Nowhere if you don’t want, Don says.
You have a cigarette?
Here, Don says and offers him one.
Jay takes it and stands off to one side. Don sits at the desk. He looks at me and then turns to the phone. He rests his hand on the receiver as if he anticipates it will ring at any moment. Ginger and Jay watch him. Ginger presses a hand to her chest and mutters something to herself. I just want to go home. If the call comes, I hope neither Don nor Jay answers. Let it ring. Ring all night if need be. I already know what I have to do. It’s all the same, no matter what they tell me. I just go with the numbers.
Keith
I drop a plastic bag on the picnic table and sit across from Jay. A few guys wander around the grass in blue VA hospital robes and stop to listen to the cars on Clement Street. Trees muffle the noise, although you can still faintly hear the cars like something far away. The grounds slope up to a crowded parking lot, and I see some older guys in the shade wearing sunglasses and sitting in wheelchairs beneath trees with canes across their laps, waiting for what, I don’t know. A ride, probably.
Jay, ice cream and cookies after the AA meeting, this guy says, stopping by our table. He leans on a walker and bums a smoke off me. Nicotine stains his gray beard, and his hospital gown slips off one shoulder and gauze pads cover spots on his thin arms where a nurse might’ve stuck him with an IV.
When’s the meeting? Jay asks.
In an hour.
OK.
You’ll remember?
I’ll try.
Jay sips some coffee and watches the guy walk away with a thousand-yard stare that sees through him and beyond to places I cannot imagine. I take two cellophane-wrapped packages out of my coat pocket and slide them toward him.
I brought you fudge grahams too, I say, pointing to the plastic bag, and some fruit-flavored wafers.
How’d you find me?
The nurse from the ninth floor told me you were out here.
When I returned from Iraq to San Francisco, I fucking drank. Anniversary of an attack, I drank; anniversary of a buddy’s death, I drank. I fucking hung out with homeless Vietnam vets on Sixth Street. Man, I hid a lot behind the bottle. I put the bottle up only when Katherine threatened to leave me. I came here to the ninth floor, the psych wing of the VA, for two weeks and dried out. I still wasn’t right. I was still forgetting shit but I wasn’t drinking, which made the forgetting that much harder to take. But I didn’t know it was a problem. Not at first. I was just glad to be home and out of the VA. During those two weeks on the ninth floor, Katherine would visit me once a day. She brought bags of chocolate chip cookies. She liked to bake cookies, but these were store-bought. Said she didn’t have time to bake. Should have known then she was already gone.
Got some Twizzlers here too in the bag.
All right.
I open a package of pink-colored wafers and bite into one. The crunching noise fills my head like breaking glass. I want to ask Jay how he’s doing but decide to leave it alone. The way my brain is, I’d probably forget what the fuck he said anyway.
I like the strawberry wafers. You ought to try one, Jay.
OK.
I watch him take one, wondering if I’ll forget I was here when I go home.
In Iraq, we used to give Skittles to the kids of hajis building our bunkers. You have Skittles when you were there?
No, I say.
None of those haji kids were bad. I don’t hold anything against them, Jay says. They just see their daddies fighting all the time and do like them.
I didn’t deal much with kids over there. They lined the road sometimes when we went out on patrol. They’d throw rocks at us, tink, tink, tink against the vic. Just when I’d think, fuck it, it’s only rocks, one of them would chuck a grenade and the explosion would toss us around like bowling pins, not hurt so much as pretty goddamned roughed up.
We had a guard tower. Tower Three. This kid and his mother lived right outside the tower in the middle of the line of fire. I’m talking snipers and mortars, and they lived with it day in and day out like people in Seattle who say, It ain’t nothing, all this rain.
I mean they didn’t have armor or a weapon of any kind. Nothing that I knew of. I don’t know how they made it. The kid was small. He had a narrow face, black hair. Maybe thirteen, fourteen. One round in him and he’d’ve busted in half. His mother was dressed in black. All you could see was her eyes, like some ninja warrior. They never acknowledged us. The kid threw rocks. Not at us. Just liked to throw rocks. I got to wondering, though, whose side were he and his mother on? Do they lay IEDs? Fuck rules of engagement, why hadn’t we wasted them?
Jay is a hell of a lot more generous than I am. Do like their daddies do. Shit, the way I see it, hajis aren’t people. They’re fucking hajis. That’s what we called them. Fucking hajis. Some nights, I watch haji-made videos on YouTube and wish I still had my weapon, the motherfuckers. I was in Target the other week, I think, the one in Oakland. I’m pretty sure it was Target, and I saw a guy, this guy with a turban. Fucking towel head. I don’t go to Target now. Goddamn hajis. When you give up so much for people you don’t even know and they try to kill you––did kill a shitload of us––fuck them. I don’t even know what haji means. If I did, I might think differently about calling them that. I’d call them something worse if I knew something worse, but I don’t.
I met Jay at a support group for Iraq War vets at Fresh Start. The VA told me about it. Jay was short but sturdy like a Mack truck. He was eating cheese and crackers laid out on the snack table like he’d never get enough. We didn’t say much beyond, Hey, brother, how’s it going? I’m Keith. I’m Jay. He spoke slowly, his mouth full of cheese and crackers, and I pulled up a chair. He told me he volunteered at Fresh Start. Answered phones. What do you do? he asked me. Come here, I told him.
I got in the habit of sitting next to him at the group meetings. I like consistency. There was a morning when the newspaper delivery guy forgot our apartment. I sat by the front window and looked out the curtain to where the paper normally landed every morning at six and thought, Where is it? What’s going on? Why’s it late? The barking of dogs behind us on Sixteenth Avenue alerted me that something was wrong. Then the dogs stopped and the quiet was worse. This guy Perez shot dogs all the time, these huge Cujo-looking things. He shot one right in the mouth. This haji farmer came out, asked what we were going to do for his injured dog. I took out my KA-BAR and cut its throat. There’s your fucking dog, I said.
But the paper wasn’t there and Perez wasn’t with me. I stared out the window, watched the gray morning sky turn to light blue, and wondered which side of the street would have the ambush. Sparrows flew out of trees. What had frightened them? I felt like I could breathe and breathe and never get enough air. I refused to leave the apartment, refused to leave the window. Katherine got on the phone and demanded delivery of our newspaper. Not this afternoon, she shouted, now! When she brought it inside an hour later, I felt better, but then I thought, Hold up. Wait a minute. I held it in my hands afraid to move until Katherine opened it and I saw there wasn’t a bomb inside.
Last week, at the Fresh Start, I didn’t see Jay. That’s how I lost friends in Iraq. Here on Monday morning, gone by Monday afternoon. They’d go on patrol and not come back. I lost five buddies my first week in Iraq. It was all I could do not to scream, Where the fuck is Jay?
Keith, you’re looking pretty wild, Ryan, the group leader, said. What’s wrong?
Where’s Jay?
He’s in the VA. Do you know the director here, Tom? Well, anyway, he told me that Jay got drunk and started cutting on himself in the shelter bathroom. The police had to cuff him to stop him from hurting himself.
Ryan served in Vietnam and did a prison stint when he got smashed one night on a fifth of Yukon Jack and dug a trench in his backyard. He whipshit a neighbor damn near to death after he asked Ryan a perfectly logical question: What the hell are you doing?
Suicide?
No. Cutting. Like high school kids do. Deal with the pain on the inside by hurting yourself on the outside. I think he might be bipolar.
