The army changed me.
Maybe it was what it took to make it through. The discipline. Or how they broke you down, completely down, until there was virtually nothing of who you were before, which helped me put the past behind.
Maybe it was being at war. Or for the first time having people who relied on me. Who didn’t know me. And me them.
I’ve read it happens like that sometimes. To people with my kind of nature.
Sometimes it just does.
We moved one last time, shortly after what happened with Deirdre. This time we went away from Staten Island completely, to Waterbury, Connecticut, to live with my uncle. I did my senior year up there and used my middle name, Frank, instead of John, and I just kind of continued it, even after I graduated and enlisted.
Frank Landry. It just stuck.
John simply disappeared.
And I never heard a thing again about what had happened back on Staten Island under the bridge that night. They likely never even found her. Probably for years. Those holes out there near the old soap factory led into tunnels that went on forever. I stuffed her in an empty oil drum and rolled her to one deep in the brush. I dragged a bush over there and kicked and scraped in gravel to cover the smell. Maybe the animals got to her. Or rats. They had large ones there. No one knew of me. We’d gone to different schools. Lived different lives. I’m not even sure she ever knew my last name. Just Streak. No one would ever even connect us. One night she went out on a hot summer eve to meet a friend and never came back.
I wanted to put the past behind. The army made that easy. Soon it was like none of it ever even happened. Like some event in your past that you couldn’t remember whether you’d actually done it or thought you had done it, kind of just made up, and from then on it’s part of who you are. We all have something like that. Of all the things I’d done, that was the one that I truly regretted. That when I did think of it, feeling her heart beating next to me, touching her body, truly made me feel bad. She was the one person I knew who saw the good in me. I never went back there, to Staten Island. Never set foot on it again.
I truly loved her.
It was during Desert Storm, and I was trained as a tank gunner. I saw a bunch of combat in Kuwait and Iraq. The real stuff. I bet I killed fifteen to twenty of Saddam’s infantry. Pow, pow, pow, pow. Whether they had their hands in the air or were running away didn’t matter. They were just like target practice to me. A video game.
Pow, pow, pow.
I was even awarded a Bronze Star. For going back in and pulling out two of my crew when our tank got hit by an RPG. I wasn’t brave. It all just happened in kind of a daze. Left a bad burn on my face and arm. I never felt that way before. A hero. And that’s when it happened. That I no longer thought of myself as John anymore. The silent kid always at war with his inner voices and urges. Whose father ran out on the family because of him.
Instead, I began to see myself as Billy, my older brother who died in that helicopter crash at Camp Lejeune. I began to ask myself, how would Billy handle a certain situation? What would Billy do? And I learned I had something in me. Something buried deep beneath all those other things. That I worked hard to now control. And as Frank I could do it. I could distance myself from my past. From John’s past. The awful things he had done.
With that medal pinned on my chest, I began to think there was something important being saved for me. That fate had spared me to achieve. I remember my mother, seeing me in my crisp green fatigues, that fancy medal, and it was like she saw me as something new. Something scrubbed fresh and clean. All those bad things, washed away.
Gone. Forever.
The army cured me, I remember thinking.
At least for a while.
Her name was April. A-prille, she used to say it.
Like she was in Paris, France, or something, not Paris fucking Island, and that she was a fashion designer with that fancy air and not some filthy whore.
She was a little chubby with streaky red hair and too much makeup. I saw her a couple of times in the town in the months after I came back from my deployment.
I’d only been with one girl before.
She asked me about my burns, and when I told her how they’d come about she said she didn’t mind. She even asked me to wear my medal. She said she’d been with burn victims and amputees, no matter. She’d even done it with some guy who’d come back with his dick blown off, which made me curious how that was done.
I found myself telling her things. About my family. Billy at Camp Lejeune. About ol’ Jerry the dog and what I’d done, which seemed pretty funny now on half a bottle of Jack. “Hey, pooch.” I sniffed around the bed like a horny bloodhound. “Here, poochie, poochie.” I told her about some of the other things I’d done. She said violence kind of turned her on.
“You have anyone to go back to?” she asked me one night after we did it. She even stroked my face.
“No. I don’t.”
So I guess I started thinking, why not her?
Next time I saw her I brought her this foxy red dress. I picked it out special for her. I thought it matched her hair. She took it out of the plastic and put it on. “You bought me this?” All excited. Danced around in it and struck a sexy pose. “So, Frankie boy,” she said, climbing onto me and finding me hard. “What is it you’d like me to do?”
I started to think she reminded me of someone. How she made me feel. I started to tell her something. “Back home there was this girl . . .”
“What girl, Frank . . . ?” She lifted that dress up and climbed on top of me. “What girl . . . ?”
“I did something bad.”
I had trouble doing it this time. “Time’s up, darling,” she said after a while. “There’s more business to be done.” She sat up and unzipped the back of the dress. “You don’t think you’re the only rooster in the barn, do you? Here . . .” She pulled it over her head. “Maybe you want to give this to someone else.” Like the whole thing had been an act.
I looked at her brushing her hair. “It was yours.”
I can’t even tell you what went through me. It wasn’t hatred. I actually liked her. At least up until that moment I did. And it wasn’t even anger. It was like I was just watching her brush her hair and I realized she wasn’t the person I thought she was and I had told her those things. Like everyone else, none of them really cared.
”And don’t go thinking this goes toward what you owe me.” She brushed out her curly red hair.
I crawled over on the bed behind her. I cupped my hands over her breasts and brought her close and whispered in her ear, “I promise I won’t.”
I took the plastic off the floor and wrapped it tightly over her face. She turned, surprised. At first, like it was part of the game. Then I kept wrapping it and wrapping it around her, so tightly her face looked like a steak in the meat department. Her fat nose pressed flat, her eyes bulging. Then her arms suddenly thrashing at me. She made a couple of frantic, garbled sounds and movements, trying to fend me off.
I just kept twisting and twisting, forcing her onto the bed, the weight of my body pressing against her.
“It was a present, you stupid bitch.” I glared into her desperate eyes. “You could’ve just fucking worn it.”
It took about two minutes until she finally went limp. The whole thing had happened with a lot of grunting and writhing. But she barely made a sound. My own breaths were the loudest noise. I unwrapped her. Her eyes were white and wide and her face grotesquely twisted. I stared at her awhile and couldn’t remember what it was I’d ever found attractive. I gathered up my uniform and left her on the bed, one leg hanging off it, one arm crooked above her head. I took the dress and crumpled it into a garbage bag that I tossed into the river.
I looked down in my shorts and noticed I’d come.
When I got out, I enrolled in Southern Connecticut State College and studied health administration. I worked in hospitals in Bridgeport and New Haven, starting in administration and then moving into claims management under my new name. A partner and I opened a private health clinic in a rundown section of Bridgeport. Then another up in Hamden. We expanded it into a small health care network. Which we sold to a larger one. I met Kathi, who was a nurse, who saw me as a person with the right qualities and the right amount of drive. She didn’t know anything about the things I’d done. We got married. Had Erin and Taylor. People started seeing me as someone who was doing good in the community, and when a state assembly seat opened and there was no one to fill it, the Democratic Party asked me to consider running. So I did and I won. I began to see that anything I wanted was suddenly open to me. I got on the appropriations committee; ten years and four elections later, I became the majority chair. I had sway over who got what, and what projects were funded. And in whose district. People actually kowtowed to me.
Maybe I grew to feel a little invincible. Like I could do anything, reinvent myself any way. Like the laws didn’t quite apply to me. And maybe I did write my own rules. Maybe I did deserve those names they called me. The Fist. The Scythe.
After all, I knew how to hurt people.
And that was all it took, right? The more I buried all those urges, the more power seemed to come to me.
For years they didn’t visit me again.
There was this pretty intern once . . . She was from the Midwest and wanted to get into politics. We went out to dinner and I listened to her tell me about boyfriends and college, and I thought, as I stared at her, what it would be like to fuck her and then kill her. Who would ever know?
Then her boyfriend called and the whole thing was gone.
Yes, the army cured me. It washed the sand over my past, buried all those things I’d done. Deirdre. April. Buried them deep into my past.
John was history.
And for almost twenty years I believed that was true.