by Layla Wolfe
Someone had made a pot of coffee. I nuked a cup, wondered why it smelled like skunk, and left it on the counter. I went to the can to pee out a hot stream, and even brushed my teeth to honor Slappy’s visit. I merely greased my thick black hair with my palms. Grease. That’s how dirty it was.
“Dude!” Slappy groaned from the living room. Maybe he’d discovered the guy’s head in his liver. “Captain Spiro!” He punctuated his moans with a giant ughhh.
I limped over to greet him. “First Lieutenant Lomax.” I chuckled. “At ease.”
“Ughhh. What the fuck am I lying on? Some kind of creepy Hajji god?”
Slappy was an outspoken, plain-talking guy from New York City, some kind of Ashkenazi Jew with a blond Mohawk. His wife Chloe lived in army housing near Fort Carson. Unlike me, Slappy was still active duty, First Armored Cav. They’d let him come back from Syria when his wife was forced to give birth. He still wore his olive drab fatigue jacket and pants. Like his face, they were extremely crinkled.
I set the horse upright against the wall. “You know I like art.”
“Yeah. Ughh. Reminds me of those god damned Hajji shops with their fucking useless DVDs.”
“No. This is nicer. Remember when we thought we were buying The Ballad of Buster Scruggs?”
Slappy stared blankly at the wall. “Yeah. We got Fifty Shades Freed instead.”
I snorted and grabbed my cane, propped against the couch. “False advertising.”
“Yeah. But it was nice to see some boobs.”
I laughed, once. “I’m out of rum. You wanna come to the store with me?”
Wiggling his eyebrows, Slappy crawled toward the couch. He reached behind it and withdrew the holiest of all grails—another bottle of rum. He stood, wobbling, brandishing the prize. “I remember hiding this. Somewhere between Iron Maiden and ‘Down with the Sickness.’”
“I’m all for that,” I said, reaching for the bottle.
But Slappy held on tight, unscrewing the cap and chugging. When he finished, a sheen came over his face. He was so limp I could easily remove the bottle from his fist. I used my tumbler to drink, like a civilized person, gulping a good two fingers’ worth.
“Ah,” I said, breathing out the flaming fumes. “What’s wrong, Slappy?”
Oh, I fucking knew what was wrong. Memories were returning to him.
“Chloe,” he squeaked. We’d been going over and over what had happened to Slappy and his wife. Slappy was my buddy in arms. Guys still active at Fort Carson often came to my condo. We’d laugh about our nightmares, about drinking too much, how no one could drive under an overpass without changing lanes. I never said no to any buddies, no matter how late it was or how heavily I wanted to drink myself into a stupor. “Come on over,” was my motto.
If you’re a leader in a combat zone, you’re faithful to your men and women. When my tour was done, I still felt obliged to my brothers in arms. Because without them, you’re dead. And being discharged, you’re abandoning them. That’s why I stayed in way longer than I should have.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “I know, buddy. I know.”
Now thoroughly anguished, he yanked the bottle from me. “Why, buddy, why? Why did the fucking army leave us in the lurch? I can never go back to Fort Carson!”
I tried to recall the reassuring words I’d given him before. “I’m pissed at the army too, man. They don’t help you handle the pain they inflict. Remember how undermanned and unequipped we were in-country? They didn’t care.”
Slappy shoved my shoulder with his palm, and I staggered a step. “Yeah, but no abortion? Seriously? We knew our child was fatally deformed months ago. And yet no abortion?”
“That’s their fucking conservative rule,” I said.
Slappy gulped too much rum and choked. It came out his nose as he coughed. I relieved him of the bottle and refilled my glass. I said, “I imagined at first I didn’t believe in the fucking army anymore. Not really. I do believe. We were just being sent to an undermanned and ridiculously planned war. You know what we’ve got? We’ve got fucking PTSD!”
Slappy gripped my shoulder and jiggled me so stridently the rum sloshed over the edge of the glass and splashed my boot. “No shit we’ve got PTSD! We’ve got PTSD coming out our fucking ears!” Smashing his skull between his palms, he went to a window, but didn’t raise the blinds. “I’m a fucking blackened searing screaming carcass of a man because of what they put us through! Nobody thought Eve would live past a week, that’s how deformed we knew she was from the beginning.”
“Yet she lived eight weeks,” I said, trying to remember if that was a good or bad thing. No, it was a bad thing. Slappy was my best buddy. I should’ve known that.
But I’d forgotten, and Slappy turned on me. Roaring, he lurched toward me, hands in the shape of my neck. “We had to live with that thing for eight weeks!”
I checked Slappy’s attack with my left forearm. He tried to redirect with his free arm, but I wrenched it with both fists, giving him a snakebite. Walking his forearm round to his right side, I used a wrist lock to twist it into the small of his back and slide it up his spine.
At least, I think I did. I remember hearing and feeling the crunch of his ulna bone in my fists. I must’ve blacked out for a few seconds because I don’t remember shoving his head down to his knees and yelling, “Eat shit and die, motherfucker!” He told me I said that, much later.
The next move would’ve been to smash his face into the carpet and knee him between the shoulder blades, but thank God I stopped just short of that.
Slappy hadn’t laid a finger on me.
Yet perhaps I’d just broken his arm.
“Captain Spiro!” he choked.
Releasing him, I exhaled mightily. His coming at me like that was so unexpected, but my reaction was probably overkill.
Smearing my face with my palm, I opened one of the blinds. Whoa. I couldn’t handle the glaring scene presented to me. I had to step away. Slappy lay face down as though abandoning his push-ups, hand resting on his hip, limp. I reached down to him.
“Come on, buddy. Sorry about that. Let’s forget all about that.”
Like doing an Upward Dog, Slappy raised his torso. “What just happened?”
I didn’t want to remind him. About Chloe, Eve, and the army screwing him over. I knew from what little I’d read that PTSD makes a person mentally unable to evolve past his trauma. I’d moved ten miles from Fort Carson into a mountainside condo, but I still had a Captain Morgan in my hand and a case of beer cooling in the fridge.
Lifting him by his good arm, I said, “Hey, let’s go down the street for some more rum.”
“Sounds outstanding.”
Slappy and I had served together during the Raqqa Offensive in Syria. After my accident, I’d stayed on to help build the base in Dei rez-Zor. Slappy and I went outside the wire a lot on various missions that no one else wanted. He had a dull sort of senseless spunk which made him the perfect partner. As I dragged myself, ligaments and tendons screaming, through each day, I felt I was working for the men under me, keeping both Syrians and Americans alive. After six tours of duty I had only a commitment to my platoon, and a nation that deployed me. After the attempted assassination, I became nuttier than a port-a-potty at a peanut festival. It became too close for comfort.
I took my cane and a cowboy hat, shrugging into a leather jacket to cover the drunken military tattoo on my bicep. Slappy walked slowly to accommodate me as I cripped along. A guy I recognized as a neighbor said hi to me on the sidewalk, but I said nothing back. I found out later everyone in our condo association was sort of afraid of me.
As we moved toward the business district, Slappy said, “Guess who I ran into? Crybaby.”
I smiled a crooked smile, damaged nerves at birth numbing the left side of my mouth. Girls used to say they liked it. Who knew? “Crybaby! Tommy Dick Sands.”
“The one and only!”
Crybaby used to go with us outside the wire. He’d finished his
stint with a Combat Action Badge and two Bronze Stars. He had vanished, as far as I knew. “What’s he up to?”
“Get this. He lives in a town called Happy Jack in Arizona. And he’s a weed cultivator.”
That really piqued my interest. I’d always felt a yen to farm—what, I didn’t know. One fellow Joe had gone back to Kansas to farm wheat. Another had gone to Nebraska to farm corn. “That sounds outstanding. Did he give you any idea how profitable it is?”
“Through the roof!” blathered Slappy. “He’s killing it!”
This was food for thought. I’d worked alongside Crybaby during the Raqqa Offensive. And yeah, he did cry a few times. Once when I had to pull shrapnel out of his stomach and apply a field dressing. Another time when he’d married a Syrian girl but had to leave her behind.
“Hey, why not weed?” I said, uplifted.
“Hell yeah why not!” agreed Slappy. He cradled his hand around his belt buckle, so I knew I’d done some damage. But I was too drunk to drive him to the emergency room.
The liquor guy gave me his usual sneer, but at least this time I had someone with me. On the way back to my condo, I blurted out,
“Maybe I’ll pay Crybaby a visit. Happy Jack, you said? It’d be a good excuse to take my Harley on the road.”
“Yeah, it’s south of Flagstaff in the mountains. Farm name of Leaves of Grass. And get this. He’s in a biker gang.”
I didn’t know then that you weren’t supposed to call it a biker gang. “Not Crybaby. You must mean riding club, like Toys for Tots runs on a rice rocket.”
Slappy shrugged. “He called it an outlaw club.”
I’d have to be sober to undertake a trip like that, but with all the new sights and activities I probably wouldn’t mind. A fresh adventure might be just the thing. When we got back to my condo, we got even more wasted and blasted music. Slappy passed out, this time on top of my Dingo boots, and I surfed on the computer for Puppies Behind Bars. Inmates trained the dogs to be service animals, and some were allotted for vets who qualified.
The idea had come to me more often lately. I’d been officially diagnosed with PTSD, although the counseling the military offered me was extremely feeble. A dog could pick things up for me. Bring things to me. And, most of all, be a companion.
A companion. Oxytocin poured through my brain just thinking of it.
There was a one-year-old puppy named Linus, an adorable curly Goldendoodle who just barked “good natured.” The blurb on him said he needed a special match. I wondered why. He had begun training when three days old, before his eyes even opened. Then why hadn’t anyone snatched him up? He was born to be the highest of all canine highs, an assistance dog to the disabled. Why hadn’t he graduated?
I’m disabled. I’d never thought of myself that way before. But when I reached for the phone to call Puppies Behind Bars drunk as a fiddler’s bitch, I knew I was.
Chapter Three
Heaven
Like the next scene in a movie, I came to by the side of a road.
That’s how chloral hydrate works. They give it to you before a surgery to help you relax. That’s why you think “my, that was a fast operation” when really it took an hour. That’s why you’re happily chatting with the assistant who takes you into the operating room, and remember none of it later. At least, that’s how surgery goes in the outside world, the reality beyond the gates of Cornucopia.
Flashes of what Orson had done to me flitted across my brainpan. The knockout drops made me blissfully numb to the anal rape with the metal dildo. He used no lubricant, being only interested in violence—not sex. Well, that’s what rape is. Violence. It really has nothing to do with sex.
Shivering a little, I remembered to care where I was. It was too dark to see much, so I figured it was before the sun rose the next morning. I sat like a regular person upright on a bench, but I was dressed oddly. Fingering my chest, I discovered I was wearing that damned nurse’s uniform again. The lapels were stiff beneath my fingers. Oh, good God in an evil world. This wasn’t a normal experience, but it had become so to me. At least I had my good, sturdy shoes on, and “I” had tossed on some kind of a sweat jacket. I clutched my giant purse that a sister-wife had once called a “go bag.”
A piteous whine pierced the still air. Chip.
His eyes glowed like a fox’s. “Chip!” He jumped up on the bench with me. I threw my arms around him and gratefully peppered his face with kisses. What a little dollface! “Chip! How did you follow me? Where are we? What is this thing—”
Oh, shut the front door. The metal dildo was still up my butt.
And sitting on it had only shoved it up there farther.
I had to stand, a dizzying prospect, and stumble behind the bench. I didn’t want to offend Chip, but I had to get rid of that thing. Suffice to say, I tossed it far into the desert, and Chip did not follow. I found tissue in my purse to clean myself.
Really, I was beyond crying at that point. I used to cry in my first years in Cornucopia. I felt sorry for myself, entreated God to explain to me why Orson singled me out. At some point I’d just given up, exhausted with the caring of it all. Instead, I tried to figure out what sort of bench I was on. Was I outside Cornucopia’s gates? Yes, a sign on a pole indicated a Kane County bus stop.
“I’m outside the gates.” I sat on the bench and rubbed my face against Chip’s.
Things started coming back to me. Save Our Baby Brides, that was the name of the organization in Avalanche started by the woman who had fled Orson Ream, protecting her teenaged daughter. Could they save me too? But I wasn’t really a baby bride. Twenty-eight, I had been sealed to Orson when I was eighteen, when my mainstream parents had forced me to cleanse my illicit baby. I had just wanted to be a lawyer! But they wouldn’t send me to college. Extremely by the book, old-timey Mormons, they were. They were not Brighamites like Orson, believers in polygamy, but they were rigid. My only choice was to perhaps marry a man who was open-minded, who would put me through school.
I never met a man such as that. So I got Orson Ream.
A car sailed by. Then another. I started wondering what I would do. Save Our Baby Brides seemed like the best, first choice. I’d been to Avalanche a couple of times since arriving in Cornucopia. Dying at the time with storefronts boarded up, apparently it’d had a resurgence since the women’s arrival, with some outsider men helping them. I’d been acquainted with a couple of women before they had made their escape. I could find them. They could help me find my brother Arkie, allegedly run off to join a motorcycle gang in Arizona.
“I’ll go to Avalanche,” I told Chip.
When he smiled his approval, I realized the sun was coming up. Distant buttes first glowed purple, then a rust red, ringing the desert’s bowl. I remembered to look in my wallet. A five-dollar bill. Would that get me to Avalanche?
Do they allow dogs on the bus?
Rooting around in my purse, under a ragged photo of Arkie I found a couple of stale chocolate chip cookies. Strangely enough, Cornucopia allowed chocolate, Coke, and booze, and they always turned a blind eye to cigarettes and marijuana. I gave Chip one of the cookies, and I tried biting a corner of the other, but it was way too hard. Chip got that one, too. I saw the beauty in his every detail as he munched, knowing why dogs were better than people.
“I’m on the road to nowhere,” I told him. “Well, I’m on the road to find out.”
I sat with that idea for awhile, and it did begin to cheer up a part of me. Maybe it was the oxytocin I’d heard flooded your brain when you petted dogs. My heart thudded when the county bus approached, and I stood and waved, unsure how to flag down a bus.
I stepped up, holding out my five-dollar bill. “Can my dog come on?”
“No dogs,” said the lady, no emotion to her voice.
I tried again. “Do you go to Avalanche?”
“You’d have to go through Zion National Park and catch the St. George bus.”
“Is five dollars enough?”
She c
alculated, maybe taking in my odd costume. Everyone in the county must have known about the fringe polyg commune of Cornucopia. I was hoping she’d feel sorry for me, assume my situation.
But no. “That’s be easy twenty, twenty-five dollars. You’ll need to transfer at the Zion ranger station.”
So, all hope lost, I had to resume sitting on the bench with Chip. It was not long before a sister-wife on her way to deliver our woven rugs to outsiders pulled over.
“Heaven!” cried Afton. “What’re you doing at a bus stop? Did you get stuck out here?”
I couldn’t tell her that, because she’d be sure to take me along for the delivery ride, then straight back into the compound. So I said, “No, not stuck at all. I’m waiting for my outsider brother to pick me up. We’re having a day trip in Zion National Park.”
“Oh, how fun! I haven’t been there in twenty years.”
“Oh, dear! Can you help with Chip? He followed me out here. Can you return him to my house? My brother told me there are no dogs allowed in Zion.”
So, although tears burned my eyes when I sunk my face into Chip’s ruff, I had to say farewell because it was best for him. Maybe later I could send someone from Save Our Baby Brides to snatch him off the compound. He leaped obediently into Afton’s passenger seat, looking like a little passenger.
“I love you,” I whispered against his cheek.
Ashton scrunched Chip’s neck fur. “Okay then, well, have fun.” But her parting words struck terror into my gut. “I’ll tell Orson and the girls you’re fine.”
What could I say, no? No, don’t tell them you saw me?
Should I walk? Should I hitch-hike? I’m never going back to that place!
Hitch-hiking actually did seem like the best option, but there was the danger of someone else from Cornucopia driving by. Men did outside work, built homes for Orson, went to mines we owned. Women even taught or babysat children, as if they didn’t have enough of their own.
I did start wandering down the highway, but shortly I noticed I was weaving. Serious stumbling, like angling one foot in front of the other. This had been happening to me so often lately. It didn’t seem to be the alcohol, as it became worse the night after a binge. I’d slur my words, blinded by a headache, sometimes even double vision like now. I’d lash out, irritating my sister-wives. Naturally, everyone assumed I was drunk, but I wasn’t. It didn’t seem to be chloral hydrate, which wears off overnight.
