As You Were Page 12

  You nod yes and clench your lips tight. It’s painful to watch. Auntie Harriet has been gone for seven years. It’s been eleven years since her first mastectomy. You’ll buy some new flowers from the gift shop on the way out, as always.

  He talks about missing his brothers, Eldon and Bub, before bringing up his sister-in-law, Auddie, as they called her. His face turns somber, and he clenches his teeth when he talks about how terrible she was to Bub and David. David especially.

  “Oh, little Davey,” he mutters, shaking his head in disgust. “And Bub was just as afraid of her. Mean old bitch,” he whispers. He smirks and says, “Bub’d call me when she sent Davey to the grocery store, you know, and I’d make my way to SUPERVALU, quick as I could. We’d shop together, Davey and me. My little buddy. We’d get everything on Auddie’s list, so he wouldn’t get it when he got home. It was about a half a mile from Green Street. I sure miss the house, Jeff. How’re the new neighbors? Are they keeping up my yard?”

  He was always so proud of his lawn and his rose bushes. But Jeff you’re not. You’re David. This happens every time you visit. You can’t recall the last time he remembered you.

  The two of you went through this yesterday.

  You take the time to answer his questions about his bushes and lawn in a way sure to make him smile. It might not hurt any for him to think you’re Jeff, but you can’t bring yourself to stay quiet. Maybe it’s selfish, but you want to visit with Uncle Harold, which is why you fish your wallet from your coat pocket, slide your Military ID card out, tap it on his knee.

  Like always, he takes it and holds it up to the light, and you watch while perplexity washes over his face. It breaks your heart, but you sit there while his smile fades. His subtle trembling turns to outright quaking accompanied by his eyebrows rising up as high as they can, seemingly lifting the corners of his mouth in an animated smile, smoothing out every wrinkle etched onto his face.

  He stammers through your name, “Davey, Davey, Davey. Oh, Davey. Sergeant David! How about them apples,” he says with a shaky yet crisp salute—beaming with pride.

  “Say, there. How much bacon does a sergeant bring home these days?” he says, smiling so wide his lips barely move.

  Your ballpark salary and housing allowance make him furrow his brow and bark, “You’re not a goddamn Colonel!”

  To put it in perspective, you tell him a newly-minted colonel makes ten grand a month.

  “A month?” he repeats.

  “A month,” you echo back.

  “Uncle Harold,” you say, interrupting his whispered slurry of cuss words while tapping the Bible sitting on your lap. You peel the LARGE PRINT sticker off the cellophane wrapping. “Yesterday, you told me you couldn’t read your Bible anymore.”

  “Ya—yesterday?”

  “I thought you might like this,” you say, and peel the cellophane wrapper away and place it on his lap.

  Looking down, he opens the cover, taking note of the large print. A smile ripples across his face while shadows fall into the lines left around his eyes and the corners of his mouth by a life well-lived, but long forgotten. He flips through the pages, runs a finger beneath the lines of text. Then tears trail down the tip of his nose, and he begins a hymn not heard since you were Davey squished into the pew beside him and Auntie at Temple Baptist Church.

  BEGGING THE QUESTION

  THE DENTIST SENDS YOU TO the Navy headshrinker, so you stop dreaming, stop having nightmares, stop waking with broken bits of teeth on your pillow. Your sleeping problem curtails, but you never fully wake either. You walk around in a fog, drunk-like. It’d be fine if you didn’t know you were in a fog. Lowering your guard is a different animal than having your guard lowered. They give you these pills and take your pistol, send you to bed early without dessert.

  You’d rather court insomnia than be chemically impotent for a matinee viewing of a B-rated horror flick featuring special guest appearances by your most crippling fears. So you flush the bottle. See, these symptoms aren’t symptoms over there; they’re only symptoms when you’re stateside, so you ask to redeploy.

  It never enters your mind that you might make it home again.

  Instead of your wife collecting life insurance, she files divorce papers. The thought of you being home day in and day out is too much to bear. Your commander knows your last ex-wife gets a quarter of your pay, and this one will get another quarter, and you’ll only be getting half of what you were to begin with once they medically retire you, if you don’t fight it.

  The doctor says there’s no way he will send you once more unto the breach. The commander argues, says you have adjustment disorder and the best place for you is being the harm in someone else’s way.

  The short version is they broke you, then send you out to stud.

  Sending you out to stud looks a lot like you wearing a Barney Fife costume and checking IDs at the IT office of an oil firm following a spill in the Gulf. When the contract expires, a hardware store hires you to sell lumber, until a two-ton bundle of pressure-treated lumber slides from the tongs of an extended forklift and crashes down onto the floor in the aisle directly behind you. You go prone, call for a status report from your team. Training takes over, muscle memory, reptilian mindset, whatever bow you want to put on it.

  A short time after, it’s explained how they want to employ veterans—just not war veterans. Flashbacks among the treated lumber and associates screaming at imaginary friends is not something they advertise in their weekly flyer. Though they’d like it to stay between the two of you.

  You run every day, beat a punching bag senseless, buy a Mossberg 500 shotgun—the one with the adjustable stock, pistol grip, and breaching barrel—a bolt-action .30-06, an SKS, Cx4 Storm, and a .40 caliber Beretta S&W pistol, run obstacle course races, collect medals for all your valiant efforts, prepare for a campaign that’ll never come—keep yourself combat-ready.

  Once this dawns on you, you take a seat in the waiting room of the newly expanded mental health wing at the Biloxi VA, which it turns out is just a bunch of temporary trailers bolted to one another. It’s impossible to focus on any one thing because of this disjointed symphony of sound swirling around inside your ear canals. There is a game show TV host and his contestants, veterans from the last hundred years of war, all talking to each other and themselves. The psychiatrist has to call your name a handful of times and has a diagnosis ready before you finish crossing the waiting room. You have one eyebrow cocked in each direction and stare at her unblinking. She doesn’t stop to think you can’t hear what she is saying or that you’re wondering why she is trying to speak over the crowd.

  She doesn’t close her door. She doesn’t know if you’re dangerous. But she knows you are dangerous, meaning: she knows you were sent to war, time and again, and made it back, time and again. But she doesn’t know if you’re a threat to her.

  She has a hunch you’re a danger to yourself.

  There’s no proverbial couch or reclining chair or ambient lighting in her office. There’s only the metal folding chair she offers you and the ergonomic one she’s sat down into. Now it’s her who’s unblinking. She asks, “Are you in immediate danger of hurting yourself?”

  You tell her you wouldn’t do that to your kids. You wouldn’t put that stigma over them, which leads her questions concerning your family. You tell her your mom is dead, your stepdad is dead, your dad is—but she cuts you off and asks again about your family.

  You don’t want them to know you when you’re like this. You’d rather die than explode on them for simply being kids. To have them fear you would kill you.

  “You’d rather die?”

  Yes, you explain. You’d rather die than have your kids afraid of you. You’d rather they not know you than fear you. You feared your father and hated him. He feared his father and hated him but stayed the course, wouldn’t break with family tradition. Dad was able to articulate this feeling—this fear he felt for his father—yet he did the same to you, day in and day out. Yo
u may not be brain damaged like he is, but there is something wrong with you.

  “One final question,” she says. “What if you didn’t have your kids? What would stop you from hurting yourself then?”

  “The safety,” you say in a measured whisper.

  “Can you speak up, please?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” you say with a shrug. There’d be nothing to stop you if you didn’t have kids.

  She reads the symptoms someone has plugged into the computer following your first visit with the primary care physician and prescribes you something they’re using to treat major depressive disorders, anxiety, and alcohol dependence. She warns of the side effects—shaking the bottle each time she shares something off the list: cottonmouth, fainting, vomiting, headaches, more frequent suicidal thoughts, unmasking and exacerbating an otherwise latent bipolarism, irregular heart rate, and priapism.

  Priapism grabs your attention and causes an eyebrow to lift, letting her know it’s not a word you know. She holds up her fist and unfurls her pointer finger, and you get her point.

  You ask how often she’ll need to see you.

  “I won’t,” she says. “Either the pills will work or they won’t. If they don’t work, stop taking them. You can call, and we’ll try something else.”

  You nod.

  “Otherwise, call the pharmacy for a refill when they run out. And if things get really bad, call the crisis line.”

  You leave armed with a pocket full of pills and a refrigerator magnet.

  MAYBE

  MAYBE YOUR DREAMS AND TRIGGERS are similar in more ways than you’d care to admit. Whether a trigger is real or a logical leap, the effect on the body is the same. Let’s not forget how a dream is a dream, whether you label it a dream or a nightmare, and both are incomplete stories seeing as how they have no beginning or end.

  There is the first part you can recall, but it’s not the beginning.

  It’s more than likely you are subconsciously stuck in the middle of a nightmarish daydream with no end in sight. But that doesn’t bother you once you remember an end to a story means the conclusion of a story. And who of sound mind looks forward to the end of their story?

  Think of a snake bite. You’d remember the fangs piercing the flesh, but it would take a few precious seconds to register what took place, so the story begins after the snakebite happens. Unless, of course, you have the good fortune of watching it happen, or, if it’s a rattlesnake and you hear the shake of the rattles, but there are still a few surprising nuances to the story of which you were unaware.

  You’ve never experienced a poisonous snakebite, but you’ve been stung by eighty wasps at once, haven’t you?

  That may be an exaggeration.

  They don’t all sting you at the exact same time. They attack your face, neck, arms, not to mention your feet and ankles. The wasps work their way inside your shirt. Others travel up the insides of your pant legs. Others still make their way inside your tighty-whities, even after you cannonball off the dock and into Elliot Lake. They crawl along the skin and congregate in the pockets of air trapped underneath your clothes and continue to sting until they lose interest.

  Glen somehow got you out of the lake and up to Grandma in the cabin. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what was wrong with you. No matter how many times she asked, she was only answered by your hysterical interpretive dance. You cried incoherently and slapped yourself.

  She’d thought you’d lost your marbles.

  Most of the wasps were alive when she stripped you down to your birthday suit in the front room of the cabin. Peeling wet clothing off a kid who won’t stop dancing and screaming is probably why medical professionals won’t hesitate to produce a pair of trauma shears and just be done with it.

  Once your shirt is up over your head, Grandma Audrey yells, “Bub, get me the witch hazel!” which he does before he goes around the cabin with the flyswatter killing every wasp he can find.

  It’s Grandma who counts the eighty bites. It’s Glen who gets rid of the Super Soaker squirt gun you filled with ammonia, thinking it would kill the wasps that built their paper nest on the corner of the boathouse.

  There’s no telling how it began, or what made you weaponize a squirt gun, or how Glen let you pull the trigger on his Super Soaker and shoot a stream of ammonia into the nest, the stream they followed back to you, the source of the assault. Still, pain has a way of beginning a story off in a fog, and maybe becomes the mortar the other—known—details are stacked upon.

  There are too many maybes that come before when Dad hammers his fist down on top of your skull, slamming your knees into the floor where the cabin meets the screened-in front porch. Your chest and face slap against the floor, too. You never saw it coming, so maybe Dad was standing behind you when he hit you.

  You’re told you stand up and say something like, “That didn’t hurt,” almost begging to get hit again, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t respond to your sarcasm. Instead, he lets you walk into the back bedroom and lie down on the bottom bunk. Or maybe someone says, “Go to your room,” or maybe it’s reflex by that point: you get hit, you go to your room. Or maybe when someone gets hit that hard they can’t hear anything for a while. Either way, what you’re told came after is Grandma screaming at Dad, saying something like, “Don’t you ever touch my David again!” along with ordering him to leave her cabin. Before he does, Glen draws breath into his chest and bows up to Dad, not knowing what will come next. He wants to hit his Uncle Dickie, knowing he went too far and wanting him to remember that.

  You wake inside a two-man raft, and when you peer over the side, you see velvet Elvis in his white jumpsuit hung on the wall at the foot of the bed. All you want to know is whether it’s okay for you to come out of the bedroom and go to the outhouse. The cabin is quiet, and it’s still daylight. Your bladder burns bad enough to make you brave enough to climb down to the floor, squeeze your nose and mouth outside the aluminum bifold door, and ask if you can go pee.

  “Yes,” Grandma says.

  You tiptoe by her and Grandpa Bub, who is sitting in the corner, lunging back and forth in his rocker. He watches every step you take.

  You know you’re really in trouble when you see him standing at the door, staring at the outhouse. He watches you walk back to the cabin. He even opens the door for you to move things along a little quicker.

  Grandma made a plate for you and sits watching while you eat. She burns through two cigarettes in the time it takes you to eat the two halves of the ham and cheese sandwich.

  She doesn’t give any word of warning, so you have no clue what is coming.

  Three days came and went since Dad cracked you in the skull. Grandma wanted to take you to the hospital, but she was sure they’d take you away from her, or Dad to jail. Or both.

  She knows she was a bad mother. But she got tired of bringing Dad to the bus stop and taking him downtown to his appointments at the Medical Arts building. She had to carry him. He was only six, but his three-quarter body cast made him so heavy, and she couldn’t get the monstrosity of a wheelchair onto the bus. Nor could she stand people’s stares. So she kept him home.

  Anytime he’d act up or act out, she’d say, “Don’t upset Richard” or “Don’t make Richard mad.”

  It became her mantra.

  People would mock her, repeating those words when she wasn’t around. But back then, your kid was your business. Not that the help he needed existed in 1950. But when you came to live with her in 1980, she looked at him, and herself, and how she parented him, and how he turned out, and she’d be goddamned if she let you turn out the same way.

  Though, that day at the cabin, she admitted there was something wrong with her Richard. He almost killed her David. And still, no one can say what you did to make him hammer his fist down on your head.

  There’s just a bunch of maybes.

  I’M SORRY, SANTA

  THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you wake to the whirl of a hairdryer and wait to get your wi
ts about you before you wander down the hallway to the toilet but realize Grandma Audrey is working the black corn silk atop her head into a perfect bouffant. You worry you might wet yourself if you try to wait her out again, so you pull on your Alf slippers and get ready for the three-story tiptoe to the manhole in the basement. Grandpa leaves it cracked open so he can take a leak whenever Grandma takes up residence in the bathroom.

  You crack the bedroom door and see a plume of smoke from her Raleigh Lights fill the hallway, coupled by a cloud of Aqua Net, so you set your feet into a sprinter’s stance and stand where she can’t quite see you. Next is something of a waiting game, which you lose. She senses you being there and sticks her hand out, holding two squares of single-ply. Scrappy crapped in her closet again. Defeated, you take hold of the shit-paper and slog down to the opposite end of the hallway, where her bedroom awaits.

  The floor shifts from your moving weight, and the door eases open, welcoming you inside. Once upon a time, this sent you running, convinced the house has a ghost.

  You pause for a breath and nudge the door the rest of the way open, waltzing into a wall of Grandpa’s Hai Karate aftershave. The bottle bakes in the morning sun, and the cracked cap fills the front room with a smell you know to be unnatural even at your tender age. You’ve learned to hide your nose and mouth inside your shirt when you make your way by her hamper, but it’s of no use. The warm wafting smell of unwashed granny panties still reaches the back of your throat and sits on your tongue, taking away any hankering you had for breakfast.

  You pause, blink, peer into the mouth of her closet and stall for a split second to let your eyes adjust, yet you know you need to get the job done before she comes to see what’s taking so damn long. Still, when you step inside, your foot falls right into the dog shit, and your slipper smears the Lincoln Log starter kit—sized pile of Boston Terrier turds clear across the floor.