“I write about the war. Am I pimping myself out?”
Both of them stared.
“Aw Jimmy, no man. No, no, no, that’s not what I meant. Your songs are a million times more truthful and powerful than anything I could ever come up with. I’m not good enough to write about that stuff. Either I’d tell people what they wanted to hear or just give them what I wanted them to think.”
I went on, but I could see I didn’t have to. I could tell from his face he believed me.
* * *
We went past drunk and slid like water finding its level to the stories we knew best. We traded a few funny ones then started reminiscing about who was a scumbag and who was a coward, who was squared away, who you could count on but was a prick, and who was an alright guy but no kind of soldier.
For us, there had been no fields of battle to frame the enemy. There was no chance to throw yourself against another man and fight for life. Our shocks of battle came on the road, brief, dark, and anonymous. We were always on the road and it could always explode. There was no enemy: we had only each other to hate.
Whenever we got together certain names came up again and again. It was hard to imagine, even years from now, a conversation about that time that didn’t revolve around these men, these fuckers we’d never forget. They were anyone who’d made things harder than they had to be, or hurt our chances of coming home, or almost got us killed by some mistake. They were the shitbags, martinets, and weaklings who fucked us with their petty tyranny, corrupt leadership, selfishness, cowardice, incompetence, or even just that lack some men had—that thing that left them passive in the face of danger.
War stories are almost never about war unless they’re told by someone who was never there. Every now and then maybe you talk about something or listen to someone who needs to get it off their chest, but those aren’t the stories you come back to, not for telling.
* * *
“H.M.M.W.V.,” she said. “Humvee.”
She repeated the word almost playfully, half-smiling and looking for some recognition of the absurdity. When I stared back blankly, she started to lose it.
“Do I pretend you can never understand me because you had a nice family and I had to watch my mom die and my brother get sent off? Should I hold that over you like it’s some precious toy you don’t get to play with? Should I pretend you won’t ever get it, ’cause you didn’t see her flatline? Huh? Who would I be to you if you didn’t know? Who would I be if I never talked about it to you?”
She was shouting now. I’d told her as much myself, but I didn’t want to hear it, not again, and I felt just then that she had no right. I shouted back. “You think I need to relive it? Just ’cause I’m not crying all the time and having flashbacks, you think I’ve forgotten! You don’t even want me to forget. Without it, I’d be just another schmuck with his hands in his pockets. I’m no captain of industry if you haven’t noticed.”
I realized I wasn’t making any sense, but I couldn’t stop until I pushed it too far, until I’d have to ask forgiveness.
“Where were you when I was over there? Some bar? Some party? And God help you if you say you were thinking of me—you forgot me before I even left.”
She flinched. I went on.
“You can’t admit it but your heart would have sung if I got killed over there. A dead soldier’s so much more romantic, just a framed photo and a story you can tell in that broken voice that comes so easy. Wouldn’t that be easier to deal with? Fucking say something!”
Her eyes, wet, broke contact. She sat slowly, perfectly still at first, on the old crimson couch that her mother gave us years ago. Above her on the wall was a picture of us as teenagers, before there was any Army, long before I left. Standing on a downtown corner in those late twilight hours when we felt our fevers peak and converge. Facing each other under the humid glow of street-lights, our faces mad with secrets, our arms raised like two conductors in private concert. It was an ambition of mine in those days to look like I deserved her in every photograph, and this was as close as I ever got.
Annie started sobbing, to herself, into her hands. I went to her, absently comforting, without looking away from the picture.
Later, while she slept beside me, I finished looking through the photos: Cole and Jimmy, Vargas and Finney, the desert, our truck, the sun. Annie lay on her back, her body along my arm, her hands folded across her stomach, her face turned and lit by the screen’s ochre glow. Slowly her head listed until it brushed my arm and she startled. Small sounds murmured up from her sleep as she shifted and turned away. She seemed in that stillness unbearably beautiful, unbearably remote. Outside the pictures there was only the darkness around us, closing in, and the dimly lit pleading arch of her neck. I shut down my computer and tried to sleep.
* * *
Finally the bartender said, “Alright boys, last call.” We couldn’t complain, that last one was on the house, and it was an hour past the city’s curfew. He’d earned the weathered “We support the troops!” sticker pasted to the wall, puckering up at one corner below a framed photo of the ’86 Giants.
Outside, the shops were closed and the moon hidden. I stopped in the middle of the street and turned to grab Cole and Jimmy, pulling the three of us into a huddle.
“Fellas, where you been? I’ve missed you.”
Jimmy leaned in close. “Well I’m here now,” he said.
Cole chortled and pushed us together. We both turned and Jimmy caught the top of my head with his eye, staggering back and cursing.
At the next corner we stopped for a minute and when we felt a breeze carry strong from the west, we turned and sought its source toward the water. We passed the auto shops that had taken over the old longshoreman district. I was staring up at an old car mounted on a pole, relying on it as the fixed point to pull me weaving down the block, when Cole asked, “What the hell is that?” I thought he saw it too, that it looked just like the old hulk we used for test fires, right outside the wire on the shoulder between the desert and the road.
He was trying to point, but was too drunk to keep his arm steady. Finally he braced the pointer with his other arm, and the rest of his body began to sway. He hadn’t seen the car, was pointing at something else.
“That used to be an elevated train line. South of here they turned it into a park, but the construction hasn’t made it this far.” It took effort to speak and make sense at the same time. The words dropped from my head into the back of my throat and sounded strange as I pushed them out, like the bleats of a muted horn.
The platform Cole was asking about looked like a short bridge that ran north-south, cutting through the middle of the streets.
“Let’s go,” said Cole, his eyes focusing and unfocusing.
“No, the park is south, south, and it closes at twelve.”
Jimmy turned to me, his face waxen under the lights, arms hanging limply at his sides, his eyes glazed over, but his mouth grinning like a fool. “Leh’s go, hero.”
“Listen.” I looked from one to the other and felt my balance tip precipitously. “It’s a no-go, let’s just walk along the water.”
“You walk on water,” Cole said. He started forward with Jimmy, and I followed. When we got closer we saw construction scaffold running up to the platform. There was no lock on the door and we climbed the metal stairs meant for the work crew and out onto the High Line.
We were level with the third or fourth story of the buildings around us, close enough to jump in through some of the windows if we wanted. Rebar spanned the width, twenty feet or so, stretching out in a checkerboard pattern. We walked over to the western ledge and looked down the broad crosstown street to the river and the winking lights across the water. To our south we saw gates and security trailers, east the streets we’d just come from, and north more rebar, an abandoned bridge aloft in the city’s night mind. We went that way, where the High Line stretched, brightened here and there by streetlights and the odd apartment, past what we could see.
&n
bsp; I felt our footfalls through the grid as we walked above the street, a corridor with darkened buildings on either side. Among the offices shut down for the night and the residential towers where people slept were half-built shells, skeletons of steel you could see clean through, menacing us with their cranes and lifts hanging like gargoyles in the shadows. For a moment I thought I heard voices from one of the apartments but it was only someone’s radio, some alarm-clock sports talk. Then it was silent again, as quiet as the city gets, when the river, the distant traffic, and the electric hum come together and whisper through the streets.
We reached a bend where the platform turned toward the water. At the crook the rebar stopped and gave way to weeds and stacks of construction materials. We took seats on a pile of I-beams and Cole made himself comfortable.
“I love places like this,” he said. “Everywhere has them, the deep pockets that other people never bother to find. This I could have come back to. See,” pointing at me in the dark, “not ideas or principles or weird-fevered fantasies. You go back to people and things. This place would have missed me.”
“You think things miss you.”
“Of course they do. My car needed a ton of work when I got back, who else was going to do it? Pianos need piano tuners. And other sorts of things, more idea-type things.”
“I thought you don’t come back to ideas.”
“Solid ideas that don’t twist around every time you look at them from a different angle. Law school was an idea, but a solid, thing idea.”
“You weren’t even sure about law school, how is that solid?”
Cole sat up.
“How does anything get solid? You make it that way.” He stressed every word, angry from repeating himself so many times, over so many months, over so many missions.
Jimmy cut through our weird jangle. “You should join a cult, one of those where they worship things.”
“I’m a cult of one,” Cole came back. “I’m an army of Cole.”
“Army strong.” I pounded my chest.
“Jimmy strong,” mumbled Jimmy, his voice trailing off.
I walked over to look at the water again. The night was starting to lift off the sky. My eyes went to the dim light in one of the buildings nearest us, and I watched two silhouettes on a curtain. The shadows moved closer, merging, pulling away and then rejoining. There was no rhythm to the movement as they went back and forth, cutting off the light and then breaking apart so it glowed between them again.
When I came back Jimmy was sleeping. Spindly Jimmy so small against the I-beams. Another couple of steps back and he was tiny against the city, barely there at all. I noticed Cole looking at him too.
“He’s doing pretty well,” I said. “Taking care of his kid, still playing music.”
“He barely covers costs playing those bars. How far you think that security guard money’s gonna stretch? Why didn’t he take that job Vargas tried to set him up with?”
“Said he didn’t want to move, and the unpaid training was too much. He’ll figure something out.”
“We’ve been back a year, and a year from now his kid will be eating more and needing new things, plus he’s got that wife to keep happy.” He paused for a moment. “I didn’t forget that letter she wrote him.”
“I didn’t forget it either but what’s the point in bringing it up now?”
“What’s the point?” Cole turned and grabbed me under the shoulder, gripping my armpit.
“They got a kid now,” I said, pulling away. “He made his peace. I think they’re getting along alright these days.”
“You can make peace with anything. Doesn’t mean it won’t blow up on you.”
Lights were coming on in the apartment windows. I felt the late effects of a heavy drunk and knew Cole couldn’t be much better. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Alright, how about a balloon wake up?”
I smirked and nodded.
Cole kneeled with his mouth an inch from Jimmy’s ear. I stood on the other side with a steel rod raised and ready to come down against the stack of I-beams. I put my hand up for Cole to see and silently started counting down from three fingers. Two. One. I swung the rod hard and struck only inches from Jimmy’s head. A loud clang boomed from the metal and shattered the silence, then Cole screamed, “IED! IED!”
First the white from Jimmy’s eyes and a split second later he jerked up like he’d been resting on a spring. I kept swinging the rod. My balance was gone and I thought I might fall over if I stopped too abruptly. I could feel the ringing in my ears. Cole put a hand on my back and I stopped. I looked at a mask of wide eyes and grimace as Jimmy stared straight ahead, past us. Nobody laughed, none of us moved. Jimmy’s face came back and he looked placid, then in one sharp move he grabbed the rod and yanked hard, pulling me down onto the I-beams.
Jimmy was on my back holding me down. The impact forced the air out and now he was pushing out the rest as I struggled for breath. Just as I was about to gulp in—“IED! IED!” Jimmy’s voice, manic and angry. Cole at the other ear “IED! You better get a SITREP and move the hell out of the kill zone!” I felt myself squeezed between the weight on my back and the steel beneath me. I still couldn’t breathe or speak, only hear and look out at the weeds and the rebar and the bridge spanning the city that was leaking light as it stirred. Then the weight was gone.
I turned over and saw them standing a few feet away in the middle of the platform, silent and staring off in opposite directions. I walked over and stood between them.
Light came through the canyons from the east in a wash of color overhead. Commuters were out and cops were off the skell beat back patrolling. Soon the guys who were supposed to be working here would show up.
“Let’s take off,” I said.
We started back toward the scaffold. When the weeds returned to rebar, quietly, plaintively, Jimmy said, “You know, this reminds me of over there. It’s kind of like the road up here. Like this is the road. And it’s always dark and there’s all this around us but it’s only us and we can’t see any of it and as soon as it’s light we’re gone. Back where we started.”
“There was a whole country around us.” I said. “I don’t know what goes on here. I have no idea what these people are thinking. They sure as hell don’t know anything about me.”
The city was fully awake now, the sun up and every light on. Figures moved in the windows, some of them looking out at us.
“Hold up,” Jimmy said. “Let’s just stay here for a while. I can catch a later bus. It’ll be alright.”
Cole spun around. “Like the road?” His voice clear and contemptuous, he lunged at Jimmy. “How the hell is this like the road? There aren’t any fucking IEDs here. Nobody telling you what to do. You can leave any time you want.” Then he turned on me. “And you. You should know better.” He moved closer and my hands coiled in my pockets. “Nobody knows you? They’re not trying to kill you, that’s all. But you’re afraid of ending up like them.”
Jimmy looked down and Cole rounded on him again. “Look at me,” he barked. Jimmy’s eyes went sideways. “Look at me!” Cole said again, but his voice carried the evenness and authority of an old note, and I heard it as “look at me, Specialist.”
Jimmy looked up.
“You can’t stay here. There’s nothing for you here.”
Cole took a deep breath and cupped his hand over his mouth as if about to throw up. Then he shook himself and said, “For starters, I’m hungry, my head hurts, I’m sweating booze, and there’s no eggs up here. Let’s go get chow.”
My eyes, squinting, adjusted to the light. I was about to say something to Cole when he cut me off. “You, both of you, whatever’s out there, I’m taking it. You don’t want it, that’s your business, but don’t lie to yourselves and pretend it’s not there for the taking.”
On my face I felt the crispness of the morning air as it rolled chill across the water. I smacked Cole on the ass and pointed an elbow at him, smiling at Jimmy. “The
conquering hero returns. What village next, good sir? The world is yours to plunder.”
“Wherever there are eggs. Let’s go get fed.”
And with that we started again to the scaffold. On our way down the stairs we passed some of the workers heading up. They carried cups of coffee and tools and had too much day ahead to worry about three guys who weren’t carrying anything out. When we passed the last of them, Jimmy turned back and shouted, “Gentlemen, hell of a view.”
And then we were out on the street, the three of us. We stretched and started toward the Port Authority, my head getting heavier with every step. I remembered Annie, remembered I wanted to talk to them about Annie, and felt a sudden urgency now. The early light was shining on everything at once with a ghostly pallor. I saw the blank open spaces between everything that stood or moved. Ordering those spaces is most of a soldier’s job, but now, back here, that’s all there is, and I don’t know if I can do it anymore without the other part.
“What do I say to her?” I asked, but they were already gone.
2
TIPS FOR A SMOOTH TRANSITION
Siobhan Fallon
When your soldier returns, take it easy, take it slow. Your own backyard might be paradise enough for a soldier who hasn’t seen grass in a year. Let him just sit in a hammock and relax.
BUT THE HAMMOCK EVIE INSTALLED in the backyard isn’t enough for Colin. A week after his return from Afghanistan, they are already on a plane to Hawaii. This trip is a surprise anniversary gift, and Evie is a girl who hates surprises.
Colin and Evie have spent the week awkwardly trying to get used to each other after a year apart. Awkward because Colin has been working long hours at the base dealing with the accountability of the men, weapons, and vehicles that returned with him.
Fire and Forget Page 3