“Exactly how I found ’em. You were still living here then. I was so scared you’d kill me.”
“I still might. Goddamnit.”
She followed me downstairs, telling the two children coming out of the bathroom that she’d be right back. She touched the small of my back. “Your money’s still there.”
I carried the case to the car and she stood behind me in the grass. Crickets trilled in the dark and a half-moon rose over the trees on the hillside.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t think it was any big deal back then.” Her apology became an embrace and she leaned into me, arms around my neck, and it felt good. I found her waist and drew her pelvis against mine.
“No big deal. Just stuff from my childhood. Some of Mom’s junk.” I exhaled. I predicted her next words as she loosened her hold and leaned back.
“It’s awful late. You want to stay here, you’re sure welcome.”
My palms rested on her hips, my fingers in the belt loops of her cut-offs, and it required all discipline in the face of instinct to let go. “I shouldn’t, really. Got a lot to think about.” I kissed her on the forehead. I started to get in the car when an inconsistency occurred to me. “Fourteen years is a long time for meth, Kaye. Somebody got killed, didn’t they?”
“There was a gun. Somebody got shot and they blamed it on Tommy.”
I squeezed her hand through the open window. “Could have been you. You be careful.”
“Thanks.” When she leaned through the car window and kissed me full on the lips, I was already turning the key.
–––
I drove down the street and basked a little in her interest. Even if it wasn’t genuine, familiarity could make it seem so. At the roundabout Chevron I started refueling the Corolla, went inside and bought a twenty-ounce Mountain Dew. When I came out, a rusty white four-wheel-drive pickup had circled the island and stopped crosswise in front of my car.
“That’s him alright,” someone in the cab snarled.
Three guys got out and faced me, two heavies and a smaller man, all in their twenties, wearing dusty black welding overalls.
“You sure, Jason?”
The little guy swayed erratically, and I realized they were all drunk.
“His car, for sure.” He swung a fist in an arc and I leaned back, shifting my soda to the left hand. He stumbled and one of his friends caught his arm.
One of the big guys raised an eyebrow. “He thinks you’re screwing his wife.” I got the feeling he didn’t believe it but needed to back up his buddy nonetheless.
“He is screwing my wife!”
“I don’t even live here.” I turned to my car, but the other big guy grabbed my arm.
“We need to settle this, one way or another.”
I jerked my arm free. “I don’t know you guys, and I don’t need this.”
The little guy launched a sloppy roundhouse kick, but it came up in slow motion and I grabbed his boot with my right hand. We stood there face-to-face for a few seconds. He started to hop on the other leg.
“Leggo of my goddamn foot!”
I did, pushing up slightly as I stepped back and he fell flat on his side, head bouncing off the asphalt. A police car circled and stopped, putting on its grill lights. He seemed to recognize the three, then turned to me and asked if I’d been drinking.
“Had a beer with dinner, about three hours ago.”
He glanced at my Mountain Dew. “You can go.”
I started the Corolla gingerly and pulled away. I’d had three beers in three hours, and I didn’t need to be in any more police reports. Kid should enlist, I thought. Go to Afghanistan where everybody in the fucking country drives a Toyota, most of them Corollas. Could spend his whole short, stupid life beating them all up.
–––
I couldn’t remember anything about John pummeling me or locking me in a closet. Funny it stayed with him for so many years. An attorney for Microsoft. Probably one of hundreds, but who would have thought? I wondered what life would have dumped on me if I’d gone to college too, but that’s just a what-if game, and you always lose if you play it for more than a second or two.
Radio on low, I rolled down the window and listened to the late-night highway. Kaye could use a lot of help, there was good to be done there, and I pictured her on the seat next to me, us talking in low voices, cool breeze through the window ruffling her hair, kids asleep in the back.
I thought of staying at the house. Could even go back, to her body, her smooth skin, whatever lotion she covered herself with before she got between the sheets, and it would be one sweet night to remember. Garcia had that, every night. I probably wouldn’t need medication anymore if I had that. Warm sweet woman and kids asleep in the other room.
But it would be like doing my little sister, and what would Janice Dunham think? Twenty-nine years old and floundering in a tidal wave of dysfunction. I couldn’t rescue Kaye. Maybe she thought I was the same kid that lived with them at seventeen. She didn’t know who I was now. I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Hubby in prison for murder, her notion of truth was all over the place, and that could hurt you in an adverse situation—”We have enough ammo, honey?” “Plenty.” And you look in the can and it’s empty.
Janelle and Zach would be adults by the time they saw their old man again. Sort of sad but, then again, maybe better for them in the end.
Dunham killed someone once; at least, he told me before I left about killing a man, a convict, some murderer who broke out of jail in BC, border patrol called in when they thought he’d gone over the fence above Curlew. Found the guy in an abandoned cabin after sunset, almost black inside. Dunham turned to see the guy running at him and fired his .38, three shots almost on top of each other, mid-torso.
Guy had a hand axe, but Dunham couldn’t even see it. His point, he said, was this: “Learn to react as you’ve been trained, and you’ll survive. Don’t hesitate. Never ever hesitate.” His training had saved his life somewhere in those black mountains behind me.
–––
At a Texaco north of Clayton I got out and stretched my legs, bladder full of beer and caffeine. The restroom was on the dark side of the building, adjacent to an open field fully lit by the moon. The wind picked up and whispered through the firs. When I came out I stopped and looked across the field again, at a shed, and I saw them—dark robes near the trees by the shed, watching; whispers in Pashtu carried by the coming storm. I backed away, facing the field, but they never put their heads back up.
In the car I locked the doors, took the nearly empty Mountain Dew bottle and flung it out the window at the trashcan, where it bounced off and landed on the cement, the wind rolling it into the shadows. Enough of that shit, I thought. They don’t fight at night. No night vision, no stomach for the darkness. No Taliban in Stevens County. I looked at myself in the rearview.
“You are totally fucked up.” The bottle of Vistaril lay in the door pocket, but having pitched the Mountain Dew I had no way of washing it down. A sticker on the side said May cause drowsiness.
I wasn’t ready to rescue anybody.
3
Bent brass sticking out of the dust cover. How in fuck did that happen? That never happens, never fuckin’ happens. Can’t pull it out, forward assist won’t knock it loose, mag won’t drop. One by one my guys stop responding, and hajjis everywhere, a smudge out of the gray sky, mass getting bigger with dust blasted forward, mini-guns shrieking long streams of tracers. Blackhawk driving them all toward my position.
I woke up on my futon, the thin sheet soaked to my back over the vinyl upholstery, mid-morning sun flooding the kitchen table. A weed-eater growled intermittently below the balcony where I’d left the door open for air. I lay there till my heart slowed, sinking, helpless, like I’d caused the death of everybody I’d ever known. Just a fucking weed-eater.
I pushed the futon into the corner when I moved in, and sleeping on my right side I can see the patio doors in the kitchen and the front door down the
hallway. I keep the door open for air and so I can hear. The futon folds out into a queen, but that’s an unnecessary exercise and, unfolded, the pad is thin enough to feel the steel frame in the middle. Folded, it’s still wider and cleaner than just about any surface I’ve slept on in the past twelve years.
It’s all habit.
I thought about buying a gun, but I’d be more comfortable with a rifle, maybe a shotgun, and then I’d have to worry about it getting stolen when I’m not here, and the neighbors would be freaked if I carried it in and out of the apartment all the time. I bought a machete at Harbor Freight for four dollars, and that seemed adequate. And I still have the big Gerber I was issued.
I started some coffee, used the toilet, poured a cup and got back on my bunk, staring at the unopened suitcase. I didn’t have a Samsonite key. It seemed a shame to trash the latches. I’d lived without the stuff inside for so long, I could wait a little longer. I could take it to a locksmith, keep the bag and use it, but I didn’t think poppy red was the best color for me if I wanted to be taken seriously. I picked up the coaster and turned it over and over. Acorn Tavern on one side, an invitation to enter Kaye’s screwed up life on the other. My God, she’d turned out pretty. Just oozed sexuality. Probably not a wise path.
Someone tapped on my door around ten—three timid taps that I almost thought were across the hall, then a few braver forceful taps. I barefooted to the door and looked through the fisheye. Girl next door.
I opened the door a foot or so. “Hello?”
“I’m Jennifer, in 209? Your neighbor.” She stepped back a little bit as she said this, a physical apology of some kind.
I started to lean into the door frame, trying to put her at ease, and remembered I was still in my boxers. “I know. I’ve seen you. What’s up?”
“I feel so dorky even asking. Can you—are you good at—fixing stuff?”
“Depends.” I could fix an antenna for a SINCGARS, clear a jammed M240, replace a belt on a Humvee. I didn’t think she was going to ask for any of these things.
“My boyfriend put a hole in the wall. Last night.” She looked around furtively, lowered her voice. “If the landlord sees it I’ll be kicked out of here for sure.”
“Let me get dressed.” I closed the door, thought for a minute if I even wanted to follow through. Team-think. You get in the habit of helping whoever in your platoon because you all depend on each other, and what the hell else is there to do with your time anyway? I pulled on khakis and picked up my coffee. I’d take a look at her goddamn wall.
It didn’t occur to me until later that maybe her boyfriend should be coming to the rescue. When I opened the door she was still waiting, pigeon-toed, looking at the floor. I tried to seem casual, friendly, but my face felt rigid. I walked ahead and she followed.
“He still here?”
“He got mad and left. Has issues.”
“Got mad at you?” I asked and loosened up. “How could anybody get mad at you?” I was flirting, and it felt good.
She reached ahead of me and unlocked her door. “He was in the Special Forces.”
“Which one?”
“Jared, the dark-haired—”
“No,” I said. “Which Special Forces? Which branch?”
“I don’t know. I think he said the Marine Scorpions one time.”
“Oh yeah. Those guys,” I nodded. “They are tough dudes.” I’d seen Jared. He hadn’t been in anybody’s army. Walked like a pimp, swinging his hips side to side.
“He was doing a kind of martial arts thing.”
We stopped in her hallway and she pointed at a caved-in punch mark the size of a salad bowl at head level. Her head. None of it had fallen behind the sheetrock.
“I’m surprised you didn’t hear him.”
“I got in late.” A brassiere lay in the doorway up the hall. “I can’t do all of this,” I said. “Maybe get you started.”
I opened the Gerber and cut a square around the whole depressed area and pulled it out. She looked dismayed when I handed it to her. “Take that to Lowe’s or someplace. Get them to match the paint. They might cut a piece of wall board to size.” She looked at me in disbelief. She thought I was going to do the whole damn thing with a wave of my hand. “Get them to cut a two-by-four a couple of feet long.”
She stuck her head in one of the bedrooms and returned with a child’s notebook and a crayon.
“Get some wall compound, wall tape. Liquid nail.”
She wrote carefully—looking at me every other second or two—this magic recipe that was going to thwart her eviction.
“Try to catch me tonight and I’ll give you a hand.”
Her whole apartment smelled like an unflushed toilet. Keystone Light cans overflowed the garbage. Where are her kids, I wondered as I walked back to my studio. Un-fucking believable. What’s the fascination with bad boys? I bet he said he’d have to kill her if he told her what he did overseas. Helpless, wanting to believe so much bullshit. All the girls love a badass.
I’d watched Mr. Dunham repair sheetrock after John and one of his basketball buddies were cutting up and left a torso-sized pocket in the bedroom wall—even held it in place while he spread the plaster. It’s peculiar what stays with you.
Back in my kitchen, I sharpened the Gerber, oiled it, and put it in my pocket.
–––
I hooked the suitcase latches with a claw hammer and popped them loose. The inside was still arranged as I’d left it eighteen years before. A bundle of letters I never bothered to read. Loose photos, square, colors worn and faded by time: a boy leaning on an old, red Ford, hair to his collar, shading his eyes. Richard and Vicky written on the back in a girl’s hand, my mother’s maybe. I turned it over again. There wasn’t a girl in the photo. There were pictures of Richard on a ski lift somewhere, as well as him and another guy in swimsuits, skinny and wet by a canal bridge.
The big framed picture of my dad. White sock tied in a knot. Untied, Mom’s jewelry tumbled out. My old scout uniform and five merit badges. Getting to the meetings was always a gamble, Mom sometimes too drunk to find the ignition, and other times she’d forget to pick me up, last guy on the curb outside the congregation room at First Lutheran. Scoutmaster Fitch would drive me home. Eventually I dropped out.
Another sock, $420 rolled in a rubber band, dull gray-and-green money of the Eighties. The condoms brittle in their foil packages. A couple of model cars I’d built, an old Minolta SLR camera Mr. Dunham gave me; I used it to shoot yearbook photos but never bought a copy of the book myself. Mom’s death certificate, handed to me in that deaf-numb time after she died.
A high school yearbook, red faux leather frayed from the edges, spine broken and dirty. Found Mom, frosted lips and big hair, in the sophomores. Andrew Kent was pictured in the back with a sly look, not quite a smile, leaning on a ’70 Malibu at the local Chevy dealer, the salesman handing him keys.
A bundle of photographs followed, mostly black and white, hour-glassed slightly by a thick rubber band that broke when I slipped it off. Quonset huts. A guy in a Jeep. Some girls in the surf somewhere, bright and smooth like I imagined California. Helicopters in long rows. A blurry photo of a helicopter in the air, and another farther away, high above mountains, taken from a helicopter’s open door, machine-gun barrel in the lower left-hand corner. My dad with a mess tray in one hand, a can of Budweiser in the other. He had a stupid floppy hat.
I took the letters to the kitchen and spread them out on the table. Only one had a stamp, 6 cents, December 19, 1970, Fort Ord; the rest just said Free, without any cancellation marks. Return address was a serial number and platoon on a few, A. Kent on others, and a couple didn’t have a return. I unfolded the pages, some margined in blue, some typed on Army letterhead, others on lined notebook paper, yellow and brittle. Some were dated, others not. Some were signed Andy, others just had the letter A scribbled at the end. I moved them around and it became evident that the earliest were mostly typed, and initialed A. After those, one le
tter hand-printed and signed A, then all cursive scrawl and signed Andy.
An envelope without any writing, no letter, just a piece of tissue paper folded around a thin photograph, a different format, longer, the glossy surface crazed. I had to put it down, then look again, unsure whether what I saw was inside the boundaries of the paper, the image so incongruent with my expectations of my father, with my own calloused sense of right, my sense of belonging in this family of ghosts. I set it down. My father stood in a jungle clearing, naked from the waist up. Asian men around him wore uniforms but no rank or patches on their arms. In his right hand he cradled an FN-FAL, a rifle never issued to American troops, a long suppressor attached to the muzzle. In his left hand, hair gripped tightly in his fingers, a human head.
I picked it up again, sat back and tried to formulate some explanation justifying what seemed to have taken place. My father found the head after they captured a village. My father tried to stop one of the men in the picture from cutting it off a prisoner but was too late. The head belonged to one of his own patrol, was cut off by the enemy, and he was taking it back to be buried with the rest of the body.
The last seemed implausible because the head looked female, though it was hard to say.
All of the excuses I made were eventually upended by the expression on his face, his faint smile—a smirk, really, the same emotion coursing through him when he accepted the keys to a new Malibu at eighteen.
“My father’s son. I am my father’s son.” I folded the tissue over it once again, put it back in the envelope and set it aside. Must have blown Mom away. Might have been a good reason for her drinking. I sat staring at the envelope, and then pushed it as far as I could across the table.
I flattened the first letter, hand-printed in blue ballpoint.
Dear Donna, July 7th, 1970
We “ship” out tomorrow 0500 from Oakland. I always figured I’d be on some troop ship, but it turns out they fly you over, feed you in flight and everything. Will be in Hawaii for about an hour, will take lots of pictures –I’m joking.
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 5