He had lived on that island, in the shadow of a three pronged volcano, for over a month before they came for him. When they arrived to take him back to the war, he stood hip deep in the water, having just speared a small blue fin trevally on a sharpened, sandalwood branch. The sun caught the blue and red-gold scales of the fish as it flopped on the spear. It had taken him an hour to spear, and its weight shook the branch as it slapped its bladed tail back and forth. Then the thunder of turbines rose up over the crash of the surf. He turned to see the military transport come over the breakers, throw its shadow over him, and land on the beach. He tossed the fish into the water, dying and wasted. As he walked through the shallows up to the beach, tears welled in his eyes. They came not because he was afraid to die, but because the moment he saw the ship, the deep sense of peace he had found over the previous month vanished. He had not been prepared for that.
He had not returned to the South Pacific until now, even though somewhere in his heart he had always intended to do so. While this was not the island he had survived on, it was close enough. That sense of peace returned to him as he stood in the forest shadows on the edge of the white blanket of sand. He stepped out from under the shadows of the palms onto the bright beach. He pulled his boots and socks off, tossed each aside, and dug his toes into the sand. He unzipped his gorilla-operator’s jumpsuit, stepped out of it, and then pulled off his t-shirt.
For most of his life he had ignored his scars, but as the island brought him back closer to the war, he looked them over. A long thin scar ran from his ribs under his armpit, across his chest, and over his right shoulder. There on his shoulder the scar cut across a tattooed hammerhead shark, its tail curved underneath it. It’s row of exposed teeth and baleful eyes gave the shark a dispassionate and death-focused expression. The scar bisected the tattoo leaving the top and bottom misaligned. Jeffrey looked down at his legs. Mottled scars and sporadic circular burns covered his shins and the tops of his feet, some deeply pitted, others more superficial.
Wearing only his boxer briefs, Jeffrey walked out across the beach and into the water. Its pale-blue clarity made the water merely a suggestion over the immaculate sand, just showing itself in bending flashes of sunlight. He walked out until the water, just on the edge of warm, lapped over his knees. He lifted his arms to his sides and fell backward. The water slapped his back and then its warmth washed over him. He sat up, chest deep, sputtering and blowing saltwater out of his nose, laughing. He leaned forward and lay belly down in the water, head up, and sank his hands in the sand. He pulled himself along until his hands could not touch, and then he swam out into the bay.
…
When Jeffrey returned to the gunship he wore only his underwear and held his jumpsuit and boots pinned under his right arm. He walked on the balls of his feet through the underbrush, keeping to the sand between the bushes. Stacy and Leif sat on the ramp, looking out through the palm trees to the ocean. Water bottles from the gunship’s emergency supplies sat beside them on the ramp.
Stacy saw him first and rolled her eyes. “Nice undies, Jeffrey.”
“Thanks,” Jeffrey said. He walked up the ramp, tossed his jumpsuit inside, and unzipped one of the three large bags of emergency gear. In it he found water bottles and MRE’s. He unzipped the second bag and pulled out several pairs of ripstop BDU’s in various shades of tan. He found a pair large enough and pulled the pants on. Leif laughed.
“What?” Jeffrey said, looking down at his pant legs. The pants, which fit his waist, floated four inches over his ankles.
“The military never did supply clothes that fit me right,” Jeffrey said. He dug into another survival bag, took out a folding knife, and cut each pant leg off just above the knee. He folded the knife, clipped it to the edge of his pocket, and sat down on the ramp. Fishing through the bag again, he found a brown t-shirt. He pulled it over his head. Leaning back on one of the survival bags, he put his hands behind his head and wiggled his toes.
“Are you done?” Leif asked.
“What did I do?” Jeffrey said, holding his arms out and looking over at Stacy who was staring at the burns on his shins and feet. “Pretty ugly, eh?” he said. “That’s what happens when you get an electrical fire in your cockpit instrumentation. You see there,” he said, pointing to a vertical row of symmetrical circles on his right ankle. “That’s where the eyelets on my boot burned me. It was so hot spatters of molten metal burned right through my boot leather.” He pointed to the middle of his shin where the scarring turned from spots to more of an overall sheet of mottled skin. “You see how the line is more severe here? That’s where my flight boots ended and I only had a layer of fabric. I kept having to reach down while I was flying and slap my shins to put out the fire.”
“Dad,” Leif said, “I appreciate that Stacy has not heard these stories before, and surely you’ll have to share with her the heroic action that led to the loss of your right pinkie tip, but if you wouldn’t mind telling me, now that we are finally stopped, what the hell just happened to my day off?”
Jeffrey scowled at Leif and then noticed Stacy leaning over to get a look at his closed right hand. Jeffrey smiled at her, held up his hand, and wiggled his pinkie, which was one joint short.
“Dad?”
“Sorry Leif. I suppose I don’t really want to think about the last several hours.” He leaned back on the survival bag and looked up at the tops of the palm trees. “Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what happened.” He looked at Stacy. “Have you been able to remember anything more?”
Stacy looked at the ground and shook her head. “I remember running down the corridor of a ship. I am fairly sure I was on the USS Lacedaemon. That’s where our CO set up our training exercise. I can recall the day before clearly. I remember the briefing on the exercise that morning and then me sprinting down a ship’s corridor. There were people running behind me. I want to say that it was David and Matt, but I can’t say for sure.”
“Those the guys in the crash with you?”
Stacy nodded, looking out now through the trees to the beach. The wind flipped at her hair and sunlight played across the tip of her nose. Jeffrey looked at Leif who sat on the ramp, staring at Stacy.
“I told you she was pretty,” Jeffrey said to Leif.
“What?” Leif’s eyes snapped to his father, angry, telling him to shut up. Jeffrey laughed at Leif.
“What’s that?” Stacy said, coming out of her thoughts.
“Nothing.” Jeffrey tried to suppress his smile and failed. “Please go on. Can you say if you were running to or away from something?”
Stacy stared at him for a moment, probably suspicious of his smile. “Definitely away. I remember being afraid.”
“Okay, hold on,” Leif said, holding up his hands, the breeze catching his loose Army t-shirt. “I would like to be filled in. What crash, who’s dead, and what the hell are you both doing with a new-generation Kiowa gunship? And please, since I could go to prison for what I just did, make it good.”
Jeffrey said to Leif, “I really appreciate you’re taking the chance on us.”
Leif looked down at his hands. “Well dad, you’ve always been there for me.”
“I would like some more detail too,” Stacy said. “As far as I know, someone tried to kill you, and you helped me out of a really bad situation. That’s it.”
“I’d argue we helped each other out,” Jeffrey said.
The breeze from the ocean stirred the palms around the ship, and Jeffrey put his hands behind his head. “Well, I guess there’s nothing for it but to start from the beginning.” He told Leif and Stacy everything he had gone through that day, starting with meeting “Arlo” and moving on to his transport’s engines shutting down. He told them about the spider and finding the bodies and Stacy. Then he told Leif about their escape from the soldiers.
They all sat in silence for a moment, and then Leif–now staring at the backs of his hands–said, “This is bad.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jeffrey said.
“And you don’t remember a thing before the crash?” Leif asked Stacy.
“No, I have no idea why someone wants me dead.”
“Enough of this for now,” Jeffrey said. “As long as we’re here, we need to enjoy it. Let’s build a fire and see if we can spear some fish.”
Stacy smiled at the suggestion and stood.
“What?” Leif said, jumping up. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do.”
“There’s plenty of time for that,” Jeffrey said, walking over to Leif and taking hold of his shoulders. “Right now we need to breathe.”
Leif shook his head and smiled. “I don’t know how you can do that knowing that someone tried to kill you just a few hours ago.”
“Oh, they’re not the first to try. It’s no big deal. Either you die or you live. If you live, you fight back. If you die, well then, who gives a shit?” Jeffrey slapped Leif on the shoulder hard, laughed, and walked out to the beach with Stacy.
Leif jogged to catch up with them.
“First, let’s get the material together for a nice fire,” Jeffrey said. “While we’re doing that, we can look for some good branches for spears. We’ll try and catch some fish. I for one do not want to eat an MRE out of that survival kit if I can help it.”
“Is a fire a good idea?” Stacy asked. “Will someone see it?”
“No. We’re surrounded by thousands of islands in millions of square miles of ocean. We’re alone out here and safe for now.”
…
Farther up the beach, a stand of sandalwood trees had provided fallen limbs in abundance for a fire. The flames of the fire, now bright against the evening sky, brought out their footprints in long shadows across the sand. The sky had shifted to a heavy red, and Jeffrey thought the clouds, now lit from underneath by the setting sun, looked very much like sand dunes. As darkness folded around them, sparks rode the twisting heat up out of the fire.
Stacy squeezed peanut butter from a brown, plastic pouch. Leif threw the empty packaging of his MRE into the fire, lay back on the sand, put hands behind his head, and looked up at the sky. The first stars glinted near the volcano’s peak. Jeffrey held a lemon cake sticking out of a tan pouch and bit at the chemical frosting.
“Come on,” Stacy said around the peanut butter in her mouth, “they aren’t that bad.”
“You’d think in 40 years someone would have figured out how to make this stuff taste better.” He ate the rest of the cake and threw the pouch in the fire. He lay back on a survival bag. “So Stacy, tell me how it was that you ended up getting into Navy Special Warfare.”
“If I tell you, will you tell me about the Hammerheads?”
“Sure, some of it anyway.”
Stacy squeezed out the last of the peanut butter, took a drink of water, and opened a pouch labeled with black letters: fudge brownie.
“I was raised on the Colorado plains. Everybody thinks that Colorado is all amazing mountains, but there’s a big chunk that’s basically just like Kansas. My dad was a minister. He’s retired now. My mom’s still a checker at the Safeway. Our house is very conservative, cinnamon scented with cross stitches on the walls. There’s a white piano in the living room where we used to sing hymns. I suppose I was a typical Midwestern girl. I had long hair, wore jeans, and loved horses. My life growing up was really good. I can’t complain. But, in high school, everything went sideways when I started dating a guy who hit me. I dated him for two years, and only broke it off when I moved to Denver for college.”
“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Jeffrey said.
“It’s okay. It took me a long time to understand that it was one of the best things that happened to me because of the direction it sent me. In the end it brought me out of my shell and showed me who I really am. Turns out, while I enjoy the quieter things in life, I really enjoy the harder edges as well. I didn’t see that at first though. I spent my first year in Denver paranoid.”
“The University of Colorado was okay, but–after being in an abusive relationship and being fairly small–I didn’t feel safe around men. No one did anything to me, but every time a guy looked at me I felt afraid. There were a few times I was pretty nasty to guys who didn’t deserve it. I thought I was being tough, but–now that I look back–I realize I was just afraid.”
Stacy bit into the brownie and continued talking with her mouth full. “I finally decided that I was sick of worrying so I looked up self-defense classes. I signed up for one at a martial arts school near the campus. One of the instructors at the class was a woman my size. She changed my understanding of the world. She made me realize how much more I was capable of than I had believed.”
“So you enjoyed the class?” Leif asked.
“I went a bit crazy for it,” Stacy said with a smile. “At one point they put on full face helmets and had us practice headbutts. They wanted us to put the top of our head into the face of their helmets. Hard and strong,” she said, tapping the top of her head, “striking soft and fragile,” and she tapped her nose then her chin. “I did the headbutt wrong… with my forehead. One of the instructors brought me a towel. I had no idea why until I looked down and saw blood on my chest and on the floor. I had stripped a ribbon of skin off the bridge of my nose. I was so amped up, I hadn’t felt a thing. I liked the self-defense class so much, the next week I joined the school and attended it through the next three years of college.”
“How’d your parents like that?”
“The first time I came home with short hair and bruises on my shins and forearms, my mom cried. She’s had me in long hair since I was a toddler. My dad said the time there would distract me from my classes.”
“On one visit home my younger sister told me some guys were hassling her at school so we went out on the back deck and I showed her a few things. My dad came out and I stopped, but he sat down and said he wanted to watch and to keep going.”
“When I came home with this tattoo,” Stacy lifted up her jumpsuit leg to expose three Asian characters on the outside of her calf, “my mom freaked out. She screamed at me for an hour, and then—when my dad got home—she made me show him. He told my mom he would take me for a drive and talk to me. We got in the car and he didn’t say a word. When my dad got silent, I knew he was really mad.”
“Yeah,” Leif said, “I can relate. My mom was like that.”
“That’s definitely true,” Jeffrey said.
Stacy said, “Sitting in the restaurant, waiting for our food, my dad finally asked me if I was a lesbian. I laughed so hard I choked on the water I was drinking. I told him that I wasn’t, but probably would be better off given the quality of men I had met. At that my dad surprised the hell out of me. He had always been so straight laced and, I assumed, closed minded. But he laughed out loud and told me that, no matter what I chose in life, he always had and always would love me. The rest of the dinner we just talked adult to adult. It was the first conversation like that I’d ever had with him.”
“So what does the tattoo stand for?” Leif asked, “Karate?”
“No it’s Jeet – Kune – Do,” she said, pointing at each character. She looked back at Jeffrey. “After college I went down to the Navy recruiting station and gave them my story. They stuck a bit on the assault charges, but…”
“Assault charges?” Leif said. “You didn’t say anything about assault.”
“Oh yeah,” Stacy said. “Sorry, I skipped that part. My last year of college I went home for Thanksgiving, and some girlfriends took me out to a tavern called MacFinn’s. It’s one of the two taverns in town. I ran into my ex-boyfriend there. First time I’d seen him in a few years. He was a bigger jerk than ever. He walked up behind me and smacked my butt hard. I didn’t give him a chance to speak. I just laid him out. The judge…”
“Wait a minute,” Jeffrey said, “him smacking your butt is assault in itself. How did that not go down as self defense or at least a mutually inclusive fight?”
“It would have been, but I went a b
it crazy. I really hurt him, and I do feel a bit bad about that.”
“What’d you do to the guy?” Leif asked, sitting up.
“He ended up with two broken bones in his foot, three in his right hand, a broken jaw, a shattered molar, a perforated ear drum, and a ruptured testicle.”
Jeffrey and Leif stared at Stacy.
“What?”
“I’m just waiting to make sure you were done,” Jeffrey said.
“Yes,” Stacy said, “that was the extent of it. I felt really bad about it afterwards. In the end, the judge was good to me and gave me a conditional discharge instead of a felony. I had five days in jail, which I served over Christmas break, and then I was on probation for a year.”
“I’ll make sure to be very nice to you,” Leif said.
Stacy made a fist, held it up, and gave Leif a broad, beautiful smile. Leif looked away and Stacy’s smile faded. She seemed, to Jeffrey, to be unsure why Leif had not responded well to her joke.
He’s shy, and you’re not fully aware of how pretty you are.
Jeffrey stretched, yawned, and then said, “Honestly, I don’t care what you did to that guy. Life’s hard, and he had a lesson coming. If I had a daughter getting treated like that guy was treating you, it would have been me sitting on the other side of the parole officer’s desk.”
“The Navy recruiter had similar sentiments when I talked with him,” Stacy said. “When I told him I had just come from my last appointment with my probation officer, he said the Navy probably wouldn’t be able to use me. But, when I told him the details, he just shook his head, called my ex-boyfriend a stupid bastard, and took out the forms to sign me up.”
“I made it through basic training, served six months as a yeoman and then asked my CO if I could put in for Special Warfare. I caught a lot of crap because of my size, but they had no reason to block me so off I went. The last thing my CO said was, ‘See you back here in a few days.’ That one comment gave me all the motivation I needed. Hell Week was terrible. I got hypothermia three times and a hairline fracture on my right elbow, but I made it through. They have this bell that’s over 200 years old. You go up and ring it three times if you want to quit. I refused to even walk near it. We had over one hundred candidates when we started. I graduated with 28 other men and women.”
Hammerhead Page 8
