She giggled a little bit, and then she said, “Bathroom.”
I’m thinking, good, she wants to get warm and wash off the mud, so I’ll dump her in the tub and be on my way. I carried her down the hall, glancing into the rooms as I passed. I had already seen the kitchen from the living room, and I didn’t like what I saw. Compared to the living room it was all too orderly and clean, no dishes in the sink, not a damn thing on the counter or the little table. And by now I’ve also noticed that every window is covered with black poster paper, the kind I buy at Walmart for Dani to draw on with her colored chalk. And the whole place has a vague ammonia stink to it, like some cat’s been pissing in every corner, except that there’s no cat to be seen, only that brute of a dog outside with the most evil of intentions.
The other two rooms I pass are almost empty, bare to the walls except for an old mattress and pillow on the floor in each of them. Laying on one of the mattresses is what must be the girl’s clothes, a pair of cut-off jeans and a yellow T-shirt. Then finally I get to the bathroom, which has this little claw-footed tub filled with plastic buckets full of rags, plus the toilet and sink and a shower stall covered with a blue plastic curtain. The girl’s still holding around my neck with one arm but her right hand is digging around in my pants, and I can’t tell if she’s breaking out in head-to-toe shivers because she’s so horny or freezing to death.
I tell her, “You need to get warm. Tub or shower?”
“Gotta pee-pee,” she says.
So I set her on her feet beside the toilet. Her hand slips out of my pants but then she grabs my dick from the outside. She sits there and starts to tinkle, all the time grinning up at me and shivering and squeezing my dick, and yeah, I should’ve pulled away from her right then. I should’ve run for my life. But I just stood there for half a minute or so and enjoyed it.
But then I thought of Cindy and the girls and that was all I needed. I pulled away from her and said something about putting her in the shower. Then I yanked open the plastic curtain to the shower stall, and in there’s a stack of four cardboard boxes of slightly different sizes. Men’s boot boxes stacked up over the drain. All but the top one has duct tape sealing them shut. And I think, shoeboxes in the shower? So I lift the lid off the top box. And the dizziness that hits me when I see all those neat bundles of cash inside is enough to make me stagger.
I’m out of breath suddenly and my knees are wobbly. When she stands up and puts her arms around me it’s all I can do to pull both dirty towels off the rack and sort of press them into her hands. I look around for more towels but there aren’t any, so I scoop her up again and stumble back to the bedroom where her clothes are, and I kick the clothes out of the way and lay her down on the mattress and tuck the two dirty towels around her.
“You need to get yourself dressed,” I tell her. She keeps saying things like, baby I’m cold, baby fuck me, and she’s touching herself and trying to touch me and my head is spinning and my ears are buzzing like a band saw. I’m, I don’t know . . . stunned, I guess, by what I’ve stumbled into. And I can’t breathe. I’m sucking air but it’s not doing me any good. I feel the same way I did when the propane tank exploded in Mahmudiya and the ringing in my ears started and all I saw was people bleeding, and for a few moments I think, I’m back there again, that there’s some weird kind of juxtaposition of time going on, and when I take a last look down at that naked, muddy girl, I honestly don’t know if it’s mud or blood all over the mattress.
I do know that I got out of that room and pulled the door shut behind me. And then I’m back out on the porch again, trying to fill my lungs and my head with something I can understand. There’s still a light rain coming down, and the pit bull starts into his barking again the moment he sees me. But there’s my bike out there at the end of the yard. The rain is falling and the leaves on the trees in the background are a dark, shiny green. I’m thinking to myself that it must be after five by now and in twenty minutes or so Cindy will be home with the girls. And that brings the whole day back to me then. That brings back all the fear and near panic I’d been feeling on my ride away from the plant.
I turned and went back into the house. Got as far as the hallway, then turned around and went back out onto the porch.
Thinking about that now, me knowing what I should do but not wanting to do it, just standing there sort of paralyzed on the porch, reminds me of the day I left for basic. I was barely eighteen, a month out of high school. Pops and Gee drove me to the bus station. And just before I climbed up onto that bus, after we’d already told each other goodbye a half-dozen times, Gee reaches up and lays both hands on my cheeks and pulls me down close to her. She was just a little woman but so serious sometimes, with this life-or-death look in her eyes that almost made me want to laugh at her. “‘Watch and pray,’” she says, quoting from the Bible, “‘that you do not fall into temptation.’”
That’s from Matthew somewhere. It’s when Jesus comes back from praying and finds the disciples all asleep and bitches out Peter for being careless. “The spirit is willing,” Jesus tells him, “but the flesh is weak.”
He might as well have been saying that to me. I wish he’d shown up and joined me on that porch. Because that was my moment, years and years after Gee warned me. I was weak in both spirit and flesh.
The thing is, I couldn’t get myself to go down off those steps, no matter how much I knew that’s exactly what I needed to do. I couldn’t force myself to go back out into the rain and climb onto the bike and take all my fear and . . . what’s the word for it . . . uselessness back to Cindy. Not when I had another option.
“Fuck your pride,” Jake had said. “You have a family to think about.”
“You just do it,” is what Pops used to say. “You do it and then you live with it.”
And you, Spence . . . the guy who kept me alive all those months, the guy who got me back home vertical, I could hear you too. I swear I could hear you standing there on that porch and whispering in my ear. “It’s all about survival, man. Priority one. Don’t you ever forget that, soldier.”
So I went back inside. I peeked into the bedroom where the girl was, and she was laying there on her back with her eyes closed, waving her hands in the air and singing, which when I think about it was that same Jackson Brown song you and me used to listen to in the afternoons sometimes when it was too frigging hot to move. I honestly don’t know if she was really singing that song or not. Maybe it was only inside my head.