She showed me a picture of her daughter, Danielle, off in Denver at her father’s for the summer.
“Heartbreaker,” I said. The girl really was stunning, even at twelve—a young Victoria Principal. “I thought you said she didn’t know her dad?”
“She didn’t, until he surfaced again after five years.”
I handed the photo back.
“He took off and went to law school.” He was reliable, she said. Had remarried, a girl named Beth. Beth was okay. Danielle liked her. Wasn’t Beth’s fault she had no judge of character. We talked until the sun started to set.
An old man moved across the farthest limits of the drive, just beyond the barn, shuffling with two forearm crutches.
She noticed. “That’s Dad.”
“He doesn’t stay in the house?”
“Has a cabin, other side of the barn. First house he built for my mother after he retired. When she died, he moved out there. Better view of the pasture.”
The figure slowed, turned our way and raised a hand. Cheryl waved back.
“Doesn’t he want to join us?” I tried to sit a little taller.
“He gives me a lot of berth. If he sees you here a second or third time, he’ll get curious.”
The figure shuffled beyond the corner as the last streak of sunlight faded across the field.
I explained I had some business to take care of in Spokane. She followed me to the car and watched while I stuffed my bag and tossed it in the trunk. I leaned against the door and felt awkward. She took a small step forward and touched my eyelid.
“It’ll heal,” I said.
“Does your mouth hurt? Your teeth?”
“No.”
She leaned forward and kissed me and stepped back as quickly. “I’d like my dad to see you a second or third time.”
“I’d like that too.” I turned into the seat of my car, feeling clumsy, extremely un-clever in my answer. I rolled down the window and offered her the key she’d given me.
“Keep it. Doesn’t fit any other door in the world except that one.” She slipped another card in my hand. “Don’t lose this. And stay out of bars.”
I backed the Corolla around her and she never moved. As I drove down the road she waved briefly, then headed back to the house.
–––
I was gambling. Gambling with time. It’s all we ever really have, all we’re ever given. You can turn time into money, or smoke, a big old house on the hill, or a whole bushel full of brass casings. You can turn it into hate. You can sell it. But when it’s all gone, you got to go. I glanced at my face in the mirror. I’d have to spend at least a week or two not getting beat up.
Climbing into the mountains, up the pass where only a week ago I imagined RPGs coming out of the woods, my head was clear, full of light, as if the sun had never really set. No trucks were on the road, and maybe it was the width of the pavement, the cool smell of the wind blasting in the window, the softening of the evening into night.
In another two hours I was falling out of the mountains, out of the night, descending on Lake Coeur d’Alene. Moving lights scattered near the water’s edge in a marina, one or two headed for port. I imagined being out on the water, something I’d never really done, and wondered what it might be like to sit in the stern of a boat with Cheryl, headed home, to some place anchored, warm, secure. I’d have to ask her about boats.
I took the first exit, pulled into a Tesoro station and filled up. A Dodge pickup pulling a horse trailer from Wyoming pulled in on the opposite side of the pump. In the fluorescent lights, two brown-faced horses stuck their heads out and looked at me. I remembered being on horseback once; the Dunhams took me up near the border, my legs grasping one giant, warm creature that was thinking, carrying me somewhere, knowing he could kill me, but loyal to my safety. It was intimidating and still it didn’t last long enough. Cheryl could have that feeling anytime, every day, and I wanted to drive right back to her.
Don’t be too eager. She said she wanted to see me again. Not exactly; she wanted her dad to see me again. A retired Air Force colonel. An officer. Not an NCO, but a real live officer—who couldn’t talk. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle that, leave a good impression. I wasn’t sure I left a good impression with Cheryl. Might be one of those women who compares every man she meets to her daddy.
But the rest of the evening at home I couldn’t stop thinking about her, imagining everything I did—opening mail, loading the washer, tearing open a frozen pizza—with her nearby; how it would be fun and novel, and all the stuff we’d talk about, and every few minutes I had to tell myself, Don’t be so fucking eager. She probably changed the lock on that cabin minutes after I left.
The last piece of mail was a plain white envelope, return address Rural Route 7, Box 11909, Granger, WA. I set it aside and stared at it like a ticket for a journey I wasn’t prepared to take. Went to bed instead, thinking about having Cheryl next to me one second, then thinking how stupid I might act, how this whole obsession to be close to someone was just absolutely the worst addiction a person could have and what a major fuckup I was about to become. I think I had bad dreams after that.
The next morning, I made a pot of coffee, sat down, opened the letter.
Dear Robert,
It was a joy to meet you, and I am sorry you felt like you needed to leave so soon. It must seem very odd to discover you are part of a family you never knew about, and not part of another.
Your arrival has added 10 years to Larry’s life, he just about gave up after Ricky died and seeing you has made all the difference. Seeing you has given us closure on many questions, and opened a few new doors. It’s the open doors in life that keep us moving forward.
I am sorry we lost Ricky when we did, I think the two of you have much more in common than you think. Like your father, I am sure you’ve been taught some hard lessons; war can be a cruel teacher. Whatever they are, embrace them, you certainly paid enough in “tuition.” Something is learned from everything, and I think if your father was here now, that’s what he’d say. That’s my grandmotherly advice. Then go fill your life with deeds that people will remember you for.
We’re both too old to drive very far out of the valley, and hope you’ll come back for another visit soon.
Rita and Larry.
“Come back soon.” I didn’t know if I could do that; the prospect felt like donating a kidney, like I’d have to work on my facade, hide all the little cracks and crazy shit that might spill all over their life and make them regret the invitation. They didn’t want to see me; they wanted to look at their dead boy again. Why couldn’t they see that? Didn’t they see they were fooling themselves? A kind of lie. I didn’t want to be part of another lie. It was hard for me to connect with a past I never really had; easy for them to connect with a future that never came.
Over there, I spent years wanting a family to write to, some counterbalance to my life, and now that I was here and they were right there, a few hours away, I didn’t know what to do. The Nikon rested on the kitchen table, a weight on the flattened letters. I sat and played with it, opened and closed the back, held the viewfinder to my eye. My father had looked through that same glass, at a completely different world.
10
I let a week pass, detailed the car, changed the oil, replaced filters, washed my kitchen floor, the baseboards, soaked every glass in vinegar, put odd ones in a sack by the door until I had four little ones and four pints left. Sharpened all the knives. Bought some black oxfords and polished them to mirror finish. No class A to go with them, but it didn’t matter. Thought I’d feel better but didn’t. Wanted to fieldstrip a rifle, any rifle, but didn’t have one. Looked in the paper to see if there were any jobs working on guns but didn’t find any. Bathtub got scrubbed, toilet scraped flawless, fixtures polished. Soap would spot them and I’d wipe them off again.
Sitting, turning the key over and over in my hand, I didn’t know if I could trust Cheryl. What does she really want? Maybe it was the sy
mpathy thing, but they always run out of sympathy after they know you. What’s exotic and dangerous from a distance can get real ugly real close.
I hadn’t trusted Jennifer. I sure as hell wasn’t ready to trust Kaye, almost as soon as she opened the door. I didn’t trust the scan codes in the grocery store, the few people on the bus at night who looked at their shoes, people who wouldn’t look you in the eye. The headline on the magazines at the checkout, the stories about Afghanistan on the radio, all full of spin that the country was growing ever more democratic, ready to sit at the table with the grownups. Every day the Taliban murdered more people. If you couldn’t hold a truth in your hand, like a bullet, it didn’t exist. You couldn’t trust anything.
I started to understand I probably couldn’t trust my instincts, my understanding, even my memory. I drove up and down the west side of the city, all these thoughts going around and around in my head, three nights in a row. I watched the eyes of the clerk when I bought gas, the girl in the grocery, the woman behind me in line, and the guy in the BMW next to me at a light, who locked his doors when our gazes met, and then I realized—they didn’t trust me either.
The following night I was headed home out of the Kmart parking lot, turning into the outside lane, taking advantage of someone turning in, when the car behind them rushed forward with a long horn blast, high beams all over my interior. I pushed down the mirror, sped up, but they stayed right on my bumper, side to side, at one point like they were going to jump the curb, pass me on the sidewalk. Apparently, I’d pulled into a void he intended to fill. Enough of this shit, I thought. I turned at a Subway a half mile farther, and they were on my ass, scraped my bumper. The driver got out, I could see him marching toward me in the side mirror, head shaved, Fu-Manchu moustache, tattoos all over his neck.
“Hey, asshole!” He kicked the side of my car. Black steel-toed boots—another welder. Closer, he kicked in the side of my rear door. I got out and stood and he stepped back, sized me up. Another guy got out of the other side, came around the front. I didn’t look at his face, just side-kicked, heard him suck it up and he was out of the fight. The driver made another kick, I blocked, he caught me in the side of the face and I punched, punched again, punched fast without focus, no control, something coming apart inside of me, and I thought I might kill him. He swung and I sidestepped, backed up. I was starting to tremble; he’d come into my space, where no negotiation was possible, but I could easily fuck up the rest of my life in a heartbeat. Gotta have control.
He turned his head and coughed a loogie onto the upholstery, looked at me and grinned, his lip bleeding. “Jap crap car.”
I watched his arms, his feet, his balance.
He pulled a sheath knife from behind with his left hand, lunged, and I caught him, pulled it across, my right elbow into the back of his, both of us against my car in one motion, my knee up in his gut so hard I wanted it to come out his back. Something cracked, he gasped, another elbow in his chest, then the right again and he went down, knee into his arm into his ribs, crushing his head against the pavement. I grabbed the knife, set the tip in his eyelid. My hand was shaking, and it cut him a little bit.
He snorted, frothed, torso twitching.
“What the fuck does it matter what I drive? What gives you the fucking right”—sweat dripped from my chin onto his face—”to run me off the road? Try to kill me?” He had a tattoo on his forearm, a dagger through a skull. “Answer me now. I’ll shove this up to the hilt.”
He whined, coughed and I mashed down harder. He couldn’t take another breath. “What did I do to you? What’s your excuse? Taliban would crucify you to a tree, you worthless fuck.” I looked at the tattoo again. A smudge of ink showed at the rolled-up cuff, and I sliced the sleeve open. An anchor. U.S.N. “You were in the Navy?”
He glared sidelong at me, nodded. I didn’t know what to say. We just glared at each other for another half minute.
A crowd had gathered and when I stood, turned, knife still in hand, they retreated clumsily. I tossed the knife on the Subway roof and they watched it rise, scattering like it might bounce back, then seemed to relax. I couldn’t see the guy I’d kicked, or anybody that looked like he’d been kicked. I planted my heel on the driver’s fingers and he stared at my shoe. I moved my foot and he scampered off to his big old oxidized Pontiac, dragging his left arm, a moment later smoking the tires backward, then over the curb into traffic.
I shook to pieces, like only my clothes held me together—had to stand holding the edge of my roof, looking down at his foot mark in my rear door, his snot on my seat. Someone touched my arm. I stiffened for a blow and turned. It was a black boy, about ten.
“Sir? You dropped your wallet.” He held it up to me.
–––
I found Zilker’s card and gave him a call. I didn’t have an appointment for his clinic, but he agreed to see me during lunch.
We sat in his office in the new wing; had that new-carpet smell, books all along the walls, mostly war, history, psychoanalysis. I walked around reading the spines while he picked through a desk drawer.
“Here.” He held out a card. “Tom McEnroe. Give him a call. He’s a vet, has a group that meets once a month.”
There was a palm tree on the edge of the card. “Gulf War?”
“Vietnam, right up to now. You need to meet some others that are back now. Might make a friend or two.”
“Therapy?”
“A kind of therapy. A chance to talk. Speak the same language.”
I took the card and sat down.
He kept notes of me, probably all of his patients, in personal shorthand on a yellow legal pad. The real chart, I’d learned, was on his computer. “Excuse me.” He pivoted in his chair, logged into my chart. “Any nightmares?”
“A few.”
He clattered away at the keyboard. “About?”
“Same old same old. I’m in a battle. Always in the desert, just before dark. Enemy is coming and there’s no fucking end to them, and they kill everybody in the platoon. All of my guys. And my rifle—” My throat tightened.
“Doesn’t work. Or isn’t loaded.” He turned in his chair.
“How’d you know?”
“Pressure to perform flawlessly always raises equal fear of failure. Happens to college students all the time.” He looked back at the screen. “They just dream about tests they’re not prepared for. How do they end, your dreams?”
“I always wake up.”
“Good.” Without looking over. “Today’s your birthday. Happy Birthday.”
“Thank you. Good that I wake up, or good that it’s my birthday?”
He didn’t answer but leaned back and leafed through the yellow pad, then gave me the old raised eyebrows. “Learn anything about your dad?”
I told him about the photo. I told him about the letters. I told him about Uncle Danny and he smiled and shook his head. I told him about Richard Nelson, my new grandparents. I told him about Jennifer leaving.
“So you think she split things off because you were a sniper?”
“Seemed that way.”
“I think it was just your fatal flaw.”
“Being a sniper?”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Fatal flaw usually isn’t a flaw at all. What I’m saying is she wanted out, maybe embarrassed you’d find out about her tardiness on the rent, or whatever, her poor parenting, her drug use, so she cut you loose but wanted you to think it was your fault.”
“My fault.” It was my fault. “Maybe she didn’t think I’d make a good dad.” Maybe I’d told her in the fog of night. A kid. Our company was crossing a field above the Pech River when we encountered about a hundred Taliban, and we dug in along a berm by an irrigation canal. I was another hundred yards or so on the left flank, without a spotter, doing overwatch, picking my targets, when I see this kid, looked like a teen, with a goat herd, practically in front of me and I fixed my eye on him, then through the Leupold, and he just seemed to be loitering, and then he opened
a cell phone, and I didn’t want to take him, but in a second I convinced myself he was sixteen or seventeen, and I took the shot. He sort of expanded and burst when it hit him. I could hear it, felt it in the air.
“Robert?”
“Yeah?”
“You said ‘kid.’”
“Did I?” I ran forward, broke cover. Him lying there in a striped tunban, half gallon of his chest gone. “I shot a kid one time. I just remembered.”
“Afghanistan?” He was hoping I wouldn’t say Seattle or Portland.
“Kunar Province. I thought he was a hostile, but he was just a kid, messing with an iPod. Found it about ten feet away, blood all over it.”
“And you told Jennifer about this?”
“I don’t think so. Just remembered it. Unless I remembered it before.”
“Robert. Things like that happen, most of the time when the enemy changes the rules of engagement.”
“Where the fuck did he get an iPod?”
He looked at me and I tried to look somewhere else, and I think he wanted to hear more, but we just sat there in the silence of his new carpeting for minute after minute. Eventually I corralled my thoughts. I told him I didn’t think the antidepressant did any good, that I’d almost killed a man in a parking lot after he tried to kill me, stupid fucking road rage because I happened to pull in front of him and somehow that entitled him to take my life.
“How do people get off being so fucking entitled? I felt safer in the Army. What the fuck happened while I was gone?”
“People have probably gotten a little ruder in twenty years.” He glanced toward the window as if they were out there looking at us, and leaned forward, hands clasped. “Lot of young men feel they need to challenge someone to prove themselves. Same urge that made you go in the Army. Except they haven’t learned what you have. They’ll probably stop bothering you when you look a little older.” He swiveled his chair lazily, then stopped. “Nothing is going to make what happened to you go away. What happens to us always, in some way, becomes part of us. The medications just help you change your response to emotions that come with those memories.”
Finding Sgt. Kent Page 16