The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

  “He wouldn’t hear it, huh?”

  “I didn’t try.” She sat at his side, gray, still.

  “It wasn’t your place,” he said.

  He heard footsteps running outside the room, then fading to quiet. They were alone in his cave.

  “I saved someone else’s brother instead,” she said. “I broke the law. To stop somebody getting drafted.”

  She clasped her hands in her lap. Her scent floated into him.

  “Why?” He heard his own abruptness, wished he’d softened it.

  She inhaled, her breath reedy in her nostrils, and sighed. “I don’t know.”

  Her silhouette seemed hazy at the edges, as if she were losing her shape. He squinted, tried to harden her outline. Lifted his hand, wanted to touch her shadow, but his fingers stopped at the rails of his bed.

  “You asked me what happened. When we were in the garden.”

  He felt her quiet eyes on him.

  “Some kid in my company walks over to my bunker in the middle of the night and tosses in a grenade.” He said it fast, to shake the memories that stuck to the words. “This is an ordinary kid. Young. Young for his age.” He was through the facts of the attack, and slowed. “Came into my company fresh off the plane, green as they come. As soon as I laid eyes on him, I knew he’d be headed back before his tour was up—fungus foot, malaria, worse. Had an unlucky look about him. Unloved—like a damn stray dog.”

  She was leaning close. He saw the shadows of her face, her eyes shining like coins.

  “He started out okay. No major problems. But months go by, and it’s too damn quiet on the base—the enemy hasn’t closed in on us yet. And that’s when the rot starts, and it starts with the bad, the weak. The scared.” His spit was briny in his throat. “There’s drugs. Marijuana. Opium. Other things I don’t even know the damn names of. Some of my men are getting sloppy, and this kid is one of them, but he’s the runt of the litter, you know, the puppy the mean dogs keep around to bite on.

  “That night—” He kept his eyes wide; behind his eyelids was where the fire was—heat, smoke. “That night this kid got his first real taste of it, his first taste of war. They’re in the trees, take some rounds, and one of them gets himself killed. And the excitement—it cracked him. Broke him open, and everything violent and polluted inside of him flew out.” Drool was gathering bitter and copious in his mouth; he nudged his shoulder forward and spit wetly into his hospital gown.

  “The kid should never have been in Vietnam. Didn’t have a scrap of military material in him—a maggot, a child, the kind of delinquent bullshitter that gets sent home in a body bag. I wish to hell he had been.” Her eyes blazed on him. “If we lose this war, it won’t be because of the Chinese or the hippies or the liberals or the media. It will be because the government is pumping the military full of kids that haven’t got the moxie to handle the sheer thrill of war.”

  “So.” He stretched his arm toward her, his stump fingers reaching in the dark. “For the kid you got exempted, you had your reasons. War’s not for everybody.”

  She took his hand in hers. Her hand was warm and damp, a tremble in the fingers.

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Jeannie stood on the sidewalk, watching for the streetcar. And as she stood, dazzled in the concrete heat of the afternoon, she felt it sharpening like a knife in her stomach, the knowledge that had made its first cut the day Kip shipped out—that she was the only one who could have saved him, and she was too late.

  Jeannie sat at the bay window overlooking Noe, waiting for Billy’s approach. She felt the apartment like a cave behind her, full of shadows. She kept her eyes on the street outside, the bloodying sunlight; saw a man on crutches limping up the hill, and had the strange sensation that it was Tom, and he was coming to save her. But it was just a stranger; he labored by, his eyes moving over her dispassionately as he passed the window. Jeannie woke in the dark to the sound of Billy at the doorway of the living room, telling her it was late, and he was tired, and she should come to bed.

  The next day, Tom was sitting in his bed, the blinds low. She pulled a chair to his side and sat. He rolled his head toward her, then back again, his ear nuzzling dementedly against the pillow.

  “Are you . . .” She half stood, looking toward the door, peering for a nurse.

  “It’s just my face. It’s tight as a drum and itchy as hell.”

  Jeannie straightened to stand. “I’ll get somebody—”

  “No, no. Don’t. A nurse will come in a while. Just needs lotion, all day long.” He waved his hand toward the large plastic bottle that stood on his locker.

  Jeannie sat. The silence grew dense. She opened her mouth, but found nothing to say. She heard his unsteady breathing, felt the tension rising off his body, wondered if this discomfort was a torture too far, the tick that crazed the bear.

  She stood, went to the sink that stood in the corner of the room, and washed her hands. She walked back to the bed, took the bottle from the locker, and squeezed lotion onto her palm. It was as thick and pale as mayonnaise. She dipped her forefinger into it, felt its puddingy coolness, leaned against the rails of his bed, and lowered her hand to his face.

  “Here?”

  He made a soft, mangled noise.

  Jeannie touched the lotion to the dark strip on his cheek, and made brushstrokes with her finger to spread it over the graft. The skin was smooth and glossy to the touch, bordered by hard striated scars whose dead, fibrous feel tested Jeannie’s stomach. She worked the lotion into the graft and the edges until it vanished, then squeezed some more into her palm, massaging it into his cheek until her fingers slicked over the grease. He let out a hot sigh, and she smelled the hunger on his breath. She placed her whole palm against his cheek and moved it in slow sweeps.

  He caught his breath in a hiss. “Your ring.”

  “I’m sorry.” She pulled her hand away and drew up straight. “Did I hurt you?”

  A pause. “You’re married?”

  She wiped her palms together; she felt a childish urge to smear the ointment on her dress, and gave into it, rubbing her hands against the cotton until there was only a sticky film covering her palms.

  “I have a husband.”

  His breath maintained a slow tempo.

  “He loves you?”

  “He does.”

  “You love him.”

  “Yes. He’s a good man.” She went to the sink, held her hands under the cold water until they were numb. “I’m not a good wife,” she murmured.

  “You’re not?” he said, and she felt a prick of surprise that he’d heard her. She turned off the faucet and took a paper towel, drying her palms, the backs of her hands, between her fingers, the ridges of her nails, the nubs of her wrists, before balling the paper and letting it drop into the trash can. He was silent; she wondered if the moment had passed. She was turning back toward him when he said, “How so?”

  The room was dark, and they were silhouettes. Jeannie felt the truth like a bird in her mouth. She opened it, let the words beat free, let them join the shadow, with its secrets and its shame. “There’s been somebody.” Her jaw felt loose and dark; some small, tight place inside her breathed.

  He was still, his face sharpening in the gloom. It was finding its weight and focus, and her eyes were learning where to look, learning to bring his unharmed side to the foreground, and to reduce the damaged side to a blur. There was something new in his expression, and she couldn’t read it.

  “We got married pretty fast,” she said, heard how this sounded like an excuse; her fingers found the lip of the sink behind her and gripped. “He was the first guy who really saw me.”

  Tom was silent. An unnamed, muscular emotion palpitated the air.

  “I don’t know if he still sees me. I don’t see him.” Shame seeped warm and unpleasant beneath her skin, alongside something light and cool—something like release. “Sometimes he comes through the door at night and he looks like he’s aged five years, and I’ve miss
ed it.” Jeannie watched Tom’s face; his eyes were bright.

  “My father told me marriage is like war,” he said. His hand was squeezing the rail of his bed. “It’s about endurance. And both parties need to deploy all the resources they can in order to endure. But,” he said, his voice thinning with fatigue, “my father thinks everything is like war.”

  Tom / August 1968

  She came every afternoon, stood close in the dark and confessed.

  “It was my husband’s signature,” she said, rubbing lotion into his face, her palms against his skin.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s a doctor. I forged his signature. On the exemption letter.”

  He struggled for something to say. “That’s some risk.” Her palms stopped on his face.

  “It was stupid,” she said.

  “You had your reasons,” he said. Her thumbs made circles at his jaw.

  “They arrested someone,” she told him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The contact guy—the man who found the families, or they found him. They got him for selling fake exemptions.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “He’s a man of principle,” she said. Tom snorted. “I mean that it’s a form of protest for him, so he’ll stay quiet.” She bowed her head and pressed her palms together; it looked like she was praying.

  “Who is it?” He’d waited until she was turned from him, filling the pitcher at the sink. Her back tensed. “You said there was somebody.”

  She turned, walked to the bed, and put the pitcher on the locker. The water rocked inside it.

  “Was it the guy they arrested?” he said.

  Surprise lifted her face. “No.” She bent to rearrange his pillow, her mouth close to his ear. “Worse,” she said. “It was worse.”

  She said nothing more about betraying her husband, his attempts to delve it from her like a shovel hitting rock, and he suspected that her sins were all connected. But in the moments between sleep and waking, he imagined the somebody was him. And in the long, bare mornings, he began to stretch the dream, to imagine her face lowering to his, her breasts pressing against his chest, her clever face as she waited for him outside the hospital, her smile as they drove to where the city met the ocean, and the bridge—magnificent as a thousand howitzers—that guarded the gateway to the world.

  The doctor told him his face could bear the light. The Mexican orderly pulled the blinds and moved his bed so he could see the bay. But when she came, she hardly spoke; she sat squinting in the sunlight, avoiding him. It wasn’t his face: her eyes, her hands, knew that part of him, accepted it. He wondered if she was afraid of him seeing her in too much brightness, if she could only show herself to him in the dark, like a virgin. After that, he told the kid who cleared his lunch every day to shut the blinds. In the shadow of those afternoons, she nursed him, touched him; turned him from bedsores; pressed flannels to his chest; cut his nails; told him secrets.

  Jeannie / August 1968

  She told him about the accident. About how her aunt Ruth never forgave Jeannie’s mom for her beauty, not even after her mom’s death; how Aunt Ruth threw out her mom’s things because she said they were growing mold in her garage. About those months after the accident, when her brother wanted Jeannie for a mother, how it made her want to run; how she ran to Nancy, the sweet torture of their friendship; how the feeling that rode sharp and clear over the others as Jeannie left the church with her new husband was satisfaction at the stunned look on Nancy’s face; how Nancy vanishing, exquisite and untouchable as a damselfly into the garden, an older man trailing after her, felt like revenge. About how Jeannie watched her brother pack for training, how narrow his shoulders seemed, his face asking for help, his pride preventing him. About the time she saw her dad shove her mother against the bedroom closet, cracking the mirror in the closet door; how, when Jeannie and Billy fought, she needled him, tried to get him to do the same, to push her, grip her arm too hard, so she could feel unhappy, and right.

  She told him about her brother taking off that afternoon in the playground, bound for the ocean, the world, a wobble in his bike as he found his weight on the pedals, his body growing lonely in the distance. Told him about the feeling she had—like falling, or dying—when a stranger kissed her in the dark at a party, her husband, innocent and shiny-faced, searching for her in the crowd; about the woman in the café and her expensive love for her son, how she prized and fretted over him like she did the yellowed pearls that clacked between her fingers; about Charlie, how her love for him was frightening but finite; how if she broke the law for someone else’s child, she might believe she’d be able to risk everything for her own son, when the day came. About Walter Moon, how the moment he laid eyes on Jeannie he seemed to hate her; about how she was afraid.

  He listened in the darkness, asked her questions. She sensed him getting stronger, sensed the toughening of his body—his movements becoming more resolute. When she massaged the lotion into his face, the scars felt taut as cables, the scabs crumb-like under her fingers. When she was done, he would push his hand into hers and squeeze, his fingers finding her wedding band and twisting it on her greased finger. Every morning, Jeannie woke with a burden as heavy as a boulder sitting on her chest, and in those hours until she could visit the hospital she hauled it with her, clammy and patient, until she could sit in the warm shadows with him, hear his steady breath, and lay her burden down.

  Tom / August 1968

  Their faces gathered before him:

  Roper, Fugate, Schmidt.

  Krause, Ortiz.

  Gunny.

  Schroeder, Berkowitz.

  They drew up into their lines before folding to the ground. Not human heads after all, but playing cards, facedown, dealt. He pulled from sleep to find her face over his, her hand in his hair.

  “A dream,” she said.

  “I could have saved them.” Correa. Hollis.

  “Only a dream.”

  “I stopped it from happening before.”

  “Shh.” Fingers pushing against his scalp. He closed his eyes.

  His men.

  “The damage he did. It goes on.”

  Jeannie / August 1968

  “Mrs. Harper.”

  “Mr. Macht? Is everything all right?”

  “Any progress with the captain? Mrs. Harper? Are you there?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Well, you need to work harder. The brig’s commanding officer is expediting all legal process following the riot. Dellinger says they’re moving to court-martial next week.”

  “There’s no way—”

  “We need to find a way. Come by my office Friday. If we haven’t got anything by then—”

  “I understand, Mr. Macht. Good-bye.”

  Kip / August 1968

  Nothing like a riot to fry off the violence that sits on the skins of idle men.

  It was movie night, and some King Rat inmate threw blows on a brig guard who eyeballed him all wrong. Soon it was rats on pigs, and the rats took the cage. The guards were on the wrong side of the gates, and it was wild time. A pack of inmates ripped the place apart with their bare fingers. These are no ordinary rats—these are blood stripe Marine rats. Locks cracked, gates ripped, a whole fucking cellblock blazed down. Me and a long, streaky kid from North Carolina broke open the contraband locker, found enough reefers to mellow a churchful of virgins. We sat and smoked and passed out the joints, staying out of the sights and hands of the brothers that were striding the walls and meting out some justice of their own. And in the end, it passed, just like we all knew it would, and the brass took control, put the bad guys in dog cages and screwed things tight again. But all of that smashing and brawling seems to have hurried those JAG motherfuckers along: cases are moving through the system like hot shit through a stinker, and mine is ready to drop.

  They hauled me out this morning for another talk with my attorney. Douglas Dellinger, with his snap-white shirts that don’t
last three cigarettes in the Danang heat. Can’t be more than a half hour we chew the fat, but he wilts in front of my eyes, his shirt yellowing against his chest, a drag-down tired look on his face. And whatever kind of night I’ve had in the brig, whatever kind of bug-scuttling or home-dreaming I’ve had to stomach, I get a lift seeing this expensive dork brought down after a few minutes on my strip.

  Today it starts off the same as always. I watch him tic and snit, see the frustration he’s got throttled down under that Ivy League hood of his. He’s already sucking on a Marlboro; this time he doesn’t offer me one, just holds the pack in his smooth fingers and taps it on the table, like it’s the prize.

  “Private Jackson.” His eyes go to the wristwatch he’s laid on the table: he’s already counting the minutes till he can get back to his hotel, switch on the air-con, take off his shoes, and drink a cold Coke. Before he opens his mouth, I know what he’s going to ask.

  “The court-martial is scheduled for next week. We need to bring a lucid account”—he corrects himself—“a clear story to the judge, explaining your actions.”

  He wants to know why. Was I loony? Was I high? Was I freaked out, messed up, wigged out, psycho, dumb, sad, juked, fooled, abused? Was I all of it, mixed up and fried together? They’ve all come by—the shrink, the priest, the Marine counsel, and now this joker—with the same damn questions, the same doubt paining their sweaty faces.

  I’ll tell you why.

  They sent us here with our howitzers and M16s, our Hueys and M60s and Gatlings, to blow pieces out of those commies, those red guys and gals, to rip the jungle from its roots and noise up the sky with our big blind birds. Sent boys from the cities and the farms, the swamps and the deserts, the prairies and the mountains—white boys, black boys, brown boys, black boys—to help out Uncle Sam, on the promise of honor, uncommon valor, and the Greatest Show on Earth. To a raggedy, skid-row country that switches between mud slick and dust bowl, where the ghosts that spook us in the dark have jack shit to do with the quiet villagers that work the green sunlit land. This place had nothing to do with us until we soaked our guts into the ground. Like that boxer said, I got no quarrel with these slopes.