Chapter
“IT’S LOADED.”
ARCHIE opens his fingers. The ex collapses onto the ground and scrambles up and backwards. Using his Sig to point the direction of their mutual path, Archie backs the ex into the space between bins further down the alley. The bins hide them from the people on the street as well as anyone strolling in the alley that crosses the one they’re in, and curious voyeurs peeking from windows and doors. Archie adjusts his hold on his grip and eases his finger from alongside the trigger guard toward the trigger. The ex freezes; his hands creep up into the air.
Ping.
Archie blinks.
His iPhone.
“Don’t move,” he warns the ex as he shifts the pistol from his right hand to his left in order to retrieve his iPhone from his inside pocket. “I’m ambidextrous.”
The ex doesn’t move.
Archie flicks on his iPhone, raising it to the same level as the ex’s face so that he can watch both the ex and read the screen. Archie’s forefinger remains alongside the trigger guard as he presses down the Home button. His iPhone vibrates in obedience. “Read messages,” Archie tells Siri. Siri reads out loud the one new message in her chirpy artificial voice after saying who it’s from and when it was sent. Hearing who the sender is blanks Archie’s mind. Ma. Archie isn’t sure what to make of her messaging him. Ma’s words repeat in his head like rhythmic hammer blows: “Thank you, thank you for serving, my son. I hope you are well. We miss you. Come back soon.”
Ma, who hasn’t messaged or emailed him since he left for Canada. Sir had told his retreating back: “Your Mom isn’t going to talk to you for this. You’re leaving her, and I’ll have to pick up the pieces from this. You’re breaking your Mom’s heart, you know.”
Archie had felt nothing. Ma was the silent type, hardly said a word, simply cooked and looked after them all. Archie cannot recall having a conversation with her that lasted longer than two minutes. He repeats the message silently to himself. He notices she omitted, “I love you.” Or “Love Ma.”
The ex stirs, trying to blend into the wall. Archie’s forefinger shifts into trigger position while his hand holding the iPhone remains frozen in its upraised position. The ex’s eyes widen in terror.
Swoosh.
“Read the email,” Archie commands Siri.
Siri tells him who it’s from. She reads out loud the subject line: “Happy Veteran’s Day.”
Happy? Archie wonders morosely. Who considers Veterans Day a happy occasion? Greeting card companies. And then the name of the sender drops into his consciousness: his father’s name. Curiosity and grief get the better of him, and he unlocks his iPhone to read the email.
It’s a gif. There are fireworks exploding behind an elephant in Arctic camouflage, saluting him. “Happy Veteran’s Day!” it reads. “Thank you for serving your country. You’ve done your time. You’ve protected us. You’ve made us proud.” Underneath the gif, Sir had typed a few words: “It was a righteous shoot. I hope you be happy, son.”
A can rolling over a heaved crack in the asphalt focuses Archie’s eyes back onto Nadine’s ex and solidifies his left arm into shooting position. The ex squeaks: “It wasn’t me. I’m not moving, man.”
Swoosh.
Archie narrows his eyes at him. He slides his eyes to read the new email while holding the ex in his sensory view. The email is a picture, this time of the stars and stripes flying in the wind of war. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” is written all over the flag. Stephen had written underneath it: “I hope you have a great day bro.”
Bro?
Who’s Stephen hanging out with that he needs to impress? Did one of his marks find out about his twin serving in the army and make some innocent remark about remembering him on Veterans’ Day? I can hear the conversation now. A scowl deepens the lines on either side of Archie’s mouth, grooves canyons between his eyes, and blackens his deep-brown eyes. The imagined conversation grips his mind: “You got a brother in the army? He’s a vet? You must be so proud. I bet he got a medal, too? He did? You served with him? No? But I bet you remembered what he did for all of us. You must be proud of him. I’m proud of all the soldiers who serve our great country. What’d you do for Veterans Day, send him an e-card?” And Stephen would’ve said. “Yes,” and then sent him the e-card to show his client he had. Some things Stephen didn’t fudge the truth about. One of them was over veterans. And he, Archie, was a veteran.
He glances at the ex. The ex’s face is white, whiter than his eyes. His arms stretch high into the air; the backs of his hands flat against the blackened-red brick wall behind him with its shards of peeling paint left from some decades-old paint job. Archie stares at him, and the ex doesn’t blink. He’s holding his breath, and his eyes shake in their sockets as he runs out of air but doesn’t dare breathe any fresh air in.
Ping.
“Damn it!” Archie spits out and looks at his iPhone’s screen.
Squeak.
Archie snaps his eyes back onto the ex. The ex’s eyelids drop to half staff; he freezes under Archie’s brown-eyed glare. The ex quivers. His rolls of fat shake like jelly; his mouth gulps fish like; but his vocal cords have seized up after their unintended emittance. He cannot speak nor defend himself.
Archie makes a moue of disgust. Archie shifts his forefinger back to lie alongside the trigger guard and readies his arm to shoot. He doesn’t want to inadvertently shoot jelly, but the ex isn’t getting the message. He shifts his gaze back to his iPhone. A rustle jerks his attention back to the ex’s white face. The ex is breathing again. “Turn around,” Archie snarls. The ex’s head wobbles. Archie imperceptibly stiffens his back into a steel shaft. His forefinger drifts back over the trigger, his head still and strong on top of his muscular neck. “Turn. Around.” The ex turns around.
“Put your hands against the wall.” The ex flattens his palms against the wall. His body trembles.
“Spread your legs apart.” The ex obeys.
“Wider.” The ex moves one leg further to the right. Then, under the silent force of Archie’s eyes on his back, moves his left leg further to the left. His legs shake so hard, his knees are in danger of buckling.
“I don’t hesitate to shoot,” Archie growls. He waits a beat. “My pistol is aimed at your heart. Understood?” No answer. “Understood?!”
“Yes,” the ex breathes back.
Archie commands Siri to read him the message while keeping his gaze locked on his target. Siri reads a message from Sally. When he hears Siri pronounce his wife’s name, his heart constricts with gladness. Siri chirps: “Hey Archie. It’s Veterans’ Day. I hope y’all are having a great day up in Canada, wherever it is. I bet you got some parka on or something. I hear you live in igloos. Well, I have to go. Me and the girls are going shopping. They have great sales on for us today. Do you get Veterans sales up there? I guess not with living in the snow and all. I hope you got peace up there. I forgive you.” Archie grins. He’d left her, yet she’d remembered him.
His family remembers him.
All of them.
At once.
They hadn’t all remembered him on the same day since he’d come back from Afghanistan shortly before that first Veterans Day in Albuquerque.
They had held a welcoming party for him, his family, their friends, neighbours, and Stephen’s clients. Balloons had stood straight at attention from every branch and pole outside his parents’ home. Sally had moved in with his parents while he’d been fighting in Afghanistan. She didn’t want to live on base in another state, so far from her friends. He’d applauded her move. He’d shared all the secrets of the house, and they’d laughed over his parents’ quirks, Ma’s propensity to say not one word during breakfast while she cooked them all heuvos rancheros and only three words during lunch: “Come to the table.” “Four words,” Sally had corrected him in their first Skype after having emailed each other for the first few weeks when he’d been stationed with the 5th Combat Brigade Team. He’d been careful to tell her nothing about his experiences with the team. And when they’d begun Skyping, he’d wash his face and hands and slip on his one clean shirt he kept in his sack for just that purpose—for talking to Sally, Ma and Sir, and his twin Stephen so that they’d never know the hellhole he was in.
Sally had done up their bedroom in pretty laces and linen. She’d gotten a brand new nightie for herself, and risque underwear, so that when he undressed her piece by piece, all her prettiness would be on display. She’d gotten a fresh dye job, and her blonde highlights gleamed under the New Mexico sun when he’d first seen her standing there, waiting for him by Sir’s car. Her hair had gleamed and her face had shone in the candlelight of their bedroom. His parents and Stephen had left the house when Sally had pulled him by the hand into their bedroom. Having dared to dream of this moment in the days leading up to returning, he’d found himself feeling unsure. Taking off her clothes had felt foreign to him. Sand and rocks and the hardness of guns and ammo were what his hands were used to. The bump of his ass on the hard driver’s seat, worn down from continual jostling during hours of driving, and grinding of gears and straining engines, were his experiences for what had seemed like his entire life. The pungency of burning oil and burning batteries and burning metal still seared his nostrils, and Sally’s floral perfume had irritated his nose. The powdery scent had seemed to mock his memory of the sweet smell of blood in desert heat.
He never wanted to smell again.
Sally had not taken his rejection well when his hands had frozen midway through slipping her dress off when he’d seen her pretty pink bra and briefs in lacy polyester decorated with feminine-pink rosettes. How could he touch something so delicate with his dirty and grubby and hardened soul? He’d only stain her with his horror. Like a tsunami, fatigue had washed over him, and he’d collapsed into bed for his last long, dreamless sleep.
The next morning, he’d arrived at the breakfast table, with his entire family waiting to greet him. Sally had followed him more slowly, acting all flushed and awkward as if they’d had a passionate night. She’d fallen languidly into her chair and fanned her face at how hot it was. He’d sat down expressionless. Ma had placed a plate of stacked flapjacks in front of him. He’d frowned and looked up at her. “Special,” she’d said and turned back to her stove. He’d looked back down at his plate, hoping to see the familiar heuvos rancheros with red and green chile sauce. Chile red, chile green smothering the white of egg and caramelized-splotched-brown tortilla underneath, not the fluffy pale blonde of flapjacks. The flapjacks reminded him of the day of his righteous shoot. Maybe it was their desert-blonde colour. Ma rarely cooked flapjacks and never till their edges browned to crispness. She slipped them pale off the griddle. Or maybe it was the height of the flapjack stack that had set his memories twitching. They’d leaned at a crazy angle like a man about to fall down. Staring at that stack, Archie’s chest had constricted, and he’d emptied into their flowing conversation the memory of his righteous shoot. Sir had clapped him on the back at how he could never hear that story enough times and at how bravely he’d protected them all. Stephen had chortled at how the Tal-i-ban who’d been gunning for him must’ve looked when he got beat by Archie. “Bet he didn’t see that coming, brother!” he’d crowed while bile rose in Archie’s throat and horror turned his eyes into staring orbs. Ma had slipped heuvos rancheros next to his flapjacks and served him a plateful of hash browns. She’d smacked Stephen’s hand as he reached out to scoop some from his pile.
Archie had eaten his entire breakfast, including the flapjacks, trying to join in their revelry over shooting that “Tal-i-ban” dead. “He got what was coming to him!” the four had crowed. They didn’t care it was a village man, not the Taliban; they saw no difference. They boasted how Archie knew how to shoot because he came from a state that knew what guns were for and didn’t hold with no gun control like those northern states. “Your gun saved your life, your platoon’s lives, Archie’s. Never forget that,” Sir had pointed his fork at him.
Archie’s saved life became their saved lives, became America’s saved existence. They’d celebrated the whole day. Ma had gathered the neighbours, and Sir had hosted a neighbourhood party where people had toasted Archie long into the small hours of the next day. He’d drunk Tequila that night. Tequila and beer made it all better.
But Sally didn’t forgive him his rejection his first night home. She didn’t forget he couldn’t make love to her. Archie couldn’t explain how the sight of her made him loathe himself. The army had discharged him on his return. Fortunately, his worker had gotten him diagnosed with PTSD and into counselling within weeks of returning. His VA counsellor had said this was normal, that Sally should come see him so that he could help them with their marriage. But Sally had told him her girlfriends thought he was just having man problems. “You have to figure out your own problems, Archie. I don’t have no problems,” she’d spat in his face and flounced away.
Her anger at his rejection, his drinking, his doubts over his righteous shoot had erupted into shouting at his silent visage over his drinking more and more beer every night. His drinking had stretched backwards in time from dinner into lunch. And that last day, when he was supposed to see his VA counsellor and had found him gone, that morning had been the first day he’d had beer for breakfast. His first liquid breakfast.
Ma had said nothing. Sir had joked he was taking this soldier thing too far. “When are you going to admit that Tal-i-ban deserved to be shot? Son, you didn’t know he didn’t have a gun. Empty hands don’t mean shit. He could’ve been concealed carrying. You gotta watch out and assume everyone’s carrying. That’s how you stay alive.”
The last Veterans Day in his home state, Archie had refused to attend the parade. Disgust had distorted Sir’s features as he’d turned his back on Archie. Stephen had castigated him for jeopardizing some business deal he was working on. “What are my clients gonna think?” he’d yelled. “You’re a coward, not patriotic enough, that’s what they’ll think! I can’t have a brother who’s not patriotic.” He’d flicked his hand at Archie and stormed out. Archie had slammed shut his bedroom door so hard, the hinges had shifted. He’d glared at the listing door while he’d drunk himself stupid, loading and unloading Pawpaw’s Outdoorsman. Archie can’t recall what Ma had done that day or where Sally had gone to. He pounds his head, but the memories remain locked while eating his nerves from the depths of their hidden cave.
Ma, Sir, Sally, and Stephen had ignored him ever since he’d left for Canada. Guilt egging him when he’d landed at Pearson International Airport, he’d messaged them all that he’d arrived safely. He mailed them birthday cards on each of their birthdays because, with distance, the relationships seemed to him less and less fractured. They hadn’t reciprocated. No birthday cards or Christmas cards for Archie. No emails. No messages. Until today.
Archie’s heart implodes.
Grief blurs the iPhone screen, plunging him into a plummet-less pool, swamping his momentary happiness. Why now? Why on this day do they at last remember he exists? Why do they suddenly care? Who told them to acknowledge his existence, to pretend they give a fuck he lives? What guilt eats them? What do they want? Tears spill down his cheeks and clog his nose. Saliva thickens into a gooey mucus carpet on his tongue. When I needed their attention, their kindness, their remembrance, all they gave me was lectures. Man up, son. Be a real husband. Be a patriot. Stop drinking. A sob chokes his breath. I did stop drinking. The day I set foot in Canada is the day I stopped. Canada changed everything.
Andrew had taken him to a health food store and had shown him the vitamins, minerals, and supplements he needed to keep sane and healthy. Archie’d begun roaming the city with the map Andrew had given him. But after the second day out, he’d left the map in his rooming-house bedroom. He only wanted to wander. The walking had quietened his soul. He’d learnt to shut away the ache of missing. He’d berated himself: your family left you, Specialist, long before you physically left them.
Now they remember.
Now they care.
It’s too late. Bitterness bites Archie’s tongue.
How do you cope with what you’ve wanted when it comes years after you needed it and years after giving up ever seeing it? The years of suffering alone, of being told how to feel about the shoot, of being rejected for his doubts, his nightmares, his PTSD anxiety, suffuse his body with aches, coagulate his shoulders into boards of pain, pressurize his head until the force of his emotions pushes against his temples, threatening to explode his brain through his skull, scalp, and hair, compressing his teeth together into paroxysms of harsh pain that scrapes into his gums and overfills his sinuses. Fluid of grief swells every cell in his body, pushing outward against their containing walls.
Physical pain ratchets up. Years of loss flagellate the messages’ heralding of change and overload his mind. He’d needed them years ago. Today, they show up. Today, they tantalize him with a taste of what could’ve been, of how his suffering could’ve been so much less. If only they’d been kind, if only they’d accepted and supported me, if only they’d gone with me to my VA counsellor, if only they’d walked with me, sat with me like Pawpaw used to, if only they’d said, “Though we cannot understand what war’s like, what you went through, only your peers can do that, we’re here for you, we’re here to hold you, to listen, and to be with you,” if only they’d reached out a hand and had never let me go, never let me be alone to drown in my memories until the day I shot myself on the wrong side of the chest.
Sally had walked in the house too early, chattering over her shoulder in her treble voice to her friend trailing and nodding behind her. Her sudden appearance had startled him, and his shaking, drunken hand had jerked sideways while his finger had pulled the trigger. The bang had ricocheted sound waves off the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Archie hadn’t felt a thing. Sally had screamed: “Archie!” Her friend’s mouth had opened slowly in a long oval, her eyes had raised heavenward, and she’d collapsed to the floor with flopping arms and legs, hitting it without a sound. He realized later the shot had deafened him to all sounds but Sally’s screams. “Archie! How could you do that to me! I just met her! My first real friend! And you had to go and shoot yourself. How could you be so careless?!”
Archie had looked down to see the fabric of his shirt torn off. The bullet had torn a chunk out of his side and taken a shard of rib with it. In shock, he’d looked back up at Sally, her voice having gone unhearable while her mouth kept moving like a machine gun belt feeding bullets. At the VA hospital, doctors had stitched the wound closed and then sent the paperwork to the VA counsellor. Contemplating the gauze still protecting his stitched-up shot side, the counsellor had asked him what had happened. Relief had sagged Archie that somebody was again listening to him.
Archie relaxes under that remembered empathy; then the shame of what he’d done burns his stomach anew. His VA counsellor had spoken of hope in subsequent visits but not his suicide attempt. His father Sir had told him he was out of practice in cleaning his gun, that that was what had happened. Sir had ordered Archie to stop talking about it as if it was not accidental. Sally had told him never to speak of it and berated him for losing her a good friend. Ma had gazed upon him with sad eyes and mute mouth. And Stephen had avoided him for three months until he felt he was safe from hearing about that subject.
Archie had learnt to keep his mouth shut. Suicide was not a topic even professionals wanted to talk about. His VA counsellor hadn’t wanted to hear Archie speak out loud his terrible thoughts of self-harm, only the good things he was doing in the present. “Keep your thoughts focused on the positive,” he’d instructed him every session.
They had all shut him out.
His eyes refocus on the black screen of his iPhone. He presses the Home button, and his lock screen shines into the alley’s shadowed light. His thumb unlocks the iPhone, and he reads the last message again. The light of their reaching out deepens the rejection that had dug a chasm between them and him. Their rejection and judgement, their abandoning him to his VA counsellor to deal with his sickness—“You’re sick, son, when is that VA counsellor going to make you right, make you see what you done was good?” The chasm, with its churning river of accusations and its steep walls of demands to be healthy, cannot be filled in with a few messages shot through cyberspace.
Archie’s emotions flee.
His tanned face resumes its accustomed mask of neutrality and power.
His thumb presses down the iPhone’s Power button.
Click.
Archie refocuses on the ex’s sagging back as he slips the iPhone back into its pocket. Archie assesses his target with vacant eyes. He lifts his right hand to cradle the Sig’s grip in both hands. He lifts his chest up higher against the pain that strains to bend him. He stretches his neck from one shoulder to the other, the muscle fibres cracking all along his neck, first one side then the other, while he keeps his eyes dead on the surrendering back before him. Archie deliberately shifts the pistol into a right-handed grip and places his right forefinger into the trigger position.
Time to end this.