Mitzi's Marine

by Rogenna Brewer

  “What about a Pez dispenser?” she muttered under her breath.

  He gave her a dirty look before leaning back against the headrest and closing his eyes.

  She already knew how this weekend was going to end. He’d insist she stop by a liquor store on the way to the motel, where he’d drink a fifth of something until he passed out. She’d alternate between staring at the walls and pacing the floor—so helpless and out of her mind with worry that she couldn’t wait to get him back to the hospital.

  She’d hoped, this being their last weekend together for a while, things would be different.

  The first spattering of rain fell as she entered the park. Mitzi flicked on the headlights and windshield wipers and drove through the military reservation. “I guess we’ll have to skip the picnic after all.”

  He muttered something that sounded a lot like “I told you so,” and she had to bite her tongue.

  “I need to make a quick stop first.” Pulling off to the side of the road, she opened the glove compartment and dug out the park map so she could find her brother’s numbered plot. “The headstones are supposed to be up in his section now.”

  “Let’s just go. You’re not going to be able to see anything anyway.” He was right, of course. The rain was coming down harder now. The uneven beat against the car turned into a steady drum, broken only by the swish of the wipers.

  The windows started to fog and she turned on the defroster. Leaning across him to peer out his window, she pointed to a white marble headstone in a sea of white marble headstones. “That’s it there, I think. And right next to him is Luke—”

  She turned to find Bruce staring at her. Medication had softened the tense lines of his face. He almost looked like himself. She really didn’t begrudge him the relief of pain pills, and she traced the lines that lingered. First with her fingertips, and then with kisses.

  He kissed her back, softly.

  She couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t fallen into a drug-induced sleep during foreplay. If he managed to stay awake long enough for her to even get him aroused, he’d simply excuse himself and go to the bathroom.

  As if she didn’t know what was going on in there.

  Careful of his stump, she moved across his lap. Though he rarely allowed her a glimpse of it, she could feel his tightly wrapped stump through his sweatpants. She’d never seen it without the white surgical bandage or the beige compression bandage he’d graduated to once his stump had healed. Though she knew he had to wrap it daily, sometimes several times a day.

  Once she straddled him completely, her open thighs communicating her need, she felt him tense.

  He turned his head to break the kiss.

  “Sorry, did I hurt you?”

  “A cemetery? Is this how you get your kicks these days?”

  That was just plain mean. “An airplane hangar ring any bells?” Given a minute, she could have come up with a dozen inappropriate places they’d had sex.

  “Mitz,” he insisted, “please, get off me. We need to talk.”

  Nothing good ever started with Please, get off me. She sank back in her seat. “Okay.”

  “I’m not going home with you.”

  She had orders to their hometown recruiting station in Englewood. Following recruiter school she’d be headed there. Meanwhile, he was supposed to put in for a medical discharge. And once his hospital stay was up he’d be free to return home with her.

  Where they’d have some semblance of normalcy until her enlistment was up. They’d get married. Buy a house.

  Have the kind of life she’d dreamed of having with him, but never thought possible. “We talked about—”

  “Recovery for an above-the-knee amputee takes twelve to fifteen months of intensive therapy. I’ve got the best chance of rehabilitation if I stay here.”

  “You know I want whatever’s best for you.”

  “It’s not that,” he said, looking at her with an intensity she found hard to read. “A record number of amputees are returning to duty.”

  He meant to combat. She stared past him out the window at her brother’s grave. “How long have you felt this way?” She knew how he felt about being a Marine. She’d just thought that once he was discharged things would be different.

  “For a while,” he admitted.

  “Why wait until now to tell me?”

  She saw the answer in his eyes—because he wanted her to accept recruiting duty. Wanted to send her home without him.

  “I think we should postpone the wedding,” he said, ignoring her question. “For…a while.”

  “Postpone? We’re in a permanent holding pattern already.”

  “If you don’t want to wait for me, fine.”

  Fine? She sucked in her breath. “I’ve waited my whole life for you, Calhoun. The white dress… The walk down the aisle… All I dream about is dancing with you at our wedding.”

  “I will walk again.”

  She choked back a laugh. “It feels like you’re walking now. Away from me.”

  His jaw tightened. He looked out his window. “You knew what you were getting into when I proposed.”

  Did she? She’d fallen in love with a charming boy who was a competitive basketball player. She loved the man who was courageous and committed. But where did his dedication to the Corps end and his devotion to her begin?

  Everything had changed when Freddie was killed.

  “I need a break from all of this.” He swept his hand to encompass everything from her brother’s grave to the bridal magazine. He should have just pointed at her.

  “Yeah,” she agreed with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “I need one, too.”

  “Just take me back to the hospital,” he said, digging out his pill bottle.

  If it hadn’t been raining, her ring finger wouldn’t have been swollen, and she could have twisted it off and thrown it at him. Instead Mitzi had to keep it together while she turned the car around and drove back to Balboa.

  By the time she’d parked the car and gone to the passenger side to help him, he had his crutches and was out the door.

  She grabbed some magazines to help keep her dry and his overnight bag. Did he expect her to follow with it? Or keep it? She stood in the rain watching him go. Planting his crutches, swinging his weight forward, planting his single foot. His sweats were getting wet from the rain.

  This wasn’t how their relationship was supposed to end.

  She missed whatever elevator he’d taken to his ward. Barely slowing for the “Caution: wet floor” signs, she reached his room right behind him. Half the beds were empty because it was the weekend. A couple other guys she’d come to know over the past three months were playing cards and one was napping.

  He was halfway to his bed when his crutch skidded in a puddle of his own making. “Let me help—”

  “Will you leave me alone!” he yelled, loud enough to make his roommates look up. He twisted around and she dropped the wet magazines trying to get out of his way. “What don’t you get?”

  “Any of it, I guess.” Wiping away her running mascara, she stood in the middle of the room. Wet hair. Wet dress. “I get that you’re hurting right now, Calhoun. But I’m hurting, too, and you don’t get to take it out on me.” She wasn’t even trying to hide her tears. And he didn’t look away. “You don’t have anything to prove, not to me.”

  She dumped his overnight bag on top of the scattered magazines. Prescription pill bottles and those little liquor bottles he tried to hide went rolling across the floor. “But you’d better clean yourself up and get your act together. Then get your ass home, Marine. Because I am not waiting for you forever.”

  She left his hospital room in tears.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BRUCE WALKED INTO WORK the following morning—with two Egg McMuffins and two cups of McDonald’s coffee—to find a black box on his desk. He set down the tray and picked it up.

  “He’d want you to have it,” Mitzi said, sneaking up on him from the alcove. Like him, she wa
s wearing her combat utilities today.

  Bruce lifted the lid. “Thank you,” he said past the lump in his throat.

  “He loved you like a brother.” She crossed the room to take his left hand in hers. Turning his wrist, she unbuckled his dive watch and replaced it with her brother’s.

  “Ditto.” There was something so intimate about the act of her changing out his watch that he simply surrendered to it.

  “Don’t make this any harder than it is, okay?”

  “Okay.” Distracted by her bent head and the whiff of whatever the fragrance was in her hair, he never even saw it coming.

  She placed a small black velvet box in the palm of his upturned hand. “I should have given this back to you sooner. I’m sorry.”

  Sorry it was over?

  Or sorry she hadn’t given it back to him sooner?

  AFTER THAT QUICK BITE at his desk—and he didn’t mean the Egg McMuffins he’d thrown away—they’d gone their separate ways for most of the morning.

  Bruce had stopped by the high school to meet with the principal and secure his invitation to Career Day. He might not want to be here, and Mitzi definitely didn’t want him here, but he still had a job to do.

  Englewood High School was a public school, and as long as he didn’t do anything to piss off the principal or the school board, no one could bar him from recruiting there. Least of all his kid brother.

  For a late lunch Bruce found himself headed down the street toward the Broadway Bar & Bowl. There were no bowlers, so the lanes were dark.

  Behind the counter a gum-popping matron with big hair and horn-rimmed glasses—a throwback to the place’s fifties theme—sprayed down rental shoes with Lysol.

  A few regulars sat at the bar inside an even dimmer lounge, where the smell of stale beer and nuts refused to be overpowered by the smell of disinfectant. Big screens mounted in every corner played highlights from a recent Nuggets game.

  Peanut shells crunched beneath Bruce’s boots as he took a seat at the bar. “Diet Coke and a cheeseburger.”

  The bartender—and also owner—of the Broadway Bar & Bowl whirled around with a wide grin on his face. “Well, look what the wind blew in! I was thinking I might see you sometime today, Calhoun. My daughter with you?” The senior—and now only—Fred Zahn checked behind Bruce for Mitzi.

  “Just me.”

  Fred reached across the bar and slapped Bruce on the shoulder several times for good measure. “Let me get you something stronger than a soft drink.”

  “A little early in the day for me,” Bruce admitted, sheepishly.

  “Diet Coke it is, then,” Fred said, drawing the soda from the tap. He added a cherry, like when Bruce was a kid, then set the glass on a coaster in front of him. “Two blue plate specials,” he shouted to the cook in back. “How the hell are you, son?”

  “Good. Better,” he amended, taking a sip of his drink. The last time Bruce had seen Fred Zahn was after Freddie’s funeral while Bruce was still in the hospital.

  Fred nodded in understanding. “Thought I’d run into you here after the game. Saw you across the way.”

  “Yeah, got there late. Wound up in the visitor bleachers.” Bruce played with the cherry in his drink, not wanting to go into detail about the rest of his evening.

  “Ahh. Watching your brother last night—” he shook his head “—brought back a lot of memories.”

  Bruce could look in any direction and see pictures on the wall of Freddie and him with a basketball.

  For twenty years the Zahn family had lived next door to the Calhouns. There was a lot of history there that made it impossible for him to just walk away from Mitzi, even if he wanted to. And especially when he didn’t.

  Behind the bar, portraits of Freddie and Mitzi in their respective dress uniforms hung side by side. A black ribbon draped the corner of Freddie’s picture.

  Bruce found himself looking up at the latest addition.

  Fred glanced over his shoulder. “Mitzi’s doing. Said we needed some kind of memorial. Last night, too.”

  Bruce touched the watch on his wrist, glad she still thought enough of him to give him a memento of her brother. Especially since it was really over between them.

  “They should’ve retired your number along with his,” Fred said, following Bruce’s silence.

  “Nah.” Bruce shook his head. He’d rather see his old number in action. Let his brother get some mileage out of it. Freddie would have felt the same way. If he’d had a brother. The day they’d enlisted they’d hung their state championship jerseys in back by the pool tables and had their own unofficial number-retiring ceremony.

  “Come bowl a few frames with me,” Fred invited, throwing back the bar gate. “They’ll bring us our food.”

  “I haven’t bowled in a while,” Bruce hedged.

  A while meaning post amputation.

  “It’s like riding a bicycle.”

  “Forgetting how is not what I’m worried about.”

  “I was thinking more like hard as hell at first. But you’ll get the hang of it after a few bumps and bruises.”

  He’d gotten the hang of a stationary bicycle through trial and error, and now he worked out on one religiously. Mountain biking was on his to-do list come spring. He was not going to let being a LAK hold him back.

  Why not bowling? Why not now?

  The alley was empty.

  Fred grabbed his bowling bag from an unlocked locker. Mitzi’s dad was fit and trim and still looked like the cop he’d once been. “Audrey,” he called out, “lane seven. Size thirteens,” he said, recalling Bruce’s exact shoe size. “Make that a new box of right-handed bowling shoes. Let’s try a left-handed pair, too.”

  Bruce went looking for a ball with just the right fit and feel to it. Eventually he settled on a neon-green one.

  “The kids like the bright colors,” Fred apologized. “And don’t get me started on the light shows.”

  “I don’t mind,” Bruce said, carrying the bright ball over to lane seven.

  “Kids used to stop by for French fries and a game or two after school. Now they hurry home to video bowl on their Wii systems. I had to take out two pool tables to update the game room with oversize driving and dancing games just to get them in the door. And don’t get me started on the competition out there with those fast food chains popping up all over the place. Did you see the new Smashburger on the corner?”

  “You want the pair of rentals, too?” Audrey handed over a stack of shoe boxes with the rentals on top.

  “May as well,” Fred said.

  Bruce was already unlacing his boots.

  “Rentals are universal,” Fred explained. “Sliders on both shoes. But we keep plenty of new shoes and balls in stock this time of year.”

  Bruce seemed to recall that information filed in the back of his brain somewhere. He’d hung out here with Freddie and Mitzi a lot as a kid.

  “Right-handed bowling shoes have a gripper on the right and a slider on the left. You’re right-handed, but we could try the left-handed shoes. See how that works with your leg.”

  By the end of their first game Bruce had tried every combination of gripper and slider. He was back to the right-handed bowling shoes. “Didn’t even break a hundred,” Bruce said, standing at the ball return with his hand over the blower and looking up at his electronic score. His cheeseburger, sitting on the back table, was all but forgotten as he picked up the ball again.

  “Never mind the score.”

  “It’s not the score so much as the gutter balls.”

  He didn’t trust his artificial leg in the slide.

  “I could put in the bumpers,” Fred said.

  Bruce hoped the man was joking.

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  Fred looked him over with a critical eye. “What’s a leg going for these days?”

  Bruce could pretend he’d misunderstood. Most people were interested in the cost of his prosthesis. But that’s not what Fred was asking. “Thirty-five grand
.”

  That’s how much he’d been paid by Uncle Sam for the loss of his leg. Roughly the cost of a good prosthesis. But he’d been given one of those—more than one of those—too.

  “Invest that money in your future and you won’t go wrong,” Fred advised.

  Bruce hadn’t touched a dime. There were a lot of mixed emotions attached to that money.

  Mitzi had purchased something tangible with the money Freddie had left her—a house. A home.

  She’d been right about him—he wasn’t ready for that. Not if settling down meant standing still.

  He hadn’t realized just how ready she was until she’d accused him of walking away from her before he could even walk.

  “Your new leg a C-Leg?” Fred continued.

  A C-Leg was a computerized leg. Microprocessors sensed and corrected movement for a natural gait. “With modifications, yes.”

  Just call me the hundred-thousand-dollar man.

  A good leg prosthesis ran around thirty, thirty-five grand. But thanks to the Special Warfare Association he had the best custom leg money could buy, a heavy-duty, high-tech knee capable of artificial intelligence.

  High-speed pattern recognition responded to changes in speed, load and terrain. He could walk, he could run, he could jump, he could climb and he could swim—all without changing his leg.

  What he couldn’t do yet was bowl.

  “Try a five-step approach,” Fred suggested.

  Because of his height, Bruce had always used a four-step. Five steps would mean shortening his stride and starting off on his artificial foot.

  Leading with his left felt awkward at first, but after several trips to the foul line he felt comfortable enough to swing his arm and let go of the ball. Before he knew it he, and his computerized knee, had the mechanics down and a measure of his old confidence back.

  By the time school let out Bruce was bowling with a respectable spin on his ball and had broken that elusive hundred. Still a long way from his 260 average.

  “See what I mean.” Fred commented on the lack of an afternoon crowd. “If I thought Mitzi could make a living at it, I’d leave the business to her and retire.”

  “You think Mitzi would want the bowling alley?” Bruce asked, trying not to sound too interested. He shouldn’t care what Mitzi wanted. Whatever it was, it wasn’t him. But her enlistment was up soon and he was curious about her plans.