Redeployment(79)

“Yeah, and then she’ll write her play. Great.”

The ugly girl finishes her cigarette and goes inside—opportunity fully blown. I throw mine to the ground and stomp it out. Jessie’s looking at me with this half-amused, half-concerned face. I pull out my pack and offer her a smoke, firing up another one for myself. Jessie takes it and examines the end, blowing on it gently, and the cherry briefly burns a brighter red.

“You shouldn’t worry about Jenks so much,” Jessie says. “This’ll be good. He’ll get out and do something. Be engaged with other humans, not just you and me sitting around going, ‘Hey, remember the time?’”

“So send him to hang with a bunch of IVAW pussies?”

“One of those pussies was a scout sniper. What’d you do in Iraq again?”

“IVAW and artists, great. To pick over his bones for a f*cking play, feeding off him like a bunch of maggots.”

“They used maggots on me,” she says. “Maggots clean out dead skin.”

That’s new information for me. Not an image I needed. I look through the window of the bar to where Jenks and Sarah are talking. If that IED had hit my vehicle, maybe I’d be in there, talking to Sarah about how all the support I’d got in my recovery had given me a newfound respect for life and love and friendship. And Sarah’d be bored and drilling me to find out how long it was before I could take a shit on my own.

“Artists,” I say, putting all the contempt I can into the word. “I bet they’ll find what happened to him interesting. Oh, so interesting. What fun.”

“This isn’t for fun,” she says. “Fun is video games. Or movies and TV.”

“Or blow jobs and strip clubs. An eight ball of coke, I bet, and a shot of heroin. I wouldn’t know.”

We smoke for a bit, with Jessie looking at me through those soft brown eyes of hers.

“What’s the point of a play?” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not fun, so what is it?”

Jessie taps her cigarette and a dusting of ash floats down to the ground.

“My dad was in Vietnam,” she says. “My granddad, Korea. But when my dad went in, he didn’t think of the guys stuck in the Frozen Chosin after that * MacArthur thought it’d be a good idea to go rogue and poke China with a stick. My dad thought—flag raising at Iwo Jima. D-Day and Audie Murphy. And when I went in—”

“Platoon and Full Metal Jacket.”

“Yeah. Definitely not my dad in an admin shop.”

“I bet more Marines have joined the Corps because of Full Metal Jacket than because of any f*cking recruiting commercial.”

“And that’s an antiwar film.”

“Nothing’s an antiwar film,” I say. “There’s no such thing.”

“Growing up,” Jessie says, “Sarah spent a lot of time at our house, and she still spends some holidays with us. Her family is a mess. And last Thanksgiving we were talking with my grandpa about how nobody remembers Korea, and he said the only way to do it right wasn’t to do a film about the war. Do a film about a kid, growing up. About the girl he falls in love with and breaks his heart and how he joins the Army after World War Two. Then he starts a family and his first kid is born and it teaches him what it means to value life and to have something to live for and how to care for other people. And then Korea happens and he’s sent over there and he’s excited and scared and he wonders if he’ll be courageous and he’s kind of proud and then in the last sixty seconds of the film they put them in boats to go to Inchon and he’s shot in the water and drowns in three feet of surf and the movie doesn’t even give him a close-up, it just ends. That’d be a war film.”

“So, what? That’s the Jenks story? Getting blown up first thing?”

“And then fifty-four surgeries. Make the war the least little thing.”

“Jenks isn’t telling Sarah about growing up and the girl who broke his heart,” I say. “And even if he were, she wouldn’t give a shit.”

Jessie grounds out her cigarette. Mine’s burning down to the filter, but I keep it in my hand, squeezed between the tips of my fingers.

“Want to teach people about war?” I say, tossing the cigarette butt down right as it starts to burn my fingers. “Start shooting motherf*ckers. Set bombs in the streets. Get some retarded kids to walk into crowds and blow themselves up. Snipe the NYPD.”