Redeployment(72)

“I don’t tell war stories,” he says, and takes a sip of his glass of water.

“Well, you’re gonna have to when Jessie and Sarah get here.”

He gives a nervous laugh and points to his face. “What’s to say?”

I take a sip of my beer and look him up and down. “Not a lot.”

Jenks’s story is pretty obvious, and that’s another weird thing because Jenks used to be me, basically. We’re the same height, grew up in the same kind of shitty suburban towns, joined the Marine Corps at the same time, and had the same plan to move to New York when we got out. Everybody always said we could be brothers. Now, looking at him is like looking at what I would have been if my vehicle had hit that pressure plate. He’s me, but less lucky.

Jenks sighs and sits back in his chair. “At least for you, it gets you laid,” he says.

“What does?”

“Telling war stories.”

“Sure.” I take a sip of beer. “I don’t know. Depends.”

“On what?”

“Circumstances.”

Jenks nods. “Remember that little reunion we had with all the ESB guys?”

“Hell, yeah,” I say. “Way we were talking, you would have thought we were some Delta Force, Jedi ninja motherf*ckers.”

“The girls ate it up.”

“We did pretty well,” I say, “for a bunch of dumbass Marines hitting on city girls.”

Jenks gives me a look. Right around his eyes is the only place where his skin looks halfway normal; the eyes themselves are pale powder blue. They never really struck me before he got hit, but they’ve got a sort of intensity now in contrast with the boiled-pork-pink smoothness of his skin grafts. “Of course, that shit only worked because I was there,” he says.

Now I’m laughing, and after a second Jenks starts laughing, too. “Damn straight,” I say. “Who’s gonna call bullshit when you’re sitting there in the corner looking all Nightmare on Elm Street?”

He chuckles. “Happy to help,” he says.

“It does help. I mean, you tell a chick, ‘Yeah, I went to war, but I never fired my rifle… .’”

“Or ‘Hey, I spent most of the deployment paving roads. Building force pro. Repairing potholes.’”

“Exactly,” I say. “Even the antiwar chicks—which in this city is all of them—want to hear you were in some shit.”

Jenks points to his face. “Some shit.”

“Right. Don’t have to say anything. They’ll start imagining all sorts of stuff.”

“Black Hawk Down.”

“The Hurt Locker.”

He laughs again. “Or like you said, Nightmare on Elm Street.”

I lean forward, elbows on the table. “You remember what it was like, going to a bar in dress blues?”

Jenks gets quiet for a second. “Fuck, man. Yeah. Automatic panty dropper.”

“No matter how ugly you are.”

He grunts. “Well, there’s a limit.”

We sit in silence for a bit, and then I let out a sigh. “I’m just f*cking tired of chicks getting off on it.”

“On what? The war?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I had a girl start crying when I told her some shit.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. Some bullshit.”

“About me?”

“Yeah, about you, motherf*cker.” Now he’s definitely smiling. The left side of his face is twisted up, the wrinkled skin over the cheeks bunched and his thin-lipped slit of a mouth straining toward where his ear should be. The right side stays still, but that’s standard for him, given the nerve damage.

“That’s nice,” he says.

“I wanted to choke her.”

“Why?”

I don’t have an exact answer for that, and while I’m trying to find a way to put it into words, the door swings open and two girls walk in, though they’re not the girls we’re waiting for. Jenks turns and looks. Without even thinking about it, I size them up—one pretty girl, maybe a seven or an eight, with her less attractive friend, who isn’t really worth giving a number to. Jenks turns away from them and looks back at me.

“I don’t know,” I continue. “I was playing her. You know. ‘Oh, baby, I’m hurting and I need your soft woman touch.’”