“Okay, sure,” I said, unsurely. “Thanks.”
I stepped across the threshold and paused as my eyes fought to adjust. The fading afternoon light I brought with me did nothing to illuminate the dark interior, although my eyes fixed on a glowing lampshade within. There was some kind of cheap, ridiculous foyer chandelier slung low enough that it grazed my head. It was missing several glass hangings and rattled as if mocking me.
The woman had moved on ahead and disappeared. I managed to follow her voice as it faded deeper into the shadows. “You’ll have to excuse the mess,” she said. “As you can see, I’m having a wonderful adventure in moving. Shut the door, will you?”
By now my eyes had settled, and the foyer took shape as well as the open living/dining room beyond. The layout wasn’t that different from my own house. The couple who had lived here prior were an air force sergeant and his South Korean wife. They’d gotten orders to Minot, North Dakota, and, like everything else headed that way, disappeared in the quiet of night, never to be seen again. Despite our shared service, we had never socialized.
I took a few more cautious steps, navigating around a clutter of cardboard boxes, their lids open in mighty yawns of disgorged packing paper. Rather than an adventure in moving, it looked more like one of exile, a picture of abandonment, as if the moving truck had simply backed up to the front door and dumped its contents through the opening.
I moved past a kitchen area to my left and into the living room, where I found the woman crouched over and rummaging through some boxes. “Make yourself at home,” she said. “So you were in the army?”
“Air force.”
Something flittered across the ceiling above me, some rodent nesting in the ductwork. I couldn’t imagine what she might be looking for in those boxes or how she expected to find it. All the windows were covered by thick sheets or curtains. Although my eyes had adjusted enough to see, the only legitimate light source was from the lamp. Near the back of the house was a sliding glass door, where a brush of sunlight glinted below the hem of the curtain.
More disturbing than the lack of light was the smell. The air inside was overwhelmingly musty, scented with low-grade alcohol or perhaps some kind of cleaning product.
“Let’s see. Where is it?” she said. “Ah-ha!” With a flourish, she produced a darkened wine bottle and held it out to me, as if it were a small animal she had shot in the woods and expected me to cook. “This was a wedding gift,” she announced. “Although I couldn’t tell you what kind it is. My husband was the wine expert in the family.”
“Please, no,” I said. “Really, I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”
I shifted closer to the lamp, which was positioned atop a round end table, making sure to keep my back to the front door. In the small circle of light was an eight-by-ten picture, neatly framed and standing amid a jumble of prescription pill bottles. I squinted, but couldn’t read the labels.
The photo showed a Marine pilot in flight suit, nestled in the open cockpit of what looked to be an F-18 fighter. He was wearing aviator sunglasses and smiling, one gloved hand extended in a thumbs-up salute. A vast desert landscape fell away behind him, and I knew immediately it was Iraq. It could have been anywhere. Nevada, California, or even Kuwait. But I knew by the cast of the shadows that it was the place I’d spent six miserable months at the height of the insurgency. Just looking at the photo, I could taste the desert dust in my mouth and feel it thicken on my teeth. This recognition was a frequent occurrence, most especially whenever I watched a news report about the war on television. Harold probably would have diagnosed me with PTSD if I’d mentioned it to him, which I wouldn’t.
While the woman continued to rummage, I gestured toward the picture. “That your husband?”
She glanced at the photo, then at me, blinking in an almost sleepy gesture. Her shoulders wilted, and the smile was gone again. I felt my heart clench up.
“That’s right,” she said. “He’s in Iraq.” She shimmied sideways on her knees to another box, this one tattered and torn at the corners.
Tell her about Iraq, Harold broke in. Connect with her. “I was over there too,” I said. “Back in 2006. I worked in the theater hospital. Administrative stuff mostly.”
“Really? You must have seen a lot of death.”
I detected a trap in her comment and chose my words carefully. “Actually, we had over a ninety percent save rate once the casualties reached us. It’s unusual to have that kind of—”
She cut me off with a grunt and said, “Save rate? Is that what you said? Wow, that’s funny.” Her concentration was now focused entirely on the tattered box. She had set the bottle down and started removing small items one by one, each individually wrapped in newspaper. I noted well the size and shape of each package. I didn’t want her emerging from the cardboard with a loaded AK-47.
I inched forward again, waving a hand to get her attention. “Please, please, you don’t have to go to any trouble.”
“There you guys are,” she said to something in the box. She produced a bundle cocooned in newspaper. She sat back on her haunches and unwrapped two wineglasses, delicately setting each one down on the floor beside the wine bottle.
Harold started to whisper into my ear again, but I cut him off. “Listen,” I said, reverting to my gruff sergeant’s voice. “We should really talk about the tires. You’ve got to understand.”
“So you say you were in Iraq?” she said, still not looking up.
I sighed, feeling the weariness of the entire exercise. I said, “I don’t think you understand how serious what you did was. I wanted to call the police.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I thought we could talk first.”
“So let’s talk. Over some wine.”
“I’m really not in the mood to drink wine.”
“That’s good. Because I never intended you to drink it.” She reached back behind her head with both hands and yanked at her ponytail, tightening the hair even further, as if girding herself for battle. Then she grabbed the neck of the bottle, rose up to her feet with the quick grace of a lioness, and hopped over the box toward me.
“Okay, look,” I said calmly, and then watched in utter disbelief as she reared back and swung for the fences. I could still feel my mouth forming the words I really think you need to when the bottle collided with my skull.
I staggered backward, arms flailing. The bottle, which did not break, felt like it was filled with concrete. The point of impact burned, and my vision boomeranged from focused to double to triple. Some glass or porcelain knickknack, perhaps even a precious memento of her marriage, crackled beneath my sneaker.
I shook my head fiercely and managed to restore my vision. Still, my brain refused to process what had happened. I could feel blood trickling down the side of my head, but I was very much aware and conscious. Somewhere in my brain’s circuitry, deep and falling fast away, was Harold’s voice saying, Get her on our side.
My new neighbor had by now set the unbroken concrete bottle aside and stooped to retrieve something from another box. My heart clutched again, and I thought for certain that her hand would soon be holding the Buck knife. But it was a frying pan. One of those heavy jobs, with a titanium nonstick surface.
Then she was crouching, shoulders back, hips tight, and with a yelp she charged at me, the cookware held high like a caveman’s club.
I said, “Wait — listen — you can’t—” as if my mind was stuck in reason mode, still looking for a way to talk myself out of it. She swung before I could get my hands up. I took the flat, hard metal of the pan to the left side of my face. Something gave and rattled. It wasn’t the skillet.