We said we were good.
He introduced us to his friend, another lieutenant. Nathan said the guy had been with the brigade’s cav scout squadron.
“Oh,” we said. “Okay.”
Nathan went to take a piss.
We said to the cav scout lieutenant, “You guys had a tough time up there.”
The cav scout lieutenant said, “So did you guys.”
“Yeah. We did.”
“But I think ours was a little worse,” he said.
“But we lost more killed than you did.”
“That’s true,” he said. “But we lost all ours in two months. Yours were more spread out.”
Nobody took offense. That was how it was. The cav scout lieutenant told us about a staff sergeant of his who’d gone up in flames and jumped out of his track and run down the road on fire. He said in all the confusion they hadn’t known where this man had run off to and they’d spent ten minutes looking for him before they found him in a bush in a ditch down the road, all burned to death.
Nathan came back from pissing, and he said, “Lemme buy all you men a round, okay? How about that?”
We said that would be great and thank you.
“What’s yer poison?”
I said I liked Red Label scotch.
After he made sure we were all holding a double of Red Label he said he’d like to make a toast.
“To two smells,” he said, “pussy and gunpowder….Live for one. Die by the other. L-l-l-l-l-love the smell of both.”
We drank the drinks. Nathan went outside and threw up in a flower bed. Borges said he wanted to go to a strip club. We asked the lieutenants if they wanted to go, but they said no, they didn’t. So we thanked Nathan again and we parted company.
Borges got thrown out of the strip club because he threw a Long Island iced tea at the DJ booth when the DJ wouldn’t play any Cypress Hill. Lessing and Haussmann got thrown out for letting on that they knew Borges. I was away trying to get a drink at the bar, and I didn’t know what had happened. After a while I figured out my friends were no longer with me. I didn’t go looking for them though. Maybe I’d have tried calling them, but I’d left my phone at the barracks. So I said fuck it and I finished my drink and I had another.
It got to be closing time. A dancer had just finished painting herself red, white, and blue to the Toby Keith song in the evening’s grand finale. I was at a table by myself, staring down at a gin and tonic I’d bought at last call.
Someone said, “Are you okay, honey?”
She was wearing plastic shoes. I said I was alright. I’d just got back with 4th ID and I was a little fucked up, but I was alright. She said some nice things and asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving. I said I wanted to go to Dallas to see my parents because they’d be there, but I didn’t have a ride yet. She said she was driving up to Dallas to see her family and she could give me a ride if I wanted. I said thanks and that would be good. She gave me her number and told me to call her in the morning.
I met her at the mall. I gave her some gas money and we went on our way, north on 35. We were halfway to Dallas when she asked me if I wanted any Vicodin. I said I’d like some. I saw the scar on her arm. It ran from her elbow halfway down to her wrist. She told me about the car wreck she’d been in. She said she’d been driving her niece and they’d got into an accident on the freeway. Her niece had got hurt too. Firemen had had to cut both of them out of the car. She said her niece had been terrified and screaming because the girl was bleeding from the head and help couldn’t get to her. She said she hated to remember that she had put her niece through that. I said it wasn’t like she’d done it on purpose, things just happened.
My parents were staying at a hotel in Fort Worth. She dropped me off in the parking lot. I wished her luck. She said alright and she drove away. I had Thanksgiving dinner with my parents at the Houlihan’s next door to the hotel. Then we went to the hospital to see the dying man.
His wife was 20 years younger than he was. She was his second wife. They used to work together.
My dad said, “This is our son. He’s just back from Iraq.”
The lady didn’t give a shit, but she tried.
She said, “My brother’s in the Army. He’s some kind of mechanic or something. They go behind enemy lines.”
We left it at that. My folks asked her how she was holding up. She said she was holding up okay even though his first wife and his first kids were giving her a hard time and she was all alone.
My dad said he wanted me to see his friend. We went into the room where he was laid up on a ventilator. There wasn’t much left of him, and each breath was like it would break him in half. He may as well have been dead for all the good breathing did him.
They’d had a little girl and a house and a golden retriever. We went to the house after we left the hospital, and my parents talked to his wife some more for about an hour. They said for her to let them know if there was anything they could do. She said thanks and that they were very kind. But she was just saying things. They were all just talking. And everyone knew that nothing would be alright.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I talked to Emily on the phone. She told me what I already knew, and I slept on the bathroom floor. My parents drove me back to Killeen in the morning. It was taking a long time because traffic was backed up for miles on account of an accident that would take the whole day to clear off the road. Some more people had been killed. And my dad got to talking about his friend some, how they were before they’d got old.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
A funny thing happened to me once: after we got married, Emily went and had electrolysis done, and then she took a series of lovers, and then there was the day that I found out I’d been something like the hundredth one to see her electrolysis. And this devastated me. But in all fairness: I had gone to Iraq. And in all fairness: our marriage was a lie. Maybe she’d thought I’d get killed and wouldn’t ever find out.
My last three months in the Army, down in Texas, I was drinking two fifths of gin a night. I shit blood. I farted blood. I jerked off in bathroom stalls, not feeling so good.
I went home for Christmas and there was a girl; she said she was on her period so I titty-fucked her, while I was wanting to die. She said, “Do you mind not hitting me in the face with your cock?”
I went back to Texas, and it was a little better. People knew what it was like. And there were a lot of them losing their shit down in Texas, so Texas was good like that: you didn’t feel like you were that fucked up as long as you were in Texas.
But then I was really getting out of the Army; my time was up. And you’d think that was all good, but it wasn’t all good. I felt like I was abandoning my people. Really they didn’t give a fuck if I was leaving or not, but at the time that was what it felt like to me, that I was abandoning my people. I thought, Maybe I ought to stay.
But I didn’t stay. I left. The fuckers made me sign up for the National Guard before they’d let me go, but they let me go and I got the fuck out. I went back to Ohio. I stopped off in Elba on the way. Emily wanted a divorce. So we got divorced and then I went home. I had a little money and started getting fucked up on drugs. I felt that if I had a little money and I could get fucked up on drugs then I could make it and something good would happen eventually. What happened was I got coked up one night in March and called Emily in the middle of the night; and I said, “I forgive you. I need you so bad. Are you fucking anyone right now? I don’t care what you did. I won’t mention it. But I don’t think I can do this without you.”
She said, “What do you mean?”