Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [21]
Still, Mason hoped. He made his rounds each day through the stinking streets, past old barricades and army patrols and starving street kids with their furied stares, and every afternoon he wrote his report and watched storms roll down the mountains like the hand of God. Finally he felt it one day as he was driving home, he just knew: his glorious friend was dead. It caught him after weeks of silence, a moment when the cumulative weight of days reached in and pushed all the air from his chest, and when he breathed in again, there was just no hope. False, small, shabby, that’s how it seemed now, the truth washing through him like sickness—he’d been a fool to think they’d had any kind of chance. Inside the house he got as far as the den, where he took the voodoo drum from its place on the shelf and sat on the floor. Wearily, slowly, he rocked the drum over and reached inside. The money was there, all that latent power stuffed inside the shaft—something waiting to be born, something sleeping. He cradled the unformed dream in his hands and wondered who to give it to.
The Good Ones Are Already Taken
It was after midight when the plane came smoking down the runway at last, the vast cyclone roar of the C-130 a fair approximation of Melissa’s inner state. A cheer went up from the families strung along the fence, the kids in their pajamas and scruffy cartoon slippers, the frazzled moms trying to keep it all together in the heat, hair, makeup, manic kids; they’d parboiled for hours in the parking lot while word kept coming from the off-limits terminal, Delay, Delay, Delay, until Melissa thought she’d chew through the chain-link fence. It had been eight months since she’d seen her husband, and every hard-fought minute for this young wife had been the home- front equivalent of trench warfare. They’d even cheated and tacked on an extra ten weeks, a high honor the captain said when the rest of the team exfilled in March, you should be so proud. Proud, sure, she would have been proud to nail Clinton’s draft-dodging ass to the wall, but what could you do? SF WIFE read the T-shirts at the Green Beret Museum, THE TOUGHEST JOB IN THE ARMY, and she supposed she was proud, or would be, once she had him back. Even among the elite Dirk had proved himself special, his surprisingly quick fluency in French and Creole earning him extra duty in the Haitian Vacation, that tar baby of a mission known to the rest of the world as Operation Uphold Democracy.
Chogee boy, she’d written in her last letter, I’m going to screw you into a coma when you get back. Melissa was twenty-four, a near-newlywed of fifteen months, and his leaving had been like an amputation—for weeks afterward she’d had missing-limb sensations, her skin fizzing and prickling where her husband should have been. As every man who’d undressed her mentally or otherwise would agree, celibacy was wasted on a body like hers: she had high, pillowy breasts, the compact butt of a boy, and abs you could bounce golf balls off of, a smallish package topped with a pretty heart face and reams of wavy sorrel brown hair. That she was also smart, sensible, and socially well-adjusted didn’t save her from serial panic attacks, the fear that sex was an engine that dragged the rest of you along. A month ago she’d been having drinks with friends and found her mettle being probed by an older, handsome man with a shoebox jaw and rapturous muscles straining at his shirt. This was James, ex-paratrooper, ex–special operations, now on private contract with the DOD; his mere proximity, their casual bumping of arms and legs, tripped an all-over sensual buzz in her, a Pavlovian hormone flush that felt like drowning. After that there was lunch, and friendly phone calls at work, then a Happy Hour that ended with her bottom