Give Me Your Heart (33 page)

A rage came over the Lance Corporal at the need to be grateful for such shit. The need to crawl like a kicked dog licking the boots of “superior officers.” Or, grateful at these
people—“family”—fussing over him calling him Dennie like they had some claim on him. Like they knew
him.
Thinking of his old man’s Remington 1100 in the back
closet, the sight of which would calm them down quick.

No he was okay. This was a “transition time”—he knew and he was okay with it. Just very tired, sulky, and bored.
Nausseous
so much to eat heaped on his plate. Drinking,
time to drink. Then there were the tricks.

How after supper there were these new people in the house with faces that resembled faces he’d known. Except the names were lost, like lost coins he’d hear rattling inside the lining
of his fleece jacket. Keys too, slipped through the holes. These were “neighbors,” saying his name like they knew him and had the right, but that wasn’t the trick, the trick was
how they disappeared right in front of him, in an instant. One of his uncles crossing in front of the Lance Corporal past the TV where the football game was on and in that instant the uncle was
gone, vanished; then a few minutes later the Lance Corporal sighted that same uncle just a few feet away.

Where were you? the Lance Corporal asked. You—where’d you go? I’m talking to
you.
Couldn’t remember the uncle’s name or even if for sure this fat bald guy
was his uncle. The Lance Corporal spoke hoarsely and not altogether coherently so there was difficulty in comprehending his speech but the Lance Corporal took care to smile to show that, hey, he
was okay with this kind of weirdness, this tricky shit, maybe they were all drunk and that was the circumstance so they could laugh at it but the Lance Corporal did not want anyone laughing at
him.
Sure he could take a joke. He was the Jokester. How’d you make yourself disappear like that he was asking the fat bald guy. All of them were looking at him with uncertain smiles.
It was well known the Lance Corporal had been the Jokester but that was a long time ago and they could not be sure if the Lance Corporal was joking now. How the hell d’you make yourself
disappear, he asked. He was asking politely. Civilians tended to be fearful of the Lance Corporal and his kind. In uniform they were a sobering sight! They could be hotheaded. They could be cruel.
They could be inventive, impulsive. The goats they’d run into on the road, that first full day when the Lance Corporal had been new to the war in the time of his first tour of duty (in fact
not a lance corporal then but only private first class) some of them—the goats—they’d decapitated. For the hell of it. So nerved-up, and they hadn’t yet engaged the enemy.
The thing is dead what’s the difference. Also a dog, which had not been completely dead though run over by Jeeps. Not people, they had not cut off any human heads in the Lance
Corporal’s battalion, though there were rumors. The goat or maybe two goats and the dog with mange all over his body like scabs.

The goat with the deep-socketed eyes like female eyes brimming with hurt and reproach and just slightly crossed. The dog with doggy mongrel eyes. Coarse sand-colored fur but the fur of the
insides of ears was silky fine, feathery. Eyes that were opened wide in terror and astonishment and something like recognition. These they’d brought into the barracks. Not the Lance Corporal
but some of the others. These were slightly older guys of whom the Lance Corporal was fearful but knew he dared not reveal it.

Dennie Junior was feverish past his bedtime. The little girl-niece had been taken home. The men were drinking. The TV was on loud but no one was listening. Dennie Junior was saying Dad-dy you
won’t go away again will you anxious and sucking at his fingers and Daddy slapped the fingers away from the sucking fish-mouth and said No.

Whoever it was that was playing the Lance Corporal/Daddy said no in a firm voice like a fist coming down hard on a table.

Civilians you can’t tell apart. Dark-skinned, rat-eyed.
Kill them all let God sort them out.

That night it seriously pissed the Lance Corporal how the kid too, which so much fuss was made of was the Lance Corporal’s own
flesh and blood,
had started playing that same trick
disappearing into the left side of . . . whatever it was—a sudden deep hole like a cellar or a pit, a gouged-out mine pit in the side of a mountain, where things went in and were gone. In a
slow voice of the kind required to speak to morons and/or the brain-damaged the
nerowlgist
had explained to the Lance Corporal that he had a
nerowloggical deficit.
See, sometimes that
part of the brain is shut down. Like a light in a room, switched off. As soon as the light is
off,
you can’t see. You can’t see that the light is
off.
You can’t see
the dimensions of the space the light would illuminate if there was a light because once the light is
off
the thought of the light is
off.
The very word “light” is
off.
Civilians who risk stepping into that darkness disappear. Sometimes they reappear but most often they do not.

All a man truly craves is the respect of his fellow men. And women too of course. The respect that is due to him. And this is the respect due his country. God will sort out
the rest.

Dennie! No, honey, it’s just a dream.

The mother hurried to the child’s bed. In the night cries and gasps for breath and choked screams. The Lance Corporal rarely slept through a night even with his numerous meds swallowed
down with Coors, but when the Lance Corporal at last drifted off into an exhausted sleep like discolored froth-surf on a beach thinly covering the raddled sand, the Lance Corporal was often wakened
by the child’s cries and the commotion of the woman comforting the child. Dennie, honey! Mommy has you, honey, it’s just a dream.

Now the Lance Corporal was home in the house on Magnesium Street, Ashtree Junction, North Dakota. The Lance Corporal was home permanently and except for his twice-weekly therapy sessions at the
VA Hospital at Grand Forks, to which he was driven (usually by a volunteer relative), the Lance Corporal did not often leave the house. The Lance Corporal was left to ponder how it had happened he
had been honorably discharged from the most revered of the U.S. armed services and yet the son the Lance Corporal had been given did not appear to be a well child.

Bad dreams in the night and sometimes while watching TV and videos with Dad-dy. The child who’d been potty-trained began to soil his bedclothes and sometimes—the most shameful times,
which threw Dad-dy into a rage—his daytime clothes, for he could not control his
pee
which leaked out of him as out of a drippy faucet that no matter how hard you twist shut will yet
drip.

The Lance Corporal’s young wife was not the one the Lance Corporal had been remembering in the hospital, which was a sharp disappointment. That was a separate disappointment of which the
Lance Corporal (who was a realist in all things) saw no purpose in speaking for the Lance Corporal was a mature man now twenty-seven—twenty-eight?—years old. Three tours of duty he had
served his country in the war, this now the Lance Corporal could certainly endure.

Yes there was sex between the Lance Corporal and his wife. Yes if you are wondering.

At the therapy clinic the Lance Corporal’s wife attended crucial sessions to acquire certain skills. And so there was sex between the Lance Corporal and his wife, to a degree.

Yes we are happy together, we are man and wife. Yes if you are wondering.

Yet the Lance Corporal insulted the wife, calling her by another’s name. In the extremity of his passion, not knowing what the fuck he was saying, or moaning. This is not right, the wife
protested. I’m the one who loved you, I was the one who married you, not her, the wife protested piteously and hours were required late into the night to placate her and these hours were
exhausting to the Lance Corporal who would come to realize shortly, like so many others, that it is easier to erase some problems than to solve them, or even to make the effort to solve them. In
the back closet the bolt-action shotgun, a single barrel for the female and a single barrel for the fretting pissy-smelling kid and a quick reload for himself.

It was a well-publicized fact, meant to dissuade young males: the leading cause of death in such western states as Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and the Dakotas among young males sixteen to
thirty is (1) vehicular accident, (2) suicide by gun.

It was a well-publicized fact meant to dissuade but a fact to give solace to most who hear it.
Your gun is your friend. Your gun won’t let you down when you need it.

Shrewdly the Lance Corporal had devised a way to drive any vehicle, even the Dodge pickup standing high from the ground. It was an ingenious technique involving one of his old boots, the handle
of a ten-pound sledgehammer, and an oversized leather glove. His brother Mack whistled through his teeth Jez-zuz, Dennie! Got to hand it to you, you are one smart dude.

Or, you are one smart fuck-ass.

(In such ways the brothers communicated. Since boyhood, in such ways. Often Mack would slap Dennie across the shoulders, or against his head but gently now, for there was the steel plate. There
were the implants you could not risk dislodging.)

On his restless drives mostly into the countryside through the ravaged landscape and into the Hump foothills past slag heaps, open-pit mines, and lakes smelling of sulfur—where in a
long-ago time the Lance Corporal’s daddy and granddaddy and who the fuck all else in the family the Lance Corporal had to assume worked for Delphic Ore, Inc., which mined ore—whatever
fuck ore the Humps had, Delphic Ore, Inc., mined—you knew that, and you’d know that Delphic Ore, Inc., was bankrupt and shut down and whatever the Humps had to yield to mankind was long
since yielded, sold and consumed and gone; and the Lance Corporal knew this and did not contest it. Thinking
I have served my country, this is a good thing. This is my country.

Pa’s old Remington 1100 he took with him. This was not illegal, this was not a concealed weapon. The Remington 1100 is one of the great guns though this specimen had to be forty years old,
the nickel-plate barrel scratched and the maple stock worn smooth.

Just birdshot he’d loaded. In case from the pickup he might see a flock of mallards or snow geese and have the opportunity for a good clear shot—this was a wish of his.

In the TV version Maudie Skedd would arrive in the house on Magnesium Street. Maudie crying and her crimped yellow hair in her face. Maudie on her knees begging forgiveness. Maudie shamed, for
all of Ashtree Junction knew of her betrayal. And the Lance Corporal said calmly
All that is past Maudie. I am in love with my wife who is the mother of my son. I forgive you Maudie this is my
new life now.

In the TV version, a handsome actor like the young Brad Pitt would play the Lance Corporal. For you could not portray the Lance Corporal as the Lance Corporal’s actual self which no TV
viewers would wish to see and the truth is, the actual Maudie Skedd is twenty pounds overweight and not so great-looking any longer.

If there was the TV version, there would be the Lance Corporal/Daddy with the beautiful little boy too. A little boy not so fretful always sucking his snot forefinger so you wanted to slap
him.

The Lance Corporal loved his son more than his own life. The Lance Corporal played video games with Dennie Junior, watched TV cartoons, and repaired his broken toys. The Lance Corporal spent
time with his son for the wife was working at Pennysavers at the mall where employees are offered such discounts, you’d be a fool not to take advantage.

Momma-Jeanne came over, also Aunt Sadie, Aunt Bessie, and Grandma-Jeanne. Helping the Lance Corporal with his little boy, for there was the realization
This is a transition time for
all.

Sometimes they prayed together. The Lance Corporal came to believe that he could sleep a purer sleep after prayer.

The Lance Corporal had killed in the war. The Lance Corporal had no idea how many of the enemy he had killed in the war. Though some of the enemy he had seen die—he had seen actual heads
explode—so there was no ambiguity. Civilians he had seen, children and females of all ages he had seen, and these were bodies he could not recall having been upright and living before
they’d become bodies. It was easier to recall them as bodies. The Lance Corporal had followed orders given to him by his superiors. The Lance Corporal had followed orders without regret or
reproach. In the dark half of the Lance Corporal’s brain figures were gathering. There was whispering, muffled voices. There should be a balance they were saying. The Lieutenant realized
It’s in their language.
For this was the other language, of the enemy. The sinister guttural language no one could speak nor even comprehend. Saying
If you give us yours.

My what? Give you my
—
what?

Yours.

Waking tangled in sweaty bedclothes or sprawled in sweat-soaked T-shirt and boxers on the couch and the TV on mute a few yards away in the night the Lance Corporal groped in panic for the box
cutter he kept by his side at such times, carried in the pickup and Pa’s old Remington 1100 in the back seat (of the pickup)—a man had to be armed at all times. This was post-9/11
U.S.A. This was a time of terror stalking the land. The Lance Corporal with the shunt in his vena cava wakened with the knowledge that the enemy dead had not said
If you give us your son you
will be forgiven.
They did not say that. He did not hear that. For these were but civilians and not empowered to make such proposals. They did not say
If you give us your son as you have
taken our sons from us you will be forgiven
but the Lance Corporal understood, that was the promise.

Where is Dennie Junior? In sudden fear for the child the Lance Corporal woke the snoring woman and stumbled into the child’s room where the child had wakened in fear of him and he
saw—it could not be for the first time he saw—that this child was not Dennie Junior but another child, scrawny, undersized, with deep-socketed, slightly crossed eyes. These eyes shone
with feral cunning like a creature’s eyes glaring up beside the highway in headlights. Where is Dennie Junior? the Lance Corporal demanded, and the woman said, This is Dennie, this is our
son, and the Lance Corporal said, This is not our son! This is not my son! Where have they taken my son! And the woman comforted the crying child, saying that Daddy was having a bad dream, Daddy
did not mean what he was saying, and the Lance Corporal backed off in fear of the misshapen child with the large rat-head and staring eyes in which there glared that look of recognition, of the
damned. And the woman said, Of course this is Dennie Junior, don’t scare us like this, honey, please, it’s one of your nightmares, and the Lance Corporal said hesitantly, Is it?
That’s what it is? A nightmare, and the woman said, Yes, it’s a nightmare, now come back to bed.