by Devin Murphy
“Jeeeesus,” I said, looking back to see the outline of those two cows disappearing. Kurt hunched forward farther with both hands on the wheels, looking ahead, a nervous half smile forming on his face. When I looked at him, I saw he was happy with his evening. With constructing some new hero’s story of his life, what it was like to be set loose from whatever craziness he’d been through. Loose enough to find some new personalized foolishness that felt like living. He had somehow pulled me into his orbit. Driving with him that night, my feelings oscillated between sorrow for the difficult life he was probably bound to lead, and envy for his wildly beating heart, panicked, and fully alive.
Here I was, out in a strange place caught between the two separate worlds of my parents, and feeling that I was supposed to be a part of this third option that included wandering out on my own, far from any place I’d ever known.
Kurt took me to the Motel 6 that I’d cowered in before Joe brought me to the ranch months earlier. We parted with a brief handshake, which felt both anticlimactic and how men like him were supposed to communicate. Alone, in the dark parking lot the neon 6 sign seemed brighter than all the stars out on the plains combined. I paid for a room for the night. Once inside, I dropped my bag on the floor, took out the only set of enlistment papers I had left. The navy. I began to fill them out. I signed my name. Lewis Thurber. I placed the papers on the nightstand, ready for when the local recruitment office opened in the morning. Then I lay in the queen-size bed imagining spending the rest of my life letting my fingers graze the belly of every star in the sky.
6
Jamie Thurber, 1992
When we dropped out of the mountains heading west into Utah, we drove by one of those brown tourist attraction signs that read “The Trail Through Time,” and I grabbed John’s forearm so he’d read it as well.
“That might get us there quicker,” he said, reaching over and squeezing his thumb and pointer finger above my kneecap where he knows it makes me jump. I planted my hands over his to hold it for as long as I could.
“Then we’d miss all this scenery,” I said. There were carmine- and crimson-inflamed mesas stretching north and south of us; just ahead the road cut through the full spectrum of brown desert. It surprised me he’d wanted to make the trip, but working on his Jeep had been the only thing he’d wanted to do over the last four months, since getting back from the hospital in Italy. He’d marked the dates of Jeep Safari Week on the calendar like its arrival would heal him, and watched the highway ahead of us with the intensity of someone who had convinced himself that the road he was on would lead to a better place.
“The little specks of human cells that cluster up to make your eyes blue,” I said to John. “How does that work?”
“That’s a good one. I don’t know,” he said, obviously not in the mood to talk much more. The wind from our open top shifted the shortened bristles of his hair. On our road trips, I made him pick a topic for us to discuss in every way we could think of. I’d learned the trick from his mother, and hoped playing this game on our drive would crack something loose in him. John had chosen the color blue when we left Buffalo, but it looked like it was up to me to come up with the instances and meaning of how that color affected our lives.
I reached over and tried to run my hand up his leg toward his zipper, but he pushed it away. He kept looking at the road. “Are you okay?” I asked him.
“I’m fine,” he said. That had become his mantra since getting back. It made me want to scream in his face. But I was afraid to push it with him. I wanted him to tell me he wasn’t fine, so that together we could find the person he had been.
I kept one hand holding his on my knee and pulled out his dog tags from under my shirt with the other. I read them aloud, which was something I had been doing around him, as if trying to convince myself he was the same person. “Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Thomas John Parks. Naval Station, Newport, Rhode Island.”
“Reporting for duty, Miss Jamie,” he said, pulling the hand that had been on my leg free to salute.
We had dated all the way through college, and married a few years after graduating from Buffalo State, where I studied philosophy, music, and painting, and John did Navy ROTC to pay for school and please his veteran father. We spent the month after our wedding and before his first deployment in a California king-size bed his parents bought us for a wedding gift.
“Why do you love me?” I asked him in that bed.
“Because you have a gypsy smile,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s the kind where there’s only one thing to do when you see it, completely abandon everything and blissfully follow.”
We made love, and when he sat up I straddled him and buried my head into his shoulder, letting my hair fall forward over his back. When we finished I stood and pulled him up by the hands so we were facing each other.
“I want to look at you—at every part of you,” I told him. “Move your body around. Flex for me and show me everything.”
“This is everything,” he said, standing in front of me. He was still breathing heavy and his penis was starting to slag back down.
“I mean it. Watch,” I said. “I’ll do it for you.” I started breathing deeply, then shallow, and every other way I could manage. “See how my stomach folds a bit when I bend like this.”
“Let it all hang out,” he sang.
“I’m serious,” I said, kicking his blue-checkered boxers off the floor, toward him. “I feel fat when I do that. I have poses that make me feel sad, sexy, mean, and ugly too. I want you to show me all of you so I have more of you to think about when you’re gone.”
After I said that, he raised his arms over his head, flexing his fingers up to the ceiling so I saw the exposed stack of his rib cage. He turned around with his arms still in the air and took a long inhale. I studied his body from the back of his neck to the muscles between his shoulder blades. He’d just finished recruit training at the Great Lakes Naval Service Training Command and was as lean and strong as I’d ever seen him, and for all my want to touch him again, I only watched as he moved for me until it was my turn, and I did the same. That’s when he put his dog tags around my neck. They smelled like freshly minted nickel and chlorine. They were still warm from resting against his chest.
I wore those tags every time he deployed, and hadn’t been able to take them off by the time we went to Utah. The tags also made me think of my brother Lewis, who traveled to distant ports, following whatever inner pressure urged him into the service. I held the tags in my hand every time I got a letter from John or talked to him on the phone, like they were an engraved promise that he’d be home soon. After he got hurt last October, when his ship was suicide-bombed in the port of Aden, I wore the sheen clear off the metal by rubbing them between my fingertips.
I’d heard about the bombing on the news before the navy recruiter showed up to our apartment. I saw his pressed black regalia through the peephole. He must have heard me gasp “No,” before I dropped on the ground on my side of the door. I was scratching at the carpet with my fingertips like a dog when he knocked again, his sullen voice finding me through the doorframe. “Ma’am?”
I was sure the recruiter was there to tell me John was dead, but he pushed open the door and told me the blast had killed seven sailors, and wounded twenty-eight others. The explosion had torn open the right side of John’s body from the quadriceps to lower rib cage. When they stabilized him, he was sent to the USS Comfort in the Gulf, then to a hospital in Italy where the doctors removed the eleventh and twelfth floating ribs on that side and grafted skin over the whole area.
We drove farther into Utah on I-70 and took Route 128 through the canyon leading into Moab. Our campsite was tucked below the road on the banks of the Colorado River, where the terracotta canyon walls rose a thousand feet on both sides of the water. “I love it here,” I told John, as he pulled our gear out of the back of his Jeep to set up our tent along the river. The sun crossing from on
e end of the canyon top to the other shifted the shadows and changed the color of the walls and water. John stood by the river and tossed rocks—each plunking under the surface. He dusted the dirt off his hands by slapping them against his pants.
I unrolled our sleeping bags in the tent and lay down for a moment. The top of the tent was dusty, and I reached up and rubbed a squiggly line with my fingertip. The dust drifted down on me and I remembered how my mom went out the same night I learned about the Sistine Chapel in school as a girl and came back with a paper sack full of brushes and paints for me. She laid a drop cloth down in my bedroom, pulled a sheet taut underneath my box spring, and we lifted my bed onto four cinder blocks so I could slide beneath it and have my own canvas overhead.
“Give it a try,” she said.
I lay on my back but didn’t know what to paint.
“Whatever you like,” she said. “Even if it is just colors.”
So I started with a red daub on the white cloth. A drop of blood in a glass of water. Then I kept on without knowing what was to come and let the paint drip down onto me like a heavy rain.
When our campsite was all set up, we drove to town. I offered John some of my candy, Mamba fruit chews that I ate way too many of. In town, the streets were full of Jeeps souped-up in every way like I’d seen in John’s Jeep magazines. He bought the Jeep for himself between his first and second cruise enlistments. He kept telling me to look at all the shocks, wheels, and roll bars on each one we passed. He got all excited and marched ahead of me so I noticed that each time his right foot came down his side pinched tight around his injury and his body hunched in on itself.
I wanted to touch his side to feel how his torso was tightening and releasing as he walked, though he hadn’t so much as let me see him naked since he’d been home. We’d made love only once since he’d been back. He’d kept all his clothes on, slipping himself free of the open front of his Buffalo Bills boxer shorts. As he slowly started getting harder inside of me I brought my arms up from behind my head and softly pressed my hand over his right side. I put pressure against the gravelly texture of his scar tissue and felt the dip where his lower ribs had been—then he pulled away from me. “Please,” I said reaching for John, trying to pull back all that want we’d worked up.
“No,” he said, and left me there on the bed. When he left the room, all that love and longing I had for him when he was away and how scared I was when I couldn’t visit him in far-off hospitals, rose up again inside of me and pushed against my skin. Since then, every morning, he’d take his tightly folded clothes into the bathroom with him and come out dressed after he showered. There was the mystery of how different he looked growing between us, and again, I kept silent.
We got trail maps at the visitor center, and walked through a couple of stores where John bought me an aqua-colored Jeep Week T-shirt, and himself a large window sticker that said “Feed the Rat,” in bold white letters.
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
“It’s a company that does all sorts of adventure-sports stuff. Get off on what you’re into, is the idea. Keep the rat that’s nibbling away at your insides happy by doing what you want.” He pinched my shoulder and scrunched his nose up when he told me that, and I felt myself relax because he had touched me.
We walked down the street and passed an old movie theater that had been renovated for the tourists. I looked in through the enormous lobby windows and saw a wooden piano at the base of the movie screen. To sit at the base of a silent screen playing as the world came at you seemed magical to me.
“That’s what I want to do,” I told John.
“Well, you’ve got to feed the rat,” he said, turning back to the line of Jeeps on the street. “Should we hit the trails?”
It was past dark when we got to the trailhead outside of Arches National Park. John walked to the Jeep and put his sticker on the windshield. He got into the front seat with two cases that he’d stolen from his unit and handed one to me. The box read “AN/PVS-7 generation 3, US Military Night-Vision Goggles.” He’d shown me how to use them after he got home from Italy, but I’d never put them on outside of our apartment. While I was taking mine out of the box I looked over and saw he already had his strapped around his head. The two eye pieces held by the head strap funneled into one eye lens like some sort of robot Cyclops.
Driving again on a dirt road, the night looked green and dull black through the goggles as we started down the trail. Lights from other Jeeps off-roading against distant hillsides resembled moon rovers, small and faraway, rocking over and through the same exposed stone that we were. We went about fifteen miles in, over mostly flat stretches.
“This is great,” John yelled once, so I would hear, as if convincing himself he’d been cut free from the silence and weight he’d been holding. At the end of a long straightaway, he turned up a narrow slope with steep cutbacks. On sharp turns into the mountainside, the beams of our headlights shot out into nothing and dissipated in the distance.
The Jeep’s front left tire suddenly slipped off the trail. My side of the car lifted and I could see straight over John’s head and off the side of a cliff.
“Oh God!” John moaned. I wanted to squeal but could not. Panicked words were twitching in my mouth but nothing came out. John hunched over the steering wheel with his elbows jutted out, locked at ninety-degree angles, as he yanked the steering wheel toward me, slammed the gas pedal, and the Jeep straightened on the trail again. The long muscles in his forearm were taut as piano wires.
John continued along the switchback ridge as slow as he could go without having the car roll backward. From my seat, I watched the cup of a valley sinking below us again.
At the top of the hill, he stopped and set the parking brake. He was pale, and sweat beaded at his forehead. We sat there for what felt like hours—each in our own state of paralysis—frozen from the gut out, silent again beneath the moon.
“This is a pretty serious grade going down,” he finally said. I scanned the area and realized there was no room to turn around. The pale green moonlight lay on the hillside like a mesh blanket over the trees. “Do you want to drive?” he asked me.
“Are you crazy?”
“I’m serious,” he said, looking at the path leading down. “I’ll put it in a low gear and walk in front of the Jeep telling you how to position the wheels.”
“Why don’t I tell you where to go?” I asked him.
“Well, I think putting the Jeep where I tell you will be better than you guessing where it should go.” From the exposed part of his face below the goggles, I saw he was chewing the inside of his cheek hard enough that I’m sure he tasted the tang of blood mixing with spit. He’d let me drive the Jeep around town, and a few times on trails near our apartment—but never like this.
“Please—no,” I said.
“Please!” he said, and I wondered again at what inner trouble he was fighting.
“This was the kind of thing you’ve been talking about doing since getting the Jeep.”
John started making coin-size circles against his jeans pocket with his right pointer finger.
“Yeah. But—but this is a complex route down.”
“And you want me to do it?” Through the green darkness of my goggles, he didn’t look like anyone I’d seen before, and for the first time since he’d been back I was genuinely afraid I’d lost the man I once knew. It sickened me, but part of me longed to go back to the carpet floor with the recruiter’s voice in my ear. If only a bit more fire had flashed into the side of his ship, I could have mourned him, and gotten on with my life. What kind of wife thinks this? I was a monster.
He got out of the car and walked away from me. His limp seemed exaggerated on the dirt road.
“I don’t know why you can’t do this,” I said, terrified of the descent around us on every side.
“I’ll walk you through,” he said, turning back toward me. “We’ll be fine.” I looked at him closely, and the goggles made it look lik
e he was backlit by a neon glow.
“You’ll tell me what to do?” I asked him.
“That’s my girl,” he said, leading me to the driver’s side where he buckled me in and put the Jeep in its lowest gear. I kept my goggles on and looked for the spot on his body where his nerves had been rattled loose. He started walking ahead of me, pointing to where he wanted the left tire.
“Give it a little gas,” he yelled, in a voice I’m sure platoons would listen to without question, but within which I knew something childish was trembling. He did this, bottled up all his hurts, as if words were insufficient for such things, and then I’d keep silent so as not to add to any of them. But the silence between us had turned gangrenous. I could feel it in my stomach.
When I hit the gas the left side of the Jeep climbed over a small boulder and my stomach tightened as I saw where the switchback dropped over the edge—where life collapsed toward a pile of unforgiving rock. This was the spine of the mountain, the slightest movement in the wrong direction, and the Jeep would have fallen—I would have fallen—fallen alone.
The tire rolled back down and I steered it from small stone to stone without listening for John. He may have stopped talking. When I looked up at him, his body was like a jiggling water balloon, sinking in on itself and disappearing. He was disappearing right in front of me, and instead of terror, what I felt under my skin, where I had kept all of my own hurt and loss and love, was a deep sense of release.
The trail wrapped around the side of the escarpment and narrowed again. I kept my foot buried into the brake pedal like it was my gravity. We inched down that hill taking dozens of switchbacks that evoked fiery crashes in my mind, until the steep grade finally leveled out and I pulled ahead of John, taking the turns by myself. When it finally flattened out I stopped.
