I drove north, turned west on 90, stopping at a rest area after a few miles. Crushed sacks from McDonald’s emblazoned with tire tracks, used diapers, two tall Bud Ice cans sat by the curb. Four garbage barrels, none of them overloaded. Toilets had piss everywhere, flies patrolling the thick air. Magic-marker drawing, bottom half of a naked girl on the partition next to me, labeled pusie. Had to be sure we understood. Did look a little like a collapsed suspension bridge. A different hand had scratched GARY’S just before pusie. Graffiti in every toilet in the world, but nowhere as apolitical as home. Just the same old anatomy lesson—simple language and one-track minds. No wonder everybody thinks we’re pigs.
I finished and washed my hands in the gritty white soap, trying to splash my face as well, but the faucet wouldn’t stay on long enough. I didn’t lock the car, not sure why not, but I remembered the Tokarev in the glove compartment and hurried out, hands and face still wet. Maybe the next toilet I visit, I’ll scribble DEAtH to grate sAtan Amerika on the wall, some phony Arabic next to it, get the Homeland Security folks on point.
The pistol was still there. I locked the compartment. On patrol you never locked a vehicle— can’t recall if there was a lock at all besides the chain and padlock we put on the steering at night in the pen. In the field one or two guys always stayed behind, ready to drive, one on point with the fifty. Push the big red button when you start it up again. Locking a vehicle when I leave still isn’t a habit.
Backing out, more garbage blew across my windshield.
On returning from Germany I flew into Seattle, starved for grease and salt and fine-shaped asses on girls you could look at and talk to, any music you wanted, any book you wanted to read, or reread, any movie, anytime everything. I rented a car and almost immediately got lost, and did so every day, once making it as far as the Peace Arch at the border. I ran out of gas a couple of times. Got panicked once in a parking garage, took a ramp too quick and scraped a fender. Decided I got lost because I hadn’t really been driving since I was a kid, in a big city ever, no horizon anywhere, so many fucking lights and signs and movement, bikes and cars and buildings and faces; sometimes you’d be stopped in the middle of all of it, unable to go forward or back or turn, wide-open and, always, shit-piles of stuff on the road that nobody seemed worried about. Nobody watching for the one guy with the phone who would detonate the charge. People with phones everywhere. Horns blowing behind you and you miss the fucking green. I’d get back to my room and close the blackouts, turn the air on high-cold and open a beer, stare at texture on the ceiling.
I managed to make it to and from South Center a couple of times, far more manageable. From the bluff up near the freeway you could scout the whole structure, the parking lot, some of the roof, the entrances, the exits. Always the exits. Found Half-Price Books and loaded so many in a box, almost everything I’d read in the past and lost or left behind, and countless others. I’ve saved almost every penny since I re-upped in ’96, about 120 grand, and that month I spent 5,000 of it.
After a week of almost perpetual confusion, I settled into my room at the Capri Motor Hotel near the airport, kept curtains drawn, ordered in Chinese food, Mexican food, beer, even a hooker one night, nice girl with thick thighs, bright lips, clean teeth. She made small talk, rubbed my back, but nothing worked, couldn’t do anything with her, limp, lost, unable to turn off my mind for a second. I closed my eyes and wondered if she was going to run a razor across my throat as soon as I fell asleep, all of her kindness some kind of polished act. Begged her to sleep with me anyway. She stayed because she couldn’t get another assignment so late, but she was gone by 0500.
I started wondering if there was any place I belonged, started to think I was like the ANA guys, who could never really go home. No disability or insurance for them and, for a lot of them, once they left their village they were persona non grata, could never go back. Lot of gay guys in the ANA as well. No gay district to hang out in, stoneable offense if the Taliban got ahold of you. So they’d go in the ANA, probably because it was the only place to meet other gays, knowing they were going to die there.
One morning I just woke up, packed all my gear, got a taxi down to the bus station and came to Spokane, like a light clicked on. Original notion was to go back to Colville, but I hesitated, like you might at the door of a girl you haven’t seen in a long time, uncertain if you should knock. Maybe I thought I was going to meet girls, girls I knew in school, girls I’d thought about for a decade or more, who hadn’t changed at all, and the world was going to be there just like I’d left it. But I already knew it wasn’t, from my brief visit in the winter so many years prior, and in the end I settled in Spokane Valley. After I was discharged from the VA I stopped buying beer.
Climbing higher in the mountains, still westbound on I-90, I kept the Corolla at about sixty, feeling like I might have abused her the night before, terrified her into thinking me a maniac at the wheel as she listened to my every word, every laugh, becoming distracted and ultimately lost.
The cut on my arm was outlined by an inch of redness, throbbing with heat, getting infected. Hard to know what Danny used that knife for, what dried corruption was layered on the blade. Might have used it to gut a skunk or murder people—who knows what I might find with a real recon: meter men, hunters, hikers, Boy Scouts, Mormons and their bicycles a foot or two beneath that uneven turf. I pictured him puffing away, shovel in hand, body parts in the wheelbarrow, stopping to use his inhaler every once in a while. Occasionally he looks up at the jet trails suspiciously, and reassures himself he’s done a good deed, God’s work.
Shithouse rat. I hadn’t used that term very often, usually heard other guys say it, but now I understood it in a personal way I could taste. Danny was crazy, paranoid with a complexity no one could rehabilitate, and I wondered if it took a lifetime to get him there, or if the voices came while he was in high school or working at one of those numerous jobs he’d written to his aunt about, scampering around a half-framed house, hammer in hand, talking to himself, kneeling to pray at high noon while his co-workers sat on the front seats of pickups, doors open, eating their KFC and laughing at him.
I downshifted coming up on Lookout Pass, a long column of big rigs in the right lane, flashers on, crawling in low gear; one of them crawling a little faster had decided to pass. Head of the column was a fuel truck. I let off the accelerator and waited for the streak of blue smoke to dart from the trees, burst the side of the tank, waited to feel the heat as I got roasted with thirty other guys. But I’m not sure anybody sees the rocket that kills them, except Marsden, and I thought of the fins sticking out of him, red running out of the new mouth, lips, punched into his liver. He must have known that his ass was gone.
Such a trite way to put it: ass gone. We say something, an expedient summary of what we really mean but won’t talk about. Did Marsden know at that moment that he was going to be put in a body bag an hour later, that he’d never get married or see his hometown again, or drink a beer or love a girl or have a kid, that the numbing cold coming over him wasn’t the IV, the sleepiness wasn’t the morphine, but all of his blood abandoning him into the sand?
The traffic thinned at the peak and we all began the long dive into Idaho. I wondered how long it took Danny Kent to untape his ankles. I left the door open and I felt bad. Something big might have wandered in and eaten him alive, but he was so fixated on looking at the sky. Maybe he had some other equally crazy friend, one of the “others” he spoke of, and they’d drop by for a nice pipe of meth and find him there. And I thought of his face when I pulled the wet rag away, every facial muscle trembling, and what I’d read about the godawful dread one could cause with such a simple procedure, leaving a prisoner in every other way unmarked.
I was surprised that I did it, that it came so easily, that I might have actually enjoyed it, and I looked at my arm, felt my face and remembered it was not an easy day. I got my car keys back and didn’t have to kill anybody, thank you. I thought about Cheryl, if I would
ever see her confident face again, a face that might have made the sun come up or settled a war, and how I lost her card, and I’m not sure any amount of torture I could have inflicted on Danny would avenge that act.
–––
It was quiet at the apartment, no kid sounds or Jennifer’s voice through the wall, unusual on a Sunday. How could I describe to her what I went through with my “Uncle Danny”? Next to him she was a paragon of rational thought.
I showered until the water ran cold, used my back brush everywhere, over the painful, swollen laceration on my arm, even brushed my face. If it fit in my mouth I would have scrubbed my tongue.
Drying off, wrapped in a towel, I fell asleep on my futon with afternoon sun flooding the kitchen. Dreams came and went, but I didn’t awaken until the next morning, and when I did I was drenched and shivering.
I made a double cup of instant coffee, sat at the kitchen table with a blanket around me and opened the last three letters. I flattened the pages, then looked at the envelopes again. No Free in the corner. Some brittle, wavy distortion in the paper, as if they’d been wet at one point. I held the first page in the light.
Donna,
Was great seeing you, and my oh my your grown up. Surprized the shit out of me at Club North. Yes I want to see you again. What boy wouldn’t? (after that weekend!)
Yes, Ive seen “HIM” here. A couple of times when I was in Long Bien. Had a bunch of cameras and meters and shit around his neck, looked more like some body from a magazine than a soldier. Click click click like a jap tourist. Pictures for Stars & Stripes or some such bullshit. Tried to act like he knew me, like we were good buds from way back. Asked what I was going to do when we got back to the ‘real’ world. I said, hey asshole, this IS the real world. Not sure he’s going to live through this, head up his ass in all kinds of ideas. You were right in changing your priorities.
War can be hell, but mostly just reshuffling the deck, you know? War can be OPPORTUNITY. More about that later. I’m going to send you some stuff. Don’t open till I get home, and don’t show it to anybody.
Will be in country for a couple of months, way in country. See you, I hope, in Seattle, somewhere around Christmas? Things are winding down over here, gotta get what I can.
Andy
It took me at least thirty minutes to soak up the idea. “Like a Jap tourist.” My dad was that man. And this was a different man, Andy Kent. Andy Kent, who had a vasectomy two years before I was born. I sat there until my arm ached, and I realized it had swollen as if a large green bean were sewn beneath the skin, and I was sweating again. I picked up the two remaining letters and my still packed suitcase.
–––
I vomited in the VA emergency room lobby. They put an IV in my arm and ran in a bag of antibiotics, some other drugs, and drew enough blood, I estimated, to transfuse another vet.
Doctor was an older guy, said he’d been a corpsman. “Why’d you let this thing get so bad?” He cleared some lidocaine from a syringe and started stinging his way around the wound. “Got yourself a fine little abscess here.”
“Only been a couple of days.”
He cut an opening near my elbow and two tablespoons of rotten yellow curd ran out, smelling like decayed meat. He started pressing a strip of fabric into the opening. “This is a packing,” he said. “Stays in until this is almost healed.” He cut the end off, leaving a little tail sticking out. “Have your wife or girlfriend, buddy, pull out about an inch each day.”
“I live by myself.”
“You go to Afghanistan by yourself?”
“What do you think?”
“Folks? Family?”
I shook my head.
He wrapped Kerlix around my arm. “People live longer with a partner.”
After a couple of hours I felt better, but the doctor said I should be admitted, stay for a few days of IV antibiotics. I refused and thanked them anyway. They asked me to sign a paper saying that I might lose my arm or die if I didn’t go in the hospital but sent me off with a grenade-sized bottle of antibiotics, some hydrocodone, and a number to call if I got worse.
When I reached the interstate I turned into the sunset and headed back to the Yakima valley, driven to find Richard Nelson, or whatever remained of his family.
8
Four Nelsons were listed: two in Sunnyside, one in Zillah, one in Grandview. The first address was a condominium. An accommodating fellow of about sixty with a ruddy face and silver moustache answered the door. He had only recently moved there from Fresno to be the hospital administrator. The second address was a few rows over in the same trailer park where I’d found Millie Kent. No cars were in the driveway and I sat there for ten minutes or more, wondering what I wanted to ask, who would know or care about two kids’ infatuation thirty-eight years past. I was working a hunch, like they say in detective novels. A hunch that no one else would likely understand and might be considered invasive. We have satellites that can pass over your house twenty miles up, read the license plate of your car, while everybody is trying to protect the privacy of shit no one cares about. It’s as if people, disempowered from the real grand scheme, find something they can be in charge of and obsess over it.
Not long after I’d landed in Bagram, I took a picture of an Afghan girl. Just a girl sitting outside of a school. Everyone was fascinated at the time with the photo of a green-eyed girl on National Geographic, and I guess I was pretending to be a photo journalist. Her brother—or father, couldn’t really tell—went ballistic. At one point he started to pull a pistol and everybody took him down, cuffed him. The captain took my little Canon and held it next to his face and deleted the picture. He seemed to relax at that. We let him go and he continued to yammer at me in Pashtu, pointing, spitting. The girl had a skateboard, but I wasn’t allowed to take her picture. Go figure.
I got out of the Corolla and went to the door. No one answered. Shielding my eyes at the window I saw most of the front room, outlines in the carpet where furniture had been moved away. Only a blue velour recliner remained.
I drove back into town, past the Sunrise Convalescent Center, where an odd stab of intuition, a wild whisper, took my ear and I U-turned. At the reception desk I asked to see Mrs. Palmer.
The silver-haired receptionist fumbled about, said she didn’t know the residents yet, she was new there, when an aide, a tall girl of about twenty, came through the locked double doors.
“Mindy? Can you take this nice gentleman to see Mrs. Palmer?”
The girl regarded me uncertainly, then motioned me to follow her back the way she had come, and the doors clicked behind us.
“You’re the first visitor she’s ever had. I think.”
She spoke forward, ahead of me. She turned and simultaneously I noticed how breathlessly pretty the girl was, even the tiny gold ring in her eyebrow, and how foul the air hung in the corridor, thick with fresh feces and old urine. She stopped at a doorway and looked in.
“I think she needs to be changed.” And she walked off. As an afterthought she called back to me, “You know she don’t talk.”
I entered the room, a chrome-railed hospital bed set low to the floor, the frail sawbuck, rawboned outline of a human, turned, curled like a fetus toward the window. I stepped around the bed until I cast a shadow over the hollow face, the lenses of her eyes opaque, incapable of focus, unable to reflect light, joy. I fingered her wrist band. In large characters after her name, 03/15/32:DNR.
“Cora Palmer?”
No response.
I reached down gently, found her thready little trapezius, and gave it a firm pinch.
Nothing. I don’t even think she gathered anything deeper than her already agonal breaths. I stepped back.
On the wall opposite the foot of the bed, a cheaply-framed, color-faded portrait of my mother, age eighteen, wearing a cap and gown. Brown dust on the windowsill. Dead flies in the track of the window, small cobwebs. A courtyard was beyond the window, untended, a metal bench and patio table covered in
bird excrement. Dead flowers, a few wild thistles, a dying tree stood motionless in the heat.
I had the snapshot of my mother on the pier in Seattle, easy enough to compare to the graduation picture should anyone query my business there, but in the following minutes no one came to the room at all. After a while, I walked back up the hall. Mindy spotted me from another patient’s room and key-carded me out. I felt dizzy, hungry for fresh air as I got into the Corolla. The creature I’d just seen was only seventy-six but looked to be ninety. I wondered if life would end that way for me, feeling like I’d opened a grave. She was my grandmother, I presumed, unless another web of lies lurked in my mother’s family tree as well.
–––
I drove north on Washout Road, then west for twenty minutes of rise and fall without passing anyone, just the race of hops and grapes, then orchards, then fields of unknown short green rows. A right turn on Beam Road, another two miles and a right on Houghton Road, easily 500 feet above the valley floor, the fields low and thick with alfalfa. I slowed and stopped at the numbered, unnamed box and turned up the gravel drive, apprehensive, wondering if I’d run into Danny again, or somebody like him. Dust boiled up behind my car and blew past my window as I slowed to a stop and killed the engine. A meadowlark sang in the stifling silence of midday. A large, brick-red barn stood askew, door half open, empty inside. I stepped out and walked a few yards, stopping at a set of concrete steps that rose through the weeds a few tiers, leading to a large, charred rectangle, the outline of a footing, a collapsed fireplace, the melted, rusted shell of a water heater. About thirty feet by forty, the center was punctuated here and there with new weeds rising through the ash. On each side of the steps, a massive tangle of white roses struggled into the air, phosphorescent in the sun.
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 12