Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  In Baharia, he was lounging against the side of a blast wall, enjoying a rare cigarette, when he saw a muscle-bound guy coated in tattoos bench-pressing without a spotter. When he let the bar slam down, weights rattling, and sat up, Dan recognized Rick Brinklan.

  “You embarrass me, man,” he said, walking over to Rick. His head snapped to Dan like he’d heard the pops of AKs. “I put on some biceps since I joined, but look at you . . .”

  “Eaton.” He gave Dan a sweat-soaked hug, then rubbed his gray USMC tee in his eyes to clear the moisture. It must have been 110 degrees. “Don’t let me give you a boner, dude. Get home to Hailey.”

  He’d heard Rick was 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines—Dad must have told him—but he never imagined running into him. There were at least a dozen or so kids from New Canaan serving, but what were the odds? He and Rick spent that afternoon smoking and walking the perimeter of the blast walls, listening to the sounds of small arms fire in the distance. Rick’s battalion had had a staggering number of casualties on this deployment, including the previous day.

  “PFC Slopes. This surfer bro from Florida—real nice guy but a total airhead. When I helped him do his taxes he asked if he could deduct his stereo system ’cause it helped him get amped for battle. He was like mystified when I told him that was ridiculous.” He smiled in the grimmest possible way. He had small, tough eyes, but with all the added bulk his face looked bloated. His trapezius muscles were like suspension bridges coming down from his neck. The claw mark tattoo Dan remembered from high school now had neighbors all over his back, torso, and down his arms. He was like an old-timey steamer trunk slapped with erratic stickers. The only part of him inkless was from the neck up, as per military regs. How tough and leathered Rick looked now. Dan had once written a history paper for him, after Lisa begged him for help on Rick’s behalf. Apparently Rick was floating with a C in his history class already, and anything less than an A would make him ineligible to play football. “He’s all equations,” as Lisa put it. Dan did it because Lisa asked and because he liked writing history papers. Rick thanked him by buying him a six-pack, though Dan never actually drank the beers.

  “EFP?” Dan asked him now. “We’re getting them every day.”

  “Yeah, E-F-buttfucking-P,” Rick said, taking a drag. “I get there and the door was hanging off. Dragged Slopes out and tried to do something for him. He had blood coming out his nose, mouth, his ears.” Rick used his smoking hand to palm his entire face to demonstrate the extent of the damage. “I got his helmet off and a piece of his brain just splats out onto his MARPAT. He had this wound on the right side of his head, and it was like his brain was trying to crawl out. His eyes were all bugging.” He tapped his cigarette. “It was pretty grotesque. I got him sitting up so he wouldn’t get blood in his airway and started doing finger swipes. Got him wrapped from head to shoulder in Kerlix, but he might as well have been dead when I found him.”

  “Were you guys close?”

  “He lived until morning. We went out and pink-misted some haji for it, so . . .”

  Dan didn’t particularly feel like reliving every combat death and traumatic casualty right then and there, but he understood the need to process the stuff that had just happened. He thought of watching Sergeant Wunderlich’s face on fire.

  Rick didn’t seem much interested in talking about New Canaan, but Dan had to somehow change the subject. Of course he ended up having to explain about Hailey.

  “Y’all are done?”

  “I told her I was thinking of signing up for another tour. She didn’t take it well.”

  Dan expected more pushback—the kind Mom, Dad, and his sisters had all given him—but Rick only nodded.

  “Yeah, I’m thinking about becoming career. I fucking hate it over here, but it’s better than back home. No jobs, everyone’s on fucking drugs. Can’t believe I was thinking of going to OSU and then starting a family in New Canaan. So I get it. You might share blood with your family, but you sure as shit didn’t shed it with them.”

  Exactly. Because how easy had it been to let go of her? He tested the subject of Kaylyn. The way Rick pretended to shrug it off, he could tell he’d gotten his heart good and broke. Rick had never been much for hiding how he felt. As transparent as glass and possibly as fragile.

  “For the best,” said Rick. Someone had left a dust-coated forklift by the perimeter, and they stopped in its shade. Rick put one boot up against the machine. Dan had a memory of standing near Kaylyn when Rick made a heroic run in a football game. Her shriek had been the loudest. Get it, babe! Getitgetitgetit! Until her voice hit a pitch like a fire alarm.

  Rick ashed his cigarette. “I can’t believe I proposed to her. Turned out she was a total whore.” He shook his head and looked at his hand to examine a fingernail, black and probably soon to fall off. “Total psycho dick-chugging whore.”

  Dan had never heard someone use the phrase “psycho dick-chugging whore” with so much evident remorse. If Kaylyn had walked down from the FOB right then, he’d have bet his paycheck that Rick would have fallen into her weeping.

  “Just wish I hadn’t thrown the damn engagement ring into the woods. Could use the cash now.” He smiled his gritty grin.

  When Dan was back home on his eighteen-day R&R, he and Hailey had gone to Nashville only to have the fight that ended it. She made no secret that his deployments were breaking her. She didn’t like the wars, didn’t like him participating in them, absolutely loathed the president. When they talked by Skype or Gchat, there was no joy in it. She hated him doing what he did too much.

  They had the final conversation in her apartment in Bowling Green. She hugged herself and told him if he signed up for another tour, she was done.

  “I want to start my life.” She bobbed her shoulders matter-of-factly, strands of auburn hair piled around her thick pink cheeks. “Not sit around playing army girlfriend or, worse, army widow. I said I would wait for you one tour, and that became two, and now you’re telling me it could be three or four? No. That’s not what I agreed to. It’s not fair to ask me to do that.” He could feel the ill-lit kitchen, the buzzing fire in the bulbs. It sounded like she’d been rehearsing that speech. “Don’t fucking kid me, kid: You’re choosing Iraq over me, Danny.”

  All he said was, “It’s a weird transition being back. You can’t turn it all off, especially for just eighteen days.” In the years that followed, when he’d have imagined arguments about their children, Dan would think of what he could have done differently in this moment. But she was right. He was happily, knowingly, gladly choosing the army over her.

  “Well,” she slapped her hands on her thighs. “Then maybe it’s time not to worry about it anymore.”

  Flying back to Baghdad, he realized he wasn’t even hurt. He was relieved. And when he landed back in the desert, when he got his M4 back in his grip, when he got shot on his second patrol, the bullet catching him in the vest so that he didn’t feel like he was hit in one spot but across his entire torso and that sliver of air between body and armor billowed up and out across his throat and face, he felt more at home than he had the previous eighteen days in his mother’s gaze, in his father’s humor, in Hailey’s arms. Home is a roving sensation, not a place, and for a large chunk of his life, the feel of that bullet to the chest, that was home.

  Rick grabbed one of his buddies to take a picture of the two of them before they headed out. He had an old Jaguars football banner that they both held up, the snarling beast exploding through a fifty-yard line.

  “Surge buddies!” he cried as his friend snapped away on the digital camera.

  As Dan prepared for the nerve-tingling drive back to Baghdad, Rick gave him a burned CD. “I got it on my iPod, so you can keep it.”

  He read the title: Slow River.

  “Oh shit,” he said. “This is Harrington’s album.”

  “Yeah, man. Not sure what you’re into, but dude’s got chops.” He laughed. “We were having beers when I was back after my first tour, and
some shit I said ended up right in the lyrics. I always busted the kid’s balls for being such a fag, but it’s pretty great. You’ll recognize so much of The Cane.”

  Dan burned Slow River onto his own iPod. Before bed, he’d read or write and listen to all twelve tracks on a loop. Something about it just unwound him, and he’d come to think of the title track and “Cattawa” to be as essential as any other piece of his gear.

  A couple of months after that, Rick took a sniper’s bullet on a dismounted patrol. One clean shot through the temple. Of course, Dan couldn’t make it home. Nor did he care to since Hailey would no doubt be there. Mom sent him pictures of the parade and clippings from the New Canaan News. Joni Ashcraft wrote the story. It quoted two of New Canaan’s football coaches, several teachers, and Rick’s father, Marty. It was hard for Dan not to imagine what his own parade might look like.

  You called me Bullfrog, Harrington sang on “Cattawa.” You warned me about these chains / If I was a weatherman I could believe / Only the darkest storms reveal the finest rains.

  * * *

  “And the way everyone, even the Left, would venerate them. Picking their noses and talking about the troops. Like we were over there in the desert churning out heroes—all that macho bullshit that gets idiot fucking kids to go and die every time.”

  Bill kept going, and Dan let him. He’d heard worse.

  “Rick was one of them,” he said. “And so when he got his head blown off, you know what I fucking did? I didn’t cry. I’ll never cry for him. We weren’t making heroes; we were making dead boys and invalids and occasionally monsters. Turning eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids into rapists and murderers. And even you guys who came back expected a parade like the saps you were when you went. Nobody gives a fuck now.” He spat these words and then choked on the leftover saliva. “So no, I didn’t go to his funeral, the parade, or fuck-all anything, and I sure as shit won’t cry for him.” He sniffed and wiped his eyes with a shirtsleeve. “This doesn’t count. This is a drunk, drugged thing.”

  Dan wanted to leave, but Bill wasn’t done.

  “We had this huge blowout fight before he left. I mean, I told him what I thought. I told him I thought he was getting played, and we almost beat the shit out of each other. But that’s not what it was even about.”

  “What was it about?” Dan asked, mostly because Bill wanted him to.

  He looked at the vivid dusting of stars overhead. “I was fucking his girlfriend.”

  “Kaylyn?”

  He nodded. A teardrop of snot hung from his nose.

  “You were dating Lisa, though?”

  A quick, bitter laugh. “Well, yeah, that’s kinda the point of cheating. If you’re gonna fuck over one person you care about why not make it a hat trick.”

  “Did Rick know?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  He couldn’t find a way to assimilate this.

  “The thing about it was . . .” Bill wagged his finger at the night. “I knew it. Even before he left I knew it was going to happen. Not like a pure psychic premonition or anything, but . . . Jesus, I just fucking knew it. And when I heard . . .” He sucked in a long breath. His voice cracked. “When my dad called me and told me, all I could think about was how much I fucking hated him.” He sobbed the last few words. “How glad I was that I’d hurt him like that. Because fuck him. That selfish fucking piece of shit with his liberty and freedom and God-and-country idiot fucking bullshit. Fuck him.”

  He put his face in his hands and hunched forward. He folded into himself like a snail and stayed there making soft noises that bloomed around him and competed with the crickets.

  “Goddammit,” he barked, punching the steering wheel hard enough to make the whole dash shudder. His sobs made him sound even younger than when Dan had known him in high school. When you really weep, you always sound like the child you ultimately still are. “I want all those years back. I want out of this fucked parallel universe we’re all living in.”

  Dan thought of walking a dirt road, the twilight still sweltering, training the sights of his M4 on laughing children. Ashcraft wanted to see conspiracy but only because it allowed him an explanation and a way to lay blame. All history was cyclic. And these cycles beget us, even if we didn’t understand them as we live them. Cycles of politics, cycles of exploitation, cycles of immigration, cycles of organization, cycles of accumulation, cycles of distribution, cycles of pain, of despair, of hope. The only fallacy, Dan figured, is the notion we’ve never been here before. But he’d carried that sensation in his chest his whole life—like he’d lived this already. Like he knew this moment a thousand years before he was born and would know it a thousand years after he died.

  Dan popped open the door. “See you, Ashcraft. Can’t say it hasn’t been interesting.”

  Wiping tears from his cheeks, Bill gave him a little two-finger salute. “Been real, Eaton. And be sure to be on the lookout for the spirits tonight. Trying to steal your light.”

  His truck stammered and chuffed as he pulled away. Dan had this furious, forestalled sensation he wanted to be rid of. It was like trying to express the word love in a time before there was speech.

  * * *

  The receptionist desk was empty. Dan started down the antiseptic hallway, sharp white bulbs throwing uniform light across the pebble-colored carpet and walls of listless, institutional pistachio green. The alcohol gave everything a surreal quality—a sensation of bright faux-cheerful catacombs. He found a few nurses gathered at a desk, all mauve uniforms and hair in buns. He could hear the music from Seinfeld leaking out of a room down the hall.

  “I’m here to see Hailey Kowalczyk,” he said. “I mean, Hailey Frye.”

  One of the buns looked him over and left to find her.

  You can always remember a person’s face but not their presence, not how they fill a room. Not how they move or think or how they weave a conversation. Green scrubs swishing, one hand swinging a clipboard, she looked thicker in the hips and breasts. Her hair was much darker, the shade of yellowing autumn leaves, held back from her high forehead in a no-nonsense bun. She smiled and there was still that bulbous quality to her cheeks, like two rosy tangerines. The closer she came, the more each of her features felt like its own vortex into the past. The slim bridge of her nose widening at the nostrils, which she flared with every expression, every smile or frown. Inflating then deflating. No ridge at the top of her ears where the cartilage ended like a disc. Her eyes the color of a blue flame. Her grin kept spreading wider and wider.

  “Danny.” Her steps picked up and she tossed the clipboard at the desk where it barely caught the ledge and rattled to rest.

  “Hey, pal.” Which immediately felt like a stupid way to address her.

  Her arms fell around him, and he tried to let himself just be there, standing with her, but there were too many vast unspooling histories. The three nurses watched.

  He waited for her to let go. When she did, she needed to wipe tears from her eyes with symmetrical swipes of her index fingers. “Sorry,” she said, more to the other nurses than to him. “I haven’t seen this guy in a long time.” She laughed at herself. “You look so good!”

  “You look so good.”

  “Hey. I know I’m fat, you lying shit. I’m working on it.”

  “Shut up, you look great. You—” He forgot what he was about to say. “I worried I was late. I left my cell phone in my car, and then I ran into—” He stopped because the night was a long, strange story that might take a minute. “I got a ride here.”

  She waved this away. “You’re fine. I’m just getting off. You still want to get dinner?”

  “Of course.”

  “Want to see her first, though?”

  “That was the idea.”

  She looked to the nurses, who were studying them with a smokescreen of indifference. He wondered how much they knew about him. She told them she was taking him to see a patient.

  “You shouldn’t wake her,” one of the nurse
s said.

  “She told me to,” Hailey said, some kind of ice between the two.

  He followed her down the halls where he could hear the television sets mix with snoring, snorting, and mumbled dream speech. They were both silent, and he could feel the flux of miles and years and other measurements.

  “Is this awkward?” she asked.

  He looked at her. “No. Of course not.”

  “It is. What do people even talk about? It suddenly occurs to me that I have no idea what people talk about at all ever.”

  “Movies?”

  “Danny, I haven’t seen a movie in like four years.”

  “World events?”

  “How about Dora the Explorer? Do you keep up with Dora?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  She couldn’t stop watching him. Dan knew she was looking at his eye. He kept her on his left, as he always did when he walked beside people so he could see them, and he could feel her leaning to glimpse it. “You really do look good. I like your hair longer . . .”

  “I’m just bad at remembering to get it cut without someone barking at me to do it.”

  She slipped her arm through his.

  He followed Hailey into the room. Dark except for a bedside lamp with the adjustable bulb pointed at the ground, the room was a jungle of ferns and other potted plants and flowers. There was also an enormous stack of books that centipeded up alongside the dresser, reminding him of his own Titusville apartment. The woman in the bed appeared to be dozing, but when Hailey put a hand on her arm her eyes slid open immediately.

  “Mrs. Bingham,” she said. “Look who I brought.”

  A misremembered dream from the night before rose, unbidden, some scenario where his captain was begging him to shave, but employing that dream logic where the electric clippers wouldn’t turn on. Then in the dream, he looked up, and he was alone, back in the frigid winter of the Hindu Kush. A land unchanged since Alexander the Great’s armies had forged across the same terrain. There were flurries coming down from a gray sky, little stars of snow that melted on his tongue. He could see for a hundred miles in every direction, from the burlap plains to the peaks and ridges that looked like bones breaking through the skin of the earth.