There was something about this statement that pissed the Lance Corporal, he wasn't sure what. In the war the Lance Corporal had assisted at interrogations in which enemy insurgents were closely questioned by the Lance Corporal's superior officers and the formerly naive Lance Corporal had acquired a bullshit detector suspecting now that no four-year-old could have uttered Daddy! Dad-dy! in such a seeming sincere manner without having been coached.
Say hi to Dennie Junior, Dennie! He's just a little scared, it's been so long.
So long was being put to him as a reproach—was it?
These tours into combat, the Lance Corporal had been serving his country. The Lance Corporal had been serving in the War Against Terror. The Lance Corporal took pride in this, and it would piss him grievously should his mission be challenged.
Sure he loved Dennie Junior. Just didn't know what you did with a kid so young yet not a baby, that can't talk to you or ask questions. People seemed to be waiting, watching. Like a spotlight making the Lance Corporal anxious. Not enough red-jelly capsules to make the Lance Corporal steely-calm. And the kid's slightly crossed eyes were freaking him. The pale blue-shale color of the Lance Corporal's own eyes in some long-ago time when he'd had what you would designate as normal eyes. That age, you want to crush them in your arms. You want to shield them from the hurt and evil that awaits them. You want to explain to these staring people, Know what?—this was a mistake. None of this I actually meant.
Not his life in the war was the mistake. But his life here. His personal life. His post–Lance Corporal life. That was the mistake.
Still—he was the Jokester. The wild things he'd said, crazier and cruder than the other guys and still the girls had been hot for him, a bad boy from Ashtree Junction.
All that was past now. They'd shoveled him up in bleeding steaming parts. They'd dumped these parts in Ziploc baggies labeled DONOR ORGANS. The bones were of no use except the marrow, said to be priceless on the Saudi black market.
Now it must've been a TV special, the young Marine Lance Corporal had been shipped back home to the (mostly ex-) mining town Ashtree Junction, North Dakota. To the modest asphalt-sided ranch house at 89 Magnesium Street. Whoever was playing the Lance Corporal was fumbling his lines and sick- looking like he'd made the worst mistake of his dumb-prick fucking life only hasn't figured out yet what it is.
In the storage closet at the back of the house, his old twenty-two deer rifle. That was a solace. He knew the rifle was there, last time he'd come home he'd checked. But the stock was cracked, he seemed to recall. His own fucking fault he'd been impatient slamming the stock against a tree when he'd missed an easy shot at a buck. It was Pa's shotgun he was thinking of. The Remington 1100 twelve-gauge double-barrel with the bolt action, which felt so good in the hands. Birdshot was the ammo he'd use, not buckshot. Birdshot is small, you could say dainty. Birdshot will not cause the target to explode in guts, feathers, flying skeins of blood.
He'd had to turn in his own Marine-issue firearms. These had been taken from him.
Who they'd got to play the kids he could not guess. Maybe the kids were actual? The little boy bearing the Lance Corporal's old name and the little girl who was his sister Michelle's child, his niece? They'd coached these kids to call him Dad-dy and Uncle Dennie. It was sweet and cute and the love came so strong in him like that sensation before puking—"nausseous"—that left him weak, unmanly. And he thought This is where the Lance Corporal is known and loved. This is where the Lance Corporal can be forgiven.
Still he was not certain if this was an actual thought of his or a TV thought beamed to him through the titanium implant.
Sometimes through the implant, speech was provided him. Though it was not the Lance Corporal's native speech yet he had to be grateful to have such speech at all, for there were "misfirings" in his cerebral cortex as in the "brain stem" it had been explained to him. Saying Proud to serve my. Sickness unto death. In Jesus' name. Will not die in vain.
This was embarrassing! This sucked! How the fuck had it happened, the Lance Corporal was still wearing his ID bracelet from the hospital? Remembered clearly they'd cut the damned thing off his wrist, or he'd torn it off his wrist with his teeth.
Dad-dy, what is this? Dad-dy!
Wouldn't you know the kid would discover it. TV kid this had to be, following some sinister strip—script?—the Lance Corporal had not okayed.
So much of this, confused to him. In the dark half of his brain where things got lost.
One of the women was fussing, helping the Lance Corporal remove the telltale hospital ID. Eight-inch sewing shears, cutting through the plastic. If you try to tear the fucking thing off your wrist, you can't. Also there was secret code, to trip off security alarms if you tried to walk out of the ward. Burn Ward, Psych Ward. Orthopedic. Surgery. They'd deactivated the Lance Corporal's ID for the Lance Corporal was discharged now from the VA hospital as from the Marine Corps "with valor."
Time to eat, Dennie! C'mon, let me help you.
Need some help, Dennie? Look here, son.
Your favorite pie, remember? Banana cream.
On the couch he'd been half asleep, the tall lukewarm Coors tilting between his wasted thighs, about to tip over and leak liquid onto him like warm piss. Shit-faced drunk on no more than three or four beers with the meds. Not supposed to drink with the meds but fuck that, the Lance Corporal was home where they respected him. Ashtree Junction where they knew the Lance Corporal from birth onward and must've said they'd forgiven him, or the charges were erased—"zonerrated"—and the records sealed. The Lance Corporal was mistrustful of this but would not dispute it. The Lance Corporal was a father here. Must've been, there were special dispensations for fathers, husbands.
He was nuzzling the little boy's neck which was hot and smelled of something sweet like soap and the little boy was becoming uncomfortable in his daddy's arms, maybe his daddy's stubble-jaws against the little boy's soft skin, or some chill chemical/metal smell of his daddy's numerous implants and shunts, and therefore the kid began to become restless and squirmy and panting through his mouth and to tease him the Lance Corporal tightened his arms around him holding him captive Gotcha! making a sucking noise sucking with his lips against the blue-pulsing carotid vein in Dennie Junior's neck, thinking This is my son! My life that has been given back to me.
This is my son, I can do any goddamn thing I wish to do for which of you sonsabitches is going to stop me.
Halfway through the meal the nausseousness came over him, he had to lurch from the table. And in the bathroom puking into the toilet. Okay he'd flush the toilet. Still more puking, then flushing. The more you heave up, the better you feel. Except the Lance Corporal had a taste of panic in terror of dislodging the shunt in his chest a thing like a catheter in the vena cava the large vein that returns blood from the body back to the heart. He'd seen diagrams and he had seen the actual shunt (steel, plastic) and he'd signed the papers he was okay with this for it had been explained This is a medical miracle to save your life but if something happened to the shunt, if it was dislodged by a sudden spasm of vomiting, coughing, convulsing, it was two hours to the nearest VA hospital, in Grand Forks. Thinking maybe it was a mistake to let them remove the ID bracelet how'd he get readmitted? Your ID is white/plastic/computer-generated. Your ID contains all vital information about you. Your ID contains surname/forename/initial/patient account #2938826-1822/date of birth 4/21/81/sex M/date of admission 8/19/07.
A rage came over the Lance Corporal at the need to be grateful for such shit. The need to crawl like a kicked dog licking the boots of "superior officers." Or, grateful at these people—"family"—fussing over him calling him Dennie like they had some claim on him. Like they knew him. Thinking of his old man's Remington 1100 in the back closet, the sight of which would calm them down quick.
No he was okay. This was a "transition time"—he knew and he was okay with it. Just very tired, sulky, and bored. Nausseous so much to eat heaped on his plate. Drinking, time to
drink. Then there were the tricks.
How after supper there were these new people in the house with faces that resembled faces he'd known. Except the names were lost, like lost coins he'd hear rattling inside the lining of his fleece jacket. Keys too, slipped through the holes. These were "neighbors," saying his name like they knew him and had the right, but that wasn't the trick, the trick was how they disappeared right in front of him, in an instant. One of his uncles crossing in front of the Lance Corporal past the TV where the football game was on and in that instant the uncle was gone, vanished; then a few minutes later the Lance Corporal sighted that same uncle just a few feet away.
Where were you? the Lance Corporal asked. You—where'd you go? I'm talking to you. Couldn't remember the uncle's name or even if for sure this fat bald guy was his uncle. The Lance Corporal spoke hoarsely and not altogether coherently so there was difficulty in comprehending his speech but the Lance Corporal took care to smile to show that, hey, he was okay with this kind of weirdness, this tricky shit, maybe they were all drunk and that was the circumstance so they could laugh at it but the Lance Corporal did not want anyone laughing at him. Sure he could take a joke. He was the Jokester. How'd you make yourself disappear like that he was asking the fat bald guy. All of them were looking at him with uncertain smiles. It was well known the Lance Corporal had been the Jokester but that was a long time ago and they could not be sure if the Lance Corporal was joking now. How the hell d'you make yourself disappear, he asked. He was asking politely. Civilians tended to be fearful of the Lance Corporal and his kind. In uniform they were a sobering sight! They could be hotheaded. They could be cruel. They could be inventive, impulsive. The goats they'd run into on the road, that first full day when the Lance Corporal had been new to the war in the time of his first tour of duty (in fact not a lance corporal then but only private first class) some of them—the goats—they'd decapitated. For the hell of it. So nerved-up, and they hadn't yet engaged the enemy. The thing is dead what's the difference. Also a dog, which had not been completely dead though run over by Jeeps. Not people, they had not cut off any human heads in the Lance Corporal's battalion, though there were rumors. The goat or maybe two goats and the dog with mange all over his body like scabs.
The goat with the deep-socketed eyes like female eyes brimming with hurt and reproach and just slightly crossed. The dog with doggy mongrel eyes. Coarse sand-colored fur but the fur of the insides of ears was silky fine, feathery. Eyes that were opened wide in terror and astonishment and something like recognition. These they'd brought into the barracks. Not the Lance Corporal but some of the others. These were slightly older guys of whom the Lance Corporal was fearful but knew he dared not reveal it.
Dennie Junior was feverish past his bedtime. The little girl-niece had been taken home. The men were drinking. The TV was on loud but no one was listening. Dennie Junior was saying Dad-dy you won't go away again will you anxious and sucking at his fingers and Daddy slapped the fingers away from the sucking fish-mouth and said No.
Whoever it was that was playing the Lance Corporal/Daddy said no in a firm voice like a fist coming down hard on a table.
Civilians you can't tell apart. Dark-skinned, rat-eyed. Kill them all let God sort them out.
That night it seriously pissed the Lance Corporal how the kid too, which so much fuss was made of was the Lance Corporal's own flesh and blood, had started playing that same trick disappearing into the left side of ... whatever it was—a sudden deep hole like a cellar or a pit, a gouged-out mine pit in the side of a mountain, where things went in and were gone. In a slow voice of the kind required to speak to morons and/or the brain-damaged the nerowlgist had explained to the Lance Corporal that he had a nerowloggical deficit. See, sometimes that part of the brain is shut down. Like a light in a room, switched off. As soon as the light is off, you can't see. You can't see that the light is off. You can't see the dimensions of the space the light would illuminate if there was a light because once the light is off the thought of the light is off. The very word "light" is off. Civilians who risk stepping into that darkness disappear. Sometimes they reappear but most often they do not.
All a man truly craves is the respect of his fellow men. And women too of course. The respect that is due to him. And this is the respect due his country. God will sort out the rest.
Dennie! No, honey, it's just a dream.
The mother hurried to the child's bed. In the night cries and gasps for breath and choked screams. The Lance Corporal rarely slept through a night even with his numerous meds swallowed down with Coors, but when the Lance Corporal at last drifted off into an exhausted sleep like discolored froth-surf on a beach thinly covering the raddled sand, the Lance Corporal was often wakened by the child's cries and the commotion of the woman comforting the child. Dennie, honey! Mommy has you, honey, it's just a dream.
Now the Lance Corporal was home in the house on Magnesium Street, Ashtree Junction, North Dakota. The Lance Corporal was home permanently and except for his twice-weekly therapy sessions at the VA Hospital at Grand Forks, to which he was driven (usually by a volunteer relative), the Lance Corporal did not often leave the house. The Lance Corporal was left to ponder how it had happened he had been honorably discharged from the most revered of the U.S. armed services and yet the son the Lance Corporal had been given did not appear to be a well child.
Bad dreams in the night and sometimes while watching TV and videos with Dad-dy. The child who'd been potty-trained began to soil his bedclothes and sometimes—the most shameful times, which threw Dad-dy into a rage—his daytime clothes, for he could not control his pee which leaked out of him as out of a drippy faucet that no matter how hard you twist shut will yet drip.
The Lance Corporal's young wife was not the one the Lance Corporal had been remembering in the hospital, which was a sharp disappointment. That was a separate disappointment of which the Lance Corporal (who was a realist in all things) saw no purpose in speaking for the Lance Corporal was a mature man now twenty-seven—twenty-eight?—years old. Three tours of duty he had served his country in the war, this now the Lance Corporal could certainly endure.
Yes there was sex between the Lance Corporal and his wife. Yes if you are wondering.
At the therapy clinic the Lance Corporal's wife attended crucial sessions to acquire certain skills. And so there was sex between the Lance Corporal and his wife, to a degree.
Yes we are happy together, we are man and wife. Yes if you are wondering.
Yet the Lance Corporal insulted the wife, calling her by another's name. In the extremity of his passion, not knowing what the fuck he was saying, or moaning. This is not right, the wife protested. I'm the one who loved you, I was the one who married you, not her, the wife protested piteously and hours were required late into the night to placate her and these hours were exhausting to the Lance Corporal who would come to realize shortly, like so many others, that it is easier to erase some problems than to solve them, or even to make the effort to solve them. In the back closet the bolt-action shotgun, a single barrel for the female and a single barrel for the fretting pissy-smelling kid and a quick reload for himself.
It was a well-publicized fact, meant to dissuade young males: the leading cause of death in such western states as Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and the Dakotas among young males sixteen to thirty is (1) vehicular accident, (2) suicide by gun.
It was a well-publicized fact meant to dissuade but a fact to give solace to most who hear it. Your gun is your friend. Your gun won't let you down when you need it.
Shrewdly the Lance Corporal had devised a way to drive any vehicle, even the Dodge pickup standing high from the ground. It was an ingenious technique involving one of his old boots, the handle of a ten-pound sledgehammer, and an oversized leather glove. His brother Mack whistled through his teeth Jez-zuz, Dennie! Got to hand it to you, you are one smart dude.
Or, you are one smart fuck-ass.
(In such ways the brothers communicated. Since boyhood, i
n such ways. Often Mack would slap Dennie across the shoulders, or against his head but gently now, for there was the steel plate. There were the implants you could not risk dislodging.)
On his restless drives mostly into the countryside through the ravaged landscape and into the Hump foothills past slag heaps, open-pit mines, and lakes smelling of sulfur—where in a long-ago time the Lance Corporal's daddy and granddaddy and who the fuck all else in the family the Lance Corporal had to assume worked for Delphic Ore, Inc., which mined ore—whatever fuck ore the Humps had, Delphic Ore, Inc., mined—you knew that, and you'd know that Delphic Ore, Inc., was bankrupt and shut down and whatever the Humps had to yield to mankind was long since yielded, sold and consumed and gone; and the Lance Corporal knew this and did not contest it. Thinking I have served my country, this is a good thing. This is my country.
Pa's old Remington 1100 he took with him. This was not il legal, this was not a concealed weapon. The Remington 1100 is one of the great guns though this specimen had to be forty years old, the nickel-plate barrel scratched and the maple stock worn smooth.
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