Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [22]
The whoop of his car alarm had wrenched her out of it. She’d driven home in tears, cursing Dirk for being gone and wondering how they’d done it, all those loyal, suffering women down through the ages who’d waited out crusades and world wars, not to mention whaling voyages, jungle and polar expeditions, pointless treks to wherever just because it was there. James kept calling; Melissa resorted to cold showers and masturbation until the captain called from Bragg to say Dirk was headed home, today, now, ETA 2200 hours. She wasn’t sure she believed it until he walked off the plane, his sleeves in a jungle roll, beret blocked and raked to the side, head carried with the bearing of a twelve-point buck. Like someone had died, that’s how strong the moment was, all that tragic magnitude suddenly floored in reverse—she had to lean into the fence while the earth stabilized, a sob dredging the soft lower tissues of her throat. Then she lifted her head and started cheering.
They lived in a trailer off base, a modest single-wide down a sandy dirt road amid the pine and sweet-gum forest outside Fayetteville, or Fayette-Nam as it was known when Melissa was growing up, forty miles down the Interstate. Thanks to the mighty spending power of its military bases, Fayetteville boasted more clip joints and titty bars than any city its size in the U.S., and Melissa’s first business as a married woman had been to move beyond the city’s trashy outer tentacles. Aren’t you scared out there, all by yourself? people asked her, other women usually—her mother and sisters down in Lumberton, post-menopausal aunts, friends from high school who’d settled for hometown boys. Plenty of worse things to be scared of, she’d answer, leaving unsaid her sense of marriage as a nearer threat than any snakes or feral dogs the woods might throw out. The threat of waking one day to find a very familiar stranger next to you in bed—she felt it sometimes in his lockjawed moods, his slides toward the brute, monosyllabic style that might drive her away in twenty years. Stranger still, and maybe funny, were the shooting sounds he made in his sleep, pow-pow, pah-pow-pow-pow, like a kid popping off an imaginary gun. Who was he shooting in that subterranean field of dreams? But he laughed when she razzed him about it in the morning, and that was the Dirk she trusted, the sweet-natured goof who could sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in note-perfect burps and had a thing for tonguing the backs of her ears. You had to be a little crazy for the Green Berets, hardcore warriors who could kill with their hands thirty-seven different ways.
“Ahhhh.” He grinned as he stepped inside the trailer, checking eight months of combat duty at the door. Melissa went up on her toes to smack his cheek.
“How about a shot?”
She’d already set out their supplies on the coffee table, the salt and limes, shot glasses, a bottle of tequila. The jet fuel of passion.
“Well,” he laughed, blushing like a prom date, “what I’ve really been craving is a beer. But let me hit the head first…”
They went in opposite directions, he to the bathroom and she to the kitchen. The trailer funneled sound so efficiently that they could talk to each other from opposite ends.
“Everything looks great!” he called from the bathroom.
“It ought to.” She opened the beers and quartered a lime while a platter of nachos spat in the microwave. “I’ve had nothing to do but clean house for eight months.”
“Hot water!” he shouted down the hall. “Clean towels! Oh dear sweet Jesus, Dial soap! It’s like I’ve been gone about six years.”
“Tell me about it,” Melissa said through clenched teeth. She stuck a lime wedge in the top of each beer. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”
Back in the den, sitting thigh to thigh on the sofa, she let him eat a few nachos and take a couple of hits of beer before she swung herself over and straddled his lap, her skirt riding artfully high on her hips.
“So how does it feel to be home?” she asked, her face