The Wilding (5 page)

He drops the lid and snaps the clasp in place and stands up. The weight of the toolbox makes him lean to one side. “I wouldn’t feel right about it.”

“Why in the world not? This is your business.”

“It’s my pleasure.” He gives her a nod before clomping down the porch, into the rain, where he runs his thumb along the teeth of the newly sharpened key before sliding it into his pocket.

The rain surges, blending the world into a single gray element. Thick tongues of mud lick their way across the road. Windblown branches paw at his windows. It is always this way in the fall. The parched yellow summer gives way to a sudden gray as the storms crawl over the Cascades carrying bags of water drawn from the Pacific.

Which means the blasting white of winter will come soon enough. How he hates winter. Everything hurts more in the cold. A fingernail caught on the head of a raised screw. A knee banged against an ice-cobbled sidewalk. A knuckle scraped over asphalt when changing a tire, losing your grip on the tire iron. His head. Especially his sunken head.

He imagines the inside of his body as a cave with a red river flowing through it, and when the temperature drops, the river hardens into a red ice floe and red icicles hang from every corner of his insides, so that when he knocks into something or something knocks into him, the ice cracks, the icicles bite. And in a place like Bend, where winter glooms the sky and frosts the roads for the better part of five months, there’s a lot of hurt.

Today feels like the beginning of the hurt, a throbbing reminder of what waits around the corner. A severe thunderstorm and flash flood warning is in effect until early evening. The temperature hovers around sixty but the wind makes it feel like fifty. Three inches of rain have already fallen—with two more inches to come before the storm lurches into eastern Oregon, where it will steadily lose power, falling apart in the desert.

This is what he hears when he flips the radio stations—the excited voices of weathermen talking about changing pressure systems, wind flow patterns, surface temperatures, and dew points—interrupted by syrupy pop songs. Nothing about Iraq. There never is.

He fingers the dent in his forehead. It has begun to throb, as if his pulse has focused there all the blood in his body. In the corner of his right eye he sees a flashing he at first mistakes for lightning. But no thunder follows. And the flashing—a white flashing that blinks in and out of sight—continues, worsens. He navigates the road with one hand while using the other to press into the dent, trying to relieve the pressure there, trying to think about something pleasant—the woman, Karen—but the rain and the winding road and his head, his aching head, prevent him. This is how his migraines always begin.

Soon his mouth will taste like metal. Soon the nausea, a sour turning in his belly, will boil over. Soon his right eye will go completely white as if veiled by a holy cataract. The pain, beginning behind his eyes and slowly clawing its way through his body until it hums at the ends of his fingertips, will grip him completely.

Ahead he spots a BP gas station, the familiar green shield floating out of the rain-swept murkiness. He snaps off the radio. He slows the truck to a crawl and grips the wheel with both hands and concentrates so intensely on an empty parking space that he doesn’t see the black BMW pulling away from the pump. He cuts it off and the driver brakes with a squeal and lays on the horn and yells something fierce out his window that Brian cannot register.

He yanks the gearshift into park and pops the glove box and withdraws a bottle of Excedrin. He thumbs it open and shakes three pills into his palm and jams them in his mouth and chews them down into a bitter paste, wincing at the taste but knowing the medicine will work its way into him that much faster.

A shadow appears in the driver’s side window—a man, Brian realizes as a face comes into focus—the man from the BMW. He wears a yellow polo shirt dotted with rain. “What’s wrong with you, you fucking prick?” he says and slams his fist against the window and leaves behind a smear of rainwater. “What’s wrong with you?”

Brian makes no response and the man retreats from view and the rain drums and the truck rocks and the windshield appears scalloped as the wind dashes over it. He closes his eyes and waits for the pain to pass or arrive in full.

When his eyes are closed, when the world is dark and he has nowhere else to retreat except the caverns of his mind, he thinks of Iraq: outside Ramadi, in Al Anbar Province: 2nd Battalion, 34th Marines. He was a staff sergeant. He has difficulty remembering days in particular. They swirl together and become flits and flashes of one big maddening day in which nothing changed and everything was bleached of its color. Same watery potatoes slopped on a tray for chow. Same games of euchre, five-card stud, seven-up. Same rusted bench press in the fitness tent. Same desert cammies with salt stains around the collar and crotch. Same Humvees growling and helicopters stuttering and mortar rounds snarling and small-arm fire popping. Same conversations about pussy and basketball and action movies and pimped-out cars. Same three-hour outpost guard shift—chewing his fingernails and smoking Camel cigarettes and flipping through porno magazines and kicking a hole in the ground and jerking off into it and watching the cum soak into the sand—leaving him half stunned with boredom. Same nosebleeds and cracked skin. Same Porta-Johns with flies and shit-soaked heat fuming out of them. Same sandals, robes, turbans, beards. Same eucalyptus trees and elephant grass and prayer mats and crows on telephone wires. Same black eyes floating from behind black hijabs, a sea of black ghosts swirling in and out of sight. Same everything. And everything with sand in it, from his Diet Pepsi to his M-16 to his pubic hair.

Of course there were moments that punctuated the even passing of the days, that punched holes in his cyclical memory of Iraq. The boy in a tattered brown robe hurling a rock at him and darting down an alley. The old woman who touched his face with her hands and spoke what sounded like an angry song. The camel shot with a flare as a joke, its hindquarters on fire, braying and galloping in circles, trying to outrun the burning. The deaf man flex-cuffed and hurled to the ground because he wouldn’t respond to their commands. The charred carcass of a Chinook chopper trucked into the outpost with the body of its pilot still melted into his seat.

The bomb that opened up in his skull.

There were bombs everywhere. Tucked under cars, overpasses, trash piles. Buried beneath a dirt road. Sewn into a vest. Stuffed into the carcasses of dead dogs. They were soaked in napalm or packed with black powder or gummed with plastic explosive. They were decorated with nails and stainless steel balls that tore through a body like buckshot through a stop sign.

That day is like a series of broken images, a torn film strip flapping through a projector. Forty clicks west of Baghdad. Fallujah. Two Humvees. Eight men, Brian among them. They were carrying supplies to the base under construction there, growling through a blond-colored collection of buildings that might have been carved by the shamal winds from dunes. The day had been quiet, the streets relatively empty. Whenever they did pass a car, he remembers holding his breath for a minute to survive the dust it threw up, making a game of it. He did not hear the explosion nor did he see it. One moment they were driving. And the next moment they were not. One moment the sky was a pale blue—and the next moment, red with fire, black with smoke.

He remembers slumping away from the Humvee and sitting down in the middle of the street and watching his shadow grow darker with the blood leaking from him. He remembers looking at the twisted snarl of flaming metal and seeing the bodies hanging out of it and crawling from it and thinking somebody ought to do something. He remembers the sound of distant gunfire that could be for a wedding or could be for a funeral or could be from another patrol. He remembers the rotorwash of the Blackhawk that sent the dust swirling from the street and the flies buzzing from his head as it touched down to carry him to the CSH in Baghdad. The IVs, the damp towels, the white sheets, the fog of painkillers.

He was lucky, they told him. He wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t like Williams, who suffered a spinal fracture and will spend the rest of his life limp in a motorized chair. He wasn’t like Jones, who was unable to pull himself out of the gun turret and whose skin melted away in a rush of flaming gasoline. He wasn’t like Carlson, who lost his legs and who gets around on prosthetics known as C-Legs with microprocessors that sense movement and adjust hydraulics.

The shrapnel peppered his arm and shoulder with small pieces of metal later dug out with tweezers. Today, he has to hunt among his hairs to even find the scars. The real damage came to his skull—a section three inches in circumference, gone, carved away by a piece of metal driven through the air.

Here his second stop-loss tour ended with an honorable discharge and a Purple Heart and a photograph of him in the
Bend Bulletin
shaking hands with the mayor, his face half obscured by bandages, his mouth unsmiling, his eyes staring into the camera with a kind of deadened resolve as if it were a 60 x 80mm scope trained in his direction. Those first few months back in Oregon he would wake up feeling as though he had taken the wrong plane and arrived at a place where no one knew him and where he should not be and where his anxiety could at any moment take command of him. He knew he was being paranoid, knew his black-veined fear to be unreasonable—but he could not help himself despite this knowledge.

The high desert landscape didn’t help, central Oregon reminding him so much of Iraq. The sandy soil that rose up in clouds and clung to skin, to cars. The stark sections of land where no life could be found except a vulture circling the sky and range steers feeding off bunch grass. The daytime heat giving way to nights so cold you could see your breath. And so he straddled two regions at once, occupying a gray territory. He startled at loud noises: a train whistle, a backfiring car, a dynamite explosion from a hilltop community under construction. He peered carefully at the underbellies of bridges and overpasses when he drove beneath them, hunting for the IEDs he knew were not there. If someone walked by him quickly in the mall or on the sidewalk, he imagined striking them in the windpipe with his fist, dropping them, demanding to know the rush of their business.

No one ever asked him about the war. Not one neighbor, not one friend or former teacher, not even if they carried a Support Our Troops ribbon on their lapel or bumper. They only said, “It’s good you’re home.” It was at moments like this, especially when their eyes lingered on his forehead—at first the bandages, later the scar tissue, bubblegum pink—that he felt on the verge of collapse. Alone. Inapt. Not a part of Iraq, not a part of Oregon. Not a marine and not a citizen—just a vessel of blood and bone and gristle floating and turning in the air. For a long time he did not feel he was capable of continuing to live a normal life, of achieving any sort of sense of comfort. He felt that he had lost more than a section of his skull. He had lost himself as well.

He blames his frontal lobe. He remembers the doctors telling him about the spider-shaped lesion there. This was why he had such initial difficulty putting words together, solving math problems, maintaining an erection. This was why his expression rarely changed, stoned-faced, dead-faced. There was a numbing effect, as if someone had excised a certain nerve from his body. He remembers in the weeks after his discharge, sitting in a Shari’s restaurant, sipping coffee and forking into a piece of strawberry pie, when a mother and her child—a round-faced toddler with a black shock of hair—sat down at a nearby booth. When the toddler broke a green crayon and began crying inconsolably, a high-pitched wailing that made him think of an air-raid siren, he imagined smashing the kid’s skull against the edge of the table until it cleaved in two and spilled forth a red mess not so different from that of his pie. He wasn’t sure what he felt in that moment, a half-chewed bite of strawberry softening on his tongue. Anger? No. Anger was a word with too much octane in it. He felt an impulse to strike out. That was a better way of thinking about his mind and its rewiring, as something that responded to impulses. He knew he was not normal. He knew people would hate him if they were privy to his thoughts. He knew he ought to feel guilty, regretful, about the child, about the thousands of tiny nightmares that went through his head every day. But he does not.

He remembers when things didn’t feel so dark, when life seemed bright with beauty, with possibility. He remembers sitting in his desert cammies on a Curtiss Commando transport plane—on his way out of Romania after a refuel, on his way to Mosul—when he peered from the window and beyond the green rolling hills and sparkling lakes and saw the Carpathians mantled with snow and felt completely alive and connected to the two hundred men around him who would face horror and frustration and who would die for one another.

That feeling is unavailable to him now. He does not see himself as part of anything, only apart. His company is best suited for the woods.

Sometimes he drives out into the desert and parks in the shadow of a juniper or a monolith of rock whose shape suggests a fossilized animal. When he sits in his truck with the country sprawling all around him, when he hears the wind moaning through the canyons and whispering through the sagebrush, when he observes the sun ride up in the sky and burn the color out of stones and the moisture out of soil, when a cluster of ants carries a grasshopper carcass into their swarming nest, when a hawk drops out of the empty blue and strikes a rattlesnake and carries it off to a fencepost to peel apart, Brian understands he is a part of the scenery—simply an animal, a complicated animal—and as an animal he can be either prey or predator, a target or the arrow that hastens toward it.

Now, at the gas station, when he opens his eyes again, he finds the bleak weather departed, the clouds blown off into the desert. The rain has clarified the air, revealing the mountains, dusted with fresh snow that gleams in the sunlight. He can appreciate their beauty only distantly, distracted as he is by the faint throbbing in his temple. At moments like these, he cannot help but feel someone has bored into his skull to burrow around, picking at his mind like a careless locksmith.