simply,
Danny had gotten used to stepping in front of speeding vehicles. Iraqi drivers seemed to have two speeds-stop and go flat out-so he, taking their fatalistic attitude, assumed the drivers of speeding trucks would stomp on their brakes before hitting him at the base checkpoint where he was usually stationed. If not, his fellow MPs would open fire. It was that simple.
This habit of driving as fast as possible was soon picked up by the Americans. It started when you got out of air transport and on the road. Since the highway between the airport and the capital was mined, and also without cover, you felt as vulnerable as an ant as soon as you hit the ground. The drivers stepped on it and went at a suicidal speed, swerving away from suspicious objects and people, even if it meant driving directly into the path of oncoming traffic. But the trucks and cars coming the other way were doing the same thing.
Danny becomes aware of a shooting pain down his left side. It jolts him from sleep, or wherever he has been. He remembers the doctor poking him along that side, and feeling nothing. The pain jolts him again. Is this good? Pain is probably better than nothing at all-it means he’s still alive.
“Danny? Danny?” It’s his sister Sirena’s voice.
He feels a cool hand on his right arm, then against his cheek. He opens his eyes, then shuts them again quickly against the glare.
“Can you hear me?” she asks. Then a note of her old, mischievous self, his little sister: “Are you in there, Danny?”
He opens his eyes again, sees her silhouette against the window before shutting them again. It is raining outside. Good. This means he’s not in Iraq. Where is he, then? He remembers the car chase. The police.
“Chucho… happened to Chucho?”
“My cousin Chucho? He’s fine. Don’t worry about him. Only you were hurt.” Sirena leans over him.
He can feel her breath on his face, and tries again to open his eyes, fluttering his lids briefly. “What?” he says.
“Do you remember what happened?”
“Yeah. Somebody shot me.”
“A
Danny grunts.
Sirena pats his hand. “Are you thirsty?” Without waiting for a reply, she reaches for a glass and places a straw to his lips.
Danny realizes he’s in a neck brace. He opens his lips and sucks.
“Is my neck broken?”
“No. I don’t know why you’re in that thing. Maybe we can get them to take it off soon.”
Danny can see a nurses’ station, more bright lights.
Sirena looks up at the clock. “Aimee will be here pretty soon, as soon as she drops off the kids.”
Soon. Soon. Soon. Her words echo in his head.
“Soon,” he says, then closes his eyes.
At Sarge’s urging, Danny tried driving the truck. After grinding the gears around the compound for a while, he got the hang of it. It was loud and hot inside. It was a hundred degrees outside. He had never learned how to drive a stick shift back home. His cousins in L.A., when he e-mailed them, teased him, told him he was finally a real man.
Danny met Aimee when he was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Her friend was dating another reservist and the four of them went out one night. The other couple broke up after about two months, but Danny kept seeing Aimee, simply knowing that he felt better when he was around her. This must be love, he thought.
At twenty-five, Danny was one of the last in his family-of the cousins-to marry, except for his little sister. The relatives blamed it on their college educations.
“Gotta get ’em while you’re young,” said Freddy, a sleeping baby balanced on his thick forearm. “Gotta get ’em while you still have hair!”
At twenty-nine, working fifty hours a week in a detailing shop, Freddy already looked old to Danny. Danny had gotten his degree in industrial design and was starting to pay back his debt to Uncle Sam. Aimee was a Cajun girl, not the sort anyone thought Danny would fall for, with wild red hair and a husky voice. She ordered up a plate of garlic shrimp and a mug of beer for each of them, and taught Danny the fine art of peeling shrimp. Then she taught him how to two-step to a zydeco band. It might have been the way she placed her boots on the sawdust and shrimp shell-covered floor of the nameless crab shack where they danced. It might have been the way she placed her hands on his chest during a slow number and took the wings of his collar between her fingertips before looking up into his eyes. But probably it was the way she double-clutched her pickup truck without ever glancing at the gear shift that won Danny’s heart.
Winning over Aimee’s family was another matter. Where Danny grew up, the place they lived would have been called “the tulees.” In Louisiana, it was called the bayou. Aimee drove the two of them south from Shreveport to the end of a paved road, then onto a sandy track that ended in water. Swinging her vehicle off to one side, she parked next to a stake truck that could have been there five minutes or five years.
“Daddy’s home,” she said. Wading into the shallows, Aimee retrieved a flat-bottomed boat from the reeds and they climbed in. They set a bag of groceries and Rikenjaks beer at one end and tucked their coats around it to keep it upright. Then Aimee grabbed the oars and steered them out onto the dark waters. Danny felt like he was in a movie, or at Disneyland, and waited for the giant, audio-animatronic gator to rear up out of the water and snap its plastic jaws at them.
“Don’t you think they ain’t real gators out here,” said Aimee, as though reading his mind. “Cause they is.”
Danny kept his hands well within the boat as the sun slipped lower on the horizon.
Danny wakes to Aimee’s kiss.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispers.
“I feel like Sleeping Beauty,” he says, “except woken by a princess.”
“Were you dreaming?” she asks, pulling her fingers through his short hair.
“Yeah. About you.”
“You seem better,” she says, dragging her chair closer. Danny notices that he’s in a regular hospital room with a door, not the ICU.
“What about Chucho? Is he hurt?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“They arrested him, but he’s out on bail. Your uncle put up the money.”
“What’s he charged with?”
“Drunk driving. Speeding. Resisting arrest. The works. You were too, you know.”
“I was what?”
“Under arrest. You were chained to the bed. Don’t you remember?”
“No. How long have I been here?”
“Five days.”
“Am I still chained to the bed?”
“My God, no. Someone taped the whole thing. A police officer shot you without provocation. Now he’s on leave and under investigation. Don’t you remember anything?”
Danny tries.
“I can get flashes of things, like little snapshots. He told me to get up. I put my hands up, exactly like he said. But he shot me anyway.” Danny feels himself heating up just thinking about it.
“Well, a couple of lawyers have called. They want us to sue the bastard. They say we have a good case.”
“I’m supposed to rejoin my unit in a week.”
Aimee throws back her head and laughs. “Soldier, you ain’t going nowhere.” Then she leans over and hugs him, and bursts into tears.
Danny itched even after he’d had the good fortune to shower, which happened maybe once a week; the
