide with how wonked-out she is. These eyes are turning to me for guidance, but I never have listened very close to the prophecies and stuff that Pastor Lynch has been trying to explain. I’ve been too busy watching Jennifer Platt and thinking I didn’t have a shot in the world at her and praying that I was wrong. God does answer prayer. I can finally testify to that.

  I say, “Nobody ever knew what that horsemen stuff meant. Now it’s clear. God’s brought us together to cleave unto each other.” I like that cleave. I think I’ve absorbed more in this place than I realize.

  Her eyes widen a little bit more. “What are you saying, Alvin?”

  “I’m like the horseman.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “To carry you away.”

  “You can’t run from the bomb, Alvin,” she says, and her voice is faint.

  “I’m talking, like, in metaphors, Jen. Carry you away in the passion that God has put between a man and a woman when they, uh, cleave. Like, aren’t we Adam and Eve here? Only in reverse? Like we’re the last two left? See, God arranged this.”

  She’s getting confused, but I figure that’s okay. She’s not saying “no” right off. I’m plugging into a thing she’s been looking forward to. Maybe not with me. But I’m in the ballpark. I say, “The missiles are going to hit real soon. There’s nowhere else to go. But here we are, you and me. God realizes that neither one of us wants to die a virgin.”

  Jennifer suddenly looks away and clamps down with her teeth on the knuckle of her right forefinger.

  I can hear myself. I’m impressed. Here it is, what’s going on outside, and with the White House about twenty miles from where I’m sitting—Jennifer and I are pretty much at ground zero—and I’m being cool as Harrison Ford or somebody.

  Jennifer stops biting her knuckle and she looks back at me. Her eyes aren’t wide anymore. They’re narrow. She’s suddenly pretty cool herself. I know she’s considering my geekhood. This is the moment when I’m vulnerable. I’m sitting here wishing I knew more about the Bible. I maybe could find just the right passage. Something like, “Give thou to the plain man and thou shalt have riches in heaven.” Which isn’t bad, really. I’m thinking about quoting that and pretending it’s real. But Jennifer lasers her eyes up and down my body and then she looks at the TV.

  Just as she does, Dan Rather stares straight at the camera and says, in a quavery voice, “Speaking simply for this reporter, I’d suggest you go as quickly as you can to someone you love and hold them close.”

  Jennifer’s face swings back to me. I figure Dan has given me a real boost here. This should be it. But Jennifer seems to have simply gone back to checking me out, critically. I know there’s not much time.

  And suddenly I have words. I cry, “Jennifer Platt, the world’s coming to an end! We must have sex!”

  Her face softens. Well, not softens exactly, because it’s still not like soft. But the criticism is gone. The hard eyes are no longer hard. She nods very faintly and she stands up and puts her thumbs in the elastic waistband of her skirt and I can feel my Little Mister Man rising in my pants like a mushroom cloud. I can even set aside the hatred I have for my mother giving such a name as that to my dick and making it stick in my head, like, forever. All that vanishes from me. There is only Jennifer Platt, her skirt down at her ankles now and her legs long and smooth
rising to her panties where her thumbs are now poised in the waistband and the very tip of me, the tip of, yes, Little Mister Man, is throbbing like crazy and I say a quick thank you to God, who is definitely in His heaven.

  And now the panties descend and a sweet golden plume rises from the center of her and it is a color darker than the hair that is cascading around her face now, this gold, it is not the color of daisies but of sunlight on a white wall at the end of the day. A stopping happens inside me. I cannot breathe from the beauty of it. The beauty of the hair of her loins and also the beauty of sunlight on a wall.

  She is moving, lying down on the other end of the couch, and she opens her legs and I am still struggling to draw a breath, and something else is going on inside me. The sunlight will not show itself in this world like Jennifer Platt’s pubic hair ever again, not with anyone alive to see it. Jennifer’s legs are open and I look at this secret place on her body and it is as pretty as her face, it is the pink of my mother’s azaleas and it is pouting like a spoiled child and I love this soft place as it draws me to it, asks me to enter, and it whispers to me now of all that there is to destroy in this world, my mother’s flowers and her hands that tend them and the spoiled children and the good children, and I cannot move, I feel the warmth of my tears and I am afraid.