“Yup. Once again.” She’s taller than she wants to be and rolls her shoulders forward to shorten her neck, drops her chin, sags her upper self like a flower that’s got a blooming too heavy atop for its stem to carry. She holds the movie toward me, shakes the box. “How ’bout a picture show, Darden?”
“Funny?”
“Could be to you.”
Mary wants to kiss, so I do, and she wants some sort of familiar caress, one that suggests we know each other’s bodies like favorite getaway places we’ve come to own, so I put both hands to her butt and pull the cheeks spread a little bit, lift her. Mary has a small beer pooch underslung from her lower belly, but is elsewhere lean, skinny, even, and I can about feel the bone under her butt with my fingertips. She’s got pale hair and a few freckles that seem to be forever fading from her face but never go away.
In the living room she right away wants me to get naked. Ma’s bed is downstairs so she can be near the john, and she lays snoring in the dining room, just around the corner. The TV is muted but on, throwing a headache light across the room, throbbing between near dark to suddenly glaring, with many skittish flickers between. I know I’m supposed to want this, what she offers, so I try to recall how it goes when this is something you want, crave, gotta have, can’t do without, might kill for, die over, mourn when it’s gone.
Somehow my clothes come off, drop to the floor, first frost stripping a tree of its last clinging leaves.
“Such a tight, smooth boy,” she says. Mary is pushing nine years older, and unlike most women would do she apparently enjoys reminding me I’m way younger. It somehow stokes her needs and juices her good to say it aloud. Whenever she says it she sighs soft and looks like a crouched cat studying songbirds in a low bush. “Lucky ol’ me. Lucky, lucky.”
All Mary does is scoot from her moccasins and jeans and blue undies. She keeps her shirt on and buttoned, the tails hanging over that pooch. Her lips get around on me some, visiting here and there, then I bend her over the couch, knees to the carpet, and slam her the doggy-way she wants it most times. Slap her ass as she has taught me while I slam, slam and slap, and she snickers, snickers, moans into the cushions. Fresh rug burns get added to the old on my knees and I collapse backwards after, stare at the ceiling, count the cobwebs and get the same tally as the visit before.
She says now I’m home for a while we should get married, and soon, before they send me back, but has only ever one time asked me about over there, how it was, what details I needed to get off my chest, what memories I might want to share with her, and I said, It’s all real sandy. Sand blows into everything. Makes soup even turn crunchy.
That’s it?
I think I miss the crunching.
“Put this in,” she says before my breathing is even righted, and tosses the movie my way. She raises herself to sit on the couch, then uses her blue undies to mop herself dry, catch my come seeping, and stuffs them dampened into her purse. “It’s got that guy in it I like.”
Somewhere in the flick I fell out of interest. It wasn’t funny, and the guy she liked so dodged bullets slower than pigeons and cracked wise at death, which never happened to him or his, and I yawned and went away. On the porch I stared up at the big oak in the yard. Tree frogs honked their raspy honks in unison, and fat brown bugs battered the porch light behind me. Mary’s car was under the spread limbs, and I saw that the windows had fogged. I crossed the dirt yard, opened the back door, and there slept Joe and Nora, undressed for bed but without a blanket to cover them. I pointed a finger and wrote Mary’s name in the fog above them, then rubbed their used wet breaths onto my face. They’d been there since she left the trailer and hit the first bar, and were probably asleep by the second roadhouse or the third. I picked both up at once, an arm under each, and neither child woke as I carried them inside. Mary looked over from her movie as I laid the kids on the empty end of the couch. She was smiling with her chin down and her eyes wide, and said, “See? I told you you loved them kids.”
* * *
In the story that happens to me so often, asleep or wide awake, I had got down on my hands and knees to collect red and white parts of Lt. Voorhees, from when his brain-housing unit came apart in his quarters, skull chunks denting the ceiling, teeth and ears splatted to the walls, brains a clotting spray—a story that happens to me whenever it wants to, and I can’t shunt it aside or stuff it in a box, but can only accept the sunken feelings it deals me time and again. A few times Dad showed up to help me collect the cracked bone and stringy glop, clumped hair, kneeling beside me in a foreign place, calling me “son” while we raised a wet pile. Some days I start hearing the final words Lt. Voorhees said before closing his door that night spoken over and over, at different volumes in my head, all day long, low to loud, Hope I dream about daylight again.
Hope I DREAM about daylight AGAIN.
HOPE I dream about DAYLIGHT again.
McArdle and Fuller fell by toward the next sundown, or the one after, drawn by boredom and word of my return, wanting to remember high school, with a box of beer and bowls of smoke to make it seem those years- ago days might happen again tomorrow if only we got wasted enough. I left the house with them in McArdle’s truck and we drove to the river, built a jolly campfire on a gravel beach. Their memories are cleaner than mine, the silly details yet shine for them, are easily found and spoken as jokes or boasts. My head cramps trying to only call up the faces from the hallways. I should be glad for this visit, I know, so I hunt dry wood up the slope, stack it on the fire to grow the flames, and say I am, I am glad to see you two, your faces make me feel home.
So-and-so got married, so-and-so moved away, so-and-so fell in the lake or was pushed, drunk as a skunk whichever. It takes only five minutes together before they lean close and ask the standard ghoul questions I expect from civilians, and I answer, Oh, you damned straight I did.
Then, Maybe more’n used to ride our school bus.
Then, Like tomatoes being busted open with hammers.
Then, Sometimes all you can do is shovel red sand into a body bag and send that home with a name on it.
The empties clatter into the fire, smokes mingle, dusk settles, there is laughter. I recall times together like this, drinking the day away in canoes on the river, chucking dry-ice bombs into blue holes and cheering the boom and spray, and as dark fell driving into town with more cold beer to circle the Sonic, round and round at half a mile an hour, biceps on display out the windows, hoping some town girls would of a sudden realize we were cute, kind of sexy, even, and want to go for a ride in the country, then switching to whiskey when none did.
I guess I joined to become more interesting than that.
Fuller had been our alpha, our main instigator, with showboat muscles and a habit of bruising you good in horseplay, then saying it was only a joke, bro, don’t be mad. In the firelight I can see he’d like to mess with me some again, as he did back when, give a demeaning Dutch rub, or clamp on a headlock ’til I croak “Uncle,” but he’s just not sure anymore, not sure I won’t go Kill! Kill! Kill! in my head, yank something deadly from my watch pocket, zip-cuff him to a sapling, and feed his ass to the fire a pound at a time. I can see the itch is in him, and the doubt, so I help him clear the confusion, saying, “After the desert, bro, the list of things you’re totally certain you’d
Ma’s breaths scrape together traveling her throat and have short hisses at their tail, plus something come undone in her chest clatters. Her sleep is a busy place and she speaks mushed words into the sheets, her legs walk to yesterday and back across the mattress, her eyelids totter as the eyeballs rush about in darkness, wanting to see everything they’ve ever seen again. The bed she chose for the dining room is small with no headboard, low to ground, a short fall if she rolled loose in her rambling and tumbled.
Another rough day before noon there was this cemetery in the sand, with row after row of markers for the dead, mud-colored or white, each big enough to hide behind, and a high dun wall around the whole place. We cleared one row then crept toward the next, each small distance electric with the idea that this gravestone ahead could be the one Ali Baba is hid behind and waiting, finger on the trigger or arm cocked to throw something
