Finding Sgt. Kent

by Raymond Hutson

  Games were always at night. Kaye would fall asleep across my lap on the way home and I’d think nothing of it. Maybe I could help her now, it occurred to me again and, almost as quick, picturing her head in my lap, I halted a selfish little fantasy. Or was that how life was supposed to work? People found somebody that satisfied their fantasies and hoped the whole business was reciprocal. It seemed very risky, that kind of negotiation.

  On my second tour we had a guy in my platoon, Scott. From Idaho, I think. Scott had a rubber sex toy the size of a Coke can he’d named Gina, something he bought in a sex shop on leave somewhere, and was very protective of her. He must have hooked up with Gina almost every night, and Gina wasn’t exactly quiet, made a sucking sound that the other guys started imitating. Guys would be having chow, Scott would sit down, and pretty soon somebody would start making that little noise with their mouth. Quiet night watch, and somewhere in the dark, the Gina noise. They did it well enough that once I even thought Scott was neglecting his post.

  Everybody had to jerk off sometimes, everybody had porn available, it was just that everybody wasn’t so noisy, and there was probably some jealousy as well. Mortenson offered to draw a face and breasts on her; I’m sure he would have done a good job, but it just pissed Scott off even more. He was kind of a loner, sort of autistic.

  Scott kept Gina in his pack somewhere. Guys tried to steal her, and Scott would move her around. One night he couldn’t find her and went hooch to hooch until she turned up, the victim, it seemed, of some kind of torture and gang-bang. He didn’t say anything, just walked off, but returned with a loaded M4 and things were very tense for a few minutes. Gina was full of sand and all kinds of contamination—I think somebody poured catsup on her. She disappeared after that. I don’t think Scott wanted her anymore, knowing what happened. Buried her maybe.

  Lieutenant gave us a little lecture the next morning on respecting what the next guy had in his pack, and still there was a lot of snickering going on. Has always troubled me since, that someone could think of something plastic like it was a real person. Now I wondered if it was worse to have a real person and start thinking of them as something plastic.

  “Find a nice girl, fuck and make babies.” Must have heard Garcia say that a hundred times the last two tours. “No bigger joy than that.”

  When he joined us it was easy to think of him as a kid, a cherry, but he was almost my age, turned out he’d been in for five years, and the first guy I could talk to about deeper questions late in the evening. He wasn’t stupid, just had a way of reducing the most complex questions to basic answers, explaining an injury or why the guys should drink their water or what was wrong with some little Afghan kid with a rash. Sat and drew a picture for a woman one time of her daughter’s broken arm, how long it had to be splinted. Knew more Pashtu than me, and a lot of medical terms. Showed me his kids’ pictures. Showed me a picture of his sister in Arizona, or maybe it was Texas, a nurse in an ER, said he was going to set me up with her. “Find a nice girl, Kent,” and he’d slap me on the shoulder. Julia hadn’t been a nice girl and hadn’t wanted to make babies. Not with me anyway.

  Army always made me feel like life shouldn’t start yet, and whatever the last thing that I did was, I’d be remembered for that, and I didn’t want to be remembered as an asshole. A few girls came and went—up-front girls, fun girls, girls who maybe were thinking the same thing. Going off and dying with an unborn kid at home wasn’t going to be my legacy.

  There was a girl at Fort Lewis between my first and second tours, we were both E-5s, and we used to get together in my room. We had bunk beds there; my roomie was always gone doing some Tacoma chick. Debbie would show up about every third night, we’d have some kind of charade, eventually trash that lower bunk. Afterwards just lie there an hour or so, talking. She was with logistics and the Army moved her to McAlester after six weeks, and I wrote her once, on a camp computer. She wrote back that she’d had a great time, but “all debts and friendships were canceled” when you deployed somewhere else. Followed by, “You know we’re not the only ones to read these.” Every time I see bunk beds I think of her.

  –––

  I topped up the tank in Othello, watching low-riders and pickups rumble past, everything tossing up a little tail of dust, the trees bending in some sirocco wind coming up from the south. Tejano music was scratching away where I paid at the window, bought a bottle of Coke, familiar rancid smells in the air as I turned away. Hand on the door of my car, an Afghani proverb came to mind: The tree does not bend unless there is wind. An elder conveyed it through an interpreter once, and I stared at the old man, asked the interpreter what he meant.

  The interpreter shrugged. “I think it means to have a safe journey, or something like that.”

  The old man raised his hand in a thumbs-up. Twenty minutes later we drove into an ambush. I’ve wondered about that phrase ever since, but still can’t decipher a metaphor for danger. Some days it goes around and around in my head. A few months later a corporal told me the thumbs-up meant “fuck you” in Afghanistan.

  –––

  I headed south, fewer and fewer cars coming the opposite direction, up a long, steady grade and onto a plateau, alone with the desert, into a furnace, sweat in my palms, on the wheel, beneath my legs on the seat. Far out in the sand a dirt devil danced briefly before dissolving. The afternoon sun merged with my own uneven thoughts of shadow and glare, watching for movement in the swaying fields of sagebrush, movement on the ridgeline, the uneven contour, the smudge of color or darkness that didn’t belong, steel-blue shimmers of heat glistening on the horizon.

  I was the point vehicle. Somewhere along that stretch I started watching the roadside for any place that might have been freshly dug, footsteps in the dust, whipping the car gently from one side to the other as irregular patches loomed out of the asphalt. Our Hummer could take a hit or two, and three of my Joes fell asleep in the heat, cherries snoozing like they were in the back of their parents’ van on a family outing. Guy named Dacovitch in the front, Hendricks behind me, Marsden behind Dacovitch, squinting at the desert, said he couldn’t see as well with his sunglasses on.

  I hit a hole deep enough to slam the car on its springs and shouted “fuck!” A half mile blew past the car, fence flashing by; nothing rattled or shook.

  “I am in Washington,” I said over the wind, fingers clamped on the wheel. “I am in Washington.”

  I rolled the window up and turned on the air. I don’t like to drive with the window up because I can’t hear outside, shots or whatever. I rolled the window down. Then I rolled it most of the way up and turned on the radio. “My baby don’t mess around ’cause she loves me so and this . . .” jack-hammered into my head. I turned it off and pulled over, killed the engine and got out.

  “I am in Washington State.” I walked around the car. “Hanford is over there. It is federal. No bad guys. Not here.” I stood in the heat until my breathing slowed. “Federal,” I repeated. “Washington State.”

  A spot appeared in the road on the southern horizon. It wasn’t real, but it was getting bigger. Then it was real, I could hear it, a shriek I felt on the back of my neck that softened my knees. I dropped down in the culvert, elbows in the sand. A second later it shot past, an old Suburban full of Afghans. Iraqis. No, just brown faces. Mexicans probably. I watched as their brake lights flickered, then went out and they were gone, receding to the north. Had I been armed I think in that last fraction of a second as they approached I would have opened up on them. How crazy would that have been?

  I urgently needed to piss, and stood below the roadside emptying my bladder, ground crackling with the wet, and a few feet from the impact a row of white ribs bulged from the sand, bleached vertebrae, a crushed skull.

  “When things go down, shoot brown,” guys used to say. Garcia always took exception to that.

  I tried to smile, opened the trunk, unzipped the duffle and tapped out a citalopram. Should have taken it that morning. Washed it down w
ith warm Coke. Mountains in the distance, cirrus clouds hung high in the afternoon heat, converging motionless in the south, and at that moment I might have been in any desolate, arid place in the world.

  I started driving again, windows open, startled out of that spell only when the rusty orange Vernita Bridge materialized, a dull ribbon of river below it. Not another vehicle passed in either direction. Should have gone down through the Tri-Cities, stayed close to people. The little books you get at the end of a deployment advise you to tell your story, especially the bad stuff, to people you know. Really tell, over and over, to people who will really listen. This is supposed to get it out of your head. This is where Zilker starts his sessions.

  I imagined Jennifer sitting on the seat next to me; I even cleared it off, tossed the Coke bottle in the back, and talked to her.

  “We were on our way to a combat outpost near—” And I have to think. “It was in the Bagrami district. We were relieving the guys already there.”

  “Relieve?” She’s smiling, doesn’t understand.

  “Like a shift change, except your shift lasts four months and there’s no running water.”

  She wrinkles her nose.

  “It’s part of the Jalalabad highway, but it isn’t really a highway. Just gravel. Really easy to bury IEDs. I’m in the second vehicle, Humvee, sitting behind the driver, when a blast goes off in front of us, a thump you feel in your chest, lifts our vehicle and drops it half sideways, pops our ears, and when the dust clears the Hummer ahead of us is upside down and burning. Whole column stops.”

  She just nods.

  “I knew guys in there. Driver was another sergeant, black guy named Percy. Had his pelvis fractured. All this time there’s fire coming in from our left. We’d driven into an L-shaped ambush.” She’ll want an explanation. “Something pops up in front of you, IED or RPG, or just some machinegun fire, anything to stop you. That’s the short part of the L. Bunch of guys pop out of trenches they’ve dug, or out of the rocks, next to you, that’s the long part.”

  “And if they pop up on both sides?”

  “Then you’re really fucked.”

  Big power lines crossed the highway, just like that day in Bagrami. It’s good to remember this stuff, I think, but that was three years ago, not here.

  She’s understanding this now.

  “My driver, guy named Chapman, gets shot through the mouth. Fortunately, he’s yelling something when it happens, and the bullet goes right through one cheek and out the other, nails a tooth maybe, but he’s bleeding like stink. I drag him down into the culvert closest to the fire and he has to keep his face in the dirt, mouth keeps filling up with blood.” Should I tell her more? “A piece of his cheek is gone, he reaches up and feels it, puts his finger in his mouth from the side, he’s panicking, and I tell him, ‘It’s okay, okay? Gonna have a bitchin’ scar, man. Chicks will love it.’ And all the time I’m trying to get a roll of gauze to stay against his face.”

  I found myself scanning the pavement again, had to tell myself that was then, and this is now. Washington State.

  “Other guys have better cover, got out of the other side and are on the far side of the road. We engage for about fifteen or twenty minutes, then they hear the thump of Apaches coming and disappear. We found three bodies, Apaches nailed a few more.”

  “Not much of a battle,” she says.

  She doesn’t understand. “Wilson, guy in forward seat next to Percy, got both his legs blown off at the hip.”

  “He live?”

  “Only in the fucking movies. He was deader than shit when we pulled him out, intestines sticking out below his vest. Big, big fucking battle for him.”

  I was getting mad, and I shouldn’t have gotten mad at her. She didn’t believe in guns, I reminded myself. Her seat was empty; shouldn’t have raised my voice. I relaxed and made her come back.

  “We had a truckload of food in the back of the column, seeds, fertilizer, stuff to trade to locals for goodwill. That got blown up by a secondary IED. Guys driving the truck had to be airlifted. Taliban won that day and fucked a lot of Afghans out of stuff they needed.”

  “I understand,” she says.

  But she doesn’t.

  A white highway patrol car passed me going north, weaving through the islands of rock, disappearing in my rearview mirror, and it was a good ending to a bad dream. A while later I descended into the valley.

  –––

  I started at the high school, remodeled and sleek as a corporate campus, but only a handful of the staff were older than myself, and only by a few years at that. No one was going to remember Andrew Kent. The librarian finally sat me in a cubicle in the reserve section of the library and stacked a pile of annuals in front of me.

  “You might find something . . .” she trailed off as she walked away.

  I flicked through the class pictures of every year from 1968, when my mother had braces and seemed a little flat-chested, to junior cheerleader, to her graduation, and then beyond. In the last volume, 1972, I spotted a familiar face in the tenth grade. Danny Kent. Same little smirk as my father, bigger nose. A brother, four years younger. I asked for the next couple of annuals and followed him through graduation, hair getting longer, becoming stoic, detached. Didn’t play football. Sort of a stoner, guitar player, one frame of him with two other boys, on bass and drums, screwing their faces up, fingers a blur of motion, the caption, Tolo 1973. Kids were watching, not dancing. Some kids looked the other way. Not many kids in the gym at all. I wrote down the names of the other two boys—Jim Kenney, Buddy Gomez.

  I went back to the ’68 and ’69 books. In the eleventh grade a shot of Mom dancing, slow-dancing, with Richard Nelson. So, they were friends, yearbook staffers. Maybe she felt sorry for him. A pity dance. Another photo in the back, they ended up next to each other in a group shot of the theatre club stage crew, cutting up, funny faces; one guy held a broom like a shotgun, another had a floodlight can. I picked up the magnifying glass chained to the Oxford Dictionary. Richard and Mom were holding hands.

  I set up the laptop, logged onto the school internet, and tried to look up addresses or phone numbers of Kents but ran into pay-only websites. In the end I just used a phone book the librarian pulled from a bottom drawer, Google-mapped a couple of addresses and sketched them out. Three Palmers turned up. Two Kents. I started to Google the Nelsons as well, but the school was closing and the shy, fragile-looking high-school girl who had taken over the librarian’s desk asked me to leave.

  –––

  The first address was in an apartment building, broken plastic toys scattered over foot-worn lawns of dog turds and junk food wrappers. I walked up to the second floor and knocked. A Hispanic girl answered the door.

  “Quién es usted?” A baby sat on the floor behind her.

  I was looking for somebody in their fifties at least. It didn’t feel right. I apologized and left.

  The second address was a mobile court, manicured like a cemetery, no trees, and sun glaring off the white metal like noon in Cairo. I drove around, passed someone in a golf cart, stopped at space number 138, a screened-in porch attached to the front of a white metal doublewide. An old couple sat in the shade of the porch watching a television I could hear from the street. The white-haired woman stood and met me at the door. I explained who I was looking for.

  “My name was Kent, but I’ve remarried. This is Mr. Bemis.”

  The old man nodded, then gazed back at the TV.

  “You can call me Millie. You must be looking for Kathy Kent’s boys. She was my sister-in- law while I was married to Clyde. They split up years ago, about the time the boys finished school. Clyde’s dead now—Honey, isn’t Clyde dead?” Mr. Bemis nodded again but never looked away from his screen. “Kathy’s down in Arizona somewhere, last I heard.”

  She motioned me to come in and gestured to a loveseat where an enormous yellow cat lay sleeping. “Jes’ push him off of there.” She sat down opposite me. “They weren’t regular people, the t
wo of them. Sorta wild.” She sneezed and took a tissue from a box on the coffee table. “Boys growed up the same way.” She blew her nose. “Older one went in the Army after some trouble with the law. Got himself killed I heard.”

  My eyes adjusted to the dark and I realized she had little statues—no, salt and pepper shakers, hundreds of them, on every available cabinet and along a little shelf circling the living room near the ceiling.

  “Other boy—” She fell silent. “You know, it’s shameful. They’re not of my blood, but nephews nonetheless. Can’t remember that boy’s name.”

  “Danny?”

  “Why yes. Daniel. Daniel tried to get me to send him some money, a couple of years ago.” She stood and went to a small roll-top, pulled one bundle of envelopes, then another and another, snapping off the rubber bands, flipping through them until the desktop was almost covered and I was about to tell her to stop. “Here it is.” She held it at arm’s length and pulled her head back. “Whitefish.” She handed it to me.

  The writing looked like a child’s, magic marker soaked into the paper rendering it almost unreadable. Just Whitefish. No street address. Maybe it was general delivery.

  “You can keep that if it pleases you. You’re closer to him than me.”

  I thanked her, tucking the letter in my shirt. We talked a while longer. No, she didn’t know any Palmer girls and never heard of the older Kent boy getting married, but she lost track of them after high school.

  –––

  At one of the addresses for Palmer, a girl answered the door in a business suit, just home from work, it appeared. Her husband was from Portland, and both of his parents were alive, last she checked. At the second address, on Harrison Hill, a plumbing truck pulled into the driveway just ahead of me. A black man got out, a small black girl running from the front door to greet him. At the last address, a nice rancher three miles from town with a long driveway, I was met by a very Italian-looking man, an old nonnina at the kitchen table. Said they’d just moved there, wanted to know why I wanted to know, and watched me leave through the curtains as I drove off. New Jersey plates on a big Cadillac by the side of the house.