Until Tuesday (11 page)

CHAPTER 10

COMPANY

It is better to be in chains with friends
than to be in a garden with strangers.

—P
ERSIAN PROVERB

It felt good to be at ECAD with Ricky, Andrew, and
Mary, far better than it ever felt in my small Brooklyn apartment. These were fellow soldiers. My people. My blood. They understood what I had gone through overseas and in the VA bureaucracy, and they had suffered life-changing injuries, too. Amputations, spinals, PTSD: we were all brothers at ECAD, even Mary, who, I suppose, was technically a sister.

I had always, even during my worst periods, felt most comfortable around combat veterans, and my few attempts at social interaction since moving to New York had always involved them. For New Year’s Eve 2007, the Wounded Warrior Project invited its members to a front-row seat (courtesy of the NYPD) to watch the apple drop in Times Square. I had always wanted to do that, so I asked and was given a pass to attend. As the date approached, though, the event starting eating away at my mind. I was so worried about the crowd, and the logistics, that I started drinking the day before to alleviate the stress. Not December 31, but the morning of December 30. I had been so hammered for so long by the time the police arrived to escort us to Times Square that the whole evening was like a city at sea, shimmering on a floating horizon you’re never quite sure is real.

I visited a veteran in the hospital with the Wounded Warrior Project. I remember that for sure, but I can’t remember how he was wounded. I saw the first half of the Bruce Springsteen concert, with disastrous results. I attended a Mets baseball game or possibly two, again with the Wounded Warrior Project, again plastered on booze so I could deal with the crowd. Please forgive my imprecision. I realize I should know how many Mets games I’ve been to, but there are large chunks of my life, especially in the year before meeting Tuesday, that I seem to have lost.

I remember other events with crystalline clarity: the burned-out suicide car in Sinjar, the call to prayer at the Al-Waleed mosque, the taste of the apple tobacco I smoked with my Iraqi friend Maher. I hear the sound of the Syrian tracer rounds in my sleep, but I can’t remember the date my grandmother died. My brother, my sister, and I spent time every week at her house growing up, and she was my childhood hero. By sheer force of will, as a young widow, she got her son (my papá) and daughter (my aunt) out of Cuba in the madness after Castro took over. She worked for decades as a nurse before returning to school for a master’s degree in education at age fifty-five and then working for the U.S. Department of Education. Cut off from my relatives still on the island, Granny was a big part of my history. She told me stories; she taught me our family traditions; she showed me, by example, how to build a life on hard work, without bitterness but also without forgetting the tragedies in your past. She died during my second tour in Iraq, in May 2005. I missed the funeral and the gathering in honor of her life, and now I can’t even remember the day Granny died, and it makes me so angry, so very angry at myself.

But things were different at ECAD. This wasn’t a forced outing. I didn’t tell myself,
Hey, you sorry sack, get yourself up and out of this stinking apartment and prove you’re still a man,
like I did for New Year’s Eve or the Mets games. I told myself,
Be strong. This is it. This is your life
.

In the days leading up to ECAD, I must have put the bottle down untouched a hundred times, steeling myself for the unknown. But when I met the other veterans, my apprehension vanished because I recognized them. No arms, no legs, a pair of braces, and wary eyes. These soldiers were hurting. They needed help. It was my duty as an officer to display leadership and self-control. Suddenly, I was Captain Montalván again, a soldier in the company of soldiers, and it felt good. Very good. I took the responsibility so seriously that by the second morning I was licking my classmate, Staff Sgt. (Ret.) Ricky Boone, on his mohawked black head.

I was pretending to be a dog, by the way. That was part of our training—ordering each other around like dogs so that we could learn the feel of issuing commands. Ricky put me through my paces, and when he finally ordered “Up,” the command for the dog to place its front paws on the object in front of it, I thought,
What the heck, do what a dog would do
, and licked a big stripe right across his head.

That started it. Ricky was five-feet-four—all right, Ricky, I know you’re reading; five-feet-four
and a half
—and shaped like a beefed-up bowling ball. He’d been a bail bondsman and an infantryman; he dreamed of being a bounty hunter; there was no way he was letting me get away with that foolishness. So he did what any hardened foot soldier would do—he laughed out loud, then plotted his revenge. Ricky had a mohawk and a weakness for gold jewelry (and a lovely wife named Tammy, who tolerated them both, if you can believe it), and he’d snap into a hilarious Mr. T act before belting me down to size.

“I pity the fool, Luis, and that fool is you!”

It was easy, amazingly easy, for all of us to get along. But for the first few days, that familiarity was little more than a cover for our nervousness. We were all here to start rebuilding shattered lives, and we were well aware of the consequences of failure. It didn’t start to feel natural until we were matched with our dogs. With Tuesday at my side—and after my insistence on training with him on the second day, we were rarely apart—things started to slow down. That’s the best way I can describe the calm that came over my life. My mind had been racing for years, dragging my worn-out body with it, but Tuesday kept me firmly in the moment, since I was always touching him, talking to him, fidgeting with his collar or leash. The training was physically demanding, especially in my compromised state, and I spent a lot of time on the sofa near the kitchen resting my back. Tuesday always sat beside me, watching the room with an almost lethargic interest or lounging across my lap. By the second day, I developed the habit of touching him whenever I spoke. Even then, it wasn’t a conscious movement. There was a trigger in my brain that, since coming home from Iraq, caused me to tense up when my mouth opened, and touching Tuesday released it somehow.

So I’d playfully insult Ricky. Ricky would respond with his Mr. T impersonation. His dog, Raeburn, would stare at him in complete confusion and Tuesday, seeing Raeburn’s look, would turn to me as if wondering what was going on. So Rick and I would laugh at both our dogs and ourselves, both of us with our hands on our dogs for comfort, and Mary would come walking in with Remy tied to her belt. “If you guys don’t stop it,” she’d say with a smile, “I’m going to beat you to death with my stumps.”

That was big for her. I don’t think Mary had ever joked about losing her arms before. Losing a limb in combat is not a tidy thing. It’s sudden, bloody, and extremely violent, but it’s also a long and painful process of surgeries and rehab. Mary had lost her arms less than six months before. She was still in the middle of a series of surgeries; she was in a lot of pain. She was trying to figure out how to put her life back together, and she was so young, not more than twenty-one and looking more like sixteen. Jared, her husband, also a soldier, was with her at ECAD. He was a wholesome guy, very quiet but polite. They were just a couple of kids from a small town in Montana, unfailingly friendly, ordinary people, and I swear I spent hours wanting to throw my arms around them and protect them from the world. We all did. Even Tuesday.

But she was tough as nails, too. As Mary wrote of her experiences in a bomb disposal unit in Iraq: “I was shot at, sniped, stabbed, smashed, run over, blown up four times, rocketed, mortared, had to clear sites that my friends were just killed at, had an Iraqi man try to buy me and had an ovarian cyst rupture, all before having an IED go off while holding it, taking off my arms.” It was a litany of trauma, wounds, and pride that only a soldier could understand, and only the strong could endure. You don’t give up easily after experiences like that. You don’t talk much about them either.

And then, on the fourth or fifth day at ECAD, Mary came waltzing in with Remy and threatened to beat Ricky and me to death . . . with her stumps! Her word: stumps. That’s the fighting spirit of an American soldier. That’s a testament to the power of service dogs. They’re psychological bodyguards. They make you feel secure and comfortable, merely by their presence. Especially in the honeymoon period, when you first get them, they are the embodiment of your new and better life. They give you confidence, when there was little but doubt and anxiety before.

That is not to say my days at ECAD with Tuesday were easy. I had classes at Columbia most days, so the schedule was grueling. Drill, drill, drill, then off to class, take a break, then drill some more. Tuesday was trained, but I was not, and I had only two weeks to learn the basics of a new life. It was hours of frustration, punctuated by short bursts of accomplishment and joy. Tuesday knew eighty commands, and that’s a lot to remember—for a human being. Especially one with PTSD. And especially when Lu kept raising the bar for success.

When I finally learned “Heel” and “Side” and we became competent at walking together, Lu added other commands. “Tell him to climb onto the box.”

“Stop, Tuesday. Good boy. Jump on.”

“He knows the box. You can say box. Now tell him to look out the window.”

“Let’s go, Tuesday. Good boy. Heel. Heel. Window.”

“He doesn’t know ‘window.’ What do you think we teach him here, Luis?”

“Up, Tuesday. That’s a window. Win-dow. Good boy.”

“Now try your cane.”

“Look, Tuesday. Get my cane. That’s it. Get it! That’s right. Bring it here. Good boy!”

Lu and her staff tried their best to disrupt us. They opened doors as we walked past or dropped treats in Tuesday’s path that he was supposed to ignore. We were told to use the “Go” command, which tells Tuesday the next commands will be given from a distance, then distracted him with wheelchairs, chew toys, the mailman (she wanted to see how Tuesday would react to a stranger), other dogs, and umbrellas. The world is a complicated place; out there, an umbrella suddenly opening was the least of the distractions.

On the fourth day, when Ricky and Andrew were matched with their dogs, we started walking around the campus at Children’s Village. The next day, we took a van to a local mall for public practice, then returned to walk around the table in the big room at ECAD, following the ever-present painted yellow line. It was a topsy-turvy time, both highly stressful and blissfully freeing. Sometimes it felt like Tuesday and I were making progress. Other times it seemed we were losing the basic commands we had mastered three days before. Ricky bought a blinged-out gold collar for Raeburn, and I went around for two days saying, in my best Mr. T impersonation (which unfortunately sounded more like Hulk Hogan), “I pity the dog that has to be seen with Ricky Boone.” The next day, my hand shook when I reached out to touch Tuesday, and I knew that contact with him was the only thing keeping me nailed to the ground.

I didn’t realize how far we’d progressed until we took the train to a nearby town for our first long outing, a morning in the park. It sounds easy, I know, but it’s not. Parks are crowded, distracting Tuesday and me for entirely different reasons. I was hypervigilant and nervous; Tuesday was fascinated by the squirrels. My failure to reach him, combined with the pressure of being in public for several hours, had a strong effect on my mood. I had left my medicine back at ECAD, and as noon approached my back began to hurt and my head to swim. I could feel the drugs leaving my bloodstream, and by the time we headed for the train station for our return to Dobbs Ferry, I was so anxious and unnerved I had almost forgotten Tuesday was at my side.

By the time the train approached, I was on the edge. I could feel the emptiness in my veins, and my brain was pounding against my skull. I needed to get on that train so I could get to my medicine, but Ricky was having trouble with Raeburn. They weren’t going to make it to the platform in time, and with the complexity of the midday schedules on the Metro-North Railroad nobody was even sure if this was the right train. As the train slowed to a stop, the sound around me grew into a buzzing, then a throbbing, then a confused cacophony as everyone blathered about whether we should get on the train or wait for Ricky or go and patrol that house or bomb that building or . . . or . . . or . . .

In the past, the situation would have overwhelmed me, leading to a migraine and, more often than not, a round of violent vomiting. But this time, instead of spiraling, I looked down at Tuesday. He was standing calmly against my right leg, looking up at me. He knew I was agitated, but he wasn’t discouraged. In fact, he was more focused than he’d been all day. He wasn’t encouraging me; the relationship doesn’t work that way. He was simply expecting me to make a decision that he could follow. So I did. I got on the train, leaving the rest of the group behind. As I settled into my seat, Tuesday looked at me again. There was no doubt about it, he was giving me an
Atta-boy
. My dog was proud of me, and that made me proud of myself. By the time the others arrived, I was lounging in the kitchen at ECAD with Tuesday at my side, the medicines racing through my system.