It’s probably another hour before I actually see them. Four guys in what look like gray lab coats and white hard hats. My stomach’s churning, and there’s hot, sour bile rising up in my throat. They’re out at the edge of the property line, standing beside a surveyor’s stake and looking in toward the building, talking and nodding to one another. I grab my own hard hat off the top of the filing cabinet and go on out to where they are.
They stand there smiling while I walk up to them and tell them good morning. One guy is holding a camera, another has a clipboard. They give me four little head bows, and I don’t know whether to bow in return or not. I really don’t know what to do or exactly why I walked out to them.
I tell them my name and that I’m the foreman, or used to be anyway, and I ask if they have any questions, if there’s anything I can tell them about the operation. One of the two who isn’t carrying anything translates for the other ones. He speaks better English than I do except for what sounds to me like a British accent. Then a guy with short gray hair visible under his hard hat says maybe five words in Chinese. Then the one who speaks English thanks me and says they have everything under control. The demolition will begin in two weeks, he says. Then all new equipment will arrive, dust control, noise suppression, everything state of the art. He says they’ll be filling orders again before Day of Thanksgiving in America. That’s what he calls it, Day of Thanksgiving in America. They’re all beaming at me like happy babies and I’m trying to smile but my mouth feels stiff and crooked and I am 90 percent certain I am going to throw up.
“So what are the chances,” I finally say, “of you gentlemen keeping me on in some capacity? I don’t have to be foreman or anything. I understand all the equipment. I can even drive a truck if you need somebody for that.”
This time the translator doesn’t even bother to translate. Doesn’t even bother to answer me. I get a nod and a smile. Four smiles all in a row. I wonder if I’m expected to bow or something, but I can’t make myself do it, and so finally I turn around and walk away. I go back to the office and pull the blinds down and put in my eight hours and then leave.
Instead of going home, though, I ride out to Pops’ storage unit and sit in the darkness with the door pulled down. All day long I’ve been feeling like my brain is swollen inside my skull, like the pressure in there is going to split my head wide open. I felt that same thing during the last weeks of my rotation in Iraq, but there was no quiet place there where a guy could spend some time alone, so I dealt with it by pushing myself through all the drills and exercises. Coming back to the FOB after a patrol was the worst time of all. You’d think a guy would feel grateful to make it back to his cot in one piece, but as every soldier knows, you lay there with your body depleted and your brain so wired you have no choice but to replay every move that day, every doorway that might be hiding somebody in its shadows, every bit of trash that might have an IED hidden under it. You keep going over and over and over it all again until some part of your brain finally gets the message that it’s okay to let go for a while, and that you had better let go and catch some zzz’s because you’re going to be outside the wire again in a few hours.
Even after I was discharged I wasn’t able to let go completely. People congratulating me and saying how lucky I was to come home without a scratch, and me with a wife and two little girls and not enough smarts to even know how to spell résumé, let alone write one. There wasn’t much call back home here for a guy who could field strip an M4 in the dark and make it through day after day of hundred-degree heat in full battle rattle. The Army gave me just enough training to realize how useless I was back home.
That first year in college, Spence, was rougher than Basic. I’d sit there in a classroom surrounded by kids who thought life was a reality TV show and they were all auditioning for the lead role. I hated every one of them. And I’m not saying it was their fault I hated them, it was mine. I was jealous because their Nike shoes and Hollister hoodies and Calvin Klein jeans cost more than I took home working campus security sixty hours a month. But the real reason I hated them was because I had something they didn’t and never would, which was a head full of little bits of days and nights when I was sure I was going to die.
I made it through college too, though. I had no choice but to get the job done. I never told Cindy about the nightmares that would wake me up at night, never told her I would slip out of bed at two or three in the morning to go sit in the living room with the TV on without any sound. She knew, though. And sometimes she’d just look at me afterward like I was something pathetic, like a dog dying by the side of the road after it’s been hit by a car.
I never told her how much I wanted a few days off without any kind of obligation to fulfill, a couple days to myself in a cabin in the woods, or even a tent pitched beside a stream somewhere. Some quiet place to detox all on my own, you know? A place to bleed it all out if I could.
Having Jake take me on was pretty close to being the best day of my life. Holding Dani and Emma for the first time, those were the very best, but knowing I’d learned a little something in college and had a job and could take care of my family, that put the nightmares to rest for a while.
I always half expected I was going to fuck up in a major way in Iraq and get myself or lots of other people killed. Then I expected to make an ass of myself in college somehow, and I guess I avoided that by keeping my mouth shut most of the time. What I never once expected was that helping some girl too doped up to keep her clothes on was going to be what did me in.
A lot of people probably wouldn’t understand why I was so messed up about stealing money from a drug dealer. I mean I know all their arguments, I make them to myself a few times every day. Stealing from a drug dealer isn’t stealing, they would say. Take it and enjoy it. Put it to good use. Be happy you got away with it.
Thing is, I didn’t feel like I had gotten away with anything. First off, Pops and Gee didn’t raise me to be the kind of person who would steal from anybody. They raised me to be responsible, and to always do what was right. I always did my best to give them what they wanted. Then I gave the Army what it wanted. Then I gave my professors what they wanted. And all along the way I gave Cindy and the girls what they wanted from me.