a Tigerland vignette
by
Destina Fortunato
For X
"I have never advocated a war, except as a means of peace." - Ulysses S. Grant
Jim thinks of his time in the military as a drug-induced dream of youth. He lived through it and came out on the other side mostly intact, optimism diminished but still strong enough to carry him through. He had words, though they had diminished too, rambling down from book-length notes to bad poetry to chicken scratches on cocktail napkins. Eventually he stopped moving his hand to put words to paper, though he still writes the books in his head. They live there, where the memories are.
His daughter started asking him about the war almost as soon as she was old enough to understand the picture presented to her by the Late Late Movie: big adventures, heroes, music swelling behind determined faces. In the old movies, there's no blood, no trauma, only grit and guts and men with unambiguous causes. Such a cliché, that his girl should wonder what Daddy did in the war. But Carla was ever curious; her mother tried to shush her with dolls, placate her with crayons, but short-term intervention couldn't keep the questions at bay for long. She was her father's daughter, no question about it.
The Paxtons had never raised a picket fence or two point five kids, or a family dog. They sought refuge among the stained carpets and ramshackle walls of base housing for the first ten years of their marriage, until they could afford better. Carla was a happy accident - they weren't ready then and didn't think they'd ever be ready, but there she was, sparkling and pink and smelling of powder, and Jim put all thoughts of fame and fortune aside and buckled down to serve his country. Not what he'd planned when he signed up, but his plan hadn't been sound to begin with. He'd been too stubborn to see it, at first and forever, but Bozz knew.
Bozz.
It's a name Jim doesn't think of as often as he once did, before time and history allowed him to bury that incident a little deeper than the surface. He can remember a time when he hadn't yet met his wife, when he was still trying to find his way, and some crazy-ass kid from Texas snatched his life up in his open hands and handed it back with pain. It's a name Jim associates with blurred vision, with seeing things as he wants them to be and not as they are; it's the name he thinks of when he remembers the first time a war protester spat in his face. It was the bandage that attracted them, like blood draws hounds, and the youngest of them had been his age -- maybe younger.
Jim couldn't bring himself to hate them, because he understood them. He could have been one of them, if life had been less kind to him, and if Bozz hadn't come between him and disaster.
There are no bestsellers for Jim. No acclaim, no accolades, nothing he has not built for himself with his own two hands. His daughter has grown up in a void of information, she has gone to school and been taught a false history, a history of heroes, when the world was on fire all around her. And she wants to know - what did Daddy do in the war?
Jim has stories to tell, many stories, but he doesn't want to tell them to Carla.
In his youth, Jim reduced the infinite complexity of the world around him to two dimensions, cardboard, insubstantial. Bozz defied all such description. Jim only knows this now because he's old enough to know it, because he didn't go over there in the trenches and the holes, and he didn't die. Bozz was the guy who fucked women, but didn't give a shit about them; Bozz was the guy who wouldn't answer letters.
Jim can't really picture his face, anymore.
Just last week, Jim's daughter asked if she could have his dog tags. He has no idea where they are. It's been twenty years since he's touched them. Carla knows, though; she's the keeper of his history, the bearer of his untold tales. "There, Dad," she says, pointing impatiently at the cedar chest in the hall closet. "Mom put all your old war stuff in there."
"So she did." Jim thinks privately that Carla has the stuff to be a writer, the keen observation he always lacked, but he doesn't know how to encourage her. "Honey, you know, to tell you the truth, I never had much to do with that war. I never really got in it."
"Oh, I know," she says, but her eyes are shining, and her hands run over the surface of the chest like a woman touching a younger lover, full of tenderness and avarice. "I just want them. As a keepsake."
She's as old now as Jim was, then. The world hasn't scarred her yet, but in time, her heart will wither under the weight of it all.
"I don't think they're in there," he lies. "I'll look later." The tags are nestled in the bottom of the chest, wrapped securely in the covers of a pageless book. They are shining, clean, but stained with invisible blood.
He will never let her touch those tags.
Later, when she's gone to bed in the room that was hers before she went to college - the room will always be hers, and in years to come, they will not even box up her trophies - he pads down the hall in bare feet and boxers and yanks the chest out. In the harsh light of a naked bulb, the guts spill out - papers, letters, photos, ashes and remnants of the past. It's as though he never left New Orleans, and it all comes back to him: the smell of weed; the taste of the dregs in a bottle of cheap beer; the feel of sheets stuck to sweaty skin. If he listens closely he can hear the tin-ear jazz from the corner joint. He can see the orange-red of the hotel bedspread, the neon flash of sex from the sign outside the window, and the words that entice: we're all gonna fuck 'til the war's over.
They didn't need the girls. They wanted them because there were principles at stake, illusions they didn't know one another well enough to shatter. Not that Jim knew that, in the moments before Bozz showed him. The girls left, and the room was as quiet as it had been before they arrived, freed of the chatter and perfume of temporary sex. Once they were gone, Bozz and Jim sprawled in a heap of stained sheets, passing joints back and forth and burning through the stash of weed Bozz had obtained outside the bar.
"It doesn't make much sense to me," Jim said, after one long pull on the joint. "Not much sense at all."
"What doesn't?" Bozz's legs were thrown over Jim's, and his dog tags slanted off the left side of his neck.
"Why they keep sending in troops when they know it's over."
"Is this additional research for your fantastical future memoirs on our time so well spent here?"
"No, you already burst that bubble." Jim snickered until smoke came out his nose, then passed the joint back. When he spoke, he knew his words had some sudden additional weight, but he wasn't ready to understand why. "They keep up the killing."
"That is the nature of war, my friend. Feed the troops to the machine and let it spit out the parts," Bozz said. The sweat on Jim's body had cooled; he shivered. "That is why I would not advocate signing up. Signing up, you see, is throwing one's life to the machine."
"I can't see you getting sucked into a goddamn thing." Jim watched Bozz rolling the joint between his fingers, watching it like it was about to perform a miraculous trick and divide into more weed. "I mean, I don't know you all that well, but-"
"You know me as well as anyone can ever know a stranger." Bozz drew the smoke into his lungs. "You shouldn't be greedy about it."
Jim had never been so high; he never would be again. He was high, and greedy, and horny. "Fuck," he said, because Bozz's leg was moving over his leg, and their faces were close, so goddamned close. "I wish those girls'd come back." He shifted in the sheet, trying to pretend he wasn't hard, that he didn't want what he wanted.
"No, you don't," Bozz whispered, and all of a sudden he pushed that sheet aside and had Jim's cock in his hand in a direct way, like the fact he was jacking Jim off was the most normal thing in the world. "Don't need 'em." He said it as though he meant for it to be true, and of course it was; they were so high they were invincible, skimming the sky on the feel of each other's touch, on the way they took and gave and pushed, everything on simple terms.
When memory rolls that direction, Jim always thinks that's the part where he should stop and pretend he pushed Bozz off, beat him to a bloody fucking stump, and left him there to consider the error of his ways. Reinventing history has never had much appeal, though, and it's all wrong. One minute they were stroking each other, and the next Bozz's mouth was on his - a kiss the likes of which Jim had never iimagined, and was never going to imagine again, and then Bozz was on top of Jim, and Jim had to touch him. Not because Bozz wanted it, but because Jim did.
Soon enough he knew the smell, the taste, the feel of Bozz, knew the rough sound of his breath when he cursed and came, the taste of his come, even the rough stretch of his own body when Bozz put his dick inside Jim, and that somehow made him whole, though it should have torn him open.
That's not how he thought he would remember it, but he can't help how those images linger in his mind. It's not like he tries to remember it just that way, but he doesn't try to forget, either.
All the letters are inside the cedar chest - all the ones he still has. Some of them are lost to time and distance, letters he wrote in a burst of disbelief and love, and sent overseas to trail Bozz there, like breadcrumbs to his final destination. Once in a while he pictures Bozz reading them, crouched in a trench or reclining on his bunk, a cigarette between his lips and smoke curling toward the sky. He even suspects that Bozz smiled, once or twice, and maybe he was tempted to put pen to paper and send love home.
Tempted, but not swayed.
When Jim stopped believing he'd see an answer to his letters, he wrote them and kept them, souvenirs of failure. These letters fall to the floor in front of him, piles and piles of meaningless drivel, and the sentiment is always the same:
don't die in my place
He picks up a letter, folds it open carefully. The paper cracks in protest - so many years undisturbed, and now a new adjustment - but gives up its words readily. He's almost afraid to read it, to see tangible evidence of the sentimental man he was so long ago, of what he wanted, what he believed, who he loved.
Sometimes Jim has a dream he's there with Bozz. They're sitting in a foxhole, in a world Jim has never seen; the trees are on fire and the earth is shaking, though the bombs fall without sound. Bozz passes him a joint and he's smiling, and it's hot as fuck in that jungle, and there's a cut on Bozz's lip.
"Christ, Bozz," Jim says - it's what he always says - and then just like that it's night, and the air smells of burned flesh and wood, and it's too dark to see Bozz smile, but Jim knows the taste of him on the end of that joint.
"Live a long time," Bozz whispers, and Jim can't remember anymore if any of it ever happened, if this is what's real, if he's there or he's still in Tigerland, or if he's home in New York, or if he can see out of his eye or if there's only darkness where his sight used to be.
Jim's knees and elbows protest as he muscles himself up off the floor. When he's packed everything back up where it belongs, all the baggage stowed, he goes to wake his daughter and tell her a story - about who her father once was, and who he's become.
End
All comments are welcomed.
destina@ix.netcom.com
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