We Come to Our Senses (21 page)

LAST
stop was Khobar Towers, a residential building complex outside Riyadh. In the courtyard between the high-rises the Army leashed up a camel. You could pay $5 for a Polaroid with it. They set up vending, bad pepperoni pizza and nonalcoholic beer, and kiosks sold cheap Saudi souvenirs, prayer rugs and t-shirts. There was a pool.

Amid the thousands in that sober Araby I ran across D. Garcia, this skinny Mexican I'd grown tight with during Basic Training at Fort Jackson. An Army truck driver, D. Garcia had logged over a million miles in theater. I told him I only wanted to be back in that sand. He said he just wanted to be back on that highway.

That night—the last time I would ever see him—D. Garcia and I falsified a requisition for a transport truck, a Deuce-and-a-Half, and stole into some immigrant area of the city, Filipino, where he'd discovered you could buy black market rotgut. It was nasty and clear and came in plastic water bottles. We got drunk and skidded all over back-alley Riyadh, screaming out of the open windows of the truck cab.

Back at Khobar we staggered through the hallways, playing commando. We gave hand signals like in the movies, and then snuck into rooms. There, Garcia aimed his fingers at sleeping troops, mock-fired several rounds, then stepped back into the hall and on to clear the next quarters.

Behind one door we found the women, splayed out on cots, sleeping in Army-green panties, a thin layer of sweat on their exposed skin. Evie Mundleson was among them, asleep on her
chest, shirtless, her breasts all smushed out. D. Garcia cocked his eyebrow at me, raised the barrel of his finger-gun to the roof, motioned for me to go inside. I nodded. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, and then at me, and then disappeared forever. I saw myself stumble over to Evie; I heard the moan that would erupt as I yanked down her battlefield panties and shoved it all straight up her ass.

I still don't know what stopped me. Really, there was no barrier left. No ethic, no cause. Yet I'm pretty sure I just went back to my bunk, jerked off in silence.

FAMILIES
and cameras on the tarmac at Bragg. It was hot and humid, and Charlotte was not there, though I couldn't stop looking for her. People hugged people, hugged children, hugged reporters. Every hand waved those little American flags you find in the cemetery. Someone handed out Southwest Asia Service Medals.

That night we put a bunch of bottles together, tequila, Jägermeister, Jack, what have you. It was guys-only. Everyone brought a fifth of the liquor they'd missed most. We drank violently, sitting on the patio outside the barracks, our dog barks reverberating off the concrete into the warm southern evening. We piled in a minivan cab and went to town. The driver didn't even ask, “Where to?” He just dumped us on a busy, soldiered street full of bars. We wandered among hundreds of redeployed troops, amid loud music and vendors and neon. A barker talked us into one of the endless nasty clubs.

Cigarettes and air freshener and terrible music. A brown-skinned woman in a denim miniskirt and halter top marched
up, and I asked her for a beer. She said nothing, only yanked me to the back of the room as the guys howled. She pulled me behind a partition, lifted her halter, placed my hands on her large breasts, then put her own hands over mine and began rubbing us in circles. It made me think of a Laundromat.

“You like these tits?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I answered. She might have been Mexican. She walked me into a small room with a lamp and an olive-colored military cot. I had to put both hands on the wall to hold myself up as she undid my pants and put a condom over me. She sat on the cot and started to work me over like a machine, licking my anus for a few seconds, mouthing my testicles, fellating me just enough to promote erection. Straight-up checklist: hike miniskirt, panties to ankles, bend over. Enfranchise me with hard statements about my masculinity as I penetrate. I finished instantly but tried to keep going, accidentally lodging the condom inside her after I went limp. I handed her all my money, then stumbled into a bathroom stall and wept.

IN
Tuscaloosa I borrowed a pair of eyeglasses from a friend, pulled a Crimson Tide ball cap low on my brow, and went to see Charlotte, unannounced. I had never worn glasses, so everything was blurry. My clothes felt borrowed and dated, and were musty from a year in the drawer. She answered the door and we stood there, silently, until finally she said she was glad to see me. She was sorry how things had worked out.

It had just rained and was July-hot. There was no baby. You could smell that the box hedges outside her apartment
had just been clipped. I had not reacclimated to southern humidity and a constellation of zits had erupted on my face. I asked if she wanted to go to the zoo or something. I cannot remember if we went. I really have no idea.

I am positive, however, that the next time I saw her it was twelve years later, far from Alabama. We ran into each other at the edge of the frozen fish section at Costco Wholesale, in Chicago, Illinois. Another George Bush was President, and a new war in the same desert was cracking wide open. And there she was.

Only, I wasn't nineteen. I was a grown man. One of thousands who'd been slowly drawn away. Away from fathers who fought in better wars, from male friends whose only interest was whether or not these men had killed anyone. From churches in small southern towns where they were made to stand on Veterans Day. Instead of the VFW or the VA, this crybaby diaspora sought out spaces both alien
and
familiar: exurb, highway, divorce court, Costco. These were grown men who shopped for discount liquor in bulk. Grown men whose doctors could not explain the sensation of fire beneath the skin. Men who could not pin their failed relationships on anything quantifiable, who obsessed over the inability to recover the lives they saw on TV. A grown man in a beige suede jacket that had lost its nap, and who had spent the many previous days on the floor of his efficiency apartment, watching a new invasion unfold on a small television. Missile strikes at remove, rabbit ears adjusted, a rerun that somehow eclipsed the original. He showered and sobbed and masturbated.

Nobody ever asks about the grown women.

Charlotte was still pretty and soft-spoken, though now with a master's
and a career, and the confidence to look squarely at the past. We stood under the fluorescence, smiling past each other, eyeballing bulk packages of cod, scrod, halibut. I wondered if she had made or kept that list, the one detailing who I was before the war.

She got my phone number before I could ask for hers, and she said we should get a cup of coffee.

Of course, she never called.

“Why on earth would we ever go back?” was the last I ever heard.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Dana Lee and Virginia Philomena, with everything I've got. To my wonderful family, Lindsey and Whiting and DeMasi and DeLoca. To Bill Clegg. To Jill Bialosky. To Liz Birch and Brendan McGrath, Allan B. “Preacher” Hunt, Kyle Beachy, Chris Bower, Thomas D'Angelo and Caitlan Mackinnon-Patterson, Werllayne Nunes and Molly Dondero, Lee Eastman II, Alice Randall, David Metcalf and Erin Moody, Margaret Patton Chapman and Tony Strimple, Richard Holland, Ken MacLeish and Rachael Pomerantz, Andrew Mullins, Justin McGuirk, Maggie Tate, Robert Rea, Cale Nicholson. . . . To Robert Olen Butler, Chris Clemans, Maria Rogers, Michael Strong. To Lynelle Keil, Scott Gray, and the Pals who visit Willow Street in Austin. To John and Angela Young, Rob Harrington, Carter Little, and My Extended Nashville Comrades. To Ted Ownby, Ann Abadie, Jimmy Thomas, and the staff at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi. To Sara Levine and everyone at the MFA in Writing, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. To the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Sewanee Writers' Conference,
and the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt. To Square Books. To the
Iowa Review
, and the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans. To all y'all, with a thanks that feels broken, because a word like thanks doesn't even come close.

“Evie M.” published in the
Iowa Review
, reprinted in
Best
American Short Stories 2014
. “So Bored in Nashville” in
Southern Cultures
. “Clean” in
Fourteen Hills
. “They” in
You Must Be This Tall to Ride
. “Hers” in
Forty Stories: New
Writing from Harper Perennial
.

Copyright © 2016 by Odie Lindsey

All rights reserved

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