Redeployment(78)

“Yeah?” I say to Jenks, who doesn’t make a sound. I can’t read anything on his face. I look down at the paper, though I’ve probably got it by heart.

“Whether I’m a poor, disfigured vet who got exactly what he volunteered for,” I read, “or the luckiest man on earth, surrounded by love and care at what is unquestionably the worst period of my life, is really a matter of perspective. There’s no upside to bitterness, so why be bitter? Perhaps I’ve sacrificed more for my country than most, but I’ve sacrificed far, far less than some. I have good friends. I have all my limbs. I have my brain and my soul and hope for the future. What sort of fool would I have to be, to not accept these gifts with the joy they deserve?”

Sarah gives a quick nod. “Okay, great,” she says, not even stopping to dwell on Jenks’s little personal statement of recovery and hope. “So you get back, your family is there. You can’t talk. You’re happy to be alive. But you’ve got fifty-four surgeries ahead of you, right? Can you take me through those?”

And Jenks, who has always separated the pain that came before and the pain that came after, takes a breath. Sarah still looks concerned, but also unyielding. I think, Jenks blew his story of triumph too early in the conversation. Especially since he ultimately gave up, told them he’d rather look like this for the rest of his life than go through more surgeries.

“They had to reconstruct me,” Jenks begins.

Sarah checks her phone, to make sure it’s still recording.

“Some stuff,” he says, “the way they do it, the orthopedics, it’s like building a table. Other stuff…”

He sips water. One of the other girls in the bar, the ugly one, goes out for a smoke. Her hot friend starts checking her phone.

“They had to move muscles around and sew them together to cover exposed bone, clean out dead tissue, and seal it with grafts. They take, well, what’s basically a cheese grater to some of your healthy skin and reattach it where it’s needed and grow skin from a single layer.” He takes another swig of water. “That wasn’t like the other pain. Drugs didn’t help. And there were the infections. That’s how I lost my ears. And there was physical therapy. There still is physical therapy. Sometimes the pain was so bad, I’d count to thirty in my head over and over again. I’d tell myself, I can do this. I can make it to thirty. If I can survive to thirty, it’s okay.”

“Good,” Sarah says. “But let’s slow down. What happened first?”

She’s got a sliver of ice in her, I think. I look down at my glass. It’s empty. I don’t remember drinking from it that much. I want more beer. I want a cigarette. I want to go outside and smoke with the ugly girl and get her phone number, just because.

“First thing,” Jenks says, “is the pain every time they changed my bandages. Every day, for hours.”

I get up, not yet sure why. They all look at me. “Smoke,” I say.

“I’ll join you,” says Jessie.

“Let’s take a break,” I say, “all of us. Don’t say anything until I get back.”

That amuses Sarah. “Are you his lawyer?” she says.

“I need a break,” I say.

And then I’m outside with Jessie and the ugly girl, who stands apart from us, while I’m lighting my cigarette and Sarah’s inside probably grilling Jenks on his torture. The setup has me on edge—one goddamn cigarette’s not gonna help, and with Jessie here I’ve got no shot with the ugly girl. No distractions, no hope to break off the evening with the potential for something new.

“You ever gonna f*ck Jenks?” I ask.

Jessie smiles at me. She spent part of Iraq as one of the only females in with a bunch of grunts, so there’s pretty much nothing you could say that’d faze her. “Are you?” she shoots back.

“It’s your patriotic duty,” I say, and she just grins like an indulgent mother looking at a naughty child. Then she gives me the finger, which looks weird on her f*cked-up hand, but I don’t gawk, I look her in the eye.

“Don’t let her get to you,” Jessie says, “she’s been like that since high school.”

“A bitch?”

“She’s better than she seems.”

“Is Sarah gonna f*ck Jenks?” I say. “’Cause that’d be acceptable, too.”

“She’ll listen to him.”