“And when you did come home, the times before that last mission?”
Fuck, man. It was like being in a cage. Like some wild animal in a zoo. I’d wake up and have like a second of peace. Then I’d feel it creeping in until I had a full belly of acid. I’d jump up and get the hell out of the house, go for a run until I was wheezing for breath. I’d kiss my ma on the cheek and grab a beer, take it to the basement to lift until my muscles were shaking. That’d do me okay for a few hours. Spent the rest of the day drinking. I don’t touch the weed anymore. Can’t risk it, you know?
“And Tammy, your wife? You said you met her on one of your leaves? How did she come into the picture?”
Sean smiled and winked at me. Well, I’d put fucking right up there with drinking. Fucking and drinking at the same time—that just about got me through the day. I’d just be in some bar and then see some chick catching my eye. It was too easy. I sound like an asshole. But they were into it. I don’t know. Never had that kind of luck in school. Maybe they felt sorry for me, having to go back.
I did not doubt one word of what he told me. Sean was a perfect cocktail for attracting women.
I guess I just got careless. Next time I came home, I had a kid and a wife.
In spite of his promiscuity, I am willing to say that I believe Sean Logan was a profoundly good man. And not simply because he married the mother of his child. Sean was a fighter. He fought for his life, for his sanity. For him, the only thing he knew that made life tolerable was being deployed, and so he came home when he was told, and he did his best to love his wife and know his child. But he feared this time—not like the men in the other stories you know, the men who are suffering from PTSD or who become addicted to the adrenaline high. Those men, for the most part, had been normal before leaving for war. For Sean, it was quite the opposite. He had sought war to escape himself.
Tammy described it like this:
I love him. Please don’t doubt that. Seriously—I would die if he ever thought I didn’t love him, from the first time I saw him, as stupid as that sounds, I did, I just loved him. You can’t imagine what it was like that afternoon. It was a rainy day, hot and muggy. I’d gone with some friends to drink some beers and shoot pool. It was Saturday, you know? There wasn’t much else to do. He was at the bar, had the whole place in fits of laughter, telling some story about some crazy thing he’d done to one of his buddies, some prank over in Iraq. He never dwelled on the bad stuff. He always wanted to make people laugh. He could lift the spirit of an entire room all at once, with one story and his enormous smile. So I walked in and he saw me. He stopped for a second telling his story, but his audience was waiting, so he continued, even though his eyes kept moving around the room, following me. I didn’t know it about him then, but when he sets his mind on something, or someone, he’s like a pit bull. He won’t let go until he gets what he wants. And that afternoon, he wanted me.
Tammy was a pretty woman, short blond hair, big brown eyes. She was just twenty-four when I first met her, and I think she had been weathered by motherhood, but mostly by her marriage to Sean. I found it interesting that she used a pit bull as a simile in her story. Pit bulls, it is said, do not release their jaws until the animal clenched between their teeth is dead. I tried not to read too much into this. The pit bull has become a colloquial symbol, and most people don’t fully understand what they’re saying when they use the expression. Still, she looked as though life were being squeezed out of her. She was embarrassed to speak to me about the more intimate details of her relationship, but I felt it was important, and so I did my best to put her at ease.