I took the Sprague exit and cruised along looking for a nursery, settling on the garden department of Lowe’s, where, after coming to grips with my complete ignorance of horticulture, I let a skinny pony-tailed guy sell me a sack of potting soil, a crepe myrtle, and a yellow-and-red-striped pot to replant it in. “Girls like these,” he said.
I set the plant in my kitchen sink and watered it, then got in the shower. Afterward, I replanted it in the striped pot, pressing my fingers in the soft soil while I was drying off, walking around my apartment naked, feeling primal. “Back to the earth,” I said under my breath. A yellow bruise was present where I’d felt the pea on my leg. My arm was healing, dry and flat. Everything was healing. I skipped the underwear and pulled on some clean BDUs, shirt open.
–––
I knocked on Jennifer’s door and clumsy footsteps sounded within. A heavy Hispanic guy answered and pushed a trashcan into the hall. “Can I help you?”
“Is Jennifer here?”
“Sorry. She doesn’t live here anymore. We’re just moving in.”
“I’m Robert.” I nodded my head toward my apartment. “Next door.”
“I’m Ramon.”
He offered a hand and I shook it. A slighter man approached him from behind.
“This is Raul.” Raul put an arm around Ramon’s waist. “Yeah. She moved out, we guess. Owed a couple of months and the manager said if we cleaned it up we could have half a month free.”
Raul held the portfolio in his free hand.
“Those were hers,” I said. “Her drawings.”
He looked down like he’d forgotten he had them. “We found them. Under the bed.”
“Yeah. The bed.” I remembered the bed.
“You want them?” He held them forward through the door.
“Yeah. That’d be great.” I took them with my free hand. “Thank you.”
He glanced at my pot. “That a crepe myrtle?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, I just adore those.”
“You want it?”
He looked up at Ramon, who said, “It’s up to you.”
I held it out. “Think of it as a housewarming present.”
I could have kept the plant, but it would have died on my balcony after I forgot to water it. I’m not a farmer.
I sat on one of the kitchen chairs and looked around my apartment for a long time, feeling like it wasn’t really a home, just a gathering of my stuff behind a secure door. A storage container that I could sleep in. I hadn’t put anything on the walls. I opened Jennifer’s portfolio and held up one picture, and then another, but they seemed just as out of place as my bookcase, my calendar from the VA, my pile of half-empty duffels in the hall, and someone else’s thirty-five-year-old love letters spread out across the table. Just as out of place as me. I opened the last letter and flattened it.
Sorry Baby-
Seattle ain’t gonna happen. I’ve got a good deal here, way too good to let go of right this minute, but I’ll be in country longer. Made E-5 last week, but part of LRRP now, and fighting the war on my terms, and takin’ care of business when I come across it. More packages coming your way. Just put them in the bottom of your freezer. Please do not open, and do not discuss with your friends.
We’ll live good. Top floor at the Sands. Can’t wait much longer to have you again, see you dressed up, see you naked. In this day and age a man has to have variety, and I got all that with you. Just have to pull off this little mission I designed for myself. And US.
See you (ALL of you) in May.
Love Andy
What a fuckhead. So he’d been a LuRP. Fit him well. Should have taken his brother with him. Tough guys, but more than one story of craziness in the jungle. What was he sending her? Jesus H. Christ. Heroin. Had to be. No cocaine in Southeast Asia. Marijuana would be too big. Had to be heroin. Lot of guys doing that, a lot of guys getting caught, back in Vietnam.
I slouched in my chair, turned the envelope over and over in my fingers, then stopped. Pale wavy ink, a cancellation pale as a watermark, approached the corner but ended. The stamp had been steamed off. I picked up the previous letter and its stamp had been steamed off as well.
I grabbed the coaster from the Acorn and turned it over, picked up my cell and punched in the number.
“Is Kaye there?”
“Can I ask who’s calling?” It was Mrs. Dunham, and her voice didn’t sound any different than it had when I was fifteen, and I soaked it in for a second or two.
“Robby, ma’am.”
“Robby Kent? I was hoping you’d call. You know Kaye was so excited when we got home that morning!”
Her voice waltzed some kind of joy, turbulent with questions, and I answered everything I could and told her I was fine and no, my injuries were nothing, and it was good to be back and no I didn’t have a job, but I was getting a pretty good compensation and I was going to wait and can I please talk to Kaye, right now?
She hesitated. “She’s not living here anymore, Robert. Moved out a week ago, into a cabin with Don Boffman, north of Kettle Falls.” Another pause. “I’m sorry.”
Older guy, electrician. She was real happy. I said I was happy for her. The conversation droned on for a few more minutes and I promised I’d come see them, and I intended to. I wanted to see Mr. Dunham again. Thank him. Not sure I ever did when I lived there. I wanted to see Mrs. Dunham again as well.
I closed the phone, tumbling the coaster with my other hand when it occurred to me I could try to email Kaye. A few minutes later I had set up an account, the edges of the screen filled with pictures, some weather girl whose dress fell off, some lawsuit about a drug, and strawberry growers are furious after the president said he liked chocolate ice cream. Why should I care? Pushing my buttons. Pushing buttons has become the national fucking pastime. I opened a new message and zoned it all out.
KAYE—,JUST TALKED TO YOUR MOM, AND I’M REAL happy that you’re
happy. Sorry I dont type well, U R my first e-mail in years. You remember those letters
that were in my suitcase? DID U soak some stamps off? REAL REAL important
if you did. WHERE WERE THEY FROM/ ? Robby.
I watched my screen expectantly for about three minutes before it dawned on me that her computer probably didn’t ring like a phone, and I’d just have to wait until she saw it.
I went out, bought some groceries, put some gas in the car. Jennifer might swing by, I thought, to leave a note with her new address, or say goodbye; I picked up a six-pack of Coors sixteen-ouncers. When I returned, kayegirl27 had answered.
Robby,
Thank you I’m very happy, I think. Janelle and Zach are happy, and they say Hi.
I knew just where to look for those stamps, at the very back of my album. I had a picture of you in 11th grade there too. Just had two stamps—1 from Vietnam, really big, has a leopard on it. And another smaller one that has a sword stuck through a globe, says ‘Republique Khmere.’ Not sure where it was from. I’ll send them to you, since they were never really mine. Am going to keep the picture.
Love, K.
The very last letter had carried the smaller stamp. Khmere. Cambodia, last place he mailed anything from. Maybe that was where the head picture came from. Not sure why a man would want to send such a picture to the woman he cared about; even a sociopath like Andy would know that was a stupid move. Maybe someone added it to the envelope, personal little gag.
I liked looking at Love, K. I didn’t belong with her, but it was sort of flattering. I thought a long time about deleting her letter, but in the end kept it. Seems weird to me that we can just wipe out the thoughts people send us so easily. On my kitchen table sat a whole stack of thoughts from 1971, all of them unaltered from the time the ink hit the page.
The post-it note Zilker gave me was stuck below the keyboard. Together We Served. Garcia was the only guy still there at the end. Lori. We called him Lori. I Googled him and opened the TWS page. Great picture, Purple Heart, and—the fu
ck—he was dead. Two months ago. Memorials could be sent to Mountainair People’s Clinic, Mountainair, NM.
Looked up the clinic, phoned them. Nice people. Said he’d had an accident with a gun, gave me his wife’s number. I sat and drew circles around her number till the pen tore through the paper. Accident. With a gun. He didn’t have any fucking accident. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I phoned; the number rang, six, seven times.
A kid answered.
I remembered pictures of his kids. Couldn’t remember what they looked like. “Is your dad there?”
“I . . . I better let you talk to my mom.”
Fuck. More silence. Some muffled conversation, an adult, maybe in another room.
“She doesn’t want to talk to anybody right now. Are you the realtor?”
Are they selling the house? She sounded like a young teen. “No,” I said. “I served with your dad in Afghanistan.”
“Dad’s dead. She doesn’t want to talk to anybody from the Army. Says you guys screwed up his head.”
“I’m sorry.” The line went dead.
My screen margins were alive with refinance ads, weight loss gimmicks, single girls looking for a date, all of them with lots of cleavage, looking like models or weather girls, girls in magazines, girls that littered the sidewalk in Vegas. It was a scam, sure as hell, like the hawkers and pimps in every city anywhere I’d ever been a soldier, preying on the lonely. Nobody ever met anybody through a little, flat, glass-and-plastic device full of particles of light, and the longer I sat and stared at it, the more angry, the more cheated I started to feel, that the world had come down to this, one fucking sales pitch after another, while I was busy trying to stay alive for fifteen years, ostensibly trying to make the planet safer for people who didn’t know how fucking tenuous it all was. And now Garcia’s family hated me and everybody like me.
I opened one of the beers and sat at the kitchen table looking over the parking lot, slowly shredding the letter from Cambodia into little fragments. When the first beer was gone I opened a second, and when it was gone I threw my bag in the car and drove to the interstate.
9
I wanted to eviscerate Andy Kent, tie him down and carve through his neck, disembowel him while he watched, for merely existing, ruining my parents’ marriage, but some Cambodian had probably availed himself of that privilege decades ago. I would go see Danny Kent instead, and we would communicate like nothing he’d ever encountered. I just got angrier and angrier—at my drunk mother, at the war that doused my father with Agent Orange, the recruiter who tricked me into pissing away fifteen years, the hajji who killed Marsden. Angry at Zilker for not acknowledging this awful waste of a life, angry at the wheel in my hand, the glass of the windshield, angry at the sky, raging against the river of chaos that fucked so ceaselessly with my life. Angry at Garcia for fucking giving up. I got him through two tours; he got me through, we got each other through, and he comes back and offs himself. Fuck. Accident with a gun my ass. Meticulous guy, cleaned his Beretta like he was doing surgery.
The beers sat in a cooler on the seat. By the time I reached the Montana border all four cans lay folded on the passenger floor. I stopped at a Chevron, took a piss, bought a forty-ounce Mickey’s and a bag of pork skins. I was still thirsty. Around sunset I rolled into Plains.
My plan was simple—drunk simple. I would wait at that restaurant, Heather’s whatever, until Cheryl showed up. I would stay there and watch, day and night, and she’d be as glad to see me as I was to see her. I could sense this. I would just sit in my car, sleep in my car, until she made her rounds. People move. People orbit, obey the same physics as a bullet but don’t hit the dirt as fast. Trajectory is all over the place, but wait long enough and they come around again. I was always chasing the past and I was sick of it. Let them come to me.
The place went dark in sections, until only a light in the kitchen serving window glowed, and then that went out as well. Some girls and a guy came out the back. One of them pointed at my car. They all got in their cars and left.
Shit. I hadn’t used their bathroom. I had just decided to get out and pee behind their dumpster when a sheriff’s car pulled through the parking lot, slowed and looked me over, then sped up. When he disappeared around a corner at the intersection, I started my engine and cruised down the street until I came to the Golden Horn Tavern and Grill, where I slipped into a narrow parking spot at the end of the lot, outlined in railroad ties.
The noise in the doorway was some country song I’d heard before in some stinky watering hole for enlisted types near Fort Lewis. I felt at home, gone back in time, like these were my people, like they should be glad to see me. I stood at the urinal in a cramped little can with five other big quiet dudes, my forehead against the wall to keep my balance, then went out and ordered a beer and asked the bartender if he knew—and I used only the most respectful terms—a lady, a smart, beautiful lady named Cheryl, who ran a dude ranch in the area. He looked at my face, at my eye, maybe sizing up my alcohol content, and said no.
He took my five and returned two with a wet pint, not looking at me again. I turned my stool around and scanned each table, the couples playing pool, and the handful of couples that moved around a square dance floor not much bigger than a king-size bed. Lot of nice looking girls there, big hats and tight jeans, sterling and turquoise jewelry and belt buckles, pretty pink fingernails hanging onto their men. They were all too young. Or too old. Or didn’t laugh right. A short guy, maybe thirty, took the stool next to me, sleeves folded back, stars and stripes tattooed on his forearm. I tried to make eye contact, but he turned away each time I looked at him. Finally I asked, “When did you get out?”
“What?”
“I said, when did you get out?” I raised my voice a little bit and pointed at his arm.
“Out of what?” He seemed annoyed and looked away.
“Army.”
“I wasn’t in the Army.”
“Marine Corp?” I was probably shouting then. I shout in noisy places.
“Look, I wasn’t in any fuckin’ army. I just happen to love my country, okay?” He took his beer and moved down the bar where he sat next to someone that seemed to know him. When I swiveled back, the bartender was staring at me, and I decided right then I didn’t belong there, and I was out of control, and look how I’d pissed off this guy who loves his country and why didn’t I just get the fuck out. I knew I was going to come down, then, and come down hard, realizing these were not my people, that maybe I had to have a better hat, or boots, or be from there, or show up with one of those girls, and oh how stupid I felt.
The smell of the pines hit me like ice water when I stepped into the parking lot. I staggered in the direction where I’d parked, and a primer-black pickup rumbled into the spot behind my car and three guys got out, each pitching a can in the bed as they hopped down from the seat.
“Hey,” I said.
One of them walked over, face-to-face, and pushed his cap back. Indian-looking guy.
“You blocked me in.”
“It’s early,” he said. “You don’t need to leave.”
“Whas’a matter Charlie?” The driver was approaching.
“He’s leavin’. Says we blocked him in.”
“Tell him to go fuck his horse.”
Charlie was in my space, his face a bubblehead of stupidity and bad breath, some kind of provocative clown. I wanted to feel something, to hurt him, hurt him bad.
“He said to go fuck your—”
I punched him hard in the face.
Immediately, someone hit me in the side of the head. The third guy, just a blur to my left, and I back-fisted him and punched Charlie, who still stood there numbly holding his nose, three more times. Things got real kinetic after that: blow to my right kidney, a couple more, I spun and went down; tripped, pushed, maybe just too drunk. A lot of boots, my back, chest, shoulders. I covered my face, and it really wasn’t that bad, I thought. Just numb enough. I grabbed a boot and twisted, someone fell
, and it felt good, just what I needed; I think I was laughing, which just pissed them off more, when a boot connected with my right eye. Somebody was calling me cocksucker and a lot of other grunting. I was grunting too.
Headlights, sudden and hot as noon, enveloped the brawl. Diesel clatter shook the earth, eyes closed, dust blasting up my nostrils. The kicking stopped. Somebody got knocked down, somebody yelled “Shit,” coughed, then “Shit almighty,” a “Goddamnit,” and three pair of boots staggered away. “Cunt,” someone shouted, and coughed again.
I tried to get up and hit my head on a bumper, fell flat in the gravel, headlights passing on the street visible beneath the long, dirty under chassis of a truck. Heat felt good.
“I need to call your dad, Charlie?” a woman said.
More grumbling, unintelligible over the engine.
“Got my cell phone. He’s writing a ticket over by Harvest Foods.”
The grumbling receded until it was almost at the door of the tavern. Saw three blurry forms through the blood in my eye, retreating up the steps. A firm hand around my bicep helped me to my feet. It was Cheryl.
She opened the passenger door and helped me up, then took the driver’s seat. Blessed quiet inside, air conditioning like snowfall. She turned on the dome light. “Jesus, you look awful.” She turned my head side to side, then pressed a paper napkin above my eye. “That’s going to need stitches.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“It’s bad. I’ll drive you over to the ER.”
I shook my head.
“Well you are definitely FUBAR.”
I took the napkin and pressed it myself. “Jesus, what did you do to those guys?”
“Bear spray.” She put the truck in gear and backed up, measured me with a sidelong glance. “Plenty left in the can.”
She drove a couple of blocks down the highway. “Where are you staying?”
I shook my head. “I hadn’t planned that far ahead.”
“You’re in no shape to drive.” She swung into a parking lot, slowed and turned. “Looks like the Glacier is full.” We swung back on the highway, headed north a half mile and she slowed. “Looks like no vacancy at the Dew Duck as well.” She stopped in the parking lot and turned my head again. “That bruise over your left eye is old. You get drunk, beat up every weekend? Some people enjoy that, I’m told.”
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 14