“Anything else?” she asked.
“Woman with hairy legs? They prolly don’t know about that. That the kind of thing you want me to talk about?”
After it had happened, she’d been unable to confide in anyone. She had walked around camp bowlegged for days, wearing no undergarments. When she could no longer stand the pain of mobility, Colleen had claimed flu to get off of rotation, then stayed on her cot for most of a week. She did not eat much, and she was silent, and she swabbed herself with aloe vera sunburn gel.
Staring at Van Dorn, she still couldn’t understand why.
“Was I the first?” she asked. “Or did you burn other girls?”
He looked at her as if she were crazy. “Like I said, girl. Nothin’ there.”
The men jostled around on their stools. One motioned for another drink.
Colleen lifted her glass. “Okay, I’ll get you started. So we’re in the Stryker vehicle, just you and me. And I don’t know about you, Van Dorn, but the fact that you were supposed to, well, babysit me ’cause I wasn’t supposed to engage in combat was a bummer. Pissed me off, bad. Still does.”
“True, that,” Van Dorn said. “I was—”
“Shhh. Hold on, I’m settin’ the scene here!” Colleen waved him down, and a couple of the men chuckled. “It was kind of a blur, all so fast. ’Cause I tell you what, Van Dorn, when you pounce, you’re quick, man.”
He sipped his beer.
“Oh, and y’all, that vehicle stank.” Colleen looked at Van Dorn. “You smell sour, dude. And your chin? I can still feel your stubble scraping my neck — ugh. And, let’s see. . Oh. The screams. My screams in that goddamned Stryker were intense, right? Couldn’t even hear the firefight. Couldn’t hear nothin’ but me screaming. Hell, I even wanted me to shut up!”
The bartender cleared his throat to try and break the story up.
“And my god, your erection!” Colleen said. “Now, there’s a short story these men haven’t heard. Your erection, still in your pants, pokin’ all up against me while you pinned me down. I mean, one minute you’re one of us; the next, your little pecker is jabbin’ all over me!” Colleen forced a laugh. “You wanna take it from here?”
Van Dorn stared at her.
Colleen rolled her eyes. “Okay, be a chickenshit.” She continued, as if setting up a joke. “So, boys, he’s pinning me down, right? He smells like a sow and his boner’s poking all over creation. And somehow, despite everything I’m still, like, Okay, here it comes. We all know what’s up. This troop is gonna do his biz. Gonna rip my pants off, and then his down, and then he’ll spit on his fingers and la dee dah, whatever, right? I’m thinkin’, like, Let’s get it over with, Stinky.”
“Sorry, gal,” the bartender said. “This isn’t the type of—”
“But this crazy mother didn’t even unbuckle his pants! Shit, y’all, he just shoved his hands down my panties and, no kidding, um. .” She blinked back tears for a second, then caught herself. “I mean, I thought an IED blast had seared us from beneath the vehicle! It burned somethin’ awful down there! I flopped like a fish on a bank. Flailed so hard I threw him off of me. And guess what?”
Nobody answered.
“This perv had a Zippo lighter in his hand. You believe that?”
Nothing.
Colleen snickered, sniffled. “Yeah. Like, he didn’t even wanna rape me. He just wanted me on fire.”
(Afterwards, she’d pushed her BDU pants down to her knees, and peeled off the rayon panties that had melted to her pubic hair. When she wailed like an animal, Van Dorn screamed for her to shut up, saying, “Jesus, I’s just fuckin’ around.” The air in the vehicle was clotted with the smell of singed hair and flesh.
Colleen had lain on her back, on the bench seat, rocking, bawling. She’d been confused when Van Dorn gently handed her a bottle of water, then stared as she doused the blisters. “Just fuckin’ around,” he’d repeated. Gripping the corrugated black plastic of his rifle barrel, he began to bang the butt of the weapon against the Stryker’s metal floor, ordering: “You”—bang—“calm”—bang—“the”—bang—“hell”—bang—“down”—bang. “Now!” In the silence that followed, he smoothed her hair with his fingers, muttered, “I barely even flicked.”)
Through the bar’s smoke and neon, Colleen stared at him. She wished to god she’d had the old Browning.22 her father taught her to shoot with. She’d inhale, hold her breath, line up, squeeze. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Center mass, as the Army commanded. She figured Van Dorn might even laugh when he saw the.22. Might hold up a hand and charge her, convinced of his ability to absorb the rounds in his palm. All the better, she thought. All the better he forget the kinship between her Browning’s 5.6mm bullet and the 5.56mm round of the carbines slung in theater. Forget that the U.S. military chose the minuscule 5.56 round for a reason; forget that instead of a fist-sized cavity left by an AK-47, that counter to any Cold War profundity, the sole intention of the 5.56mm round is to ricochet: off the bones, sinews, spine. Forget that you can in fact shoot a man in the legs, or the ulna, and the round may well bounce all the way into the abdomen, shredding muscle and artery. She’d give it all to him, center mass just as trained, secure in the pinball-like reflection of the bullets inside his rib cage.
“That about right?” she asked him. “Anything I forgot?”
Van Dorn looked to the mirror behind the bar. The men turned their eyes from his reflection.
“What I thought,” Colleen said. “Anyhow. I’ll just let you get back to tellin’ these boys what a badass you are.”
She fumbled in her skirt pocket for her keys and some money.
“Hey?” the bartender asked, startling her. “You good?”
“Well,” she said, pausing to consider. “I’m better.”
He nodded. “I hope so.”
She threw a $20 on the bar and walked to the door.
“Come see me,” the bartender called out. “If you need to talk or somethin’.”
Within a minute Colleen was stomping the gas pedal, kicking up a hail of oyster shells as she peeled onto the county road. She was drunk, and the car drifted across the yellow centerline now and then. No matter; she was heading deep into the countryside, nowhere near anything, let alone a cop. The clean night air pushed like a river against the mildewed odor of the Cavalier. The tires squealed as she took a curve, and her headlights flashed over vast fields of row crops, cotton and soybean and corn, and the endless steel trusses of center-pivot irrigation arms. She was not Civil Affairs. It didn’t matter what her job was, anyway. She held an intimate knowledge of every weapon at the company’s disposal. She could break down and clean and refit and reassemble any standard-issue rifle — SDM, A4, M16/AR-15, M203—any of it, faster than anyone in the battalion. M60 and.50-cal. “What the?” She pounded the wheel as the tears came, then gunned the accelerator, the car lilting as she hit the dips in the road.
Her life was pinned between Highways 7 and 15. It always had been; whether as a child riding to town with her father, or on the middle school bus, or while tooling around with handsy high school boys. Her homeland had been carved up before Colleen was even born. Driveway to asphalt, highway to interstate then back again, she ran on a track forged by someone else, by men; a map, a guidance system, a grid, thrusting her from point to point, repeat, repeat, the cycle punctured only by trauma.
She whipped the Cavalier off the road at full throttle, thrusting into farmland, nearly rolling the vehicle. The tires threw gravel, then dirt, and then the windshield was gummed with plant life. Young corn stalks lashed the window frames, their row spacing a drumroll, their shorn silks and tassels, confetti. She then steered the vehicle into wide arcs and curls, exactly as she had in the desert.