We Come to Our Senses (13 page)

Staring at Van Dorn, she still couldn't understand why.

“Was I the first?” she asked. “Or did you burn other girls?”

He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Like I said, girl. Nothin' there.”

The men jostled around on their stools. One motioned for another drink.

Colleen lifted her glass. “Okay, I'll get you started. So we're in the Stryker vehicle, just you and me. And I don't know about you, Van Dorn, but the fact that you were supposed to, well,
babysit
me 'cause I wasn't supposed to engage in combat was a bummer. Pissed me off, bad. Still does.”

“True, that,” Van Dorn said. “I was—”

“Shhh. Hold on, I'm settin' the scene here!” Colleen waved him down, and a couple of the men chuckled. “It was kind of a blur, all so fast. 'Cause I tell you what, Van Dorn, when you pounce, you're quick, man.”

He sipped his beer.

“Oh, and y'all, that vehicle
stank
.” Colleen looked at Van Dorn. “You smell sour, dude. And your chin? I can still feel your stubble scraping my neck—ugh. And, let's see . . . Oh. The screams. My screams in that goddamned Stryker were intense, right? Couldn't even hear the firefight. Couldn't hear nothin' but me screaming. Hell,
I
even wanted me to shut up!”

The bartender cleared his throat to try and break the story up.

“And my god, your erection!” Colleen said. “Now, there's a short story these men haven't heard. Your erection, still in your pants, pokin' all up against me while you pinned me down. I mean, one minute you're one of us; the next, your little pecker is jabbin' all over me!” Colleen forced a laugh. “You wanna take it from here?”

Van Dorn stared at her.

Colleen rolled her eyes. “Okay, be a chickenshit.” She continued, as if setting up a joke. “So, boys, he's pinning me down, right? He smells like a sow and his boner's poking all over creation. And somehow, despite everything I'm still, like,
Okay, here it comes. We all know what's up. This troop is gonna do his biz. Gonna rip my pants off, and then his down, and then he'll spit on his fingers and la dee dah, whatever, right?
I'm thinkin', like,
Let's get it over with, Stinky
.”

“Sorry, gal,” the bartender said. “This isn't the type of—”

“But this crazy mother didn't even unbuckle his pants! Shit, y'all, he just shoved his hands down my panties and, no kidding, um . . .” She blinked back tears for a second, then caught herself. “I mean, I thought an IED blast had seared
us from beneath the vehicle! It burned somethin' awful down there! I flopped like a fish on a bank. Flailed so hard I threw him off of me. And guess what?”

Nobody answered.

“This perv had a Zippo lighter in his hand. You believe that?”

Nothing.

Colleen snickered, sniffled. “Yeah. Like, he didn't even wanna
rape
me. He just wanted me on fire.”

(Afterwards, she'd pushed her BDU pants down to her knees, and peeled off the rayon panties that had melted to her pubic hair. When she wailed like an animal, Van Dorn screamed for her to shut up, saying, “Jesus, I's just fuckin' around.” The air in the vehicle was clotted with the smell of singed hair and flesh.

Colleen had lain on her back, on the bench seat, rocking, bawling. She'd been confused when Van Dorn gently handed her a bottle of water, then stared as she doused the blisters. “Just fuckin' around,” he'd repeated. Gripping the corrugated black plastic of his rifle barrel, he began to bang the butt of the weapon against the Stryker's metal floor, ordering: “You”—
bang
—“calm”—
bang
—“the”—
bang
—“hell”—
bang
—“down”—
bang
. “Now!” In the silence that followed, he smoothed her hair with his fingers, muttered, “I barely even flicked.”)

Through the bar's smoke and neon, Colleen stared at him. She wished to god she'd had the old Browning .22 her father taught her to shoot with. She'd inhale, hold her breath, line up, squeeze. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Center mass, as the Army commanded. She figured Van Dorn
might even laugh when he saw the .22. Might hold up a hand and charge her, convinced of his ability to absorb the rounds in his palm. All the better, she thought. All the better he forget the kinship between her Browning's 5.6mm bullet and the 5.56mm round of the carbines slung in theater. Forget that the U.S. military chose the minuscule 5.56 round for a reason; forget that instead of a fist-sized cavity left by an AK-47, that counter to any Cold War profundity, the sole intention of the 5.56mm round is to ricochet: off the bones, sinews, spine. Forget that you can in fact shoot a man in the legs, or the ulna, and the round may well bounce all the way into the abdomen, shredding muscle and artery. She'd give it all to him, center mass just as trained, secure in the pinball-like reflection of the bullets inside his rib cage.

“That about right?” she asked him. “Anything I forgot?”

Van Dorn looked to the mirror behind the bar. The men turned their eyes from his reflection.

“What I thought,” Colleen said. “Anyhow. I'll just let you get back to tellin' these boys what a badass you are.”

She fumbled in her skirt pocket for her keys and some money.

“Hey?” the bartender asked, startling her. “You good?”

“Well,” she said, pausing to consider. “I'm better.”

He nodded. “I hope so.”

She threw a $20 on the bar and walked to the door.

“Come see me,” the bartender called out. “If you need to talk or somethin'.”

Within a minute Colleen was stomping the gas pedal, kicking up a hail of oyster shells as she peeled onto the
county road. She was drunk, and the car drifted across the yellow centerline now and then. No matter; she was heading deep into the countryside, nowhere near anything, let alone a cop. The clean night air pushed like a river against the mildewed odor of the Cavalier. The tires squealed as she took a curve, and her headlights flashed over vast fields of row crops, cotton and soybean and corn, and the endless steel trusses of center-pivot irrigation arms. She was not Civil Affairs. It didn't matter what her job was, anyway. She held an intimate knowledge of every weapon at the company's disposal. She could break down and clean and refit and reassemble any standard-issue rifle—SDM, A4, M16/AR-15, M203—any of it, faster than anyone in the battalion. M60 and .50-cal. “What the?” She pounded the wheel as the tears came, then gunned the accelerator, the car lilting as she hit the dips in the road.

Her life was pinned between Highways 7 and 15. It always had been; whether as a child riding to town with her father, or on the middle school bus, or while tooling around with handsy high school boys. Her homeland had been carved up before Colleen was even born. Driveway to asphalt, highway to interstate then back again, she ran on a track forged by someone else, by men; a map, a guidance system, a grid, thrusting her from point to point, repeat, repeat, the cycle punctured only by trauma.

She whipped the Cavalier off the road at full throttle, thrusting into farmland, nearly rolling the vehicle. The tires threw gravel, then dirt, and then the windshield was gummed with plant life. Young corn stalks lashed the window frames, their row spacing a drumroll, their shorn silks and tassels,
confetti. She then steered the vehicle into wide arcs and curls, exactly as she had in the desert.

As the car shaved the crops, its engine near redline, Colleen knew that nobody had ever forged that particular pathway, in that particular way. She laughed at the landlessness of it all, at her authority in motion, and then yelled out in glory with the choir of snapped stalks . . . until the Chevy smacked dead into the irrigation tower and her face cracked the steering wheel.

Blood streaked her chin as she processed the pain. She listened for fighter jets, or the bleating of goats, her muscles locked in anticipation of a blast concussion.

When nothing came to engage, Colleen let go of her fear. She lay her head on the wheel as her body went slack. Her consciousness drained out to the wobble of gooseneck pipe that spanned the quarter-mile sprinkler truss.

She wasn't dead. She was twenty-two years old, and very much alive.

11/19/98

This unusual episode is one of the series' best ever, with the non-stop comedy roller-coaster suddenly throwing a brilliant surprise ending at you.

—“T
HE ONE WITH ALL THE THANKSGIVINGS
,”
from
Friends Like Us: The Unofficial Guide to
Friends

ANOTHER GLASS OF
Beaujolais Nouveau. Every year, Shea tells me how special it is. Every year, it tastes terrible. Finally, this time, this year, at the Whole Foods I asked her to buy a new California wine instead. Called simply “Nouveau,” it was positioned right next to our horrible stuff. I mean, great marketing. It was from Sonoma too, I think, which would've been pretty good. (After all, Williams-Sonoma is pretty good, right?) The debut Nouveau also had an artistic and flashy wine label, just like the French stuff. Beyond even Beaujolais, the fake wine came with Christmas-ornament grapes in bronze patina, noosed around the bottleneck, for free.

Shea didn't go for it. She said that some traditions are just that—traditions.

Anyhow, it's Tuesday. It's Wednesday. It's Thursday.
Must-See teevee.
Friends
and co. at six o'clock, six-thirty
Seinfeld
noosed around its neck. I'll get another glass of this crummy wine. “Shea? You want anything?” “No, thanks, hon. Six minutes!” God bless her, lounging on the weathered brown Italian leather of the retro Cotswold sofa. The ruby Pakistani rug at her feet—what's that rug pattern called again?—by way of Nieman's. Resto Hardware oak coffee table, matching end table, bronze patina lamp and knickknack closing in. The laughable Burberry pajamas by seven p.m. The skin-tag polyps in her armpit. Another glass of wine.

Here's the kitchen, here's the wine,
Access Hollywood
. I need some wine. Kitchen. Should have gone with the Viking stove, for resale. Or at least the FiveStar. The rust-colored, Italian-style, Mexican-made-tile so slick under sock feet. Countertops wiped to a gleam. The cobalt-blue triple-Moen-sink; the green digital numbers of the stainless microwave. Travertine abounding, and Sub-Zero fridge, stocked. Museum of Fine Arts
The Impressionists
magnet smack-dabbing photo of Shea and me from the newspaper's About Town section. I bought the Jenn-Air stove but was wrong to do so, despite what I argued to Shea and later had to admit, no problem. The Jenn-Air was $2,701, cheaper than Viking—ridiculous. Now I notice that 2-7-0-1 comes up all the time, just to mess with me. Like, there were zero commercials shown on 1/27. No kidding. Instead, at every break the network ran news clips of the President saying, “I did not have sexual relations . . .” So depressing. And of course 12/07 is the “Day That Will Live in Infamy,” year after year. Point being, the Jenn-Air does not have (a) the resale value, nor (b) the conversation value of the Viking. Or even the FiveStar, for that matter. And since we're not going to cook anyway,
well, what the fuck? We need all the resale and conversation value we can get. Yes, I'll be the first to admit it. My mistake. I hope we've moved on.

“Honey?” she calls. “It's about to start”—12/71 being her birth month/year.

“Okay, coming.” I am hungry, am I? We've been watching for years and years and years and . . . since right after college. This and
Seinfeld
and
Frasier
and, well, things have gotten interesting.
Seinfeld
and
Frasier
are the new
Cheers
and
M*A*S*H
, rerun- and real-episode-wise. Five-thirty
Seinfeld
, six o'clock
Friends
, six-thirty
Seinfeld
, nine-thirty
Seinfeld
, ten o'clock
Friends
. Seven o'clock new
Friends
and
Frasier
on Thursday. Shea and I joke that if you flip the remote exactly right, you never have to hear a single syllable of Peter Jennings or Dan Rather, or anyone else depressing. The other evening, around five-thirty, she said, “I'll trade Chandler Bing for Vernon Jordan any day.” I said, “Ditto me for Joey Trib instead of Linda Tripp!” Do they still show
Cheers
and
M*A*S*H
? No? Maybe, yeah, sometimes, where?

“Honey?” I call to her. “I've got one.”

“Uh-uh, here we go. Better be good.” A few times a week, Shea and I do this thing where we'll claim exterior-only parts of each other that we love.

“It is,” I yell back. “Oh, hey—can you hear me? Hold on a minute.”

I think I should piss. Moen faucet in bathroom, icy granite, extra-deep basin. Silent-flush, cavernous bowl. For a while, the whole Phoebe-gets-pregnant story line on
Friends
was hard for us, but the show is just too funny to stay down about. We try to do the thing where Shea pulls her knees up
to her chest after I come. We'll see. I despise the doctors, the specialists. Mostly, we never know whether to be excited or depressed when Shea doesn't get her period. I can't even ask her anymore. Textile-linens from Monte-somewhere in Italy, via Neiman's, which are supposed to be “exquisite,” but really don't sop up all that much. Bed, bath and shower curtain. (Still not sure if a downstairs shower is good resale or not.) The preview of today's
Friends
Thanksgiving special says they'll all remember their Worst Thanksgivings Ever—which I guarantee you will come up for a laugh around the table next week, at Thanksgiving. Aveda Energizing Body Cleanser and Aveda soaps promise “the art and science of pure flower and plant essences.” What the hell? Woman stuff, I suppose. Shea raves about this crap. I got a pimple after using it. Hadn't had a pimple in years.

I call to her, “Okay, ready?”

“Ready as I'll ever be,” she says with a laugh.