by Amber Burns
“Hang back guys, we got a kid with a gun!” I said into my mike, but Maxwell had just stepped into view next to me.
He took a deep breath, and as he lifted his hand to signal the rest of the guys to stay back, the kid opened fire, catching him full in the neck and chest. I didn’t have time to think, I shot him. I took aim and shot the kid in the head.
“Falcon, what the hell is going on there? Why have shots been fired?” Base screamed over the comms.
Briggs and Andrews entered the room, rushed to Maxwell and absolute chaos erupted,
“Maxwell’s down, he got taken out by a kid with an AK, we are getting out of here, fuck this extraction, I don’t know what else is in this dark shit hole!”
It was my voice, but I didn’t feel like I was the one speaking.
We got out of the building, and ran back to the vehicles with Maxwell dragged limply behind us in our arms. The guys driving took one look at him and opened the back doors of the Humvee.
“He’s gone Michel,” Andrews said, trying to take him from my arms.
“No!” I cried. “He can’t be, he isn’t!”
Everything fades a bit at this point, but somehow we all got back to base, and I’ll never forget sitting in the back of that vehicle with my hand on Max’s chest, not actually hearing anybody speak. I don’t know when the moment dawned on me that I couldn’t feel his heart beating or breath coming from his body, or when exactly I looked down and saw half his face was blown away, but it did at some point.
I staggered from the Humvee when it pulled to a stop, and two steps away from it I spilled my guts on the tar, burger from the night before, coffee from an hour ago, all of it. Surprising how quickly everything had gone to shit really. The first person that came striding toward me when I straightened and wiped my mouth was Major Springer.
“I need to debrief the three of you Deverroux, mess tent at nine, go clean yourself up.”
I simply nodded and walked off to the dorm-tents. I needed a shower, I needed to wash all Maxwell’s blood off of me.
The three of us stood to attention in front of the Major, when he took a deep breath, sat back against a table and crossed his arms.
“At ease gentlemen. Now… What in the shit-fuck-storms-sakes happened to a simple extraction mission? Explain yourselves.”
Andrews and Briggs both looked at me to start.
“Sir, everything seemed fine, but there was a kid, a kid with an AK in the passage we needed to pass through to get to the back of the house where the extraction target was. Maxwell didn’t wait for my warning, or he didn’t hear me, and the kid got startled when Maxwell, he lifted his arm to warn Briggs and Andrews to keep back. Then he shot, the shots caught Maxwell in the neck and head, and then I took the kid out before he could shoot anyone else. That’s the sum total of it Sir.”
The major sat motionless and silent. Not knowing what else to do I continued to ramble.
“We decided to run for it, because I didn’t know what kind of attention that noise would have attracted.”
I stopped. Something happened to me then and I couldn’t breathe, my heart pounded so hard I swore it was going to jump right out of my chest.
“I killed a kid Sir, a ten year-old boy.”
I sat down on my ass before I knew what was happening and started hyperventilating.
“I killed a kid, I killed a kid Sir…”
2
I know they sent me to a shrink, and when I couldn’t talk to her about what exactly had happened, there were murmurs of ‘PTSD’ and I know I spent a lot of time rocking back and forth repeating those words, “I killed a kid,” through a haze of medication. But I do remember clearly getting on a plane to come home, and I very much remember the smell of the fresh air as I stepped off the plane at Scholes International airport in Galveston, Texas.
Once you get home after seeing some of the things you see in a place like Kabul, even on the outskirts, or when you’re driving through outlying areas, it’s hard to look at things the same in a civilized country. I’d love to say you become numb to the shit around you… But I didn’t, I saw everything so much more clearly, and I felt everything more deeply, I had nightmares, I saw Maxwell everywhere, and the kid I killed haunted me like a shadow, in my nightmares and in my peripheral vision. I wanted to die, until one day when I found something that dulled the pain.
I was sitting in a bar two blocks down the road from the marina, beer in hand and staring out at the sea, over the harbor and straight to where my boat, the Mary Jane was docked. My staring out to sea was interrupted when a shady looking character parked himself next to me and I just about leapt out of my skin.
“Hey, sorry fella. Seen you here a while, on holiday?” He asked, staring me up and down.
I suppose I looked like shit, I wore faded fatigues and a black vest, and though my body hadn’t completely gone to waste, I had grown a bit of a paunch that was visible as I sat there with my legs up on the rail. I showered, but I hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. The stranger kept staring, and I felt my temper dissipating.
“Listen man, I ain’t here to bother no one, what are you looking for?”
I tried to be polite, but I don’t think I succeeded. He smiled, and I should have known it was the smile of a shark right then.
“My name is Allen, and I kind of, well you could say I look after the needs of a couple of the locals, especially the guys who come back from the Afghan land… With the shakes, and the nightmares, and the tempers...” He waited, and saw what he wanted obviously, “I can get you those meds the psych’s stop wantin’ to write prescriptions for after you leave hospital. I have friends in the right places, I see you, and I can hook you up with the stuff to make all of that go away.”
It took me a lot of thinking, because I knew I was stepping onto a road that was dark, and usually went only one way… Bad. But I was tired of the faces, and I was tired of the cold sweats every night when I woke up screaming. I bought a bottle of thirty Xanax tablets from Allen that day, and when I got back to my boat that evening I took my first one.
Addiction apparently doesn’t sneak up on some people, it shakes your hand, greets you, and makes its home in your life, like an old friend. That’s what Xanax did to me. For the first time since I’d walked away from that building in Kabul, I felt no stress, no anxiety and no pain. I slept like a teenager that night, an absolutely dreamless sleep, but when I woke up I found that I needed to take another one to manage the shakes that had come back, and man oh man, did it combine nicely with a glass of scotch…
One every four hours or so turned into one every two hours, and so it progressed. It was not instant, nor was it a slow process, but soon I was finding Allen to get my supply on a weekly, then daily basis. I was out of it most days, sitting at that bar and staring at the sea, which was calm now that it was out of storm season. It was this state of mind I was in when I walked into “Ink Your Skin” on a Thursday afternoon. It was a bad day and I was thinking of Maxwell something fierce.
The girl behind that counter couldn’t have been more than twenty five years old, but I’ll never forget her words, or her calm demeanor.
“Good afternoon, what can I help you with?”
She smiled up at me, her dark red hair in pigtails. I tried to talk but my first attempt failed. She passed me a Kleenex, and only then did I notice the wetness on my face.
“Thanks, sorry.”
She walked out from behind the counter, and disappeared for what seemed like ten minutes, coming back with two steaming mugs of coffee.
“Here you go, looks like you’re having a rough day,” she said kindly.
I just nodded, still wiping at my face.
“I want to get something in memory of a friend who I lost in Afghanistan a few weeks ago,” I blurted out. “He was a high-school friend, we were on two tours together, and I watched him die.”
She walked over to her counter and came back with a sketch-pad and pencil.
“Tell me a bit
about him?”
I started rambling about Maxwell.
“His name was Trent Maxwell, his family owned a Horse Ranch outside Odessa, and he loved it, spent every moment he could with those animals. We used to spend our summers out there together in High school, working the ranch. He gave his life for this country, he was only twenty seven.”
I drank my coffee and sat back, still in the happy numb haze of the drug, and when she showed me her drawing, I smiled.
“I love it.”
Two horses ran side by side, in astonishing detail, across a field where the flag blew in the breeze on a pole off in the distance. There were two figures in shadow leaning against the fence post underneath it, and at the bottom was written the date I’d given her as his date of death along with the words, ‘Never Forgotten’ in a soft cursive script.
She nodded.
“I’m glad, you give me time to draw out the stencil for this, and come in tomorrow. Now I know you are taking something, can you tell me what it is so that I know if you’ll bleed excessively?” She asked this last part softly and with compassion in her voice as she placed a delicate hand over mine.
“I take Xanax, for the shakes and some PTSD issues I have.”
She nodded, “That’s okay then. My name is Kate, by the way.”
I frowned, “I’m sorry I’ve been rude Kate, I’m Michel.”
After seeing Kate at the tattoo studio and deciding to get the memorial tattoo, I went back to the boat and vanished into oblivion, lying on the deck while the sun set overhead with a beer in one hand. The gentle rocking of the water lulled me into a semi-comatose state of relaxation. Before I knew it I was walking back into the tattoo studio the next day. Kate had a bed ready, sterile and prepped, and all the instruments of the trade laid out. It was not my first tattoo, but it was the biggest, and when she rubbed the stencil onto my back, it took up the whole space, from shoulder to shoulder, and down to my waistband.
“You ready for a good few hours of pain Michel?” She asked, grinning like a little she-demon.
I took a deep breath and stuck my face down in the hole provided.
“Do your worst pretty lady.”
The pain was therapeutic, eight and a half hours of catharsis. The endorphin high was almost too much, and my Xanax need only kicked in once I got back to the boat again. It felt like I was in a state of shock from the prolonged pain.
The healing process over the next few days was a bitch. The location of my ink meant there was dry and scabby skin I couldn’t reach to rub cream onto. It sucked being alone. I ran into Kate again two weeks later, and she invited me back to her studio for coffee. We had coffee, and then she asked to inspect her handiwork. Once my shirt was off, she trailed her fingers tenderly over the shapes of the horses, rubbing in a soothing ointment.
“It’s perfect,” Was all she’d said before I’d turned around and seized her roughly.
We were at each other like animals, kissing, biting and scratching, tearing at each other’s clothing. With her sitting on the edge of her own tattoo table I lifted her skirt and she slipped her panties aside.
“Here,” she said as she passed me a condom.
I started to roll it onto myself when I realized I was only half hard and my head was cloudy. The need, the want for a woman was there, but the ability seemed to be eluding me. I tried for a few more seconds to encase myself in the slick latex before dropping it, half open, to the floor.
“I… I’m sorry,” I managed to mumble while retreating out of the studio.
I left her studio with my legs shaking. When I got back to my boat, took a pill and climbed onto my bed, I hadn’t been with a woman in months, more than a year in fact. I wanted love, not empty sex anyway, but was a bit upset I was unable to make it happen nonetheless. I fell asleep at about three in the afternoon to the gentle sway of the water under me, and at six, my cellular phone’s incessant ringing woke me. With a sleep-fuzzy head I sat up and answered, almost expecting bad news, and not prepared for what I heard…
“Michel Deverroux?” The voice on the other end of the line asked tentatively.
I yawned. “Yes, who is this?”
Nobody had looked specifically for me since I’d come home, and I carried a constant fear with me of getting called back on duty, honorable discharge or not.
“My name is Murray Conrad, and I am an attorney in charge of your uncle’s last will and testament. Mr. Lechat passed away a week ago, and I have managed to locate you, finally.”
He hesitated. “Are you there Mr. Deverroux?”
Oh I was there alright, I was scrabbling for my bottle of pills.
“I’m here, I’m just a little bit shocked. I didn’t hear that he’d died. Andy’s dead?”
I grabbed at my water and saw the glass almost in slow motion as it fell to the floor and shattered into fine shards. I clamped the phone between my shoulder and ear, and crawled to reach for a bottle of water shaking.
“Keep talking, sorry, I just dropped a glass.”
I swallowed two of the tablets. Andrew Lechat was the last member of my family I had actually been in touch with, he still spoke to me via letters on a regular basis after I joined the military, and had taken me in when my mother and father disowned me when I was very young, and this was a huge blow.
“Yes Michel, he is dead and he left his house to you, the beach house in Galveston. I believe you are there at the moment anyway, in the area?”
I could have sworn my heart stopped.
“He did what?”
“He left you a house, and there is a sizeable financial inheritance too, including proceeds from the New York property where he lived for the past few years that he wished sold. Andrew Lechat was childless, and everything was left to you. He was a very wealthy man Mr. Deverroux.”
This was probably not sinking in correctly, and I dumbly answered.
“Yeah, um, I’m here, at a… Well, I’m here.”
“Good, I’ll courier you a stack of papers and a set of keys to the house along with the address of the house, it is standing empty, and yours as soon as you want it Michel. I understand you have just come back from Afghanistan?”
I nodded to myself.
“Yeah, I was there.”
Murray finished with, “I’m sorry, it’s a tough place, I did a tour myself, lost a leg to a landmine and then came back. Adapting to life here isn’t easy after… I’ll get those things sent off, you’ll have them tomorrow.”
The medication took me to my quiet place, and I sat there on the floor where I’d ended up after taking them, my phone slipping from my fingers as I stared at the pattern on the wood. Maxwell was dead, the child was dead, and Andrew was dead too, and now I had no one. My mother and father were alive, but they sure weren’t interested.
I spent the day sitting in the bar, my usual spot, waiting for the courier to arrive with my papers and my keys, I’d told them to just deliver here. It may have been a bit dodgy, but I thought it was a good idea. I also called Allen who said he’d met me with my supply and “slip in a little ‘something special’.”
The day was a blur of a number of beers and a number of pills, the ‘something special’s’ of which I couldn’t identify… I would later find out these little beauties were actually called Tramadol, an opioid-type painkiller, and stupidly you could actually buy them over the counter.
Eventually I received the package from the courier and signed for it. After grabbing my duffel from the boat, I took a cab to get to the house, giving the cabbie the envelope with the address on, because I don’t think I could have found my way to a toilet if my life depended on it I was so high. I figured I’d fetch the boat to a closer slip at a later stage. Upon arriving, I dreamily fiddled with the keys and I swear it took me an hour to find the keyhole; never mind get up the stairs and to the front door. I wasn’t sure I enjoyed this sensation so much, it was as though I was walking on a cloud, looking through a cloud, and everything I tried to touch was enveloped in cloud-lik
e fluff.
I didn’t even see what the house looked like when I fell into it that first time, I barely made it to the couch before I collapsed.
The next morning, the door was wide open and my duffel still lay on the stairs. A warm breeze blew off the sea, and my head ached ferociously. When I stood, swaying on my feet, my stomach heaved, and the nearest place I could reach was the open front door. As I straightened after losing my stomach contents over the rail and wiped my mouth, I looked straight ahead from where I stood.
My view consisted of a wide open snow white stretch of beach with a small border of dunes and succulents between it and the house, this was traversed by a wooden walkway. The breeze carried the smell of the sea and iodine scent of washed up seaweed. The entire scene was something straight out of a Nicholas Sparks movie and felt unreal.