Redeployment(41)

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First female I saw after that, I smelled first. The whole table of us, at the chow hall at Al Asad, and the smell of her short-circuited our collective brain and the conversation stopped and we all turned to her at once and she walked right by, neither pretty nor ugly but a woman, not seen through a scope, close enough to reach out and touch. Close enough to smell.

Me and Flores got into a conversation about what we’d like to do to her. I mean, things we didn’t even want to do, just us competing with each other for the dirtier thing. Flores won when he said, “I’d let her piss in my mouth just for a sniff of her snatch.”

“Who wouldn’t?” said Old Man.

“You guys are idiots,” said West. Later, though, West got all motherly and told me how much he missed his family, and he asked me, “You got any girls back home you’d like to see?”

“Not really,” I said.

“You know,” he said, “sometimes, girls who wouldn’t give you the time of day when you were in high school change their minds once you’re a war hero.”





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I didn’t feel like a war hero when I got back to Lejeune, especially not after the memorial service for West and for Kovite and for Zapata. It was a lot to take. Everybody got drunk afterward. Flores couldn’t deal and went to the barracks to be alone. I wanted to go with him, but I stayed with Old Man. He needed looking after. And Old Man wanted to go to the Pink *cat, this strip club in a double-wide trailer, painted pink. The *cat was off-limits for Marines, but Old Man said it was the best place for what we wanted, and Old Man was the one to know.

“So there’s whores in there?” I asked him when we pulled into the parking lot, which was nothing more than a mud-and-grass field. I thought I knew the answer to that. Whores was the whole purpose of the trip.

“They don’t think they’re whores,” he said. “They think they’re dancers who sometimes f*ck their clients.”

I laughed, but he stopped me.

“I’m serious,” he said. “You f*ck this up, you aren’t getting laid. They don’t see themselves as street whores.”

“But…” I pointed at the trailer.

He laughed. “I bet there’s girls that f*ck at the Driftwood, too. There’s girls that f*ck at the nicest strip clubs in the world. And there’s a few girls here that don’t.”

“All right,” I said. “So why’re we here?”

He started counting out reasons on his fingers. “Most of the girls here f*ck,” he said. “It’s less expensive. These girls treat you better because they aren’t hot and they want repeat customers. You and I are just back from deployment, so really hot women are wasted on us. Also, there’s no dress code.” He pointed to his crotch. “There’s a reason I’m wearing sweatpants.”

Old Man saw me shudder at that, and he laughed again. If I’d felt like I had a choice, I would have walked away. Something about the sad little parking lot, with a few busted-up Buicks and trucks lined out in front of the pink trailer, it was too far away from what I hoped I’d get. Some hot young chick who was doing it for the money, yeah, but maybe one who really liked me, too. Old Man headed over to the door, and since he had the car keys, I followed him.

We walked in and there they were. Naked women. It was a small space, smelling of beer and sweat, with seventies rock blaring. There were only seven or eight customers in there, all but two of whom were definitely civilians. The chairs and couches all looked like they’d been picked up off the side of the road. We stood at the back for a few seconds, and then we went to the front and sat down together in a pleather, zebra-print love seat by the side of the stage, which was a little square about a foot off the ground at the end of the trailer. Old Man got me a beer and I drank it quick, taking small but quick sips and looking around at the girls and the customers, trying to figure how the whole thing worked. Then the dancer onstage got down in front of me and I stared straight ahead, into the tiny strip of fabric between her legs. She was an older woman who didn’t have the greatest body but didn’t have any scars that I could see and who looked like she’d probably been pretty when she was younger. I didn’t breathe for a bit. When she got up, I asked Old Man how we got the girls alone.

He could see how I was, and he smiled. He pulled two twenties out of his wallet and gave them to me. Then he pulled out a one, folded it, waved it in front of the dancer, and tucked it in her G-string.