HECTOR sits on the sidelines, watching the smooth white sphere arc back and forth. The players are evenly matched, and the steady, rhythmic clicks as the ball shuttles this way and that are reassuring. Hypnotic. He can close his eyes and almost, for a while, forget.
The Corps calls it the Wounded Warrior Regiment. It’s like a hospital, but not exactly. The division sent him here after the hospital ship got him off the ventilator and, eventually, okayed him for air travel.
The Wounded Warriors live in hundreds of mobile homes lined up in ranks behind the headquarters building at Pendleton. The trailers were trucked in and set up fast and cheap to house the thousands of casualties streaming back from the Pacific. There’s not much going on to keep everyone occupied, though. Some local folks, mainly vets, widows, and older people, retirees Hector figures, have organized outings for the recovering troops. Softball games, trips to San Diego, picnics on the beach. Donated money to send them sports equipment, like the Ping-Pong table here in the rec room.
He went on one of the outings a week ago, to San Onofre. The same town he and his School of Infantry squad went to on liberty, years ago, before shipping out. Back then the gate had been blocked with orange Jersey barriers, HESCO bastions, and concertina. JLTVs with mounted .50s had overlooked it, while armed sentries paced the flanks, frowning down at the new Marines as they ambled out on their first liberty.
Now those barriers were gone, dismantled. Instead, two lone guards snapped to attention, saluting the veterans as they walked and limped and crutched and wheeled past toward the waiting buses.
When they reached the beach, the guys who could walk were assigned to bungalows. The ones who couldn’t had special tents, right down on the shore. The people running the rec area had set up for a campfire that night, and after a cookout with hot dogs and chips and pizza and macaroni salad and even a thirty-two-ounce can of Bagby each, a guitarist had led a sing-along.
But he left shortly after it started, and walked down the beach alone. Looking up at the stars as they wheeled down to die in the sea. Listening to the surf. A siren song that was chilling, unpleasant, because it took him back to Itbayat, where his company had been pinned down and almost wiped out.
He’d watched the moon glittering on the waves.
Glittering, above their faces …
He didn’t want to. But he couldn’t help it.
He looked down, into the water. And there they were.
Some were waving to him. Others had their mouths open wide. The ones who hadn’t made it. They seemed to be shouting, but he couldn’t hear their words. Anyway, he knew what they wanted.
They missed him.
They wanted him with them.
He stood watching them for a long time, there in the wind from the sea, and at last waded out. In his boots. In his MARPATs. Out into the surf.
He hesitated as the cold reached his crotch. Drew a breath, shuddering.
Now they sounded closer. A distant but definitely more distinct murmuring. Though he still couldn’t quite make out the words. Maybe a little closer …
He took another few steps into the rolling surf. Now the sea was at his chest.
The moon glittered on the waves, sparkling like diamonds, cold as rimefrost.
He took another step, and suddenly the bottom caved away beneath his boots. He sucked a breath just before his head went under. Flailed, beating at the water, and clawed himself back up to the air.
He broke the surface gasping, unable to stay down, yet struggling to keep his nose above the water. Suspended. Between. The sea icy cold. Numbing. He’d never been a good swimmer. Failed the test in boot camp. Except back then, at the start of the war, it’d been impossible to fail. You just got kicked back to the Booger Squad, to do it all over again. Until finally they gave up and shipped you out anyway.
Fifty yards out, sculling desperately to keep his head above water against the steadily increasing pull of wet boots and soaked cloth, he stared out to sea, out over toward the far Pacific, remembering.
A voice lifted behind him. Higher, clearer than the rest. For a moment he thought it was Lieutenant Ffoulk, then remembered: she was dead, shot by a sniper while they were hauling down the flag in Taipei. Her head haloed instantly with a pink mist.
An icy crest rolled over him, submerged him, and he came up even less buoyant, gasping, sputtering. The voice called again, more urgently. A woman’s. So maybe it was Ffoulk. Or Orietta.
Maybe now, so close to rejoining the ranks of his dead, he could finally hear them clearly …
He cocked his head, splashing, coughing, choking on new mouthfuls of salty sea in the gathering darkness. No, it wasn’t Ffoulk. Somebody was yelling at him. From back on the shore. “Hey you! Out there in the water!”
He sculled around, mind still roiling, to a sight that instantly cleared it. He stopped fighting then, staring instead, and instantly started to slip under.
The woman was shedding her clothes as she ran, tossing away her uniform blouse. Kicking away her boots. Then bending, stripping off trousers. Until, all but naked, pale-radiant in the moonlight, she arched like a dolphin over a breaker and plunged into the surf. Her head emerged a moment later, as she shook out long dark hair, then jabbed at the sea in a savage crawl.
Toward him. He floated there, flummoxed, gaping at her until the ocean flooded his mouth and choked him again and he snapped it closed, sputtering. She ducked under a roller and emerged again. Her back glowed in the moonlight. The sea seemed to glow around her as she thrashed through it. It seethed with a greenish-yellow silent luminosity, a phosphorescent torpedo-wake as she plunged forward, turning her face upward at every alternate stroke to draw breath.
When she reached him, she yelled something uninterpretable, and grabbed his shoulder.
Before he could react she punched him hard in the gut, doubling him and emptying his lungs. She spun him as he choked and sputtered, circling his neck with a muscular forearm. Then she began towing him back toward shore with powerful, downward-thrusting chops of her free arm.
He fought her, dragged willy-nilly along on his back, but his flailing fists encountered only the unresisting sea. After a few more futile thrashes and useless jerks he sagged, winded. Gave up and lay back, letting her tow him along with those powerful one-armed strokes, tireless as a tugboat.
At last his dragging heels brushed a foothold. A sandbar, a few yards out from the beach. She relaxed her grip and let him find his footing. The sand caved softly, yielding under his heels. The surf battered them, nearly knocking him down.
She steadied him with a hand on his arm, regarding him in the blanched light of the full moon. “Y’okay?” she gasped.
“Uh … yeah. You … anyway. Thanks.”
“Looked like you were. In trouble. Out there,” she panted out, still winded. “Sorry I … had to punch you. If I hadn’t, you’d’ve grabbed me. Drowned us both.” She let go and bent too, hands on knees, sucking in air. They leaned together now, bracing each other as another comber hit them, like a couple of drenched linemen.
When it passed on he blinked salt sting from his eyes and saw her clearly for the first time. In the moonlight, the wet bra and white panties were transparent. He gazed at goose-pimpled arms, little erect nipples, hard muscular arms, a dark delta at the crotch. Sturdy thighs and stockinged feet. Dark hair straggling down over above a face oval, yet almost masculine, with a taut jaw and black eyebrows that nearly met in the center. He shivered in the cold, gaze riveted to dark eyes.
She held him at arm’s length, regarding him too with a cool yet still worried expression. “Carlina Farnaccio.”
“Hector Ramos. Second of the Third.”
“A marine.”
“Yeah … you?”
“Navy. Corpsman. I gave you your Chink Flu meds when you got here, remember? At least I think that was you.”
“I don’t remember … wasn’t in such great shape.”
“No, a lot of you really aren’t.” Grabbing his wrist, she led him toward the shore. Tossing back, “What the fuck’re you doing out there anyway? This isn’t the swimming beach. Aren’t you afraid of sharks?”
“I just … felt like it.”
“Out here, all alone. You weren’t having intrusive thoughts?” Leading him up toward the dunes, she suddenly reverted to some kind of clinical mode. “You weren’t trying to—?”
“Huh? Oh. No, fuck no. I was just cooling off.”
“Well, looks like it worked. You’re shivering pretty bad,” she said. As they reached the trail of her clothes, she bent to pick them up. “Jeez … I’m gonna be wearing sandpaper the rest of the night.” But instead of pulling them on, she felt his forehead, like a mother checking on a fevered child. “Wow. You’re really hypothermic … Here, let’s lay down. Out of the wind.”
She smoothed her clothes down on the sand, like a patchwork blanket, between the waving grasses. He relaxed obediently. She knelt, then slithered forward, covering him with her nearly naked body. “I better warm you up. Body heat, you know?”
Her weight felt reassuring. Firm, yet giving. Accommodating its shape to his. Her skin felt clammy at first, as cold as his, warmthless and unliving as the sand beneath them.
But gradually it warmed. Her cheek lay close against his. Her arms enfolded him. He closed his eyes against a sudden prickle of tears that welled from some depth he couldn’t plumb. He panted, trying to muffle his sobs.
“Better?” she whispered, breath warm on his ear.
“Yeah … yeah.” He closed his eyes, then opened them again to the moon. Feeling the warmth slowly return to his skin. And trickle downward …
She wriggled slightly, then lifted herself and glanced down the length of their entwined bodies. “Hey … what’s this shit? Are you fucking kidding me?”
He grimaced. “I’m sorry—it’s just—”
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” She grinned. Felt down between their pressed-together bodies, and to his astonishment and near horror lightly traced the outline of his erect penis under the wet fabric with thumb and forefinger.
He shuddered, closing his eyes involuntarily. She sighed, and raised herself a little on both arms, peering over the top of the dune. Then placed her lips next to his ear and whispered, so softly he almost couldn’t hear it over the rustle of the wind in the sea grass, over the high endless song the machine guns had left in his head, “If you want, you can take off your pants and fuck me. Hector. Get some of that shitty war out of your system. But only if you want.”
AND now he’s sitting in the MWR hut, watching two clueless corporals each with only one hand left battering a fucking little plastic ball back and forth as seriously as if it meant an Olympic medal. The posters on the walls are about something called Warrior Games. Hector can’t care less. He has no interest in power lifting, or rowing, or shooting clay pigeons, or any of that shit. Actually, if you gave him a shotgun, he’d probably start shooting the people around him. Like he’d feverishly sworn to do, back on the hospital ship.
He closes his eyes and shudders. Remembering the helplessness, the terror. Having that thing down his throat. Paralyzed, unable to move or fight, trapped like the quarry of some predatory alien, enwebbed and hung to season before being devoured at leisure.
The trouble is, there really isn’t anything that interests him. At all. Except maybe for Carlina. And he’s not sure yet what that means, other than that they get it on at every opportunity.
He doesn’t have any other friends here. There are some other dudes from the Second, but he didn’t know them downrange and feels no connection. He does know his RCC. His care coordinator’s a bouncy always-smiling white girl, Sergeant Brinnell. She made a joke about being hard when they first met, but he didn’t get it. He has to go to therapy every weekday afternoon, in the Head Shed trailer, where he and ten other guys and girls sit around and try to talk about their days. Which are always the same, of course. And their nights, which suck and are sometimes pretty tormented.
The white Ping-Pong ball clicks, takes a sudden wild spin off the table, and flies directly at his face. He flinches away, dropping, hitting the floor with both hands and rolling. But no one laughs. No one in the whole hut laughs, though they all glance over to see what made him hit the deck.
There’s that, at least. They’re all in the same boat here.
USS Totally Fucked.
THAT afternoon at session a fat civilian in a too-long blue Patriot tie gives a speech. He talks about the continuum of care and its three phases: recovery, rehabilitation, and reintegration. He’s from the VA. Not a Marine. Hector tunes out after the first three seconds. He’s heard it all before, but then, he’s been here longer than some of the new guys.
Under the drone of the lecture he drifts back to that first night with Carlina. Her teasing smile in the rimefrost moonlight as the sea grass waved above them. The ripping, succulent pain of release. Then, her lying next to him in the dark, gently manipulating an organ he’d nearly forgotten he possessed.
Until it rose again, and she rolled over once more atop him, this time stretching and working until she too achieved a short, choked cry that mingled with the shrieks of the seabirds and the booming crash of the surf.
Surreptitiously, under the shield of the Recovery binder he has to bring to each session, he strokes himself under the rough digitally patterned fabric.
THAT night he wins a remote availability. You sign up for it in advance, and there’s some kind of lottery, since connections are still tough to get. He lines up outside the video booth, a half-enclosed setup between the trailers. No one likes it because there’s no privacy, so you can’t do a sex call, but it’s better than nothing.
Anyway, he isn’t interested in a sex call. Carlina has taken the edge off that. They’ve met twice more, once at her hootch when her bunkie was out, the other time out in the dunes behind the camp. Spreading a blanket, and talking, then getting it on. In a savage, almost tigerish way he’s never encountered before. Certainly not in the awkward gropings in his old Kia, behind the high school football field. She takes him from above, savagely, as if commandeering his dick for wartime use. And something repressed and angry in him responds, and they copulate savagely under the stars again and again until they roll apart exhausted as if they’d just staggered out of the surf together once more.
He shakes this intrusive thought off as his mom appears on the screen. She looks exhausted, in a rumpled green smock like hospital scrubs, but smiles broadly at the sight of him. “Héctor. Como estas hijo, estas mejor? Te veo pronto en casa?”
For the first time in his life it feels weird speaking Spanish. After so long away … “Hello, Mom. How’s everybody there?”
“Your sister esta muy bien … Your hermano called from Mexico, he has a new bebe … I am a grandmother! So proud. You will see pictures, when you come home. When will you be here, in the casa?”
“I don’t know. Don’t know what they’re planning to do with us.”
“What will you do when you come home, mi hijo? Work at Farmer Seth’s? They have to give back your old job when soldiers come home, they say so on Patriot Network.”
The processing plant. Most of the workers were immigrants; Americans wouldn’t work the way the lines demanded. All the lines: deboning, whole bird, grading, cut up. These ran at different speeds, but no one could ever stop or rest. Five minutes off every hour. Half an hour for lunch.
He squeezes his eyes shut, remembering the Hanging Room. The rattling clang of the stainless hooks. The blood. The shit. The fluttering, squawking, terrified birds. The snarl of machinery, the whir of exhaust fans, the mutter of forklifts bustling cartons of disassembled meat off to the freezers. Above, looking down from their offices, the Bosses. And the clattering endless whine of the Line echoing, stainless, rubberized, greased with fat and blood.
But the chicken’s cheap in the scarlet packages, with cheerful, friendly Farmer Seth, lanky and white-bearded in trademark yellow bib overalls, grinning out from the plastic wrapping.
He jerks his eyes open, sweating. No. No way is he going back there.
“Héctor? Son?”
“Uh, no lo creo. There’s got to be someplace better to work.”
“Yo tampoco lo creo.” Doubt in her voice. “Not a-round here. It’s not so bad, though, is it? They don’t pay much but the work is steady. La gente siempre va a comer pollo. And if you get hurt they give you another job. Like your friend with the one arm, what is his name—”
“José’s not my friend,” Hector grits out. “He’s the production foreman. And he only got that job after he lost his arm in the ice machine because he said he’d sue the company.”
He hears the exasperation in his voice and tries to rein it in. Confronting her concerned, worn, tired face on the screen … She only wanted what was best for him. But a job, citizenship, to no longer have the fucking Loyalty League harassing them, that would be heaven on earth for her. “What are you doing now, Ma?”
“Oh, I am taking care of old Mrs. Custis. I stay there at night. Make her supper. Take her to el retrete. Keep the place clean. You know how it is.”
“I wish you didn’t have to work so hard, Ma. Wish you didn’t have to at all.”
“Oh, it is not too bad. It keeps me busy.” A pause, during which someone outside the partition yells he’s going over his five minutes. Hector shouts back, “Fuck off, knuckle fucker!”
His mother frowns. “What was that, mi hijo?”
“Nothing, nothing, some ass—some guys here crowding me. I can’t stay on too much longer.”
“You want to know about Mirielle, I guess. I have not seen her. I think she and her mama may be out of town. She’s a good girl, Mirielle. You could do worse.”
Someone bangs on the outside of the booth. “You’re eating my time too, asshole. Hang the fuck up! Other guys wanna talk!”
Hector yells back, but he’s got to wrap this up. His mother asks worriedly what’s going on there, why they are shouting. Is he safe?
He doesn’t want to think about Mirielle. He’d carried the rosary she gave him. For a while. But after the shambles and death on Taiwan, then Hainan, she’d dropped astern like garbage in a ship’s wake. Become a hazy distant memory, no longer even a dream. “Uh, Ma, no way. Okay? I got too many problems now to foist them off on her. She’d be better off without me. You can tell her that, okay? Look, that yelling, that’s just the other guys wanting their turn on the vid. I’m doing okay, Ma. A lot of people here’re a lot worse off than I am.”
“Tell me you will come home safe, Héctor.” Her voice was pleading. Fuck, she was shaking out a tissue, which meant she was going to cry.
“I got to go, Ma. Love you!”
“Vaya con Dios, Héctor, mi amado hijo. Call me again soon.”
THAT night he meets Carlina again. This time, out behind the trailers. There’s a baseball diamond hardly any of the patients use, though the amputees sometimes come out here to practice walking the bases on their new legs. Which look nearly real, Hector has to admit.
His own injuries are less evident. If only they could replace his brain with some computer box strapped around his neck, like the ones that control the artificial legs …
She’s waiting for him in the dugout. Somebody’s equipped this as a snake pit, with a narrow bunk mattress, cheap bead curtains, a box fan, and a battered red-and-green Yeti cooler. It’s apparently obscure enough, or maybe notorious enough, that the roving patrols don’t come here. Hector wonders how she knows about it. Other than her hootch or the dunes there isn’t any other place to get together on site. He wonders why. Is not getting laid supposed to help them recover? Certainly being with Carlina has dragged him a little bit out of his head. If only to make him get boners during session.
They strip down and within seconds fell on each other like starving jungle cats. He keeps trying to roll on top but she won’t let him. “You wanna do this, we do it my way,” she states. There’s no arguing with this, so he rolls off and positions himself on his back on the stained, mold-stinky mattress.
The smell reminds him suddenly of the one time he got it off during the war, other than the hand job from Orietta at boot camp, and popping his nut into a MWR napkin. Like most everybody else in the platoon, which sometimes left the ground outside their foxholes littered with gray-green tissues.
The Indo senior enlisted had taken him to a massage and spa place in Bongkaran, where he paired off with a pouty and actually pretty hot little whore who said she was into Hispanic guys. She’d giggled when he asked if she was a ladyboy, and pulled down her pants to show him she wasn’t. He’d been careful to wear a banana burka, though. Which he isn’t doing now, but Carlina’s never said anything about protection.
Then he forgets everything as she leans over him and tucks it in. To that warm welcoming place where he can forget all the things he doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to remember. The reproachful dead faces he doesn’t want to see but can’t look away from. The numb horror he doesn’t want to carry inside his head, like a fucking bullet the fucking surgeons can’t get to, so they just leave it there. To fester and work itself closer to his heart, gradually, to kill him, sometime, no one can tell when.
Her thrusting hips take him out of himself but he falls back. Coming close. She increases the pace, up and down, sliding, smiling down at him as his face tightens, as his whole body strains upward.
He fires, grabbing her shoulders, the grunting agonized cry bursting out of him in the dugout beneath the earth. Buried, like so many good fucking Marines.
He just hopes that whatever’s going to be at the end of this purgatory, he gets there soon.
THEY lie exhausted on the flaccid mattress, looking up together once more at the stars twinkling above the outfield fence. Bright and clear tonight, as if they’re at sea. Past that glow the marigold night lights of the camp. He’s stroking her hair. She’s talking about cutting it short, but he doesn’t want her to. He doesn’t like short hair on girls. And so far, at least, she hasn’t. Maybe just for him? He doesn’t think so, but can’t help wondering.
She murmurs, “You feelin’ better now?”
“Yeah. A lot.”
“No more walking out into the surf, and not coming back?”
“Told you, I wasn’t thinking about that,” he lies.
“Like fuck you weren’t. I looked at your record, Ramos. You were some fucked up. Are some fucked up.”
“My breathing’s a lot better.”
“I’m not talking about your lungs. You were down for compromised immune system, eye damage, complex PTSD, alcohol addiction, moral trauma, and dissociation. As soon as they removed the restraints, you tried to choke one of the doctors on the hospital ship. Your shrink recommended a suicide watch. He wants you red-flagged on a watch list when they release you.” She rolls over and frowns. “You do know all this, right?”
He takes a deep breath. Shrugs. “All I know is, I can’t stop thinking about stuff. And I don’t care about what happens now, or getting home, or anything. DGAF, you know?”
She cradles his face in both hands and sighs. “You went through some dread shit, Hec. Nobody can say you haven’t, a three-island Marine. And you still came back. In one piece. More or less.”
He takes another breath, and to his astonishment tears start to burn again. What the fuck, over? Every time he makes it with this bitch, he cries. What kind of pussy is he turning into? But now, instead of toughing it out or laughing it off he mutters, surprising himself, “I don’t feel like I should have. Come back, I mean.”
She chuckles bitterly. “When your buds didn’t. Yeah. I hear that all the time. Hector, it’s just that, you won the lottery. You got lucky! Sure, go ahead and miss them. But there’s nothing you can do about it. Or that you have to do about it. Just try to remember them, and get on with life as best you can.”
Pretty much what the fat civilian in the too-long tie said too. But somehow, coming from her, here, now, it seems to mean more. Maybe because he’s starting to wonder if maybe he loves her.
It’s a scary thought. Not quite as puckery as riding an ACV in to the beach while the Slants are shelling the shit out of you, but still, scary in its own way.
And maybe she knows this just from him not saying much, because she says, still looking away, “You know, pretty soon now you’re going to get mustered out.”
“You think?”
“I know. They don’t want to keep you guys here any longer than they have to. They’ll unload you on the VA, give you a pat on the back, and that’ll be it.”
He sighs, not wanting to think about it. Wanting to hold on to this instead. This night. Their night. Whatever it means.
But she won’t stop talking. “So what are you going to do?”
“Me? I was thinking about … staying around here. In San Diego. Until your tour’s up.”
“Until my tour is up.” Her tone is flat, neutral. “What’s that mean? I hope, not what I think.”
“I mean … I like you. I thought you liked me.”
She rolls off him and sits up. Reaches for her bra, huffing, looking away. “That’s beside the point. You’re getting out. Going home. Wherever that is.
“But me, I’m staying in. I’m a regular, Hec. A fucking lifer, unnerstand? I’m gonna make master chief and retire on twenty. Maybe do enlisted-to-medical. At least get my degree.” Her shadow seems to be farther away somehow, even though she’s still sitting on the same mattress with him. “I like you, sure. But this is nothing special, for either of us. I’m not going home with you, or making this forever after. Just to get that clear.”
He lies waiting, he’s not sure for what; maybe giving her a chance to change her mind. “So this is just a hookup?” He can’t keep the hurt tone out of his voice.
“You needed it. And, yeah, I liked it. But you ain’t the only patient I liked this year.”
“Oh, I get it. You fucked me as … part of my therapy.”
She barks a laugh, buttoning her blouse, then stands to work her trou up over her hips. “Sure! Just part of the treatment. CT scan, blood work, psych counseling, and get it off with Carlina. That’s pretty fucking insulting, you know that? Or it would be, if it didn’t work better than the meds.”
He sits up and grabs her wrist. “I didn’t mean that. Don’t go away mad. It … I got to say, it does kind of … work. It kind of got me … interested again.”
“It got you horny again.” The tension seems to ease off; they’re both laughing now. Though his sounds forced, even to him.
“You really think I’ll get out of here pretty soon?” he asks.
“I shouldn’t tell you this. Don’t tell anybody. But they’ll discharge you next week. You know, not enough beds, not enough staff. They can only keep the troops so badly wounded they can’t go back to their families. Facial wounds. Nutcases. Quads. You’re Olympic material compared to some of these guys. As you well know.”
“As I well know,” he repeats. He’d wandered into one of those wards last week. And never wanted to see stuff like that again. “Maybe you’re right.”
“Oh, I’m right, all right.” She straightens from zipping her boots. “You’ll have a great life, Hec. Go home. Find some local cutie. Squirt out a few brown-eyed puppies. Forget the war. Forget me. Pretend everything’s cool. And someday you’ll realize, it really is. Believe me.”
A scuffing, followed by a faint clatter of tiny glass spheres. He lies half naked, spent, the wind cold on his exposed groin, arm over his eyes. When she doesn’t say anything more he mutters, “You still there? Carlina?”
When he opens his eyes, the dugout’s empty. She’s gone, but the stars still glitter through the swaying beads of the curtain, reflected and refracted from bead to sparkling bead, so they seem to be twinkling all the more brightly.