by Odie Lindsey
She’d get her own place soon. A job and whatever. Sometime.
She could picture the desert, barren and pocked by missile char. Fighter jets rented the vast gray horizon, cracking the sound barrier, shredding the calls to prayer. She had watched them deliver payload on the beige city in the distance, a city almost shorelike against a gulf of sand, and with minarets capped in turquoise. From her platoon’s staging area she saw the explosions, and the tufted clouds that rose silently afterward. At distance, it took several seconds before the concussions of the blasts had arrived to buckle her knees; the space between visual and physical was like being stuck in a riptide, a schism of cause and effect. Colleen could not get over this dead interval. She was terrified of it, but more than anything wanted to find it again. To somehow crawl inside.
The beige city in the distance. The goat herd that wandered onto the edge of the formation. Their bellies distended, their hip bones propping hide. Gray and black goats with stringy beards. Their shepherd, a lanky teenage boy in a beige caftan, wielded a dry reed. His face was smooth and feminine. One troop had laughed about the goats acting like stray dogs, trotting in a pack, starving, their dusted tongues bobbing from the sides of their mouths. Their shrill bleats and neck bells. Starving and trotting toward the soldiers.
Colleen and the platoon had loitered in the sand, having exited the vehicles despite orders to stay put, to remain on the outskirts and wait. They were heavy with equipment, tactical armor to tempered steel plate; their sweat was quickly shed to the oven-dry air. The guys pissed at the back bumper, and cut up, and listened for the order to engage the city. Now and again they’d seen the small, muted blooms of smoke rise from a frag grenade or IED.
They had spot-welded scrap metal to the floorboard of the Hummers. They had not live-fired their A4s. They were staged at distance from the action, on the periphery, waiting. And the goats had charged at them for food. And pop-op-op, brass casings hit the sand. They dropped half of the herd within seconds, and then Colleen and Van Dorn and the rest of the squad had held the shepherd kid back at gunpoint, his face a squall of Why?
This was early in the tour. They still held indoctrinations of faith, honor, manhood, love, remorse, reunion, memorial. Yet after the episode, the simple killing of goats, Colleen had sensed something sensational about herself, about all of them: They were free. Of obligation, code, or history.
Of land. Day upon day, staring into the void of sand, surrounded by it, coated in it, the talc-like granules circulating in her lungs, deposited, expelled, she was divorced from her lifelong relationship to land: how it had defined her, and her parents, and even how earth itself had been defined by others before she was even born. How the passing down or manipulation of soil determined both who you were and what you weren’t.
Yet looking across the desert, ridiculous in its capacity, all direction marred by only what was temporary, truck to tent to trailerlike CHU barracks, to the drift, even, of landmass, the dissolution of history by wind, Colleen understood that for the first time she was rendered landless—but with total authority. There was nothing to accumulate, to pay down, to pass on. No demarcation, save sand and rock and horizon, and the ability to navigate it at will.
The void was lawless, and gorgeous with opportunity. They were able in theory and by firepower to traverse the space as deemed fit.
It was strange to her that the majority of her unit still stoked the narratives that they felt relied upon them: the things they owned or could potentially own; the foods they had always eaten, or the women and kids who depended on them. The talk was not of transcendence, but of combat pay and mortgages and church; of the predetermined highways that would guide their new, postwar pickups. They yammered about GI Bills and VA loans, and the fixed-rate rewards of making it home in one piece.
Again, this was early on. By the end of the tour most of them didn’t care if they ever redeployed.
One morning, a few months into that first tour, Colleen had requisitioned a Deuce-and-a-Half truck, then veered off of the asphalt two-lane and into the gut of the desert, alone, carving the sand, fishtailing wildly. She looped the vehicle a time or two, marking great quarter-mile circles, and then cut deeper into the expanse, weaving in snakelike curls. Her vision and hands forged new pathways with the wheel; her tires left ruts where none had rutted. She ran out of gas in the middle of everything, and then watched the sand-drift devour her tracks. She was scared. Thrilled. She wriggled out of her clunky, ill-fitting body armor, and she squatted and pissed in the sand. Laughed so hard that she teetered onto her backside—and then laughed even louder, and applauded for nobody.
The roads, she thought now, as she stared at that popcorn ceiling. “The land,” she whispered as she looked to her pink bedroom walls.
She got out of bed, and tiptoed across the room. Chewed on her thumbnail and looked out the window, to the moonlit pines that walled the edge of the property. In memory, she again heard the bleating of the goats, the hobbles, the pop-op-op. She remembered the balance of the herd trotting over their dead.
They had given the kid a wad of USD for the damage, joked, “Get along, now, little haji.” When he had continued to protest they waved him back with rifle barrels. Corporal Van Dorn then razor-wired a nanny to the hood of the Humvee.
Picturing Van Dorn made her eyes well. Colleen shuddered, and wiped her palms against her cheeks, and then rocked on her heels to try and strangle his memory—though she knew this would never, ever happen. She smoked another cigarette, and stared at the lighter. She flicked it and flicked it, then hurled it across the room.
CRIED, BEAT EACH OTHER
SHE had come home on a chartered United 777, landing at Fort Bragg after a stopover in Ireland, a layover at an airport terminal full of whiskey kiosks, and with windows that showcased a green landscape shined by rain. It was the loveliest place she’d ever seen—a judgment aided by the daze of jet lag, and the lens of the Occidental: lipstick, skirts, 3-D movie ads. Colleen, swollen with optimism, swore she would return to Ireland one day . . . if she could remember the name of the town.
Stepping onto the tarmac back at Bragg, she felt nothing, save annoyed. Everyone else’s lovers and wives kept bumping into her. They carried handhelds and placards, and children who wagged tiny American flags. They knocked her about, not even an “Excuse me,” as she cut across the steaming black asphalt, looking for recognition.
Her mother stood in back of the melee, in Dress Barn denim, crying. Colleen walked up and accepted a too-long hug, and was told that her daddy wasn’t there because of work, because the fields back home were snowing in cotton.
“Of course,” Colleen said. She wondered, though, if maybe her mother, Janette, hadn’t encouraged this arrangement. Or, conversely, if her father hadn’t tempered his own desire, in order to let the two vets share their moment.
Janette hugged her several more times, and then returned to the crusty, base-side motel when Colleen’s unit was beckoned to their barracks. She told Colleen that she was going to stay for however long it took to finish things up. That they would drive back to Mississippi together. Janette then insisted that Colleen name the food she had missed the most, and Colleen couldn’t really think of anything, because missing food was a frivolity that had vanished months before, when the actual missing of anything could no longer be satisfied by shit concept or dream. When pushed, Colleen threw out that the catfish plate from Cracker Barrel would be awesome, thanks, and Janette said she’d bring one back ASAP.
The subsequent communion, a to-go catfish dinner on a weather-beaten picnic bench, soggy batter and Sysco-esque bins of tartar sauce, was meant to bridge a lifelong rift. The squeak of plastic fork on Styrofoam, the straw-suck of sweet tea and the sticky glaze on fried apples brought the brokering of her mother’s own National Guard deployment, Operation Desert Storm, 1991.
“You know, Mama, you never talked about your mobilization,” Colleen said.
Janette glanced up and smirked, then stabbed at her
fried okra. “Well. You were a toddler when I was called up. Too young to understand what—”
“I could feel it, though. After you came home. Always.”
“That’s dramatic,” Janette said, rolling her eyes. “Hell, Colleen, my greatest regret is that I joined the Guard even though I was plannin’ for a family. That I spent a year of my life gone. I cried every single day over there, then smothered you with hugs when I got back.”
Colleen said nothing.
“What?” Janette asked.
“Only two times I remember you even talkin’ ’bout the war, Mama. One was the screaming match you and Daddy had after you refused to attend church in uniform for Veterans Day. Two, when you gave me your campaign service medal after we lost at regionals, seventh grade.”
“You were so good at basketball. Why didn’t you pick it back up in high school?”
“You said I was your hero,” Colleen continued. “And Mama, you pinning that medal on my chest was awesome. But, like, that was it. That was all.”
“Well. Just try and—”
“I still feel shut out by the silence. The specter. The feeling that Daddy and me was holding you back. Were keeping you held—”
“Hey!” Janette barked. She stared at Colleen, then reached over and patted her hand. “There was just nothin’ I could have told you about war. Nothin’ I could say. You know that now, right?”
Colleen stared at her lap.
“Wadn’t about you, babe,” Janette said, then opened the Styrofoam boat that housed their dessert. “You know that now.”
They moved on to commentary about double-fudge cake.
Two days later, Colleen told Janette to go on home, that out-processing was going to be another week of standing in line, of hearing tests and head evals, of forms and formations and who knows what else. Her mother assured her that it was no problem to wait, and asked Colleen if she wanted to talk.
“Naw. I’m good,” Colleen said. “Promise.”
They left it at that. Janette hit the road.
That night, Colleen and her squad went to the base PX, and bought handles of whiskey and tequila. Within an hour the guys were pissing on the hedges outside the white clapboard barracks, and, jokingly, on each other. Two guys from the motor pool beat each other to pieces, then got up and hugged, and cried, and pushed their foreheads together, blood smearing, then clacked their bottles and swapped I-love-you’s, and everyone else called them dick-lickers. Colleen and her cohort had laughed at this spectacle, because they needed to laugh, and more so to hug and kiss, and even more so to demolish each other, to make sure the hugging and kissing didn’t spread.
The lot of them then decided to go into town and lay waste some whores.
The club in Fayetteville had been loud, smoky, nameless. Beneath the drench of knockoff perfume was an air of mop water and puke. Uniformed were everywhere: drunk, loud, immortal. They were immune, still, to the bill cycles and family reunions, parent-teacher meetings, gas prices and cuckoldry that would quickly re-latch and debilitate.
Colleen sat at a small lacquered table while her squad members embarked with various shades and shapes of women, in and out of tiny, makeshift rooms partitioned by floor-to-ceiling curtains. They’d laughed at her as they left her alone; “So sue me,” they’d say, and then ask her to wish them luck. She did. The whores periodically came around to Colleen, and asked her to buy them a round. She did. The women hung around long enough to brag about their ability to make anyone happy—wink, wink—and Colleen grinned and was flushed, and looked to the table but said nothing. The women moved on. She sat alone and stared around the room, and drank. And drank.
At some point a couple of way-gone roughnecks, Airborne, arm in arm and staggering toward the door, stopped at her table. They stared down at her, their heads keeled to the side like confused dogs. Seconds later they burst into laughter, one falling to his knees in hysterics while the other giggled through an apology. “Really. We’re sooo glad you’re here,” he said. “Like . . . hoo-ah, sister!”
Colleen betrayed no expression. The roughnecks laughed harder at this, their rage and amusement so clear on their skin, their combat so real through their diaphanous skin. They laughed at her until a grizzled first sergeant came out of nowhere and shoved them out the door—deaf to Colleen’s protests that they be left the fuck alone; she didn’t need any son of a bitch looking after her.
During the brigade’s final day of out-processing, she informed her CO that she would no longer drill when they got back to Mississippi. She told him to transfer her, no questions, to Inactive Ready Reserve (IRR), whereby she was no longer responsible for any Army anything, save waiting on word of her honorable discharge and VA benefits. He agreed to this. The CO had heard rumor of what happened between Colleen and Van Dorn back in theater. He’d heard enough to know that things would be simpler without her.
She signed a handful of forms and the war was done. She got on the bus back to Pitchlynn, Mississippi.
AT NIGHT
SOME months after redeployment, Colleen was in a dark room traced by the odor of sweat and cologne, and maybe semen. She and the boy kissed a little and then she broke off laughing. The red glow of alarm clock digits spread across the white dorm refrigerator, which she opened in order to take another beer. The boy leaned in and bit her neck as she gulped. His hands then slid over her, grappling her breasts, and she wobbled over and rested against what she guessed was a large padded recliner. A La-Z-Boy like her father’s, situated across from a television, as was his. The beer can on her lips, the boy’s lips on her neck, she stared at the slip of white hallway light at the bottom of the door, and she thought about her CHU trailer at forward ops, about the hairline fissure of light that had poured over the tall concrete barriers outside, and into a crack between the corrugated metal wall and corrugated housing of the air-conditioning. She remembered being lodged in that trailer, hour after hour, ordered to wait, to stand down, practicing Arabic commands while aiming her M16A4 into the mirror—La! Ogif, shithead!—listening to small-arms fire and to the men mobilizing outside, packed in too tight to pace, too tight to scream, the fracture of light was salvation, a way out.
The boy turned her and walked her backwards, until her calves hit the edge of the bed. “Hold up, grunt,” she said, teetering. She drained the beer and dropped the can on the linoleum. She giggled, then pulled him onto the mattress. His breath was a fashioning of alcohol and smoke and fading spearmint gum, and his fingers fumbled to unfasten her bra. She guessed he wasn’t more than three years younger, probably less than two. Yet he moved with the inept, throaty greed of a fifteen-year-old. Colleen refused to let this bother her, mostly, and finally reached back and popped the bra clasp for him. He said nasty things and she ignored him, wanting only another beer. His t-shirt came over his head, and then hers the same. He clenched her dog tags for a second, without recognition. She stared at that strip of white hallway light and tried to remember how she’d picked him up. She marked the smell of unwashed sheets; the feel of a handed-down comforter sent from home. He moved on top of her, nearly muzzling her with his mouth, his hips and penis grinding into her. She reciprocated to a point, the puddle growing inside, aching, her body soon wetting his fingers.
SHE’D spent that morning at the Veterans Administration Outpatient Clinic, Pitchlynn, Mississippi. It was her first time visiting the converted Motel 6, and she had since determined it her last.
Under the clinic’s gum-colored portico, two passenger vans had idled, waiting to shuttle the fucked-ups to the big VA hospital in Memphis. The van’s civilian drivers had cut their conversation in order to ogle Colleen’s approach. Her eyes hit her feet as she stepped past them and through the sliding doors.
Coughs, wheezes, wheelchairs on commercial carpet. Beyond the reception desk, middle-aged and old men loitered in clumps, reeking of body musk and tobacco. Synthetic-blend jeans and nylon jackets, insignia on black baseball caps, had memorialized their service.
An h
our later she’d been lying to—no, corroborating with—the VA claims investigator—who grilled her for one, tiny complication of her tour. Physical or mental trauma. Anything they could claim.
“Surely there’s somethin’ you can hang your hat on,” he’d prodded, his wiry steel hair and pilled black turtleneck. “Some kinda pain worth anything?” His paneled office wall featured a poster of a Stryker vehicle. A plastic ficus tree was wedged in one corner, its leaves muted by dust.
(A Stryker, Colleen remembered. Bodies on bench seats, crammed and jostling, the wheels crunching landscape, the lull of engine strain and the rhythmic clash of gears. Your helmet clacks the armored panels behind you. Clacks the helmets of the troops sitting on either side. Heavy with web gear, mask, Kevlar, weapon; the air-conditioning always out, the cooling vests not worth shit, you can’t believe the constriction, the hour after hour in 125 degrees. In 130, 150, gulping water, so much water; everyone but you can piss without removing body armor. Banging along, pressed against each other, their cock tips dropped into empty Gatorade bottles, sweating, unable to do anything but listen to the chatter of the driver and the M2 operator, trying to dodge the cube of sun blaze from the open hatches above. Sweat and gears, and the trembling need to piss, the consideration of pissing in your BDU pants, terrorized by shame but having to piss so bad you buckle in contraction, so bad you can feel the first blossom of tract infection, and you pray for the strength just to wet yourself. All of this alongside the constant, practical concern about what faceless object will kill you. Not if, not when, but what.)
“Think, girl,” the man had ordered. “Let’s get paid.”
“I,” she had whispered.
He cocked an eyebrow.
“The, um. Warts?”
“Gotta speak up.”
