Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (8 page)

SERGEANT SAVINE

I’d acquired ether from the Regimental Med locker. I figured a bit of his own, a bit of his own back in him. Cash wanted to beat him,

to beat him silly and dumb and knock out all of his teeth, to fuck him with a flashlight and leave him for dead in the desert.

Cash dragged him out of the Hummer by his feet. The after- noon burned straight down into the desert, burned the desert flat, the heat radiating off the sand and swirling in your lungs and cov- ering your body, blanketing your body with fire and an intimate feeling of death.

Cash kicked him in the face so hard the pressure bandage I’d used to gag him went from white to red in seconds. Cash said to him, I bled out of my ass like that, and he kicked him again. I reached down and pulled the bandage out of his mouth so he wouldn’t choke on his blood. Cash repeatedly punched him in the face but the Ether Bandit made no noise, his face bloody and his nose badly broken. He spit out three teeth. Cash said, Fag-rape me and you die ugly. Cash kicked him in the ribs and the face, and he still made no noise. He was strong, and I figured he could take this all day, all night. I kicked him in the head. I pulled the ether out, daubed it on his skivvy shirt that we’d found at the whorehouse, and covered his bloody face.

PFC BROCKNER

I remembered his pretty face. The other one covered my mouth and nose with my ether shirt and I thought, Okay then, let’s do it, nothing I haven’t had before. He didn’t keep it on long enough, or use enough, so it felt like a good buzz, like coming down from a weekend of good clean drugs and dancing until 6:00
A
.
M
. They ripped my trousers down and turned me over. I could make out their voices, and which voice belonged to whom. The guy I raped hit me over the head with something hard, and then said, This

flashlight is bigger than your dick. How are you gonna like it up inside you?

The flashlight split me open—the tearing of flesh and muscle and, as the metal went deeper, the ripping of my intestines—and I felt the metal in my stomach, buried that deep inside. I told him to fuck harder, to get deeper inside of me, that I wanted to feel it in my throat. This pissed him off, the guy I raped, and the other guy said, He’s fucking crazy. I knew they wanted to hear me cry, they wanted to hear me beg them to stop, to whimper like a bitch, but I would not give them that, I wouldn’t give them anything they wanted.

SERGEANT SAVINE

The Ether Bandit was as hard and crazy as a fighter. He was half conscious, and he told Cash to fuck him harder. And Cash did but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t shit we could do to make him pay, there wasn’t shit we could do besides put a bullet in him, because we weren’t going to flashlight-fuck him to death.

I pulled Cash away from him. I removed the flashlight. The Ether Bandit’s ass was a mess, blood and muscle and tissue ex- ploding from his insides out. I applied a pressure bandage to his wound and injected him in the hip with two morphine syrettes.

We drove to our battalion bivouac near Rish Qahwah. Cash wasn’t satisfied, but I told him he had to be, that what we’d done was enough to kill a man, and the Ether Bandit hadn’t backed down, so we had no choice but to let him live.

PFC BROCKNER

Late that night a platoon from the 5th Marines found me as they drove through the desert on their way to a night fire. The grunts

medevac’d me to the infirmary of the U.S.S.
Peleliu.
My name ap- peared on the Division crime blotter as another victim of the Ether Bandit. A Naval Investigative Service officer interviewed me, and I gave a perfect physical description of myself, but he didn’t notice me because he was so close and afraid for his own ass.

By the time I recovered, the war had been over for a few weeks.

VICTORY GARDEN
‌

JAMI ATTENBERG

We met in the bushes, she and I. That’s where everyone goes
nowadays to get their fun on around here, ever since we had to give up the cars. We gave up the cars without a fight, because there wasn’t much oil left to put in them. The president decided to start a bunch of wars (Q: How many wars can you start at once? A: Four.) and he asked us to donate our cars so we could build weapons, and we all said, sure, wasn’t like we were using them anyway. And just like that it became illegal to have a car. They throw people in jails now. They will fuck you up if you have a car. Now we walk everywhere or ride our bikes (the bikes weren’t worth their time), and when we want to make out in the backseats of cars we just use the bushes instead.

67

I wasn’t making out that night. My girl had left me to get mar- ried to a soldier who was going off to war. (The one in India, I think.) “No offense,” she said. “Benefits.” She had met him at one of the barn social nights. Slow dances under rotting beams, punch spiked with government-issued vodka, an enormous American flag pinned to the wall. Girls are recruited starting junior year. There are posters in the cafeteria. An open invitation to the young ladies.

Say goodbye before they’re gone.

I had heard stories, also, of what happened outside the barn, in the back, near the pile of old tractor tires, under a thrush of trees. A soldier asks a young lady to take a walk, and she says yes—she has to, this might be their only chance to meet, to connect, to fall in love—and he puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes it when they walk out the door together.

But it has nothing to do with a walk; it’s all about fucking. There are lines of our local girls bent over the tractor tires, their skirts pushed up just high enough on their backs so that their asses are swinging in the air, moving back and forth while the soldiers stick their pricks in them. Some of the girls are on their knees, too, and they suck and lick under and around and all over, a fury of motion with their mouths; these girls are serving their country and then suddenly their faces are damp, wet with the soldier’s come, or it runs down the back of their throat, or if he is a gentleman he misses her entirely and hits the tractor tire instead, the white fluid glistening against the rubber in the moonlight.

God bless America. That’s what they grunt under their breaths.

I did not know my girlfriend had been attending the barn socials. It only took her a few months before she found the man for her. It had made me crazy, not just the thought of her leaving me but that she had snuck around on me for so long. Was I really dumb or was she really smart? For a while, I could not wrap my head around who she was, or how I was supposed to let her go.

Still, marrying a soldier was your best bet for a good life. They say there’s only three ways out of any town these days: join the army, marry the army, or start walking. (I can’t join myself. One leg is shorter than the other, so I walk a little bit funny. It’s not enough so you would notice, only enough that I can’t be asked to fight, to serve, to protect, to destroy.) So I could not hold it against her. We had just graduated from high school. I did not put up a fight. I had nothing to give her but a ride on the back of my bicycle.

Although it is a smooth ride.

I was alone, taking the dog for one of the nightly long walks that had replaced the time I spent with my girlfriend. We were alone together, the dog and I, but I think we both wanted to be near people even if we couldn’t be with them. The dog always pulled me that direction, down by the park, and he sniffed and howled a little bit. We were lured by the bushes, the sounds and the smells of all the kids from school, the kisses and the moans. I could picture the bright purple marks forming on their necks. Everyone was so happy and free. The air smelled fresh and green and sexy. We were young.

This is what they do now. They start at one end of town at sunset, and one by one, the kids show up and make the march to the park. By night, the streets are full of kids walking and talk-

ing, sharing whatever news they heard their parents whispering about that day. Sometimes they scrawl things on walls with chalk. Names of enemies, dates of drafts, lists of the missing and the found. A good piece of dirt can get you laid before dusk breaks. (Not that they’re in any hurry: Curfews disappeared with the cars. How far could anyone get? What kind of trouble could they find on their feet?) And then there they are, at last, at the park, in the dark. Kids fall in love in the bushes, babies are made, mosquitoes bite. Where you’re born is where you’ll live is where you’ll die.

Sometimes I miss oil.

They gather near a patch of American elms; that’s where it shifts. Maybe they’re thinking about how they’re doing their part for our country, our great nation. They swig alcohol from paper bags, move their weight from foot to foot, dance to the sound of the cicadas chirping from the leaves. I’ve done that dance before. And then they pair off eventually, wander away from the elms, closer to the bushes, pointing at a constellation or lying down and hoping for shooting stars. A shooting star guarantees that first kiss. After the first kiss—maybe they roll around on the ground for a bit—it’s a just short walk to the bushes that spiral up every year higher to the sky, farther away from the earthly pleasures beneath them.

They’ve been calling it “the rustle” lately.

Not everyone hangs out in the bushes. Some kids like to pair up on a Friday and pick the dirt weed on the back roads. That stuff was never strong enough to smoke until a few years ago; there was a shift in the air after the explosion in Council Bluffs, and now what looks harmless can send you flying for two days straight. Those are the kids who don’t care at all about going anywhere,

although every so often one of them will pack up a bag of weed and head on down the highway. They never come back.

And then there’s me. I like to walk, and watch everyone. We were tracing a little path when I met her, me and the dog. She was coming up toward us, a huddle in the darkness of sweaters, a sturdy coat, and a gigantic backpack. She balanced each step with a walking stick. We stopped as we approached, and stood in front of each other, and then a girl let out a loud and very final-sounding moan from the bushes, and the leaves rustled.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m lost.” She didn’t look scared at all, though maybe she should have been, wandering around in the middle of nowhere, near all those squirming bodies in the bushes.

“Where are you trying to go?” I said, though I had a pretty good idea.

“I heard there was a place for people like me around here,” she said. She shifted her backpack up on her back and lifted her head up, and the moon and the stars hit her face and I could see that her skin was clear and her eyes were dark and focused and determined, and then she smiled, not warily but aware. There was a sliver of space between her two front teeth. I wanted to insert my tongue between the space and let it lie there for a while and see what it felt like. The dog liked her, too. He sniffed at her feet and then rested at them.

She was making her way to Los Angeles, she told me. We’d seen a few of her kind passing through before. Los Angeles had seceded from the union a while back, when the first rumblings of the car reclamation had started. They had fought the hardest of anywhere. They loved their cars the most. Foreign investors in the film industry had kept them stocked with oil, and our government

allowed them certain freedoms as long as they kept churning out movies. We had all heard stories of a city trapped in gridlock, but people were migrating there from all over the country. To a place that
moved
.

It was a real shame about Detroit, what happened there.

“You’re a ways away from the shelter,” I told her, but I said I’d walk her in the right direction. It was a nice night. From the bushes we heard two voices jumble together in laughter, and then a man said, “I love you.” I offered to carry her bag for her, and she judged it, judged me, and then handed it over.

As we walked she told me about life back east. Her husky voice perfectly matched the sound of the crunch of gravel under our feet. She was from Philadelphia, and like every other city out there, there weren’t too many trees left, let alone bushes. There were lines every night at the few parks that remained open to the public (the military had built up housing units wherever there was room), and the government charged admission. A fee to flirt. If you couldn’t afford that, it was all alleyways for you.

She said she got sick of the feel of cold cement against her ass.

I closed my eyes for a second and I was there with her in the dark, near a darkened building, maybe a courthouse or a library or a shopping center. She was pressed up against the wall, and the brick crumbled behind her when I touched it with my fingertips. I rubbed the dust off on her neck and chest, and then I moved my hand down to her breast and throttled her nipple. I squeezed so hard. I wanted her to feel good. And then I put my hand between her legs and it was warm down there, and I knew she was going to smell sweet and taste sweet, and I pulled my hand up and put a finger in my mouth, and it tasted