Kelly Ann and Jack had the baby on the bed with them and were watching her try to scoot herself up, bottom first. She’d push on her forearms and grunt and labor until the weight of her head pulled her back down. Jack’s mother said it wouldn’t be long until she’d be able to grab on to things and stand. Jack said, “She won’t even remember who I am.”
“That’s not so.”
“I guess kids get by all right. If they never know you, they can’t miss you.”
“Come on, she knows you. Tara, where’s Daddy? Daddy Daddy Daddy.”
Jack said, “I guess you could show her pictures. That would be something. If I wind up getting killed.”
“That’s no way to talk,” Kelly Ann said. Even though there was a part of her that thought knowing somebody killed in the war would be romantic, the heartbreak and all. Just the idea of it, which didn’t mean you wanted it to happen.
“I’d rather be plain dead than come back without any legs or half my brain, like some of those guys.”
“Stop it, OK?” There were things she didn’t want to think about. Pictures you saw, guys and sometimes girls too, pieces broken off of them like they were gingerbread people. It wasn’t even that great of a war. But the country had called, and Jack and all the others had answered.
She said, “Maybe me and Tara could come with you and live on the base. They have that, don’t they? Family housing.”
“No, you’re better off here. I don’t want to have to worry about you once they ship me out.”
“We could have our own place.”
“We already got this place.”
“I mean a start-from-scratch place.”
Jack rolled away from her so he was on his back, staring up at the ceiling. “You act like we’re not lucky to have it and we are. We don’t even pay rent.” They’d put Jack’s signing bonus in the bank and weren’t going to touch it. It was a future they weren’t allowed to have yet.
“I know we’re lucky. I just wish—”
But she didn’t finish her sentence. It made her feel guilty to want more of anything, when Jack was going to a foreign land and putting himself in harm’s way. Even though she did wish lots of things were different, a million large and small wishes, and here she used to think that if she had Jack, that was the whole world.
Jack left for Fort Benning, one more good-bye, and Christmas and New Year’s passed without him. Kelly Ann got used to having him gone, as she guessed he got used to doing without her. She missed him, she tried to keep missing him as hard as she could, but the edge had worn off. For the baby’s first birthday there was a party with a cake and both sets of grandparents and they made a video and sent it to Jack. On it they got the baby to say da-da, which was a big success, although she made a lot of sounds now and you couldn’t always tell if she meant anything by them.
In March Jack called and said he was going to be “sent overseas and into a hazardous situation.” That was all they were supposed to say, like anybody would be thrown off by it. Mechanic’s school hadn’t come through and he was regular infantry. He wanted Kelly Ann and the baby to come down for a visit before he left, and so she bought a plane ticket and made the arrangements. But at the last minute the baby came down with a fever and a cough and the doctor said to keep her home. So it was Kelly Ann alone who went, a friend driving her through squalls of thin sleet to the Indianapolis airport. It was the first time she’d ever flown.
She landed in Atlanta, then changed planes for Columbus. Jack was there to meet her when she came out of security, not wearing his uniform, as she’d imagined him, but his regular old denim jacket. His hair was a little longer now and he’d gained his weight back. He looked older to her, a layer of heaviness in his face, and she wondered if she looked different to him as well. He had a bouquet of carnations wrapped in stiff plastic for her and Kelly Ann carried them in her free hand so as not to crush them. She couldn’t decide if it was better or worse that the baby hadn’t come along. Worse because now Jack might not see her for a long time. Better because it could be just the two of them again, the way it was before everything got so complicated.
They stayed in a motel in Columbus, and the next day he took her to the base and got her a visitor’s pass so she could see it for herself. Or not all of it, since she couldn’t go into the barracks or the rifle range or any of the other actual training areas. But there was plenty more. The base was a whole city, with streets and street signs and its own hospital and stores and gas pumps. It was already spring this far south. Where there was grass it was green and perfect, as if each blade had been given its own military haircut. The streets were swept and the curbs freshly painted. When Kelly Ann remarked on how clean everything was, Jack said it didn’t get that way by itself, and there were three ways of doing anything, the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way.
They went to a recreation center with pool tables and a bowling alley and a bar that served soft drinks, since enlisted men couldn’t drink on base. There were other soldiers there with other visitors, moms and dads, but mostly wives or girlfriends and children running in shrieking circles. And since there were women soldiers too, there were husbands and boyfriends.
Jack saw a guy from his company who was there with his wife, so the four of them sat down together in the snack bar and ordered hamburgers and fries. His name was Peterson, and Jack introduced him as Pete, even though his name was really Wayne. In the Army, they hung nicknames on everybody. Jack’s nickname was Party.
Pete’s wife’s name was Lucy, and they were from Texas. Lucy had a beauty parlor hairdo and a red manicure. She was dressed up too, in a skirt and heels and a plaid jacket, and a handbag that matched the plaid. Kelly Ann wondered if she should have worn something other than jeans, since she could tell that at least part of the visit was about showing her off.
But Jack didn’t seem to notice or care what she had on, just shoved their chairs close together so he could put a hand on her leg. Pete Peterson said, “So how’s it goin, huh, you two finding enough to talk about?” Kelly Ann knew that what he meant was sex. He had one of those Texas accents that made everything sound fake.
Jack said, “Don’t you worry about us, buddy. How about you guys, you enjoying the hospitality of the U.S. Army?”
“Lucy here wishes it had more of a resort feel to it. She wanted waterskiing and maybe a casino.”
Lucy gave him a drop-dead look. She wasn’t doing anything besides sitting there all dressed up and prissy. There was a silence that stretched on and on, then Kelly Ann said, “I was supposed to bring our little girl, but she got sick.”
Pete said, “You don’t hardly look big enough to have a baby. A shrimp like you.”
“Well I did have her. Didn’t I, Jack. He was right there.”
“Oh yuck.”
“They don’t have kids yet,” Jack told Kelly Ann.
“Nor never will, if I have to watch.”
Lucy gave him another nasty look, this one suggesting he wasn’t going to get the chance to even start any kids.
Kelly Ann would have liked for Jack to say something about what a wonderful experience it had been, watching his daughter come into the world, because it had. But Jack just started in on his fries, as if none of this had anything to do with him. Kelly Ann was beginning to wish she hadn’t brought up the subject in the first place. So far she wasn’t too impressed with the class of people the Army attracted.
“Now that is one thing I could never do, be in some delivery room,” Pete said, twisting his face into a comical expression. “All that blood and gunk coming out of her.”
“That’s funny talk for a soldier,” said Kelly Ann, when no one else would say anything.
“Think I’d rather get shot at.”
“I wouldn’t want you there anyway,” said Lucy, then she closed her mouth for good.
Kelly Ann looked out the windows, where ranks of soldiers in camouflage uniforms were marching right down the middle of the road, like a parade. A sergeant ra
n alongside, counting cadence. She wished the rest of them would just drop it.
They began talking about the war, about getting to the hot zone. Because after all, that was the main event, the whole reason for the base and the uniforms and the manual of arms and the flags flying and all the rest. She understood that for Jack and the other soldiers, everything else was only talk and waiting around, and nothing else up to now had ever been so important. Not her, not even the baby. Jack said, “Man, I do not want to be in that stinkin place. But if I got to go, I say let’s get it over with.”
“It’s messed up,” agreed Pete. “They can’t do one thing for themselves. Here we’re supposed to be what, the evil empire? And they’re the ones blowing everything up.”
There wasn’t anything more to say to that, since everyone was in agreement. When they were through eating, Jack and Kelly Ann got up to go, and they all said, Nice to meet you, to each other.
When they were outside, Jack said, “Texas,” and shook his head.
“I’m glad we’re not from there.”
They went back to the motel and took off their clothes and lay on top of the covers with the air conditioning turned on high. It was muggy for so early in the year and it felt good to be out of the sun and back in this place that was as much theirs as anywhere else, now that they’d made love in it. Jack said, “Two nights and three days. That’s all we got.”
“I don’t want to be counting,” Kelly Ann said.
Once Jack had left the country, there was an anxious time before they heard from him again. Kelly Ann knew that word would reach them if anything truly bad happened, so that no news was good news, of a sort. But it kept her from sleeping, trying to imagine it all: heat and sandstorms and women wrapped up in robes like in the Bible, and the dark, angry men you saw on the television, gathered into furious crowds. She watched for Jack on television too, every time there was any footage of GIs. Now that was silly, but she couldn’t help it. Whenever they showed soldiers out on patrol, swinging their rifles from side to side, or speeding along in a Humvee, she tried to see the faces beneath the helmets. After a while she knew she wasn’t going to see Jack, but she still paid close attention. She wanted to be able to follow along when he told his stories.
Finally he called, although he called his parents instead of her, and Jack’s father had to come upstairs and get her. That upset her but there wasn’t an opportunity to say so in the excitement and hurry-up of talking. Jack’s voice sounded tinny and flattened, squeezed through a long series of relays until all the feeling was beaten out of it. The parents went into the next room to let her talk, although there wasn’t any such thing as privacy. She said that she was fine, the baby was fine. “What are you doing over there, what is it like?”
Because of the long long distance there was a lag or hitch in between saying a thing and getting an answer, so that conversation had an outer space quality. “Ah, it’s OK, I guess. Parts of it are really wasted. Blowed-up cars. Blowed-up buildings. What kind of people trash their own country? Makes you wonder. Other parts are nice. Base is pretty nice.”
“Do you have to…” She wanted to ask if he had to shoot people, but that was probably something he wasn’t allowed to talk about, and she didn’t want to get him in trouble in case the Army was listening in. “I hope you don’t have to do anything real terrible. Or see it either.” She didn’t want him coming home all crazy and dangerous, like some of them did, because the war had turned them mean.
“Chow’s pretty good, for the Army.”
Maybe he hadn’t understood her. She wasn’t going to ask him again. The mother wanted another turn to speak, and Jack was running out of time on the phone, so she told him to please be careful and call again real soon, and he said he didn’t know when he could do that but he could probably e-mail.
Hey there,
I’m kicking back with a cold one just like Friday nights at home the difference is its no bullshit one hundred and five degrees at ten o’clock at night. I have a pretty good adjustment to the heat but its not a natural way to live. Maybe if your born here. Don’t worry too much, the guys in my unit are the best there is and everybody watches out for everybody else. Just about every day is something you wish hadn’t happened but it is a job like any other, you put your head down and do it. I wish you could send me some sexy pictures of you but I guess not. Tell Tara Daddy misses her lots, you too.
xxxxx Jack
Kelly’s father, who had been a Marine, said that even the Army—he always made clear he held it in low regard—would be good for Jack. The service would make a man out of him. It toughened you up and taught you discipline. The bond you made with the men you served with was a blood bond that would last a lifetime. Kelly Ann thought about Pete Peterson and wondered if she was in for a bonded lifetime of him.
She heard something wistful in her father’s words, and in the spaces between the words. It was the same for the men down at the VFW. Whatever they’d done in the service, they’d polished it up like a medal. It had been the best part of them, their real and secret life. It was a brotherhood of secrets. And when he came home, Jack would be in on it.
One morning she left the baby downstairs with Jack’s mother-—Tara had her own crib there by now—and drove to the next county to see Jack’s recruiting sergeant. It was summer again, with a red-winged blackbird shrilling from every fence post, and big cotton clouds in a hot blue sky. This time last year, the Army hadn’t yet turned into anything personal.
The recruiting office was in a little mall next to a larger mall. There was a manicure place and a phone store and a Chinese take-out and then the recruiter’s, like it was just one more thing to buy. Kelly Ann parked and walked in the front door. No one was visible in the front section of the office, which was just a couple of desks with chairs. A movable partition screened off the rest of it, the coffee room and the room where they showed movies of Army life. Posters illustrated different kinds of military missions: the grubby camaraderie of the unit gathered around a tank, the helicopter pilot with his hands steady on the controls, the honor guard standing at attention. In all this there were two women soldiers and three black ones, a proportion that Kelly Ann guessed had something to do with who the Army wanted to attract and who they didn’t want to scare away.
She waited, and after a minute Sergeant Crissy came out from behind the partition. “Hi, can I help you?”
She’d been there any number of times, sat there with Jack while he and the sergeant went over all the things the Army would require of him and all the things the Army would shower on him in return. Kelly Ann spoke her name, and Jack’s, and watched the sergeant’s face register her. “Well sure,” Sergeant Crissy said. “If you’d have come in with Jack, I would have known you in a minute. What do you hear from him, everything going good?”
He told her to sit down and he asked about the baby too. The sergeant was tall and well put together. Here in the office he wore green fatigues and combat boots, but when he’d come to the high school he’d worn a dress blue uniform and his service medals. He was the cleanest man any of them had ever seen, clean down to his shoelaces, polished up to his buttons, and all that powerful barbering. They’d all fallen a little bit in love with him on the spot, boys as well as girls.
When they’d finished the small talk, Sergeant Crissy said, “So what brings you down here? Anything I can help you with, anything at all?” The military was one big family, she’d been told, and while she didn’t much believe it, she didn’t mind making him go through the drill.
“I need some information. About enlisting.”
He didn’t get it at first, and even when he did he pretended she was joking. “Now why would you want to go and do that?”
“Same reasons as anybody else.”
“You’re thinking of enlisting.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Well that’s something.” He was giving himself time to think. “What made you come up with that idea?”
“What does Jack think about all this?”
“He’s open to the idea.” She had not yet told him.
“And your little girl?”
“She’s good with Jack’s folks. One or the other of us could come back on leave from time to time. And once we got stationed together, we could have her with us.”
He was too smooth to make fun of her outright. He was going to be patient and reasonable. He hiked his chair so that it was a scant inch closer to hers. He must have become a recruiter because he liked to convince people of things, persuading them with his big handsome head and body. He said, “It’s hard on the spouses. Always is. And here you are with a baby. Of course you miss Jack and you want to be with him and this seems like a good way to go about it. But the Army’s a lot more than that. A good four years more, if nothing else.”
“I remember the terms all right.”
“No offense, Kelly Ann, but can you do even one push-up?”
“I can manage.” She’d tried and she’d wound up with her face in the carpet more than a few times. But she was getting better. “I can train, just like Jack did.”
“Run two miles? Carry a full pack?”
“If you think I can’t do anything at all, just say so.”
“That’s not it.”
“What it sounds like.”
“Say you go through basic and your AIT, there’s still no guarantee you’d be posted anywhere near each other.”
“I thought your job was to sign people up.”
“Kelly Ann, there’s no pleasure or anything else in it for me if you take your oath and then show up right back here after three days.”
“How about you just walk me through it.”
Throw Like A Girl Page 6