13
Luis
DR. GHOSH SAYS THAT
human beings under stress are capable of extraordinary things: some good and some bad. There are people who have lifted cars in the air to save someone being crushed after an accident, and people who have survived days treading water after a shipwreck. There are also people who have drowned their own children or set themselves afire because they just couldn’t bear what Dr. Ghosh calls the “physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual” stress of certain experiences.
I memorized that list: physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Because that’s true. What happened to me was all those things, all at once. I don’t even know which was most important. You’re physically wrecked when you’re downrange. It’s hot, it’s dusty. Man, the dust in Kalsu is unbelievable. It gets everywhere: in your mouth, in your ears, in the skin of your neck. It’s in your equipment and in your food and in your bed. Nothing you eat tastes like anything you’ve ever eaten before anyway. Your CHU is like a tin closet, and it echoes. And you’re constantly going from complete inactivity to chaos. You’re either bored out of your mind or waiting to lose your mind to some homemade explosive.
And the spiritual piece. That’s tricky. A lot of guys pray. We even got a Muslim in my unit, and he prays five times a day. At first the guys didn’t like it. They said we were in this country because of the Muslims. But it’s different now. You spend all that time together, you get close. These guys would die for me, and I would die for them. What does it matter what name someone uses for God? At first I felt a little weird about the evangelicals praying to Jesus, like Jesus was different from God. I’m Catholic, so we’re careful about stuff like that. But then there’s this guy named Eric, who’s Jewish, and he told me it made him feel weird that Catholics talk about God like he has a human body.
Some guys get religious in a war, but other guys start being against religion. That’s kind of how Sam and I were. I prayed a lot, but Sam could hardly stand anyone praying. We didn’t talk about this. I didn’t pray in front of him, or at least not so he could tell, and he didn’t say too much stuff about religion in front of me. When you’re in a combat zone with someone, you stop focusing on how you’re different. The only way anyone is going to survive is with help from each other. That’s the real religion.
Dr. Ghosh says it will help if I can start to recognize the signs of stress in my life. I guess I’m pretty violent in my sleep, and some nights they tie my arms so that I don’t rip out my tubes or damage the equipment or something. I know that I am having nightmares at night, but I don’t remember them. Dr. Ghosh says that I should try to remember, when I first wake up, and he says the nightmares might be really bad, but it will still help if I remember them and talk about them.
It’s strange. I like Dr. Ghosh. But a lot of what he thinks I should do is the exact opposite of everything I needed to do to survive. I would have been dead months ago if I started thinking about my nightmares. If I thought about anything other than what the mission was, how to survive it, what were all the ways I could die that day. If you’re not thinking like that, if you’re not ready to do whatever you need to do to live, you aren’t going to make it downrange. You’re just not. That’s what folks back home don’t get. When you’re there, you’re living every single second with the possibility of an IED shooting nails and barbed wire through your head, with the chance that some maniac is going to use his vehicle as a weapon, with the reality that it could be a woman, an old man, a little kid. You don’t know what’s going to come at you, 24/7.
And when you’re in that situation, it’s bad. It’s really bad. But parts of it are weirdly good too. Like, you always know what the priorities are. Survival. Being there for your squad. There’s a bunch of little shit, like who prays to who or who eats what, that guys might talk about—they might jaw about just to release some stress—but nobody cares about it. When you’re in a combat zone, you know what’s important and what’s not. And the most important thing is what you will do for the guys around you and what they will do for you. That, and that you never let up, you never relax.
Which is the one thing I never figured out about Sam and that yo-yo. Because if there’s any guy over here who never let up, who never forgot what could happen, it was Sam. But when he got that yo-yo out, he did let up. And he did it on purpose. Maybe he knew he was still on, somewhere. Maybe he just had to let it go sometime, and he figured he’d rather die doing that than anything else available to do over there.
You gotta be able to react—no hesitation—if you want to live. If you want to have a good shot at living. Otherwise, it’s just dumb luck. And luck always runs out. This is what Sam and I figured out about each other on a mission. We both could make a decision fast and stick to it. Hesitation kills.
So Dr. Ghosh says now I should start thinking about my nightmares. Noticing what gets me upset during the day. What the triggers are. I don’t know. That’s going to be hard to do. He says the nightmares and the yelling and whatever else I do at night is not crazy. Even the way I get really angry during the day, sometimes over stupid stuff, I know it’s stupid, but I just can’t help it. There are noises these nurses make that kill me, I cannot stand this cart thing they have. Dr. Ghosh says all of that is the opposite of crazy. It’s a normal response to how I have been living. But it is isn’t going to work when I get out of this hospital, and I came damn close to killing myself—as close as you can get without doing it—and so I need to figure out what the triggers are before I try something like that again.
It’s nice when Dr. Ghosh says stuff like that. Like it matters to him. What I do. What happens to me. It feels nice and then it feels bad. Maybe that’s a trigger too. Someone acting half decent.
Dr. Ghosh worries about me trying suicide again. I can’t imagine it. It’s not like you can pop a soda can twice. It pops the first time, and then whether or not you pulled it open, the explosion has happened. That’s me. I popped. And now, what’s left in me is really bad, and maybe it will even build up again, but it’s not about to pop. That’s not what I feel like: someone about to pop. Maybe I feel like someone who
is
popped. But how would Dr. Ghosh know that?
DR. GHOSH SAYS I WROTE
a letter to an eight-year-old kid in Nevada. Damn. That’s a young kid. I was still sleeping next to my abuela’s bed in third grade. I would go to sleep in my bed, but in the middle of the night, I would go into my abuela’s room, and curl up on the floor with a blanket and pillow. I did that for years. I know I was still doing it in third grade. She should have stopped me. I was too old for that. Even though I never even remembered walking in there. I just always woke up on the floor. My abuela didn’t talk about it at all. She just woke me up when it was time for school, and I carried my blanket and pillow back to my room.
Thinking about waking up, on the floor there, it’s making me feel really strange. I wish I could wake up there right now. I wish I were eight years old, and my abuela was waking me up, and all I had to do was take my blanket and my Superman pillow back to my room. I wish my abuela were downstairs, humming her bad music, making me some huevos. I wish I were eight. I wish I’d never grown up. I wish I could do it over again. Do this last year over again. I want to take it back. I don’t want to be a man who killed a kid. I don’t want to be the man who didn’t get killed, when Sam did. I don’t know how I can live with that. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I don’t know how to get out of this body, this life. My abuela would never believe what I’ve done. I could never tell her. I’m never going to tell anyone. But what do I do with it? Why can’t I take it back?
How could an instant change everything? One thought. One instinctive reaction. I can’t take it back. I’d give anything to take it back. It doesn’t seem possible that I tried so hard to do the right thing, to do my job, to do it well, to be a good soldier. I wanted to be a good soldier. I was a good soldier. And then one split-second fraction of an instant, and everything is different. And I can’t fix it. I can’t change it. I can’t get that kid back. I can’t help that mother. I hear her crying at the back of my mind all the time. I can hear her wailing. How much she hurts. How much she is always going to hurt. There can’t be a worse sound in the world. She has lost everything that mattered to her. How could I tell my abuela this? How could I tell my abuela that I’m the man who did this?
Sam knew how crazy it was making me. And he covered for me. For the way I couldn’t concentrate, the drinking, what an ass I was making of myself. So is that what happened to Sam? Did I make a mistake? Did I let go for an instant? Long enough for him to get killed? I think that’s what I can’t remember, why I can’t remember, because it’s my fault. Because I fucked up, and Sam got killed. It’s the logical answer. You can’t let up, you can’t relax, you can’t get distracted. And I had that kid, and that mother crying, in my head all the time. All day, all night. I know I’m the reason Sam is dead. I just can’t remember exactly what I did.
Buddy fucker.
How am I supposed to live with that?
WHEN YOU’RE A SOLDIER, THE
most important thing you can do is take care of your buddy. Because you have to know that your buddy is going to be there for you. Everything is built around that. Starting in basic training. Esprit de corps. Or whatever bullshit French word they want to use for it. And in basic, there are days when you think you will never care a damn what happens to your commanding officer, and then you get to Afghanistan or Iraq, and you care. Man, you care. Sam and I probably never would have even spoken to each other stateside. He really did hate spics. But there, man, that is the closest relationship I have ever had in my life.
And gringos are right about one thing: Mexicans do care about kids. When you’re Mexican, children are really important. That’s not just for the women. That’s for everybody. My parents aren’t the best example of that, but my abuela is, and that is how Mexicans are.
So I’m the Mexican who killed an innocent kid, and I’m the soldier who got his buddy fucked. I wish I had killed myself. I wish I hadn’t used a .22. I wish I hadn’t jerked, or missed, or whatever the hell I did. I wish I felt like I could pop again. Because I don’t think I have what it takes to try that again. But I don’t know how I am going to live with what I did. I don’t see how Dr. Ghosh can make that any better.
And I don’t deserve to have it be better.
But how am I supposed to live?
How do I go back to my abuela and Las Vegas now?
And if I do pop again, if I do find a way to get out of this, how is my abuela supposed to live?
14
Avis
LAUREN SAYS NATE READ
the note I left, but he never called me, and he didn’t answer when I called him. Lauren and I have spoken each day, and from her I know that Nate is back home, that they are “doing better,” that Lauren has not yet talked to him about seeing a counselor but “is going to do it.” I am uneasy. Nate and Lauren are twenty-seven years old. They’re married. What really is my role here?
Is Lauren in danger?
I don’t get to Rodney’s house until almost ten. I’ve been wondering if Nate will show up, but as soon as I arrive, I see that the two of them are hard at work already. Boxes litter the square patch of dirt that serves as Rodney’s front yard, and Nate’s arms are piled high with pieces of Santa’s sleigh. Rodney sits at the front door, patiently testing a big mound of light strings in the outdoor socket.
“Nato, what do you think of putting a rocket launcher in Santa’s hands this year? Think I’d make the six o’clock if I did that?”
Nate laughs. Rodney has been trying to get featured on the six o’clock news for years. He says he’s sick of the uptight folks on Hondo Court getting all that free press each year. What’s wrong with the lights down on West Adams?
And Rodney has big plans for this Christmas. Nate wasn’t around to help him with the lights much over the last few years, but now that Nate is back at home permanently, working at the police department no less—which Rodney figures is going to save him a lot of money in driving tickets—my brother is going all out.
There hasn’t been any room in the garage for his van in years, and as far as I can tell, he’s spent most of this fall’s Social Security checks ordering more decorations off the Internet. Rodney won’t throw anything out, so the plastic sheet of Disney characters will still cover his garage door, the hundreds of mothy old stuffed animals will still be perched along the edge of the lawn, Nate will still hang the three white-light angels over his front window, the slightly crooked fat snowman will still welcome children coming from the elementary school down the street, and, of course, Santa, his sleigh, and all eight reindeer will still take center stage across the lawn. Most people might think that there really isn’t any place to put more decorations, but most people aren’t Rodney, and I can tell from the stack of boxes that have never been opened that there is going to be a lot more to look at this year.
NATE HAS BEEN HELPING RODNEY
decorate this house since he was four years old. That’s the year Rodney and Sharlene moved in, and the year they decided that the tasteful display of white lights at our house was “just too pansy ass” for their boy. Jim stayed out of all that. He helped them get the mortgage on the house, and ten years later, when things were going well, he paid off what was left and gave the deed to Sharlene. Jim did this sort of thing quietly; he didn’t, for example, wrap up the deed and present it as a gift. He just mailed it to Sharlene in an envelope, with a note that said she should probably get someone to look at the air-conditioning unit. I found the note when I was helping Rodney go through our mother’s things after she died. I wonder what Sharlene thought of that note, much less the gift. She never mentioned it to me. I only found out because I asked Jim why our tax returns looked different that year.
“You didn’t have to do that, Jim. Sharlene and Rodney can take care of themselves.”
“It was twenty-two thousand dollars, Avis. It doesn’t make sense for them to be paying interest on a mortgage.”
“Well, thank you,” I said awkwardly.
“Avis, don’t thank me. It feels weird for you to thank me.”
That’s kind of how Jim was with my family. He had this idea about what a man should do, how he should use his money, and he did that. He didn’t even think much about it. On the other hand, he didn’t really pay attention to what Sharlene or Rodney were doing or how they lived. He didn’t seem to worry about their influence on Nate, like I did. He didn’t worry about whether they were drinking around Nate or what they talked about with him. If they wanted to put up some really tacky Christmas display for Nate, and if Nate liked it, that was fine with Jim. When Nate was little, Jim would go down to the house on West Adams and examine the lights, the sleigh, the stuffed animals, with him. Once Nate got older, I doubt that Jim even knew whether they were still putting up the lights or not.
RODNEY MAY NOT HAVE WORKED
in the last two decades, but he is a professional when it comes to Christmas lights. It takes him and whoever is helping him three days to take the display down in January. Every light set is meticulously returned to its original box and organized in the garage according to the order in which it will be rehung the next year. If I know Rodney, he already has calculated to the last inch where the new decorations will fit in and has a detailed plan for rewiring the whole affair. It’s the big event of his year, the thing that everyone knows him for, and as much as I hate the idea of Santa holding a rocket launcher, I have always been glad that Rodney has this.
I LEAVE MY CAR ON
the street, where it won’t block the garage door, and make my way to the front entrance. I kiss Rodney on the cheek and walk into the yard to give Nate a hug. We embrace awkwardly, given what happened, and I say, “Nate, we have to talk about what happened. I’ve invited your dad over next weekend, so the four of us can talk.”
“Okay. Okay. Mom, I know. I’ll call.”
“What’s the secret?” Rodney yells out. “You making big plans for my Christmas present?”
Rodney is feeling fine. He doesn’t look too good—his skin is a pale sort of gray-yellow, and there are deep pouches below his eyes—but he’s feeling fine. No doubt there’s a flask tucked in the side pocket of his chair.
Rodney switched to a motorized wheelchair about three years ago, and he’s aged a lot since. He has a long list of medical problems, partly because he’s been in the chair since he was nineteen years old, and partly because he drinks, but also just because he’s never really done much. He was a good athlete as a little kid, like I was, but things went downhill quickly for him.
Sharlene let Rodney come home to live after his accident because they were friends. Not just mother and son, but friends. When he was twelve years old, Rodney would sit at the kitchen table with Sharlene, smoking and sharing her whiskey and talking about the shit at the Four Queens just like one of Mom’s bar hostess friends. I was sixteen and pretending to be tough and starting to see how life was different for other people—starting to imagine that even I might live another way. I used to yell and tell her that Rodney shouldn’t smoke, that he shouldn’t drink, that he was just a kid, a skinny kid, who needed his brain cells, but they both laughed at me, and if I kept it up too long, Sharlene got mean. She would ask me if sleeping around was better than drinking and smoking. She knew I had made a mistake, and she knew how much I regretted it. Sharlene could always take care of herself; if it meant cutting her daughter to the quick, she didn’t think twice about it.
IN THE END, MAYBE IT
worked out that Sharlene and Rodney lived together. She gave up the boyfriends; he made a life for himself on this street, in this house. It wasn’t what I wanted for him. If I let myself remember Rodney as he was—a little boy, so sweet, so much sweeter than I was—and then think about how his life turned out, I feel ill, but if I let all those images go, if I forget about all those times that I promised him things would get better, that I would take care of him, that I would not let anyone hurt him, then I think that he is happy enough with his life—as happy as anyone else I know.
Nate has begun to set the largest displays where they will be anchored, and I go in search of the box with the plastic garage door panorama. When Nate was a small boy, the panorama featured Donald Duck stringing Christmas lights around Pluto instead of a Christmas tree. Nate loved that. He laughed every time he looked at it, and he would chatter on about it at dinner.
Do you think Pluto wagged his tail when Donald Duck wrapped the string around it, Mommy? Do you think Pluto eats the lights?
Just thinking about the image would make him laugh.
Rodney let the colors get really faded on that one, since Nate loved it so much, but for quite a few years now, the panorama has featured Mickey and Minnie and Goofy opening a big pile of presents. I find the box, and as is true every year, realize that it is a lot heavier than I am expecting. I tug it toward the garage door and then stop to check that the hooks that hold it are still in place.
Just then, there is the loud sound of lights exploding. Nate yells, and before I even know he has moved, he is throwing me to the ground and pushing his arm against my back.
“Stay down. Stay down,” he hisses. Then he gets up, running in a half crouch toward Rodney, who is holding a hissing string of exploded lights in his hand.
“You going to shoot me, Nato?” Rodney asks, in a long, slow drawl. “You think I’m one of those Taliban guys?”
Rodney is grinning, but my heart is pounding. What will Nate do? Rodney is delicate. Nate can’t just throw him to the ground. I struggle to get up quickly, thinking that somehow I can stop what is about to happen.
But it doesn’t happen.
Nate stops. Looks around. At me, trying to get up, and at Rodney, sitting cool as a cucumber with his lights.
I freeze.
But then Nate starts to laugh. He laughs so hard, I think he might also be crying. And Rodney laughs too. Rodney laughs, and he says to Nate, “Man, them Ahabs really got you going. You just as bad as some of those winos on Fremont Street. You just plain old nuts, Nato.”
And for some reason, this makes Nate laugh even harder. He is laughing so hard, he has to sit down on the grass. And I am laughing too, because I can’t remember when I last saw Nate laugh, because I am so grateful to Rodney, grateful because Nate loves him so much, and I am also crying, because something is not right with Nate; something is really wrong.
NATE WAS ALWAYS HOTHEADED. HE
was always a risk taker. There was a period of time—after the car accident his junior year of high school, after basic training, after that first incredible growing up that happens to a boy who joins the Army—there was a period of time when Nate seemed to have wrestled his demons, when it seemed that Nate was becoming the best man he could be.
Jim and I were close then. I still remember talking with Jim that first year or so that Nate was in the Army.
“Jim, the military has been good for him. He made the right choice. We were so worried, and yet he made the right choice.”
“It’s amazing, really, how much he has changed. He was telling me last night that he set up a savings account with an automatic paycheck deduction.”
“Yeah, I know. When I walked in yesterday, he was polishing the wood floors, on his knees, and he said, ‘Mom, I just wanted to do something for you.’ I had to walk away, because it hit me so hard. His being nice. It’s like we have our old Nate back.”
“A lot of boys have trouble in high school, Avis.”
“I know. But I was so afraid. So afraid that he would be angry forever, that it was my fault, that we had let him get away with too much.”
“Yeah. I never felt like we were too easy on him, Avis. He was a tough teenager. We could have done it differently, but I’ve never been sure there was a better way.”
NATE JOINED THE ARMY RIGHT
before 9/11. He got out of basic training three weeks after. That was scary. Because, of course, we had told ourselves that the Army would toughen him up, that it was a good time to join the military, that the world was relatively at peace. Do you remember that? How just before 9/11, it seemed like the world was more peaceful?
And then it changed. And we knew it would just be a matter of time before Nate was deployed somewhere awful. Boys were joining the military in record numbers then, but Nate got in just ahead of them. Just in time to be first out of the gate.
And still it took a while. More than a year before he went to Iraq. Back and forth. Three tours.
And in between, when he was home on leave, he made plans. Each time, he seemed older and surer. He started talking about coming back home when he was done. Joining the police force. Coming home was because of Lauren, of course. Somehow, Nate had gotten back in touch with his middle school sweetheart, and they were in love.
When Nate told us that he was dating Lauren, that they had gotten back in touch, that he was planning on getting out of the military and coming back home, I thought, for a while, that everything was working out. Working out better than I had dared hope.
Jim and I were doing well, Nate was doing well, everything seemed right. I thought it meant that we had done it right after all.
And then Jim and I started to run out of things to talk about. He worked a lot. I couldn’t seem to figure out what I wanted, what I was supposed to be doing with my life. Last January, just weeks after Nate got out for good, he totaled his car in an accident that didn’t quite add up. He wasn’t hurt. Wasn’t drinking. (That’s what I thought, of course, that he had been drinking.) But his blood alcohol test was fine. He said he had just looked down at the radio, had somehow veered, looked up too late to miss the wall altogether. Just got slowed down enough not to get hurt.
It could have happened that way. Jim believed him.
“Jim, do you think that is all that happened? That he looked at the radio?”
“Avis, stop it. I can’t go there with you. I can’t do this with you anymore. Of course he just looked down.”
But I was right. Whatever happened with the car, I was right about Nate.
His bachelor party was so out of control that he arrived at the rehearsal dinner with fresh red bruises all over his face. They were blackish at the wedding, yellow in the honeymoon pictures.
He got suspended from his job at the Luxor for a day. Never told us why. We would never have known except that I stopped by to give them a table from Nate’s old room. Lauren blurted out that Nate had been suspended. The suspension was one thing, but it was the way that Nate looked at Lauren when she told me that surprised me.