On his piss break he walked over to check out the car. It was a sweet little car with leather seats, a wood steering wheel. He ran his hands along the sides of it. Something caught his eye, a metallic reflection, and he saw that the man had forgotten his keys. There they were in the ignition, attached to a rabbit’s foot. He had also broken the cardinal rule of airport parking—he’d left his ticket in the car. The ticket was up on the dashboard where anybody could see it. Denny caught his own reflection in the dark glass and it suddenly occurred to him that it might be a setup. There were probably cameras all over this place. He glanced around to see if anybody was watching him. Maybe it was a test they did on new employees, he thought, and peered over at a coworker, May Lynn, who was on her cell phone behind the filthy glass. There were no cars in the line—it was quiet. He felt all alone, the slight wind grazing his skin, this weird balmy quiet. You’d get that kind of quiet in the desert and it was sometimes nice, but it didn’t last.
It’s not your car, so keep walking. And that’s what he did. He walked around the parking lot like a person getting exercise on his piss break, but he couldn’t get those keys out of his head and, with the way things were going in his life, it took a great deal of effort and concentration on his part not to run over there and take it and drive the fuck out of there and never come back.
Routine made a difference to Denny. It got him through. They don’t tell you how different it is over there. Things you don’t expect, emotions. You’re flying over there and you’re a little excited, you think it’s this great adventure, you think you’re a fucking badass now that you made it through basic training, your initiation into hell. But it’s not all that simple, and you don’t really know what you’ve gotten yourself into. Then you land; you arrive. The heat is the first thing you notice. Then the light, the smells, the people, everything with an edge, an extreme—kind of like waking up with a severe hangover—and then the realization creeping up the back of your neck that you’re stuck there. There is no way out. Basically, you learn pretty quick that you’re totally royally fucked. And it’s like abstract. Everything about it is abstract starting with the light, the heat, the open space. For the first couple of weeks in Kuwait City it was like Christmas every day, unpacking crates of supplies, and he was like, yeah, I can deal with this. He had felt like it was under control, it was going to be all right, and maybe it was true that everybody back in Washington was looking out for him. Then it came time. They woke everybody up in the middle of the night—St. Patrick’s Day, 2003—and said they were moving out. Drowsy with sleep, disoriented, his unit did what they were supposed to. They set out to make war.
A lot of stuff happened to him in Iraq. Not just with the Iraqis, but in his battalion. He had gone over as one person, and come back as somebody else. He learned pretty quick that if you let them see your weak side they would hurt you for it, they would make you suffer. You could not be weak. It was not allowed. It was like some kind of perverse club—you had to be totally in or you were fucked; you were dead. You had to want to kill. You had to want to kill so bad you couldn’t wait for it, you couldn’t wait to go out there. You went to bed thinking about killing and you woke up thinking about it. That was the only way you survived. And there was no church in hell that was going to forgive you for that.
Once you get over your first kill, something twists up inside you and you suddenly have a purpose, a reason for being there. You experience a kind of reckoning. Kind of like when you shake up a can before you open it and it sprays all over the place, that’s how fucking crazy it was—something that could be a big joke, something maybe you dreamed up as a gag, but then you’re wet and everybody else is all wet and nobody’s happy. And instead of Mountain Dew you’re covered in blood.
Halfway through his tour he started crying a lot. He would bawl like a baby. It would come on suddenly, gush out of him. Sometimes they locked him up, they said, “Get the fuck with the program, dickhead.” They made him feel stupid and he’d suffered a whole lot of that abuse already in his life and he didn’t need it over there. He had seen things. He had seen children getting blown to pieces. He had seen an old woman lose her eye. His best friend, Ross, had gone down right next to him and Denny had tried to save him and had held him in his arms and cried over his body, but nobody could do anything. He had watched Ross’s soul go up to heaven, a kind of yellow mist. It’s a weird thing when you hold a dead person. There were soldiers down everywhere he looked, limbs splayed out. Pieces of bodies. They all worked together to keep people alive. He had learned to tie a tourniquet; he had learned CPR. Sometimes it worked. Everybody was pretty upset. He didn’t like to make excuses, but it may have been the reason for what they did to the girl.
There were four of them and she had come out of nowhere, maybe she was thirteen, fourteen, he didn’t know. At first they were all just joking around, not funny, but kind of in a sick way, not letting her pass, and then all of a sudden Hull was doing her and Denny realized what was going to happen next, and if you didn’t go along you were fucked, they’d never let you forget it, and even though Denny went last and couldn’t get hard and was just pretending, he was still guilty, and she had bit him so hard he still had a scar. Hull wanted to kill her afterward, but Denny convinced him to let her go—said she wasn’t worth it, that maybe they’d get away with it the way things were—and she had gimped off on her hands and feet like a beat-up kangaroo, spit dripping out of her mouth and this awful little sound coming out. They all just laughed. And when Denny puked in the shadows they laughed some more. They never let him forget it. Later that night Hull jumped on him, pinned him down, said he’d kill him if he told. “I’ll fucking kill you and make it look like a Haji.”
A few nights later Denny woke out of a deep sleep and saw Jesus standing over him in these purple scrubs, the kind you see on doctors, and he had a long white beard just like they say. He told Denny he was going to be all right, that he should be patient. Soon he would be out. He went and told the shrink he had seen Jesus and the shrink snickered and told him to stop being such a pussy.
Now he dreamed about the girl almost every night. In the dream she put her veil over his nose and mouth and he would wake gasping for air, feeling suffocated. He had brought the war home with him. There were things he couldn’t get over. They had told him to put it behind him, but he couldn’t. There were things he had done, they had all done them, and you hoped they went away, but they didn’t. They really didn’t. Because you didn’t forget shit like that.
One thing he had learned over there was to sense when bad things were going to happen. It was a feeling you got sometimes. He had it now. Even in his aunt and uncle’s house he didn’t feel safe. If something dropped on the floor, he just about jumped out of his skin. His hearing was keen, like a dog’s, he could hear everything. His stomach always in knots, his jaw clenched. It was like some essential piece of himself had been left behind in that desert, something he would never get back. It was stuffed into an old suitcase, lost in some airport terminal with all the other lost bags. Anybody could walk along and take it. Unprotected, he was out in the open, in full view of a sniper, just waiting to get the shit blown out of him. Let it happen, he thought. Let it happen now.
Two weeks before the end of his tour he got shot. They tell you it’s going to hurt, but this was medieval pain, this was the pain of the rack, stretching your flesh into something else. It was like nothing he’d ever experienced. You couldn’t compare it to anything. Maybe like a train running into you. Something to that effect. And he could remember lying there thinking, please God, just take me. Take me out. He was in a hospital for a while, and then they sent him home, an honorable discharge, but he couldn’t get his mind around the honorable part. That was almost a year ago, and now all he had to do was wait for his benefits to come through. He just had to put it all behind him. He had to move on. He had to.
That same Thursday night, after his shift, he met up with Javier and his girlfriend at a bar in Hollywood
, a pool hall. It was the night that changed his life. There was this girl there, Daisy. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, she even looked like a Daisy with her slender white petals. Denny didn’t know how to talk to girls. For most of the night he just watched her floating around the room. She kept going outside with different people. He could see her standing on the curb, smoking, watching the cars. When she came back in, Javier made him go up and talk to her. She shook her blond hair off her shoulder and asked him about his limp and he told her he’d just come home. “What was it like over there?” she asked, and he used his stock answer, “Hot.”
“You’re a hero, I guess.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, you deserve a medal.” She smiled.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I deserve anything.”
“I can tell just by looking at you.”
“Tell what?”
But the music came on too loud to hear her answer. She led him onto the dance floor and they danced—basically she danced and he sort of stood there trying to move a little bit. She didn’t care. She took his hand and moved it back and forth and he watched her hips, her little badminton tits going back and forth inside her shirt.
They shot a rack together and she wasn’t any good at pool. She let him buy her a drink. The four of them took Javier’s car and drove to Venice and walked along the beach. They went into a bar and he took her hand under the table and held it tight. The girl asked him about Iraq and he made himself sound like a hero. She put her hand on his arm, and then he took her hand and held it under the table. It was sweaty, they were both nervous. Later they walked on the beach, putting their feet in the water, and he tried to kiss her. “Where’d you come from?” he asked her.
“You dreamed me up.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. It scared the shit out of him. They made out on the beach and her mouth tasted like cherry cough syrup. Her breasts were small and pointy. She told him she was sixteen. He was twenty-one, not much older, but still, he could get in trouble. “You look older.”
“I know. People tell me that all the time.”
“Can I see you again?”
She took his hand and wrote her cell phone number on it and gave him a big, juicy smile. “Bye, bye, sailor boy.”
If you kill for Allah you get virgins in the afterlife—it’s a big selling point to a common Islamist terrorist. They make it sound so great. He found himself thinking about it that night on the bus, wondering if the girl, Daisy, was a virgin. Maybe she was, he thought. His first girlfriend had been a virgin, but he didn’t remember anything all that great about it. Her name had been Christina, a red-haired girl from his high school who smoked menthol cigarettes and had pimples—he’d had acne too. Even though he’d practiced, the condom was tricky to put on and it broke, finally. The girl had been upset and called him a pathetic excuse for a man. Now that he thought about it, screwing a virgin was overrated. If he had his pick, he’d rather have someone experienced in the afterlife. Somebody really hot like a porn star who knew what she was doing. Come to think of it, he’d never really had anyone who was great in bed. No, he decided, when it came to sex he’d only had amateurs. Well, that was all right; he wasn’t complaining. He took whatever he could get.
When he finally got back to his aunt and uncle’s house, he took off his clothes and got into the shower. It was still like a gift to stand, unhurried, in the shower. He realized he was crying. It was maybe two a.m. and he felt scared. The windows were black, he pulled the shades. Anyone could be watching the house, he thought. Wrapped in his towel, he stood in the hall for a minute, listening, but the only thing he heard was his uncle snoring. It was an endearing sound, and again his eyes welled with fresh tears. Before the war, he had taken all that shit for granted. Not now. Now he cried over stuff like that, because he realized how much it mattered to him. They had always fought, him and his uncle, and his uncle was always right. For a long time, Denny couldn’t get his shit together. He didn’t know; he felt bad about everything. He had just wanted them to be proud of him, to do something that made them feel like raising somebody else’s kid had been worth it.
In his room, he sat on the edge of the bed, shaking. He felt the presence of someone there, a spirit. Maybe it was his mother. He could still remember his aunt leading him down the hospital corridor on the day he’d said good-bye to her for the last time. How she’d held him and apologized for being so sick. For leaving him behind.
It came to him now that he’d never forgiven her.
He had not been born destined for nice things. Everything was secondhand, even his girlfriends. It wasn’t his looks, because he had looks, he was good-looking—his mother had been white—his father, Marie’s brother, had looked just like his aunt, strong Mexican faces, dark eyes. He had those eyes too, and feathery lashes that made all the girls jealous, but he had his mother’s fine skin, her good teeth and wide lips. But not everybody could put up with his jumpy manner, Attention Deficit poster boy—he’d spent a lot of time watching recess from the classroom windows, which was pretty stupid when you thought about it, just about the last thing he’d needed. So yeah, now he was bitter. Maybe that’s why he’d enlisted in the first place: to get the fuck out. He wanted to make use of himself. He wanted to prove that he could be something.
He went to sleep and in his dream the girl was there, the one. She came this close to his face. She was about to bite him when he woke up.
He cried and hated himself some more. What kind of fucking faggot cries like this? They had been right; he was a fucking pussy.
Next morning, his day off, he slept in. Somewhere around noon he woke up to the sound of the doorbell. Nobody ever rang the doorbell in their neighborhood. Weddings and funerals, maybe, but not regular social calls. He glanced out the window and saw a police cruiser. The house smelled of coffee and his aunt’s tamales. He could hear her heels clacking on the tiles as she walked to the door. This was it, he realized, they were here for him.
Denny shuffled into his clothes, old tennis sneakers, a jacket, and was out the back door. He was a skilled athlete—a magnificent warrior—and the stretched-out yards behind the neighboring houses became the broken hovels of Baghdad—in his head, through his eyes, he was right there—the sounds and smells, the vivid white light. His heart was beating in his chest and he felt light, agile, as he slalomed through swing sets and fallen bicycles, the holy Jesus statues, climbed the chain-link fence, hit the pavement and kept running.
There were the usuals at the bus shelter. They looked at him sideways, turned away. Maybe on account of the sweat; he wiped his brow. The bus pulled up and he got on, dropped his money in, took a seat in the back. He had a don’t fuck with me look on his face. At any second, he might take the whole bus out. That’s what he would do if anyone messed with him. The bus went along, stopping every couple of blocks to pick people up. He got off at the airport and walked up to the lot. It was almost three. Luckily, Javier wasn’t working yet, only May Lee and he avoided her, and two other people he hadn’t met, but knew by sight. The sky turned pearly, the clouds pushing down. Maybe it would rain. The lot was pretty full. The car was still there. It was waiting for him. He got into it like it was his and started it up. The engine responded with a lusty roar and he shifted, hit the gas. He wound around toward the exit and stopped at the gate furthest from his. The girl took his ticket; she didn’t recognize him. “Fourteen dollars.”
He paid her and smiled and she raised the gate and he drove through it.
It was a swell car. He thought he could smell roses. He hadn’t bothered to check the registration or to look in the trunk. There was something inside of it, he thought, rolling around. Later, he would check. Now he had two things on his mind. Buying a gun and finding Daisy.
9
On Saturday morning Hugh woke in the motel room. The sounds of the boulevard filled his room, somebody whistling, a woman’s shrill laughter, the beeping of a horn, a siren, a crying baby
. It began to rain. Hugh sat there for a few minutes with his hands pressed together in his lap as if in prayer. Suddenly, the whole sky was full of rain. He sat there watching it.
He had made his peace with himself about the incident with Hedda Chase. It was over and done with and out of his hands.
On the whole, it was a confusing time for him. On the one hand, he wanted to leave his wife. On the other, he was afraid to cut the ties to his old life. He called himself a writer, but what did he have to show for it? Here he was in this stinking motel room. He’d gotten this far, he realized, he could not go home now. Empowered, he called his wife’s cell phone. When she finally picked up, he could hear a lawn mower in the background. “They’re mowing their lawn again,” she explained. The neighbors were neurotic about their grass—there wasn’t a single dandelion on it. As much as Hugh complained and made fun of them, Marion seemed to admire them. “I’m making a garden for us,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m outside. I’m making a garden. We’re going to have beautiful tomatoes this summer.”
He could tell she was back on her antidepressants. “Marion,” he said. “I’m not coming home.”
“What? The mower—I can’t hear you, Hughie. What?”
He shouted into the phone. “I’m not coming home.”
“What? I can’t—what did you say?”
He hung up. What was the point? He sat there for a moment. He opened his briefcase and riffled through his papers and pulled out a copy of his screenplay, The Adjuster. He thought it might be salvageable in some way. Perhaps if he just told his own story. Perhaps if he simply told the truth. Would people be interested in a story about a man like him—misplaced—working in the wrong job, married to the wrong woman, living in the wrong house? Everything wrong. Once you bought into that life, how did you escape it? Of course you could not. You were stuck. Vulnerable to the judgment of strangers, people you didn’t care about and yet you cared what they thought. And, once you admitted to failure, like savage crows they feasted on your remains.
A Stranger Like You Page 14
