by Mj Fields
Car bombs, roadside bombs, suicide bombers, mortars and playing dodgeball… with bullets. Not only seeing, but saving people who you can see absolutely hate you, and would gun you down if given the chance. Those days, well, they’re a fucking Friday morning.
Your civilian weekdays, the days you curse the dawn, and have to force yourself out of bed because you just need an hour more sleep, because you stayed up too late Netflix and chilling. The days you have to put slippers on to warm your feet, the days you get stuck in traffic because of an accident that will force you to stay at work an extra hour, making you miss happy hour with the boys… you should consider yourself fucking lucky. A soldier’s weekdays are sometimes never ending. We fight to survive, then we fight harder, so you can… hit snooze. We may have to take a life to ensure we breathe, so you can put fucking slippers on. We may have to carry our brothers bleeding bodies to a hummer to take him back to get medical attention, and still go back to fighting while wondering if he’s alive. But bitch that you missed happy hour…
That’s just a week. One fucking week.
I just returned from fourteen months of the worst Monday a civilian has ever encountered. I have little, if any, empathy for anyone who’s having a bad hair day.
I look down at my speedometer and realize I’ve hit ninety. I loosen my grip on the throttle and take in a deep fucking breath of freedom…. and I try my best not to choke on it.
Welcome home, soldier.
We’re so fucking happy to come home, to our loved ones, and women… but not the kind who steal our fucking wallets, I think to myself.
This happiness, this high, doesn’t come without a fall. Mine’s kicking my ass now. But theirs… theirs are worse.
I’ve had brothers who see their wives, embrace them, fuck, I’ve seen them smell their hair, like I inhale the ocean breeze. They look like everything is finally alright, life is fucking good, until it isn’t.
“It’s like a second first date for weeks, man,” one of my men, Cruise, told me after one of my many deployments. “When you first see her, touch her, hold her, smell her hair, thinking about its fucking time. Then you realize something’s not right. Something’s different. But you push through, because you know damn well, she’s going to be laid out in front of you when the kids are in bed, and you know what that pussy smells like, tastes like, and feels like, you’ve jerked off to the memory for months. You pray for that fucking minute it’s just you and her.”
With my rank came responsibility, and that responsibility was brutal at war, and sometimes more so when dealing with the aftereffects of war. The problems we face trying to find our new normal is hell.
“Then, then you realize, it’s not a second first date. She cut her hair, changed her fucking perfume, she smells different because she is different. She’s getting up and getting the kids ready for daycare, because she got a job to help make ends meet and you can’t keep them because you still can’t wake up without thinking you’re buried in sand. Takes a toll on you, on her, on the kids, who just wanna stay home with Daddy. Then she’s pushing you away. A month ago, she was a sex kitten fingering herself on Skype, now she’s pushing you away, because her needing your dick was bullshit. She was full of shit. She lied. She fucking lied.”
Cruise was in my office after a call to his house for domestic violence after getting drunk for the tenth night in a row. The MP’s brought him in and I had to talk to him the next morning. He didn't lay a hand on her, but he busted up half the dishes in the kitchen, and he did it while his kids cried in a corner. It all started because his wife forgot to grab beer on her way home and he took it as her not giving a damn about him.
After he saw a counselor, and they had counseling together, they worked it out. But they were the exception.
Every combat deployment changes who you are. Every. Fucking. One. It doesn’t end with you, it spills over, effecting loved ones.
I understand the depth of it and have avoided it, easily.
This last deployment, I came home with every one of my men. Not one of us lost limb, nor life. But we all lost something else, a part of our souls.
It was the perfect high to end my career with the United States Army.
Yesterday, I drove as much as I could hugging the coast on US Highway 1. With the ocean to my right, the breeze in my face, and all the time I needed to decompress, and I knew damn well, I desperately needed it. It was like an IV mixed with time and normalcy pumping directly to my vein.
I knew I needed one more night to face what I was about to face, so I took it.
Now, as I head west, I glance in the rearview mirror as the ocean gets smaller and smaller, until it finally disappears.
The closer I get to a place I called home for the first almost seventeen years of my life, the more I think about how fine a line it actually was. The line between right and wrong, insanity and sanity, home and happiness.
Emporia, Virginia, I read the approaching sign and feel an invisible weight on my shoulders as I slow down.
After the exit, I decide not to drive through the town, even though it’s shorter. I didn’t want to see the spots that hold the good memories, the corner diner, the playground, the ball field, and the school. Most kids I grew up with hated school; me, it was the only place I didn’t have to look over my shoulder all the damn time.
I grew up here, grew up hard, grew up fast, and grew up fucking wrong.
But it’s in the past.
The past…
Every soldier and civilian I know talks about Karma being a bitch. It’s true, Karma is a bitch, but it’s a threat. In the hurricane that is life, Karma would be a warning, not a watch. But the past is worse than Karma, and the past is no threat or warning, it’s an actual occurrence, one you watch for returning and pray it won’t.
Instead of heading right to the main drag, I head left, and follow the highway to hell.
Driving up the winding mountain road, I remember one night telling the old man I wanted to live in town. Bad move, since he was already in the hooch, and I immediately regretted it. After a backhand to the face, one I had learned to ‘take like a man, and not cry like a bitch’, he told me, “Shit flows downhill, and we ain’t shit.” My cheek still pulsing and painful was reminder enough to a ten-year-old dreaming of playing in the major leagues to shut his mouth, to hold back what was on the tip of my tongue. I wouldn’t be awarded the ‘privilege’ of walking five miles, uphill, after baseball practice if I mouthed off.
We had one car, and my mother used it to get back and forth from her job in the mines, the old man was on disability, had been since I could remember, and drunk just as long. If I wanted to play kid games, walking was my only choice. And yeah, I wanted to play kid games. I would have played in pig shit if it kept me away from his repetitive drunken speeches about how his old man built this place. His job was to make sure it was kept so that he could give it to me.
I didn’t want the shit hole. I have no idea why the hell he would.
The house was decent to look at, but when it rained, when the wind blew, or when the snow fell, you could feel it through the logs my grandfather had cut down from the property to build the log house with. Twenty acres of a hill had been raped and was barren, and half an acre of flat land wasn’t what I would consider a fucking prime piece of property, but he sure as fuck did. You’d think there was gold underneath the soil, but there wasn’t shit but bones.
I knew there wasn’t shit because when mom got laid off at the mines, she was convinced she could grow some fresh vegetables, to save us some money. Nothing grew but weeds.
Then, because the two people who raised me and had done one hell of a job doing so, they decided to supplement their… loss of income. They became foster parents. No one questioned it. Why would they when Dick and Jane, no shit, that’s their names, had a proven track record of successful parenting. I was at the top of my class, a star athlete, and never gave anyone a problem.
I was born into a family of good old boys,
a flag waving, proud, military family. The way the old man made it sound, we were Army royalty. The reality, he and my grandfather were dishonorably discharged, both for incidents involving too much alcohol, and neither served in any conflict. My choice to enlist wasn’t to make the old man proud, it was my own backhand to his face the night Child Protective Services finally came in and took my parents out in handcuffs. I’d show him what military meant. And I’d do it honorably.
11
Oliver
I could have hopped a plane and left my bike at the place I hated, yet paid the damn taxes on since the day I was employed, but I feared it would tarnish. I also needed the open road to rid myself of the stench, and decompress further.
I was headed to the Hamptons to meet my brother, one I chose, one who chose me, the one who lived with us, who didn’t take my advice as past foster siblings had, to do whatever he could to get out of the hell he’d landed in.
When Bastian came to live with my family, he was different from the get-go. He didn't take the bait from my old man, who offered every one of the kids a drink, or a smoke. He had manners, good as any I’d ever seen, he gave a shit about grades, and he even signed up to play ball with me. And my father immediately hated him, almost as much as he hated me, almost.
How the fuck could a kid be excited about the kind of life he and I both were destined to have? He had just come from some Fresh Air kid program, and was excited about life after high school. He told me we should both go to college.
I told him he was bear shit crazy, which in case you aren’t aware, is crazier than bat shit.
“What makes you think you’re gonna be able to escape this hell hole?”
“Two words, one name, Maisie Josephs.” He said it with enough confidence that it was almost believable, almost.
When my mother started her shit with him and pushed him as he was coming down the stairs, he came back from the ER with a cast on his arm, and even though he could’ve done what the previous foster kids under their ‘care’ did, turn them in, he didn’t. They’d have done what they always did– lied. Then expect me to back their story. He’d have been sent on his way. But he didn’t. He came back.
I didn’t say shit until the next day at school. I yelled at him and asked him why. He told me because he’d never leave a friend behind.
Then the cunt did it again, pushed him down the stairs, a few months later, he gashed his head open, and social services stepped in. This time, I was bigger, stronger, and I knew I had to protect him. I told them the fucking truth. I spilled every fucking thing they’d done. Well, almost everything. But it was enough.
Enter Maisie Josephs.
The woman had cocoa skin and a golden heart.
Bastien, or Bass as I called him, was still in the hospital with a concussion when she and a lawyer showed up with a promise to help us both get out, as long as we did something for her.
Two days later, we were living in the Hamptons, two months after that we were emancipated, and we had new last names, Josephs.
The last name change was Bass’s idea. Maisie and her husband, who had passed away years ago, never had children of their own. Bass thought it was only right we gave her that, and I agreed. Three months later, we graduated high school.
During the emancipation process, Maisie hired a private investigator and Bass found out his father, who he’d never met, was a billionaire fashion icon. I’d never seen him angrier. Anger changed to bitter, and bitter changed to him blowing off a full ride to college, hell bent on vengeance for letting him suffer as he had since his mother’s death when he was three, and then his grandmother’s death at age eight.
I went on my own mission, one to prove what Maisie was always saying, “The past doesn’t define you.” It sure didn't, and I was gonna prove that I was better. So, I enlisted, and I swore an oath to her, the US Army, and myself, to make sure I lived honorably. And I did.
Bastien and I are two totally different types, but the decision to be brothers bound us stronger than any fucking bloodline would’ve. And although he is happiest doing nothing, reading books, staring at the water, listening to music without lyrics, basically, fuck not all day, I need to be physically busy.
Where I had spent eight years serving my country, he had spent time banging some French chick, Ines, who put his pretty face everywhere, from the runway, and over social media, to places that made me sick to my damn stomach to consider. When he woke up to her bullshit, he went to college. He has his MBA, money saved that he’d earned from being a fashion model, and a house next to Maisie’s on the beach. He had no plans past tomorrow.
Last we talked, he found out our Maisie was sick, and not the kind of sick that’s cured with a pill. The shit kicker, she was hiding it from us. He admitted he needed my help, and that never happened, so I knew it was time. And after my last deployment, I felt bringing every one of my men home in once piece might be all the penance I needed to maybe, just fucking maybe, forgive myself for all the lies as a kid and start to believe I deserved what Maisie and Bass said I did.
As I get closer to the Hamptons, I decide to travel a bit farther. I decide it might be a good idea to tour around New York City and take a ride past de la Porte, just to see what it was Bastian’s biological father was truly made of.
This also gives me more time to clear the noise in my head.
It’s early when I arrive in the city. Cabs, town cars, delivery trucks and pedestrians fill the streets, but I maneuver through them with ease. Thanks to Roxie.
Coming up 75th Street towards 5th, I swerve around a cab that pulled over to pick up the suit waiting for him, when a woman is just right fucking there, three maybe four feet in front of me.
Only thing I can do to avoid hitting her is dump the fucking bike.
The Big Guy is either looking out for me, or Roxie, my bet’s on Roxie, when I end up tipping her to her side without letting her touch pavement.
I look up and see wild blonde waves on a young woman with a slight build, piercing blue eyes, and black makeup smudged by the tears falling down her porcelain skin. Her lips are bow-shaped, but with the tears falling, and the sun hitting her face just right, I could have sworn she had a scar in the fucking same place as Grace’s.
The fucking wind is almost knocked out of me and even though my heart jackhammers an unsteady beat inside my chest, I can’t breathe.
She looks at me apologetically and I force a nod to tell her it’s okay.
I fell in love at fifteen years old. Don’t ask me to explain how I knew, I just did. She’d come to our house when her former foster parents had their first kid. She’d been there since age ten.
I had no idea how anyone, let alone two families, could have let her go, but they did. Grace Pallone.
She was sixteen and looked about twelve. She was afraid of her own shadow, which made me keenly aware that my parents would see it as weakness and exploit it as soon as she walked in the door with her dingy white canvas sneakers, two black garbage bags and a backpack that looked to be as old as her.
I was always a big dude. Six foot three, and lanky as fuck until I started playing ball, which happened to be the year before Grace moved in with us.
She stuck to me like glue from the moment she walked in. Like she sensed I would keep her safe, and I knew immediately I would do everything I could to do just that.
The first night I heard her muffled sniffs, and the occasional sob through the wall. I waited until I knew the parents would be in bed to go to her room. When I walked in, she looked up and I said, “I’m right here.” I pointed to the floor and didn’t wait for permission. I dropped my pillow, and I slept on the floor in her room. She didn’t seem shook by it, and she didn’t ask why. Not sure I could have answered if she had. What she did was thank me.
We rode the bus together, sat at lunch together, and I even convinced her to try out for the girl’s ball team, which she didn’t make, but I remember her saying she was glad that she didn’t, because then she’d have
to miss my games.
She did her homework on the bleachers and walked home with me after practice.
Week one, I slept on her floor. Week two, she told me I could sleep on her bed, but on top of the covers. She smelled like vanilla. I liked it. Week three, she threw the covers back and I was under them. That’s when the kissing began. She tasted like spring water, I loved it.
I laid on my stomach to hide my hard on, washed the bedding when I came on the sheets. She told me not to be embarrassed, and then told me there were ways not to make a mess. I nearly made one right then and there, that was week four.
Grace’s hair smelled like vanilla, her tongue tasted like spring water, and between her legs she tasted just like… an addiction.
We hid it well, never got busted by the parents. Held hands on the bus, found places at school to hide away, and weekends… swear to God, I began to live for them. Only time in my life I didn’t hate my folks for getting piss drunk, him all day, then she’d join after working the mines. Hell, I wanted them to. The sooner the better.
The horn blowing behind me brings me back to the here and now, and I watch as the mystery girl runs to my right, down 5th Avenue.
I straighten Roxie as the light turns green. Punching the throttle, about to turn right, I see the sign, Left Turns Only. Fucking one-way street.
I zip around the block, hoping to see her again. Needing to make sure she is alright, even though I am ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure she isn’t Grace, I need her to be okay. Heart still jackhammering when I round the corner hoping to catch a glimpse of her, and of course she isn’t there.
