Only the Rain(9)
I remember Keith being one of those guys who’s always smiling and nodding, always agreeing with everything you say. But if you looked into his eyes, you could tell he didn’t really comprehend most of what was going on. The kind of guy who never should’ve been in the military in the first place. Should’ve been on a playground somewhere teaching ten-year-olds how to play checkers and badminton, things like that.
Anyway, the Al Jubouri guy obviously doesn’t like his woman being touched, and truth is Keith should have known better in the first place, he had the same training all of us had. But it was what it was, and before you know it the husband pulls this long skinny knife out of his pants and is moving in on Keith. And of course now, at the worst possible moment, Keith’s training kicks in and bambambam the guy is on the ground, motionless as a stone. Only thing moving is the smoke rising out the barrel of Keith’s M4. I remember the smell too, that stench of burned propellant, and how for a few moments it’s the only smell in the air, stronger even than the sewage stink. And then all of a sudden the wife’s throwing herself down on top of her husband and wailing while he bleeds out on the ground, and the next instant there’s people running and screaming and cursing all over the place.
The only thing that saved Keith’s skin was that all of us immediately surrounded the scene with weapons at the ready so nobody would come along and attempt to swipe the knife. We got photos of the guy laying there with the knife still in his hand.
After the investigation, when Keith spent the rest of his tour manning a radio back at the FOB, I told myself it was the best place for him. Probably where we all should have been.
I’m guessing incidents like this one kept playing over and over in your head same as they do for me now. That’s why you never got tired of preaching at us, every time we’d go out on patrol. “We’re here to protect these people, not kill them. Kill one of them, and next day six of their relatives join the insurgency. Next day there’s more bombs on the road. Then it’s gonna be some of us bleeding out on the ground.”
I can’t tell you how many times in the past months I’ve wished you’d been around last summer the day I lost my job. Wish you’d been standing there in that soggy yard when I climbed off my bike. “You turn your ass around, soldier,” you would have said. “You get back on your pony and ride.”
In some ways, I guess, I have a lot in common with Keith.
Because there I am running over to the naked girl, splashing up muddy water with every step, that pit bull going absolutely foaming-mouth berserk at the sight of me, and me leaning over to ask if she’s all right only to see her laying there all spacey-eyed and giggling as if the rain on her face is the funniest thing she’s felt in her entire life.
“You okay?” I ask her. “You took a pretty hard fall.”
She reaches up and puts her wet hands on the back of my neck and sings along with the music coming out of the house. And stupid me, I can’t help but smile at her. Even with that pit bull barking and snarling a few inches from my face, all but spraying me with his saliva, I thought she had a really sweet voice. And what man isn’t going to smile when a pretty, naked girl is singing to him with her arms around his neck?
“Listen,” I told her. “You need to get inside. You’re all goosebumpy. Plus, if somebody else comes along and sees you like this . . . this isn’t the smartest thing for you to be doing.”
She raised herself up then like she wanted me to kiss her, but then she winced and moaned and tightened up for a second. I said, “Tell me where it hurts. Does it hurt in your back?”
“Mmmm,” she said, so I slid one hand under her shoulders and the other to the small of her back, trying to feel if anything was broken. Not that I would have known anyway. They don’t teach you that in business administration.
All I really accomplished was to give her a chance to roll over into my arms. That’s when she stopped singing and said, “Carriemeehin.”
It took me a few seconds to decipher that, what with her slurring her words together. I couldn’t smell any alcohol or weed so I figured she was high on coke or ecstasy or something like that. I was just guessing, though, since I’ve never gone beyond weed myself, and that stopped the day I met Cindy.
“You want me to carry you inside?” I said to the girl, and she said, “Mmm.”
I looked up and out across the yard then, because I was thinking what if somebody drives past and sees me carrying her into the house naked? I’d passed only a few houses on the way here and they were Amish places set way back from the road, but I wasn’t worried about the Amish. I was worried about somebody calling Cindy and saying, “Russell rides a Road Star, doesn’t he? With a blue metal-flake paint job and leather saddlebags and no windshield?”
Truth is I was kind of frozen there in indecision for a while, my hands on her wet skin and my knees in the mud. If that dog hadn’t jerked itself an inch closer to me, I might still be in the same position.
So then I’m carrying her up onto the porch and she’s hugging up against me and moaning every now and then with her mouth pressed into my neck. I stop outside the open door and call inside a couple of times. “Hello? Anybody in here? Hellooo? Anybody home?”
I get no answer from anybody, not even Gregg Allman. The music has stopped and there’s this three-way conversation going on between that crazy dog and the pattering rain and my heart thumping like the wings of a flushed grouse.