A Living Grave

by Robert E. Dunn

  The next I knew, it was dark. Not completely: It was the point of the evening where the day had given way, but the night was not yet strong enough to hold the world on its own. Uncle Orson used to say, If the day was a pig, this time was the curl. I always liked the thought that the birth of night could be the curly tail of a pig going over a fence.

  Outside the boat’s cabin, coming from the picnic table inside the shop, were voices and the sound of a meal. They sounded happy. I opened a window and sat very still in the darkness beside it to listen. It was a bad idea. Not only the sounds came through but the smell of the fish they had cooked.

  The simple and sane thing would have been to bolt outside and throw up into the lake that was only feet from the door. I went to the sink and banged my head on the cabinet in the process. At least no one got to witness that bit of indignity.

  That pig’s tail slipped beyond the horizon, leaving true night behind as I put myself back into bed and drifted away again. In the night I woke and heard my father and Nelson talking. I only heard voices and not words, but the conversation was friendly—warm, even. Nelson was a hard man not to like and my father was quick to take to people. I knew only that they were sitting outside under the dock’s awning, talking. It had to be about me. I felt vaguely ashamed as I went back into sleep.

  The next time I awoke it was because Nelson was in the room with me. He was trying to be quiet but he was coughing. When I sat up he said, “I brought you some water.”

  I took it but didn’t say anything. Sips, just enough to wet my mouth were all I allowed myself. He offered aspirin and a wet cloth for my head, but I declined. Before he left I was out again.

  The dreams came after that. Desaturated in color, flowing and unpredictable in movement, images churned like old movies projected onto a quick-moving river. Behind the wall I bled and watched the dust come. First like snakes, excellent in their animal camouflage, looking like the burnished earth and slithering one at a time, searching me out. Then many at once, so many they joined into a tide of misty dirt to cover me. At times I watched myself in the grave as dust piled up, both covering and filling me, until my bleeding was dust into dust. Other times I watched, a third-person omnipotent viewer, as the living dust came to me-but-not-me. I was Angela Briscoe, motionless and accepting. I was also Carrie Owens in displaced underthings, pulling the rain of dirt onto myself, participating in my own burial.

  Again, I awoke and I cried. My father was there. He had brought in a lawn chair and sat beside my bed. Another cycle of sleep and dreaming to awake and cry followed to find Nelson sitting in the chair. He was there the next time too, painting on his small easel in full daylight. If I was grateful for anything, it was that he didn’t try to make me talk. His presence was an invitation, not a demand. For a little while I watched him paint. Every so often he took his gaze from the art board to look at me. At one point I had the horrifying thought that he was painting me sweating and mouth breathing—looking like the creature from the booze lagoon.

  Without saying anything to Nelson I flipped over, turning my back on him. He continued working without a pause. I hoped that meant I wasn’t the subject. The sound of his work soothed me then, little scrapes on the board, the small clatter brushes made when dropped in the tray, quiet movements.

  Finally, I slept and fell into true darkness. Dreams, and all consciousness, were left at shallower depths. When I awoke that time the light was either fading in or fading out. Out, I decided, only because it was still hot. I was alone and I smelled like a weekend drunk tank. I actually had to look to be sure I hadn’t wet myself. No, but the sheets were soaked with my sweat. Worse was the taste of death and moldy peanut butter in my mouth.

  Where had that come from?

  Two times I brushed my teeth, then I stripped and remade the bed with fresh sheets. After that I brushed my teeth again before stepping into the boat’s small shower. Soap and water made me feel two steps closer to life. Even when the water turned from warm to cold it felt glorious. My teeth got one more vigorous brushing. I scrubbed the top layer of skin off my tongue and the roof of my mouth. By the time I had brushed my teeth enough to face the world, the world was hiding its face from me. Most of two days had been lost. I stepped out into the cooling air to see if I had lost anything else.

  Nelson was sitting alone in the shop. Dishes had been cleared from the table and he had his easel set up, painting a picture of the dock at twilight. Everything was there: the colors, more than I had ever noticed. A fading sky was bruised purple. Still water seemed to move, green on green. Strung around the edge of the dock were the bare bulbs. They outshone the nascent stars. It reminded me of that painting of the diner by Edward Hopper, only without threat in the darkness. Nelson’s painting was all about joy.

  “Hi,” he said as soon as I came through the screen door.

  “I’m sorry,” I answered.

  “Don’t be,” he shot right back. “Sit with me. How would you feel if I said I missed you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, sitting. I looked at the painting, not at him.

  “Your father and uncle went out. I think they wanted to ‘give us room.’ ”

  “Hmm . . . very considerate of them.”

  “Wasn’t it? I won’t ask if you want a beer.” I could hear the smile in his voice. Just to be sure, however, he turned and winked. From behind the easel and art board he pushed a dripping glass of ice water. “Here. Best thing for you.”

  “Why did you ask me how I would feel if you said you missed me?”

  I took the glass and drank every drop, then sucked on ice until it disappeared down my throat.

  Nelson watched me and dabbed away at the painting. When I set the glass down and began to breathe again he said, “Because I missed you. And because I don’t want my missing you to be a burden. And . . . well. . . I don’t want—” He stuck his brush into some white, then some blue. I almost said something about a mistake, then he ran the brush over a bit of dock and the colors streaked together—mixed without mixing. It looked right but I didn’t understand how.

  That seems to sum up a lot of things for me.

  He let his hand come down to the tabletop. It rested there like it was thinking of its next move. I covered it with mine. As soon as they touched he turned, ready to speak, ready to tell me what he didn’t want.

  I kissed him.

  As we kissed I held on to that hand and squeezed. I wanted it to know I was there. When the kiss broke I thought he might try to talk again, so I shut him up. That second kiss was more about heat and hunger and I pressed my tongue into his mouth, tasting him and giving myself to be tasted.

  I took my hand from his and put it behind his head and pulled him tightly to me. We let the kiss fade slowly and I released him at the same rate.

  A breeze, cool and clean, smelling of rain, trickled through the screens. For the first time I noticed the falling pressure. Rain was coming.

  “Come with me,” I told Nelson.

  Outside we stood beside the water and watched the sky creep with muddy clouds coming from the southwest. They were heavy and dark, flashing with silent lighting. Under our feet the smooth water trembled like skin that had gone untouched too long. I kissed him again.

  For a long time we stayed embraced within the building wind. Our kisses were wet with desire. The penetration of his tongue in my mouth was becoming a teasing mockery of the true act.

  Air, moist and quick, eddied around us and my skin puckered with gooseflesh from the cool motion. Nelson wrapped me tighter in his arms. In the crowding sky an anvil of dark cloud stacked higher and higher. Fingers of electricity clawed through it and for the first time we heard the thunder. I bit Nelson’s lip and his hands responded on my back, tracking my spine and then digging in at the top of my hips.

  I put my hands on his face and held on and sucked the air of his breath from his open mouth, swallowing him into me. With my hands, I then pushed him back, severing the kiss. I could feel the regret in his
hands as they traveled up from my hips to my waist.

  “I want this,” I said and my desire was punctuated by another flash and rolling rumble.

  Nelson opened his eyes wider and pulled a sharp breath from the wind. Then I saw something replace the understanding in his eyes. On my waist, his grip became even softer. A gentleman to the end, he said, “I think you might still be a little drunk.”

  “Maybe,” I said and then I smiled. “But I’m not that drunk.” I released his face and pulled open the front of my shirt. For the first time in forever I wasn’t thinking about scars as soon as my skin uncovered. My bra was thin spandex; it showed the dark shape of my nipples standing out from the breasts. I wanted them touched, needed to feel his mouth on them. I grabbed his hand, still gently holding my waist, and brought it up.

  I felt like the clouds above us, heavy with rain and charged with electricity. There was a moment, a beautiful moment without fear or reservation. I let my head fall against Nelson’s, cherishing the feel of his intimate touch. Only a moment. Then the wind carried dust and dead leaves, brown decay and fear.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. Seemingly on its own, my hand pushed his off my breast and I pulled the front of my shirt together.

  As I clutched the fabric, tight as a wet knot, at my chest and pressed it to my sternum, Nelson let his hands fall to his sides. He stepped behind me and pressed his chest against my back. With his lips in my hair, he whispered, “Don’t be sorry. We’ll give what we can.”

  I was relieved. But—I touched the crescent scar at my left eye.

  After that I was angry. Lightning broke through the clouds to reach out for the tall trees atop the bluffs on the far side of the lake. That was how the anger felt inside me. It was energy, branching out and touching everything. It flashed and it burned, leaving me charged but immobile. Anger at myself and at the Army, at the men who hurt me, at the violence I had set loose against Danny, all branches. But that night, there was a new branch. I was pissed at myself for feeling relieved. I was hiding from life at every turn and now I felt relief to let it pass.

  No more.

  I released my shirt front and took Nelson by the hand. I pulled him toward the houseboat. Once inside he started to say something. “Shhh,” I said.

  Digging through a drawer in the dark produced a book of matches that I used to light three glass-globed storm candles. All the light in the world was in motion. The candle flames flickered. Lightning flashed. The outside dock lights rocked in the wind and scattered reflections over the rough water.

  I dropped my shirt to the floor.

  Nelson put his hands on my bare shoulders. He was shaking.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he said so softly that, at first, I thought it was the wind. “I don’t know . . . I’m not sure I can. If I’m able.”

  In the shadows and candlelight I couldn’t see the color on his face, but I could honestly feel the heat of his blush. For the first time I realized that it wasn’t only my own fear I was challenging.

  “I’m not sure I can, either,” I told him. “But I want to try. Do you?” His hands trembled but they didn’t leave my skin. Nelson didn’t speak but I could feel his answer. I don’t know from where—maybe it was from him, maybe I was still a little drunk—but for the first time in over ten years I found the courage to say, “Touch me.”

  He found the courage to do so.

  Chapter 11

  Later, we talked in the darkness with the raw honesty of new lovers. For me it was mostly confession. For Nelson it was a strange kind of stage setting. He kept trying to thread the needle between plans for life and plans for death. The carefulness with which he spoke of the future said to me that his statement about not dying may have been more wish than promise. I didn’t have the courage to ask.

  Maybe the future is best without promises.

  I told him everything that had brought me to this place. He couldn’t ever know me without knowing about the assault and everything that came after. My bloody experience in the field hospital and waking with the unit commanding officer beside my bed. The CO didn’t ask about insurgents that had taken and done this to me—he told me about them. When I told him it was men under his command who had done these things, he told me that I was confused.

  I told Nelson all about the horrible convalescence in a military hospital in Germany. Army personnel, some of them lawyers, some just bureaucrats, visited me daily with sad faces and offers. If I accepted their truth and signed their papers I would be given an early but honorable discharge and stateside treatment. When I asked why I hadn’t been interviewed by the Criminal Investigations Division they always said they didn’t know anything about it.

  It was a nurse who finally understood what was happening. She had seen it before. She called CID. Captain John Reach was the investigator that showed up. He took detailed notes, said the usual sympathetic things, and disappeared for a week. When he came back he said his investigation was complete, there was no evidence of the assault and no charges would be filed. Then he warned me.

  Most people who never run up against the peculiarities of military law are astonished to learn that it is a crime in the service to accuse any superior officer of illegal action without bulletproof evidence. Nelson had been a marine and knew the code. Like most service people, though, he had never seen it in action. I had accused two men, both superior in rank to me, of rape. The only evidence I could give was my absolute knowledge of who had done it.

  That was where the real honesty began. I admitted to Nelson, and myself for the first time, my own complicity in what happened. I had accepted my fate. I bought the Army line that the chain of command was sacred and over all else; it was the Army itself, the institution that I loved, which needed to be protected. After everything, I refused to resign. Then I was sent back to active duty with my company. Both of my assailants had been promoted and I had a new reputation within the command. It took another month for me to understand that there was no going back.

  I would never fit into my unit again and probably nowhere else in the Army. So I talked to a reporter. I filed official reports with everyone I could reach. The institution responded with charges of its own and threats of a court-martial. I heard later that I was saved only by the intercession of a member of Congress. It was something I never expected or understood. I was saved, but my career was dead. Even after that I had tried to stick it out. Then came the patrol where my men all explained to me how they felt and, under fire, refused my orders. I’d almost had to shoot the corporal to regain control. It was over. My resignation was accepted without resistance.

  I wasn’t even supposed to have been in combat situations. Officially women weren’t allowed in battle, but the wars on terror were different kinds of wars. There were no front lines and no facing armies. Everything was mixed up with civilians and militia groups, and women in the American military were under fire. No one wanted to hear about their successes or their failures. They just wanted the problems we presented to go away.

  Nelson made the comment that at least it was over and behind me. That’s when I told him about the reappearance of Reach in my life and the accusation that I was somehow responsible for the killing of one of the men that had raped me.

  He said he wouldn’t judge me if I was. I laughed, truly grateful for that statement.

  Nelson told me his story. The contrast was stunning. Not because his experiences in Kuwait and Iraq were so different. Living and fighting within the artificial night created by a thousand oil-well fires had left its mark on him just as indelible as those on my skin and, ultimately, more dire. The contrast was that his story was all after war. Even dealing with the cancer in his lung, which was small-cell and aggressive, he had hope that his story was still ahead of him.

  I hope so too.

  When the talk slowed and the rain had become a steady drizzling, I turned my body into Nelson’s and cuddled onto his lap. I kissed him while I pulled his hand down between my open legs. Then I told hi
m, “Do it again, please.”

  He laughed and the warmth in his voice was joy in my ears when he said, “Anything for you.”

  * * *

  The next day was full of light and humidity. Moisture rose from the ground, giving the day a steam-heat texture. Every breath was like sucking through a wet blanket. Nelson said it was good for landscapes, that water droplets colored the air and made the heat ripple as it rose. He spent the morning painting on the top deck of the houseboat and only came down long enough for breakfast. I don’t think he was really hungry—he barely touched food—but I could tell he liked the company. We smiled at each other like kids with our first crushes. It all felt so good and, since I was on suspension already, I called and cancelled my next appointment with the therapist. That was a liberating feeling.

  Dad and Uncle Orson tried to ignore us but I know they were laughing about it when we couldn’t hear. The pair of them had argued that morning in the parking lot. It wasn’t the usual kind of argument I’d seen between them a million times. This one was real. The fact they’d felt the need to sequester the conflict out in the parking lot, out of my earshot, said a lot as well.

  It passed quickly, though. Afterwards, they went to the grocery store, still bickering. But I had the feeling that something big had been left unresolved. Something about me. When they came back, they carried enough food for a dozen breakfasts and then cooked it all.

  We had grits and French toast, bacon and ham, eggs both scrambled and fried, and biscuits. Everything was slathered in real butter and enough grease to clog even my uncle’s sewer-pipe arteries. It was delicious and the best time—with the exception of the past night—that I’d had in years.

  We had an entire day like that. The night was another thing of beauty and secrets. Nelson and I barely slept. But nothing good ever lasts.