Thank You for Your Service (13 page)

“I believe I may have a boat,” he says.

Saskia emerges from the house to look.

“You don’t like it?” he asks her.

“I do like it,” she says with that same smile he has been seeing since she first spotted him sunbathing in North Dakota without a shirt. “I’m just never getting in it.”

She goes back inside. Dave goes back across the street.

“My boat,” Adam christens it.

He heaves it into the back of his pickup and heads toward the city limits, past the used car lots and Chinese takeouts, past the trailer parks and strip clubs, until, past everything, he gets to a boat ramp at a spot where the Republican River is thin.

No one’s around. The wind is still. The water is smooth. He eases the boat in. A little bit of the river dribbles into the bottom along one of the seams, but not enough to be a concern. He pushes off with a paddle and feels the grab of the current. Instead of using the motor, he lets the water take over. It spins him so he is pointed downriver and moves him along faster than he thought it would. It feels good, this. The boat is floating. The boat is fixed. He drifts for a while longer and then hits the switch on the trolling motor so he can come back upriver to the ramp, get his fishing pole, make an afternoon of it.

“Uh-oh,” he says when nothing happens.

He hits the switch again.

It’s the battery, he realizes.

He checks the wires, and tries the switch again. Nothing. He tries again. But the battery is dead. It must have been down to its last juice when he tested it. He tries again. The current keeps moving him along. Again. Nothing. No way he can afford a new battery. Again. Again.

So that’s that.

He reaches for the paddle. It takes him some time, but eventually he is back home.

He had really wanted a boat.

It is such a lonely life, this life afterward. During the war, it wasn’t that way, even in the loneliest moments, when somewhere in the big night sky was a mortar that was on its way down and there was nothing to do but wait for it. Over time, the war came to mean less and less until it meant nothing at all, and meanwhile the other soldiers meant more and more until they came to mean everything. “None of this shit would have happened if you were there,” the soldier had said to Adam the day James Doster died, and it wasn’t only the possibility that had stung Adam so much, it was the friendship he and the soldier had. His name was Christopher Golembe, and in that soldier’s way, just as Adam had loved Doster, he had loved Golembe, too. To be a soldier in combat was to fall in love constantly, and then Doster was dead and Golembe was saying what he said, and what did Adam do next? He fell apart alone and flew
away alone and came home alone, and even with Saskia and Zoe and Jax, he has felt alone at times ever since.

In Peter Chiarelli’s suicide meetings, they talk often about the importance of camaraderie, and how many times has Adam wished for that very thing? “Well, I’ll walk you as far as the shitters, because I have to go to the bathroom” were the last words he heard in combat from the soldiers he was with, and since then he has exchanged e-mails with some of them from time to time, but that’s been about the extent of it. He has yet to talk to Golembe, who didn’t say goodbye, but maybe that’s just the way it goes. Love hurts and all that.

Whatever, Adam’s closest friend now is a guy named Stephen, with whom Adam had served during his first deployment, and part of his second, until a bomb blast sent Stephen home with a traumatic brain injury and PTSD. They met again a few years later, when Adam was home, too, and both were trying to recover in the Fort Riley WTU. They decided to introduce their wives to each other, and at a first dinner, things were rolling along just fine, right up until Stephen pitched forward and began trembling. Saskia watched, horrified. Worse, Stephen’s wife, Christina, who was in the middle of telling a story, kept on with it until she saw the look on Saskia’s face. “He’ll get up,” she said with the calmness of someone who had seen this before. “He’s fine.”

And she was right. Eventually he did get up, and he was fine, if fine can mean TBI and PTSD and headaches and a cyst on his brain the size of a baseball and a lack of focus and an inability to work and a total disability rating from the VA.

“You’re my best friend,” Stephen declares from time to time.

“Um, you, too, man,” Adam says reluctantly.

As for Christina, she isn’t so fine at times, which Saskia finds reassuring. Misery loves company and all that.

“I’m supposed to be grieving right now,” Christina tells Saskia one day when Saskia stops by her house. They had been pushing each other for months to start counseling, and Christina, the braver of the two, has just come back from her first appointment.

“Grieving?” Saskia says.

“For the loss of my husband. For the man he was,” Christina says.
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, technically, I’m supposed to be grieving. I don’t know exactly how I’m supposed to be grieving or what exactly I’m supposed to be doing. But I’m grieving.”

She looks away. She reaches into a diaper bag to get some wipes to clean one of her children’s dirty bottoms. She looks up at Saskia and is crying.

“It’s just too much,” she says.

She gets up and leaves the room to compose herself, but there is nowhere to go because every room in the house is a reminder in some way of Stephen’s condition. The kitchen sink is filled with dishes that he seems incapable some days of helping with. The deep freeze is filled on one side with popsicles for the kids and on the other side with packages of dead rats, hundreds of them, which Stephen thaws and feeds to his eighty snakes, including boa constrictors named Coco and Chanel that he likes to wear around his neck. The more hobbies he has, the better, he has been told, so he builds rockets, too, all over the house, and he is putting together a little museum of war-related items for whoever might wander into his basement. He has a few things from Vietnam and World War Two, but the focus so far is on himself. There’s his helmet, in a glass display case. There’s his uniform, on a mannequin. There’s the hat he wore on all of his sniper missions. There are his boots. There are his guns, his many, many guns, more even than James Doster had.

“I had a guy trade me a rifle for a shovel one time,” he boasts to Adam and Saskia one night.

“You gave him a shovel and he gave you a gun?” Adam asks.

Stephen nods and tells them about another deal. “I traded a flashlight for a World War Two pistol. It’s almost like I could trade a quarter for a thousand dollars.”

“Rub some of that luck on us,” Saskia says.

“Think lucky and you’ll
be
lucky,” Stephen says.

“Oh God,” Saskia says.

So it goes with Adam’s closest friend, and maybe only friend, whose wife calls Saskia one day to tell her that when they checked their bank account that morning, there was an unexpected deposit from the
government. That they didn’t know if it was back pay or an adjustment to Stephen’s disability rating or what it was, only that it was eleven thousand dollars.

“Eleven thousand dollars,” Adam says now to Saskia. They are in Saskia’s car. Adam is driving.

“We have officially become those people,” Saskia says.

“The jealous people,” Adam says.

“I don’t hate them,” Saskia says. “I just hate—”

“The system,” Adam says.

“Yeah,” Saskia says. “Like every time they struggle, they get something. ‘A sign from God.’ That’s what Stephen said.”

“And he’s not even religious,” Adam says.

“ ‘Their time of need,’ he said,” Saskia goes on. “Well,
we
need.”

They drive in silence, thinking in their own ways about eleven thousand dollars. Adam takes out his cigarettes. He always buys the cheap ones, the ones that taste bitter and stale. He lights one and inhales.

“What’d I ask you?” Saskia says sharply.

Adam looks over at her, confused.

“What’d I ask you?” she repeats and starts spitting out sentences as prompts. “When you drive my car? To have the decency? Not to?”

“Not to smoke,” he says.

“Put it out,” she says. “Put. It. Out.”

He puts it out.

They are on their way to Whiskey Lake Raceway, a third-rate dirt oval on the far side of Fort Riley. It was Dave’s idea, from across the street. He supplies the tow truck at the races, in case of accidents, and he also has a car to race, an off-white thing he’s been working on with a number 4 on the side fashioned from duct tape. If Adam and Saskia wanted a night out, he offered, his wife would watch Zoe and Jax while they handled the tow truck.

Now, as they near the racetrack, Adam’s cell phone rings. It is Stephen. “Guess what I’m doing right now?” he is hollering. “I’m lying naked on my bed. I’m lying on a pile of money.”

Now they are at the racetrack, walking toward Dave’s tow truck
through a field thick with summer grasshoppers and watching a car even rattier than Dave’s passing by with the words “Livin’ the dream” painted on the back of it. “Aren’t we all,” Adam says.

Now they spot a soldier from Adam’s old unit here with his wife, and the four of them talk for a while amid the grasshoppers.

“You seen Sherfield lately?” the soldier, whose name is Tim, asks at one point.

“No, last time I talked to him he was getting surgery and he was getting re-classed to finance or some shit like that,” Adam says.

“Yeah, I don’t know about that,” Tim says.

“Remember the time he was running around with a vibrator on a string at the PX?” Adam says. “Remember that shit?”

“Yeah, he didn’t know what it was,” Tim says, laughing.

“Helicopter. Helicopter,” Adam says, laughing, too, as he remembers what Sherfield was yelling when he picked up the vibrator and swung it around his head, and meanwhile, Tim’s wife, Sondra, not so interested in Sherfield, is saying to Saskia, “Tim bought a new car.”

“Really?” Saskia says.

“Uh-huh. He traded in his GTO,” Sondra says. “Got an ’06 Mustang GT.”

“Awww,” Saskia says.

“Really pretty,” Sondra says.

Meanwhile, Tim is telling Adam that he stayed in the unit that Adam left and, after a year home, was with them when they went back to a completely different war. “All the new guys I got were so disappointed they didn’t see any action,” he says.

“Oh well,” Adam says.

“What color is it?” Saskia says.

“Red with white stripes,” Sondra says.

“Yum,” Saskia says.

“You know my dog got killed,” Tim says.

“What?” Adam says.

“He got hit by a car,” Tim says. “While I was in Iraq. My wife took him to Missouri. He got hit by a car.”

“No shit,” Adam says. “Jesus. I remember we had two dogs in Iraq the
first time. I still think about them, you know? They were like our patrol dogs. These dogs didn’t have nothing. They just liked us. They’d follow us to the chow hall and wait outside, and we’d come out and feed them and they’d get in the back of the Bradley and go out on missions.”

Now Adam and Saskia are driving home after the races, and Saskia asks how he’s doing.

“Good,” Adam says, sounding distracted.

“Good,” Saskia says.

“Gotta take a heartburn pill and my medication,” Adam says.

Now they are home, and they have carried the kids across the street and put them to bed, and Saskia is inside waiting for Adam, who is outside on the porch, by himself in the dark and thinking about the dogs in Iraq some more—about how he loved them, too, in that soldier’s way, and how the soldiers had given them names, and how they slept with the soldiers sometimes, and how one day one of them wouldn’t stop barking and growling at an Iraqi policeman who took out a knife and grabbed the dog and held it down and before anyone could stop him sliced its Achilles tendon, and how some soldiers boasted later that they had held the Iraqi down and done the same to him.

He lights another cigarette. He stays on the porch a little longer.

Such is the depth of his lonely life, into which one day arrives an e-mail from another soldier, Michael Emory, saying he had been thinking about Adam and would like to come visit sometime.

The last time Adam saw Michael Emory was years before, when Emory was just about dead and draped across Adam’s back, and the blood coming from a bullet hole in Emory’s head kept going into Adam’s mouth.

“Your friend” is how Emory signs the e-mail.

“I’m looking forward to it,” Adam writes back. “You got a place to stay while you’re here?”

The life afterward: Michael Emory’s has taken place in hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, and lately, a double-wide trailer south of Atlanta. He was supposed to die and didn’t, was supposed to not walk and does, was
supposed to not talk and does that, too. “He’s a walking miracle,” his chief doctor says, and then revises that. “He’s an absolute walking phenomenon to those who don’t know differently.”

He was shot in the head and the bullet ruined the part of his brain that regulates such things as emotions and impulse control. It also left him partially paralyzed. “Hemiparesis,” he says, proud that he can say such a word. He has no sensation on his left side. He can’t easily stand. He can’t move his left foot or toes. He can’t straighten his left arm. He can’t wiggle his left fingers. He can’t wink his left eye.

He is divorced now from Maria, the woman he was married to when he was in the hospital and who didn’t leave his bedside. “I love you, baby,” she would say over and over to him in those first days, when he couldn’t talk and could barely move. “Her and her damn mouth” is what he says about what happened after that. “If we weren’t sleeping or fucking, we were arguing.”

He has a young daughter who was in the family truck one day when he all of a sudden went haywire, punched the rearview mirror, shattered the windshield, grabbed Maria by the top of her head, shook her back and forth, and screamed, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.” Now the daughter is gone to Texas with her mother and he is grateful that she doesn’t have to grow up around such a man as himself. Before he was shot, he was never angry. Now he can’t control it. Now he telephones his daughter every day from a safe distance. “My little giraffe,” he calls her.