“Think about getting out,” Jefe had told me on the flight back. “Maybe not right away. It won’t matter so much, right away. But with kids this job is hard.”
You don’t expect to hear that kind of talk from a warrant officer with over twenty years in. You really, really don’t.
“Plenty of the guys have kids,” I said. “I mean, you’ve got kids. You’ve never even been divorced.”
“Maria and I are old school. She pretends I’ve never fucked whores in Colombia. I pretend, too.”
I waited, but he didn’t say anything more.
“Jefe,” I said. He looked at me placidly.
“Yeah,” he said.
We stared at each other.
“Look,” Jefe said. “The first couple of years don’t matter so much. You can catch up. The kid won’t remember. But you stick around much longer, still doing this shit when that little girl is seven, eight, twelve years old?” He paused. “My kids don’t know me. And you’re not like the rest of us old boys.”
I stared down at my feet.
“So you’re saying I’ve got a few years to think this over.”
Jefe smiled.
“Maybe,” I said, “I’ll get out when the war is over.”
“Which war?” Jefe said.
“Iraq,” I said. “Afghanistan’ll never end.”
When we finally got to Bragg, Natalia was there waiting for me, a fierce five two in a black dress stretched tight over her bulging stomach, dark eyeshadow framing light brown eyes, and her hair straightened because even though I like her better curly that’s what she does for big occasions.
“God,” I said. “Look at you, you sexy beast.”
“Go on,” she said, pointing to her stomach. “Make a fool of yourself.”
So I did, touching her stomach, then putting my ear to her stomach, then waiting awkwardly for something to happen until I think I felt the tiniest something and I smiled and stood up and kissed my wife again. Everything, I was sure, would work out beautifully.
Coming back from a deployment, you’re strangers. Even if you don’t come back to a woman whose whole body has changed, who’s spent months of pregnancy alone. Dealt with the stress of you overseas, alone. Dealt with the not knowing, alone. Even as time went by, as Natalia and I got more and more used to the combat commute, me showing up months later, both of us different but still loving each other, forgiving of each other and trying to be kind, it was never a smooth transition. Usually, it takes me a month to fit myself back into her schedule. There’s a while where you’re dating your wife, and the favorite uncle to your kids. There are plus sides to that, but it takes effort. There’s a wear to it.
We’re better than most. We talk. Natalia can talk her way through anything, but our talk in the early days of a redeployment is never really talk. It’s never aimed at anything other than filling the silence. Maybe because there’s too much at stake, because there’s no sure path through the confusion, because each deployment is different, and there’s so much you want to say but can’t express when you’re not even sure yourself what you’ve just been through, and how it’s changed you, and how to put that into words.
When I was upset or angry, especially as a teenager, my father would take me and teach me how to change the brakes on a car, or clean a hunting rifle. One time I got in a screaming match with my mother, and after giving me a half-hearted beating—my father’s beatings were always half-hearted, mere duty—he took me to Walmart. He didn’t say a word while we wandered the aisles, just picked up a five-gallon bucket, some pickling salt, and then six heads of cabbage.
“We’re going to make sauerkraut,” he said, as if that settled things between us. We took the supplies to the garage, which stank of oil, and there we shredded cabbage, and kneaded in the salt until our hands were raw. I suppose, for all my father’s inarticulateness, that this was his one wisdom, the knowledge of how to take my wild teenage moods and convert them to work, while he worked alongside me, ensuring that I grew up always feeling loved.
I thought about that driving home with Natalia, home from my first Iraq deployment, one hand on the wheel and one hand on her stomach, while she kept up a constant stream of chatter and I kept quiet. Happiness traveled up my arm from the life beating under my fingers, and I wondered if I would put the lessons she’d taught me into practice, if I would open up to my own child. She’d been forcing me to talk since college. More precisely, since a month into my time at college, when she let herself into my dorm room, sat on my bed, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Why are you being so weird?” And then during the next couple of months, proceeded to make me tell her. Or would I be like my father, revealing myself best when working in silence, elbow-deep in cabbage?
“Are you even listening to me?” Natalia asked.
“I . . . driving is just a lot to take in right now.”
“Uh-huh.”
“In Iraq we’d drive down the center of the road, and cars would get out of our way. Every car that passes, I feel like it’s gonna cross the yellow line and crash into us.” I stared at that line as I drove, watched cars coming from the other direction, safely on the other side of the line, treating it the amazing way I’d treated it my whole life, as an almost magic barrier, not as something that could be crossed with a slight turn of my wrist, sending me and my wife and child headlong into the oncoming traffic. There we were, in a cost-efficient sedan picked out by my wife, the accountant, the sort of car that most of the pickups on the road could just roll right over without stopping. “Maybe we
