by Nico Walker
We said, “Oh, shit. Look at that.”
We asked was he alright.
After a minute he said he was alright.
Then we huffed one last can of duster.
And it was alright, like we were kids.
PART FOUR
HUMMINGBIRD
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The airliner touched down at Fort Hood around eleven on Tuesday morning. We were bused from the airfield to a parking lot on Battalion Avenue. We were told to line up on the sidewalk because we were supposed to go running into a gymnasium where a lot of guys’ families were. A subwoofer was going in the gym, and you could hear the kick drum a hundred yards down the avenue. I was at the end of the line. We started moving up. Ahead guys were running into the gymnasium. The bass line was coming through along with the kick drum now. It was mostly joes towards the end of the line, mostly joes who hated shit like this. The dog and pony shows. I didn’t feel like I’d done anything to go running into gymnasiums about.
There were smoke machines and we came in through the smoke. The DJ was playing the refrain from “Disco Inferno” on a loop:
Burn, baby, burn…
Burn, baby, burn…
Burn, baby, burn…
The families were in the bleachers, cheering and yelling guys’ names out and waving and taking pictures and filming. The soldiers formed up in ranks. First Sergeant Hightower told us anybody who lived off-post was free to leave after they picked up their duffel bags. Anybody who was going to live in the barracks would report to the barracks and wait to be assigned a room. He said we were on pass till next Monday on account of that Thursday being Thanksgiving. He said we could fall out and we fell out. Guys looked for their people. Husbands embraced wives. Fathers embraced children. I had to get the fuck out of the gymnasium because I felt a panic attack coming on. Dry heaves and everything. And I guess I was ungrateful, given all the people in the gymnasium and the DJ. But they weren’t my people and fuck the DJ. You do the best you can.
Things went faster than expected at the barracks. They had everything sorted out already since they’d been expecting us. We only needed to sign for our rooms. This is when I got separated from Echo Company and reassigned to HHC. Suddenly I wasn’t a line medic anymore. My roommate was a random motherfucker I didn’t know. He had come to the battalion midtour and had been in HHC the whole time. I don’t remember his name. I remember he bought an Xbox 360 and he drank Pepsi and wore eyeglasses and had brown hair. He had a little headset so he could talk to his girlfriend in fucking Kansas or whatever while he played video games. That’s all I remember about him.
I went to the mall in Killeen and I bought a cell phone at a kiosk. I got ripped off on the contract. People had started texting while I’d been away and I didn’t know what texting was supposed to cost. I called my parents and told them I’d made it back okay. My mom said she and my dad were flying down to Texas because a friend of my dad’s was about to die in Dallas. They’d arrive in Dallas on Thursday, and Dallas was only a few hours from Killeen so it would be easy enough for me to get up there and see them. I said I’d try and do that.
I took a cab to Walmart and bought some clothes and some bedding and a table lamp. I went back to post and drank heavily. There was a 24-hour PX gas station–liquor store on post near the main gate, so drinks weren’t ever going to run out.
When I was drunk, I called Emily, and it didn’t go well. I was hurt as fuck that she wasn’t there. I wanted her there so bad. I said I knew she’d fucked around on me.
I said, “You broke my heart, you fucking cunt.”
She said, “What are you talking about? Baby, you sound like a psycho.”
I said, “Why would you do that? What the fuck did I ever do to you?”
She said she hadn’t fucked around.
It was a bad time.
* * *
—
WEDNESDAY NIGHT I was over on the Echo Company side of the barracks, and Borges got in an argument with Haussmann. I don’t know what it was about. But Borges tried to stab Haussmann and Haussmann got away and called 911.
The police came with North. North was CQ that night. The police weren’t MPs, they were Killeen PD. I had already explained to Haussmann that he had fucked up and that he needed to unfuck things, and Lessing had done the same for Borges, and it seemed like we were all on the same page. The police split us up. One of them was over talking to Borges and Lessing and the other was talking to me and Haussmann, and I helped Haussmann tell the police there had been a misunderstanding. No one had actually tried to stab anybody. There had been some loose talk. That was all. Regrettable, yes. But really no big deal. We were sorry for the inconvenience.
“Loose talk?”
“Yessir. Loose talk.”
He said we were full of shit. He said, “I think you’re full of shit and I think you’re full of shit.”
He was pointing his finger in our faces and everything. I asked him why he was acting like that.
“I didn’t fucking swear at you,” I said. “Why the fuck are you swearing at me? I just got back yesterday, motherfucker. I guess that shit means yer fucking welcome, doesn’t it.”
North told me to calm down. And I heard something in his voice, like he wished he could be the one arresting me. I felt sick and I tried to ignore it.
Haussmann said, “Look, Officer. I’m sorry that you got called down here and that I’ve wasted your time. It was a misunderstanding. No one tried to stab me.”
Borges was a ways down the hall with Lessing and the other policeman. Now he turned towards us and shouted, “DON’T LISTEN TO THEM, OFFICER. EVERYTHING THEY’RE SAYING IS LIES.”
Somehow nobody went to jail. And everything was okay. There were no hard feelings. We all went to Bennigan’s: Borges, Haussmann, Lessing, and I. The waitress was no less than a hundred months pregnant. She had the name Shawn tattooed in big script on the side of her neck. But it didn’t discourage Borges from trying to seduce her. He was unsuccessful. And the waitress said she wasn’t going to serve Borges any more Long Island iced teas.
Then Lessing said, “Is that motherfucking Lieutenant Nathan?”
And it was Lieutenant Nathan. We went over and said hello to him. Nathan was a good guy. Maybe he was a bit fucked up from the brainwashing. But who wasn’t? And he was glad to see us. He said, “How ya doin, men?”
We said we were good.
He introduced us to his friend, another lieutenant. Nathan said the guy had been with the brigade’s cav scout squadron.
“Oh,” we said. “Okay.”
Nathan went to take a piss.
We said to the cav scout lieutenant, “You guys had a tough time up there.”
The cav scout lieutenant said, “So did you guys.”
“Yeah. We did.”
“But I think ours was a little worse,” he said.
“But we lost more killed than you did.”
“That’s true,” he said. “But we lost all ours in two months. Yours were more spread out.”
Nobody took offense. That was how it was. The cav scout lieutenant told us about a staff sergeant of his who’d gone up in flames and jumped out of his track and run down the road on fire. He said in all the confusion they hadn’t known where this man had run off to and they’d spent ten minutes looking for him before they found him in a bush in a ditch down the road, all burned to death.
Nathan came back from pissing, and he said, “Lemme buy all you men a round, okay? How about that?”
We said that would be great and thank you.
“What’s yer poison?”
I said I liked Red Label scotch.
After he made sure we were all holding a double of Red Label he said he’d like to make a toast.
“To two smells,” he said, “pussy and gunpowder….Live for one. Die by the othe
r. L-l-l-l-l-love the smell of both.”
We drank the drinks. Nathan went outside and threw up in a flower bed. Borges said he wanted to go to a strip club. We asked the lieutenants if they wanted to go, but they said no, they didn’t. So we thanked Nathan again and we parted company.
Borges got thrown out of the strip club because he threw a Long Island iced tea at the DJ booth when the DJ wouldn’t play any Cypress Hill. Lessing and Haussmann got thrown out for letting on that they knew Borges. I was away trying to get a drink at the bar, and I didn’t know what had happened. After a while I figured out my friends were no longer with me. I didn’t go looking for them though. Maybe I’d have tried calling them, but I’d left my phone at the barracks. So I said fuck it and I finished my drink and I had another.
It got to be closing time. A dancer had just finished painting herself red, white, and blue to the Toby Keith song in the evening’s grand finale. I was at a table by myself, staring down at a gin and tonic I’d bought at last call.
Someone said, “Are you okay, honey?”
She was wearing plastic shoes. I said I was alright. I’d just got back with 4th ID and I was a little fucked up, but I was alright. She said some nice things and asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving. I said I wanted to go to Dallas to see my parents because they’d be there, but I didn’t have a ride yet. She said she was driving up to Dallas to see her family and she could give me a ride if I wanted. I said thanks and that would be good. She gave me her number and told me to call her in the morning.
I met her at the mall. I gave her some gas money and we went on our way, north on 35. We were halfway to Dallas when she asked me if I wanted any Vicodin. I said I’d like some. I saw the scar on her arm. It ran from her elbow halfway down to her wrist. She told me about the car wreck she’d been in. She said she’d been driving her niece and they’d got into an accident on the freeway. Her niece had got hurt too. Firemen had had to cut both of them out of the car. She said her niece had been terrified and screaming because the girl was bleeding from the head and help couldn’t get to her. She said she hated to remember that she had put her niece through that. I said it wasn’t like she’d done it on purpose, things just happened.
My parents were staying at a hotel in Fort Worth. She dropped me off in the parking lot. I wished her luck. She said alright and she drove away. I had Thanksgiving dinner with my parents at the Houlihan’s next door to the hotel. Then we went to the hospital to see the dying man.
His wife was 20 years younger than he was. She was his second wife. They used to work together.
My dad said, “This is our son. He’s just back from Iraq.”
The lady didn’t give a shit, but she tried.
She said, “My brother’s in the Army. He’s some kind of mechanic or something. They go behind enemy lines.”
We left it at that. My folks asked her how she was holding up. She said she was holding up okay even though his first wife and his first kids were giving her a hard time and she was all alone.
My dad said he wanted me to see his friend. We went into the room where he was laid up on a ventilator. There wasn’t much left of him, and each breath was like it would break him in half. He may as well have been dead for all the good breathing did him.
They’d had a little girl and a house and a golden retriever. We went to the house after we left the hospital, and my parents talked to his wife some more for about an hour. They said for her to let them know if there was anything they could do. She said thanks and that they were very kind. But she was just saying things. They were all just talking. And everyone knew that nothing would be alright.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I talked to Emily on the phone. She told me what I already knew, and I slept on the bathroom floor. My parents drove me back to Killeen in the morning. It was taking a long time because traffic was backed up for miles on account of an accident that would take the whole day to clear off the road. Some more people had been killed. And my dad got to talking about his friend some, how they were before they’d got old.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
A funny thing happened to me once: after we got married, Emily went and had electrolysis done, and then she took a series of lovers, and then there was the day that I found out I’d been something like the hundredth one to see her electrolysis. And this devastated me. But in all fairness: I had gone to Iraq. And in all fairness: our marriage was a lie. Maybe she’d thought I’d get killed and wouldn’t ever find out.
My last three months in the Army, down in Texas, I was drinking two fifths of gin a night. I shit blood. I farted blood. I jerked off in bathroom stalls, not feeling so good.
I went home for Christmas and there was a girl; she said she was on her period so I titty-fucked her, while I was wanting to die. She said, “Do you mind not hitting me in the face with your cock?”
I went back to Texas, and it was a little better. People knew what it was like. And there were a lot of them losing their shit down in Texas, so Texas was good like that: you didn’t feel like you were that fucked up as long as you were in Texas.
But then I was really getting out of the Army; my time was up. And you’d think that was all good, but it wasn’t all good. I felt like I was abandoning my people. Really they didn’t give a fuck if I was leaving or not, but at the time that was what it felt like to me, that I was abandoning my people. I thought, Maybe I ought to stay.
But I didn’t stay. I left. The fuckers made me sign up for the National Guard before they’d let me go, but they let me go and I got the fuck out. I went back to Ohio. I stopped off in Elba on the way. Emily wanted a divorce. So we got divorced and then I went home. I had a little money and started getting fucked up on drugs. I felt that if I had a little money and I could get fucked up on drugs then I could make it and something good would happen eventually. What happened was I got coked up one night in March and called Emily in the middle of the night; and I said, “I forgive you. I need you so bad. Are you fucking anyone right now? I don’t care what you did. I won’t mention it. But I don’t think I can do this without you.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
“Do I have to fucking spell it out?”
I had rented an apartment on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, and Emily moved in the first week of that April and tried living with me. She’d just graduated from college with honors and she was beautiful and golden so whatever: I really fucking tried. I bought some stupid furniture. I thought, This is what people do when they settle down. I took Emily to the theater, and I bought her a dress to wear. She went and returned it for another dress and she put that one on and I put on the one suit that I had and we took some 1mg Xanaxes and went to the theater. It was a one-woman show about Ella Fitzgerald. I’d bought the tickets way in advance. Emily liked Ella Fitzgerald a lot. Anyway we got there and we were the only ones dressed up. It was a lot of middle-aged and older people from the suburbs there, and they were all wearing L.L.Bean and shit. Middle-aged people with money, couldn’t wear a fucking sport coat or nothing. They deserved vomit. This was the life we fought for. The show was alright. Then Emily and I went home and took some more Xanax and blacked out and went to sleep and James Lightfoot tried to call me but I couldn’t hear the phone ringing and that was the night he got arrested trying to break into my apartment building except it wasn’t my apartment building; he’d tried to break into the wrong building. The cops found a knife on him. Drugs were involved.
* * *
—
MY FIRST Guard meeting wasn’t a smash hit. Everybody thought I was a prick because I was bad at hiding that I thought everybody was an asshole. I showed up high on OxyContin, and I’d forgotten to wear an undershirt. I don’t know, I just hated this fucking Guard unit because it wasn’t Echo Company and half of them were off-duty sheriff’s deputies and shit like that and the way they talked made me sick.
&
nbsp; I was starting up going back to school again. I was going to a state school downtown, and I’d go to school and Emily would snort all my cocaine and leave a note in the drawer saying she wanted me to stop doing cocaine. She was a real first-class bitch; this is why I love her to death.
It didn’t work out. It was 70% my fault. I’d been getting into the OxyContin pretty hard, and it made me feel a type of way so as I wasn’t about taking any shit from her. Also I was pretty fucked in the head, and I was being a sad crazy fuck about some horrors I’d been through. It’s true that you go through some horrors and it fucks you up. I don’t care what violent motherfuckers say; if it doesn’t fuck you up then it’s only cuz you’re just too fucking stupid. Still there’s no use being a sad crazy fuck about it because you kill yourself like that. And I was seeing ghosts. And I was talking too goddamn much. And I was making her miserable. I guess I wanted her to feel like shit.
But what killed it was when I fell in love with an 18-year-old girl from Barcelona. Zoë. Technically she was 17 and 350 days. But I didn’t do anything. I just took her out for pancakes. And Emily found out about it. Roy of all fucking people told Emily about how I’d taken Zoë out for pancakes. Plus he left most of the story out and made it sound like I’d been a real fuck about it. The thing was: I’d been drinking at Roy’s and I had asked several people if they’d like to have pancakes with me at the Severance IHOP, and all but one of them I asked were dudes. All but one of them weren’t this girl Zoë.
I’d said, “Roy, you wanna go to IHOP?”
He’d said no.
I’d said, “Joe, you wanna go to IHOP?”
The same.
“What about you, James Lightfoot?”