Throw Like A Girl (8 page)

Maybe he hadn't understood her. She wasn't going to ask him again. The mother wanted another turn to speak, and Jack was running out of time on the phone, so she told him to please be careful and call again real soon, and he said he didn't know when he could do that but he could probably e-mail.

Kelly's father, who had been a Marine, said that even the Army—he always made clear he held it in low regard—would be good for Jack. The service would make a man out of him. It toughened you up and taught you discipline. The bond you made with the men you served with was a blood bond that would last a lifetime. Kelly Ann thought about Pete Peterson and wondered if she was in for a bonded lifetime of him.

She heard something wistful in her father's words, and in the spaces between the words. It was the same for the men down at the VFW. Whatever they'd done in the service, they'd polished it up like a medal. It had been the best part of them, their real and secret life. It was a brotherhood of secrets. And when he came home, Jack would be in on it.

One morning she left the baby downstairs with Jack's mother-—Tara had her own crib there by now—and drove to the next county to see Jack's recruiting sergeant. It was summer again, with a red-winged blackbird shrilling from every fence post, and big cotton clouds in a hot blue sky. This time last year, the Army hadn't yet turned into anything personal.

The recruiting office was in a little mall next to a larger mall. There was a manicure place and a phone store and a Chinese take-out and then the recruiter's, like it was just one more thing to buy. Kelly Ann parked and walked in the front door. No one was visible in the front section of the office, which was just a couple of desks with chairs. A movable partition screened off the rest of it, the coffee room and the room where they showed movies of Army life. Posters illustrated different kinds of military missions: the grubby camaraderie of the unit gathered around a tank, the helicopter pilot with his hands steady on the controls, the honor guard standing at attention. In all this there were two women soldiers and three black ones, a proportion that Kelly Ann guessed had something to do with who the Army wanted to attract and who they didn't want to scare away.

She waited, and after a minute Sergeant Crissy came out from behind the partition. “Hi, can I help you?”

She'd been there any number of times, sat there with Jack while he and the sergeant went over all the things the Army would require of him and all the things the Army would shower on him in return. Kelly Ann spoke her name, and Jack's, and watched the sergeant's face register her. “Well sure,” Sergeant Crissy said. “If you'd have come in with Jack, I would have known you in a minute. What do you hear from him, everything going good?”

He told her to sit down and he asked about the baby too. The sergeant was tall and well put together. Here in the office he wore green fatigues and combat boots, but when he'd come to the high school he'd worn a dress blue uniform and his service medals. He was the cleanest man any of them had ever seen, clean down to his shoelaces, polished up to his buttons, and all that powerful barbering. They'd all fallen a little bit in love with him on the spot, boys as well as girls.

When they'd finished the small talk, Sergeant Crissy said, “So what brings you down here? Anything I can help you with, anything at all?” The military was one big family, she'd been told, and while she didn't much believe it, she didn't mind making him go through the drill.

“I need some information. About enlisting.”

He didn't get it at first, and even when he did he pretended she was joking. “Now why would you want to go and do that?”

“Same reasons as anybody else.”

“You're thinking of enlisting.”

“That's what I'm saying.”

“Well that's something.” He was giving himself time to think. “What made you come up with that idea?”

“It's a good opportunity. It's worked out pretty well for Jack, and we could decide if either one of us wanted to make a career of it. We could be stationed together. Not right away, but somewhere down the line.”

“What does Jack think about all this?”

“He's open to the idea.” She had not yet told him.

“And your little girl?”

“She's good with Jack's folks. One or the other of us could come back on leave from time to time. And once we got stationed together, we could have her with us.”

He was too smooth to make fun of her outright. He was going to be patient and reasonable. He hiked his chair so that it was a scant inch closer to hers. He must have become a recruiter because he liked to convince people of things, persuading them with his big handsome head and body. He said, “It's hard on the spouses. Always is. And here you are with a baby. Of course you miss Jack and you want to be with him and this seems like a good way to go about it. But the Army's a lot more than that. A good four years more, if nothing else.”

“I remember the terms all right.”

“No offense, Kelly Ann, but can you do even one push-up?”

“I can manage.” She'd tried and she'd wound up with her face in the carpet more than a few times. But she was getting better. “I can train, just like Jack did.”

“Run two miles? Carry a full pack?”

“If you think I can't do anything at all, just say so.”

“That's not it.”

“What it sounds like.”

“Say you go through basic and your AIT, there's still no guarantee you'd be posted anywhere near each other.”

“I thought your job was to sign people up.”

“Kelly Ann, there's no pleasure or anything else in it for me if you take your oath and then show up right back here after three days.”

“How about you just walk me through it.”

She made him lay it all out for her, the enlistment bonus, the commitment, the training, the family policies. He displayed the list of lying, glamorous careers open to her: public relations specialist, animal handler, meteorologist, flight medic, intelligence analyst. “What am I most likely to get?” she asked him.

“Troop support. Clerical, maybe. You could end up driving a truck. Or in food service.”

“I guess somebody has to do it.” She wasn't going to let him scare her off with his dismal talk.

When she left, she had a plastic bag full of applications and brochures, all the slick colored paper the Army printed up to sell you on itself. That evening she dug out her old running shoes and a pair of shorts and drove over to the high school. There was nobody else around. She set her water bottle on one of the bleachers and started a slow jog around the rubber track that circled the football field. In one corner near the fence, a killdeer had built a nest. It ran ahead of her for a little ways, pealing and dragging its wing, to lead her away from the eggs. After the third lap it decided she wasn't a threat and left her alone. Kelly Ann got a stitch in her side after half a mile but she thought that wasn't bad for a start. Nobody was going to expect much of her, and that would be some advantage.

When she e-mailed Jack about enlisting, the answer came back almost right away: “ARE YOU CRAZY????” She knew if she kept at it, she could talk him into it. Of course he'd be worried about Tara, he'd say that a child needed its mother even more than its father. But most of the time Tara seemed to belong to Jack's parents as much or more than to her. It was almost as if she'd had the baby for them and wasn't going to get her back for a while anyway.

Crazy was pretty much what everybody thought, including her father, who was old school about women in the military. Her girlfriends acted like they thought it was a great idea but she could tell it was the last thing on earth they'd do themselves. Their lives were boyfriends and the drama that went along with the boyfriends, and watching the same television shows so they could talk about them, and wishing the world was more like television. They weren't anxious to try any other way of life. Jack's parents went along with it, as they went along with everything, even when it bewildered them. “We sure would miss you, Kelly girl, but you do what you feel is best.”

Jack said, “If you end up getting shot or something, everybody's gonna say it was my fault for not making you stay home.”

“Unless you shoot me yourself, I wouldn't worry about it.” She listened to the click and hum of the long-distance line.

“Since when did you get so willful? I never knew you to have such a hard head.”

“I guess it's come on by degrees.”

At the end of August, Sergeant Crissy came out to the high school and watched her do the two miles around the track. Then she stretched out her stomach muscles and started in on sit-ups. She did the push-ups last, and by then it was like walking through a wall of fire. Sweat ran into her eyes and blinded her. Her legs were cramping and she was afraid she would throw up. When she finished she rolled over on her side and tried to get breath back in her ragged lungs. Sparks of red light exploded behind her closed eyes.

“All right,” the sergeant said. “All right, you proved your point. Welcome to the Armed Forces.”

She was set to report on October first, the week after her nineteenth birthday. The summer heat stayed all through September without letup, a yellow furnace that scorched the crops and turned even the shadows hot. One afternoon Kelly Ann drove the small grid of Leota's streets, the baby strapped into her carrier in the back seat. She was trying to imagine missing anything here: the IGA and its window banners advertising lettuce and store-brand cola, the post office, the Farm Service, the beauty parlor where they still did wash and sets, the tavern that opened at 5 a.m. to serve coffee and sweet rolls.

She drove a little distance down the highway to the Sonic, where she could order from the car and not have to carry the sleeping baby inside. She was waiting for them to bring her food out when someone in the next parking space tapped the horn. Kelly Ann looked over and saw it was Mrs. Jones, Jonesy, her old English teacher, waving away to beat the band.

Jonesy looked like she wasn't going to quit on her own, so Kelly Ann turned the air conditioner on for Tara and got out to stand next to Jonesy's open window. “Kelly Ann, I declare, I was just thinking of you the other day.”

“How are you, Mrs. Jones?” Kelly Ann asked politely. Jonesy had been teaching English at the high school for a hundred years. She dyed her hair black and teased it into a puff, and she wore a lot of peasant-style wooden jewelry. She had made them memorize “The Man Without a Country,” and “In Flanders Fields.” There were so many people, Kelly Ann thought, that she never wanted to be like.

Jonesy was dressed up for school, and she had a large-sized paper cup of something. “I can't believe this heat. I drove straight over here for a root beer float, I had a taste for one. Is that your little girl? Oh, she's just beautiful.”

“Thank you. She's mine and Jack's. Her name's Tara.”

Jonesy asked how Jack was, and Kelly Ann said he was pretty good so far, and you just had to hope for the best. Jonesy took a pull at her root beer float and the straw rattled in the bottom of the cup. She'd heard about Kelly Ann going into the Army; everyone had heard of it. She said, “I hope it works out for you, dear. I hope it's not too hard on you.”

“It's an opportunity to help my country.”

“Well sure it is. And to be near Jack. I understand that. You're young, and youth must be served. Did we ever do that ballad in class, the one about the girl who disguises herself as a soldier to go look for her true love on the field of battle?” Jonesy raised her eyes and drew herself up in her seat, the stance she assumed when reciting:

“That's how it goes. There's a lot more, but I can't recall it.”

“I don't think we got to that one.” Out of the corner of her eye, Kelly Ann saw the carhop coming out with her food. “It was real nice seeing you, Mrs. Jones.”

“You were such a good student. You were one of those that made me look forward to class.”