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It’s called a contact entrance wound. When the gun barrel rests flush with the skin, the propellant gases get forced into the subcutaneous tissues. The molecular imperative of those gases is to expand: When expelled, they blow the flesh surrounding the exit point open in an X, or star pattern.
The gun was an M1911 single-action recoil. The slug was a .45 cali-ber ACP, a significant upgrade from the 9 x 19mm Parabellum load in your standard M9. The M1911 was a special dispensation to select Recon Force Marines.
None of this would be mentioned in the file on my Veteran Employ-ment o∞cer’s desk. He was about forty with a whitewall haircut. Small o≠-colored squares on his teeth led me to believe he’d recently had braces removed.
“Tango Company.” He closed my file. “Wild bunch, yeah?” “Can’t really compare it, sir. I never fell in with another.” “Me? 1175th Recon, Echo Company.” “Ooh-rah.” I smiled. He did, too. A vein split his forehead. I couldn’t help picturing a worm coughed up on the sidewalk after a thunderstorm.
His o∞ce was the industrial gray of a dead tooth. His desk was the same metal cube public schoolteachers got. Young vets occupied orange plastic chairs in the waiting room, leafing through copies of Armed Forces Journal.
“We got plenty of opportunities popping up at Occidental Chemical,” he told me. “Analyzer techs at the chlorine refinery.” If you were a working man in Niagara Falls—Cataract City—chances were you’d punched the clock at OxyChem, colloquially known as the Oxy. My father did. Mandatory showers followed each shift. They pump a nontoxic deionization solution into the water lines. Dad’s hair went white at the roots. Cataract City buys more Just For Men per capita than anywhere except LA, probably.
“Anything else?” He leaned back in his chair. I’d grown my hair out. My eyes might’ve appeared sunk into my head. A trick of the light, was all.
“A real push on for school-bus drivers. Bit of a crisis, actually. Got to pass an eye test.” “No problem.” “Drug test.” “No problem.” “One week training, paid. Twenty hours in class, twenty in a bus.” I liked kids more than most adults. It was a no-brainer.
The bus company assigned Route 347, servicing Niagara Falls High. My bus was a seventy-two-seat hognose pusher: hognose because it lacked a hood, pusher because its engine was in the rear.
Mornings I drove to the bus lot, poured a cup of co≠ee from the steel dispenser, and milled around with my fellow drivers. A lot of them were retirees or single parents, which ensured plenty of photo-swapping: wallet-size kids and grandkids. There was some gentle needling, but none of the aggressive ranking out common in the corps; when you drove a cheese wagon, dick swinging seemed silly. We’d don reflective vests and head out of the yard, a stately yellow flotilla.
Sixty-three kids, grades nine through twelve. I navigated streets of prewar shotgun houses to pick them up. Mornings they were barely awake. Afternoons they were wired on Red Bull, jacked up on gossip. My eyes flicked to the rectangular mirror above my head—the riot mirror— tracking down o≠enders.
“Howie Bigelow!” I knew everyone’s name; the familiarity un-nerved them. “Ice the lip, or you’re hoofing it home.” Not sure how I came to think of them as boys and girls, or com-munally as kids: I was only twenty-three. The other drivers did, so you fell into the habit. A few girls . . . I didn’t flatter myself thinking they fantasized about macking on their bus driver, who, yeah, grew his hair long and sported a tattoo but probably seemed a knob for all that, sit-ting sti≠ in his seat like he had a walnut up his ass.
A month in, the phone rang.
“My daughter’s set to ride your bus.” A man’s voice. “It’s a particular situation. I’d like to meet you.” I drove to the address. A small house behind an industrial bakery. The sweet smell of proofing bread. My knock was answered by a thin, delicate man with a widow’s peak. The darkened skin of his scalp told me he worked at the Oxy. He introduced himself as Cedric and shook my hand. Tendons stood out on his wrist. A braidwork of bluish veins.
Cardboard boxes stamped ANDA MED were stacked beside the hall-way closet. Panties were hung to dry on the banister. The size a five-year-old might wear. All patterned with cabbage roses. If the roses were pink, the waist- and leg-bands were pink. Orange roses, orange bands.
“She hasn’t been to school in nearly two years,” Cedric said. “The tumor, the operation, the recovery . . . relapse. But she wants to try.” Breanne—a terrible name; she preferred “Bree,” which was only marginally better—sat at the kitchen table. Cedric had filled me in over the phone. She’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor at fifteen. A hot-red acorn on the MRI, socked tight between the parietal and occipital lobes. Chemo. Surgery. Next, a medically induced coma. She was sixteen by the time she came out of it. Full recovery seemed a real possibility. Then this. Whatever this was.
You got to figure she’d seen my look before. As if I had a fifty-pound bucket of clay and was troweling it into the hollows of her cheeks, the shadowy pits of her eyes, shaping her into the girl she must once have been.
She stood up. Fuck me, the e≠ort. Legs weak as a newborn foal’s. I didn’t move any closer. Wouldn’t make it any easier. I could give her that, at least.
“You look like shit” were her first words to me.
“Cedric Dancey’s girl?” my father said, when I told him about it. “Jesus wept. His wife couldn’t hack it. She hightailed it. You can’t hardly blame her. Ced . . . man’s a saint. A living saint.” Five days after graduating high school, I was knifed outside the Mighty Taco on Pine Street.
I’d been on 4th Street: Unc’s, Sharkey’s, Murph’s, taking advantage of the bottomless-cup specials with the border-hopping Canucks. I was swaying up Pine when some guys bumped me coming out of the taco joint. Words were exchanged, and then me and one of them squared o≠. I’d boxed the Golden Gloves eliminators, basement of Saint Hagop Armenian Church four blocks away. My right fist caught him in the neck. He staggered and I pressed in, but then I saw my arm was all blood. The slash came up under my armpit halfway across my biceps.
Two things I’m thinking: One: I used to play baseball with the guy who slashed me. Opti-mist’s League at Reservoir Park. The Panthers, name of our team.
Two: No way am I bleeding to death outside the fucking Mighty Taco.
“Enough?” guy said to me.
“Enough,” I agreed.
Two weeks later I was in a barber’s chair in the marine training depot at Parris Island, hair collecting on the pea-green tiles.
My peeps were 20/30 at best, meaning I had to be fitted for bulky black-framed army-issue glasses, a.k.a. BC glasses, or birth-control glasses, because you sure as fuck aren’t getting any wearing those ugly-ass things. I was at the base optician when a guy came in to pick up his own pair. They blew his eyeballs up bad: two watery yolks swimming behind the convex plastic.
“What do you think,” he said to me. “Sniper material?” Billy Merryweather from Velva, North Dakota. Our drill instructor deemed him su∞ciently malnourished to be put on double rations for the duration of our thirteen-week training junket.
Merryweather’s temperament was at odds with the big green ma-chine. Whenever we were taught some sort of combat drill or maneu-ver, he’d say under his breath: “That’s one way to get your ass killed.” You got the feeling he didn’t consider loving the American flag and bombing bin Laden out of his spider hole in the name of Mom, God, and apple pie to be all that important.
This didn’t endear him to the other recruits, many of them former football line-pigs with folds of well-tanned fat bunched at their shirt collars. They were prone to numb, inarticulate silences punctuated by bursts of quasi-articulate profanity. In many ways, Basic was an extension of high school: nineteen-year-olds jacked on testosterone angling for alpha-dog status, except here everyone practiced bayonet-ing technique at 1400 hours. Another recruit, a partially lobotomized Arkansan named Morris, took to calling him Fairyweather.
“Fairyweather,” Merryweather would say. “Clever. I see what you’ve done, there.” One afternoon we were field-stripping our M16A2 rifles while our drill instructor hollered: “Strip it, flip it, regrip it! Some sandy mother-fucker’s got you deadsighted right now!” Merryweather dropped his magazine spring in the dust. Purposefully.
The D.I. bawled: “Recruit, you earned y’self a hole”—screwing a squared-o≠ finger into Merryweather’s forehead—“right there.” Merry-weather thumbed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and said: “Hal-lelujah! I’ve earned the gift of second sight.” D.I. bitched him heavy and assigned two hours of quarterdeck, but you could tell he dug the kid. He saw what I saw: Merryweather may fuck the dog on drills, but when things got greasy, he’d have your ass. Even shitkickers like Morris knew it . . . yet it only seemed to amplify their hate.
Recruits could bank on eight hours of kip, but Merryweather earned an hour of fire watch nightly. The night sergeant punted him out of bed at one in the a.m. and made him walk the base perimeter—point-less, punishing gruntwork, seeing as there was nothing to protect our fellow marines against save the odd coyote. I took to committing tiny infractions—dogging it on the p.m. run, dropping my shit-on-a-shingle in mess hall—to earn fire watch, too.
One night we were hoofing the company street, ice plants crunching under our boots, when I said: “The hell you doing here? I got to ask.” “My dad robbed a 7-Eleven when I was six,” he told me. “Later I asked myself: Why not a bank? But Dad could’ve stood outside the Grand Forks Citibank and never got an inkling of what went on in there. In his guts, he’d rather stick up convenience stores.” Merryweather whistled through the chink in his front teeth. The sound carried up into that pristine Carolina night. Stars of such con-centrated white.
“He earned a ten-year hitch in Cass County. Years later I ask him: Why? He says he did it for the jazz. Three tours in Vietnam had turned something in him. He said it’s like he’d been burned. You can’t really feel a thing until you’ve encountered that heat again. Women couldn’t do it. Booze. He was chasing the burn.” At the end of Basic, graduating recruits congregated at Vic’s Tavern, a scratch-ass bar in Pineland Station. The local women were tuned in to the thirteen-week cycle; they colonized the postage-stamp dance floor. Merryweather and me sat alone. Morris heated pennies with a Zippo and flicked them at Merryweather’s back. I batted one out of the air casually, heard it go ping on the scu≠ed linoleum.
One girl swished her hips and raked her hands through her hair, giving the witchy-woman stare to us slavering dogfaces.
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” I said.
Merryweather had seen Cool Hand Luke, too.
“Oh, she knows exactly what she’s doing.” A burning penny singed his neck. Next Merryweather was up, grind- ing the gal with the come-hither stare. She’s taking o≠ his glasses; she’s trying them on. Soon Morris was up there, dwarfing Merryweather, shit-talking and pushing him around.
Merryweather’s left caught Morris in the underside of his jaw, that spot where all the nerves bunch up. Blood had been in Merryweather’s eye for weeks—he’d been waiting to throw that shot, and Morris was dead surprised when it came. It unhinged Morris’s knees, and Merry-weather’s next punch, a right, hit Morris dead solid perfect. He went down awkward, a ship sinking into the shallows. Blood fountained out of his burst beak.
“Nobody can eat fifty aaaigs!” Merryweather screamed.
Ever see one of those red-assed baboons in rut? Merryweather, in that moment. Lips skinned back from bared teeth, tendons standing out on his neck like steel cables. A natural-born world shaker.
Exact, considered movements. That, I think, was how she once moved. Now Bree moved—awful to say, but fuck it—like a zombie. Lurched.
Each morning she walked unassisted to the bus. One arm outflung, the other at her hip like it was stirring a pot of soup. Sometimes she fell, and I let her fall, and when she did it was like watching a chest of drawers pushed out a third-story window. She would roll herself over in sections, making me think of salvagers dragging a sunken ship out of the sea. She’d laugh at the sky. Scream, other times. Cedric would stand on the porch, knuckles white as hoarfrost on the rail as she hauled herself up. Unstoppable. A zombie.
“A little help?” she might ask.
“Want me to call an ambulance?” I might say.
A scar ran laterally across her skull, ear to ear. She wore a macrame cap. Sometimes her body moved with unselfconscious grace, and you’d see an echo of the coltish creature she’d been.
“This is cruel and unusual, dude.” “Less talk, more walk.” “Fuck o≠. Seriously.” She sat first seat, o≠ my right shoulder. She favored shirts she’d worn at eight: Her father had packed them in the attic, never thinking. I bought us co≠ees but she didn’t drink hers, just held it.
“I like the warmth.” “So why am I ordering it two creams, two sugars?” “That’s how I take it.” The other kids didn’t know how to act. Bree got this broad panto-mime of concern.
“Ooh, girl.” Stroking her hair like she’s a dog or something. “You’re so strong. It’s just incredible.” “I do dee-clayah,” Bree would say in a shit-eating southern-belle accent. “Ah say, ah say yoah con-soyn is plum givin me the vaypuhs.” It struck me that Bree may once have been an intolerable bitch. It also struck me that she may simply be exponentially smarter than ev-eryone else, which . . . upshot’s the same.
Sometimes after school she asked me to drive to the Niagara Reser-vation, an arrowhead of undeveloped land projecting toward the falls. I parked and stacked wooden blocks under the tires. Opened the windows.
“Love Canal’s not far from here,” she said one afternoon.
Years ago Hooker Chemical—the Oxy—buried twenty-something tons of toxic material in a dump site in the southeast known as the Love Canal District. They covered the drums with six feet of clay. The city kept growing. Some councilmen pressured the Hooker bigwigs to sell. The bigwigs drilled down and showed them the green death. Fuck it, the councilmen said. We’re hardy stock. In came the steam shov-els and jackhammers. Up burped the toxic goo. Houses still went up. Schools. Kids splashing in puddles left by ruptured chemical drums. Sounds crazy, but you got to understand Cataract City.
“They think that might be it,” she said. “The doctors.” “I’m not sick.” “A≠ects people di≠erently, maybe.” The cataract surged between the firs. Thundering white, a cloud formation dragged down to earth. The pressure of water hummed against our ears like wings.
If Cedric wasn’t home we’d watch television. Once, she fell asleep on the sofa, head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled a little like Permeth- rin P-40, the lemon-scented insect repellent I’d sprayed on my fatigues in Iraq. The suture marks in the scar on her scalp were pleated like fish gills. She woke.
“Okay, this is weird, but I got to pee. I need your help to sit.” “Okay.” I followed Bree into the bathroom. Tiny drops of dried blood on the toilet seat froze something in me. She slung her arms around my neck. She parted her legs so I could get my own between hers. One of my hands was braced behind her back, the other under her thigh—not touching, just there. When she was seated, her hands slid away slowly, under my jawbone, fingers touching over my Adam’s apple.
“Unbutton my pants?” “ . . . ” “I’m fucking with you.” When Cedric arrived, he retrieved a Tupperware container of sy-ringes from the fridge. They sat in chairs facing each other. Cedric kissed his thumb and pressed it to the crook of Bree’s elbow when he drew the steel out.
One condition of my discharge was that I attend a weekly Vets 4 Vets meeting. My failure to show could jeopardize my Celexa prescription— those purple beauties did sand down the rough edges any man can feel.
Meetings were held at Zion Lutheran Church, corner of Michigan and 10th. First-birth mayflies swarmed the exposed bulb above the basement door. The ceaseless boom of the falls carried above the trees—live here long enough, that sound is white noise.
Cinder-block steps descended into a low-ceilinged room dominated by a mural depicting a group of men (all with blond, center-parted hair) gathered by a shaft of sunlight streaming through the clouds. The Gothic type read: By grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone. You could fall into the habit of imagining the men at these meetings as they’d once been, amid the zip of bullets, clatter of tanks, and the strange songs that echo in their blood. Some of them didn’t look that bad. Missing a finger, maybe, or one eye gone milky white—but when they laughed it was genuine, not the sound of dried seeds rattling in a hollow gourd. One especially decrepit specimen may’ve helped the Boer fight the English.
A horseshoe of collapsible chairs ringed a plywood lectern. Cedric was there, too. He’d been a gunnery sergeant in Desert Storm. We got talking about these meetings one afternoon, after I’d dropped Bree o≠. He’d decided to come.
At 19:00 the meeting came to order. That night’s special guest was o∞cer cadet Dennis Fekete. A brushcut man we learned was his uncle pushed him out of the rectory in a wheelchair. Fekete had green eyes and an acne rash on his forehead, likely from whatever mood enhanc-ers and beta blockers he was boated up on. Fekete was missing his arms and legs. His fatigue trousers were buttoned well above his waist, I suppose because without hip bones they may have slid o≠. The empty pant legs hung from the edge of the chair like a pair of windsocks in a dead calm. He’d cut the sleeves o≠ his shirt . . . actually, no, fuck, he hadn’t cut them o≠. Could be his uncle did that for him. What’s left poked through the holes: Mottled pink skin stretched over a few inches of humerus bone. A Silver Star, awarded for conspicuous gal-lantry, was pinned at his breast.
“I’m proud to have served,” he said. “If I had it to do over, I’d give it all again.” A lot of downcast eyes. We tried to picture what it must be like, liv-ing in such a redacted state. Fekete’s voice was phlegmy; he might’ve inhaled some superheated air during the explosion that left him like that, broiled his lungs. Fekete’s stumps wriggled animatedly where they jutted from his shirt-holes. His body vibrated while he expressed his points and once came precariously close to slipping o≠ his chair, but his uncle gathered up the camouflage fabric at Fekete’s shoulders and reseated him, the way you’d arrange a sack of bird seed.
“Would I go back?” he asked himself. “Damn sure. I’ve got unfinished business.” Everyone else thinking: No, man, that business is done. You’re finished business.
Afterward, nobody could shake his hand. Mainly it was awkward back-pats, even a few head-pats. Outside, the night smelled of creosote. Mist hung between the parking lot’s light stanchions. Cedric sat on my truck’s tailgate with a half-dozen tallboys.
Cars fled past on Main, the growl of their motors swelling and reced-ing. Men congregated by their bumpers. The hiss of beer-can pull tabs. Fekete’s uncle pushed him around on a sad-ass coronation tour.
“We ought to nuke the whole Middle East,” Fekete said in his phlegm- choked voice. “Turn it into a fucking parking lot.” A few guys looked away. The uncle maneuvered Fekete over to the bushes edging the lot. Fiddled with his nephew’s uniform. A pressurized stream of urine arced a good three feet, splashing the tarmac.
The uncle wheeled Fekete over. Their cheeks were flushed. At least Fekete had an excuse: He couldn’t have weighed more than a buck ten. Wet spots on his dangling trouser legs stirred rootless horror in me.
“Spare a drop for a wounded serviceman?” the uncle asked.
The uncle unscrewed an oversize version of a sippy cup, the kind toddlers use, and filled it with the beer Cedric gave him. He raised it to Fekete’s lips.
“You going back over soon?” Fekete asked me. “I’d go, if I could. If I could give anything more, I would.” Give what, exactly, Dennis—your fucking head? Q: What had no arms and no legs and made you feel like a bag of shit for still having yours? A: This motherfucker.
“When you do go back, blow a few of those sandy bastards to hell for me. Tell them Dennis Fekete sent you.” Fekete had been a few years ahead of me in high school. He ran with a pack of junior-survivalist types. Paintball enthusiasts who sent away for mail-order Bowie knives out of Soldier of Fortune. He failed the army physical twice, signed with the reserves, and caught on as a Spec 4 small-engine mechanic in Kandahar. Through the grapevine I’d heard Fekete got his arms and legs torn o≠ driving shit to a burn pit.
At Kandahar, you pissed into “desert daisies”: metal tubes dug into the sand at a 45-degree angle. Honey buckets were also typical: 55-gallon steel drums with a splash of Anotec Blue, a wood plank laid across. Full drums were hauled to a fire pit far enough away that the wind wouldn’t carry the stink back.
While driving a load of drums, Fekete ran over a dirty mine. His body got blown out the rear window, fatigues fricasseed o≠ his ass. The recon marines who found him must have been in an unsympa-thetic frame of mind. They said Fekete looked like a dog turd at the beach. Of course, that hadn’t been the story Dennis Fekete told.
“Got to protect what’s ours,” he said, picking up on some point his cow-eyed uncle had made. The wind blew his empty pant legs side-ways. “Beat back the . . . the . . .” His chin dipped to touch his Silver Star. USMC General “Perfect” Peter Pace had pinned it to Fekete’s hospital gown in the base OR—your typical “pin and spin” ceremony. His uncle held the sippy cup to his lips. Fekete had gotten it as bad as he was ever going to get it—and yeah, it was bad; dead would be better—but the only way he’d ever go back would be on the USO tour. If he’d had his limbs, I would’ve slapped him cold. I stared at Fekete’s stumps, these melted birthday candles sheened with mist, wondering how long before he killed himself. How?—hold his fucking breath? His uncle could push him to the edge of a swimming pool. Or leave Dennis a few feet shy and let him wrig-gle to the edge like a caterpillar.
Sliding o≠ the tailgate, I knelt before his wheelchair.
“Know something, Dennis? Your face is . . . not a scratch. Like a baby’s.” I wrapped my arms around him. I cradled his head as you would an infant who doesn’t yet possess the strength to control the enormous weight of his own skull. The mad thrash of his heart behind skin as in-substantial as tissue paper. I held him for too long, then reseated him in the chair. My hands remained on the stumps; the broken points of his bones hummed frantically in their sockets.
“In a way, Dennis, you were really, really fortunate.” I touched his temple, drew my finger down his cheek near his mouth. Thinking maybe he’d bite. Half hoping he’d try.
When I pulled up at Cedric’s house, he lingered in the passenger seat.
“Want to know the most brutal thing I ever saw in my stint?” When I didn’t reply, he went on.
“Wasn’t in combat. We were on furlough. Thailand. That country worships elephants, yeah? But this one, a circus elephant, guess she was a trampler. Kept stepping on her handlers.” He laughed. “A recidivist trampler. Six, seven tons—what’s an elephant weigh? Somebody said she had an abscessed tooth, and if you’d just fix it, but . . . that big foot of hers coming down. Like you or me stepping on a boiled peanut. They led this elephant into the public square. Mary, was her name. Mary. They chain her up. Someone has a pistol with a big fat bore. He shoots her point blank. Nothing but chip a little hide o≠. Thing is, she didn’t do anything. They say she was a trampler, but right then she was docile as . . . fuck. Just stood there and let this bastard shoot her square in her face. She . . . she whined. Didn’t know an elephant could make that noise.” Cedric unrolled the window. The falls, their endless boom.
“They decide to hang her. Some guy shows up with a derrick crane. They loop a chain ’round her neck. Hoist her up. You hear the ligaments crack in her feet. They’d forgotten to unchain her legs, you know? They get her o≠ the ground, and the chain snaps. Whatever-odd tons of elephant comes crashing down. Her hips break loud as a rifle crack. This crazy jet of blood shoots out her trunk. Everyone scatters, shriek-ing and giggling. She sits there, whining, covered in blood and dust. They got a thicker chain.” We sat a while.
“Tough one, my daughter.” “Uh-huh.” “But it’s a pretty common sort of tough, if you can believe it. At some point the question gets asked: How deep’s your bucket? A percentage of us, we just die. The rest, there’s nothing we won’t . . . a body can eat itself until nothing’s left but appetite.” Cedric gave me a look I couldn’t place. Then he was walking to the front door.
His back split down the middle. White fire ignited at the base of his spine, ripped up each vertebra and broke into bright orange wings across his shoulder blades.
The mouse, the spider, the girl. That was Iraq, basically.
Southern edge of a desert country, between the industrial hub of Al Basrah and the township of Al Hartha. Wind-shaped sand hardened into spiny formations. Sweat pooling in my eye sockets. Checkpoint 86K. A cement pillbox bordering a bone-white road. That was my home for eleven months.
Trucks. Motorcycles. Bicycles. Foot tra∞c. We stopped everything. What’s your business? What’s in your satchel? Are you sympathetic to American interests? We were tollbooth operators with Kevlar vests and automatic rifles.
Days unfolded inside the checkpoint. Four perspiring cement walls. Casement windows filmed with sand. Two cots. Two marines. We played cards. Read paperback westerns. Sweated out our body weight at regular intervals. We awaited the arrival of some unknown cer-tainty, but when it failed to materialize, we learned to exist in the shadow of its utter inevitability.
The mouse. The spider. The girl.
The mouse was a small brown mouse. It lived on its own in a nest it built in the generator housing. That a mouse would have no family I found distantly upsetting. It dashed ’round the checkpoint walls, a blur against the cinder block. Brazen, this mouse. Nosing up to my cot, chewing the jute of my rucksack straps. I’d leave MRE cornflakes near its hole. Mouse Boy, my fellow grunt took to calling me. One afternoon it ate a Froot Loop out of my palm. I could’ve curled my fingers around its helpless brown body.
The spider was a camel spider, also known as a desert wolf spider. Its body was the size of a man’s thumb, with an engorged bell of an ab-domen. Its legs were thick and furred. It was the color of deerskin and lived outside the checkpoint in a hole dug at an angle into the sand. A camel spider exiting its hole was quite a sight. Its front legs pushed up and out, then split into four. Each limb moved in its own question-ing pattern, testing the air. Next they planted in the sand, and the spider pushed itself out. Watching this, it was di∞cult not to picture a flower coming into bloom. The spider fed on scorpions, lizards, and huge beetles called fog drinkers, owing to the fact they spread their bumpy wings against the damp breeze to gather water droplets out of the desert fog.
The girl lived in a stone dwelling two hundred yards distant with her mother, father, and younger brother. Her father herded stringy- shanked goats. We never spoke. They were a family who lived near the checkpoint and that was all.
The girl’s eyes were a scouring blue. When she looked at you, which wasn’t often, you felt your bones lighting up in phosphorescent relief.
I spent four months at checkpoint 86K, got two weeks’ furlough, another four months, another furlough, and when I returned Billy Merryweather sat in a camp chair eating MRE jambalaya.
He’d shed twenty pounds, and his skin was the color of pig leather. He touched his spoon to his forehead in a half-assed salute. He still wore those BC glasses, the right lens bisected by a milky crack.
“How you keeping up, soldier?” he said.
“Keeping on. You?” “Monstering, baby. I’m just monstering.” He’d been stationed north, Wardiya, near the Syrian border. He’d been assigned to a city-sweeper unit: a taskforce that infiltrated sus-pected safe houses in urban centers. The hairiest duty a recon marine can draw—the sort that saw you in narrow alleys taking AK-47 fire from second-story windows. Merryweather had picked up a terrible case of psoriasis. He scratched himself until pinpricks of blood dotted his elbows. He insisted on wearing those bust-ass glasses, notching them up his nose with an exaggerated squint.
At the blistering peak of an Iraqi afternoon we’d hop in the Hum-vee for patrol. Sixty klicks to checkpoint 86L and back. Merryweather manned the roof-mounted .50-cal. We cruised past licorice bushes and burnt-out Datsuns when he’d let loose. The throaty bumpha-bumpha of the gun blurred out the hum of the diesel engine, while my head snapped against the headrest from the recoil and copper-jacket rounds tinkled into the cab. Bullets slammed into the ground, throwing up staggered pu≠s of sand like that water fountain show at the Bellagio. Merryweather reveled in the pure waste, I think, plugging an empty desert with five thousand bucks of Uncle Sam’s lead.
“Heat check!” he’d shout. “Heat check!” Little things. His head would dart to one side, as if he were tracking something: the mouse along the floor, maybe, or a fly zipping out the door—but no mouse, no fly. Other times he’d flinch as if little balls of heat lightning had popped in front of his face. He smiled for no reason and laughed in the night. His skin gave o≠ a goatish odor.
Every morning the girl filled a bucket at the well. Merryweather . . . I don’t want to say he timed it. But when his gaze settled on her, fear overtook me like a fast car on the highway—the taste of a busted-open watch battery under my tongue.
One night I awoke, and he wasn’t in his cot. I found him outside, crouched near the spider’s hole. It had caught a fog drinker. The night so quiet that you could hear the crack-crackle as the spider tore apart the beetle’s exoskeleton.
“My father was wrong,” he said. “It’s not a burn. It’s a spear. A con-centrated spear of light. White of a star or something. You know? That white. Painful, yeah, must be, but you can’t feel it. That pure white eats the pain. The air’s poison, but you can breathe. It’s fucking . . . it’s ambrosia. The spear of light is your home. Spiked on it.” He squinted his glasses up his nose. Moonlight reflected o≠ the crack, cleaving one eye. “When you come o≠ it you’re pretty grateful, for sure, because humans probably aren’t built to exist on that spear.” One afternoon he claimed he was pissing battery acid and begged o≠ patrol. I drove the circuit on my own. Upon my return the mouse was dead.
The day before, Merryweather had watched it eat dry oatmeal out of my hand. He chucked his helmet at the wall, scaring it away.
“What the hell’s that thing going to do when you’re gone?” Now it lay outside the camel spider’s hole. The mouse’s head was can-openered o≠. Camel spiders don’t inject venom: They chew you open and eat your insides.
A bootlace was duct-taped to the mouse’s tail. The bootlace was knotted to a stick driven into the sand.
I slid my hand into the sand and picked it up. Its head hung o≠ its neck on a hank of fur. It weighed nothing. Its eyes were eaten out of its skull. My hand clenched reflexively. The mouse crumpled like a cellophane bag.
Inside the checkpoint Merryweather boiled an MRE on the camp stove. I calmly unscrewed the bayonet from my M16.
The spider flinched down in its darkness. Digging my free hand into the sand, I stabbed into its hole. The handle thrummed slightly, the way a fishing rod does when you get a nibble. When I withdrew it, the spider was pierced. Brownish-yellow yolk streaked the blade. There’s no understandable internal anatomy to a spider: They’re just full of goo, like some carnivorous bath bead. About a thousand shiny eyes were crowded into the nightmare landscape of its face: They looked like caviar, or like fly shit. It twisted itself up the blade. Its mandibles bit uselessly at the steel. Its legs jittered over the hilt to touch my fingers. Its hairs weren’t bristly, as I would have thought: more like the downy hair on a baby’s scalp.
I removed Merryweather’s pot from the cooker and scraped the spi-der o≠ the blade with my boot. It hit the flame, legs curling around the blackening nut of its abdomen. Its head exploded, kicking its body o≠ the stove.
Merryweather hopped up, mock-frightened, and stomped on it.
“Got the little bastard! I just saved your life.” I drove Bree to school. Picked her up. In between, thought about her.
Sometimes I’d place my hand on her arm to help her up and feel tension radiating from her bones, or deeper than bone: her marrow, electric. Get that close to somebody, feel that tension, it’s possible to believe you’ll dream the same dreams that night.
Sometimes I’d think she was crazy. I mean, shithouse-rat crazy. But after a while you realized she was simply past caring. At certain depths, not caring is kissing cousin to crazy. She did care about her father—“I don’t want to die on him,” she’d say—and evinced a general-ized concern for all creatures more powerless than her, but that made it a short list.
“You’re a handsome fucker,” she’d say. “I mean, your nose is too big for a start, but the rest of your features salvage it. Narrowly.” “You don’t look half bad yourself. You could stand to a lose a few pounds.” “Plus your teeth are discolored. You drink too much co≠ee. That stu≠ accelerates the heart. Beats faster, aging you. You’ll look like Larry King before you’re forty.” “Co≠ee!” I’d say, hitching up phantom suspenders. “Superfood or silent killer? Maryanne from Houston, you’re on the line.” After school we sat on her sofa watching TV. She’d put her legs across mine. Her feet were enormous, real gunboats, the phalanges sticking out like railroad ties. Maybe it was just that the rest of her had shrunk.
“Why don’t you massage those bad girls?” “When’s the last time you washed them?” “You really are one tall drink of asshole.” I’d never massaged feet before. I suspected there was an art, and my large, callused hands were imperfect tools. I pressed my thumb to her arch and moved the pad against the taut tendons in slow circles.
“Mmmm.” Bree smiled her little smile. “Like that. Just . . . like . . . that.” What would it be to have sex with this girl? It struck me as an act requiring delicacy and control. She didn’t even look like a woman. Breasts nonexistent. Hips pronounced as ears. You couldn’t take her up against a wall. Couldn’t get careless in the moment. Not one move, one touch, without her permission. I saw her hipbones snapping, busted ends grinding. I pictured her breastbone cracked open like a venus flytrap to reveal the billion-trillion things that must be coring her out: In my mind they were white-as-bone fishhooks with garbage-disposal mouths. I could kiss her all over. Rough and sinewy as most parts of me were, my lips were soft. Kiss her feet. Her calves. Each rib. Her eyelids.
People would leave things on Cedric’s doorstep. Flowers. Teddy bears. Bree’s room was a plush menagerie. She was embarrassed by it: “I should hurry up and die to spare everyone the expense.” But Cedric was often overcome. I saw him weep over a helium-balloon bouquet tethered to a stu≠ed pig. Eyes sheened with tears, he told me: “They care a lot, you know? They love us so, so much.” One afternoon at the reservation Bree began to seizure. Her skull slammed the window, and her body fell between the seats. I placed my hands around her, the knobs of her spine hard as cat’s-eye marbles, and pulled her o≠ the floor. White foam emitted from the sides of her mouth. She threw up. It was as milky-sweet as pablum.
I drove to the hospital. Cedric showed up soon after, though I’d never thought to call him. When it became clear nothing could be done, she was released.
I went over that night. Bree was a bit better. Cedric o≠ered me a beer and thanked me, but his eyes were elsewhere. We watched a bad comedy. Cedric laughed more than the material merited.
Before Bree went to bed he administered her shot. He only gave her half the dose. While he helped her into bed I picked up the syringe. I pulled the plunger and touched the black rubber stopper to the tip of my tongue.
My father has worked at the Oxy since forever. He drank a lot of water. The airborne chemicals leached moisture out of his skin. When I was a kid, sometimes I’d drink from his cup. The taste was the same as the taste on that stopper.
I kicked a hole in the sand and buried the mouse.
Merryweather began to fixate on the girl.
He kept losing weight. Veins trailed like root formations down his forearms. His eyes were sunk so far into his skull you had to figure they were touching his brain. Yet he worked out fanatically. Wall squats. Chin-ups on an exposed beam. His sun-blistered skin sheened with sweat.
“Ooh-rah,” he’d say, showing too many teeth, tendons standing out on his neck.
The girl filled the water bucket. She picked fruit o≠ a date palm. Merryweather dragged a chair over to the spot I’d kicked in the sand. He sat on top of the mouse’s grave and watched her. He rubbed his hands over his knees. He may have calibrated the angle at which the sun sparkled o≠ her eyes.
“I bet her cunt’s full of sand,” I may have heard him say.
One night he told me he was going over to the girl’s house, for a visit.
“You can’t even speak the language.” “I want to see how they live, is all.” “You can see from here.” His fists balled whitely. He put his Browning 1911 on the mattress.
“I’m not going armed.” But Merryweather always carried a knife in his boot.
I went outside to use the desert daisy. Fear thrummed in my veins, an electric impulse with no place to discharge. The evening rain had tapered to a warm drizzle. I unzipped, inserted my penis into the cold metal tube. I watched the predatory lope of a hyena beneath a low-slung moon and thought about how on Sunday mornings in my neigh-borhood the butchers hung meat still red with blood in their windows. When I returned home, months later, my father would say: “No two ways with you anymore, is there? When you’re happy—bam!—you’re purest happy. I like it, though,” he’d say, but his eyes would remain riveted on the rim of his beer bottle.
Her cunt’s full of sand. . . .
The gunshot set the hyenas gibbering in the dunes.
Cedric had sold his truck to defray Bree’s sky-high medical bills. I pulled up to the bus stop outside the Oxy, o≠ered him a ride. He smiled.
“Hey, great timing.” I drove to a bar in the east end. Dark, the pool-table felt torn to rib-bons. Cedric put back a shot of Rumple Minze and said, “Thanks for this.” We drank Busch and watched the Colts annihilate the Bills.
Afterward I drove to the reservation. Mine the only car in sight. The falls growled like a living thing beyond the lot lights.
“She’s not getting any better.” “Maybe not,” Cedric said. The red bands circling his eyes made it look as if his blood was eating its way into the whites. “But she’s . . . can’t give up hope.” “You know my father’s at the Oxy, right?” I said. “The chlorine refinery.” Cedric rolled down the window and fiddled with the sideview mir-ror, like to check if there was anyone behind us.
“Chlorine,” I said. “One mean bastard of a chemical.” “We take precautions.” “Insurgents used it in Iraq,” I said. “They blew up chlorine tankers in public spaces. The survivors said it smelled like pepper and pine-apple.” Cedric nodded, said, “Weird,” still fiddling with the mirror.
“Roll that up, Ced, will you? Cold out.” “Nice night,” he said, but did it. Then he flattened his palms on the dash as if bracing for a collision.
“Thing about chlorine is,” I said, “it reacts with the water in our cells. Turns them into acid, basically—poisonous little balls bouncing around inside you. But once it reacts, it’s gone. Poof, right? Untraceable.” “I really wouldn’t know.” “No, not you. I’m saying if you knew what you were doing . . . if you mixed the right amount of hypochlorite with, say, medicine that’s actually been prescribed . . . you could make a real mess of somebody.” We sat a stone’s throw from Love Canal. The boom of the falls seemed loud enough to loosen the fillings in my teeth.
“You do it patiently enough, Ced, I guess you could make someone sick forever.” Cedric leaned back in the seat. Looked down his chest, smiling, shaking his head. His hand went inside his jacket and came out with one of the slender little blades they use at the Oxy to slit open sacks of chemical. This one had hockey tape wound around the handle to make it grippy. He opened his fingers. It sat in his palm, a silvered slice of the moon. He seemed surprised to find it there.
I cupped my hand to the side of Cedric’s skull, dug my heels into the floormat and torqued my hips and pushed. Pretty damn hard.
When I entered the pillbox, Merryweather was still alive. Unless, like a fish, it was a case of his nervous system firing o≠ one last senseless fusillade.
At the military inquest I learned the bullet had entered under his right jawbone, traveled diagonally through his tongue and mouth, piercing his soft palate and shredding his pharyngeal tonsils before it invaded his cranial vault and exited the left side of his head.
All I could tell in the moment was that the hole was a scarlet star-fish.
He was on all fours, head hung between his shoulders, gun still in hand. The skin under his fingernails was purple: Hydrostatic pressure had burst the blood vessels. His body slumped forward until his skull touched the floor.
At the inquest I heard Merryweather had been involved in the deaths of five Iraqis. His unit fired on a transport truck that failed to heed their warning. The truck bed was full of goat herders. Three of the five were children.
The Judge Advocate General asked me to pin down Merryweather’s frame of mind. I told him about the mouse. That I’d heard him cry at night. Just procedural i dotting and t crossing. Marines do eat the gun. Tragic, but it happens.
The forensics examiner said it was odd that the victim, as he called Merryweather, was still holding the gun. Apparently recoil, coupled with the force of the skull snapping back, usually causes the weapon to fly out of a victim’s hand. As opposed to TV crime scenes, in which suicides are usually found holding the gun.
The examiner also said contact entry wounds are nearly nonexis-tent in such cases. The pathology of the victim, his typical mindset, is he’s debating his decision to the end—“Searching for the hand of God,” is how the examiner put it—and at the last instant pulls the gun away or angles his head back a fraction, so the barrel isn’t flush with the skin. He absorbs an intermediate wound, with soot tattoos pepper-ing the entry hole.
I was discharged following the inquest. Apparently the pathology of a marine who witnesses a fellow marine kill himself is a marked tendency toward moodiness and social disengagement, making him of questionable benefit. I didn’t gripe it. I’d had all I could stand of the big green bastard. Eat the apple. Fuck the corps.
Months later Merryweather’s mother wrote me. She found my name in a notebook among his personal e≠ects. Ten pages of small, neat cursive. She told me her son had been born premature. Wasn’t much bigger than a dinner bun, she wrote. The doctor held him in his cupped hands. A target of schoolyard bullies. Once he came home with bubble gum squashed into his hair. It took an entire jar of Skippy to get it out. For weeks his scalp smelled of peanut butter. The military seemed so against his nature. I felt awkward, the recipient of such intimacies.
What happened to her son happened to a lot of us, I wrote back. You get lost over there, charting an alien geography so far from any-thing you’ve ever known; sometimes it gets to feeling you’re on the airless mountains of Mars. That sandy motherfucker sinks roots into you. Of course, I didn’t use this exact phrasing.
In your life there are few key instants, or maybe only one. And then there are all the other instants. My present belief is a man can get trapped in that one instant. This part I did not write.
Your son was a good man and a good marine, Mrs. Merryweather. I loved him.
And in my way, I really had.
We talked afterward, Cedric and I. Sat at a picnic table in the cool dark of the woods.
“I need help,” he said.
“You do.” “She’ll get better.” “She’s going to.” He rubbed the side of his head and told me he’d walk home. I said this was all between us and could stay that way, but he insisted, so I let him go.
I walked to the metal railing that ran along the basin and inhaled the clean mineral smell of the rock. Moonlight hit the spray at the base of the falls, and the atomized water projected it back, an inverted bowl of light. Night birds took flight from the cli≠s. Cutting through the darkness, their white wings reminded me of tracer fire. That water tumbled at twenty-six metric tons per second. If a body gets trapped down in those lightless chambers hammered out by that immensity of water, well, it’s gone. You can’t send frogmen in: They would die look-ing. You could try draglining, but after a while skin goes soft: Treble hooks pass right through, like through gelatin.
Back at my truck, I saw vandals had busted out the passenger win-dow. I found a crumpled McDonald’s bag under the seat. Scrupulously, I picked up shards of safety glass.
Driving a school bus is routine. Wake up. Drive to the bus yard. Pour a cup of co≠ee. Smile at the wallet-sized grandkids. Don a reflective vest. Give your bus a careful once-over.
The legal term for what we transport is “precious cargo.” She’s waiting on the porch. Her shirt’s buttoned wrong, probably because she did it herself. Maybe she’s looking a bit stricken, like she’s lost something, but she’s there. She’s there. I crack the doors.
“Time’s a-ticking.” “I’m coming, you rat bastard.” And she does. Slowly, tortuously, but yeah. That pot-stirring motion of her hand. Tendons bunched along her jaw. I can’t help but smile.
Somewhere along the line I lost that measured quality. I may have forfeited the middle: that vast and subtle spectrum of emotions be-tween the extremes. Before, if a beautiful girl fixed her gaze on me, I’d play it cool—now, why bother? If I’m bursting, it shows. I don’t feel silly or weak, like I’m handing some crucial part of myself away.
She’s going to fall . . . no, no, she’s fine.
My hands rest on the wheel. A small flame pops alight above the knuckle of my pinky finger, as if a wick’s embedded in the skin. The flame touches the next knuckle, the next, each bursting into a tongue of fire. The sound they make igniting is low and satisfying. Every avail-able oxygen molecule pressed into the service of that flame.
Whumph is the sound. Whumph, whumph, whumph, whumph.

Source: http://craigdavidson.net/PDF/TheBurn-1.pdf