by Odie Lindsey
“Plantar warts?” she’d asked. “My feet are still screwed up from them boots.”
“Warts!” The investigator laughed into his lap. “We can work with this. Now, if we was talkin’ Vietnam, hell, it’d just be part of the deal. But today?” His pen slashed at the appropriate form. “Warts it is.”
She had come to the VA seeking counseling. Someone to talk to. Someone who could explain and then exorcise her compulsion to hurt, to trash herself, to do whatever she could to get back to the elating brink of trauma; to random, visceral, adrenalized trauma.
But you couldn’t just walk into the walk-in clinic. You had to go through the process like everyone else: intake paperwork, biomed overview, financial evaluation, wait; benefits categorization, primary physician assignment, claims screening, wait. Instead of seeing a shrink, or even a nurse prac scripting SSRIs, Colleen wasted half the day being humiliated for her postwar weakness . . . then shamed into filing for a payout over warts.
Leaving the claims investigator’s office, she’d been dispatched to give blood and urine, meeting the requisite demand of a physical before her claim could be filed with the federal government, perhaps as an action against the federal government, in part because the Feds gave out unnecessary handouts. This was Mississippi, of course.
Meanwhile: wait.
The men who sat around her in the VA clinic lobby were black and white, using canes or in wheelchairs, their pajama pants legs tied in a knot. Elderly wives in cheap wigs sat beside them. The Weather Channel beamed from a wall-mounted television.
They stared at her. She sat in a row-bound chair, adjusting her legs, her ass and her everything, until the clerk finally called her number. He gave her a plastic cup, and pointed to the unisex restrooms. She went inside, noting the chrome handrails by the toilet, her nose sorting the communal bodily smells. Read the posted instructions on how to give a sample: WASH HANDS THOROUGHLY BEFORE TOUCHING PENIS. PULL BACK FORESKIN IF APPLICABLE. URINATE FOR 3–4 SECONDS INTO TOILET. DO NOT TOUCH PENIS TO INTERIOR OF CONTAINER. FILL CONTAINER BETWEEN ¼ and ½ FULL OF URINE FOR DOCTOR.
She pissed on her fingers and knew she’d contaminated things. Wiped herself off and tugged her panties up, and then stared into the mirror until the urge to cry had passed. She returned to the clerk, placing the sealed urine cup on a Tupperware cake tray at the edge of his desk. He ordered her to wait, said they’d call her in an hour or so for the blood draw.
“No worries,” Colleen responded, and marched out the sliding doors. She drove to the string of cheap bars near the campus.
CAST in the seam of hallway light beneath the dorm door, she flipped herself from under the boy. They peeled their clothes off, and she mounted his thin frame. She positioned his erection behind her; he struggled to place it inside.
“No,” she ordered.
“Condom?” he asked.
“Christ, no.”
She moved her pelvis in a slow, circular rhythm, her hands palming his hairless and slightly muscled chest. She pegged him a high school sideliner, only recently divorced from dreams of further athletic pursuit. He groaned and again tried to penetrate. “No,” she repeated, moving atop him, circular and fluid. She reached between her legs for a few seconds, then used her self-slicked hand to cradle him outside of her body; she rocked up and down, his penis gliding between her buttocks and wetted palm. Slipping against each other, he so desperate to enter, she so intent on rupturing this need, so insistent on receiving the pleasure, the puddle, as generated by only exterior heat. His cock lodged tight between her hand and buttocks, Colleen bucked back slightly so that her vagina remoistened him, her hand stroking him as she rode up and down. Her climax began in waves that radiated outward, downward, inward as she grasped him, the tide of elation moving her to spasm; her pelvis backing into him, her gasps her kneaded breasts her hand sliding faster, up and down and up and . . . The tickling warmth on her back as the boy came in an apex of deprivation.
He gulped like a child. She shushed him and gripped his involuntary pulses.
Buried in the darkness was the sound of a tiny gear. Colleen knew exactly what it was. Because every troop seemed to have taken the same shots: Vehicle, sand, mortar fire; helicopter, sunset, the Coke logo in Arabic. Interiors of CHU barracks, blast scenes, bloated dead goats and hajis . . . as frequently cut by the automatic shutter closure of a dead lithium battery. The tiny rev of a camera gear. Click.
(She had no idea that war and campus were conjoined by a love of slut-shaming.)
She got one good punch in before he covered his face, and another few about his neck before he threw her to the floor. She was silent as she got up, focused on finding the device in the pitch-dark. She kicked open the small refrigerator, using the light to check the closet. He called her a white-trash bitch, and considered forcing her into the hallway, where she’d be poised for ridicule by the brothers. His eye closing from the punch, he instead covered himself with the comforter.
She found the camera hidden in bunched clothes atop a hamper. She threw it against the wall, splintering the darkness with the scatter of plastic shrapnel. He cursed again as she grabbed her clothes and stormed out. She ducked into the men’s hallway bathroom, dressing inside a filthy stall—her bra and panties and one sock absent—then marched back into the hallway, toward the exit. When the boy’s face peered out from behind the metal door she kicked it into him, and he howled in pain. She flew down a flight of stairs and through a large front room, a space defined by worn leather couches, by crest-like insignia and Greek letters on the wall. On a large flat-screen television, SportsCenter chattered away for no one. She marched out of the house, between the white columns and onto the front walkway. She did not know the campus, and was unsure of how far it was back to the bar, and her car. She had not remembered to grab the memory card. She marched past the genteel university buildings, wondering how many more nights out she could take. Headlights passed over her, those of SUVs mostly, stuffed with drunken, privileged kids, kids that were her age give or take, a few of them teasing her clumsy stride. Her footfalls were hobbled by plantar warts. Her shirt clung to her back.
VFW
COLLEEN pulled into the oyster-shell parking lot of the VFW, then killed the engine. Buried by moonless night, she sat and listened to the snap of the flags in the hot breeze, American, POW, state flag with stars and bars, and to the clank of the metal fastener and guide rope against the aluminum pole. She lit a Misty.
The building looked more like a machine shop than a clubhouse: blue corrugated exterior and white metal door. A quartet of pickup trucks dotted the lot, and a trace of country music seeped from inside the canteen. She had passed the hall all her life and never paid it any mind. But she couldn’t do another night at an in-town bar, in Pitchlynn or even Oxford or Tupelo. Another morning coughing up phlegm, reeking of stranger.
She wore her desert boots and a denim miniskirt. She paused as she reached the building, took a deep breath and pulled the door open. Stepped into the tight room of damp, orangey light. The walls were adorned by dime-store trinkets and bumper stickers, guide-on pennants and cardboard crosses of Malta. Walking toward the bar, she watched herself in the large mirror on the wall behind it. She saw a handful of good ole boys with beat faces, whose VFW caps lay flat on the bar by their drinks. There were black plastic ashtrays and a small television in the corner. Fox News, muted. A thick drift of smoke.
They stared and waited for her to ask for directions, or maybe to ask for her boyfriend. One of the men, Vietnam-era, bit the side of his lips. The bartender, tall and gray-bearded (also Vietnam, or maybe Desert Storm), nodded at her. The few elderly men, Vietnams, maybe even a Korea, looked to the television, or into their drinks.
“Help you, ma’am?” the bartended asked.
“Wouldn’t mind a drink.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. He looked to his colleagues, as if wanting someone else to reply. “Um, darlin’, I don’t mean to be unkind. But you know we’s a private club, right?�
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“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
“Well.”
“Well?” she asked.
“Guess you’re a vet?”
She nodded.
He lit a cigarette. “We appreciate that. And we glad to have ye. But the thing is, you have to join up. Not just qualify, see?”
“Didn’t know that part,” Colleen said. She nodded, and started to turn back to the door.
“Hell, Edwin,” one of the men said. “Give her a goddamn drink. She’s earned it.”
The bartender pinched at his ear. “Sure. Yeah. But after tonight, you’ll have to apply, okay? Ain’t some social club. You’ll, uh, have to apply.”
She pulled a stool from the bar, ordered a Jack on ice. The room was mostly quiet. One of the men looked at her. “Desert?”
“Yup.”
The men talked of the coming harvest, of Southeastern Conference football. They smoked religiously, the exhalation clouding a string of red Christmas lights that ran along the bar shelves. Colleen ordered another drink, then another. She chimed in on their conversations of farm equipment, and cursed harder and with more flourish than their wives or mothers or daughters. With whiskey-watered eyes and rounded consonants, they found that the binding link between all was the stinging legacy of plantar warts—a recognition that had them all guffawing. Someone suggested Colleen might like to apply to found a Ladies’ Auxiliary. She figured that she was qualified to join any VFW post—Ladies’ Auxiliary or not—and considered stating this. But she also gauged intent, and let it slide, Thank you, and then ordered a round for the house. The men raised their glasses.
Beyond the drift of the recorded pedal steel rose the sound of car wheels skidding outside, and the thump of bass from a loud stereo.
“Aw, hell,” the bartender said. “Here comes our newbie.” The men snickered. The Maybe Korea paid his tab, noting that he was gonna get out before it got too wild. His body just couldn’t take it no more.
“Y’all still got all that crazy in you,” he said to Colleen. “Still don’t know how to be home.”
She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
Corporal Van Dorn walked into the bar, desert boots on the floor, a boisterous How-dee! to all in attendance. She turned to face him and he froze for a second, before breaking into grin.
“No way,” he said. “Thirty-fuckin’-eight? Whatchoo doin’ here, girlfriend?”
Colleen turned back to the mirror. Van Dorn walked over, sat at the opposite end of the bar, slapping one of the men on the back. “What damned cat dragged ole Three-Eight into this joint?” he asked. “She’s a sight for soreness!”
“She ain’t no thirty-eight years old,” the bartender responded, handing Van Dorn a Bud Light. “Looks about twenty to me. I mean twenty-one!”
“Naw.” Van Dorn snickered. “It’s a joke we have. Right, Three-Eight?”
“Sure,” Colleen said.
“Thirty-eight is the MOS job number for Civil Affairs,” Van Dorn explained. “Desk jockeys. Now, y’all geezers don’t recall that because you never had to consider chicks. Army puts most of the girls in Three-Eight to keep ’em safe and shit.”
“So you’s Civil Affairs?” one of the men asked her.
“No.”
“Just a joke.” Van Dorn snickered. “Right, Three-Eight?”
Colleen turned up her drink, and nodded for another. She lit a cigarette, the flame of the lighter quivering. A couple of the men asked Van Dorn how he was, and he held court as he blustered and bragged. They tolerated this, because storytelling—his or anyone’s—cued up the opportunity to indulge their own tales, to again revisit their trauma.
So the men did just that, they ran a story cycle, memory to memory, barstool to barstool, and on down to Colleen.
Van Dorn snatched the silence from her. “I tell you one thing y’all ain’t never seen, and that’s a woman in full web and chem gear, middle of a combat zone, tryin’ to cop a squat!” he bellowed, and some of the others chuckled in response. “Hey, Three-Eight? You remember th—”
“You so interested in stories, why don’t you go on ahead and tell ’em?” Colleen asked.
“How’s that, girl?”
“Go on, hero,” she said. “Tell ’em about us. ’Bout you and me, and what we done.”
“Huh-oh!” One of the old vets snickered. They turned to Van Dorn, eyebrows cocked in wait for steamy detail.
“Hell, Three-Eight,” Van Dorn said. “Nothin’ to tell.”
Colleen sucked her cigarette, and watched the ash flare in the mirror. She slid one hand to her lap. She could picture the cubes of sunlight through the small APC inlets. Could almost feel the weight of his torso, heavy, his body pinning her against the vehicle’s padded bench seat, his hands cuffing her wrists.
“Come on, stud, tell it!” she barked.
“Whoa, girl,” the bartender said. “I think maybe it’s time we—”
“I said there ain’t nothin’ to tell, Three-Eight,” Van Dorn fired back. “Nothing in the world I can tell these men about war that they ain’t already lived. I mean, look around you.”
The bartender continued, “I think our new friend has had a bit too—”
“Who do you think these men are?” Van Dorn asked. “What don’t you think they know? Hell. You think they don’t know killing? They know killing. You think they don’t know heartbreak? Terror? Torture? What on earth am I gonna tell them?”
Her eyes watered, so she stabbed her fingernails into her palm.
“Shit,” Van Dorn continued. “You know what, though? I guess I could tell ’em what it is to have to stare at a blood spot on the ass of your fellow troop ’cause she’s up and run out of Tampax. Remember that, Three-Eight? Huh? Guess I could talk about having to stare at stupid brown roots growing out of dye-blond hair. About having to negotiate combat while flanked by someone verifiably weaker than you.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Woman with hairy legs? They prolly don’t know about that. That the kind of thing you want me to talk about?”
After it had happened, she’d been unable to confide in anyone. She had walked around camp bowlegged for days, wearing no undergarments. When she could no longer stand the pain of mobility, Colleen had claimed flu to get off of rotation, then stayed on her cot for most of a week. She did not eat much, and she was silent, and she swabbed herself with aloe vera sunburn gel.
Staring at Van Dorn, she still couldn’t understand why.
“Was I the first?” she asked. “Or did you burn other girls?”
He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Like I said, girl. Nothin’ there.”
The men jostled around on their stools. One motioned for another drink.
Colleen lifted her glass. “Okay, I’ll get you started. So we’re in the Stryker vehicle, just you and me. And I don’t know about you, Van Dorn, but the fact that you were supposed to, well, babysit me ’cause I wasn’t supposed to engage in combat was a bummer. Pissed me off, bad. Still does.”
“True, that,” Van Dorn said. “I was—”
“Shhh. Hold on, I’m settin’ the scene here!” Colleen waved him down, and a couple of the men chuckled. “It was kind of a blur, all so fast. ’Cause I tell you what, Van Dorn, when you pounce, you’re quick, man.”
He sipped his beer.
“Oh, and y’all, that vehicle stank.” Colleen looked at Van Dorn. “You smell sour, dude. And your chin? I can still feel your stubble scraping my neck—ugh. And, let’s see . . . Oh. The screams. My screams in that goddamned Stryker were intense, right? Couldn’t even hear the firefight. Couldn’t hear nothin’ but me screaming. Hell, I even wanted me to shut up!”
The bartender cleared his throat to try and break the story up.
“And my god, your erection!” Colleen said. “Now, there’s a short story these men haven’t heard. Your erection, still in your pants, pokin’ all up against me while you pinned me down. I mean, one minute you’re one of us; the next,
your little pecker is jabbin’ all over me!” Colleen forced a laugh. “You wanna take it from here?”
Van Dorn stared at her.
Colleen rolled her eyes. “Okay, be a chickenshit.” She continued, as if setting up a joke. “So, boys, he’s pinning me down, right? He smells like a sow and his boner’s poking all over creation. And somehow, despite everything I’m still, like, Okay, here it comes. We all know what’s up. This troop is gonna do his biz. Gonna rip my pants off, and then his down, and then he’ll spit on his fingers and la dee dah, whatever, right? I’m thinkin’, like, Let’s get it over with, Stinky.”
“Sorry, gal,” the bartender said. “This isn’t the type of—”
“But this crazy mother didn’t even unbuckle his pants! Shit, y’all, he just shoved his hands down my panties and, no kidding, um . . .” She blinked back tears for a second, then caught herself. “I mean, I thought an IED blast had seared us from beneath the vehicle! It burned somethin’ awful down there! I flopped like a fish on a bank. Flailed so hard I threw him off of me. And guess what?”
Nobody answered.
“This perv had a Zippo lighter in his hand. You believe that?”
Nothing.
Colleen snickered, sniffled. “Yeah. Like, he didn’t even wanna rape me. He just wanted me on fire.”
(Afterwards, she’d pushed her BDU pants down to her knees, and peeled off the rayon panties that had melted to her pubic hair. When she wailed like an animal, Van Dorn screamed for her to shut up, saying, “Jesus, I’s just fuckin’ around.” The air in the vehicle was clotted with the smell of singed hair and flesh.
Colleen had lain on her back, on the bench seat, rocking, bawling. She’d been confused when Van Dorn gently handed her a bottle of water, then stared as she doused the blisters. “Just fuckin’ around,” he’d repeated. Gripping the corrugated black plastic of his rifle barrel, he began to bang the butt of the weapon against the Stryker’s metal floor, ordering: “You”—bang—“calm”—bang—“the”—bang—“hell”—bang—“down”—bang. “Now!” In the silence that followed, he smoothed her hair with his fingers, muttered, “I barely even flicked.”)
