by Odie Lindsey
“What?”
“More practically, I’m givin’ it to you so you can get to these Strawberry Tour trips without having to wait around on me. Or me wait on you!”
“I don’t need a car, Deana. So skip it. What’s up?”
“You do so need one. You—”
“Spit it out.”
“For the Strawberry appearances. And far more important than that,” Deana continued, “far more important, if I’m being greedy—which I am—is that you’ll need the car to come visit me.”
Colleen knew what was coming. She looked back to the television.
“Hon?” Deana spoke. “I have to go home. I’m going home. Giving my marriage another try. Me and old what’s-his-name have been having some good times again, and. Well.” She leaned over to embrace Colleen, issuing a run-on string of: everything-will-be-okay / nothing-will-really-change / you’ll-see-me-every-day, I-swear / we’ll-tool-around-and-flop-around-and-watch-teevee / you-come-over-and-we’ll-still-do-the-pageant-stuff / and-I’ll-help-cover-the-rent for a couple of months, and . . .
“Dammit,” Deana continued. “Just be happy for me.” She grabbed Colleen’s hand and placed it on her abdomen. “You’re gonna be, like, a second mama, you know?”
Colleen flinched, then stared at Deana’s lap.
“Please,” Deana said. “Just be happy. I don’t want to do this without you.”
Colleen slid her hand off of Deana’s body. “Sure, okay, Dean,” she said, then stood up and went to her room.
An hour or so later, Deana knocked on Colleen’s bedroom door.
“It’s all good, D.,” Colleen called out. “I’m just tired. Lots to process.”
“I gotcha,” Deana replied. “Good night, then.”
“Night.”
Through the particle-board door Colleen heard Deana’s footsteps fade down the hallway. “Night,” she repeated, but to herself.
Is this all you have to say? The best and only syllable? The single word offered instead of any other possible word?
What about a name? A beckoning? Why not a one-word question: “Deana?” Even this would have brought a reply, a reconsideration. Or how about, “Dean, I’m lonely, and I’m scared, and I’m lost,” or “Dean, I’m not strong enough to figure out why you’re the only person I find love for”? Or, heaven forbid, what about a paragraph? A chapter? A novel of conflicted thoughts, needs, or collapses that tether your homeplace to the away place? An epic of confusion about where you’ve been, and who you were? How about a “Dean, who am I now? What the hell do I want?”
Or what of a testament to the new complications? To the . . . the . . . crucible. The crucible of who you might want to be, and, good lord, the questions about how to get there—as can be spoken aloud, to the only soul you’ve found who not only accepts your ragged-ass state of being, but who’ll drop everythin’ she can to help you work through your lack?
What about that? All those words, or thoughts. Or anything more, really. You don’t even have to know what you want to know right now. You don’t have to offer her anything, save an admission that you need to feel . . . what? Close? Safe? Trusted? On orders? You don’t even need to know what you need. Who you are, what you want. You don’t even really need to know. You just need to start speaking.
So given all that, given now, what do you really have to offer?
“Night?” Colleen whispered. She lay in silence, the crescent moon’s light casting through the off-white mini-blinds.
When she was convinced that Deana was soundly asleep, Colleen threw what she needed into her old Army duffel, and headed out.
10
She chain-smoked while staring through the break in the blackout curtains—as did many others inside Sarge’s house. Yet instead of their concocted scenario of raid or bust, of FBI, MBI, ATF, or even UFO, Colleen knew that no one was coming to get them. She only wanted to watch the street.
She saw the passersby in front of the little brick house, the house that looked just like the other houses beside it. It was a little brick house in a hood of little brick houses, a formation of post-WWII ambition turned post–Brown v. Board erasure. These were squares, plots, tracts, cells. She watched the neighborly parade of rickety old folks and distracted young. The body-compromised, and the cops. Nobody on those blocks walked for leisure or exercise; they did so out of necessity, to the convenient store for groceries, or perhaps to the bus stop, and on to hour-wage work. Colleen watched and she waited for repair to resume on an old Monte Carlo up on blocks by the curb. She watched the others come and go from this very house, their nervous to-and-fros spread across all hours and weather, across race and age and class. She watched the unmarked cruisers idle in wait at the stop sign, or peel away in response to an in-progress down the block. Mostly, though, Colleen watched the elderly woman across the street, who sat alone in a metal glider behind a rusted screen porch hour upon hour, every day, back-and-forth rocking, waiting to die.
The rest of Colleen’s congregation griped for her to be careful, to get back from the window. They picked at their skin—their scabs like chicken pox—then peeked over her shoulder and asked if she’d seen it:
Did you see it? Do you see ’em? Oh man, they’s out there, they’s coming, and, like, I’m not sure, but I think I saw them in the back I can’t tell but I’m telling you they’re coming and, like . . . I don’t know—ha ha—I’m so fuckin’ high, you know, but I mean . . . do you see ’em, did you see it?
“Nothin’s out there,” she’d reply, and perhaps pat a knee. She’d then turn back to the window and try her goddamned best to not go hit that powder.
It was her ability to transcend the stuff that made Sarge offer it for free. She’d go hang in his bedroom for hours at a clip; he’d let her in through the triple locks, to the mother-in-law add-on that insulated him from the rest of them, the “fleas.” She would dump out his ashtrays and they would fill ’em back up together, watching ESPN Classic and the SEC Network, reruns of the football games they had missed while deployed. They watched so many games that they even spoke of betting on them—a laughable analogy, since Sarge’s life and livelihood was already a wager on reruns. He bet that people would come back to him, come back harder, giving more of themselves . . . until they wiggled down the drain.
Only, not Colleen. Not yet, anyway.
She and Sarge both knew that soon, she’d give him whatever part of her he wanted, however he wanted it, as often as he allowed. For now, though, theirs was a kick-ass sort of camaraderie. They were a squad of two, against the fleas who beat on his metal door every five seconds, who machine-gunned his phone with texts, calls, and voice mails, Jesus Christ. He swore that these people were needier than the fuckin’ orphans he and Colleen had seen during deployment. Nits. Lice. Fleas. Skin-pickers. Reruns, every one of them.
She and Sarge chattered about player positions and three-four defense packages, and after a while he’d offer her a taste, and she’d pause and say, “Naw, thanks, Sarge, not tonight.” Now and again, at halftime mostly, they’d surf the cable channels, pausing to consider shards of the outside world.
At daybreak, she would split from Sarge’s room and return to her front window perch, wondering how long she could hold out, and why in the hell she even tried.
One night, during some halftime, out of some sense of deference, Sarge let the clicker loiter on this twenty-four-hour-news package about the Women’s Trauma Recovery Program at the VA center in Menlo Park, California. The lady reporter noted that it was the only space of its kind. B-roll footage showcased female vets in session and in dormitories. Sarge and Colleen watched a woman who sat alone in a library, then a crew of females who strode the orchard-like grounds that cradled the stucco-and-Spanish-tile facility. With vine-topped trellis and bougainvillea blossom, the place was a dreamscape, an otherworld.
“Menlo Park,” Sarge uttered, a frail hint of optimism in his tone. “Sounds like a cigarette brand, but it looks way cool. I wonder how hard it is to get i
n there. Like, if you could—”
“Game’s back on,” Colleen said. “Turn it.”
The two weeks she spent there dragged out like an era, cig after cig ripping her lungs like silicosis, tarring her hair, stinking up everything. She finally moved upstairs in search of proper sleep, to be away from the powder fleas and introduce herself to the ones who never woke: the slugs. She crashed on a pallet of cheap blankets constellated by burn holes, and kept a diet of days-old coffee and maybe raw ramen. She shat water, and her tummy burned. But she slept.
The landscape of that little upstairs—a converted attic, a couple of rooms and dormers—was littered with baggie corners and ashes and blood-blotted cotton balls. Empty pill bottles lay everywhere, their orange plastic smeared by dry saliva, the biorecord of tongues that had licked out all residue. Ripped-open soda cans sprouted used syringes like lily blossom bouquets, with cig butts as infill and ashes spackling everything. Ashes and blood-spotted makeup remover pads. Carpet stains. Cut lengths of electrical cord. Mirrors, and a flat-screen. Dead lighters everywhere. Blanket nests in every nook.
This space was where Colleen had finally arrived at the truth: she was never a powder flea to begin with. She had once more mustered into the wrong goddamned army!
She told Sarge of her revelation as if witnessing to him, speaking gospel. She then issued him her orders: Dilaudid, or no, better yet, Opana.
“That is wild,” he replied. “I never would’ve pegged you for a slug.”
“Hell, Sarge.” She grinned. “Me, either!”
He hitched an old rifle sling around her bicep. Used his thumbnail to slice up a sliver of the tiniest pill, then cooked it down in the shorn-off bottom of an empty beer can, dissolving the time-release casing. While doing so, he brought up the tag football games they’d played in the compound, back in-country. He and Colleen went on about how rad it was to be able to ignore small-arms fire while executing the perfect button-hook out-pattern.
“Now, that there’s a skill,” Sarge said, fixing her. “They shoulda covered us on ESPN Classic!”
She began to agree, but her mouth fell slack. She glanced to the crook of her arm, then went limp. And he cradled her.
***
DEANA’S CAR squealed to a stop against the curb, and she launched out as quick as a missile. She double-timed over the concrete walkway, bolting to the front door of the little brick house. She lifted her fist to the door. Then she paused.
This had to be the place. Just had to. Colleen had described it to her late one night, the postwar brick bunker that she had ridden by—one-time-only. The trafficked, side-street home with blackout curtains on the downstairs windows and aluminum foil over panes at the top. (You could either score at Sarge’s, Colleen had explained, or you wound up in some rando cracker lab lodged in a vacant double-wide in the country. So this, Deana thought, had better goddamned well be the place. I am not headin’ out to the country.) She took a deep breath, and delivered a trio of punches on the weathered door.
“Colleen?” she yelled. “You’d better get your bony ass outside! Now!”
The fleas fled the perceived invasion, hiding in bathrooms and closets. Deana kept on screaming, until one of the others, the upstairs slugs, finally opened the door just a crack. Deana pushed through him and into the house. Her flood of curses was as fouled as the Ganges; she marched room to room, downstairs then up, her hand over mouth and nose (as if this would kill the smell of the place), until she found Colleen heaped and high in a blanket-nest.
“Get up,” Deana ordered. “Get up!”
Colleen shook her head gently. “It’s okay, babe. I am so, so good.”
Deana continued her tirade, reminding Colleen that she had a crown to uphold. That the beauty shop had put their asses on the line for her. “For chrissakes, you’re a veteran.”
“Yeehaw,” Colleen mumbled.
Deana yanked her friend up by the arm, then stared hell into some gaunt twerp who questioned the aggression. Deana then dragged Colleen down the stairs and out the door, into the hot, drenched July air. The old woman on the rocker stared back at them.
“I can’t believe I’m doin’ this bullshit,” Deana continued. “For heaven’s sake, Colleen. I am countin’ on you to help raise this baby!”
Colleen stopped and stared at Deana’s abdomen for a few seconds, before glancing up to meet her eyes. “Give it up.”
“Give it up,” Deana mocked, yanking her friend the rest of the way to the car. “Boo-hoo. I swear. You’ve got more goin’ on than anybody I know. And look what you’re doin’ with it.”
She buckled Colleen into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and walked around the hood of the car. Got in and cranked the motor. “Now, here’s the deal. I can either take you back to my place, the VA, or the police station. Your call.”
Colleen rolled her eyes.
“What I thought. But I tell you what, Colleen. If you try to split my guest bedroom again—hell, if you even look outside the window longingly—we’re done. I won’t have anything more to do with you. You hear? Colleen? Do you hear me?”
“I hear.”
“You’d better,” Deana insisted, peeling down the street. “I swear, you will make this up to me, girlfriend. I mean, you had better get cleaned up fast. ’Cause this ain’t about you, Colleen. It’s about me, and your folks, and the gals at the shop, and—”
“Okay. Just . . . shhh.”
“It’s about a crew of good people who have lined up to help you. The whole town, really.” Deana stomped the brakes, bucking Colleen forward. “So how long is it gonna take you to get squared away, anyway?”
“Huh?”
“How long? How goddang long till you’re straight?”
Colleen stared through the front windshield, down the street and into the tree line on the far horizon. “Few days?”
“Better be,” Deana said. “Lest you forget, Colleen. You’ve got a date.”
11
He had promised her Thai, said he knew the perfect spot. Having been backed into a soft and compelling corner, Colleen had agreed to that first date with Derby, providing he could meet her requirement.
This had been four, maybe five years before she was pregnant.
Yet after Derby picked her up for the date, when they were already on the road, just far enough away from her place to feel committed, he had announced that Thai was off. He told Colleen that he’d thought about it, “thought a lot, truth be told,” and that he’d even found a candidate place, up near Memphis. A dishwater joint that got okay online reviews but nothing great.
“But I just couldn’t risk any ‘okay’ anything,” he explained. “I refuse to take you to any sort of ‘nothing great,’ you know? Especially since it’s the only date we’ll ever have.”
She huffed.
He continued. “Then I figured that I had rather take you straight to Thailand. Take me there, too, since it’d be my introduction to the cuisine.”
“So you’re drivin’ us to Thailand?”
“Oh hell no,” he said. “This old truck would never make it. But I found the next best thing.” He went on to explain that, having done some demographic research on the library computer, really parsing out the who, where, and why of American Thai enclaves, he had instead set his sights on someplace a bit more getable than Phuket.
“The West Coast has good Thai,” he said. “Great Thai, it seems. So do D.C. and New York, of course. But the two biggest, closest spots are . . . well, can you guess where?”
“How ’bout I don’t?”
“That’s correct: Chicago, and Dallas.”
Colleen didn’t care about Chicago, though she had perked up over Texas. “We’re headed to Dallas?”
He stared at her. Winked. “Yes.”
“Really?”
“Well. We are technically drivin’ in that direction. Southwest, sorta. So here’s the plan. We’re gonna make a stop, right up here, on a nothin’ patch of land outside of our beloved Pitchlynn, Miss
. We’re gonna talk for a while, and have a snack or whatever. Watch the sun fall. And after that, if you want to drive on to Dallas, then, dammit, we’re drivin’ to Dallas, okay?”
Okay, she thought. Okay, someone is taking care. Taking charge. Trusting me to trust them to take the wheel on my behalf, but for once with my interests invested, and without settling for whatever comes along as default. This was good. It had felt so damned good to be thought about, and in this case to be thought about as movement, as open possibility, as exception. Why was this? Why now?
A few miles later they snuck onto the FOR SALE property that would at some point become her house. Their house. It was a small hunk of land like the hunk of land she’d grown up on. The generic brand of place she had never envisioned returning to, precisely because it was the type of place she didn’t want to die on—until that moment, on that day, with that man. Somehow. Why?
Though she couldn’t verbalize it at the time, let alone think straight about any facet of her life, Colleen knew she’d been rudderless, unsatisfied, and without clear objective. She kept a beauty queen sash in the trunk of Deana’s car, draped atop the gas mask she’d snatched from battalion supply. Neither had brought her comfort, and their collision didn’t fit. (In fact, she had mucked herself up pretty good trying to make either of them function.) So as the sunlight began to honey, and with Derby walking them around, explaining what he was gonna do to the place, step by step, the mission convicted and defined, at once familiar and yet somehow transformative, she felt compelled to join his vision.
He was charismatic, and commanding, and she believed he’d take care of her. Listening to him orchestrate plans, she knew that he believed this, too.
She sure as hell needed some saving.
Most of all, despite the bruised-up, banged-up state of her being, she knew that somehow she also needed to save. And from what Deana had told her about Derby’s family, she would likely have her chance. She understood that it often took scarred-up people to soothe other scarred-up people. She could co-contribute to his redemption.
