We Come to Our Senses (19 page)

And the clouds fracture into full torrent and flood, and the slop flows all around us. The slop like the slop in the desert in the void. The exhaust in the slop with the body oil and must as we rutted to our death through the gale in the
desert. Only now, only here, the glass shards and bourbon vapors shove into mud as we slog away exhausted, and back to the car. Pebble hail plinks the metal roof like bamboo wind chimes; I crank the engine and then murder that accelerator, squealing out of the cemetery and over a nameless county road . . . whip-skid it through a four-way stop sign . . . and T-bone the side of a Chevy C-10 pickup with a worn metal camper over the bed.

Steam and furrowed metal, semen tang and pocked chrome; the droning, AM-drizzle of Conway Twitty's “I've Already Loved You in My Mind” from the truck cab; the driver, his head against the steering wheel, unshaven, his bulbous face all bloody but he's okay, I believe, from the register of disbelief in his algae-green eyes as I stumble by, staggering to the covered truck bed, towards the sounds of panic and foreign shushes.

Hail on metal. Mud-slug feet. Cold air in my open fly, I find six Mexicans jammed inside the camper—five women and a baby—smacked up and shivering and not a spackle of English, right there, in faded Wrestlethon t-shirts and Goodwill jeans, in ridiculous pain, praying to desiccate, invoking some resurrection of dust—instead of metal leaking sky-soaked, hand-muffled baby wails. Refugees now, they came so close to the end of some epic, or perhaps to the beginning of another, but got consumed by deluge in rust-truck Kentucky.

Surely, at least the baby's gonna be okay.

Maybe.

I think.

Laura died of the Black Plague, remember.

Hers

THEY FLEW US
to the front in the belly of a loud C-130. We sat in cargo nets attached to the walls, bobbing in turbulence like babies in bouncer seats, too low to see out the windows. We landed in a gulf of dust and were jammed into trucks and taken to the compound, a small collection of tents inside a head-high berm of sand. A rocky desert horizon surrounded. We were ordered to calm down but stay sharp. Drink water.

Take chemical pills. Rumor was the pills were untested on humans, yet every morning we stood at parade rest, on the Iraqi border, in saggy, ill-fitting chemical suits, chewing the pills on command. It had been raining for days, so everything was soaked and beige and barren and slopped. (They had not briefed us on this wet climate. They had briefed us that Iraqis use American tanks and planes—we'd supplied them, after all—so the only way to discern the enemy was if he was firing on you.) The chem gear felt like a fatsuit as you lumbered around the compound, your boots sucked into the mud. A-10 Warthogs and F-whatever jets ripped the sky, unleashing their arsenal a few seconds north. Concussions from missile
strikes buckled your knees, and shook you awake at night. Breathing meant wondering about sarin or VX asphyxia. A primary concern was whether your gas mask was truly airtight, or whether the atropine needle would break off in your femur when the time came to self-inject.

Take pills. Drink water.

Atropine: often fused with opiates, used to quell the death rattle.

After a week, one woman refused. She said her body was messing up because of the pills. Actually, she said “fucking up.” She was African-American, late twenties, with short straightened hair. Thin legs but huge torso. She was ornery, and said fuck that because the pills were fucking her up.

Fine. She would die by Scud missile. They told us she was crazy, and told her, “Suit yourself.” Another loud black chick with fat breasts and fried hair. I imagined her cruising the mall back in Tuscaloosa, talking loud, dragging a baby boy by his arm.

She refused the pills. A couple of weeks later she had to go to the medical tent. She wasn't pregnant—they knew
that
much. But her period had disappeared; she wouldn't bleed, and nobody could tell her why. The medical tent shipped her down to the battalion hospital, which shipped her down to the main hospital in Riyadh, which shipped her back up to camp to pack. “Mother
fuck
,” she said. “All I wanted in this life was to serve, then to get home and start me a family. Now I can't even have no babies.”

More tests were required. They sent her home. We never heard anything else.

SPEC
4 Janette cried about her kid. You went to the motor pool to requisition a truck, ducked in the tent and saw the photo taped to her field desk: a tiny girl, towheaded, in a miniature Mississippi State cheerleader uniform. Don't ask if they'd taken her to the stadium on game day, or Janette would tear up and tell you about Colleen having fallen asleep during the Egg Bowl! She talked and cried while sitting near you at chow. Raised her voice to nobody at all about COLLEEN'S TURTLE DIED OH MAN WHY AM I NOT HOME? She missed her daughter while you ate breakfast, having just come off of guard duty. For hours you'd sat alone in a hutch at the edge of the compound, in the dark, facing the void through a slot between sandbags, your rifle aimed, your mind confabulating structures from the blackness. (Republican Guard advance or geometric patterns, the mind must see
something
.) You tried to forget that you'd traded your entire month's furlough for a ride in the back of a transport truck, breathing diesel exhaust and eating dehydrated pork, in order to wait in line for hours, to use a pay phone . . . to get your fiancée's answering machine.

And missiles burst. And the rains passed and the mud turned back to sand and windstorms engulfed everything for days, filling your boots, your eyes, your lungs, covering you in rashes. And Spec 4 Janette yapped and sobbed over her daughter, Colleen.

In our twelve-man tent, talk cycled about Janette's tight
workout body. One night, PFC Lomes tells everyone that during overnight guard duty he left his post to go smoke in the motor pool tent, and found Sergeant Cross pumping her. Says it just like this: “Sergeant Cross was pumping her, man. She had that good-hurt look on her face. Like, she was bent over her field desk, gripping the corners!” While telling us this he throws his hips like Sergeant Cross, grapples the air.

After lights-out, in the break between jet screams our tent was alive with fists rubbing against nylon sleeping bags. Everyone coming in silence.

CAMP
was so small that Evie Mundleson and I saw each other every day. Yet she no longer spoke to me. Back in Riyadh, during in-processing, she had asked if I wanted to come with her. Had arched her eyebrows, and used the word
latrine
. By this point the females were no longer allowed makeup, so Evie's cheeks were a drama of settled red pocks. Her dye-blond hair had no benefit of product.

I had stared at her for a few seconds, then told her I had a fiancée.

“Oh. I'm sorry. It's just that, well.”

It's just that everybody was fucking in the latrines. Port-o-lets labeled in Arabic whose plastic shells would rock and creak, whose sloshy reservoirs sounded like bathtub waves throughout the night. Just that we'd been stuffed inside a corrugated metal hangar outside Riyadh, were sweating, scared and unwashed, confined to ordered rows of olive-colored canvas cots and duffel bags. That Scud missiles traversed the
night sky and the moon hung sideways. Half a million Iraqi troops were poised for the Mother of All Battles.

In-processing, in-country, at last. We had stared at each other for days. We had picked out the weaklings and placed bets against them. (Evie was the safest of the casualty bets.) We cleaned, then recleaned our carbines. Oiling the barrels, breaking down sight assemblies. They had known better than to issue us ammunition.

It's just that when not an activated reservist, Evie M. bar-backed at Game Day, a strip mall sports bar in north Tuscaloosa. There, her twenty-year-old body was losing to the free potato skins. Her nights were defined by Misty cigarettes, dead kegs, and tip-outs. And she was okay with this, there, between walls covered in Crimson Tide jerseys and plastic NASCAR flags. In Riyadh, at in-processing, she was scared beyond panic, shaking, wanting only to be groped in the community toilet. Many had felt the same.

WHEN
by-the-book Sergeant Motes was sent home for being too old and sclerotic, Tetley Teabag and I became the de facto Supply and Armory leaders. Benefits included our very own tent, just Teabag and me. We bartered goods with other squads, companies, camps, armies, whomever. Extra boots got us a large, in-tent ice cooler; surplus cammies were good for foam mattresses; tent poles meant a radio, and so forth. We were sultans.

Tetley Teabag was a late-twenties rural Alabama high school graduate, desperate to be seen as a hardass. He had
the mustache, buzz cut and accent, but was squat and soft and round. He also had the toe.

The Tetley Toe. Stateside, just before deployment, Tetley had thrust a posthole digger at the big toe of his left foot. This earned him an odd reattachment and a relentless wound. The medics made Tetley limp around on a so-called Chinese jump boot: an oversized medical shoe constructed of royal-blue canvas and white Velcro straps. The roughnecks harassed him for this, as did the officers, and the women.

But forget the boot. The thing about him was that he NEVER went to the showers. Night after night he shut the tent flaps and wiped himself clean with a wet rag. He called it a “bitch bath.” In the dim orange lamplight, he'd turn his puppy-fat back to me and use this propane-powered camp stove to heat water in a tin basin. (By this point I was taking two-three-four cold showers a day. They kept drilling us for an attack that never came. The sand was everywhere. My lungs wheezed and my breath stank with it.) (This was also after Charlotte had stopped writing me.) As finale to Tetley's cleansing, he would wrap a Tetley tea bag around his blackened appendage. His grandmother sent boxes of them, instructing him that a woman's remedy was the only medicine a man could trust.

On guard duty one night I realized I'd forgotten my gas mask, and had to come back to the tent. Tetley was naked and bitch-bathing, and though he curled up when I cut through the entry flap, I saw what might be described as a mole or a nub, protruding from the thick beard between his legs.

I did not care that Tetley had the penis of an infant. Conversely, he seemed relieved to be uncloseted, because the next
night, during a violent sandstorm, he confessed to me that he was a virgin. Said he was worried about dying unfulfilled.

“Mundleson is lonely,” I yelled. We had to scream over the wind. We lay on our cots with our goggles on and our mouths covered by government-issue scarves. Rubbers were unrolled over our gun barrels to keep the sand out. It was no use looking at each other because you couldn't see anything.

“What?”

“I bet Evie'd be your girlfriend,” I shouted again.

“Screw that, man.” He called her pug-ugly, which was unfair, and which failed to trump that he could not expose himself in theater. No two ways about it: the only way Tetley could both keep his small penis a secret
and
lure a willing partner was to get home alive and marry some Christian.

AFTER
the nonmenstruating woman was sent away, only two black girls remained. Back home they went to the U of A. One of them, PFC Davis, had screwed this cheeseball Joe Minetti in the toilet back at Riyadh. So there was
that
, and somehow
that
had become attractive.

This, too, was after Charlotte stopped writing.

PFC Davis was inspiring. Curvy and defiant and laughing, always sharp. One morning, the XO ordered the two women and I to burn the latrine waste. He didn't say as much, but I figured this was my punishment for hiding in the showers. The black chicks did not have to figure anything. Our company was made up of Alabama rednecks and Spec 4 Janettes, so they knew they'd just been born wrong.

We yanked large metal tubs from beneath seat-holes in the
plywood toilets, and burned what was inside. The tubs, having been half filled with diesel the week before, were brim-high with turd and Tampax, vomit and ejaculate and toilet paper. And we lit all that on fire, and then walked from tub to tub, hour after hour, taking in putrid black smoke.

Diesel burns slow and won't explode when you light it. Nor will it penetrate the surface of the sewage. So you use a two-by-four to stir the char, to expose the flame to the sludge below.

Scorching shit in the desert. You get used to it. After a few hours, the three of us flirted around the feces. The sky was beige and gray. The sliver of landscape we saw over the compound berm was as barren as the moon.

“Y'all don't date black girls in y'alls fraternity?” Davis asked.

“Probably not,” I said. “But I'm not against it.”

“You sayin' you
have
dated a black girl?”

“Well, no. But I've thought about it.”

“I bet you have.” She laughed, then coughed.

She and I both knew a liaison would follow. She had overnight guard duty, alone, at the far corner of the berm. She said she needed company. I needed company.