Finding Sgt. Kent

by Raymond Hutson

  It was after six and all I had was a partial address of an uncle I’d never seen, brother of a father I’d never known. Some guy who could barely write, who, even in his fifties, I estimated, had to resort to begging an old woman for money. Maybe he was a cripple. Maybe a vet like myself but couldn’t put two and two together anymore. The VA was full of guys like that, all of them some mother’s son with a life of dreams before them, long ago, that never came true. I would talk to him until something connected. He’d look at me and know I was his brother’s boy.

  Evening was falling, so I drove down I-82, avoiding the desolate back country and all of the voices there, crossing the shallow river in wide sweeps of the highway, dense stands of trees near the water’s edge, long shadows cast across rows of hop vines stretching across the valley, hills still rich and warm with sunlight. At a few points men stood in the river with their sons, fishing.

  At a Super 8 I took a first-floor room looking out at a courtyard, a dozen or so little kids, all squeals and pool toys and wet faces, and thought about that morning. Those kinds of delusions happen, I realized, when I’m idle. Give me a mission and my mind doesn’t start putting things together out of pieces of shit.

  The TV seemed to be all survival shows, people doing their worst to each other, everybody sort of a prick. Life has no good guys, they were telling me. Just survivors. Would like to put a helmet cam on each one of them and throw their ass out the back of a Chinook over Jalalabad, see how they survive.

  When my almond chicken arrived I gave the guy a ten and ate next to the window with a glass of ice water, trying to make sense of Danny Kent’s letter. I opened my bag after that, took each of my evening meds and turned out the light, the sky outside still pale gray, falling asleep to the splashing, the flutter of children’s voices, the sounds that children make before they learn to bully, or want, or feel hate or jealousy.

  5

  A cocktail napkin was wedged near my doorknob when I got home the following afternoon, CALL ME in ballpoint. I dumped my suitcase on the futon, went over and knocked on her door. No answer.

  I sat at my kitchen table and unfolded Danny Kent’s letter again.

  I worked for the forrest survice, helped put out that fire near Calispell. Then: les scwabb, learned that getting my hands dirty was ok . . . built an apartment house in Boner’s fairy. He seemed to be giving his work history—his start history, anyway—at a half-dozen positions, badly misspelled but with a bravado of accomplishment, and I wondered why he lost all those jobs. Debbie, whoever she was, had left because she could not keep the faith. In the last sentence he asked Millie to send him $3,000, money order would be best, reasoning we are of one God, one Family.

  Aunt Millie, and it gave me a small degree of comfort to call her that, hadn’t said, but I got the feeling she didn’t send him a cent. I wasn’t sure I could sympathize with a guy who quoted the Psalms to shake down an old lady.

  Then I started to appreciate how lucky I had been to have one employer for fifteen years, food and board—how rare that could be for a lot of guys, even during the Eighties. How I couldn’t land a permanent job with my associate’s degree when I was out. It could be really tough, and I was being an asshole. Construction jobs end all the time, I reasoned. Debbie leaving him could have spun him out of orbit for a while. I was still going to have to talk to him eventually; maybe I should brush up on my Psalms.

  –––

  A tap at the door. Her tap. I’m learning her tap.

  “You didn’t call me.” She stood arms crossed, pushing her breasts up in her tank top.

  “I don’t have your number,” I said. “You didn’t call me either.”

  “You never gave me your number.”

  “I rest my case.” I turned away, back to my seat at the kitchen table, leaving the door open so she could follow.

  “Thought you might be out drinking with your big macho Army buddies. I missed you.” She rubbed my shoulders briefly, then swiveled into the opposite chair. “You didn’t come home last night.”

  “Nope.”

  “Where’d you stay?”

  “I had to go down to the Yakima Valley. Sunnyside.”

  She crossed her arms and her cleavage rose again. “Don’t tell me you got a girl, in Sunnyside?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I bet.”

  “Look, I don’t have any macho Army buddies. I wish I did. And I slept in a motel. In Richland.”

  “By yourself?”

  “I think there were about a hundred other people registered too. What are we? Going steady?”

  All the starch went out of her. “Guys. All alike.”

  I pushed my chair back. “I’m trying to find my grandparents, okay?”

  “Why not ask your folks?”

  “They’re dead.” This startled her, like no one our age was supposed to have dead parents. She reached for my hands, but I swung them behind me. “Long time ago. Not a big deal.”

  “But you’re just now looking?”

  “I’ve been busy.” I could say that my psychiatrist told me to do this, but she didn’t need to know that. I felt scrutinized, invaded. You shouldn’t feel like that with someone you’ve slept with, had sex with. I was just learning about pop-ups on my laptop, how intrusive they could be. I started to feel the same way about her. A thump came from the wall followed by exuberant giggling. We both turned. “Kids home?”

  “Yeah. Sounds like I better get back.” She stood up, the scent of musk oil, roses, drifting past.

  I caught her hand. “Still want to fix me dinner?”

  “Not much in the fridge right now.”

  I plunged my other hand into my pocket, brought out two twenties. “Surprise me. I’m easy.”

  “I’ll put the kids to bed about eight. Sometime after?”

  “Sounds good.”

  She started to leave.

  “I missed you too, Jennifer. And the lizard.”

  She twirled with a big grin and spun away.

  –––

  She broiled a fillet of salmon with some crushed nuts, and sautéed asparagus. Bottle of Barefoot Chardonnay. Two candles, each half burned down, in molded glass candlesticks. The children’s unfinished mac and cheese still visible on the counter; they giggled from their bedroom and kept peeking down the hallway until she went to their room and, after a few minutes of silence, returned and sat down.

  I refilled her glass. “Duct tape?”

  “That’s cruel. I just read them a story.” She set her plate aside and scooted her chair closer. “You have any kids anywhere?”

  “That I know about?”

  “Don’t be cheap.”

  “I was married once, for about two years. No kids.”

  “Tell me a war story then.”

  “About my marriage?”

  She smirked. “No, silly. About what you did. Over there.”

  I halted right there. I thought about my last talk with Zilker, and it would put a cold wetness on the whole evening. She was wearing a white tube top and cutoffs, low-heeled sandals, some perfume that sent all kinds of signals, and I wanted exactly what she wanted, I thought, and she didn’t really know that all the stuff in my head could give her and her children nightmares for years.

  “We lived in these barracks, sort of pop-up huts. Like the Quonset huts in old war movies, but smaller. With insulation.”

  “The round things.” She scooted closer. “The round things,” she repeated.

  “And there were eight of us in there, a squad.” I laughed. “And some of ’em, most of them, they snore. I used to try to breathe out when they snored, like it wouldn’t be as loud.”

  “Eight is a lot of guys.”

  And I could tell by how she wrinkled her nose that it sounded stinky to her. “There’s eight guys in a squad, unless one of them gets killed.”

  She went silent.

  “But nobody—” And I thought of Marsden then, and an RPG right in his stomach that didn’t go off,
and him lying against a wall, his face all screwed up in a scream, but he couldn’t because it hurt too much to breathe, and you could see the fins sticking out just below his vest, and if it had hit the vest it would have gone off, killed him right then, and probably the blast would have gotten the two of us closest to him. Garcia crawled over and just pulled it out and laid it there, and then you could tell it occurred to him it still might go off, and he dragged Marsden back through a doorway and dumped a couple of quick clots in the hole, but they just floated away and we all started stuffing in every bit of packing from our kits, Marsden beginning to get it, that this wasn’t good, and he was looking at my face, then Garcia’s, back and forth with that big question and wanting to read something that we weren’t going to give him, just staying busy, poker-faced, then Marsden getting quieter and quieter. Chopper was there in eighteen minutes, but I knew he was dead when we loaded him, all of his blood in the dirt and looking like we’d cleaned a deer there. “Nobody in my platoon ever got killed, okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.” She stepped behind me and massaged my shoulders. “You’re so tense. Got just what you need.” She reached over the cabinet above the refrigerator, laid a Ziploc on the table.

  “Pot?”

  She tossed some papers on the table.

  “I really can’t do that.”

  “Come on. We’re going to have a lot of fun,” she singsonged, swaying side to side.

  “You go ahead.” I remembered my medication. “I’ll be right back.”

  At my apartment I found a Vistaril, took half of a Viagra, and stood looking at the wall, imagining her through the plaster rolling a tight little joint. Pulling it through her mouth to wet it a bit. We used to patrol with the ANA. We were supposed to be training them. For fuck’s sake, we had to train them to put their helmets on the right way; sometimes they’d be backwards. Most of them stoned all the time. Break ranks in a firefight and charge, or scatter, and we spend half a day burying them. Too fucked up to know if their AK was loaded. Hashish use was just another kind of suicide for a soldier and everybody with him. Stoned people get too focused on themselves, no empathy; your leg is blown open and they say “Bummer, man,” and go back to staring at a little bump on the back of their hand. If our own guys were found with the stuff, even on liberty, somebody would bust them up, put them in the infirmary, even break an arm. You didn’t want somebody like that in the field with you.

  I thought about her tan and what she wanted and tried to put all of it out of my mind. Just for tonight, I thought, maybe she’ll learn something from me. When I got back to the table she was waiting. She’d rolled two.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “You’re used to it.” Downed the rest of my wine. “Might mess with my medications.”

  “You know you can cook with it, too.” She gestured at the remaining salmon, flecked with nuts and dark green specks.

  “That’s not parsley?”

  She shook her head slowly, sweetly, satanic.

  “I don’t feel any different.”

  “You will.”

  The tiniest wave of anger rose in me, betrayal, then evaporated like steam from a mirror; I forgot what I was going to say.

  She took a long drag, held it a few seconds, then blew a smoke ring. “You were going to tell me a war story.”

  I smiled, leaned back in my chair, shook my head. The room swayed in increments.

  She got a serious expression, took another drag and held it while the sweep hand on the kitchen clock made three quarters of a rotation. When she exhaled she squeaked, “Please?” Then giggled.

  “I can’t tell you one because it would be a lie. Do you understand?” We both leaned over the table, inches from each other, her eyes like bright little motors. “War doesn’t have a beginning or an end, or any kind of plot, you see?”

  She nodded.

  “Just a bunch of scary chaos. A lot of boredom in between. So, if I tried to tell a story, something would have to be made up.”

  She began to stroke my face like I was a puppy.

  “People want to hear stories to be entertained.”

  She kissed the side of my mouth.

  “War just doesn’t come close.” I took her face in my palms. “You have any of your paintings you could show me?”

  “Drawings. Pen and ink.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “It’s been a long time.” She went to the hall closet, dug around for a few minutes, tossing backpacks and shoes and a folding stroller onto the carpet behind her. “Here.” She laid a lopsided plaster oval on the table. “Brenna made this in pottery class.”

  It looked like a try at a bowl, or an ashtray, rainbows of color spread with fingertips, unfired plaster. “That’s pretty good. And pretty, too.” I held it closer to the candle. “I thought you were going to show me your drawings.”

  “Oh yeah.” She rotated a finger at her temple. “Silly me.”

  She went back to the hall closet, stared at it quizzically for a moment, then disappeared into the bedroom. A few thumps, the roll of a closet door. “Why don’t you come back here,” she called.

  A candle was lit on the nightstand. A CD played soft, throaty harp music. She’d unzipped a portfolio and opened it, covering most of her bed; a stack of drawing paper, frayed at the corners, fanned like a hand of cards; the top sheet a pencil sketch, edges marred by eraser—a girl with two braids, determined, solemn. I looked at it, then looked at her.

  “We all had to do a self-portrait.” She flipped it over. “Didn’t mean for you to see that one.”

  “It’s good,” I said, and turned it over again. “You were so serious.”

  “I was eighteen.” She stared at the face impassively. “I don’t think I drew teeth very well.”

  We flipped through the folder, one sheet after another, and she stopped longer on a few, on some with a start, as if she’d never seen them before, or had but meant to discard them. A still-life of flowers. A staircase leading to a black doorway. A wooded road, tangles of branches. We stopped at a garden scene, floods of transparent yellows and orange and violet. “I tried to watercolor that one.” She dragged a finger over it. “Never finished it.”

  “It’s not too late,” I said. I spotted a little red triangle near the center. “You put a gnome in there!”

  “Yeah. You’ve got an eye for detail. Instructor never even saw it. Or didn’t say anything if she did.” She smiled, looking at the forgotten sheet. “Two more, I think. Can you find them too?”

  I studied it for a moment and found two tiny figures, at the edge, crawling beneath a fence. I pointed them out.

  “Very astute.” She closed the portfolio carefully but then tossed it on the floor beneath the window. The sheets fluttered out, scattered across the carpet. “Long time ago.” She turned off the bedside lamp and closed the bedroom door.

  “You could get a book, an easel,” I said, but she was against me, her tongue just above my collarbone.

  “So, what did you really do, in the Army?” She started to unbutton my shirt.

  “I had to find gnomes,” I whispered. “Bad gnomes with guns, so far away nobody else could see them.”

  She tugged at my belt buckle, giggling and growling.

  “I had to shoot their little caps off.”

  She spread her fingers inside the waist of my jeans and slid them down, pushed me back on the bed and fell upon me, her tongue, her mouth on every angle of my body. I arched, neck over the edge of the mattress in speechless euphoria, while her nails traced the length of my torso, fell into the small of my back. The vacuum of her lips, the ballet of her tongue might’ve swallowed me altogether, and I wanted her to. A small gnome looked up at me from the floor in the flicker of the candlelight.

  “Too late, too late,” she whispered.

  –––

  Something was in my nose—delicate, inquisitive antennae. Then my ear, then a firm little tug and a shot of torment. I opened my eyes and the gnome was there, a corona of light around his head. No, a littl
e boy, his fingers embedded in my earlobe.

  “Are you our new dad?”

  Jennifer groaned under the covers. “Casey, go to your room.”

  “Hungry.”

  “Mommy will get up and make breakfast soon. Go play with Benny-bunny. Don’t wake up your sister.”

  I closed my eyes to the glare and listened to little feet waddle away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I should have locked the door.” She sat up. “Fuck. It’s eight thirty.”

  “You have to be at work?”

  “Pre-school. I’ll just say they were sick.” She looked at the drawings scattered over the floor. Casey had stepped on one, tearing it a little. “Shit,” she whispered, and turned to me with the same morning-after hesitation I’d seen on her face three days before. I was part of the mess she had to clean up. “So, you were a sniper.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Shot people that didn’t even see it coming.”

  “Nobody ever sees it coming.” I took her hand and tried to joke. “If they did they’d just duck.”

  She pulled away. “It’s not funny.”

  “You’re right, it’s not. But it was my job.”

  “For twenty years?”

  “Fifteen. And not even that. Just while I was in Afghanistan. Jennifer, everybody I shot had a gun. Every one of those guys would have killed ten or twenty American soldiers.” I stood, pulled my pants on. “I saved 400, maybe 800 guys. A lot of them eighteen or nineteen.”

  “So that’s the way you look at it?”

  “I thought you said a girl feels safe around a guy that can kill someone if they need to.”

  “I never said that. Never!”

  She was right, I thought. It was Kaye.

  “Any one of those guys could be saying the same thing, how many people they saved, to their sweetheart.” She glared at me. “If they were still alive.” She pulled on her bra. Her eyes narrowed. “Eight hundred? How many men did you kill?”