A Stranger Like You (17 page)

Soon as he made enough money he was going to get his own place somewhere. He was going to buy himself a car so he didn’t have to ride the bus with all the cleaning ladies and gardeners. They reminded him of Hajis, and sometimes when there was one that was a little dark, with the oily greenish skin, or some kind of cloth on their head like the towel heads in Iraq, he had to stare at the floor and count, that’s what they told him to do at the crisis center, just breathe and count—anyway, they had given him some pills and sometimes they worked and sometimes he wouldn’t take them because he thought, if he did, something might happen to him, something terrible. He knew what they were trying to do. Shut him up. It was a government conspiracy. They didn’t want people knowing what it was really like over there, what it had done to his head. On the other hand, he had acquired certain skills that were useful to him now. For one thing he was a marksman. His body was toned, he was stronger than before. Problems would arise and his body would react without even thinking about it, like one of those slick intelligence operatives in the movies, nothing could really stop him—he was a fucking machine. He could read people. He could look at someone’s eyes and know things, intimate things. He could guess whether they were honorable, or whether they paid their bills or cheated on their taxes or on their wives. Like one of those police dogs, he had a nose for deception. In the long run he figured it would be useful somehow.

His doctor at the VA told him about a priest who had a support group in a nearby church. They’d been meeting on Sunday afternoons, for two hours. Everybody had been to war, either Iraq or Afghanistan. You went around in a circle and you could say whatever you wanted and sometimes the father asked you questions. Denny didn’t mind going, but he never really said anything much. He liked being inside the church. For a period of time in high school he had considered becoming a priest, but then he’d had his first girlfriend and changed his mind. They sat on the hard metal chairs near the windows with the blue curtains. The curtains rippled and snapped sometimes, if there was a breeze. Watching them was like a kind of mystery, like the wind had a story to tell. The church was very old, no air-conditioning, and on hot days you could work up a sweat sitting there. Something about the heat and the smell, the damp linoleum floors, the dust, reminded him of the desert. Hot during the day, hot and dry, and cold at night. You were constantly in a fever state, sweating in your body armor, your Kevlar, and then, at night, shivering under your sweat, the kind of shiver you get when you’re sick. When it was his turn he said, “At night there were so many stars. I’d look up.” He shook his head, his eyes watery. “I’ve never seen a sky like that.” He didn’t tell them that it always made him cry. He didn’t tell them that the stars in Iraq were like the teeth of the dead.

Nobody could really help you. You had to sort things out on your own. Denny tried. He carried his stories around in his pockets, in his fists, like stones. After an hour they took a break. They stood awkwardly like kids at a school dance, drinking lemonade and eating cupcakes made by some of the church ladies, with pink icing. During those interludes it came to him that he was better off than most. There was this one woman, her name was Chloe. She didn’t say much in the group. When it was her turn, she’d freeze up and stutter and then she’d start to cry. One time she took off her prosthesis and showed everybody her stump. It was weird; nobody said anything.

They all had something in common, something you couldn’t put into words. When you’re over there, everything you’ve been taught in church goes right out the window. The more he killed the better he felt. That was the truth. You got praised for killing. You were part of a team, an exclusive brotherhood. Knowing you can die at any second changes the way you see, the way you think. He never would have believed he had the capacity to kill with his bare hands, but he’d done that too. Once. It was either succumb and die, or kill. His body went cold and rubbery, unbreakable. The killing was an intimate, terrifying dance. He was the fucking terminator. And the victory—he didn’t want to call it sexual but it was pretty close. It was primitive.

He had this one friend from work, Javier. Javier was chunky and suave. He had a girlfriend and liked to read poetry. He carried around this huge volume of e. e. cummings and used to sing out poems when nobody was around. Javier was not a soldier, but he had gone to prison once for something stupid. They had an understanding. They shared something that didn’t need to be discussed. So that Thursday night Javier asked Denny would he mind taking the night shift and Denny said no problem. Denny didn’t mind doing favors for Javier because he knew they would be returned. It was something he missed about the army. He missed his buddies; they were the brothers he’d never had. That was the only thing about being over there that felt right and he would have done anything for them; he had killed for them and they had killed for him. You couldn’t mess with that bond. You didn’t find it anywhere else.

The night shift was slower and cooler than the day shift. His aunt had sent him with tortillas and limeade and he’d just finished eating. For some reason it wasn’t very busy. Somewhere around nine o’clock, maybe a little later, a car pulled into the lot and parked under the lights. Denny happened to notice it because it was vintage, a BMW. He had always liked foreign cars, especially old ones, and it brought back good memories of the only teacher he had ever liked, Mr. Ruggeri, who taught the vo-tech classes at his high school and didn’t make him feel like shit every chance he got, like his other teachers. From where he sat in the gatehouse, he watched as the driver got out of the car, pulled on his jacket, took a small suitcase out of the backseat, and walked toward the tram. It could have been the lighting, but he looked a little bit like a Haji. But that was of no consequence anymore. He had to keep reminding himself of that. There were perfectly nice Muslims living in this country who deserved to be left alone.

On his piss break he walked over to check out the car. It was a sweet little car with leather seats, a wood steering wheel. He ran his hands along the sides of it. Something caught his eye, a metallic reflection, and he saw that the man had forgotten his keys. There they were in the ignition, attached to a rabbit’s foot. He had also broken the cardinal rule of airport parking—he’d left his ticket in the car. The ticket was up on the dashboard where anybody could see it. Denny caught his own reflection in the dark glass and it suddenly occurred to him that it might be a setup. There were probably cameras all over this place. He glanced around to see if anybody was watching him. Maybe it was a test they did on new employees, he thought, and peered over at a coworker, May Lynn, who was on her cell phone behind the filthy glass. There were no cars in the line—it was quiet. He felt all alone, the slight wind grazing his skin, this weird balmy quiet. You’d get that kind of quiet in the desert and it was sometimes nice, but it didn’t last.

It’s not your car, so keep walking.
And that’s what he did. He walked around the parking lot like a person getting exercise on his piss break, but he couldn’t get those keys out of his head and, with the way things were going in his life, it took a great deal of effort and concentration on his part not to run over there and take it and drive the fuck out of there and never come back.

Routine made a difference to Denny. It got him through. They don’t tell you how different it is over there. Things you don’t expect, emotions. You’re flying over there and you’re a little excited, you think it’s this great adventure, you think you’re a fucking badass now that you made it through basic training, your initiation into hell. But it’s not all that simple, and you don’t really know what you’ve gotten yourself into. Then you land; you arrive. The heat is the first thing you notice. Then the light, the smells, the people, everything with an edge, an extreme—kind of like waking up with a severe hangover—and then the realization creeping up the back of your neck that you’re stuck there. There is no way out. Basically, you learn pretty quick that you’re totally royally fucked. And it’s like abstract. Everything about it is abstract starting with the light, the heat, the open space. For the first couple of weeks in Kuwait City it was like Christmas every day, unpacking crates of supplies, and he was like, yeah, I can deal with this. He had felt like it was under control, it was going to be all right, and maybe it was true that everybody back in Washington was looking out for him. Then it came time. They woke everybody up in the middle of the night—St. Patrick’s Day, 2003—and said they were moving out. Drowsy with sleep, disoriented, his unit did what they were supposed to. They set out to make war.

A lot of stuff happened to him in Iraq. Not just with the Iraqis, but in his battalion. He had gone over as one person, and come back as somebody else. He learned pretty quick that if you let them see your weak side they would hurt you for it, they would make you suffer. You could not be weak. It was not allowed. It was like some kind of perverse club—you had to be totally in or you were fucked; you were dead. You had to want to kill. You had to want to kill so bad you couldn’t wait for it, you couldn’t wait to go out there. You went to bed thinking about killing and you woke up thinking about it. That was the only way you survived. And there was no church in hell that was going to forgive you for that.

Once you get over your first kill, something twists up inside you and you suddenly have a purpose, a reason for being there. You experience a kind of reckoning. Kind of like when you shake up a can before you open it and it sprays all over the place, that’s how fucking crazy it was—something that could be a big joke, something maybe you dreamed up as a gag, but then you’re wet and everybody else is all wet and nobody’s happy. And instead of Mountain Dew you’re covered in blood.

Halfway through his tour he started crying a lot. He would bawl like a baby. It would come on suddenly, gush out of him. Sometimes they locked him up, they said, “Get the fuck with the program, dickhead.” They made him feel stupid and he’d suffered a whole lot of that abuse already in his life and he didn’t need it over there. He had seen things. He had seen children getting blown to pieces. He had seen an old woman lose her eye. His best friend, Ross, had gone down right next to him and Denny had tried to save him and had held him in his arms and cried over his body, but nobody could do anything. He had watched Ross’s soul go up to heaven, a kind of yellow mist. It’s a weird thing when you hold a dead person. There were soldiers down everywhere he looked, limbs splayed out. Pieces of bodies. They all worked together to keep people alive. He had learned to tie a tourniquet; he had learned CPR. Sometimes it worked. Everybody was pretty upset. He didn’t like to make excuses, but it may have been the reason for what they did to the girl.

There were four of them and she had come out of nowhere, maybe she was thirteen, fourteen, he didn’t know. At first they were all just joking around, not funny, but kind of in a sick way, not letting her pass, and then all of a sudden Hull was doing her and Denny realized what was going to happen next, and if you didn’t go along you were fucked, they’d never let you forget it, and even though Denny went last and couldn’t get hard and was just pretending, he was still guilty, and she had bit him so hard he still had a scar. Hull wanted to kill her afterward, but Denny convinced him to let her go—said she wasn’t worth it, that maybe they’d get away with it the way things were—and she had gimped off on her hands and feet like a beat-up kangaroo, spit dripping out of her mouth and this awful little sound coming out. They all just laughed. And when Denny puked in the shadows they laughed some more. They never let him forget it. Later that night Hull jumped on him, pinned him down, said he’d kill him if he told. “I’ll fucking kill you and make it look like a Haji.”

A few nights later Denny woke out of a deep sleep and saw Jesus standing over him in these purple scrubs, the kind you see on doctors, and he had a long white beard just like they say. He told Denny he was going to be all right, that he should be patient. Soon he would be out. He went and told the shrink he had seen Jesus and the shrink snickered and told him to stop being such a pussy.

Now he dreamed about the girl almost every night. In the dream she put her veil over his nose and mouth and he would wake gasping for air, feeling suffocated. He had brought the war home with him. There were things he couldn’t get over. They had told him to put it behind him, but he couldn’t. There were things he had done, they had all done them, and you hoped they went away, but they didn’t. They really didn’t. Because you didn’t forget shit like that.

One thing he had learned over there was to sense when bad things were going to happen. It was a feeling you got sometimes. He had it now. Even in his aunt and uncle’s house he didn’t feel safe. If something dropped on the floor, he just about jumped out of his skin. His hearing was keen, like a dog’s, he could hear
everything.
His stomach always in knots, his jaw clenched. It was like some essential piece of himself had been left behind in that desert, something he would never get back. It was stuffed into an old suitcase, lost in some airport terminal with all the other lost bags. Anybody could walk along and take it. Unprotected, he was out in the open, in full view of a sniper, just waiting to get the shit blown out of him. Let it happen, he thought.
Let it happen now.