Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [34]
“Well, babe,” he said, “it’s Kuwait.”
Melissa screamed.
“Hey, it’s not so bad. They got about three million mines laying around from the war, we’re gonna show their guys how to dig’em out.”
Mines. Melissa resisted the urge to tear at her hair. “When do you go?”
“Not for six weeks.” He pulled her close, snaking his hand under the waist of her shorts. “Think you can stand me that long?”
Later that night Melissa had occasion to reflect that sex smelled a lot like tossed salad, one with radishes, fennel, and fresh grated carrot, and maybe a tablespoon of scallions thrown in. The notion came to her as she lay naked in bed, making a tent out of the sheet with her folded knees. Beside her Dirk was nodding in and out while they drowsily reviewed the events of the day. Melissa mentioned that she’d had lunch with her cousin the psychic.
“Psychic,” he said in a drifty voice. “I know this lady?”
“You’ve never met her.”
“Hunh. She do voodoo?”
“Well, it’s more like she’s got her own thing going.”
“Wanna meet her,” he said, seeming to fade out.
“Sure, we’ll have her over before you leave.” Melissa shifted, raising peckish sparks from the sheets. “So what’s it supposed to be like over there. In Kuwait.”
“Hot,” he muttered. “Sand. Lotsa camel jocks running around.”
“Any voodoo?”
He chuckled, then murmured something she didn’t understand. Maybe a minute went by. Melissa listened to a hoot-owl lowing outside. Acres of crickets jangled in perfect time like thousands of synchronized maracas.
“Though in a way I guess it’s all voodoo, hunh.”
“Wha?”
She hesitated, taking the measure of how she felt; after a moment she decided it felt okay. “In a way it all comes down to voodoo, I said.” She didn’t really get it, she told him, but she could handle it. If this was something he thought was important in his life, she would trust him, she would try to understand. Because she wanted them—
“Oh honey I love you so much,” he blurted, his voice too drastic, almost weepy. For a second she thought he was mocking her, until he went on in that same urgent voice: “Cap’ll take it, yeah, Cap’s got it under control. No go no show what a bullshitter, intel says it’s solid, bro. Roger that, lock and load. Ready to rock.”
So he’d slept through her big concession speech. Pow, he hupped in her ear, pah-pow-pow, pow; target practice had commenced for the night, in semiautomatic mode. Melissa sighed and straightened her legs, the sheet collapsing about them like a giant flower. So in six weeks she would be alone again. The episode with James was a shadow on her mind, like some dark, ominous smudge in an X-ray; she dreaded Dirk’s leaving, but something in her was rising to meet it as well, anxious to see if she would manage better this time. For a while she thought about her little drama at the altar, trying to fix in her mind the true experience of it, the tingling immanence that in retrospect had about as much zip as static cling. She didn’t know what to think about any of this. Voodoo, desire, oversexed spirits, dreams channeling information like a video stream—if these were real, then the business of who we were transpired mostly in the air around us. You could drive yourself crazy with it, she supposed. Some did; and some found their peace in it? But at least there was this, she thought as she rolled toward Dirk, spooning herself into his concourse of knobs and hollows. This was real, whatever else life might bring—there were, finally, no words for this. Melissa kissed her husband’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and waited for sleep.
Asian Tiger
The Myanmar Peace and Enlightened Leadership Cup was a bush league tournament by any standard, not even regular Asian Tour but a satellite, the dead-end fringe of professional golf. Which was where Sonny Grous made his living these days, when he wasn’t missing cuts on the Hooters Tour or hustling hundred-dollar nassaus in America’s suburbs; as a twenty-three-year-old rookie on the