As You Were Read online

  He takes note of how your teeth grit when you tell these stories. He surmises you don’t want to tell them. You’re bearing down so hard on your back teeth it doesn’t even look like your mouth is moving. It’s almost as if telling these stories is a kind of ventriloquism. Your teeth grind this way and that until they slide into an overbite and stay that way, giving you the inflection of a bulldog who growls when he means to say hello.

  He won’t hear about you shuffling into a trailer half-asleep—a makeshift latrine—at 3 a.m. and finding an escaped detainee. He won’t hear about you beating the guy senseless until you come back to yourself and remember where you are and that you’re on R&R, and this man, who is only trying to clean the shitters, doesn’t say a thing because he has a family to feed. At least that’s what makes the most sense.

  He won’t hear about exploding out of your bed and tackling some Lieuy who shook you awake when you needed to go talk to the TOC, so they could tell you what you could and could not say about the Blackhawk taking fire because Blackhawks can’t take fire in the Green Zone. If attacks happen there, then it wouldn’t be a Green Zone, understand?

  He won’t hear about working an intake detail and having a detainee stand like the Vitruvian Man, finding a Wahabi tattoo on his hand—a dagger with wings—when you roll his wrist skyward, looking at his face, finding his face looks far too much like your father’s, putting him in a wristlock, forcing him to the floor, down onto his knees—in terrible pain, crying the way Dad did the last time you saw him at Deb’s house during Christmas, when he said he could still kick your ass, so you made him cry out, too, “David, you’re hurting me. Please stop.” But you don’t stop until everyone hears and everyone comes to see for themselves. Aunt Bobbie comes out of the kitchen, and the cousins come inside the house, and your nephew stands back far enough to take in the spectacle of it all.

  But this man you have by the wrist isn’t Dad. He’s some bloated terrorist with a scraggly black beard, all of which leaves him looking like Bluto.

  After the fifth week, the shrink says it’ll get worse before it gets better. On the sixth week, the doctor says he’s making you worse, he’s not helping you, and asks, “What therapy do you think would help? What therapy do you want to try?” You ask, “Which one of us has a PhD?” and add an oh-by-the-way, telling him how you went to the USM library last time you visited Mississippi. You read his dissertation—at least the abstract. He stutters through the rest of the conversation in defeat, says he’ll see you once a month instead of once a week.

  Once a month happens only once.

  Before the talk therapy, there is the church. You don’t know who has your back, who you can trust, so maybe it’s time for omniscience. No one says where to be and when to be there or what to do but you, and you begin to think more and more how fellating your .40 caliber S&W doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. You have no faith in His words or comfort in His house, but you’ve witnessed enough monstrosities and atrocities to entertain the idea of ever-after evils actually existing. That alone is enough to convince almost anyone to sit in a pew and listen until they too are a lost little sheep, confused as to what it is they can and cannot do—so they resign to life on their knees. The church limps along, leaning on blind obedience, but you’ve learned blind obedience tends to get guys killed when the guy behind the podium has never stepped foot into the valley of the shadow of death, and he’s talking about being God-fearing. Fearing God, in other words. Fearing breaking His rules, and He has rules against everything and everything is an abomination, but only some of the abominations are brought into the light. Questions are met with the same look you got back in the fourth grade from Mrs. McClaire, who taught Monday through Friday in one classroom and in another come Sunday mornings. She teaches you about Abraham and all his children, but when you ask her, “What about Tad?” to prove you were paying attention to her in her other class, it’s safe to say she gets more than a tad perturbed with you and asks you to sit in the church with the adults until it’s time for the kids’ choir practice.

  You don’t argue because she’s good friends with Grandma Audrey. Tomorrow is Monday, so you’ll see Mrs. McClaire then too. If you don’t go sit with the adults, there’s a good possibility your desk will be sitting in the corner under her blackboard all by itself come Monday morning, or else right next to her desk, so you can’t disturb the rest of her class with your questions.

  The kids’ choir practice plays out like a broken record. There’s only one boy with a baritone voice, and later a bass. And that’s you. So, guess who always plays Joseph and is always at center stage when it comes time for solos during the Christmas and Easter pageants. Because of this, older girls forget how young you really are. Because of this, you are a bit naïve when it comes to matters of the heart. And there’s not a whole lot more frustrating for a girl in grade school than unrequited love.

  This one little blonde girl pushes you when you don’t even look her way while she’s flirting. Not that you’re all that aware of what flirting entails.

  She knocks you off balance and into one of the metal folding chairs. It’s innocent flirting. But when a human head slams into a metal folding chair, the metal hinge slams shut without hesitation or protest. It is what the manufacturer meant to happen when the seat and backrest are shoved toward one another with enough force, after all.

  After all this time, there’s no knowing who separated the eyebrow from the metal hinge of the chair, but it’s a safe bet it was done as a reflex. What is still fresh in your memory, however, is how everyone stared at the hand you held tight against the source of the searing pain. The kids’ choir director’s requests to see what was hidden beneath that hand were ignored until the pain subsided enough for you to pay attention to something else. The sight of the glob of blood on its way down to the floor proved as captivating for you as it is indelible.

  Blood really does fall in slow motion.

  The sweet little blonde girl who caused all of this to happen scurried over to the wastebasket and retched in regret or disgust. Who’s to say? The two of you never again spoke. But the church loves to tell you how love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy, love does not boast, love is not proud, love does not dishonor others, love is not self-seeking, love is not easily angered, love keeps no record of wrongs, love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth, love always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres, it never fails. Where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. But it fails to mention how unrequited love leaves scars.

  THE ART OF PREMEDITATION

  OF ALL THE IMAGES AND smells and sounds that burrowed into the limbic system, there’s not one memory of Mom and Dad as man and wife.

  Grandma Audrey says, “You’re making that up,” or “That’s your imagination playing tricks on you,” or simply, “That never happened,” atop her saying how Mom is dead and gone whenever she’s asked to confirm something you remember about your life back before you came to live at her house, back when you were little.

  There’s only one remaining picture of the wedding. It’s not of them standing before a preacher bookended by the best man and maid of honor, but of Mom sitting on the Davenport in Grandma Audrey’s living room between Grandpa Bub and Grandpa Bullshit. Mom is a petite little thing wearing a white wispy-looking dress with muted green trim—an overlap of hippie and disco fashion. It’s her second wedding, too, so it’s an off-white dress. She’s about six months pregnant, but no one would know by the way the dress fits her frame.

  Dad is off-camera somewhere, dressed in a Key lime—colored leisure suit.

  Grandpa Bub has squished himself up against the far end of the Davenport and stares off into the middle distance. There’s plenty of room for the three of them, but he’s doing all he can to cushion himself from this shotgun wedding.

  Grandpa Bullshit leans as far forward as he can in the hopes of
getting out of frame, but his buzz cut and burning cigarette are in sharp focus.

  The only picture of Mom and Dad while they’re married is one of them sitting on that same olive-drab Davenport with you three months later. You can’t be more than a couple of days old. Mom’s in a T-shirt proclaiming “What You See Is What You Get,” and Dad’s dressed in a pair of black and blue and gray plaid bell bottoms, along with a white short-sleeve shirt with a butterfly collar.

  He hasn’t buttoned his shirt and looks like an Indian Tony Manero. He’s smiling, but not at the camera. He’s got his arm around Mom and his eyes glued to you, his only begotten son. Mom, though, she’s posed, sitting up straight, holding you up for whoever is behind the camera, smiling ear to ear. Her whiteness—your whiteness—never dawns on you until it is placed alongside his Indianness.

  Dad’s been divorced for most of your life and sparsely dated. There is one time during junior high when you crawl into his car and catch a whiff of something. In the backseat lies a crumpled mess a little too lacy to belong to either of you two. Curiosity gets in the way of better judgment, and you find yourself pinching a pair of panties.

  Dad says, “Hmm, where’d those come from?” with a laugh.

  You say, “Where’d that come from?” pointing to the half-smoked joint in the ashtray, but he doesn’t answer. He just lets out the clutch and drives down the alleyway.

  Before whoever forgot her panties, there was Connie. They dated for several years, but she stopped coming around right after you turned five, right after she bought you this massive folding case full of Crayola water paints, crayons, Cray-Pas, colored pencils, markers—sixty-four of each.

  More than that, for a time, Connie made you feel like you had a mom.

  The last image you have of her is when she and her sister Donna, along with Aunt Bobbie and Auntie Harriet and Grandma Audrey and Debbie, all sat around the dining room table, clucking, talking bad about men.

  You do your best to ignore them and their girl talk. When you grow weary of being excluded from the conversation because you’re a boy, you say something about how you don’t want to be a man when you grow up, which makes them all cackle. No one likes getting laughed at, so you sprawl out on the carpet with a bunch of construction paper and all those colors and create. But “If you’re going to eavesdrop, pay attention.” At least that’s what Grandma Audrey always said.

  Connie’s dating Dad, and Grandma’s got Grandpa Bub. Auntie Harriet has henpecked the hell out of Uncle Harold. Aunt Bobbie’s fine without a man, but Donna does have man problems.

  Her husband, Steve, is a mailman, but he’s not the proverbial mailman with a bunch of kids living along his route who look suspiciously like him. Donna’s problem arises from the recent discovery of how Steve has been inappropriate with her daughters since right after they got married. Her oldest won’t talk. She cries when you ask her what’s wrong. It was her youngest who told Donna what was happening.

  Someone says something about cutting off his tallywacker.

  Someone else shakes their head and says she has to kill the bastard.

  Connie agrees and asks, “How?”

  Shoot him, plain and simple, is the consensus of the table.

  Take a gun and shoot him.

  Connie says something about ambushing him along his mail route while it’s still dark out and shooting him in the chest.

  Grandma says there’s no way you could sneak up on a man who walks the same route every single day. Men are already paranoid as can be. She could never walk up behind her Gene without him getting spooked even while he was relaxing in the recliner.

  Then the table gets a bit more creative.

  Then they get really specific.

  Then Grandma says they got to stop talking about it. It’s gone from a bunch of hypotheticals to premeditation. She crushes out her cigarette, leans back in her chair, folds her arms. Connie says they have to get going anyway.

  Steve was killed on April 4, 1982.

  Donna found a guy at the Red Lion Bar who agreed to do it for five hundred dollars—let’s call him Todd. She knew the guy. She was a regular, as was he. As was Dad. Steve wasn’t. Todd didn’t know Donna’s husband; he only knew Steve was a child-molesting mailman. He didn’t need to know much else, but, still, Donna added a little more to the story every time she reintroduced the subject.

  She even wrote down her husband’s work schedule and the license plate numbers for the vehicles he drove.

  Todd told her he’d think about it.

  Two hours passed, and Todd had heard enough, told Donna to drive him home where he’d change clothes. Then he asked if she would be so kind as to bring him up to the Bridgeman’s restaurant across the street from the bowling alley. He’d handle things from there.

  Todd waited for Steve in the parking lot by his vehicle, asked if he could hitch a ride. Steve agreed, since Todd’s place was along the way.

  Todd shot Steve in the chest a total of five times, dumped his body, drove his Jeep back to the bowling alley, called Donna from a payphone, told her to come to get him, but grew antsy and walked to her house instead. From there, the two of them went down to the Aerial Lift Bridge and parked in its shadow to talk about what happened before he took off for Texas.

  Donna was convicted of first-degree murder for her involvement in her husband’s death. Todd did time, too, of course.

  A week after the trial, Connie told Donna’s attorney it was her who set the whole thing up—not her sister. She never even let her sister know what she had planned.

  Donna was innocent. Oblivious.

  The attorney taped the conversation, which contradicted her testimony at the earlier trial. Guilt-ridden, she admitted to lying under oath and talking her sister into lying too.

  Come Connie’s trial, she pleaded the Fifth. Donna sang. She talked about how they rehearsed what to say so much that they had a running bet concerning the verdict. Connie pleaded guilty to perjury and conspiring to mislead the jury. The court concluded anyone aware of the things Steve did to Donna’s girls had reason to fabricate a fictional version of what they knew about his demise—including Connie’s lover—which is how the court officially referred to Dad.

  He never dated again.

  He didn’t know how to take the fact that the woman he loved used all the other women he loved as a think tank to come up with a way to kill off his child-molesting brother-in-law. It was a bit too much for him to wrap his head around. He stayed single, hoarded VHS tapes with unending hours of bootleg porn, and drank. The only pictures of women he kept around were printed on shiny paper and unfolded from the center of some magazine.

  MULTIPURPOSE CLEANER

  YOUR FIRST MEMORY IS NOT when the wolf pups bit at your ankles and pulled the socks and shoes from your feet. If you close your eyes, shuffle through all those little flits and flashes from childhood, it’ll dawn on you how that very first memory involved Grandma Lynn, Grandpa Bullshit, and the Pillsbury Doughboy. The whole scene takes all of ten seconds.

  While toddling around her kitchen, out of curiosity you wander over to her to see what she is doing. Someone working quietly draws you in like the hypnotic blue light of a bug zapper. You stop inches from her butt—right as she bangs a can of biscuits against the edge of the counter hard enough for them to burst open on the first try. You’re in diapers still, which is fortunate, because you fall to the floor, cheeks first, and wail. It’s your own fault for walking around like a cat all the time, anyway. But you do so because Dad’s head is sensitive to sound once he finds his way home, so like a doting son you learn to tiptoe around the trailer to not disturb his beauty sleep. But even that’s not exactly foolproof, so Mom plops you down into the playpen, where you sit hunched against the screen mesh until lunchtime, and then dinner time, and then bedtime, until the doctor says you have a curvature of the spine.

  Your crying on the kitchen floor gets drowned out by Grandpa Bullshit’s laughing. He sits and watches the whole thing play out. He
knows what’s coming, and he thinks it’ll be funny as all hell and wouldn’t dare spoil it for himself by uttering a word of warning. His laugh turns to a cough, which turns to phlegm rising, so he makes his way to the spittoon beside his bed.

  That would be the same spittoon Mom talks about in another story, about you acting out at her parents’ house because you can’t at your parents’ house. She found you laughing, giggling, playing in their bedroom, jumping on their springy double bed. Instead of breaking your neck, you bounce all over until you slide off the edge and land feet first into the spittoon, where your knees fold and you sink to your chin, and the cup overfloweth.

  Mom gags and lets go a shiver when she tells you this part of the story.

  While she cleans her father’s phlegm out of your hair and from between your toes and the creases of your chubby little legs, you can’t stop giggling. It tickles you and sickens her each time her fingers find another glob of her father’s phlegm caked in some hidden crease. It eventually becomes too much for her to handle and she pukes all over you.

  The shower is raining down, causing you to slide this way and that, all across the tub in every imaginable direction. You are still laughing, giggling, having a grand ol’ time, while she’s grabbing for you, trying to get hold of you, and getting sicker each time she touches you. This last small detail sticks with you once you remember how Mom said she never wanted kids; she only wanted out of her parents’ house.

  Flash forward to the summer before you turned four, the first summer after you went to stay with Grandma Audrey, the summer you got into the bucket of tar when someone forgot to snap the lid down tight after they’d finished fixing the leaky roof.