You Know When the Men Are Gone (19 page)

Inside the motel room, Kit decided to change tactics. While Helena was washing her hands at the bathroom sink, he stepped up behind her and put his arms around her waist, nuzzling his chin in the back of her neck. He felt her body stiffen.

“I don’t care if there was someone else,” he whispered. “It doesn’t matter. Things can go back to the way they used to be—”

She turned so quickly, slipping out of his arms, that he almost fell over.

“I told you there isn’t anyone.” She paced the narrow passage between the beds and the TV.

“Remember how good we had it?” he asked.

“Good?” She spun toward him, her hands on her hips. “You were always training late at the range and working weekends. Our apartment smelled like vomit and paint thinner from the last tenants. The neighbors had slasher films blasting all night. I was afraid to go outside by myself.”

Kit was suddenly very tired. He leaned into the wet sink and tried to take pressure off his injured foot. He stared at his wife. For thirteen months he had dreamed of their home together, the meals she had waiting for him, the hot running water, the refrigerator always full, the steady air-conditioning, and the comfortable couch. Everything in hindsight had seemed like a delirious indulgence, just to have electricity at the end of every switch and lightbulb. He had forgotten that Helena hated that apartment on Trimmier Avenue, how she had to use a pair of pliers to get the dishwasher to work, how the shower leaked water from one end of the bathroom to the other, how she tried to get a dog-walking business going and failed.

“We’ll find a nicer place,” he said dully. He no longer wanted to have this conversation, he didn’t want Helena’s version of their life together to ruin the one he held in his mind.

She was pacing again. “I wish I was a better wife.” She stopped and looked at his foot, her eyes translucent with tears. “I just want to go home and start all over again.” Then, so quietly he almost didn’t hear her, “Alone.”

So he called up some of his single buddies, Crawford and Dupont.

“Who’s up for a day of drinking?” he asked, and arranged for them to pick him up.

He left Helena sitting on her bed, her thin arms crossed over her chest.

“Don’t you want to get your truck?” she asked. “And your things out of storage? I wanted to get you set up. ...”

But Kit ignored her, rifling through his duffel bag for that last bottle of Vicodin, swallowing three without any water, not caring that they got caught in his throat. And he didn’t take his crutches as he slammed the motel room door behind him.

They went to The Last Stand Bar and Grill. Crawford and Dupont got the usual stares when they walked in together. Crawford wore the white button-up shirts and skinny ties favored by proselytizing Mormons, argued against evolution, and was hooked on comic books. Dupont had the word
Afrika
tattooed across his dark shoulders, boasted about the wartime rap videos he had put on YouTube, and got a manicure once a week. But Crawford, Dupont, and Kit had done basic training at the same time, managed to get sent to 1-7 Cav, then spent the deployment together in Iraq. They’d trained, bitched, slept, and pissed together for the past two and a half years: it was the equivalent of knowing each other for about a decade in the civilian world.

The Last Stand was a First Cavalry Division favorite and the walls were studded with memorabilia to prove it. There was a badly drawn poster of the doomed Custer, who had commanded the 7th Cav Regiment, and newspaper clippings about the raffles and fundraisers that the bar had hosted in order to send packages to the soldiers overseas. There were signs stolen from Fort Hood parking lots, photos of soldiers in Iraq standing with thumbs-up in front of Saddam’s palace or pitted desert landscapes, and unit patches that the customers tore off their uniforms and traded in for free drinks. But for a Cavalry unit renowned for its long-ago horsemanship and now destined to ride nothing but tanks and Humvees, the shining glory of the bar was the mechanical bull in the corner. Cowboy hats or baseball caps of those who had fallen off hung above the metal animal, nailed to the ceiling in warning.

“Isn’t that sweet little wife of yours here?” Dupont asked, buying a round of tequila shots and canned Miller Lite to start.

“She’s a bitch,” Kit replied, and reached for the small glass of tequila and the yellow oblivion it promised.

“To ditching bitches,” Dupont toasted, and the three guys swallowed the tequila and slammed the shot glasses on the bar.

Kit had turned twenty-one in Iraq, his birthday spent guarding Assassins’ Gate, one of the checkpoints of the Green Zone, and that day his buddies had toasted him with hot canteen water that tasted faintly of bleach. After the desert, after months of hospitals and strangers, sitting with Crawford and Dupont while drinking beer at a bar felt like the best thing in the world. And they wanted to hear about his foot, all the gory details of his surgeries, the pain he was in, and most of all how many Vicodin he had left and what their value might be in the barracks.

It was “Boom Boom” Dupont who had ripped Kit out of the Humvee after the IED went off, the IED that turned the entire undercarriage of his truck into a fiery wall that consumed the five men inside. Sergeant Schaeffer had been sitting next to Kit and caught most of the molten explosion. His body threw Kit against the side of the Humvee and somehow, miraculously, shielded him from the flame until Dupont, from the truck behind, grabbed Kit by the right arm and pulled him out. Kit had escaped with almost every single bone in his foot pulverized and burns on his face and hands.

Sergeant Schaeffer had not survived.

“To Sergeant Schaeffer,” they toasted for round number three, four, and five. The sun was setting outside, the fluorescent lights in the bar starting to glow in the dusk, and a few bottle-blondes in cowboy hats and short denim skirts were two-stepping near the jukebox. Kit felt the floor shifting underneath him.

“Take it easy,” Crawford said when Kit stumbled up to the bar to order another round. They had called Crawford “Choirboy” in Iraq because he didn’t curse, dip, smoke, or drink coffee. But Kit had once gotten a look in his buddy’s TUF box and, under the layer of X-Men and Black Knight comics, the guy had the biggest collection of Jenna Jameson DVDs Kit had ever seen. Crawford continued, “We’ve had time to get our tolerance back. The first week I was home I would get drunk just twisting the cap off a bottle of Jack.”

“I’m okay,” Kit said, reaching for his wallet. He wanted to call the motel, to make sure Helena was still there, but he ordered tequila instead.

He looked over and saw Dupont, six-four and darker than the smoke-stained bar walls, undulating to the country music as if it were a ballad by Mariah Carey. The girls at the jukebox smoked their cigarettes and ignored him the way most girls living outside Fort Hood ignored guys with high and tight haircuts. But Dupont had the grace and nonchalance that women inevitably wanted to get close to, and the tallest girl couldn’t help but start two-stepping next to his swaying hips. Then he made a motion toward the hibernating mechanical bull. The girls lifted their eyebrows and shrugged, then followed him over to where the hats forlornly covered the ceiling like the scalps of Custer and his massacred men.

Kit sniffed his shot, winced, and downed it. He thought of Helena’s life at home. The business classes at community college, nights at the Go-Go Putt with the high school friends she had never strayed from, her boss, Mackey, who called her “my girl” and gave her grotesquely untalented figurines he carved out of walnut shells, her gossip-loving sister who could talk for hours and just had twins, even her mom, Linda, with her big huggable arms and freezer full of everyone’s favorite ice cream. Kit hadn’t realized the idea of home could pose such a danger. That it could steal Helena away from him so completely. Or that it could never be his own home again.

“Let’s ride that bull,” Kit said, the warmth of agave in his stomach almost quelling his nausea.

“Don’t be a beef-wit.” Crawford finished his beer and looked down at Kit’s cast.

“Trust me, Choirboy, I don’t feel a thing.”

Kit watched Dupont and then the blondes, in quick succession, get tossed from the bull, each of them donating something to the sacrificial ceiling. The girls lost their cowboy hats. Dupont left his T-shirt dangling from a lightbulb and, stripped down to his wife-beater and the smudged Louisiana Tiger inked on his right shoulder, was suddenly thin and shy around the ladies.

Something’s got to go right for me,
Kit thought, assessing the headless, legless creature. When Kit was nine and his mother was splitting up with his second stepfather, he spent the summer in Winnemucca, Nevada, with his mom’s folks. Every day his granddad would take him out to a cactus-laden field and put him bareback on a horse, a sullen old mare that would bite a hand rather than take the sugar. Before she got the chance to sink her teeth into Kit’s thigh, his granddad would hit her hard on the rump and she would gallop as fast as those old legs let her. Kit would hold on to the matted mane, his heels tight in her belly, and it felt like flying. If he could ride that mare, he could ride this metal thing, and maybe it’d help him get lucky with the blond girl who flashed him her light blue panties when she did a somersault off the bull. That would show Helena.

The guy manning the mechanical bull looked at Kit’s foot. “You sign the release form?”

Kit nodded and he let him through.

Kit got up on the contraption carefully, getting his good foot through the stirrup and pushing the toe of his cast into the other. He grabbed the horn in the center of the saddle and just to act jaunty he lifted his left hand up over his head, rodeo-style. He heard Crawford and Dupont cheer wildly, and even a hoot or two from the hatless blondes.

The bull started to move, slowly at first, letting Kit get the hang of it. It seemed easier the faster it went. And it was like his granddad’s nag. He could almost hear her hooves against rock and dirt below, the wind in his ears, and that rhythm, that perfect, beautiful motion of being aligned with another creature, mindless with adrenaline and the pounding. God, he loved this, why didn’t he ride more often? What could beat this feeling? Damn, he could do it, he would do it. Blue Panties was his.

Then the bull lurched and started moving in a new direction and the tenuous hold of his cast in the stirrup came loose. He felt himself pitching forward, and if he had been sober he would have tried to tuck and roll like he had learned in Airborne School, but instead he landed hard and the pain that shot up his left foot into his spine forced tears out of his eyes. He stayed like that, flat on his back, until both Crawford and Dupont came running over and helped him up, his leg dangling uselessly behind.