The Sandbox (4 page)

8

I make a
mad dash to the Comm Trailer. I figure everyone else will be battening down the hatches and I’ll get a little extra time on the satellite phone. I’m not sure it’ll work when the storm hits, so I need to move fast. It’s nibbling at the edge of town as I duck in. The sun looks like a dirty penny.

Sergeant Guzman is in the process of shutting everything down. He pulls the cigar out of his mouth and groans when he sees me. The sergeant is way too big for his uniform. In fact, it looks as though his uniform is stuffed with the bodies of two men and topped with a single, miniature head. There are a lot of big guys in the military, so this should tell you something.

“I’ll be fast,” I say.

“The hell you will, Joe.” Sergeant Guzman calls everyone Joe.

“How about rock, paper, scissors? I lose, I’ll shine your boots, clean your rifle, and roll your smokes for two weeks.”

Sergeant Guzman is a notorious gambler. I’ve heard guys say he’ll bet on the length of time it will take to grow a moustache or how many puppies a stray dog will have. I don’t know about that, but I did see him bet on how many times Lieutenant Blankenship would refer to the seven-dash-eight handbook in a single morning briefing. He won with a spread of twelve to nine. I’ve heard him call in football bets to his bookie in the States. The man has never missed wagering on a scorpion fight. Today is no different. The sergeant doesn’t hesitate.

“Make it three. And you only get five minutes. No more.”

“Deal,” I say.

We knock fists. One, two, three. I hold out paper. He holds out rock.

“You better make it fast, fuckwit,” Sergeant Guzman says, “because I am not, I repeat, I am not riding out the storm in this shithole trailer.”

“I’ll be quick,” I say and give him the number I want to call.

“Goddamn right you will, Joe,” he says and shakes his head.

The phone rings six times and just as I’m getting ready for the machine, someone picks up.

“Hello?” I say, and then after a half-second, I hear what I just said in the earphone again. This stuttering seems to happen every other time I use the phone. It throws me off balance and makes it hard to concentrate on what I’m saying. Static hisses and swirls down the lines. I imagine the route my voice takes—beamed up into orbit and then down to some satellite tower on the East Coast, into the phone lines and out across a string of creosote-soaked pine poles to a little brick apartment building on the south side of Savannah.

“Toby?” the small tentative voice says, and my heart turns into warm pudding. It’s my fiancée, Clarissa, soon to be the mother of my child.

“Oh, baby, am I glad to hear your voice.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Five fucking minutes. Tops,” the sergeant says, tapping his watch.

“I better get to it then,” Clarissa says

“Get to what? I was the one who called you.”

“I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say the next time you called. Last time we got cut off before we really said anything.”

A million worlds away on the other side of the ocean, Clarissa’s lips brush up against the mouthpiece, but she doesn’t say a word. I take a deep breath and stretch my neck until it cracks. I don’t like the way this conversation is going and we’ve barely said a dozen words.

“How’s our little Herman?” I ask, after a long moment of awkward silence.

“Toby, I never agreed to name him after your grandfather.” She swallows and I can hear her throat make a dry click. “We don’t even know if it’s a boy.”

“But that night you said—”

“I was drunk. You can’t count that.”

“Damn right I can. We were also drunk the night we made Herman, and that sure as hell counts.”

“That’s what I’m calling about.”

“No, I called y—wait, is something wrong?” My chest tightens. “Did something happen at the doctor’s?”

“Nothing happened. It’s just that . . . well . . . I . . .”

A horrible thought occurs to me, one every soldier with a girl back home has at least once a week. “Did you meet someone else? Is that what this is about?” I don’t really believe this. Can’t, in fact. I’m not sure why I said it.

She breathes. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to picture her face. All I come up with is her left hand. The one with the small J-shaped scar below the thumb. I would polish Sergeant Guzman’s boots for a month if I could kiss it right now.

“What is it?” I say after a long silence. “I’m sorry I said that— well—it was—it’s been a bad day.” I want to tell her about the IED attack, but I know she’ll never understand. I tried before. She got frightened. I got frustrated. There’s no way to explain something like this to people back home. There just isn’t.

She breathes loudly into the mouthpiece.

“We’re talking in circles here,” I say, although we’re not really talking at all. “I can hear it in your voice. Something’s bothering you. Is it your parents?”

“Toby.” There’s an edge to her voice. I wish we could start the conversation over again. It always takes a little while for both of us to relax and really talk to each other when I call, but today is different. It’s much worse.

“I just didn’t want—”

“Stop, Toby. Just listen to me for a second. Listen.” She pauses again, even longer this time, and I think I hear traffic sounds in the background. A radio.

“I’m listening.”

The satellite phone’s receiver hisses like a leaky tire. The storm is blowing my voice away. Oh, shit, I think, please don’t cut off now.

“Here it fucking comes,” Sergeant Guzman says, watching from a window in the office. He taps the glass with a finger. I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or to himself. “This looks like a mean one.”

“What?” Clarissa says. Her voice suddenly sounds very far away and it’s not just the faulty connection. “I can’t hear you. Maybe you should call back. This is killing me. I don’t—”

I force myself to modulate my voice with limited success. “Don’t what, honey, don’t what?”

“Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m just having a bad day, too. Maybe we should try this another time when we’re both in a better mood. Why don’t you call me tomorrow? Oh, yeah, I forgot, you only get so many calls each—”

“Look, I know it’s hard.” I don’t want to hang up yet, so I try a different tactic. “It’s about killing me, too. If I could leave right now and come home, I’d get on a plane tonight. But I can’t. Like you said, we’ve already talked about all this.” I hear the pleading tone in my voice and it sounds fucking pathetic. I stop to clear my throat. “I’ll be back in ten months. I know I promised eight, but I got extended, and there’s not a hell of a lot I can do. They’ve got you, body and soul, as soon as you sign the paper. You can wait ten months, can’t you? Come on. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You. This baby.”

“I miss you so much. But sometimes I’m not sure if I can do this any more. If it got any worse, I’d—” She stops suddenly.

You’d what? I wonder. But I can’t ask that. I’m not sure I want the answer. But then again, I’ll never stop thinking about it if I don’t. I can’t seem to help myself.

“What are we talking about here? Are you saying you’d—”

I don’t even have to say it. She knows what I mean. And I’m not sure if this should reassure me or scare the hell out of me. Somehow it does both.

“No, no, don’t be silly. You’re my fiancé,” Clarissa says, but she doesn’t sound so sure about it and this worries me worst of all. “It’s just . . . it’s harder than I thought. Being apart. Sometimes I have to look at a photo to get your face straight in my head. It’s weird. And I’m really scared about the other thing.” There’s a long pause. I want to bang the phone against the wall. “I’m worried about how I’ll—I don’t want to be like my mother.”

“What are you talking about? You’ll be a great mother. The best. You can’t think this way. It’ll only bring you down. You—”

“Toby. Wait. Let’s not talk about this now. I know you’ve got a lot of stress. You don’t need this too. The next time you call, I’ll be in a better mood. Today just isn’t . . . good.” Her voice becomes ragged with tears. I feel my eyes fill. Shit. I look around. Sergeant Guzman stares out the window with a vacant expression on his face. Probably wondering how to beat me next time we play rock, paper, scissors. I mash my eyeballs with the heel of my palm.

“I love you, honey. We’ll get through this. It’s tough, I know, but just think how happy we’ll be. You and me and Herman. Or not Herman, but . . . the baby.” I keep on like this for a while before I realize the line has gone dead. It’s the storm, I tell myself. It’s the storm that did it. I stand holding the phone pressed to my forehead.

The sergeant looks over at me. “You done, Lover Joe?”

“Yeah,” I say, “the line went dead.”

Sergeant Guzman gives me a sympathetic look and a slow shake of the head. I know he thinks I’m lying and it makes my face get hot. He’s a career man, like most of the really good sergeants I’ve met. His round, almost girlish face fills with wrinkles and he runs a hand over his Marine-style high-and-tight haircut. He can’t be more than a couple years older than I am, but the way he acts you’d think it was ten. Sergeant Guzman’s got two kids back home in Atlanta, and you can tell being a daddy has somehow aged him on the inside.

“Don’t take it too hard, Joe,” he says, giving me a gentle shove toward the door. “Whether I want to or not, I listen to these calls every day. Jody problems are always the same.”

Jodies are men back home who steal soldiers’ girlfriends and wives. We sing songs about them when we march. We joke about them as we eat. But lying in our cots at night, we fear them. They will steal your future just as surely as a bullet or a bomb.

“It’s not like that,” I tell him, hoping it’s true. “The storm knocked out the connection.”

“Okay, Joe,” he says, and then flicks a switch and the lights go out.

9

It takes me
thirty minutes to find my tent. Usually it’s a two-minute walk. The sand scours my hands and cheeks. It finds every bit of exposed flesh and tries to grind it away. I think about Clarissa. She said she had to look at a photo to remember my face. I know she can’t have forgotten the first time she saw it. I remember that day as clearly as anything that’s ever happened in my life, and I know she must still remember too. She has to. It was a few months after my grandpa died. I’d bought a new parachute for a trip with my jumping buddy, Frick. We drove all night to a famous bridge in West Virginia, one of the best base-jumping spots on the continent. The perfect bridge. This was my farewell trip. By then I’d already failed out of college and signed up for the Army. We took turns throwing ourselves off that huge bridge. It was beautiful. Early May. A sky as blue as the ocean looks when you’re a child. The new leaves still had that bright neon green color. We took drags from a one-hitter painted to look like a cigarette before each jump, but I would have felt high without it. My body burst into song each time I chucked myself into that gorge.

It was on my third jump of the day that I saw her. Clarissa said I looked like an angel. My new chute was white with golden stripes, and in bright sunlight, it could almost blind you. I saw her the moment my chute opened. Somehow, she’d gotten separated from her friends. They’d been camping for a couple of days in the state park. That morning she got up before the sun rose and the others were awake, and went out alone to see the river, and got lost. Clarissa wandered through the trees for hours. When she finally reached the river, she followed it downstream, hoping to find a bridge. And then, who should appear but an angel.

My pal Frick had work, so he went home that evening. But not me. I had a new pretty parachute and a grateful girl. So of course I stayed on with Clarissa. We ate SpaghettiOs out of fire-blackened cans, drank Wild Turkey, and spent the night making love in the back of my Toyota 4Runner. By daybreak, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, or at least move in with her. Corny, perhaps, but such stories almost always are if you’re not personally involved. We found her friends around lunchtime the following day, sitting on a log singing Tori Amos songs and snuffling over their lost pal. Three hairy-legged girls in Swedish sandals. They took an immediate dislike to me. I felt so love-drunk, I hardly noticed.

A week passed before I managed to get up the nerve to tell Clarissa I’d already signed on for a hitch in the Army. I took her to Forsyth Park and sat her down by the big fountain. It was a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. A storm the night before had washed the sky clean. You could smell the ocean all the way upriver in Savannah. At first she thought I was joking around, but when the grim look on my face didn’t go away, she cried. Then I did.

In the year before I deployed, I saw Clarissa every chance I got. By this time, I’d already run through most of my inheritance, but I used the rest on plane tickets and sparkling rings, taxicabs and tasty meals. Her parents thought I was a chunk of crusty shit scraped off the rim of a truck-stop toilet. On the night I met him, her father threatened to eviscerate me with his thumbnail, a yellow horny thing he kept longer than his other nails so he could use it as a tool. Her mother patiently explained that if she found I’d molested her daughter in any way, she’d hunt me down and nail my member to the floor with carpet tacks. A direct quote. That Sunday morning when I broke the news in the dining room of Lady and Sons restaurant that we would soon be three, her father pushed over the table, jumped across the spilled cheese grits, and choked me until I passed out. When I came to, he gave me a cigarette and we took a walk around the block. Her father spieled off a long list of actions that would cause my early death. At the end, he looked me in the eye and asked if I understood, not whether or not I agreed with him, but whether or not I understood. I nodded. “Good,” he said, “I hope your neck’s all right.”

Clarissa told my fortune with tea leaves. She made me boxer shorts out of six pairs of her own panties. She took a picture of each of her toes and sent them to me in an album she made out of flattened Orange Crush cans and cardboard. She wrote me a poem for every day we were apart. She poured gasoline in the shape of a T in her parent’s backyard, so when she woke up and looked out the window she would think of me first thing. She invented a lively dance called the Toby-Toby and performed it in Forsyth Park one glorious Saturday evening in our special spot by the fountain. She tattooed my name on the inside of her lower lip, so we could kiss perpetually. She sang me Stevie Wonder songs on my answering machine. Each time she saw me again, Clarissa would kiss the inside of my left wrist before she said word one. Clarissa was twenty-two the day I met her. She turned twenty-three the day we conceived our child. My love for her swept through me like a forest fire. If it goes out, she’ll leave behind miles and miles of hard black stumps.