SPEC is twenty-two or twenty-three, Latino, still at the point where he dons his dress greens for church and on Veterans Day. His Specialist 4 rank insignia and campaign medals are Brasso’ed and perfect. At least, I think this kid is Spec. He doesn’t go by that nickname, anyway, certainly not to me. On warm summer Sundays, he’ll loiter on the porch with his parents. The old folks on adjacent patios or porches call hello to him in Spanish; the drive-by crews nod out of respect. If and when I have tried to engage, hurling a question or comment from my stoop to theirs, Spec falls silent, or just walks inside. His mom will jump in to rescue the awkwardness, her accent and Spanglish a bridge of neighborly communion.
Sitting at my window, I like to spy on him through my old combat optic. Tickle him with crosshairs as he engages the empty houses, setting up his snares and traps. Other times I sit on my front stoop and just watch him tend his stupid dog. Dare him to confront me.
Spec can’t let go of war. What’s worse, he remains idealistic. Instead of contemplating his own VA loan, trying to buy in or buy up, he risks all by planting snares inside any building with a lockbox. Coyote spring traps are set to snap metatarsal through Italian leather loafer. In the gutted brownstone hulls he mounts plastic buckets full of shit and orange soda above cocked doorways. He tags the building exteriors with hobo code, lest the kids or locals fall victim to his devices. A rectangle with a dot in the center, or a symbol that looks like a T tipped on its side. I can’t translate the signs but I know what they mean.
I also know what comes next: the Surge. Spec knows this, too, that law enforcement will soon mobilize against him. Yet he still posts raw phone video of a Hakkotsu shock grenade explosion from down the street. (He introduces the online segment on a makeshift set — his bedroom? — while clad in a Bulls’ ball cap, shades, and black bandanna. On the wall behind him is a modified City of Chicago flag, in which the flag’s three central stars have been replaced by dollar signs. Spec issues conditions to the authorities, the banks, and the gentrifying rich, then calls out neighbors who stride the fence.) He rigged the Hakkotsu inside an empty Big Gulp cup. Detonated it just as a female realtor unlocked a gut rehab for a young Indian couple. The latter sprinted off. The former squatted to the sidewalk in a piss-wet skirt, her fingers toggling her ears to clear the ring.
THE dark grooves beneath the old cat’s eyes are pure sick. Distemper rivulets, blood and influenza. I wish she would die. In the alley, when the kids walk their Pits and Presas, and that one fat Rottweiler, she flees. Pulls her nicked ears back and hauls ass, like a refugee, or jihadi. She looks proud, somehow, sometimes. The young cats invariably end up crushed and ice-matted, their blood-rimmed nostrils and gaping mouths.
Outside my hazy kitchen window, rising from the horizon of flat rooftops are a pair of antiquated, rust-iron cupolas. Remnants of a neighborhood not under siege, they’re the only structures I’ve learned to appreciate here. In the afternoon sunlight, they remind me of Rome.
EARLY in my time here, one evening at sunset, I heard a car pull into the alley below my window. It stopped and idled brusquely, as if it had a hole in the exhaust. A few seconds later came the report of five or six low-caliber gunshots. Tiny pops, cutting the atmosphere. This sounded like cheap fireworks, or like those plastic mini-champagne bottle streamers so rampant in everyone’s Chinatown. I ran to the window to assess, my father’s old M1911 pistol in hand.
Christ, Tennessee, I thought. You do NOT engage combat outside of an official combat zone.
The car gunned it back to its own eroding neighborhood. This was no militia. It was just a rival gang. Cats and kids scattered.
I can never relate the fury: torn awake at 3:21 a.m. by the back-and-forth of a rapid-fire, low-caliber semi, and the slow cannon blasts of a large-bore revolver. Exactly as the continuity of the firefight drove me to the floor, consumed by memory, the gunfire ceased. Things fell into pitch, homelike silence — until this rock-star-confident male bellowed, “I hit you yet, nigga?”
THE kids will kill the old cat if they can. I just want to cure her. Replace her. In Baquba and Taji, they were everywhere: legions of runny-eyed runts, available to absorb rage. Yet nobody messed with them. Rather, they just lived, and bred, and mewed, and no local kid or old man yanked them up by their tails. Booted them to feel in control. Amid the palm rows and beige buildings, the onslaught and block-to-block, it was as if those cats were neutrals. Better than neutrals, though, because all sides sort of revered them. Tacitly. Tiger-striped kitties pouncing as if on cutesy YouTube — against a backdrop of torched cars and rubbled mud-brick. The fetid stink of the Diyala and orange groves and burnt plastic, people.
YOU don’t need much money to see Rome. You only need take advantage of your earned combat benefit. If things get too intense at home, you claim space-available on a DoD flight to Baltimore, then on to Aviano, and Rome. You stay in this Philippino-owned rooming house, surprisingly close to Piazza Cavour. Share a residenza with strangers and cook for yourselves. You don’t have to go on tours or buy expensive clothes. Just saunter around, lost in the antiquity, amid the sun-soaked spectrum of pastel-colored walls and lame political graffiti, plant-lined terraces and umbrella pines. Hike up one of the hills and sit through dusk. Buy food for the cats from a cart at the Forum.
MY mortgage broker called last week. It is time to pull the trigger, or reassess; by spring, this block will outprice me. I listened, and listened again, my eyes fixed on the neighborhood of questions that populate the VA app.
Late that night I put on my black fatigues, then snuck into Spec’s target homes and removed all of his devices. I left the snares and spring traps in a box on his doorstep. I trust he will realize this more as tribute than threat.
LATE spring through early fall, when you come home at the right time, at the first cast of sunset, you see it. Generations gather around the stoops and doorways, and laugh and yell and wave. The old ones tell embarrassing stories about the young while sweeping smooth their Astroturf patios. The young ones take turns practicing rhymes, cheering or jeering each other’s performance. Spec looks on, smiling. When I was very young I lived in a small decent house in Nashville proper, in a would-be historic district hemmed in by squalid urban housing, and I was afraid to go outside, and was told not to do so when alone, and inside that house I one day saw an old video for a Rolling Stones song, “Waiting on a Friend,” and Mick and Keith and a couple of Jamaican guys gathered on the steps in front of a gritty metropolitan graystone, and all kinds of people walked by, and Sonny Rollins played saxophone on the soundtrack while they hung out. This street reminds me of that, only that is a joke. This is a double-parked Ford Explorer with a Puerto Rican flag hung from the rearview mirror by golden tassel, and with lowered windows from which erupt a sonic mash of hip-hop and Latino rhythm that wiggles the hips of young and old and me. It is the sigh and squeal of air brakes on the bus at the corner. It is a squirrel standing upright beneath one of the city-planted trees, her teats bursting with milk; it is the fair-haired Polish barber-woman who shuffles by after work every evening, rolling her eyes at the dark-skinned newcomers (who have been here for at least a generation). The smell of the take-home pierogis she clutches, the punk lottery tickets at everybody’s feet. The cautious, peering eyes of an orange kitten beneath a parked car, and the crepuscular sunset, purple, pink and navy, drenching a ceiling of clouds like quilt batting, my god.