Anyway, I went back to the bathroom. I grabbed one of the taped-up boxes. Then I went out to my bike. I don’t know if the girl was still singing or not. I don’t know if the dog was barking or if the rain was falling or anything else that happened.
The fog of war, they call it. And I took a long ride home through that blinding fog of war.
When I got home that night with the box of money in my saddlebag, I didn’t know what to do. My mind was racing with all kinds of thoughts. Cindy had put my garage door up after she pulled the pickup in, so I drove into my stall and parked the bike half-turned toward the door the way I always do. What little of me had dried out inside the naked girl’s place was soaked again, and I was shivering with cold and a confusing mix of fear and excitement. I regretted what I’d done yet I couldn’t wait to see how much money was in that shoebox.
I shut off the engine and sat there on my bike for thirty seconds or so trying to get my thoughts together. That’s when the door into the kitchen opened and Cindy looked out.
“Thank God,” she said. “I called you twice wondering what had happened to you.”
“Rain happened,” I said. “Lots of it.”
“So I see. You want me to get you a towel and some dry clothes?”
“A towel and my robe, I think. Do I have time for a hot bath?”
“I’ll get it started,” she said. “I’ll feed the girls while you’re soaking.”
“Thanks, baby.”
“I kept praying you hadn’t wrecked somewhere.”
“Must have worked,” I told her. She gave me that smile then that always made me feel better than any I love you could. It was 30 percent mouth and 70 percent eyes, and what that smile said was I need you so so much, Russell. I need you more than I need myself.
I tried to give her the same kind of smile back and said, “Hit the garage door button, will you, baby?”
The door grumbled and clanked down to the concrete, and only then did I start to get some breath back. How could anybody know it was me? I kept asking myself. The girl didn’t know me and I didn’t know her. The dog didn’t know me. The only question was, had somebody come along while I was in the house who recognized my bike? I figured that was the only thing I had to worry about. That and what was going to happen to my soul. I prayed that Gee might be able to pull some strings from her end.
I finally managed to haul myself off the bike and peel off my top shirt. It was a short-sleeve chambray and felt like it weighed five pounds. The T-shirt underneath was plastered to my skin, and every time my icy fingers touched some other part of me I winced. Cindy came out then with a beach towel and the gray fleece robe the girls gave me the previous Christmas. She set those things on my workbench and grabbed the back of the T-shirt and dragged it up over my head and then wrapped the beach towel around my shoulders. “Go sit on the step and I’ll take your boots off,” she said.
“Sweetie, I’ll do it. You don’t need to be out here.”
“You’re practically blue,” she said.
“Who knew rain in August could feel so cold?”
“It’s the wind chill,” she said. “Where’s your raincoat? Didn’t you even put it on?”
“Stupid, I know. I started out under a patch of blue sky.”
“Did you think it was going to follow you the whole way home?”
I grabbed her in both arms then and pulled her close, held her to me tighter than I had in a long time. When I finally kissed the top of her head and let her go she looked up at me and said, “You almost wrecked, didn’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re still shook up about it.”
She turned to the bike then and went over to it and started studying it up close.
I said, “What are you looking for?”
“It doesn’t look like you laid it down.”
“I fishtailed once is all. Some idiot in a big black Land Cruiser pulled right out in front of me.”
“You let him have it?” she asked.
“I was too busy trying to stay upright. By the time I got steadied, he was nothing but a couple of taillights.”
She came away from the bike then, back to me, which made me feel a little easier. “Aw babe,” she said, and laid a pair of warm hands on my waist. “I’m sorry you had such a nasty ride home. How was the rest of the day?”
“Good,” I told her. “No problems.”
She wanted to help me get the rest of my clothes off but I finally convinced her to go back in the house and let me do it. Then I sat there on the top of the three concrete steps that go up from the garage floor to the door into the kitchen, and with fingers that were still stiff and stinging I unlaced my boots and wiggled them off. My feet were the only part of me still dry.
Ever since I came home from the service I’ve been wearing my tan desert boots whenever I rode the bike. I told myself it was because they were a lot more comfortable than the heavier and stiffer discount-store bike boots I had, and that was true, but I think another reason they feel so right on my feet is because they keep me attached to that other time. I hated nearly every minute of my time in the Army, yet I’m grateful for it too. You can’t endure as much discomfort and downright pain as a soldier does, and you sure as hell can’t witness as much violence and stupidity and cruelty as we did, without it leaving its mark on you. Wearing my boots while doing one of the things I love best is my way of saying thanks to the Army, I guess. No, not to the Army really, but more to the things I experienced in the Army. I came across so many people a lot worse off than me. A world of suffering, but goodness too. A way of life I’d never imagined existed when I was growing up in Pops and Gee’s house.
And that day as I took my boots off in the garage, as I held onto my dry socks with both hands and looked over at my bike dripping onto the concrete floor, it was like a switch clicked in my brain and I was looking at the cement porch of that house we searched in Iraq—the one with the boy chained up outside, same as that pit bull at the house I’d just left. He was maybe twelve, thirteen years old. Man, we talked about that boy for days afterward, always questioning ourselves. Down’s Syndrome, you said. I can see him as plain as day right now, that goofy, crooked grin when he saw us coming into the yard, like we were the most exciting thing he’d ever seen. That rusty chain, maybe fifteen feet long, fastened around his ankle on one end, around a porch column at the other end. The way the chain had worn away the bottom of the column till it was nothing but a thin spindle, and us wondering how long it would take before it wore through completely, either through the column or through the poor kid’s leg.