I wormed it out of Al when he joined me for cribbage, a habit since log school. I’d hung a bug zapper in my plywood-walled room, and he dealt hands punctuated by the electrocution of flies. He said the battalion XO—the Major—had put them all up to it, ordered everyone to rotate visits to my bunker to give me some human contact, some friendship or something. To cheer me up. You have the hardest job in the battalion, he said. I probably do. I’m the mortuary affairs officer, and not ten miles away, grunts are dying.
“What is this, some sort of check-on-the-little-lady, make sure the job isn’t breaking her?” I asked, sipping my third Coke Light of the evening.
“C’mon, you know he’d say that for the rest of us too. It’s a shit detail.”
“Just because I have a pussy—”
“I know, I know,” Al broke in. “Doesn’t mean you are one.” He moved his peg on the cribbage board.
There are perks to my billet. Two plasma-screen TVs, for instance, wangled by the major so my Marines can decompress. But I’m tired of field grades parading in for the dog-and-pony show, of stretchers, nitrile gloves, face masks that don’t hide the stench. Tired of putting up a front that I’m fine while bloody scrubs swish in the washer. Once in a while I feign a deluge of paperwork and lock myself behind this plywood door, just to get an afternoon’s break. I can’t be friends with everyone.
But Supply’s skinny second lieutenant is different from the gawkers. The day he takes his turn in the funerary rotation, he walks in all round glasses and serious eyebrows. One of those straightedge types. Instead of marveling at my platoon’s MTV hookup, he looks at me, at the creased cover of The Things They Carried. Asks how I like it, drinks the Coke Light I offer. Looks at me again. I see the green flecks in his light-brown eyes. I rub the back of my neck, swat a stray hair from my collar, return his stare. I’m not used to second glances. But I notice the kid’s corner dimple when he lets himself smile. I talk to him twice as long as any other visitor.
I call him “Little”; the other officers have christened him Chicken Little for his scrawny legs, though he’s not small, a foot taller than my five-two. Afternoons, I start to look for him in the chow hall, nodding when I see him with his gunny or one of the other boot lieutenants. I know this crush is stupid, a middle-school thing, that I’m a senior captain and he’s a second lieutenant and while the higher-ups are vigilant hawks against predatory male officers, no one would believe either of us if it came out that we’d hooked up. They figure him for a virgin and me for hopelessly butch. They’ve probably called me worse, since I went through the Corps’ martial arts hazing, study Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu on the side, and now run a couple of entry-level classes for the devil dogs. During the bouts in which I cannot roll well, I roll dirty. I will let no one accuse me of being weak.
One afternoon I sidle up to the chow line behind him, sliding my tray in trace along the aluminum counter. I order red meat and white rice. He eyeballs the fish patties.
“Don’t do it,” I warn. “You’re in a landlocked country.”
“My stomach’s an MRAP,” he says. “Besides, I like fish.”
I shrug and shake my head. Secretly adore his bravado.
That evening, my watch chief hears him heaving in a Porta John. I pour boiling water into a thermos of powdered soup, and have the sergeant bring it to Little’s hooch. Little returns it the next day, clean, with a thank-you note on green waterproof paper. I tell him to come back anytime. Watch a movie, maybe. I figure—well, shit, I don’t know what I figure, but I know I want to keep talking to him.
A week later, I’m teaching a nighttime martial arts course in the sand pit outside my bunker. Little stops by on his way from evening chow and asks to help, lifting his blouse to expose a green belt with white tab. Turns out he’s an instructor too. I say sure. This is rare for me. I never let anyone interfere with my sense of control.
He holds a Thai pad for me to elbow and strike. I straddle him to demonstrate a mount, a kick of joy in my stomach at the contact, however public, however purportedly chaste. With a jerk of his hips he bucks me, thuds a palm to my ribs, flips me beneath him. Trying to gain some leverage, I graze his crotch with my heel, making him yelp. Next thing I know, he’s got me in an arm-bar, about to dislocate my elbow. My heart beats fast as I tap his leg. He tightens his grip for a second, smirks a devilish eye-flash. “Oh, does this hurt? Ma’am?” I laugh and he lets go.
Next comes the hip toss. The Marines form a semicircle and Little looms over me, bashful as if at a fraternity formal. His eyes dart to a sharp chunk of gravel in the sand a few feet away. “Trust me,” I say, nudging it aside with the toe of my boot.
Facing him, I step in, grab his right wrist with my left hand, and step back with my left foot, tracing a tiny letter C in the sand. I dig my right hip into his and hear him exhale. His body floats for a moment, hip to hip, then arcs a capital C through the air. He lands on his back, fists up and ready.
Little C, big C. Small choices snowball and slam you down on your back, blinking.
After class, I glow as he carries training pads back to my bunker. I recall one of my sergeant instructors from Officer Candidates School: a petite, muscular black woman in starched camouflage, hair slicked in an immaculate bun. She’d stood only slightly taller than the women in Munchkin Squad. She was our hard hat, the one who would run us all into the ground without chipping a manicured nail. One night we’d all stood at attention, sweat pooling even after an evening shower, and she’d savaged our platoon in a disturbingly honeyed Carolina accent.
“Lemme tell y’all something. If you a woman in the Marine Corps, you either a bitch, a dyke, or a ‘ho.’” My ears had pricked. It was the most interesting ass-chewing since the other sergeant instructor had called our platoon a “friggin’ abortion.”
“If you always gotta be with the males,” she’d continued, “and you smiling at them, and every time you talk to ’em you gotta touch they arm—” She’d whipped around. “Then you a ’ho.
“But if you do yo’ job, and you treat them like they yo’ brother, and you don’t pay no attention to them ’cause you got a man somewhere else . . .”
She’d cocked an eyebrow and pointed with an index finger.
“Then you a bitch.”
“That last one,” she’d said, sashaying out of the squad bay and shaking her head, “I don’t think I need to explain.”
Walking down that concrete path with Little, carrying fighting equipment, I’ve staked my reputation on being a martial arts instructor, a short-haired hard-ass. I don’t know what I can give him but trouble.
But after the pads are stacked in a corner of my room, he sits in a white plastic chair and fiddles with the magnetic chess set on my plywood bookshelf. My smile stretches wider and my nerves kick into high gear.
I pull two near-beers from my mini-fridge. They taste like beer, but don’t feel like beer. You’d have to drink a case to imagine a buzz. But as Little gulps his, he becomes loquacious. He’s spent weeks wandering warrens of twenty-foot containers, tracking contractors who go back to their air-conditioned cans at 1700. Rageful field grades yell at him nightly, claiming vehicle parts, ammo, and armor don’t get downrange fast enough. He needs conversation. He makes eye contact. He relishes my attention more than he lets on in public. I only want to know more about him.
“Yeah, I’m a ham,” he laughs. “Auditioned for theater in high school. The Music Man. Makeup, straw boater, everything. Girls all over me, saying what a perfect tenor I had. Anyway, that shit was done soon as my stepdad pulled up. Asshole.” His expression darkens. It’s the first real emotion I’ve seen in him. I incline my head his way, trying to catch his eye.
He snaps his chin up.
“Anyway,” he says.
“Asshole, huh? Sounds like the audience lines to Rocky Horror,” I say, and instantly regret it.
He lifts his can of O’Doul’s to his sweating neck. “Yeah, except no ‘Time Warp.’” I’m surprised he knows Rocky Horror, but then again—theater. I wish I could time warp so he was fewer than ten years younger than me.
When Little lowers the can, I notice the half-inch scar just under his right ear. “That fucker do that to you?” I ask.
“Nah. Cyst when I was eight,” he mumbles. “Benign. And never me. Just my sister.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t know til later,” he says, eyes pinned to the floor. “I swear, I didn’t find out til later.”
I can’t fault him. I know this brand of powerlessness. I’m not a bad person, though my old man spent the first decade of my bird-chested life pounding into me that I was.
So now Little comes over after martial arts class every night I’m not processing bodies. One night we pretend to watch CSI. Its theme song bleats, “Whooooo are you?” while a woman in a white lab coat mixes test tubes onscreen. And slowly I titrate my stories, testing his reaction. I tell him about cottage cheese and spongy white bread in an empty kitchen back home. Flung ashtrays that narrowly missed me, skittering across grimy linoleum. Mention that guy freshman year, so he knows I’m straight. And, as no doubt would delight the major, talk of my struggles with the dead. About the ultrasound of a sergeant’s unborn child. The suicide note from the PFC who killed himself on Mother’s Day. My buddy who I didn’t know was dead until I pulled him out of a body bag. The reservist platoon bullshitting at the motor pool when they were mortared. They’d been together so long they all had the same tattoo. When my Marines marked up the outlines on their clipboards, the tattoos were all in different locations, some chests, some ankles, lotta biceps, one wise-ass on his left butt cheek. But the same tattoo.
Throughout my exorcism, Little’s eyes remain steady on mine, and not with pity. I’ve had men look at me like that before, all little-lost-puppy-come-to-daddy-I-can-fix-you. Not this one. The set of his jaw says no one can get in. But I meet his hazel gaze and revise that to please don’t let anyone get in.
During one night’s martial arts training, Lance Corporal Mott, the one with zero filter between his brain and his mouth, says, “I like practicing ground-fighting with females because I feel their chests on mine.”
Little points to Mott’s man-boobs and says the Corps should install a red button on numbnuts like him to cut off that brain-mouth connection. But goddamned if hard biceps and solid pecs aren’t just what I’m craving. After class, I ask Little if he wants to practice ground fighting in my room, where there’s air-conditioning. He smiles a little wider than he needs to, says, “Sure.” Adrenaline streaks through me as I slide the shard of two-by-four that locks my room door. For once, my size comes in handy; we both fit in the small open space on the fake-linoleum floor. If he comes over to watch movies, and now will do this, I know his mind orbits me too.
I sit on the floor and lean back. Damn my tight lumbar; thirty-three is no joke and I’ve crouched for tense eons on convoys. He mounts me, his knees astride my waist. I’m wearing PT shorts and cammie pants, and he wears his baggy-trousers-over-shorts ensemble that makes the major call him “LT HammerTime.” Four folds of crumpled fabric mask his hard-on, but not well enough. I grab his lapels, break his posture, pull him down. I feel the heat from his cheeks reddening an inch from mine.
I teach him a different version of the usual front choke; the soft crook of my elbow brushes his ear as I wind my arm round his neck. Might look like a hug, were it not for his sharp exhale. Mimicking, he wraps his right bicep beside my carotid artery, compressing the other side with his forearm, driving me to the verge of unconsciousness. It becomes his go-to move in the minutes that follow, and he tries it over and over again in stiff jerks. He has not yet learned to use an opponent’s energy to his advantage. I spot the choke every time, swim up out of his hold. I am never nearly as gentle with the other Marines. His body freezes when he feels me winning. He still can’t relax, won’t take off his glasses. “I won’t hurt you,” I tease. I can smell his deodorant mingled with the apricot soap I dug out of my seabag after I met him.
He grips my thighs with his own, his breath in my ear. I slide my hands slowly down his ribs and he stifles a moan. On this floor, Iraq disappears. It’s only us breathing into each other.
“I want you to hold me,” I whisper. Not even that I want to fuck him—though I do—but I want to wrap myself in him, like a hunter hides in a bearskin, willing the night cold to cease.
Little breathes out. He sits up and raises his wrist, snapping me from my reverie. I think he’s getting ready to practice the choke again, but he looks at his watch and says, “Shit. I gotta go,” and clambers to his feet. He shoulders his Camelbak; the hose slithers from the floor. He flicks the mouthpiece’s lock up and down so it won’t drip. His eyebrows knit, like he’s gauging something. I get up from the floor more awkwardly than usual.
He reaches a trembling, browned hand and fluffs sand from my hair. I touch the side of his neck with my fingertips. He turns away when they rub his scar.
“Just trust me,” I say.
He mumbles again, “I gotta go,” and moves the pine lock from its place. On his way out, he looks at me over his shoulder, his eyes like a tied-up dog’s. The door bangs behind him.
I worry briefly he might tell someone, but first, no one would believe him, and second, it would mean trouble for him too. Exhaustion overtakes my anxiety. I shuck my wet undershorts, slip on a clean pair, and climb onto my thin mattress. I know I’m flirting with reprimands, and worse, rumors about my reputation. But I sincerely wonder what it would take to make Little give in. How can I earn his trust?
Gary and I had trusted each other. We’d turned fourteen the same spring, and I’d walk to his clapboard house before school, after his mom left for work. Gary was shy, and attended only shop class. He had skilled hands. The two of us fooled around in his sunny bedroom just off the kitchen, its French door latched tight. After a few weeks, he said today’s the day and I said okay, but don’t tell anyone as he fished a condom from under his mattress. It hurt at first, but then numbed, sort of. Romance movies had made me think it’d feel good, but it wasn’t much fun. Gary grimaced for the ten seconds he took to finish.
He didn’t know it was my first time too.
When I saw the blood on the sheet, I kept calm. I knew girls sometimes bled the first time.
But he thought he broke me.
He didn’t believe my halting explanation, that this was normal, that it meant I’d been a virgin. Instead he rattled the French door’s latch free and darted to the kitchen phone. In his panic, he called his mother. The rotary dial cranked an excruciating churn. He gripped the receiver, naked and breathless.
“Mom, you gotta come quick. We did this thing. She’s bleeding. I broke her!” he yelled.
It took his mother a full two minutes to figure out what he meant. Finally, she barked a hoarse laugh. I pictured her drag on a Virginia Slim behind the DMV counter.
“Christ,” she said. “She’ll be fine. Go to school. Jesus.”
I never went back to Gary’s house. Instead, I became the shy one. But I haven’t forgotten him. His face melds into a horror show of bodies as I float toward fitful sleep.
Overnight, a vehicle-borne IED strikes a truck twenty miles away. My platoon and I convoy out in the early morning, trailing the Jaws of Life. When we arrive, my staff sergeant—a reservist who’s an ambulance driver back home—slices open what’s left of the truck like a cheap can of beans. I snap on blue nitrile gloves and do the same job I’ve done for months. We recover seven body bags of gristle, slop, some recognizable human parts. Might be a bad sign that I rarely gag anymore. Our convoy returns after nightfall, trailing dust clouds that leave orange puffs in a purpling sky. As I radio in to tell them we’re close, my driver chews his Camelbak tip. I think of Little. Soon we’re back at the gate. My Marines line up at the clearing barrel. Adrenaline leaches from my nerves, replaced by exhaustion. My lower back tightens. The heat’s cooled to ninety, but I’ve sweated so hard I smell ammonia, and I’m thankful for that slight whiff over the coppery odor of blood.
Throughout the gut-soaked endeavor of cataloguing possessions and scissoring clothes, I hover over my buzzing Marines. I can never just turn myself off; I need to be present. My NCOs have a well-practiced routine to load the stretchers lining the bay in which we all work. I try to pitch in.
“Ma’am, let me get that,” says Callas, my thin female lance corporal, motioning for an end of a body bag. Her collarbone juts from the neck of her t-shirt. No one’s been hungry for a long time. They’ve all lost weight. People send care packages of PowerBars and whey protein powder. I have to put some meat on my Marines. They’re barely older than the kid I could’ve had with Gary, were we less careful.
I duck into my room to collect paperwork and glimpse my rack with exhaustion and bitterness. It’s been two years since I shared a rack with anyone. I hesitate to email Little; last night feels ages away. And no one from the outside can enter while my platoon processes bodies.
But as I unhook dog tags and a crucifix from what’s left of a neck, my mind’s eye holds an image of him standing outside our compound’s barriers, watching me. I imagine him shifting from foot to foot. I want to be his heroine.
Hours later, when we’ve finished clumping bloodied sawdust into biohazard bags, when the stretchers lie rinsed and the bodies are boxed safely in the refrigerated shipping container, I sink into my fake-leather office chair. I reach way down under my desk, beneath a balled-up poncho liner, and pull out a plastic water bottle. Its contents look like dark piss. Its peeling label’s torn to ribbons, one fringe for each night I need it. I rip another few millimeters, unscrew the top, and pour a capful. I tilt my head back a few seconds, feel the bourbon burn down my esophagus. Illegal, but it takes the edge off. I just need to close my eyes. I dig in a drawer for a nub of mint gum. Can’t get caught. I rest my elbows on the steel desk and rub my temples.
The phone rings and I mutter, “Goddammit.” Five fucking minutes is all I want. The tinny trill sounds again, the triple-ring that means it comes from off base, likely a combat surgical hospital. I bring the receiver to my ear and think of the tender skin on the side of Little’s neck. I hope I don’t break him. I don’t know what I would do or whom I would call if I broke him.
