Military Clean
It happened on Friday evening as yellow-blue flames licked the edges of my steak. The smell in the air made the back of my throat ache in anticipation as I stood at the grill in my backyard. Through the sizzle and smoke, I heard the bell on my fence gate clang. The air in Tampa was dry and a late-October breeze had been blowing, but not hard enough to ring the bell. Somebody had entered my yard.
The meat needed just enough char on each side so the center stayed red and cool. I hadn’t eaten since the previous night, when I’d microwaved a Hot Pocket too long. There was enough beef for two, but my son, Matt, had gone to a concert with his friends. He was seventeen now, my son—an age when music matters as much as girls and sports. He did his old man proud. He maintained my trust by obeying our policy of sending text messages to update me every so often, but never while driving. I’d miss my boy during dinner, but Matt could eat his half cold in the morning with a glass of milk to wash it down. Pure protein to nourish growing bones.
I rested the grilling tongs over the handle on the closed grill hood and walked along the pool deck. Mildew rose to the surface of tan deck pavers that needed a thorough pressure cleaning. The pool was only half-filled with water gone green. I’d discontinued the weekly service. Matt didn’t have time to swim in it, let alone clean it himself. Chemicals and electricity for that pump were expenses I’d eliminated months ago. Now, I walked around the corner of the house where a patch of stucco broke free. The whole house had turned chalky and needed paint.
I expected to hear Matt, coming back for something he’d forgotten in his room, or for more cash from my pocket. Instead, I heard an older male voice call out. “Yo, Rod. You back here?”
My ribs felt vacuumed of breath. I hadn’t heard my old nickname in twenty-five years, and even without seeing who had spoken it I knew exactly who was trespassing in my backyard. The fluid in my body turned into cement. I stood still, ankle-deep in the grass. “Oh shit.”
Flash Taylor walked around the corner as if still ducking through passageways aboard ship, or perhaps he’d just been beaten down by Navy prison. With a sardonic grin, he said, “Been a long time, Rod.” His lungs wheezed in a way I never remembered.
For years I’d looked over my shoulder, knowing he’d find me. The more time went by and the more I struggled through the life I’d chosen, the less I bothered to watch my back.
The heaviness of seeing him compressed my neck and turned my voice to a coarse whisper. “I don’t believe it,” I said, as upbeat as possible. He came at me with arms wide, set not to fight, but for a hug.
His thin arms wrapped around me. He smelled of hand sanitizer and celery salt and I felt ribs through his shirt as I hugged him back, somehow balancing the dread and the excitement of seeing my old friend.
We parted and stared at one another. Flash looked thinner than ever, even while hunched.
“You look good,” I lied.
The face that had been leathery and dented now appeared as pale and pocked as a golf ball. When we’d first met up aboard the USS McCreight, he started wearing his Dixie cup down low on his brow like I wore mine. Or maybe it was the other way around. Everyone on our ship used to say we could’ve been brothers. I never would’ve gone that far, but I always suspected our police sketches had turned out similarly.
In those quiet seconds standing in my uncut grass, I felt a sort of relief seeing him on my own turf, but also an anxious hope, because I needed to square myself with him. He had to know that I’d been pissed all these years about the way things went down, and about feeling bad about it for so long and always having to look over my goddamn shoulder.
Before I got a chance to ask how he’s been, Flash reared back.
Time slowed in that moment, somehow, and the open gate seemed to magnify waves of western sun that haloed his right fist. The tattoo on his forearm caught my attention—the two-headed dragon crashing through waves was a mirror image of the tattoo on my forearm. Next thing I knew, his knuckles landed on my cheekbone with enough force to jolt my head to the side, lightning bolts appearing behind my eyes. His face twisted with disappointment, I think, that I didn’t go down.
I grabbed at the new ache and held out my other hand. “Whoa, man. Take it easy.” It hurt to talk, but nothing felt broken and no teeth felt loose. “I know you’re pissed,” I said. “I’m pissed, too. Let me explain.”
As I swallowed back blood I noticed the smooth jazz playing from the ceiling-mounted speakers of my lanai. My son never cared much for soft music, but every negative or aggressive impulse I’d ever had fed off of rock and roll. No matter how much I preferred loud guitars and driving drums, I had stayed away from them since I became a civilian.
Flash faced me, looking older than our years, but not quite out of breath from the effort.
“Listen,” I said. “You’ve got it all wrong. I get that. If shit was reversed, who’s to say I wouldn’t feel the same way about you. But that don’t make it right.”
Flash tucked his fist into his opposite armpit. “Did you learn that bullshit from your junior college psychology course?”
I felt frozen in cement again, unnerved that he knew about my civilian life.
“Yeah,” he said through his crooked smile. “While you were dicking the dog, I was doing my homework. Saw your little bio on your website.”
The air smelled ashen, and in that moment I thought about the abandoned steak on the grill. I turned to walk along the pool toward the grill and he followed.
I had long ago composed moving speeches in my head, but I couldn’t remember any of them or where I’d planned to begin.
Grease flared as I opened the lid. I’d been out of propane for weeks and earlier I’d dumped in half a bag of charcoal. Smoke rose from the sizzling drip pan. The noise my stomach made sounded like steel wheels circling an empty garbage can.
I slammed the lid shut to hide the ruined meat. My empty stomach rolled in on itself from hunger and nerves. I yelled, “Motherfucker!”—at the steak, at him, at my hunger, at my failure to watch my own back.
“That’s a fucking waste,” Flash said.
“Look,” I said. “The simple matter is you didn’t get locked up because of me. You got locked up because of you. We both took the same risk. I just happened to get away.” I gestured with the tongs I didn’t recall picking up. “If I could’ve gotten you out, I surely would have.”
He stared at the lake where cattails waved like green and brown fingers. Above us, pine needles swept the air from the ends of lazy branches. “You never came to see me. Not one motherfucking time, motherfucker.”
Laughter swelled up in me. It struck me as funny that he didn’t evolve away from talking like we used to, but why would he? I passed off the extra breath as a sigh as I hooked the tongs over the grill’s handle again. “I couldn’t even write to you, for fuck sake.” The grill threw off heat that radiated on my back as I spoke. “Those fuckers at NIS were up my ass, asking questions about you. Trying to make me incriminate myself. I had to downplay how well I knew you to make them leave me alone. Any contact would have brought them sniffing around again.”
No one who knew us believed I wasn’t with him the night he got arrested, but the authorities never produced any credible evidence to prove otherwise. It had been a bad night for both of us. While I hung back in the shadows in the King’s Head Inn parking lot, Flash charged forward waving an old .38 revolver with the serial number scratched out. He stuck it in the faces of the coke mule and an undercover DEA agent. All our planning prepared us to rob a drug deal, but we had no way of knowing it was a sting operation going down that night.
***
I opened the lid once again, but the meat was as black and cracked as the charcoal. It burned too hot for too long. I turned to face Flash.
He pulled a pistol from the small of his back and held it against his thigh. “Even if I believed you,” he said, as he cocked the hammer, “it’s too late for your ass.” The pistol shook in his hand as he spoke. “I lost twenty-five years of my life because of you.”
I nodded my chin toward the gun. “Is that?”
It looked like the same Ithaca model .45 the Navy issued, but this one came nickel-plated with a shine like a mirror and onyx handgrips.
“I found it in that cigar box in your computer room yesterday while you were at work.”
The thought of him in my house chilled me like a piss shiver.
Flash raised his hand and aimed at my abdomen. I didn’t close my eyes and my life didn’t play before my eyes like a movie, but my mind somehow filled itself with the family portrait that used to hang in our foyer. The four of us.
“You had to know I’d find your fucking ass.” He said it in a flat monotone with virtually no expression on his face. At moments like these, he looked least like me. I didn’t recognize him.
That he’d found me at all struck me as a little surprising. The Internet didn’t exist the last time I saw him, and of all Flash’s traits that made me want to hang around with him, his deductive reasoning skills didn’t even make the list.
“You’re damn right, I did,” I said, looking at the pistol. “And it’s about time.” I had no way to know if he would actually shoot. “We were partners. Running buddies. We were fucking Vikings, man. You can’t make friends like that out here.”
***
A wise man once said, “A ship at sea is a crucible that breeds only teamwork, tolerance, or tyranny.” That was true. No one could go home after work. There was no such thing as calling in sick. The all-encompassing gray of the ship’s interior was sometimes all we’d see. Days could pass without going up on deck to get fresh air. Tending equipment, eating meals, jerking off—all activities done within the confines of the ship, amid the smells of grease from the engine room and the galley and the rumbles caused by both. Being topside with nothing to see but water always felt like magic. Man, it hypnotized me sometimes. The endless waves of blues cresting to variations of white, and then receding into deeper blues. No waves were exactly alike and I’d wanted to chase the flavor of the horizon.
***
Cats fought or fucked in the neighbor’s yard on the other side of my six-foot, wooden fence. Flash jerked his shoulders upon hearing the noise. He steadied himself and looked back to me. “Them’s cats. Right?”
After I nodded, Flash waved the pistol toward the pair of weathered Adirondack chairs Matt and I had built years ago from Home Depot plans. The light had dimmed on the east side of the house, but not dim enough that I missed Flash’s hands shaking on the armrests that I’d sanded dozens of times. His face twitched in a way I’d never seen before, or maybe had just forgotten. The shadows from the floodlights mounted above the sliding glass doors cast his skin in a washed out tone as gray as the chairs.
Toward the lake, the darker shade of dusk settled in. I knew every inch of the land from the street to the lake because I’d cleared it all myself—wrestled that god-awful Brazilian pepper and Melaleuca and stink vine thick as my fingers. I’d burned out the poison ivy with a combination of chemicals the one-eyed guy at the garden center swore would work. I used to do projects like that before the boom and bust. My ex-wife got a portion of my company, a condo on St. Pete Beach, and a huge alimony settlement, but I kept the house—the only home Matt knew.
Humidity hung easy, just moist enough to taste, but not enough to wet the skin. The air stank from the viburnum hedgerow grown shaggy along the perimeter of the yard.
And now I sat with a gun pointed at me, held by a guy I have pictures of—some in uniform, some of him alone; me and him together, flipping the bird on shore leave in Rota, our arms around dark haired girls on both sides of Turkey, as well as Italy, Spain, and Romania, all the while drinking beer. Endless days at sea and out-of-control nights in various ports of call.
***
A slow saxophone played overhead. In the old days, the filter pump circulating the water in the pool would have drowned out the music with a steady hum that pushed a waterfall from a ledge built into the Jacuzzi. It was hard to believe, looking at it now, that ripples of crystal clear water had once rolled to the shallow end like tiny waves on the beach. I slid full back into the chair, never letting my eyes focus on the gun in Flash’s hand because I didn’t want to show fear burning in me hotter than charcoal.
“Look, man,” I said. “I went legit. It was just easier, in a way. You know? And maybe you should, too. Get a brand new start. I can help you. But you got to go legit.”
He nodded, either at the gun or signaling me to continue.
“I boosted a UPS truck that first December I got out,” I said. “I dealt the cargo to two vans and three pickup trucks, but those motherfuckers had helicopters and dogs and all that shit. They wouldn’t let go. I wasn’t going down for a batch of last minute Christmas gifts. I bailed on the payout. Disappeared. Been straight since. Started my own business, from the ground up.”
Flash scratched his chin stubble with the barrel of the pistol, expressionless.
As tight as we’d been, I never could read him. I’d given up trying after I’d learned from a personnel man aboard ship that his home address was an orphanage in Erie, Pennsylvania. He never spoke of his parents or of being a kid and I never brought it up, but that personnel man had answered a lot of questions I never had to ask.
On one of the many nights over the years my sleep had been disturbed by the dread of such a confrontation with Flash, I’d realized that he hadn’t joined the Navy for the travel and adventure, he’d merely been evicted from the orphanage the day he turned eighteen. He’d brought all the bad habits of orphanage life into the Navy with him. We made a good team.
***
With the smell of burnt steak in the air and the gun trained on me, I said, “All right, Flash.” I gestured toward the house, pool, and lake. “I’ve made a pretty good living.”
He laughed and rested the pistol on his stomach. His other hand covered his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, “by scrubbing other people’s shitters?”
After a deep breath, I said, “I haven’t cleaned anything in ten years.”
Flash looked past the pool and the lake beyond.
“Things got a little tight for me after the divorce, and business is down a bit since the housing bubble, but the model is solid. At the peak, I had thirty-seven employees. We were averaging sixty houses per day, a hundred bucks each, minimum; many double that price. We were talking two million, gross. And I needed to hire more people! We were growing by word of mouth alone. We’ll get back to that soon enough. In the meantime, there’s plenty of meat on the bone. You could have your own house in two or three years.” I considered it a better deal than anybody else in the free world would give an ex-con with outdated skills and a bad attitude. He’d be an idiot not to praise me for the opportunity.
Flash gestured with the pistol until the barrel pointed right at my head and suddenly I preferred the idea of getting shot in the stomach. “You want me to field day greasy geezer’s cribs? Is that the deal?”
“I’m offering you a partnership,” I said, louder than I had planned.
“Partnership? It’s more like a punishment,” he said with a short laugh. “I’ll pass.”
I scooted to the edge of my seat. “Our teams are licensed, bonded, and insured. They’re on time and well-trained. They wear khaki pants and blue polo shirts with Military Clean in stencil font, set against an American flag. I hire only veterans. The best among those who stay can work their way into supervisory positions or other administrative roles. We have a supply officer to keep a just-in-time inventory and a team of dispatchers to field phone calls and schedule appointments. We run a lean operation with low overhead—just an eight hundred square foot office and warehouse with a large enough center aisle to hold employee muster every morning. Their cars are their own, but they have Military Clean magnetic door signs they put on and take off every day. The supervisors are required to inspect each employee and team car daily. I give year-end bonuses to all employees, based on seniority. It’s a good deal. It would get you on your feet and we could be square.”
Flash looked straight up, hocked a loogie into the hedgerow, and said, “That don’t come close to squaring shit between you and me.”
That attitude didn’t sit right. “The only thing I owe you is appreciation for not ratting me out.”
He flexed his fingers around the pistol. “Oh, I’ve thought about that shit.” He looked through me. “Thousands of times.” As he spoke, anger tightened his face. “You fucking left me.”
If not for the gun, I might’ve told him to sack up. Instead, I said, “We were responsible for ourselves. I reacted quickly enough to save myself. If you were a little more cautious we both would’ve gotten away.”
“What?”
“Forget it,” I said and sat back. Shrugged. “Besides, how would both of us getting locked up help anybody?”
After a moment, he pointed the gun at my torso again. “And all these years, I’ve thought about you fucking free bird—living high on the hog.”
The word “hog” made my stomach rumble and I thought about the steak I never got to eat. “Sure, I wasn’t locked up. But make no mistake. All this,” I said, sweeping my hand toward the house, the pool, and the lake, “didn’t just happen. It took a whole lot of eighteen-hour days.” I adjusted my shirt collar and added, “I lived on tuna, rice, and tap water for a lot of years. Never took vacations. Cost me a wife and daughter. But I’m offering you a solid job with the potential to start your life over the right way.”
Flash seemed to focus on me as if he’d forgotten the reason for his presence, or second-guessed it. He held the pistol grip in one hand and the barrel in the other, leaned his chin on the slide near the hammer. His head shook and the gun waved as he said, “You can’t buy your way out of this one. Not with your money and certainly not with your bullshit business.”
“Fuck you. Like I bought my way out of shit before.”
Flash laughed and stomped the deck with the bottom of his shoe as if he’d just heard the funniest thing ever. “Says the guy who paid E-3s to do his laundry.” He laughed again before continuing. “And as I recall, you also rented lockers from married guys to store all your shit. You had Charmin sent in care packages, you pampered prick.” Then the remnants of laughter faded and his face got earnest again. “You were always so comfortable. No more.”
“So you’re just going to kill me?” I held my hands wide, pretending to be ready for it, hoping he didn’t pick up on the fear I tried to breathe through.
Before he answered, a crash of glass echoed from inside the house. I ignored the gun pointed at my abdomen and raced into the house to investigate. Flash followed and ended up next to me, a step nearer the door as we faced my son, Matt, standing in the foyer. Light from the outside fixtures shadowed us and the shrapnel from the turquoise vase that had lived unseen all these years on the oak table by the door.
Flash stood closer to Matt than I wanted him to, and even though he hid the pistol behind his back I wanted to rush over and yank my boy to safety. But I couldn’t risk scaring him or startling Flash by telling Matt to run. If it came to it, I couldn’t risk Flash shooting me in front of my son. And God help us all if he had the intention of hurting my big handsome boy. He was street smart for a senior at a private high school. His bags were all but packed for Florida State where he planned to earn a business degree and return home to assume his role as vice president of Military Clean.
Our dream, my son and I, centered on franchising nationally so I could take up golf and go boating while strangers paid to lease the reputation I’d worked so hard to build. Matt would manage all that, collect a handsome salary and settle down and raise me some grandbabies.
Flash didn’t say a word, and before I made my move to be Matt’s human shield, my son looked at him as if he didn’t even see me. I thought he’d say, “Who are you?” Instead, he said, “Ah, shit, Pops. That was a fucking accident right there.”
I didn’t care about the vase. My son addressing another man as Pops was simultaneously a whack to the base of my skull and a sharp punch to my solar plexus. I stepped in between them and said, “What’s going on? Why are you back?”
Matt grabbed the sides of his head and shouted, “Oh, shit. There’s two of you!” He crunched broken porcelain as he backed away. “What the fuck’s going on?”
Flash laughed in my son’s face like it was the funniest joke in the world. “Is Wonder Boy always so drunk and high he mistakes strangers for you?”
“I’ve had a couple beers,” he said to Flash. “Get off my ass and just give me some money.”
I grabbed him by the arm and said, “What have I told you about that language in front of company?”
He pulled away. “Dude, stop double-teaming me. And stop the lecture. My AmEx got refused again. I need two hundred dollars for the tickets.” He held out his hand. “And another two for refreshments and shirts and gas, and shit.”
There was an awkward quiet as I reached for my wallet. Flash nodded as if acknowledging my intention. To fill the quiet, I asked Matt, “What band are you going to see?”
“What difference does it make?” He wobbled as he spoke. “It’s all the same shit to you.”
I had all of forty-three dollars in the wallet. “Here, take my MasterCard. I’ll get your card squared away first thing in the morning.” Doing so would mean stopping payment on my life insurance, but I’d worry about that when the time came.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll keep yours until then.” He placed the card over his iPhone screen and tucked them into his back pocket.
“You’re not driving are you?”
“I’m not a fucking idiot.” He snatched the money from my hand and added, “My girl’s waiting in the car.”
“Be safe. And have fun.”
As he pulled the door closed behind him, he said, “Whatever.”
However long that transaction had taken is how long I forgot Flash was there and that he held a gun on me.
“You’ve got a way with kids.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. It was partly relief, partly because his sarcasm always cracked me up. “Yeah, well, at least this one still comes around. His sister is all but gone to me. Her mother’s poisoned her against me. I suppose that when she gets married, I’ll have to sneak a peek from the church’s outer doors.”
Flash laughed that laugh of his again. This time it came out slower and lower than usual, but rolled the way it always did. His face creased into a smile as he raised the .45 close to his chest. I wasn’t prepared for him to take aim and found myself looking away and clenching every muscle in my body to deny him the satisfaction of begging or peeing myself.
A slight click made me open my eyes and face him as he ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber—the bullet fell to join the vase chards on the tile. Flash held up the magazine and the pistol and wiggled them in his hands and then set them both on the bare oak table.
Relief flooded through my chest and abdomen. But before I could lunge for the gun, Flash shook his head as he opened the door and stepped outside.
A frog chorus croaked from marshland along the driveway.
Flash held his hands beside his shoulders, palms out, and backed away. Framed by a triangle glowing from the floodlight on the porch, his posture was a wreck. He probably had nothing in his pockets, no home or family to go to, no prospects. In the instant before he turned, Flash looked most like the twenty-year-old sailors we’d been back in the day. But the man walking across my yard was a civilian now. Not a prisoner, but a free man.