Finding Sgt. Kent

by Raymond Hutson

  –––

  I returned to Colville on leave fifteen years earlier, unannounced, in winter. I hadn’t planned to make the trip, but I took the chance to sneak away from my brief marriage. Turned out the Dunhams weren’t home. My rental car didn’t have snow tires and got stuck in their driveway. A day wasted, dark too soon, bleak and empty, the whole town hung with Christmas lights glowing in the fog, many broken or burned out.

  I drove past the high school, which was closed for the holidays, and decided the place had nothing for me—not really a conscious decision, just some aversion in my gut. Had a new wife and that was going to be my future.

  I didn’t go back, always thinking that I’d write to ask Mr. Dunham to ship my suitcase to me when I got to some permanent address. When I flew back from Germany, discharged, I realized I didn’t have my address book anymore, and random parts of my memory seemed to be gone. I’m not completely blank, just every once in a while something I thought I knew goes missing from my mental library.

  I crossed through Chewelah and saw the sign pointing up to the ski slopes. 49 Degrees North. Dunhams took me skiing there, eleventh grade. A few images returned—Janice Dunham in tight, turquoise ski bibs and a white turtleneck.

  Driving past Addy, I crested the hill at the mobile park, but our old trailer was gone: the pink-and-white singlewide streaked with rust, a thick smell of mildew rising from the soft places under the carpet. Past the wheat fields, below where it was flat enough to farm, there would be deer in the morning, seven or eight sometimes. Mom always said she’d shoot one if we had a bigger freezer, but our only gun was a .22 autoloader she kept under her mattress. I came home one time and the TV was gone, my Nintendo and all of the games. She said someone broke in and stole them. The pistol, too.

  When I told my best friend, Brandon, on the bus the next morning he said, “Your mom’s an alchy. She probably sold that stuff.” I wanted to punch him, but he was my friend, and the way he said it felt true, like he was doing me a favor—like everybody saw what I was too dull to notice. You couldn’t punch somebody for telling the truth.

  A great big expensive-looking gooseneck trailer sat in our old spot with a lot of slide-outs. They used to not allow travel trailers there. Probably having trouble now renting all the spaces. Descending the hill, three deer were crossing the highway, nonchalant. I blew my horn and they just looked at me from the shoulder.

  I drove through the center of Colville, trying to spot stuff I remembered and what had changed. The Acorn Tavern, which I never explored because I was too young. A couple of furniture stores we never visited because we were too poor. Safeway, the spot near the door where Mom always parked. Beyond the loop, they’d built a Walmart, and I cruised along the strip mall beyond. A lot of rent signs and empty windows, and then, at the end, Jones Boy CDs and DVDs, New and Used. A Mazda minivan was parked in front, one door caved in, a khaki- black-and-red bumper sticker, battle bar of the Gulf War. It clicked: Raymond Jones. I stopped and went in. He was stooped over the counter and I almost didn’t recognize him. He had gained fifty pounds, at least, an eagle tattooed on one forearm, flag on the other, and hair, grayed in streaks, that reached his shoulders.

  “What can I do you for?” He didn’t look up.

  “You have Full Metal Jacket?”

  He continued to scratch numbers on a stack of empty cases. “DVD or VHS?”

  “Don’t you have it on thirty-five millimeter?”

  He looked at me like he was going to spit, then, uncertainly, “Bobby? Bobby Kent! I’ll be goddamned!” He stepped around the counter, embraced me like a Frenchman. “Jessie, come on out here.” A pimple-faced Mexican girl, about six months along, stepped out of a back room. “This here’s my buddy. Went to war with me!” He turned to me. “Glad we got out when we did. Have to be some kinda goddamn fool to end up in Afghanistan.”

  We hadn’t really served together. We graduated, both joined the Army and went through basic, during which Raymond showed a certain talent for opening locks—a talent acquired before the service, actually—that almost landed him in the Fort Lewis prison. Instead, he wound up being a gunner on a Bradley.

  The girl held out her hand. “Nice to meet you.” She smiled timidly, one incisor capped in gold, and turned to Raymond. “Gotta go pick up the kids.” She looked maybe nineteen. Raymond tossed her a ring of keys and a minute later she was backing the Mazda.

  CDs covered an end cap, surly people with lots of attitude—white guys, black guys, girl bands, all looking so postured, so pissed off. Why is everybody in music pissed off? Raymond seemed inured to it.

  “You got kids?”

  “Hers.”

  “Nice store. Lots of inventory.” The place felt marooned, at the end of a strip mall without any people. “Looks like you’re going to have another one. Doing alright?” I walked along an aisle, separating the boxes here and there with my fingertip so they lined up better.

  “It picks up at night. I do all the paperwork in the mornings.” He raised a clear case and a paper sleeve. The back was blank. “Get most of my stuff from Canada, comes out of China.”

  “Pirated?”

  “Ooow,” he wrinkled his nose. “I prefer ‘high-profit-margin merchandise.’ Tough to stay afloat in a little town. Kids don’t have any money.” He leaned on the counter next to the till. “You got any kids?”

  “I was married. Couple of years after Iraq. Went to college. No kids.”

  “So where you been, man?”

  “All over.”

  We talked a while longer, about guys in the unit, his bagging an elk the autumn before, how Randy Grow got arrested, then got away, and was recaptured near the Canadian border. I didn’t remember Randy at all, but I nodded a lot anyway.

  “Bobby Anderson. Remember him?”

  I didn’t.

  “Went in the Navy year after us. Lives over in Republic now. Bobby had a little brother, six, seven years younger.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Name was Kevin. Went in the Marines. Second Gulf War. Fallujah and all that shit.” We were alone in the shop, but he lowered his voice anyway. “Done hung himself here, just last week.” He pantomimed a noose snapped tight at the side of his head.

  “Fuck,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Lucky we got out, man. Bad juju over there.”

  It seemed pointless to mention I’d re-upped. Would only embarrass him. I remembered him being clever—the dude who always had the final punchline at Fort Lewis. Now he just sounded trite, shallow, like someone I didn’t feel comfortable sharing personal stuff with; not because he’d abuse it, but because there wasn’t any kind of connection. I was sorry for his friend, but Raymond’s concern was invested in the gossip value. Probably whatever had happened to Kevin was a whole lot worse than anything we’d dealt with in Iraq in ’91. Raymond was just a little vacant. Too many drugs, too long adrift in the woods.

  –––

  On Walnut I slowed at the corner of Hofstadter. No familiar cars or border patrol truck in the drive, just a beat-up Alero. The Dunhams might have moved. I rang the bell and a moment later dogs were barking and children shouting; then, adult footsteps.

  The door opened a few inches and a young woman—cutoff shorts, dishtowel in hand, clear-faced and blue-eyed, blond hair knotted back with a few strands loose—regarded me uncertainly.

  “Robby?”

  “Yeah?” I didn’t recognize her.

  “Oh my God, it’s you! Robby Kent!” She opened the door wide, sprang up on her toes and hugged me. “Let me get a look at you.” She scanned me up and down, then turned and motioned me into the living room. “Mom and Dad aren’t here right now—be home early tomorrow.” She did a little dance and cupped her face with her hands. “Oh my God, I can’t believe this!”

  I expected to see a room full of faces, but she was alone. “Kaye?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know who I am.” She smiled and wiggled her torso. “I’m not a little girl anymore.” Sh
e gestured me through the kitchen and opened the back door. “Janelle! Zack! Get back in here.” She turned to me. “They always go out the back when the doorbell rings.”

  “Why?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You got married.”

  She swiveled into a kitchen chair. “For a while.”

  A boy, about four, and a girl of about six or seven dashed through the kitchen and scurried upstairs. “Their dad?”

  “Tom. Tom Lutchmyer.”

  He was two years behind me, sophomore with bad news all around him. I forget the details.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, he was sweet. Had more money than anybody, had himself one badass truck.” She shook a cigarette out of a pack. “Felt so good, riding way up there with him. I was eighteen.”

  “What happened?”

  “He’s down in Airway Heights.” She lit the cigarette and held the pack toward me.

  I shook my head.

  “Got himself fourteen years, for meth. Wasn’t his, though.” She stood and turned to the fridge. “Somebody else just left it in our house.”

  “Tough break.”

  “I was just going to heat up some spaghetti for the kids. You wanna stay for dinner?”

  Her story sounded stale, but I wanted to catch up on history. The screens were open, lilacs outside. “Sure.” She was nice to look at in a down-home kind of way.

  I hadn’t been around many kids—mostly beggars, cutting up, bartering, worshiping, sometimes stealing from us in every hamlet I patrolled. Sometimes they were even forward observers for the Taliban. I realized I didn’t really know how to talk to them.

  “Wash your hands.” She corralled them to the sink, squirted a blob of hand soap for each of them. “Hey, what’s this?” She massaged dirt off the little girl’s arm.

  “Zack poked me with a piece of wire.”

  “Zack?”

  Zack shook his head.

  “Looks to me like you were climbing on the fence again.”

  “Oh yeah. I think that’s what it was.”

  Kaye patted the little arm dry and kissed it. “Not nice to tell fibs. Especially about your brother.”

  Zack was silent most of the meal, intermittently watching me wind my noodles and trying to do the same before he eventually quit and ate them with his hands, his mother reaching over to wipe his face. Kaye had poured them each a glass of Kool-Aid and opened a couple of Coors for us.

  “You’re limping. You get wounded?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t want to talk about it?”

  “It’s not that. I just don’t remember much.”

  “One of those LEDs?”

  “IEDs. No. If it’d been an IED I wouldn’t be here. Just got shot, that’s all.”

  “That’s still awful.”

  “Wasn’t much. They fixed it pretty good in Landstuhl, but then I got a fungus infection. Fucked it all up.”

  Zack waved his fork like a baton. “Fugged all up!”

  “Zack!” Kaye hissed.

  “Sorry.”

  Janelle spoke up precociously. “That’s okay. Mommy says that all the time.”

  Kaye leveled her fork. “Mommy’s going to say it again in a minute. You just eat your dinner.” She looked at me, counting some inner clock. Her features softened. “At least you get to collect some kind of comp, don’t you? Being injured and all that.”

  “A little bit. I’d rather have my career back.”

  “With people trying to kill you?”

  “I made master sergeant. Could have spent the rest of my time stateside. Been a recruiter or something, finish out twenty years.”

  She grew somber and laid down her fork. “You gotta know, Johnny felt so bad. For you getting injured and everything, after how they treated you when you lived here.”

  I must have looked clueless.

  “Specially the time they pummeled you so much and locked you in the closet.”

  “Tell him it’s okay. Part of growing up.”

  “But when he heard ’bout that medal, he said he just couldn’t believe they’d done that to a hero.”

  I laughed. “Tell him if he ever does it again I’m going to be really torqued. What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s an attorney. Lives over on Mercer Island. Works for Microsoft.”

  “You say hello for me, okay?”

  She was squirming, glancing at the counter, the sink, looking for some minor responsibility. “I could have gone. To school, I mean. Got accepted at Central. But I had Janelle.”

  “Doesn’t mean you’re any less smart. You still collect stamps?”

  “I’m surprised you remember.” Her smile stumbled, fell. “I put ’em away when I got out of high school. Still have the album, though. One of these guys might pick it up someday.” She walked into the hallway. “Used to be on the bookshelf here. Dad might have moved them.” She came back empty-handed. “I tried to get them from every country in Europe, every place I thought I would travel someday. Then I started on Africa.”

  “I saved a bunch of them when I first went to Iraq. Was going to send them to you.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I don’t know what happened. You lose touch with a lot of stuff real quick over there.”

  She opened more beers and we sat in the living room, on the same couch I’d slept the first night I moved in with them. Cable played some sort of cop show, something that was supposed to be real-time, but they were clearing rooms silhouetted in doorways, approaching vehicles way too casually, and I squirmed or sighed or bit my lip, and Kaye must have thought I was uncomfortable.

  “You got that PTSD stuff?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten a lot of things.”

  “Sorry I picked this show.” She raised the remote and clicked a few times. “You must have had to kill a lot of people, huh?”

  “A few.”

  She turned to the screen and we were silent for minute, watching an eighteen-wheeler cross a frozen lake.

  I hugged her shoulder and tried to joke. “If I hadn’t killed ’em they might’ve shot me in both knees.” Her skin was smooth, warm, tanned, her muscles toned.

  She turned, took my hands in hers, twisted her lips in contemplation.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I mean, it was a job you had to do, right?” Looking earnest. “It makes a girl feel a little better, knowing she’s with somebody that can kill a man if they need to.”

  The tickle of her nails on my palm felt full of sex for a moment, a force rising in my groin like I hadn’t felt in years, but unearned, like I wasn’t really pedaling but the wheels were turning anyway. “Now that”—I pulled my hand away and pointed at the screen—”that makes my sphincter tighten. Most dangerous job in Afghanistan.”

  “Driving a truck in the snow?”

  “Driving a truck anywhere. Big, big target. Mines, IEDs, guys with RPGs. Nobody wants to drive a truck over there.” We sat with the kids on the floor in front of us, briefly playing the roles of perfect children, trying to assemble some yellow plastic model. Janelle finally turned and put it in my lap. “You try.” She hopped up on the couch and burrowed under my other arm. Her hair smelled dirty.

  It was a plastic dog, but after turning the parts several ways, it was evident at least one large piece was absent. “Maybe your dog was in a fight,” I said, leaning forward. “Has some parts missing.”

  Janelle slipped back on the carpet and Kaye leaned into me. “You’re good with them,” she said, the heat of her breath in my ear, and again it raced all over my body. The truck show ended and she ordered them upstairs. She stroked my knee. “We read about the medal in the Statesman. Was it for that?”

  “Purple Heart? Yeah.”

  “Is it getting better?” She stroked my knee again and left her hand there.

  “Not getting any worse.”

  “Hey, before I forget”—she took a coaster from the end table and scribb
led with a ballpoint—”here’s my number. Email too. Don’t lose it. Don’t wanna wait eighteen years to see you again.”

  I shoved the coaster in my shirt pocket, ashamed to tell her I didn’t own a computer, and then remembered why I’d come. “I left a suitcase here when I went away.”

  “After high school? Damn.” She flopped back. “I wouldn’t know where to begin to look. That big Samsonite you kept under your bed?”

  “That was it.”

  We started in John’s old room, now shared by her children. A thorny layer of Legos spread everywhere, stuffed animals and crushed Doritos in the carpeting, we knelt and peered under each bed with a flashlight that kept going out. No bag. I thought I saw a dead mouse.

  “If Dad had known you were coming he would have got it out.”

  “Didn’t have your number.” I stood. “You guys are unlisted.”

  “That was Tom’s fault.”

  We walked room to room on the second floor until I spotted the attic pull-down. “Up there?”

  At the top of the ladder, a string brushed my face in the shadows, pull-chain for a couple of bare lightbulbs. The attic was stifling from the afternoon sun, and sweat ran down my scalp, across my brow, stinging my eyes by the time I found and dragged the case back to the ladder, where Kaye watched, poised on the top step. She took one end from me and we both stepped down into the cool hallway.

  She wiped my face with her hand and brushed dust away from the suitcase locks. “Some fierce letters in there.”

  “You read them?”

  “I was just a little girl. All Samsonite keys are the same.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “You put them all back?”